by Gin Phillips
He tipped his head at her. “I never said I didn’t believe in fact. I said I was careful about it. Data is fact. What we find is fact. The skeleton and that skirt and the bowls are facts. It’s the interpretation that veers off into the land of conjecture. I like to be clear about which is which.”
She shrugged her acceptance. If he needed her to stick with hard fact, she could do that. “At some point, the artist either leaves here or comes here. All we know for sure is that she was both here and at Crow Creek. And the parrot woman was here. Surely you’re willing to concede that the woman worked with parrots now. That skirt. Plus the feathers in her hair.”
Silas stopped. They were at the bottom of the short, steep hill leading to Braxton’s house. The Manor, as Ed called it.
“There are no macaws here,” he said. “Not a single skeleton of a single macaw. Not a single feather of a single macaw. Other than on your girl there. She was not handling parrots here. There is no evidence to support that.”
They started up the hill.
“Then what do you think she was doing?” Ren challenged.
“I don’t know. But here, at this site, I do not think it involved parrots.”
“You think she handled parrots somewhere else?”
“That’s more likely.”
“So maybe the parrot woman came from somewhere else, and then moved here. Without her parrots. But the people here still knew her history and buried her accordingly.”
“Maybe.”
“The parrot woman starts out somewhere else, then comes to the canyon,” said Ren. “My artist moves, too, toward Crow Creek or away from it.”
They were halfway up the hill with still one curve to round before they could see the house full-on.
Silas slowed his steps. “Is it a more direct link than that?”
“They came here at the same time?” she suggested. “For the same reason? They knew each other before they came here? A family who traveled together? Part of the same clan?”
“Any of the above.”
She lost her footing for a moment on a patch of gravel, then jogged to catch up to him. “Could it be as simple as drought? A mass movement here at the same time?”
“Could be,” he said. “I hope it was. The broader the movement, the bigger the implications.”
They had reached the house.
It was not a particularly large house, only one story, adobe, with a red tiled roof. It was as much glass as it was adobe, with wide blocks of windows. Braxton had built his home on an overlook with the valley spread out beneath it. From the vantage point, the green of the willows and the cottonwoods and lush grass by the creek dominated the landscape. The walls of the canyon caught the sun, and the shades of gray and pink, peach and tan—rhyolite in all its tones and moods—shimmered. The dryness muted everything slightly; in wetter years, Silas had seen these greens much deeper, the earth much richer. But the muteness only made the view more of a watercolor, soft and blended and fantastic.
“It would be huge,” Silas said, as they approached the front door, “if we could track a migration so specifically. I’ve got a web of data with northern and southern groups coming and going, but with very few specific dates. If we can track one group of people and know where they came from and when they arrived here, that could anchor the whole map of the canyon.”
Braxton had heard their voices through his open windows, and he appeared at the front door just as they stepped on the porch. He clapped Silas on the shoulder and held out a tan hand for Ren to shake.
“I wondered if you were avoiding me,” he said. Braxton’s hair was still black, falling over his forehead, and his eyes were nearly as dark. The lines around his mouth and eyes were deep, deeper still when he smiled.
“I wondered the same,” she answered. “Thank you for letting me come here. For letting us do this.”
He waved a hand curtly, shaking his head. Silas had gotten the same response every time he’d tried any expression of gratitude.
“Come in and have some tea or a beer and sit on the back deck with me. After you do whatever it is you need to do. Phone, Silas?”
“Human remains,” said Silas. “Just need to call T or C.”
“You do that, and I’ll fix Ren a drink,” Braxton said. “I know Silas won’t touch anything serious this early, but maybe you’d like a Corona?”
“Iced tea would be wonderful,” she said.
“Damn teetotalers.”
“It’s ten-thirty,” said Silas, looking over his shoulder as he stepped into the shadows of the house.
“You’re archaeologists, for God’s sake. Didn’t anybody ever tell you you’re supposed to drink all the time?”
After he made his call, Silas poured himself a glass of tea. He made his way to the deck, which jutted into empty space and hovered over the valley. Ren was nodding at something Braxton said.
“He’s going to call me back,” Silas said. “In a meeting. I was thinking I’d pull up some articles on macaws while I’m here.”
“Fine, of course,” said Braxton. “Help yourself to the computer.” He turned to Ren. “Satellite connection. Only place in the canyon with access.”
“You don’t mind being so removed from everything?” she asked. “An hour away from the grocery store? Half an hour from neighbors? No newspaper, no cell phone?”
“I grew up in the wilds of New Mexico a good sixty years ago. Lived about a mile away from Silas’s dad, by the way. Not many amenities. Then I moved away, of course, and did a little of this and that.”
“By ‘this and that,’ he means pushed the right buttons on the stock market until it poured out money like a slot machine,” said Silas.
“Yes,” said Braxton. “Like a slot machine. I was in New York for a while and spent a dozen years in Boston. I miss restaurants and music and good coffee shops. I miss seafood. But look at this place. Sometimes I sit out here in the mornings and I think I can feel myself evaporating, spreading out over the valley and drifting down.”
“Like dust,” said Silas.
“You lack poetry, Silas Alan Cooper. This place makes you want to be absorbed by it. I never wanted to be absorbed into Boston.”
“It’s like stepping into a magic wardrobe and winding up in Narnia,” Ren said. “Time moves differently here.”
Braxton smiled. “Silas loved that book when he was a kid. Is that the one with Turkish delight? He was obsessed with figuring out what Turkish delight was.”
Ren chuckled. “He was?”
Something on her face made Braxton’s eyes widen slightly, and he glanced quickly at Silas, then back at Ren.
“It’s a jelly made of starch and sugar,” said Silas.
“Let me tell you something,” said Braxton, leaning toward Ren and brushing his fingers against her wrist. “Silas wrote a little song about Turkish delight. He used to carry around an out-of-tune banjo when he was just a tiny thing. He wrote songs about Turkish delight, about a deer named Wild Bill, and, as I recall, about a girl named Mohawk.”
Braxton sat back and turned a pleased face toward Silas.
“Thank you very much,” said Silas. “That was very helpful.”
“I also seem to remember you setting ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to music,” Braxton added.
“It makes a good fight song,” Silas said to Ren.
“That wasn’t so long ago,” Braxton said, rubbing a hand along his cheek. “When was it? After your grad work? You were visiting with, ah, Tina.”
Braxton was not subtle. He had paused, belatedly, before Tina’s name. And as he said it, he looked uncomfortably at Silas, then stared intently at the wall. That led to another pause when it seemed obvious that Ren would ask who Tina was.
Instead, she started describing the bowl and the feather apron they’d found.
The moment passed by.
“So just how big is this?” Braxton asked. “This artist’s bowl you’ve found? This body underneath it?”
Neither of them answered. He watched their faces, and his breath hissed out. “That big, huh?”
Soon Silas and Ren said their good-byes. They trotted down the hill with shuffling steps. Slowing down took more effort than speeding up. As the ground evened out and the path opened onto a horse pasture, Ren slowed to a walk, and Silas matched her pace.
“A girl named Mohawk?” she said.
He shrugged. He could see only two horses grazing, but the others must be behind the trees.
“Sing it for me?” she asked.
He kept his eyes on the horses. “I was married.”
“You were?” She stopped.
He felt a relief at announcing it, and an annoyance at himself for feeling relief. He did not do well with secrets. He liked things out in the open. For weeks he had considered telling her about his ex-wife, thinking Ren would ask about past relationships at some point and give him a good opening. Braxton had done him a favor by mentioning Tina, and even then Ren had remained oblivious. She had less interest in personal history than anyone he’d ever known. He suspected, if it were up to her, they would confine their conversation, their relationship, to these specific days in this specific canyon. She seemed to have no history of her own, and he mostly liked the challenge of unraveling her, layer by layer. There was a thrill to her opaqueness: She was open to interpretation.
“When I was twenty-nine,” he said. “For five years. Tina. She was an anthropologist.”
She laughed and started moving again. “We’re an inbred kind of bunch, aren’t we?”
She had no more questions, of course. He put his arm around her shoulders, and her hair fell over his arm, soft. They walked on.
If Silas was to ask himself why he married Tina and not someone else, he would point to one particular moment: him sitting in a library cubicle, fighting off a headache, with a small-print book on his desk and fluorescent lights beating down on him from the particleboard ceiling. A paper airplane sailed over the wall of the cubicle and hit him on the cheek. He unfolded it, leaning his chair back on two legs to scan the library. He saw no one, but the paper read: “Catch me.”
He was in graduate school by then, and they’d already had a handful of dates when she’d launched that plane from behind the nonfiction stacks. He saw a flash of her jean jacket between the shelves and stood up, walking as quickly as possible. When he rounded the corner of the stacks, she was disappearing down another aisle. He had a clear view of her ponytail. He took off running. When he caught up to her, his arm curving around her waist, Tina laughing up at him silently, he thought she was much prettier than he had realized. He felt like he had never really looked at her face before, and he felt off balance.
It had seemed like a sign at the time.
They married just as he started his dissertation. It lasted five years, and they were not a bad five years. But he was gone a lot, and she was gone a lot. There were no more paper airplanes. He never actually finished the dissertation. He got caught up in fieldwork, project after project, and never seemed to find time to sit at his desk long enough. He felt more comfortable in the field, loved the ebb and flow of site work, the reading of signs, the predictive leaps, the pieces eventually sliding together. He had told Tina once that he felt intimidated by his profession, meaning not the work itself but the rituals of scientific one-upsmanship. He disliked conferences. He disliked that when you asked a question after someone’s presentation, the point was not to get an answer but to convey the superiority of your own incandescent intellect. He felt unsure of how to ask a question when he simply wanted information. He never felt unsure as he looked over a prehistoric site.
Tina said he needed to work on self-esteem issues and recommended a book with “embrace” in the title. When he thought of her now—when he thought of any of the women in his past—his lack of recall bothered him. Nancy Turner in the eighth grade with her red-brown curls that went in every direction, twisted into a braid when she ran the mile at track meets. Hannah Hightower, whom he dated all through high school, the first girl he slept with. A handful of girlfriends in college. Liz, the nurse he’d dated after his divorce. Gina, the banker who loved the Celtics and cursed like crazy when she was mad. At various points, each woman had felt integral. His head had been filled with her. And then, after it ended, he could not imagine having been with her. Now, at forty, he remembered more specific conversations with his favorite history teacher than he could remember with Hannah Hightower. A perfect image from watching the 2000 NCAA basketball championships—Mateen Cleaves driving the hole with a sprained ankle—seemed clearer to him than any moment in his marriage. The women drifted away or he drifted away, but after some point of intersection they spun off in their own directions, leaving only the smallest traces behind: the citrus smell of Nancy’s red hair, Hannah’s laugh, Tina’s small feet in his lap as he rubbed her arches.
Migrations and abandonments.
When Braxton first invited him to the ranch and he first tromped through the canyon, it had been out of fashion to talk about different groups of people coming and going. The popular notion had been that every group of people was shaped and transformed by the environment around them. Each group had a specific territory, a permanent landscape.
Silas was not sure that he believed in permanent landscapes. He was not sure he believed in one perfect match. Regardless, nothing had been permanent here. Ever-shifting groups came through this canyon, staying for a season or a year or a decade. They came because of water or game or enemies chasing them from a former home. The prehistoric world had been a web of connections: Trade routes allowed for an exchange of food and trinkets and materials across hundreds of miles. Parrots came from Mexico. Mollusk shells from the Gulf of California were shaped into smooth bracelets and worn by women in this canyon. You could trace the networks of connections by the objects you found.
Groups moved among one another, young couples intermarrying, because in a world full of small villages—maybe four or five families living as a group—the gene pool needed livening up frequently. So you had women moving for men, men looking for women, traders selling their merchandise, entire villages uprooting in search of food or water. Of course, there was conflict, a stronger group wiping out a weaker group for a prize section of land. The losers scattered. Or at times groups merged for the greater good.
It was a world of movement and change, souls shifting and drifting and severing ties to place after place. Amid all the paths crossing and families pulled together and apart, most things were left behind. There were no wagons, no pack mules, no wheelbarrows. No wheels. When these people moved, they brought what they could carry. Stone tools and tanned buckskin and a sharpening rock could be packed in a burden basket with a copper bell and a child’s doll. What they chose to take with them, what strained their muscles and bowed their shoulders, were the treasures they couldn’t bear to lose. If you didn’t love it or need it, you left it somewhere along the way.
The medical examiner acknowledged that a prehistoric body had been found. Silas and Ren agreed that they would keep the bowl to study at least temporarily—they would contact the local tribes, who would probably want the bowl back in the ground with the body. But she could examine the bowl herself until they heard from the tribes. Silas wrapped up one of the sherds from where the kill hole was punched to be sent for an analysis of the clay.
They found nothing else around the body. After one last round of photos, they backfilled the room, dumping shovelful after shovelful back into the hole. Even through his gloves, even with his already concrete calluses, Silas ripped blisters into his palms. He poured peroxide on them at night, savoring the sizzling sound.
“Your hands are frothing,” she said, as she sank onto the bed. “Does it hurt?”
“No.” He frowned. “Not at all. Which sucks, because I feel more confident about it if it hurts. You have any rubbing alcohol?”
“Masochist.”
“I do have a bit of a puritanical streak.”
She shook her head. “I have no interest in pain.”
“Coward.”
She was still watching the peroxide bubble on his skin. “I have not noticed this supposed puritanical streak, by the way.”
He looked over at her thighs.
“It comes and goes,” he said.
She lay next to him and traced the ridges of his chest, finger sliding up and down over skin and muscle. Wearing a path over the bands of muscles covering his ribs. Hills and vales, she thought. Pectorals. Ribs. Abdomen. Ribs.
“What are these?” she asked once.
“Ribs.”
“No, the muscles.”
He shrugged. She traced, eyes shutting.
“They’re the part of you that would make barbecue ribs,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I like this.” He ran his hand down her shoulder blades, pausing flat and warm at the small of her back, stopping at the curve of her hips.
“The dip of my back?”
“It’s not a dip. It’s a reservoir.” He traced the curve of it, the thin hardness of her spine and the soft flare. “It’s geography.”
He talked another language when he slept. He fell asleep quickly, effortlessly, while she had to coax sleep to come. But his sleep was rarely silent.
“Snee,” he said, rolling over, one arm falling hard across her hip.
“Snee,” she agreed.
“You’re a Volkswagen flip-top.”
She liked to repeat his words back and see if he would agree with them. “A Volkswagen flip-top?”
“You are,” he insisted. “You are, baby. Man. You’re a baby man.”
“Baby man?”
“Shaped like a baby. Built like a man.”
Weeks passed. If Ed or Paul noticed where Silas was sleeping, neither commented on it. During the day, everyone stayed focused on what else the ground might offer up.