Come In and Cover Me (10 page)

She found him sitting by the creek half an hour later, far away from the house and the others. She had seen his flashlight bobbing in the dark and had followed, but the flashlight was nowhere to be seen now. The moonlight was gentle and kept her from walking into trees. The grass crunched under her feet, brittle, and the willow branches whispered in the breeze, rustling like silk. Small winged things chirped from the trees and the undergrowth.

“Sit with me,” he said.

“I can't see the ground,” she said. But she followed his voice and sat, bending her knees. The edge of her shorts skimmed the denim over his thighs as she settled.

On and on, the creek gargled.

“The thing is, there's a mystical side to this,” he said.

How like him to start an interrogation by answering rather than asking. She smiled in the dark. “Yeah.”

“One time here in this canyon we found a burial,” he said. “My trowel went right through the wall and scraped the edge of the skull. At that second when my trowel hit, there was this hum in the air, and then movement everywhere. A black cloud. Bees. Everywhere I looked, there were bees. There were three of us there, and none of us saw where they came from, but there were bees down in the pit, all around our faces and hands, brushing against our ears and necks and every square inch of skin. Not stinging at all, just hovering around us. I looked down at my hand, and it was like I had a black glove on. Then they were gone. Twenty seconds, maybe, of bees everywhere; then they disappeared as fast as they'd come.”

He let his knees fall apart slightly, and she felt the warmth of his leg against hers. “Tell me what you really saw at Crow Creek, Ren.”

That was not what she had expected. She had not prepared that story.

“That comes first,” he added. “Whatever happened here, I'm not going to understand it until you tell me about Crow Creek.”

The moon was almost full, the shape of a rabbit clear and nearly complete in it. This close to him, she could see Silas's face. He always wore his hat during the day, and his face seemed naked and vulnerable out in the open.

“I told you part of it,” she said. “I wasn't lying.”

“But there's more. It doesn't make sense unless there's more.”

“Yeah,” she said. She saw no reason to prolong it. He deserved these answers. He would not believe her, of course. But she would try. And if he walked away from her, there would be an advantage to that. Everything would be much easier.

She remembered the girl's face and focused on it, closing her eyes so she could see it better.

“You can take it or leave it, but this is what happened,” she started. “We'd been at the site for three weeks. I was sitting on the side of a hill that led down to the creek bank, and a little girl passed by me on her way to the water. She wore a string apron, and she had thick black hair down to her hips. I knew she didn't belong—or that I didn't belong—one or the other.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him, trying to gauge his response. He faced the water and said nothing. She continued.

“She was maybe twelve years old, with narrow little shoulders and dusty feet and ropy muscles like kids who stay in the pool all summer. She waded into the creek up past her waist, so her hair was floating around her like a veil skimming along the ground. She had something in her hand, behind her back, that I couldn't see. She stumbled, and she must have dropped it because she bent over suddenly, looking in the water. I scooted closer and watched. She reached down again and again, feeling around. When she bent over, more hair would drag through the water, and it had to be blocking her view. She'd toss it over her shoulder, but it would fall down again. Hair everywhere. Then she came up with a rock about the size of her hand. It was thin, thinner than your finger, black, with a sharp edge. I worried she would cut herself accidentally. She turned toward me but didn't look at me, standing still in the water with the sharp edge in her hand, pointed right at the skin of her throat. I thought I could see her pulse.

“I stood up then, worried, about to say something, anything. To stop her. Then she grabbed a chunk of her hair right above her ear, held it out away from her face, and started hacking at it with the rock. It fell into the water, and she grabbed another handful. Hair everywhere. There was black hair falling in strands and clumps, drifting all around her like seaweed or snakes or something alive, floating and swirling and then finally washing downstream. It happened very fast. Like I was imagining it all. At the end she stood there with her little bare head, shorn like a sheep, with pink skin showing through in places. And she smiled a huge smile.”

Ren stopped, remembering.

“Her jaw was square and her cheekbones were sharp and her eyes were bright,” she continued, then paused. She tried to hold on to both faces—the girl and the woman in the macaw apron—and compare their eyes. She'd thought the girl's eyes looked wet, glossy, like stones in the river. Were the grown woman's wide, dark eyes those same eyes? She didn't know.

“There was this look on her face of, oh, at first I thought happiness. But now I'd say it was satisfaction. She had done something important. So she walked to the edge of the creek, stepped out, and started climbing up the hill. She walked so close to me I could have touched her, and then she knelt down at the top of the hill about ten feet behind me. She looked straight at me then, and tossed the hair-cutting rock behind her, like she was showing me. So I dug there, where the rock landed. By myself at first because none of it made any sense. I couldn't tell anyone I wanted to dig there because an imaginary little girl told me to. But pretty quickly, I realized there was a hidden room there—a few rocks from the wall were right under the surface, and once I found those, I had a reason to suggest we dig there. And you know the rest.”

Silas rubbed his palm across his jaw, back and forth. His beard rasped against his hand.

“Do you see ghosts lurking around sites often?” he asked with no trace of sarcasm.

“No,” she said. “Almost never.”

“But you don't act like you were very surprised to see a little girl who died in the twelfth century.”

“Not totally shocked, no.”

He studied her. “So why do you think you saw her?”

She shrugged. She had never figured out the answer to that question.

“Sometimes knowledge comes out in strange ways, you know,” he said. “Your mind puts together connections in ways you don't understand.”

“Right,” she said, exhaling. He was trying to make it all logical, sensible. He had reached some sort of limit, maybe, on just how much he was willing to accept. But he was still here. Still next to her, still listening. That mattered.

Meanwhile, the weight of talking about this, of shaping it and lifting it up and passing it along so carefully to Silas, had exhausted her. She was ready to let the subject float away into the dark. She had seen people, specific individuals, twice before she saw the girl at Crow Creek. Not counting Scott. She'd seen a gray-haired man shaping a dart point near Casa Grande, and she'd seen a woman crying in Mesa Verde. In both cases, she'd been feeling, not thinking—absorbing the strong breeze or the baking sun—then suddenly someone was there who had not been there a second earlier. At Crow Creek she had been focused on the shine of the water, on the fast-moving currents, when the little girl appeared.

These ghosts wanted something from her, she assumed. She was trying to guess what it was, trying to help them. She did not know why they appeared to her. She did not know why she could hear inarticulate sounds but not their actual words. She did not know what the hair or the feathers or the pottery meant. And she didn't know what song Scott had been humming by the window this morning, with sunlight and tiny floating particles raining down on him. She did not know if she should invite Silas into her room tonight, and she did not know what she would say if he knocked on her door uninvited.

She had to tell him about the woman in the macaw skirt, of course. When she finished, he had only one more question for her: “Do you think the girl you saw then and the woman you saw today were the same person?”

“I don't know,” she said. “There was maybe twenty years' difference in their ages. It's possible.”

He was quiet after that. She found it hard to remain still. He was not acting like he thought she was insane. When he stood and held out his hand, she let him pull her to her feet. She was eye level with his chin. He held her hand as they made their way out of the willows and back into the open moonlight.

It occurred to her that some men were attracted to crazy women.

She did not have to invite him. He stood halfway in her room, one hand still on the door. He was only a step away from the bed, which took up three-quarters of her pine-paneled room. Her jeans were in a pile on the floor, and her pullover hung on the doorknob. She'd been reading, and her T-shirt was bunched around her hips, under her red flannel sheets. Looking at him, she rubbed her thumb against the sheets, which she thought were somehow sexy and comforting at the same time, and surely if any sheets could send the image she wanted these would be those sheets because they said she was neither Madonna nor whore but someone in between and she'd nearly packed the light blue sheets but thankfully had not brought them because they lacked all allusions to whores and when he looked at her she forgot her sheets.

“I missed you,” he said.

She wondered if he'd knocked and she'd forgotten that already.

“Hi,” she said.

“Can I come in?”

“Yes.”

“Can I sit down?”

“Yes.”

“Chatty, aren't you?” he said, sitting, his hand flat on her sheets. Then, before she could say anything, “Are we going to do this, Ren?”

“You're in my bedroom,” she said.

“That doesn't mean we're going to do this.”

“You're in your boxers,” she said. They had a pattern of what she suspected were beagles. She would remember to make fun of them later.

“That still doesn't mean we're going to do this.”

She pulled back the sheets, not too far, just enough to make the invitation clear. Now he could see where her T-shirt had ridden up, exposing the tops of her thighs and her black panties—utilitarian, but still black.

“Oh,” he said, closing the door behind him. He walked toward her, and she scooted toward the middle of the bed, putting down her book. She was sitting with her back pressed straight against the headboard.

“I missed you,” he said again.

“We said good night about fifteen minutes ago,” she said. He was playing with the edge of her shirt, the backs of his fingers lightly rubbing against her thigh, sliding down toward her knee. She felt the touch more because his hand was hidden under the sheet.

“Yeah,” he said.

She picked up his hand—the one not teasing her thigh—and raised it to her jaw. She tilted her face into his palm. He smelled like soap now, the barest trace of juniper still underneath. His white T-shirt had a hole at the neck.

“Come here,” she said, her hand sliding to his wrist, pulling him toward her until she could feel his heat and his weight. He slid his hand down her leg, wrapped it around her ankle—still under the cover of sheets and blankets—and pulled her under him smooth and fast. She heard her book hit the floor, his elbow sharp against her side, and he said her name into her mouth.

 

THEY CALLED HER VILLAGE
Women Crying, although this was not because of any particular sadness. Her mother said that long ago there had been no people here—not a single footprint along the wet mud of the creek, not a single room shaped from sticks and water and earth. Instead of people, there had been a crowd of yucca, a field of them, too many to count. They had grown there without anyone's help, but still they looked like a planted field, like laid-out rows of corn or squash.

By the time the people came, the yucca had died some time before. And so they stood sadly, collapsing in on themselves, woman-shaped and gray, loose hair blowing. Women Crying. But the sound of the village's name was a liquid sound, like water pouring, so there was a pleasure to saying the words.

That was only one of her mother's stories. Her mother had the gift of seeing the patterns in things. She saw the images in the clay, and then she would paint the clay so that its true stories were revealed. The gift of seeing patterns ran through the blood from mother to daughter, and her mother said the gift was strongest when it was poured into a single daughter, an only daughter. Sisters diluted the gift.

She was her mother's only daughter. She had three brothers—once four brothers—but they did not touch the clay.

Her mother's hands smelled of clay, rich and wet and restful. The clay was always in the lines of her knuckles, under her fingernails. She would say that to have clean hands, to wash all trace of the clay from yourself, was an insult to the earth and to the spirits. Around her throat, her mother wore a piece of turquoise, a piece of the sky from the previous lower world that ants had carried with them as they emerged into this world. The mother valued the necklace, but the daughter adored it. She would sit in her mother's lap and roll the stone between her fingers.

Her mother finally let her try her own bowls. The first ones she attempted—all of them patted and kneaded with hands too little to grip a grinding stone—had exploded. Three bowls destroyed. That was because she had not added enough water to the powdered clay. How small was she then? So small. Years before Non came.

Her mother had been patient with the first two shattered bowls, but she was not patient when the cracking of the third pot echoed through the air. (There had been whole pots in between broken ones, nicely shaped smooth bowls, as long as her narrow feet, and it was probably those whole, satisfactory bowls that dried up her mother's patience.) A cold hard look, no fondness in her eyes—her mother did not have to speak. She closed herself off, making invisible walls go up in front of her eyes like frogs did. Her mother never needed to yell—the walls in front of her eyes were enough.