by Gin Phillips
He had learned the basics of flint-knapping, of shaping rock into tools. More specifically, using one rock—a hammerstone—to whack little pieces off a second rock until you’d made a dart point or a knife or an ax or such. He liked shaping obsidian, although it inevitably made him bleed. But if you wanted to break obsidian, you needed a soft rock to use for your hammerstone. Too much force would shatter the obsidian.
He watched Ren, and it was like walking up to the sheer pink walls of the canyon, craning your neck and trying to comprehend the lines and scope and sculpture of this thing that you could never quite see all at once. Or watching just one small piece of that same rock in the palm of your hand, catching the sun and throwing off colors that were unnamable, until you realized that it had ceased to be a known object. To watch her and feel his reaction to her—it shook him.
The downhill walk jarred his knees. The trees grew bigger as he got closer to the water: The junipers towered thirty or forty feet above him. He worked his way down onto the last terrace before the floodplain. He found what he was looking for and made his way back to Ren.
She was watching for him when he reached the top of the trail.
“Why do you have dead sticks?” she asked.
“They’re seep willows.”
She nodded, obviously waiting for more.
“The Spanish called them yerba de pasmo,” he said.
“Okay, herb,” she said. “Herb of . . . what?”
“Chills. People used the leaves to make a remedy for chills. And I think they chewed the stems for toothaches.”
“Do you have a toothache?”
“No. The dead sticks are perfect for roasting marshmallows.”
She raised her eyebrows. “We have marshmallows?”
“Sí. Lucky for you, I packed the groceries.”
Night fell, and the temperature dropped. They’d brought sandwiches but needed a fire for warmth, and they took their time cooking and savoring the marshmallows. The melted sugar and the heat and the view of the stars left Silas content and lethargic. Ren was pressed against his side, and he felt affection return full force, trumping frustration. It was difficult to stay angry with her when she had marshmallow, inexplicably, in her eyelashes.
The thought made him swipe at his beard; he located a sticky patch and scraped at it with one finger. Then he could feel her eyes on him again, and when he turned, she looked away. He felt his contentment evaporating.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” he asked again.
“I’m not looking at you.”
“Do you think I don’t know when you’re looking at me?”
“Obviously you don’t.”
“Aurenthia,” he said, exhausted.
“I’m not looking at you. Not at you.”
He caught the distinction. “So what are you looking at?”
A pause. “Nothing.”
He stood, twisting at the waist, popping his back. She seemed startled by the sudden movement.
“You’re a terrible liar,” he said. “And you’re driving me crazy.”
She only looked up at him. He made one last effort.
“Tell me what’s bothering you,” he said evenly.
Objectively, he couldn’t help but be fascinated by the workings of her face in the firelight. She wanted to tell him. She wanted him to leave her alone. She didn’t want him to be angry with her. She was pissed off that he was pushing her. Her jaw and lips moved, just tiny pulses of movement, and her eyes slipped and slid.
“This will be a mistake,” she said. But now her gaze was steady, holding his, and he knew he had won. He sat beside her again.
“What will be a mistake?”
“To tell you.”
“Try it,” he said.
She didn’t pause at all, and later, when he thought back on it, he was impressed that once she made up her mind, she didn’t flinch.
“You saw Lynay the other night,” she said. “Or maybe you just felt her.”
“What?”
“Lynay. At my house. In bed two nights ago. She was leaning over you, and her hair brushed against your face. It made your nose itch, and you sniffed. Then you said, ‘Who are you?’”
He kept his face empty as his mind whirred. So this was what she had been watching and waiting for: this moment of revelation when he would show that he did not believe in her ghosts and never had. He looked at her as intently as she looked at him, the blue-black sky around her face, and knew she had been preparing for him to fail her test. Or for her to fail his. He wasn’t sure which.
“I told you it would be a mistake to tell you,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“I know this won’t really raise the level of our discourse,” he said, “but you’re being such a girl. Quit reading too much into a few seconds of silence.”
“You don’t have to pacify me,” she said. “You don’t have to believe me. But you asked me what happened, and I told you. So don’t blame me for this whole awkward situation.”
Her jaw was jutting slightly, and her eyes looked too big for their sockets.
Silas shifted slightly in the dirt. He felt a rock digging into his thigh. The truth was that he did not believe in actual ghosts that wandered around sites and haunted lovely archaeologists. He did not believe that spirits mimed little dramas, trying to get someone to pay attention. He did believe in spirits, but he believed these spirits were subtle, prone to whisperings and nudges and inspirations. Intuition.
“You know about Eilean Donan, the Scottish castle?” he asked.
Now she looked less defensive, more annoyed. “What?”
“In the early nineteen hundreds, a stonemason in Scotland claimed to have had a vision of the Eilean Donan castle as it had been in the fourteenth century. The castle was in complete ruins by that time. But it was rebuilt according to the stonemason’s vision, and when the actual plans for the castle were found years later, they matched his vision down to the slightest detail.”
She looked less annoyed.
“And there was a geologist who found a fossil, some sort of prehistoric fish,” he continued. “Agassiz was the man’s name. He couldn’t figure out how the fish had looked, the bone structure was so bizarre. Then he had a dream for three nights in a row that showed him the fish, and he finally sketched what he saw in his dream. It matched the fossil perfectly.”
“So what are you saying?” she asked. “You think I’m daydreaming?”
“No,” he said. “I think you’ve seen something, understood something. I think your ghosts are your subconscious trying to give you clues.”
He believed that dreams and visions were the hippie cousins of the scientific method. He believed there was value to them. He believed that knowledge could bend and twist itself into surprising shapes. He did not believe a bit of subconscious knowledge could tickle his nose.
“You think I’m imagining it all,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“No. I believe you’ve seen something that I don’t,” he said. “I believe there’s something here. I believe your ghosts are a manifestation of your insights.”
“You don’t think she’s a figment of my imagination?” she asked.
“No,” he said, and meant it.
“Okay,” she said, and meant it. “I’ll take that for now. But you’re wrong: She’s not just an idea. She’s too annoying.”
He looked at her and thought how much he loved her face.
She woke him, whimpering, as she sometimes did. Monster dreams, he called them. He had nightmares himself occasionally, but hers always took the form of a child’s terrors—witches, werewolves, vampires, dark shadowed things under the bed.
He slid a hand down her warm arm as
he shushed her, whispering, “It’s a dream,” in her ear.
She was instantly awake, breathing heavily. “Oh. Thanks.”
“Vampire?” he guessed. The last one had been a werewolf climbing in through her bedroom window, and she had known it had already eaten her parents.
“Witch,” she said, speech sleep-slurred. “I was hiding behind Dad’s recliner, and she was coming for me, so I jumped out and grabbed her, and when I put my fingers in her mouth, she bit me.”
“Well, honey,” he said, “that’s what you get if you stick your finger in a witch’s mouth.”
She snorted, stretching her arms, then rolled over to wedge her head under his chin.
He wrapped both arms around her, warding off witches. He pressed his cheek against her hair.
“The monsters are always in your house, aren’t they?” he said.
She didn’t answer. He assumed she had fallen asleep again.
He had seen another site suddenly revealed like this, bared to the fresh air after a layer of earth had washed away. That had been an untouched site, a huge site, maybe as big as any Mimbres village ever found. The pueblo had been built near a big seep at the meeting of a side canyon and the west fork of the Mimbres River.
The site was a treasure. Hundreds of rooms. The secrets they could hold, the details of architecture and diet and social structure, of trade patterns and spirituality and health. The entire pueblo had been covered and hidden for centuries, no hint of it above the surface. It was located in an alluvial fan, where water had washed down a slope and spread several feet of silt and gravel—alluvium—over the once surface-level village. So it all disappeared under the dirt. Then arroyos had cut through the land, and the walls had started to show themselves.
The pueblo was found in 1989, just months before the burial laws banning the destruction of burial sites went into effect, and Silas had come out to the site only because his professors had mentioned it. He was a college kid with no experience. But he got directions and drove himself down the narrow county road. He was careful and quiet, staying on the right side of the “No Trespassing” signs, peering over barbed wire to get a look at the edges of the walls. He knew the site would take years, and that maybe if he played his cards right, he could be a part of the excavation. He could help uncover an entire world.
Then the bulldozers had come. The owner of the land needed money, and Silas understood that. These were the same people, with the same set of problems and fears, he had grown up knowing. The ranchers who came to drink coffee with his father were just like these men along the Mimbres. They had their land and not much else. So if they found out that suddenly a patch of dirt that happened to hold a bunch of old bowls could be worth tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of dollars, they cashed in. Those bowls could mean sending kids to college, a new roof, retirement. And they were only talking about digging up a bunch of old bowls and old houses and old bones.
He had once heard a preacher say that because these bones weren’t Christian bones, they didn’t have to be counted as human. They deserved no more care than rabbit or coyote bones.
Silas came back after the bulldozers had come, after the earth had been torn up and pushed around. There were bodies scattered through the backfill. He could see the bones piled up in the dirt—ribs and mandibles and tibiae and patellae, skulls. Tiny bones of children and infants. And mixed in with the bones there were river stones from the walls, wooden posts from the ceilings. When he got closer, close enough to smell the freshly churned earth, he could see teeth scattered through the dirt, canines and molars and incisors. Some black-and-white sherds. There had been whole bowls, of course, but they were gone now.
The neighbors said that the art dealers had lined up along the barbed-wire fence, yelling out offers as the bowls were pulled from the backfill. They could be handed a bowl then and there, a successful deal made, and they could walk off with their bowls and leave the bones behind them.
Later a group of archaeologists had still excavated the ravaged site—there were still burials and a few stray walls left in place. They found the faunal remains of domesticated turkeys—a first. But Silas never worked at the place, never even tried to arrange an assignment. He hated the thought of bones out of place, scattered and left behind. Even now, if the images surfaced, if he pictured it all in his mind, the memory made him tired.
Ren wasn’t awake yet, and the sun was just coming up. Silas had needed to pee, and now he stood outside their tent and watched the light spread across the sky, spilling warm over the flats. He twisted to the side and cracked his back. He rubbed his hands over his rough cheeks. He could feel bits of Gila Conglomerate in his beard. He would make coffee later. Now he wanted to rinse off, to wash the grime off his hands and feet and face, at least, and get his thoughts together.
He couldn’t find soap. He must have forgotten to pack it.
He started down the trail, which felt slicker and less stable to his sleep-sluggish feet. He skidded right away and righted himself quickly. He brushed against a branch of honey mesquite—which had more substantial claws than the catclaw—and scraped his arm. No blood. Something small moved in the brush—probably a bird. He paused but couldn’t see anything. He started down again. He made a point of concentrating on his feet, watching the trail instead of the sideoats and blue grama and juniper reaching toward him. There did seem to be an awful lot of honey mesquite on this trail, though. And something else was rustling off to his left. Something bigger. Maybe a rabbit. He looked toward the sound and noticed a clump of whisklike snakeweed mottled green and brown—good not just for snakebites but as a cure for joint pain, his mind supplied.
He remembered one of his last arguments with his ex-wife—they rarely even had arguments, that’s how much distance had accumulated between them by the end of the marriage—when she kept insisting that they were fine. The marriage was fine. She was happy, he was happy, everything was wonderful. And he said, “No, it’s not.” He said, “I’m not happy. And you can’t really be happy. Shouldn’t we at least try to talk about this?”
Tina said, “Since when does the man want to talk about relationships? Isn’t that supposed to be my line? There’s nothing to talk about.”
He hated not talking.
He tried to keep his mind on his footing.
But then there was the most amazing rock lichen underneath a mesquite bush. The lichen’s bright yellow and rust-orange paint splotches covered the entire rock, impossibly bright. He wondered if he was wrong, if it actually was painted, but no, that was ridiculous. He stopped and looked, bending sideways at the waist, so when his foot slipped on a smattering of pebbles, his balance was off. The trick to falling was to let your feet go ahead and slide forward and just sit down into the fall. Scraped hands and a sore butt would be the worst of it. But one leg went out from under him, and he was slamming onto the ground flat on his back, too fast, too hard, head snapping forward and then back onto solid rock. And then he was not aware of anything.
The light was too bright. Sun in his eyes and a headache. And he was lying on the ground. None of this made any sense at all. Why would he be lying on the ground? He had been tired earlier, not quite awake. Maybe he lay down here on this trail? He shifted, and his head throbbed. Oh. The pain made it all clearer. That sonofabitch lichen.
He heard Ren’s voice above, calling for him. He sat up, wincing.
“Here,” he yelled, and his voice echoed around his skull unpleasantly. “I fell down.”
He still couldn’t see her, but he could hear her steps coming quickly. He wondered how long he had been lying here and how long she had been calling.
“You okay?” she called.
“Yeah. I tripped on a rock,” he said.
He saw her feet and then her face as she leaned over him and her hands landed on his shoulders. He was still lying flat, so her face was upside down. He
expected to find her rolling her eyes, teasing him. At Cañada Rosa he had fallen into the stream several times, his toes slipping off the rocks, soaking his boots.
She was not laughing. A tear hit his cheek.
“You’re crying,” he said.
“No, I’m not.”
She straightened, then knelt beside him, her hands still on him. He was at a loss for a moment, watching the tears stream down her face and splat on the dirt.
“Yes, you are,” he finally replied.
She raised a hand to her face, touching her cheek lightly, like checking to see if paint was still wet.
“I don’t cry,” she said, looking up at him. “I really never cry. Not ever.”
He cocked his head. There had been a touch of pride in her voice.
“You’re crying,” he said again.
“I heard you leave the tent,” she said. “And I heard the grass rustling down here. Then you yelled.”
“I don’t remember yelling.”
“Well, you yelled, and so I got up and came out here and called for you. And called and called. So I started down here, still calling. And I couldn’t see anything, but then I saw your foot and the blue of your jeans on the ground. And you weren’t moving at all, and you didn’t answer me. Then I got close enough to see that your eyes were closed. There’s some blood on this rock, and you still didn’t answer me.”
“Was I out more than a few seconds?”
“It felt longer than that.”
“Do we have any Tylenol?” he asked, trying to raise his head and finding that movement was easier if he kept his eyes closed. “It’s just a little slice off my scalp, but I might have a serious bump.”
“You looked dead,” she said.
This stopped him. “I’m not. Not remotely dead.”
“Maybe it was a mistake coming out here,” she said, lowering herself onto a rock. She had not bothered to button her jeans. He braced one hand on her knee and pushed himself into a sitting position.