Come In and Cover Me (26 page)

“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.

“Because I tripped?” he asked.

“You could have been really hurt.”

His thoughts did not seem quite clear, so he tried to carefully consider what she was saying. It didn't make sense.

“I fall down all the time,” he said.

“Still.”

He ran both hands over his scalp. Everything felt normal, other than the one missing chunk. He wiggled his toes and his fingers, flexed his legs and arms. He took his time, taking inventory of muscles and joints and bones.

“I've broken both arms,” he said. “I've gotten a few concussions, sprained my left ankle seven—no, eight—times. Let's see. Dislocated my shoulder. Did I tell you about that time I killed a rattlesnake with a can of ravioli? You and I would be working in a bank if we wanted to sit at a desk all day. What's got you so disturbed?”

“I'm not disturbed,” she said, as a tear slid into her mouth.

The only sound was the rushing of the creek.

“You are definitely disturbed,” he said calmly, but his words were clipped and tight. “And it's not just me falling down. Something's worrying you.”

He could feel an ant bite starting to sting on his hand. His head hurt.

“You scared me,” she said finally, running a hand across her face. She looked as worn down as he felt. “I had a few seconds where I thought you were lying dead right in front of me, gone, and the idea of losing you terrified me. Okay?”

He looked down to take a breath. She was right, he noticed—there was blood on the rock where his head had landed. He shifted his eyes to her face. She was trying to stop the crying, desperately trying to not look disturbed at all, and he wished he was still unconscious and could wake up and start the whole scene again. He did not like this place. He did not like how tense they had been ever since they got in the truck and headed to this hillside. He had thought the edginess was her fault, but now he wasn't sure. There was sadness on her face, and he would swear there was love there, and the tamped-down terror she'd admitted. He wished they were back in the canyon, back in their little side-by-side rooms where he could hear her bare feet padding toward his bed after she'd changed into that blue T-shirt with bear prints.

“I'm sorry you thought I bashed my brains in,” he said.

She smiled, weakly.

“I like your brains,” she said. “In your head, specifically.”

They got to their feet together, and he felt reasonably steady. Other than a headache, he felt perfectly normal. After a few steps up the hill, a few steps behind Ren, he thought even the headache wasn't as bad as he had thought. Maybe he wouldn't even bother with the Tylenol—it was only a bump.