The Man In The Seventh Row (17 page)

'Look,' she said excitedly, extracting a shard of patterned glass from the topsoil. It carried the faintest traces of the symbolic markings that proved it once served as a container for the local drink known as Irn-Bru. Once she did find a bit of a Mediterranean wine jar and that fired her imagination for a day or two. But she wasn't really into digging with a trowel. She would rather just go at it with a spade and get it done as quickly as possible.

'We decided to have a baby. Jo gave up her job and moved down to the cottage. But the baby didn't happen. Not at once anyway and Jo always wanted everything at once. She said there was nothing to do in Whithorn and she was going back to Edinburgh. She said I could go too if I wanted, but it had to be for good, not just the weekends. I said I wasn't going back to Edinburgh to be unemployed, with someone who didn't really want me around anymore. So that was that.'

Roy left a few details out. As an atheist, he felt vaguely uneasy about excavating an ancient Christian site. He felt it slightly indecent that he did not share the beliefs of the hundreds of skeletons in the earth around the ruins of the cathedral. Secretly he shared Jo's sense that the dig lacked the excitement that had drawn him to archaeology in the first place. He did not want to dig up the beginnings of his own society. He wanted to unearth evidence of strange cults and ancient exotic civilisations. It seemed that the great days of archaeological adventure were in the past.

In 1871 Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the lost city of Troy, to which Rosanna Podesta eloped with Jacques Sernas and a supporting cast that included Ulysses, Achilles, Agamemnon and Brigitte Bardot. Sernas shoots Stanley Baker in the heel, but Torin Thatcher captures the city after hiding his men in a wooden horse. In 1899 Arthur Evans located Knossos on Crete, where King Minos kept the minotaur, the creature that resulted from his wife's coupling with a bull sent by the sea god Poseidon, whose name was later made famous by Gene Hackman's sinking ship adventure. In 1922 Howard Carter opened the tomb of The Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamun, and in 1981 Indiana Jones found the Lost Ark of the Covenant, unleashed the wrath of God on cinema audiences around the world and inspired Roy Batty's belated entry to student ranks to study archaeology.

Latterly during his stay at Whithorn, Roy had become excited by stories of a local cult that sacrificed virgins. And it happened not 1,000 years ago, but in living memory. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been involved, generally the girls who had leapt naked through the fire, rather than those who had been there on that awful day when they burnt a policeman to death. Various places were mentioned in the area and he marked them with a cross on a map. Creetown. Kirkcudbright. Gatehouse of Fleet. He visited the roofless church at the hamlet of Anwoth, with its graves dating back four centuries, decorated with skulls and crossbones. It was here that children supposedly danced around the maypole and learned that it represented the penis. But there was no archaeological evidence.

He and Jo drove from Whithorn to the very tip of Wigtownshire and into the caravan park at Burrow Head. It was deserted. Wind blew over the waves and whipped icy rain into Roy's face as he knocked on caravan doors without response. Eventually a young man in a singlet answered and, with a yawn, directed him to a mound overlooking the sea. Roy drove as far as he could and then he and Jo got out of the car and walked the last few yards across the land. The wind was so fierce here that it threatened to blow them over the edge and they had to shout to make themselves heard.

'I'm going back,' said Jo.

'No, look,' Roy shouted. 'Look. This is it.'

He was pointing to a square hole in the ground. He stepped towards it, but the wind blew him back a step. He knelt at the hole. It had been partially filled with cement and contained the final remnants of what might have been a wooden stake.

'This is where they did it. We've found it. This is where the cult sacrificed Edward Woodward in the wicker man.'

'It wasn't a cult,' said Jo. 'It was only a film.'

'It was a cult film,' Roy replied.

That was when Roy told her he had the chance of another job and asked if she would come with him. He felt this was what she had been wanting for the past two years; he had taken the necessary steps to make it happen, to move from the erstwhile cultural metropolis in the bottom left-hand corner of Scotland back to the 20th Century. Jo asked where the new job was. Roy said she should be prepared to commit herself to going with him before he told her. She said if he told her where it was, she might go with him. He said that was not good enough. All she needed to do was say that, in principle, she would go with him, and then he would tell her where it was. But she wouldn't. So he never told her. He just went. Without her.

18

The yellow blossoms of the prickly pear, the fiery orange on the tips of the spidery ocotillo and the delicate pink flowers of little spiky cacti sprinkled the dry brown landscape with colour, just as they had in Cochise's time. The shopping centres, gas stations and fast-food joints of Phoenix's urban sprawl ended suddenly when Roy turned his one-way hire car off
US
Highway 60 at Apache Junction, the very name of which marked a transition from Glen Campbell's America to that of Geronimo, Victorio and Chato.

The road was marked on Roy's map as the
AZ
88, but was popularly known as Apache Trail. He drew the Ford to a halt at the sight of the empty desert spread out before him. He got out of the car and walked across the blistering earth. A snake slithered across a rock and disappeared into the brush. Saguaro cacti, familiar from Roy's earliest western memories rose to several times his height. The characteristic arms do not branch out from the main stem until the plants are about 75 years old and mature specimens live till they are 200. Perhaps Geronimo had stood beneath this same specimen.

The landscape had not changed in a thousand years. This was the Apache raiding route, twisting, turning and climbing over the ridges of the rocky desert landscape, from Apache Junction to the ancient Salado Indian cliff-dwellings 40 miles away. The Apache could cover 70 miles in a day by alternating walking and trotting. They would put a pebble in their mouth so it would not dry out. Now Roy was going to join them at San Carlos, one of the best known names in the history of the West, and the history of the western.

The Apache were the most feared and savage of all the Indian tribes. Their very name meant enemy. But Roy had seen
Broken Arrow
. He knew Jeff Chandler was a man of honour, a man of his word, and that it was the white man who spoke with forked tongue, like the snake on the rock by the car. As a boy Roy wore his mother's bright red headband and a long towel that went inside his trousers, but was arranged so that it hung out at the front and rear. He used lip-stick to draw lines across his cheeks.

The government tried to 'concentrate' the Apache on the San Carlos reservation. 'Take stones and ashes and thorns and, with some scorpions and rattlesnakes thrown in, dump the outfit on stones, heat the stones red hot, set the United States army after the Apaches, and you have San Carlos,' wrote Geronimo's nephew Daklugie. Cheated and tricked by the authorities, the Apache regularly broke out of San Carlos. Geronimo had only 20 warriors on his last campaign in 1886, but ran 5,000 American troops ragged. One officer observed that chasing Apache was like 'chasing deer with a brass band'. San Carlos served the same purpose in westerns as Colditz and
POW
camps did in war films. It was a place to escape from. Some would rather die a good death than live a bad life on San Carlos.

It was all over when Geronimo surrendered in 1886. His people were officially classified as prisoners of war until 1913. Geronimo sold autographed photos of himself to tourists and became an exhibit at the St Louis World Fair in 1904. He took to wearing a top hat and charged appearance fees, like a film star. One night in 1909 he got very drunk and fell off his horse. He lay out all night in the cold, contracted pneumonia and never recovered.

A hundred years after Geronimo broke out of San Carlos Indian Reservation for the last time, Roy Batty arrived. He had little difficulty finding his house in the town of San Carlos, for it was little more than a few streets of identical grey houses, with cars propped up on bricks alongside the buildings to be cannibalised for spare parts. A child with narrow eyes, olive skin and hair as black as a raven's wing watched him, unsmiling, as he got his cases from his boot. He dumped his luggage and walked over to the cafe. The only other customer was an overweight female officer in the uniform of the Apache tribal police.

Like the child, she watched him silently with dark brown eyes, as he ordered breakfast of coffee, bacon and eggs from a young Apache woman in tee-shirt and cut-off jeans. The policewoman noted the strange foreign accent. San Carlos did not get many tourists. Those who wanted to see Indians preferred the dancing variety at Knott's Berry Farm, where they could also see Snoopy and take in a couple of rides in a morning.

'You the archaeologist from England?' she inquired.

'From Scotland,' he said, nodding.

She extended a plump brown hand.

'Yeah, Scotland, I know. I'm Mary MacDonald. I'm part Scottish too.'

Roy wondered which part exactly.

'Do you know the MacDonalds?'

In the days that followed he regularly breakfasted at the cafe and met the Apache policewoman who called herself Mary MacDonald and told her about the old country. They talked about the similarities between the Indian tribes and the Scottish clans. She was in her forties but had never been farther than Los Angeles. After breakfast she would sometimes drop him at a site where the Apache had camped a century before and he would dig patiently in the earth for anything they had left behind. He found a flute that might have been used by some courting young man and a stone wrapped in buckskin that would probably have been the head of a club. But he was also looking for pottery and artefacts of earlier occupants, tribes that had disappeared, tribes like the Salado, who built the cliff dwellings at the end of the Apache Trail, but the search was proving disappointing.

'Denise will give you salado with your bacon and eggs, Roy, if you ask her nicely,' Mary told him.

Roy reflected that Apache puns were worse than those of his dead father.

He got to know the young Chiricahua couple that lived in the house next door, the parents of the little boy who had watched him so curiously when he first arrived. With them he went to an Apache initiation ceremony. Apache girls would become women in the sunrise ceremony. Roy remembered the drama of Richard Harris being pulled to the ceiling by ropes and pegs in his chest in
A Man Called Horse
. They followed the dust trail of another pick-up to a clearing where dozens of young women were dancing, not very energetically, in lines; and several hundred onlookers sat around on tail-gates and in deck-chairs, drinking and chatting. The girls were dressed in red and yellow and blue Spanish dresses. The onlookers wore jeans and stetsons and cowboy boots. There was not a headband or bath towel in sight. The initiates were sprinkled with yellow powder and it occurred to Roy that it was easier to become an Apache woman than a Sioux warrior.

Prospector Ed Schieffelin arrived in Apache country in 1877. He was told that the only thing he would find there was his own tombstone. But he struck lucky, found silver and, to rub salt into the wounds of his detractors, called his claim Tombstone. Within a few years the town that sprung up in his wake was one of the biggest between St Louis and San Francisco, with a population approaching 20,000 and a murder rate four or five times higher than that of Los Angeles in the late 20th Century. It was here that Marshall Henry Fonda, with the aid of a consumptive Victor Mature, did his duty, rid the town of the murdering Clantons and made the west a safe and decent place for his darling Clementine to live. It was here Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, DeForrest Kelley and John Hudson, walked tall down the main street. You only had to look at them to know they were the goodies.

The Clanton brothers, the McLowry brothers and Billy Claiborne took part in a brief, bloody gunfight at the corral in Allen Street on 26 October 1881. At the end of a furious, point-blank exchange three men lay dead in the dirt, none of them Earp's. Earp survived to become a Hollywood legend, not just on screen in the shape of Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster, Randolph Scott, James Stewart and President Reagan, but in real life. For he lived long enough to collaborate on a star biography and to give film-makers a first-hand account of his adventures, and in so doing shape his own legend. His friends included the movie stars William S. Hart and Tom Mix and the director John Ford, who said he filmed the gunfight just as Earp said it happened, even though Old Man Clanton was in Ford's gunfight, whereas in real life he died several months before it happened.

Roy joined the throng in Allen Street, where the saloons and boardwalks have been preserved for the tourists, along with shops selling quality souvenirs at discount prices. Fat men, women and children in jeans and cowboy boots. Every few yards notice boards recorded Who Shot Who, an innovation that had not at that point been copied in South Central
LA
, which stubbornly refused to acknowledge the tourist potential in murder. At the
OK
Corral itself nine dummies stood motionless where the gunfighters had stood. They looked like animation figures having a break from filming
Postman Pat
.