Come In and Cover Me

by Gin Phillips

  “You love it,” said Ren, understanding, watching as the girl’s skin drank up the clay. The next thought that crossed her mind was that she had chosen the wrong word, that this girl did not love the clay so much as she needed it.

  Silas was surrounded by paper. He’d requested that some articles be mailed to him and had downloaded a stack of others. He sifted through old site reports and obscure journal articles, following up with calls to universities and museums. He wanted to know more about macaws, more about hypothetical trade routes or migrations in the area between Crow Creek and Cañada Rosa. He wanted a context.

  Meanwhile, he waited. Discoveries did not usually come with shock and gasps, despite the periodic appearances of bowls or bodies. It took days and weeks and sometimes months for lab work to come back, to connect the dots among soil samples and charcoal pieces and bone and ceramics. There would be analysis of the architecture, of the sediments and deposits in the dirt itself, the stratigraphy of the trash heaps. Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis required a thin section of a sherd to identify the elements in clay—a step toward locating where a ceramic piece was made. That would help determine where. The when would come together from an intricate web of ceramic cross-dating and chronometric dates. The data points on his graphs did not come from ghosts, which were altogether too insubstantial to leave a mark. As long as they fit the data, he had no issue with Ren’s phantoms. But they had no more influence on his conclusions than a cloud or a gust of wind.

  He wanted to map the canyon, to lay out the years and the people as accurately and thoroughly as a street map of Silver City, from major intersections to tiny offshoots that dead-ended after a few yards.

  Parrots did not fit his map. He needed to draw them in correctly, or everything else would be thrown off scale.

  His father taught him to shoot, gave him a .22 on his twelfth birthday. He was allowed to deer-hunt when he was sixteen. Rifles were for hunting, his father said, and pistols were not. If Silas wanted a pistol, he could wait until he turned twenty-one and buy his own.

  Silas’s friend Jim had a father who gave him a pistol before he got his driver’s license. When they were both seventeen, Silas and Jim would pass afternoons driving along the beaten-up road to Kingston, playing the radio, windows down. Jim drove an old Buick with burgundy upholstery and kept his pistol in the glove compartment always, although he didn’t show it off. It lay there as unused as the state map beside it.

  One Saturday, with empty road behind them, they saw a blue Ford pickup coming from the other direction. Jim said, “Oh, shit,” under his breath. Silas hadn’t known that Jim had been running around with someone else’s girl, but the cheated-on boyfriend was behind the wheel of the blue truck. The truck passed, then brakes squealed and the truck spun in the middle of the road behind them, changing directions. Silas could hear the engine roaring. Jim had the gas pedal on the floor, but the truck kept gaining, pulling close, ramming the bumper of the Buick. The jolt made the car jerk and wobble. They headed off into an open field, clouds of dirt flying up from the tires. They hit a ditch or a rock or something—Silas couldn’t remember. But the Buick wouldn’t go forward, and they couldn’t back up because the truck had pulled in close behind them, doors opening before the engine turned off.

  Silas watched the truck through the rearview mirror from the passenger side. One guy came staggering drunk out of the backseat, weaving toward the car. Likely because it was closer, the drunk guy came to Silas’s window. Three more boys—all older than Silas and with slouching shoulders—stayed by the truck. The drunk one slammed a flat palm against Silas’s window and said, “You get out of the car.”

  Silas cracked the window, and the flat palm slammed against it again. “Get out of the car, motherfucker,” the guy said.

  Jim wasn’t saying anything.

  When the truck had started chasing them, Silas had been nervous. When they drove off the road, he had been scared. His mouth had been dry, he remembered that—the need for water. And when he saw the drunk boy’s face at the window, he was completely terrified. He’d never taken a real adult punch. But the second slap of the drunken palm shifted something. It steadied him. His door was unlocked, and he made no move to lock it. He opened the glove compartment—not hurrying, reaching calm and steady—and showed the pistol. He did not touch it; he only showed it. And then he looked in the boy’s bloodshot eyes.

  “You go on and open that door,” Silas said. “You go on and open it.”

  The boy held up his hands, backing away. He and his friends climbed back into the truck, and they all drove away. Silas sat in the car, listening to Jim freak out, and he felt something new, something satisfying. He would feel it again when he was grown, once he learned the ground and the bones and the ways a village could disguise itself underground. But driving back home after making that drunk boy back down, that was the first time he felt like he was someone who could do things. Someone who could take care of himself and maybe other people, too.

  It hadn’t lasted. He got home, walked through the door, and announced something like, “I am a tired Spanish donkey.” Or possibly “I’m a tired mechanical monkey.” This was a habit of his mother’s—inventing nonsense phrases—and his father usually ignored her when she did it. But it drove him crazy when Silas joined in. Before Silas closed the door behind him, his father strode from the kitchen and snapped, “Talk like a normal human being.”

  Even as he’d rolled his eyes at his dad, his confidence evaporated. That sense of himself as competent and smart and brave—gone. He hadn’t even told his father the story of the drunken chase until years later. But that sweet feeling of sureness, it was lodged inside him as vivid as a childhood smell—bacon cooking, cut grass, his mother’s jasmine hand lotion. The memory of it filled his head. He thought that the most you could hope for, really, were moments of such true certainty. Most of the time, inevitably, you screwed up. You struggled to tolerate yourself. But sometimes you got moments where you felt good and strong and sure, when the right words were waiting on your tongue, when you knew the answer without thinking.

  He called Ren at work on Friday.

  “I’m willing to acknowledge that there could have been one parrot on the site,” he said without a hello. “Maybe even two. We wouldn’t necessarily find a trace of one or two parrots. But I still find it highly unlikely the parrots were trained or raised en masse.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “So why would there be only one parrot?”

  She had stopped herself from saying “Why was there only one parrot?” She was willing to make her questions more conditional. She could give him room to explore this for himself.

  “It was a pet,” said Silas. She noticed he did not say “could have been.” He said “was.”

  “A pet,” she echoed. She considered the macaw appearing from thin air, landing on Non’s arm. Chattering to Non and Lynay. It was a bird that seemed to have a degree of charm. She had done her own reading: Scarlet macaws were easily tamed, good company, and not prone to bad behavior, unlike the military macaw and the thick-billed parrot, which also showed up on pottery.

  “The birds were usually sacrificed when they were around ten to thirteen months,” Silas said. “There’ve been very few remains of older birds found, but it’s likely they were pets. Maybe they’d learned to speak and were highly valued because of it. It would make sense.”

  “So the older birds weren’t sacrificed?”

  “Not from what I can turn up. I guess if they made it past the proper ceremonial age for sacrifice, they were home free. I haven’t found a lot—some of the notes from the older sites just don’t have the detail. But it appears that the older birds hadn’t been plucked, and they didn’t have a left wing missing.”

  “Because you don’t pull the plumage off something you love,” Ren said. “You don’t use his body for rituals. You bury him like a family memb
er.”

  “So I’m just saying if you’re right and the parrot woman had the macaw with her, he could be a pet. And that still wouldn’t point to any raising of parrots at the Delgado site.”

  “Agreed,” she said.

  She could hear him smile on the other end of the phone.

  The next afternoon, Saturday, Silas got a call that made him jump onto the sofa, landing on his feet, crouched. The papers stacked around Ren’s legs shifted and scattered. She watched him nod at the phone, thank whoever was on the other end, and hang up.

  “Well?” she said. “I take it you got some news?”

  There was something about his pose that reminded her of Spider-Man.

  “Was everything you found at Crow Creek analyzed?” he asked. “All the sherds?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Did you find any red-slipped brownware?”

  “You’re going to torture me for a while, aren’t you?”

  His expression didn’t change. “Red-slipped brownware?”

  She was willing to let him enjoy this, whatever it was. He did have a gift for analysis. She thought he had his own visions that took shape in the graphs and percentages. “Yeah,” she said. “A decent amount. But they stopped making that by 1000 AD. It’s a century off our time period.”

  Silas nodded but did not look discouraged. If anything, he looked like he might leap into the air again.

  “The lab said six sherds from Delgado don’t match the clay we’ve found around the canyon,” he said. “Those sherds are red-slipped brownware, and we only found them in one room. It was the same room where we found the big sherd of your artist’s bowl.”

  Ren stood and started to pace. Pottery was too valuable to be thrown away simply because it broke. The pieces of a bowl could be used for plates, for utensils, for cooking and serving. If a large bowl broke in half, each half could be reinvented as a new vessel, and if it broke into four pieces, all four pieces would find new life. There was no waste. And maybe a cooking bowl held more than pragmatic value. Maybe your mother passed down her favorite pieces, which her mother had passed down to her. You’d keep those pieces with you until they were worn to nothing but dust.

  “Somebody brought their grandmother’s china with them when they moved to Delgado,” she said.

  Silas was bouncing on his heels, wobbling on the sofa cushions. “Here’s the other thing: The clay in the brownware had significant traces of antimony and arsenic. We haven’t found deposits with antimony and arsenic within twenty miles of the canyon.”

  She stopped pacing. “That matches what we found at Crow Creek.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “They were at Crow Creek first,” she said, walking faster now, spinning around at the fireplace and heading in the other direction. “The artist and the parrot woman, Lynay and Non, moved from there to Delgado.”

  Silas had already told her he did not feel comfortable calling the dead women by first names. Now he frowned—winced, almost—but he didn’t correct her.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I think it’s safe to say we had a group of Mimbreños move from Crow Creek to the Delgado site sometime around or after 1100. The pottery we’ve found would suggest that, yes, your artist was among these women.”

  “And she came with the parrot woman,” she insisted.

  “No indication of parrot ceremonies at Crow Creek, was there?”

  “She was with Lynay at Crow Creek,” Ren insisted. “Lynay drew her bracelets.”

  “Please stop doing that,” he said. “Can you just stick with ‘the artist’?”

  She held up a hand in acknowledgment. “That’s where their paths first crossed,” she continued. “I’m not saying that’s where the parrot woman was born—she could have been anywhere before Crow Creek. But I’m saying she was there with Lynay. That doesn’t explain the northern influence on the pots, but we’ll figure that out later. Maybe the parrot woman worked with parrots in the north, and that same northern influence—either through the parrot woman or through a larger transplanted group—shaped Lynay’s style.”

  He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. His eyes closed for one, two, three seconds.

  “Maybe,” he said. “There are plenty of maybes.”

  “We’re closer,” she said.

  “A lot of strands running through this thing, aren’t there?”

  “We’re getting closer,” she repeated, collapsing onto the arm of the couch and leaning against him. His shoulder was warm against her bare arm, and she felt a callus on his thumb as he rested a hand on her thigh. His breath smelled of orange juice.

  She watched his face and knew he had drifted off to somewhere in the distance, that he was seeing masses of people, uncountable, crossing broad swaths of land and mountain. He wasn’t seeing faces. He was seeing movements, swarms, the gathering of multitudes.

  “Can I see your files on Delgado?” he asked, as she had known that he would. His eyes were bright. “This could be it. The first step toward proving a specific large-scale migration to the canyon. Dating it. It could be the anchor for the whole sequence of occupations.”

  “I can find out where she came from,” she said.

  He focused on her. “It’s a lot to hope for,” he said. “One woman in the middle of thousands.”

  “That’s the point,” she said. “I’ll get the files.”

  It wasn’t that she didn’t care about the larger movements, about the trends and causes and effects that intrigued him. It was her job to care. But she was pulled in a different direction, maybe not an opposite one but one marked by two precise sets of footprints and wide, dark eyes and dirty fingernails. She couldn’t see past familiar faces to look for Silas’s crowds.

  She kept all her file folders in the china cabinet by the front door—she didn’t have any china, and the shelves were the perfect size. She headed toward the front room, crossing through the doorway into the entrance hall. A beam of light reflected off the hardwood floor, and bits of dust danced in the air. Silas had left a pair of shoes and a white shirt by the door.

  As soon as she rounded the corner and could no longer see Silas, Ren spotted Lynay sitting on the windowsill, crushing something in her hands. Or rubbing something slowly. She stood as Ren approached, and Ren could see that it was not clay on her hands this time. This was a dark, vivid red, and it was dripping onto the floor. Two drops, three drops, hit the floor with a heavy splish. It was a thick liquid.

  The girl stepped on Silas’s white shirt, the brown of her feet handsome and smooth against the ivory. One drop fell from her hand to her foot, running down her arch and landing on his shirt. The red spread across the white.

  She considered calling Silas, but she kept silent. He wouldn’t be able to see the girl, anyway. And she did not want him near Lynay. Not when the girl’s blood-colored hands were spreading dark stains over Silas’s shirt.

  Lynay came closer with her red red hands outstretched, and Ren couldn’t help but step backward. The girl was as calm and serene—and beautiful and bare-chested—as ever. She reached for Ren’s face, and Ren stumbled. She fell backward, hitting her elbow hard on the floor and yelping in pain. Lynay and her dripping hands were gone then, of course.

  Here and then gone. Always here and then gone. The girl was going to give her whiplash.

  She wasn’t sleeping. There were nightmares that she could not remember well, nightmares with running and bright sun and the sound of things breaking. Once she was walking through a canyon and saw her mother standing in a driveway. Her mother toppled over backward, straight-legged, and her head hit concrete with a sickening sound. Then her mother bounced up, smiling, because it had not hurt at all. And Ren knew it was not her mother at all but something wearing her mother’s face. The bone-on-concrete sound did not leave Ren’s head even after she woke up. She dreamed
she and Silas had found an immense pear, shoulder-high, that was as lightweight as a beach ball. They dribbled it and rolled it, then tossed it back and forth. As it came toward Ren, it blocked out the sun.

  Other times she was running and running, and there was the scrape of claws at her back, blood on the ground around her. Once she felt teeth sink into her forearm, and she screamed as she sat up in bed. She was tired of waking up crying, out of breath. It had been a long time since she had nightmares. Now she lay awake next to Silas, staring at the ceiling, just as she used to during the long, wary nights in her parents’ house.

  She no longer wanted to make friends with Lynay. She was not curious or flattered. She was on edge. It rattled her, constantly rounding a corner and seeing the girl. After all this time trying to summon the right ghosts, she found she just wanted them to leave. She couldn’t shake the sight of the girl’s hands dripping red, even though Ren suspected the liquid was paint. Paint was a good thing for Lynay, right? She painted what she loved: her pottery. And the girl herself didn’t seem threatening. She was as nonthreatening as a dead girl with red dripping from her hands could possibly be. Still.

  Ren had not seen Scott since she left the site. She considered that the girl had managed to convince Scott to let her trade hauntings with him. Like switching seats on a bus. She stifled a laugh.

  How long since she had sat beside him in the canyon? Eleven days? Twelve? He didn’t usually stay away so long.

  Silas shifted in his sleep, his hand landing on her hip.

  He was an affectionate sleeper. She had given him two men’s T-shirts—just solid colors, no logos—to add to his drawer full of typing-on-the-computer clothes. He didn’t seem to care where they came from. She thought they were both left from Daniel, who never came back to claim anything.