by Gin Phillips
She took her hand off his arm and stepped off the curb. “Skillet is a friend I used to play pick-up basketball with,” he said from behind her. “The name’s because when he shot, he sizzled.”
At the restaurant, the tamales were hot and perfectly moist, and when Ren finished her helping, she peeled the strips of leftover breading from the corn husks and dropped them into her mouth bit by bit. When she wiped her hands, she could feel the cornmeal under her fingernails.
“The bulldozers would turn up the bowls in a cushion of dirt,” said Silas, ripping a tortilla in half. “Along with turning up the bodies, of course, because that’s where the bowls were. The landowner and Gardner would split the profits. Before the burial laws were passed, Gardner raked in the cash. Even reputable museums bought from him.”
Silas was describing Bob Gardner, the best-known pothunter in New Mexico during the seventies and eighties, whose construction business had served as a front for large-scale bulldozings of archaeological sites. A landowner could find a pot, call up Gardner, and he’d send out the appropriate number of men with the appropriate number of bulldozers.
“I was twenty,” said Silas, “doing an internship up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, and my boss wanted to go see Gardner about a cylinder jar he’d heard about. He told me I could come. A maid let us in the house, and when we walked into the living room, there were Mimbres bowls everywhere. Everywhere. In the entranceway, on the coffee table, on the shelves. On the mantel there was this one spectacular polychrome—a red-on-white-with-yellow misfire—with an image of a warrior. I bet it was worth more than any piece we had in the museum. And next to the mantel, there was a jaguar pelt stretched across the wall. I’d never seen a jaguar in the wild. It’s been illegal to hunt them for as long as I can remember. Then Gardner walked into the room, using a cane. He told my boss he’d sold the jar already, and we sort of lapsed into silence. So I asked him if that was a jaguar pelt on the wall.
“He said he’d bagged it himself, and he asked if I hunted any. I said yes, but that I’d never seen a jaguar. He told me they weren’t easy to come by.”
Silas sipped his beer, setting it back on the table with a soft clank. “I said, ‘Aren’t they an endangered species?’ even though I knew they were.
“And he said, ‘Everything has to die sometime.’”
He glanced around the table. “And that, in a nutshell, was Bob Gardner.”
“Not a good man,” said Ren.
“No,” said Silas, “he was not. Although I think sometimes the old-time pothunters get a bad rap. It wasn’t always good versus evil. Some of them really loved the pieces and did what they could to preserve the pottery. They were in it for the art instead of for the money.”
“They kept it for themselves,” said Ren. “Whether it was the money or the art.”
“Didn’t you manage to direct some of Gardner’s pieces to the T or C museum after he died?” said Ed.
Silas nodded. “A few.”
“How’d you get them?” asked Ren.
“His housekeeper knew of some smaller pieces he kept in storage. He hadn’t made arrangements for them.”
“How did you know about them?” she asked.
“I went out to his house after he died and asked her if there were any pieces unaccounted for,” Silas said. “We drank a few cups of tea and talked about her two daughters in high school. One was hoping to be an engineer. It was a nice afternoon.”
Ed snorted. “Silas flirts with women, men, cats, dogs, sometimes lizards.”
“And houseplants,” added Paul.
“I do not,” said Silas, with some dignity. “I am not attracted to houseplants. And I did not flirt with that woman—I talked to her. Nicely.”
“You flirted with that geologist when she came out to the canyon,” said Paul. “She was in her sixties.”
“I did not flirt with that geologist. That’s ridiculous.”
Ren thought he sounded annoyed now. She watched his face, although he wasn’t looking at her.
“You don’t even know when you’re doing it,” said Paul, and it occurred to Ren that Ed had grown quiet. “It’s like breathing. You can’t help it.”
She remembered that when Scott was in middle school, her parents had devoted entire dinner conversations to trying to teach him when a joke was no longer funny. To explaining how to read your audience. But the more Scott wanted to impress someone, the more he beat a dead joke into the ground.
Paul turned to her. “Ren, he flirts, doesn’t he?”
And now they were all looking at her. She held her glass in front of her mouth, not drinking. “I hadn’t noticed,” she said.
Silas was folding his napkin. Paul kept looking at her. Ed did not.
“But I’m not a houseplant,” she added.
“We’re just giving him a hard time,” said Ed, a little loudly. “It’s not like we’ve seen him with a constant stream of women coming through the canyon.”
“Hence the houseplants,” said Paul.
“Enough,” said Silas, flatly, and everyone became interested in their napkins. Ren watched him in her peripheral vision, and he did not move, not even a jostle of his knee or the twitch of a fingertip.
She wanted to say something very quickly, something utterly fascinating. “Paul,” she said, “when did you get interested in archaeology?”
It was sufficient. They moved on. She and Ed and Paul chatted easily enough until the waitress brought the checks. Eventually Silas picked up his beer again and nodded his agreement at a comment or two.
Until they pulled off onto the dirt road into the canyon, the ride home had been almost completely silent. Ed loved to drive, even on these roads, and Paul sat beside him. Ren and Silas sat in the backseat, seat belts buckled, jerking forward and back as the tires hit ruts and rocks. Ren pressed her cheek against the cool glass to watch the sky in early evening. She had a takeaway sack of tamales still warm against her foot. Her forehead smacked the window as Ed drove through the creek, and she pulled back slightly. The sky was deep and rich just after sunset, tactile as velvet or raw silk. She saw a small movement along the edge of the road.
“Jackrabbit,” she said, pointing.
“The bunnies love running across the road this time of the day,” said Ed, taking a quick look. “It’s suicide alley.”
Silas was removed in a way she was coming to recognize. He was transparent at times, and at other times he completely disappeared. One second he could be joking and holding court, filling up the car or the porch or the open air with the force of his presence. Then that very presence that drew them all to his every word would collapse like a star turned—what did stars turn into? Supernovas—no, black holes. In any case, he would be gone, vanished into his own head. He’d been gone ever since the restaurant. She disliked feeling him turn inward. She herself was skilled at not getting caught in her own head.
Another creek crossing. Then another. The water was solid black, reflecting nothing, and even though she knew its shallowness, Ren could not shake the feeling that each time the wheels tipped into the water, they were all plunging into an abyss.
She wished this were not an excavation she cared so desperately about. To get involved with someone on a dig risked the entire project—all the drama and emotion of the personal contaminated the professional. She’d seen it happen to others, but she had never been tempted. She resented the timing of the temptation. This dig, more than any other, she did not want to risk.
She looked over at Silas. She enjoyed how his mind worked and the length of his eyelashes. She thought about houseplants.
“I can’t believe you wouldn’t do a shot of Jäger with me,” said Paul to the car in general.
“It’s like drinking motor oil,” said Ed.
Paul swung one foot onto the dashboard with a
thud. Ed swatted it back to the floor.
“I spent some time at El Barrio Inglés in Roatán, Honduras, on this ethnographic research project,” said Silas.
Ren thought she could hear the slightest rustle of cotton against upholstery, the sound of them all settling back against their seats, anticipating a story. They could all surely feel the shift in his mood, the energy radiating outward once more, the light turned on.
“My dad had ordered me not to go, and I was in a rebellious phase,” he continued. “He said I should wait and go on a project where someone could watch after me. He said I’d get my head cut off and stuck on a stick. My dad hadn’t really traveled much. And I was looking for any chance to prove that I was tough enough and good enough. I was supposed to be looking at how native diets had changed from historic times to present times.”
Ren wished he would say more about his father, and at the same time she wondered why he bothered to mention his father at all. The reference had been unnecessary.
“Anyway, they don’t like outsiders too much in the barrio,” continued Silas. “I had a contact who was supposed to hook me up with the locals. It turned out he looked like a very tan Andre the Giant, and he took me on this never-ending tour of the surrounding hillsides. He didn’t even bring water the first day. The second day he did the same thing, letting me get a feel for the land, he said, and this time I brought my own water and kept my mouth shut. I thought maybe it was some sort of test. Either that or he really was going to kill me and hide my body in the underbrush. The idea of my head on a stick did occur to me. On our way back to town the second day, he said, ‘So what are you going to do here?’ I told him I needed to ask people some questions about what they ate. He said, ‘Then what?’ I told him the answers would tell us if their diet was healthy. He shook his head and said, ‘No—what are you going to do after you ask the questions?’
“I thought about it and told him I didn’t really have anything planned. He said, ‘Do you like rum?’
“The next morning he had a few dozen kids and adults show up. I talked to them, and then he and I drank rum—ron—for the next forty-eight hours. We set up a game of bowling with the empty rum bottles and a mango, and we actually had enough bottles for all ten pins. Let’s just say that scenario does not have the appeal that it once did.”
Paul craned his head toward Silas. “Why a mango?”
The Jeep lurched into the creek again. Paul braced his hands on the dashboard, and Ren grabbed the door handle.
“You can always use the satellite phone at Braxton’s, if you want,” Silas said quietly into the dark. He didn’t turn toward Ren, but he was clearly talking only to her. “He likes the company. And he should be back this week.”
She frowned, knowing he couldn’t see.
“Okay,” she said to him, considering what he might mean. “I’m not really big on talking on the phone.”
“It’s not that you need to use the phone,” he said quickly. “It’s not like I’m the phone police. But my parents are older, and they get nuts when they think I’ve disappeared into the wilderness. Sometimes people like to know you’re okay. And you’ve dropped off the face of the known world for weeks.”
The Jeep jerked hard to the right.
“Okay,” she said, rubbing her neck.
“In case anyone will worry,” he added.
She nodded. He waited, expectant. She let her head fall back against the seat.
“No one knows I’m here,” she said.
“What?”
She knew how it sounded. That’s why she avoided the subject—if she opened the door, people expected explanations. There was no point.
“I mean, people at work do, obviously,” she said. “But no one will worry. No one knows I’m gone.”
He nodded, his shadowed profile unreadable. Paul and Ed were quiet in the front seat.
She nodded, hoping he was satisfied.
“You do have family out there, right?” he said. “Parents still around?”
“I have family,” she said, and her tone must have successfully conveyed her lack of interest in elaborating. He didn’t speak again.
Another lurch of the Jeep. In the pitch dark, with the ground and the sky shaking with every turn of the wheels, her thoughts wandered to Scott coming home from high school. Their parents were leaning against the kitchen counters, her mother cooking, her father talking, and Ren listening. She’d been in fourth grade. She could feel crumbs on the bare soles of her feet, so she rose to her tiptoes on the yellow linoleum, using one foot to scrape the crumbs off the other.
“Hey,” she called, when Scott walked through the door.
“Hey,” he said, dropping his book bag on the floor.
Anna, stirring green beans, turned her cheek for a kiss when Scott reached for a glass. “Hi, Mom.”
“Good day?” asked their father. Harold had changed from his work jeans into soft, frayed khakis and a Pacers T-shirt with the lettering nearly worn off.
“Fine.”
“You have any homework?” asked Anna.
“Not much.”
Ren saw the mark on Scott’s arm before her father did, and she was deciding whether to mention it. But her father didn’t hesitate.
“What’s that on your arm?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Scott, grabbing his left forearm with his hand. He wore short sleeves, and his hand couldn’t quite cover the ink.
“Someone wrote on you,” Anna said, turning. She’d left the pots to simmer. “Who would write on your arm?”
“It’s girl writing,” announced Ren.
“What did a girl write on your arm?” asked their father.
Instead of answering, Scott started backing toward the kitchen door, slowly, arm covered. The family advanced equally slowly.
“Nothing,” Scott said.
He turned to run.
Harold reached quickly, wide, strong hands grabbing. Scott looked over his shoulder, grinning, and feinted to the left. But their father had an endless reach—he caught Scott’s shirt and reeled him back. Chaos broke out. Anna reached for Scott’s arm, too slow, and he twisted away from her. Harold hauled his son closer, into a bear hug, his weight slowly pushing Scott to the ground. Once his knees hit the floor, Harold flopped on his side, taking Scott with him, horizontal now.
There was the sound of laughing and breathing, and shoes scuffing against linoleum.
“What does it say?” asked Anna, on the floor herself, reaching again. Scott wriggled and balked, red-faced, chuckling at them all and at the fingers Ren kept poking into his underarms.
“Stop it!” he gasped. “Dad, it’s like having a house dropped on me! Get off me!”
They were all on the floor now, Harold with his hands on Scott’s shoulders, one calf braced across his son’s thighs, pinning him with sheer weight. Anna had caught his left arm under her leg and was using both her hands to pry away his right hand.
“Help me, Ren,” she ordered.
Ren stopped poking at Scott’s underarms and added her small fingers to the struggle, pulling at Scott’s thumb while her mother worked on his four fingers. Scott gave in with an “Uncle!” and a long laughing wheeze. His hand dropped to his side, Harold suspiciously eased his weight off his son, and they all stared at the writing.
Ren renewed her giggling, but her parents only stared, foreheads wrinkling.
“What’s that mean?” asked Harold.
The message read “Scott is a QT” in curlicued writing with emphatic flourishes.
“What’s a cut?” asked Anna. “A quit?”
“No,” said Ren, smirking at Scott. “I mean, I haven’t done this since, like, third grade, but you read them like letters. Read it aloud and say the letters.”
Scott rolled his eyes at her.
She looked delighted with herself. Scott stopped trying to look offended.
They lay still, side by side, flat on their backs, like they’d all been making linoleum angels. The floor was cool, and crumbs stuck to exposed skin in constellations. Harold and Scott breathed hard, chests like bellows. Anna rested a hand on her husband’s chest, and her long, pink-tipped fingers rose as he inhaled. She stroked Scott’s hair, once, twice, and Ren tried to maneuver closer to draw her mother’s touch.
“Who thinks you’re a cutie?” asked Harold.
“Nobody.” Then, after a long wait, “Elizabeth Roberts.”
“Do you like her?” asked Ren. She tried to imagine a fourteen-year-old girl in love with Scott. She was not in love with any boys.
“She’s okay,” Scott said.
“You could have just showed us,” Anna said. She’d moved her hand to Ren’s shoulder, lifting the hair off her neck with gentle sharp nails. The other hand she left on her husband’s chest. He’d captured her hand with one of his own.
“Yeah,” said Scott. “I don’t know why I thought you might harass me.”
“So is she a cutie?” asked Harold.
“Does she know how to spell?” asked Anna.
No one seemed to want to expend the energy to stand, so they stayed on the floor until Anna said she thought the beans were burning.
It was Ren’s favorite memory. She wished she could cut it from her head like a tumor. She wrapped her arms around herself and pressed against the cold, hard side of the Jeep, absorbing the jolts into her body.
They were always in the heat and the light, and sometimes Ren craved shade.
More than a month in the canyon, they had opened a dozen rooms, and still no sign of her artist. She had driven back to Valle de las Sombras twice, rushed through her to-do list, then returned. What they’d found seemed to back up Silas’s original theory: Northern and southern groups had been here at times, separately, but there was no evidence of the kind of intermingling that distinguished her artist.