The Return

by Bentley Little

  "Jesus," Glen breathed.

  "Yeah."

  "And there's been more?"

  She nodded. "Judi and Randy found the jawbone of a horse so horribly deformed that we didn't even know what it was at first. It was in a garbage pile, a pit filled with castoff food and broken household items. A horse's jaw should not have been in that spot in the first place, and this thing . . . it looked like the jawbone of a monster. They also found--I know this doesn't make sense, but it's true--a leather pouch containing Greek money and, next to it, what Al has identified as a Saxon children's toy. They're both from roughly the same time period as the pueblo, and while it's possible that someone came by later and placed them there, it's not too probable. From the positioning of the items and the obviously undisturbed ground where they were found, it looks like they were in the pueblo when it was abandoned. Only as far as anyone knows, the Anasazi never had any contact with or knowledge of either the Greeks or the Saxons."

  Melanie licked her lips. "And then there's . . . my picture. It's creepy enough to find strange things buried in the ground for hundreds of years that don't make sense or can't be explained. But when one of them involves you personally, it . . . it . . ." She shook her head helplessly. "I don't know how to describe it. It's just worse is all. You start feeling like you're the target of something. You wonder if it's just a coincidence or if it's like one of those old mummy movies and you're the reincarnation of some princess that the monster's going to come after."

  "What does Al say about all this?"

  She shrugged. "He seems excited, but I think it's more because these are rare finds and will help him protect the site. I don't think he believes there's anything out of the ordinary. Who knows? Maybe he's right."

  "But you don't think so."

  She shook her head.

  "He said something to me when he first brought me out on Monday, something about archeologists thinking Anasazis had devolved into other tribes, but fiction writers thinking that something mysterious had happened. He seemed to side with the fiction writers. Maybe he's working out some sort of new theory about their disappearance, and he doesn't want to let on or say anything about it until he can publish it."

  "That's not so far-fetched," she admitted.

  "Maybe all this stuff supports his theory. Maybe that's why he's so excited."

  "I hope so. It makes it a little less eerie somehow."

  "So you're not going to quit?"

  Melanie frowned. "Quit?"

  "I thought you were scared that--"

  "It'll take more than that to scare me away. It's spooky, I admit, but once I start a job I finish it. Besides, I want to find out what happens."

  Glen smiled. "Good," he said.

  She started to say something, then stopped and smiled herself.

  They walked in silence for a moment, but it was a comfortable silence. They'd reached the downtown area by this time, the original Main Street, not the newer one with the gas stations and fast-food outlets, and she pointed out the old Bower Hotel, now home to medical offices, dental offices, and a few failing boutiques. She showed him the former sheriff's office, now an antique store, where rumor had it that Doc Holliday spent an involuntary evening on his way to Tombstone. They stopped in at Yellis' Soda Fountain, unchanged since the early 1900s and still owned by the same family. Melanie was obviously a frequent customer, and she bought a box of lemon drops, the type Glen had not seen since childhood.

  They turned off Main and walked down a tree-lined residential street with beautiful old homes that seemed completely out of place in this dumpy little town.

  Melanie popped a lemon drop in her mouth, then offered him one. "So tell me about yourself," she said. "I assume you're not married. Otherwise, you wouldn't be out here digging in the dirt all summer. Divorced?"

  Glen shook his head. "No. And no significant other either."

  "I'm sorry. Did you have a bad breakup?"

  "From who?" He smiled wryly. "To be completely and totally honest, I haven't even had a girlfriend since college."

  She raised an eyebrow.

  He held up a hand. "I know how that sounds, and I know I should probably lie and pretend that my social awkwardness stems from the fact that I was involved in a long-term relationship and have been out of commission for a while. But the truth is, I never found anyone. And what's even more embarrassing is that I didn't really make an effort to look. I graduated, went to work, and suddenly I looked up and years had passed and my life was exactly the same as it was a decade ago. I'm not a workaholic or anything. It's not that I didn't have time for a relationship. It's just . . . well, I guess I sort of got into a rut and didn't know how to get out."

  "You're out now."

  He smiled. "Yes, I am."

  "You know," she said thoughtfully, "you're the wave of the future, that type of new modern American I've been reading about: cut off from regular human contact, interacting only with coworkers and people on the Internet. You're probably one of those millionaires next-door, living in a modest little condo, eating frugally, never buying new clothes or new cars, and after you're dead, your neighbors will find out you had all this money that you had stashed away and could have done something with."

  He felt embarrassed because she was a lot closer to the truth than he wanted to admit. Not about the money. But about the lifestyle.

  He changed the subject. "What about you? Are you seeing anyone?"

  Melanie was silent for a moment, then pointed down at the sidewalk. "See that?"

  "What?"

  "Those words."

  He bent down to look at a name imprinted into the corner of the sidewalk square. " 'F. J. Black," ' he read. " 'Cement Contractor." '

  "That's my great-grandfather."

  Glen was not sure exactly what this had to do with the topic at hand, so he said politely, "Oh. Your family's in construction?"

  "He was a murderer. There are people's body parts buried in these sidewalks."

  He looked at her, not sure if she was joking.

  She wasn't.

  "He was the most notorious serial killer in Bower history. The only serial killer in Bower history. He murdered sixteen transients between 1910 and 1935. This was a mining town back then, and a lot of workers drifted in and out of here, especially during the Depression. Every couple of years, he'd pick out some young man without a family, have a few drinks with him, take him out behind the lumberyard, and kill him. He'd chop the body into little tiny pieces and then mix the pieces in with the cement of whatever he was working on at the time. The town sidewalks were his biggest and longest project, and they got most of the bodies. Of course, no one found out about any of this until after he was dead, when my great-uncle Horace found his most recent victim out in the lumberyard, part of the body mixed in with some mortar, the rest in the dirt. They only found out about the others because my great-grandfather kept track of them in his ledger, along with his list of materials and expenses. He didn't write down names, but he wrote down descriptions and specified where he'd disposed of their body parts." She stared down at the sidewalk as she spoke, unwilling to meet his eyes. Her voice was low, unusually subdued.

  "Everyone in town knows that. And they know that I'm his great-grandaughter. People are nice to me, I have friends, I'm a part of the community . . . but I'm not exactly prime dating material. The men of Bower aren't beating a path to my door. In the back of their minds is the thought that there's a mass murderer in my family, and that maybe his genes have been passed down to me." She smiled ruefully. "Not exactly the kind of thing men like to think about on a date.

  "So, to answer your question, no, I'm not seeing anyone."

  "Wow." Glen did not know what to say. What was the appropriate response to that? He shook his head, stunned. "Wow," he said again.

  "Kind of see me in a whole new light now, don't you?"

  He looked at her in surprise. "No," he said. And it was true. Her revelation was shocking, but it did not alter his opinion of her,
did not reflect on her in any way, at least not in his mind. The past was past, and what happened had occurred decades before she'd even been born. Hell, he knew next to nothing about his own ancestors. For all he knew, they could have tortured people during the Inquisition, come over to America to slaughter Indians, and then worked their way up to lynching black men.

  "I wasn't planning on telling you that," she said softly. "At least not for a while. I haven't told any of the others, not even Al."

  "My lips are sealed."

  "I guess I just thought you should know."

  He wasn't sure what she meant by that.

  "You know, the past doesn't die. It's with us all the time. The sins of the father and all that." She looked down at the ground, at the imprint in the cement. "I've thought sometimes that maybe that's why I teach history, why I spend my summers doing these amateur archeological things. Maybe I'm just trying to understand why we're such slaves to what went before."

  Glen shook his head. "Maybe that's true in a small town, but not in the big bad city. I know people who've reinvented themselves three or four times over. They don't even have to answer for their own previous actions, let alone the actions of others."

  "I wish I could do that, start over someplace where no one knows me."

  "Why can't you?"

  "I live here."

  "So?"

  "My job's here, my parents are here . . . I just . . . I can't."

  Glen thought about his own mother, his own life. "Well, you leave almost every summer--"

  She laughed. "And a liberating experience it is, let me tell you."

  "Why not make it permanent? You know, I was trapped in a life I didn't want until my mother died--"

  "That's the thing: your mother died. You wouldn't have left otherwise. You wouldn't have quit your job. You wouldn't be here."

  "No," he admitted. "But I should have done it a long time ago. And you should, too. You don't have to go far. Springerville, say. Or Randall. You could work for a school there, live your own life where people know nothing about your family background, define for yourself who you are, yet be close enough that you could still come back and visit your parents on the weekend if you wanted to."

  "That does sound tempting."

  "There's nothing stopping you."

  "I'll think about it." She smiled at him, and there was gratitude in that smile. If he'd been more confident, if he'd known her longer, if he were a different type of person than he was, he would have hugged her. The moment seemed to cry out for it. But instead he smiled back at her, and they resumed their slow stroll down the street.

  He found himself trying to imagine what she had been like as a child, as a teenager. She was his age at least, and he wondered if they would have gotten along if they'd met back then; if they would have been high school sweethearts, going to school dances, going out on dates, marrying young and having kids. Would that life have been better than the one he had now?

  They continued walking. There was a long pause in their conversation, this one awkward. He glanced through the large front window of a well-kept house. Inside, the living room lights were on, though dusk had not yet arrived. A boy and a girl were sitting on the couch watching television. Their mother was seated on a nearby lounge chair, reading a magazine. He turned back toward Melanie. "So," he ventured, "would you like to go out on a date sometime?"

  "Isn't this a date?"

  He cleared his throat nervously. "I don't know," he said. "Is it?"

  She took his hand, and he felt the softness of her fingers against his, the smoothness of her cool palm. She smiled at him, squeezed. "It is now."

  3

  Melanie awoke feeling good.

  It had been a long time since she'd awakened on a day off feeling anything but restless and out of sorts. She peeled and grated potatoes and made herself hash browns for breakfast, which she ate on the back porch while watching a hyperactive group of sparrows dart between her two lemon trees. The sky was clear, but the temperature was not too hot, and it looked like it was going to be a very pleasant day.

  She'd dreamed about Glen, and it was a sexual dream, the first she'd had in a long, long time. She was not a person who ordinarily remembered her dreams, and on those few instances when she did, they were usually nightmares. But this time was different. She and Glen were making love on soft meadow grass near a mountain stream; she was on top, the warm sun shining on her bare back, and everything was perfect.

  That euphoric feeling was still there when she woke up, was still there after breakfast, was still there after she'd changed the sheets and made the bed and vacuumed the house.

  She would be meeting Glen after lunch. They'd planned to go out this afternoon with Randy and Judi. Ron and Buck would have come along in an instant--all of the ASU students were going stir crazy here on their days off and were grateful for anything that would help kill time--but the four of them had made a concerted effort to keep their plans quiet.

  Her morning was free, though, and she felt so good that she decided to drop by and see her parents. Ordinarily, she made her obligatory weekly visit on Sunday evening, arriving just before dinner and leaving almost immediately after, but today she thought she'd actually spend some time with them, and she drove across town to her old home.

  She pulled up in front of the house. Neighborhood kids she didn't know, but who would doubtlessly be in her class a few years from now, were playing kickball on her parents' lawn, using the willow tree and the corner of the garage and the flower box as bases. They stared at her suspiciously as she parked her car and got out, walking up to the front door. She felt like the intruder here, and while she smiled at the children, she felt relieved once she was inside, the door closed behind her.

  "Mom!" she called out, walking into the family room. "Daddy!"

  Her mother stood up from the couch. "What a surprise! We didn't expect you until tomorrow, dear. What's the occasion?" A frown passed over her face. "There's not any problem, is there?"

  Melanie laughed. "No. I just thought I'd stop by and pay you guys a visit."

  "Well, we're grateful."

  Her father shifted in his easy chair. "You're here just in time. Your mother's trying to drag me into her drama league."

  "We're doing Death of a Salesman this season, and I think he'd make a perfect Willie Loman. Look at how beaten down he is."

  "I've been telling her that maybe someone who's interested or someone with some acting talent might be better."

  "You can't spend the rest of your life just sitting in that chair watching sports and court TV shows. You're retired now; you can do anything you want."

  "And I don't want to hang out with a bunch of queers and old ladies redoing some play that's been done better a million times before."

  " 'Queers and old ladies,' huh? Yeah, you'd better watch out. There might be some neegroes there, too."

  Melanie stepped in. "Mom? Obviously he doesn't want to do it. Daddy? Racism, sexism, and homophobia are nowhere near as charming as you seem to think they are. Now, why don't we all just forget about the drama league for a little while and try to have a nice normal conversation, like a regular family?"

  Ordinarily, her parents would have chuckled and they all would have settled down to talk in a happy, everyday way. But, instead, they both lit into her for having "teacheritis" and treating them as though they were seventh-grade children, her mother saying Melanie thought she was better than they were because she'd gone to college, her father telling her that she was an ungrateful know-it-all not half as smart as she thought she was. There was real animosity in it, and Melanie was taken aback. What had brought this on? She and her parents had always had a great relationship, a loving, sitcom-family relationship, and to her this came completely out of the blue. She was more hurt than she let on, and she excused herself, going into the kitchen ostensibly for a drink of water, but really to settle her nerves.

  Strangely enough, things were calmer when she returned. Everything was back to
normal. It was as if the vehement argument had never happened, and after a minute or so of awkwardness, Melanie told them about her week. She loosened up as she spoke, and she talked about Glen, saying how nice it was to have someone her own age at the excavation.

  Her mother read between the lines instantly. "Why didn't you tell us about him before? Have you two gone out yet?"

  "He just started this last week, and we haven't been on an official date yet, but we sort of went out last night. We took a walk. I showed him around town, and then we grabbed some food at La Casa. I think you'd like him. Both of you."

  "It's about time," her father said.

  "George!"

  "She's no spring chicken." He turned toward Melanie. "You were already six years old by the time your mother was your age."

  "Thanks, Daddy."

  "Well . . ."

  "Speaking of the excavation, your father found some Indian pottery."

  He snapped his fingers. "That's right! I forgot to tell you." He struggled out of his chair. "I was digging a hole for those new sprinklers I'm putting in, and I came across this piece of pottery. Strangest damn thing. You and your friends dug holes to China in that yard when you were little and never found so much as an arrowhead, but now that they discovered that Indian ruin you're digging at, stuff seems to be coming up everywhere." He shambled down the hallway. "Wait a minute. I saved it for you."

  She started to follow him back to his den, but stopped in the hall to look at the framed photos of herself that her mother had used to decorate the walls. A new baby picture had been added since last week, replacing a much cuter one that had hung there for twenty years. An outline of the older, larger frame was visible around the new one, and she wondered why the photos had been switched after all this time. "What do you mean, 'stuff seems to be coming up everywhere'?" she called out.

  "George Kelvin said he found an Indian necklace while he was planting roses. And Helen's grandkids dug up a mess of arrowheads." He emerged from the den holding a triangular pottery shard that was black on one side, brown on the other. Between his fingers, she could see the white lines of a decorative pattern. "Come on, let's go back into the family room. The light's better. You can see the picture."