The Shadow of Venus (11 page)

Claire hated to go to parties alone, especially parties where she didn't know anyone. To start a conversation with a stranger at a party was about as comfortable as stripping naked. But this event would be different. She was unlikely to know anyone but she had a purpose beyond networking and chitchat. She could wander around the site, look at the observation chambers, and watch the moon rise without having to make conversation. The only person she really had to talk to was Edward Girard. It could be difficult to get him alone long enough to ask if he knew Maia. She planned to bring along her copy of
Ancient Sites
with the Quentin Valor illustration as well as a photocopy of
Summertime.
Lisa's painting was a good way to start a conversation. Claire didn't have a copy of the police photo, but even if she did a photo of a dead person was less likely to start a conversation than to bring it to an end.

Chapter
Thirteen

C
LAIRE TOOK THE BRAND
-
NEW
H
IGHWAY
550
THROUGH
C
UBA
. When the route became a four-lane highway, it was assigned a new number, but Claire remembered the old Route 44, especially the days when it was under construction and a white-knuckle drive all the way to Farmington. Traffic was let through the only open lane one direction at a time. If anyone ignored the signal to stop, a head-on collision was almost inevitable. Drivers sped up and passed on all the blind curves and places marked with no-passing signs. It was promised that the new road would be worth the expense and make driving a pleasure, and eventually it did. Claire enjoyed the drive through the red rock canyons and the wide open spaces. There were many places in the Southwest where eons of wind and water had whipped the rock into the shapes of sentinels.

Claire crossed into Colorado feeling she lived in a middle zone between the poverty of the third world and the affluence of the first. In a sense New Mexico had two foreign borders—Mexico and Colorado. The houses were more spectacular in Colorado. Vacation homes of several thousand square feet sprawled across hillsides in inaccessible places. Even the SUVs seemed bigger. The people looked taller and blonder. But the roads were no better. The dirt road that led into Spiral Rocks was as tortuous as many in New Mexico. It had almost enough ruts and bumps to make Claire wish she owned an SUV, although she had sworn to herself that she would never buy one. There were times when the rattle of her camper shell made it sound like it was about to fall off.

She could see the spiral rocks silhouetted against the sky for miles before she reached them. They were distinguished from other pinnacle rocks because they sat on top of a mesa with no other formations nearby.

By the time her truck had climbed the serpentine road up the mesa it was late afternoon and a large crowd had gathered. Claire saw people of all ages, from infants to elders, dressed in expensive hiking gear, faded jeans, or the bright embroidery of Santa Fe ethnic, which made those New Mexicans seem like poor artistic second cousins who had to dress flamboyantly to be noticed. The vehicles were mostly SUVs and trucks.

Claire followed the arrows to the section designated campground, found a place, and parked. Other visitors were busy setting up their tents. Claire stayed in her jeans but changed into the crocheted top and put on her hiking boots before walking across the mesa.

The isolated area was as flat as a tabletop and a perfect location for viewing the sky. No towns
could
be seen. There was little artificial light, no plumes of smoke from power plants, no pollution, nothing between the mesa and the sky. Claire saw a weathered wooden house on the northern side of the mesa. The twin spires were located on the eastern edge. Over the millennia they had been twisted into pink-and-beige spindle shapes by wind and water. The emptiness between them was filled once every eighteen and a half years by the rising of the Maximum Moon. It would be a major disappointment, Claire thought, if it happened on an overcast night. Tonight, however, the sky was perfectly clear.

As she walked she blended into a crowd moving toward the rocks. Excitement moved through the gathering like wind rustling dry leaves.

“I was here the last time,” Claire heard a man behind her say. “That was before any of the chambers were built.”

“I was only two years old then,” his younger companion replied.

“It was spectacular,” the older man said. “The moon came over the top of the mesa roaring like a lion.”

Claire was glad the crowd was large enough for her to disappear inside it. She had wondered what Edward Girard looked like and how she would identify him, but that turned out to be easy; he was surrounded by admirers. When the crowd parted Claire saw him standing near the rocks. He had a strong, muscular upper body on top of long, thin legs. His dark brown hair was thick and shoulder length. His face was radiant when he smiled but seemed gaunt and haunted in repose. Edward Girard acted like he was tolerating the admiration rather than enjoying it.

Claire's impression was that whatever he had created here, he'd created it for himself. The audience was only the means to an end, the support and money that enabled him to build his monument. Edward was the center of this crowd, but he was almost as alone in it as she was.

She turned away from the rocks and began to explore the monument, waiting for a better time to talk to Edward. The spiral rocks reaching for the sky were the centerpiece, but the artist couldn't take any credit for creating them. He could take credit for the buildings, however. Unlike the massive pyramids constructed by the ancients, Edward had built a series of small, round chambers, spread out across the mesa like cups turned upside down or inverted caves cut out of cliffs. They had the rough exterior finish of rock.

Claire followed the crowd as it drifted in and out of the chambers. It took a large ego to commit oneself to such a monumental and remote monument. That Edward had succeeded was obvious from the praise Claire overheard.

“He brings the sky down to earth,” a woman said in the awestruck, reverent tone Claire recognized as New Age New Mexican. “I feel like I can reach out and touch it.”

“It's like black velvet,” another woman answered.

“He's
a genius,” a man said.

“Absolutely,” New Age Woman replied.

The sinuous shapes of the viewing chambers and the path winding around them reminded Claire of the work of the master Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Tiles were set into the path in the chevron pattern of rattlesnake hide.

Claire liked the feeling of intimacy created by the series of small chambers. The combination of path and buildings was a work of art, but the chambers themselves were geared to the sunset and the night sky and kept their secrets during daylight. One was set up to frame and light the sky, to flatten it and bring it down into the chamber, but that one worked best at sunset. Others focused on rarely occurring astral phenomena. Claire located the Venus chamber and found that it had to be entered through a low passageway as if the visitor were crawling into an igloo. She got down on her hands and knees, glad she was wearing her 501s. She poked her head into the passageway and saw a man approaching from the other side. They stared at each other like two animals on a collision course. Who had the right of way in this situation? Who had the power? Thinking the man might be uncomfortable inside and anxious to get out, Claire backed away.

“That was a trip,” he said, dating himself and dusting off his pants as he crawled into daylight.

Claire crawled through the entryway and entered the chamber. The interior was painted pure white. The only light came from a small opening in the west framing the bluest patch of sky she had ever seen. The opening was on a track in the ceiling that could be moved to follow the path of Venus. She assumed it was focused on the spot where Venus would appear sometime after dark. Even in daylight, isolating a piece of sky changed the way she perceived it, turning it deeper and bluer, giving it a new meaning. Claire glanced behind her to see if there was enough light from the sky alone to cast a shadow and found there was not.

Someone hooted outside. The sound reverberated through the passageway and swirled around the chamber.

“Coming out,” Claire called. She crawled through the passageway and found a family of six waiting at the far side. “It's a small chamber,” she said. “It might be better not to go in all at once.”

“You first,” the mother said to the father.

Claire left the viewing chambers and walked to the area in front of the spiral rocks where people were gathering as the sun moved toward the horizon. Some stood, some sat on the rocky ground, some had brought chairs or mats. Claire tried to make herself comfortable on a smooth patch of rock. Edward Girard stood in the space between the rocks as if he was a conductor preparing to orchestrate the rising of the moon. A woman with chestnut-colored hair spoke to him. She wore a trim shirt and her jeans had a crease. Edward tilted his head in her direction but his attention seemed focused on a point between the
setting
sun and the rising moon.

As the sky darkened, someone began drumming with a steady, repetitive beat that gave the crowd a cohesive feeling. Claire enjoyed the rare sense of being part of a tribe. There was an anticipatory rustle as the moon's aura became visible in the east. As the first sliver of light climbed over the distant mountains, the drum beat louder and the tribe cheered. The moon rose at a measured pace. Its light turned golden as more of it became visible. Edward Girard stepped aside. The moon became a perfect, golden circle that filled the space between the two rocks, an event that had been taking place every eighteen and a half years for as long as the rocks had been spirals, an event that humans had observed for thousands of years. It was a transcendent moment for Claire that reached into the past and encompassed the future. There was a collective gasp when the moon filled the space. The drum paused in its beat. From the proper angle the full moon could be seen between Spiral Rocks wherever it rose, but only the Maximum Moon filled the space.

As the moon rose higher in the sky, the tribe began to wander off. Claire stayed until it reached the very tip of the rocks. Then she stood up and shook the blood back into her numb legs. She looked around for Edward Girard but he had disappeared.

Before she went back to her truck and to sleep, she revisited the Venus Chamber. The moon was so bright now it diminished everything else in the sky. She couldn't locate Venus and doubted it would be visible inside the chamber, but she was curious to see how it looked after dark. The serpentine path was well lit by the moon and the tiles seemed to glisten and slither underfoot. Claire had the sense she was on the track of something dangerous and divine. Other people walked the path in groups or alone. If they spoke at all, their voices were hushed.

When she reached the Venus Chamber, Claire debated whether she should hoot or howl before crawling through the passageway. Bellowing wasn't her style so she cleared her throat. When there was no answer she got down on her hands and knees and crawled in. The white interior of the chamber was dimly lit by the ambient light of the Maximum Moon, not bright enough to cast a shadow but bright enough to see that there was something in the chamber, a shaggy shape that moved and grunted like a bear. The shape lunged forward.

“Uh,” it said.

“Ooh,” a woman answered with a willing cry.

A couple was making love in the Venus chamber, love that was raw, powerful, dangerous, possibly even transcendent, most definitely private. Claire backed out on her hands and knees. To the people who were standing outside she said, “I'd wait before I went in there.”

She returned to her truck, made herself a peanut butter sandwich, and ate it. She changed into a sweatshirt, climbed into her sleeping bag, and zipped up the zipper. But how was she supposed to sleep
after
that? Her dreams would be full of lusty animals transforming from men into bears. A guitar strummed in the campground. A drum beat softly. Voices laughed and sang. Claire listened until she fell asleep.

******

She woke up very late at night or very early in the morning when the cold white light of the moon slid into her camper shell. The campground was quiet now. Everyone else seemed to be asleep. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees. Claire was snug in her sleeping bag, but she wanted to see the monument with no one else in it. She made herself get out of bed, pulled on her hiking boots, and left the camper shell. Some people were tucked away in their tents, some were sleeping in their trucks and RVs, others were wrapped in bulky lumps of down on the ground. The moon's light made it easy to pick a path between them.

Claire looked up at the sky, where the moon was so bright that the stars had been reduced to twinkling fireflies. If the constellation Pleiades was visible, she couldn't find it.

No artificial light could be seen in the east. Spiral Rocks looked exactly as it did when the Anasazi lived nearby. Fire, the moon, the stars, and the planets were the only light they had at night. The night sky reflected the Indians' life on earth. To them the Milky Way was the tracks of the dead. The constellations were their brothers and sisters and the animals who inhabited their world. The moon was in the west now, at Claire's back, casting a long shadow before her. She followed it through the campground, toward the twin spirals.

A man stood alone between the rocks. Claire had no fear of approaching him in this enchanted time and place. When she got closer she saw that his hair was thick and shoulder length and his legs were as long as a spider's. It was the celestial artist, Edward Girard, surveying his domain.

Chapter
Fourteen

W
HEN
C
LAIRE WAS CLOSE ENOUGH TO SPEAK
, she said, “Watching the moon rise through the rocks was a magical experience. I'll remember it for the rest of my life.”