Trinity Sight

by Jennifer Givhan

  Through the mask, Arlen spit. “She’s not even your wife.”

  Malia asked, her voice crestfallen, “Aktsek’i, is this true?”

  His voice was equally deflated, his whole demeanor a collapsed hot air balloon, falling. “Tsitda, I wouldn’t lie to you. We’re married in the Zuni way.” In Zuni marriage, the couple is free to live together as husband and wife, to make sure they are compatible, before any vows are made. Either party can break the arrangement without consequence.

  Malia pointed with her chin toward the corn girl. “And is that your child?”

  Chance sighed. “Yes. Miwe e’le is mine.”

  “Filthy liar,” Arlen said. “You disgrace us.”

  Chance said, “Do not follow us, brother. I do not want to hurt you.”

  Calliope lowered the gun in the kitchen. Malia was looking at her with suspicion. She hated to leave this way—to leave the Coyote clan women who’d shared their lives with her. She wanted to tell them she would return, that she would come home to them. She could bring her son—

  She stopped herself. It would not work. The masked men would not have it. She didn’t belong here. The way Malia was looking at her, she could not tell if she would ever be welcome again. Perhaps Malia blamed Calliope for what was happening with her son. For taking her son away.

  Once they were in the truck, Eunjoo asked Chance, “They won’t hurt your family, will they?”

  His voice was sad, but he said, “No. They never would.” And Calliope understood what he meant; they didn’t see her as his family. She wouldn’t have been safe there. She couldn’t go back if she’d wanted to.

  “Will they follow us?” Calliope asked.

  “I hope not.”

  Mara sped through the dirt roads off the rez.

  They neared Black Rock, the basalt bluff at the northern edge of Zuni where Old Lady Salt had lived before she’d uprooted herself forty-five miles south, because the people had disrespected her by urinating and spitting while swimming in her waters and wasting her sacred flesh; she had hoped that by moving farther away, they would appreciate her more. Their pilgrimage would mean something. She’d left a gaping hole in the center of the rock, the place she’d traveled through to find her new home.

  “The rock baby,” Calliope said. “I left her.”

  “You’re carrying her, mujer.”

  Calliope’s gut lurched, and she checked quickly on the corn girl in the wool sling across her chest, making sure the flesh-and-blood girl had not turned to stone.

  “Not Miwe e’le. On your back. I exhumed the rock baby while you were in the back with Mara. I knew you’d need to bring her.”

  Calliope lumbered out of the heavy backpack straps and peered inside the bag. She pulled out the rock baby. Funny how she could have stoppered the hole in Black Rock, she matched so well, she could have staunched that gaping exit wound.

  “Did you bring Amy too?” Eunjoo asked.

  Mara patted the rock in the center console. “Got her right here.”

  “Good,” Eunjoo said. “It would have been cruel to leave her. Since she isn’t dead.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  QUEMADO LAKE

  Calliope still wasn’t inured to Eunjoo’s pronouncements or prophecies or whatever they were. She settled back with the corn girl still sleeping against her chest, tried to steady her breathing and clear her mind of the fear fomenting like stormwater in the bay of her thoughts. She couldn’t help it. Even after Eunjoo had fallen asleep against her lap, Calliope kept glancing back every few minutes to make sure Arlen and the other masked figures were not following, reminding herself they were not gods but men; they would not bound atop the truck as the Suuke had thrown itself onto the airplane. Whatever Eunjoo had seen in the pasture, it wasn’t a vengeful Suuke. They’d killed them both. Arlen’s scalding anger could assure her of that.

  They ran out of gas a few hours past Black Rock, hadn’t traveled more than a hundred miles on the dirt washes and remnants of ancient dirt roads. The truck gears grinded to a halt beside a patch of rabbitbrush she could tell was bright yellow in the day, though it was covered in shadow now, the moon half hidden by clouds. They’d known they were leaving for months. Why hadn’t they prepared? Were there even any gas stations left? She hated that they were stopping so near Zuni. What if Arlen and the others had followed them? They’d catch up any time.

  Mara stated the obvious: “We really didn’t plan this through.”

  Chance opened the cab door, jumped out, saying, “Maybe you didn’t.”

  Calliope followed him to the truck bed, the corn girl stirring only slightly but then settling back to sleep as Calliope rubbed and shushed her. Chance shone a flashlight and lifted the tarp to reveal an assortment of tools, the Suuke knife that Amy had tossed back there at Tía’s hacienda, and two steel barrels the size of beer kegs.

  “You want us to drink our troubles away?” she joked, averting her eyes from the knife.

  His mouth inched into a flaccid smile, lacking its usual buoyancy. He said nothing, just climbed the tailgate and lugged one barrel to a standing position on the edge of the bed nearest the gas cap. “Let me help,” Calliope offered, filling the uncomfortable silence.

  “You ever siphoned gas before?”

  No. But she could learn.

  He picked up a clear snake of plastic tubing, and she felt slightly ashamed that even with Chance, she was still relying on a man for help. If Amy had been here, Calliope bet she would’ve known what to do.

  “Open the cap, insert this all the way down the filler neck.”

  She followed instructions.

  “I’ll do this part. Don’t want you getting gas down your throat.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous for you?”

  Chance shrugged, his expression and demeanor since they left Zuni troubling Calliope. As if he were saying, How much longer do I have, really?

  Once the gas was streaming through the plastic snake into the truck, she asked, “Are you afraid this won’t work?”

  He pointed his chin toward the flowing liquid, his hand pinching the tube. “It’s working.”

  She tapped her foot in the sand. “Not the siphon.”

  “I know.” He shifted his weight, leaned against the side panel, rubbed his temples and eyes with his free hand. “What other option do we have?” He sighed, took a deep breath. “It has to work.”

  “Chaco could be a dead end. Then what?” She would never see her son again? Never hold him? Never show Andres he had a daughter?

  Mara called out from the driver’s seat, “It’s not a dead end. Keep the faith, honey. I’ll be back to my Trudy this time tomorrow.”

  “It’s not even equinox yet,” Calliope muttered under her breath. “If there is a tunnel, it hasn’t opened.” They assumed, anyway. What did they actually know? What secrets they’d learned, they’d learned from Arlen. And Calliope wasn’t even sure she could trust him. Nothing was written down. And if they were right, and Chaco opened a doorway home, what then? What would Calliope say when she took Chance through, to her house? Would she just open the door and bring him inside, the way he’d taken her to Malia’s house and introduced her as his Zuni wife? How would this work? Hey there, everyone, here’s the man I crossed universes with. We fell in love and got pretend married and now we’re home and want to get married for real, so I’ll need a divorce, thank you. She felt dirty. More than that, how could she do that to Andres? She’d loved him before all of this. Or at least she’d thought she’d loved him. Had he moved on? This whole time he and Phoenix must have thought she was dead, and now she was going to show up with another man instead. They wouldn’t believe her story. They’d think she’d left them to live with Chance, maybe down in Texas. Or like her own father, that she had crossed the border. That she’d actually just abandoned them.

  Chance pulled the tube from the barr
el, then the truck. “Should be good.” She stared at him while they closed and secured everything, covered the bed with the tarp. Was she searching for some sign from him that he knew what they were doing? That anything would be untangled once they got to Chaco, if Chaco really was a way back? He didn’t look at her, and she felt cold in the night air, even with the corn girl wrapped in wool around her chest. Chance walked around to the driver’s side and asked Mara if he could take the helm for a while.

  Mara settled into the back seat with Eunjoo, now awake, looking out the dark window and whispering under her breath.

  “Who are you talking to?” Calliope asked.

  “Coyote.”

  Calliope had learned by now that the girl’s imaginary conversations were anything but fantasy. She looked around. “Where is Coyote?”

  “I’m calling him.”

  “What for?”

  Eunjoo said nothing.

  Mara said, “We’re lucky to have this child with us. No one ever believes the children.”

  Calliope believed. But she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  In the passenger seat, the corn girl had awoken. She usually slept through the night, but this had been a strange night. Calliope unwrapped her, feeling for dampness. She wasn’t wet. The corn girl brought her finger to her mouth, suckling on her skin, frustrated there was no milk, beginning to cry. Calliope put the girl to her breast, said, “You win, Miwe e’le. A midnight snack.”

  Still she was unsettled. As the girl nursed, Calliope imagined what might have just happened in Malia’s house. Would they have killed Calliope? She was certain they weren’t capable of that violence, but she knew their stories told of sometimes horrifying punishments for breaking taboos. In one account, the ko’ko Salamobia, personification of anger that needed exorcising, would come from the sacred lake and behead the offender. She thought of Arlen, spitting in rage, his voice twisted to a growl at the thought of Calliope and Chance together or killing the Suuke together. She couldn’t tell which angered him more.

  Her pulse quickened as a horrible thought took shape. “Chance,” she whispered. “What if Arlen intended for us to go to Chaco tonight? What if that was his plan?”

  “I’ve known Arlen since we were kids. What you saw tonight, that wasn’t him. He wouldn’t act like that. He hasn’t been the same since …”

  Calliope filled the silence, whispering, “Since his sister died.”

  Mara asked, “What happened to her, if you don’t mind this old busybody?”

  He didn’t say anything at first, and Calliope put a hand on his shoulder, her other hand still holding the corn girl to her breast. Chance didn’t look away from the dirt ahead. They weren’t going more than thirty or forty miles per hour in the dark without a visible road.

  She didn’t think he would answer, he was silent so long.

  Then he said, “I couldn’t save her,” his voice immeasurably sad. “We were swimming in Quemado Lake.” He’d told her about this lake, where he’d experienced a mathematical epiphany, and a veil had been lifted. “I’d gone fishing there countless times, I thought I knew that water so well.” He paused, pulled his hair back, breathed deeply. “I should’ve been paying attention. I should’ve been holding our daughter. My wife hit her head on a rock. I was three hundred feet away. By the time I got there they were both at the bottom of the lake. I didn’t know who to save. I tried saving them both.” His voice cracked. “I was selfish. I tried saving them both, and I saved neither.”

  It was unbearable. His shame. His pain.

  His story really was like the Zuni migration; he’d lost a mother and child to the water, to Zuni heaven.

  Perhaps Arlen’s words had brought it all back: She’s not half the woman my sister was.

  Arlen blamed Chance for his sister’s death. Blamed Calliope for taking his sister’s place.

  Still Chance hadn’t answered Calliope’s question, and her suspicion lingered, palpable in the truck as his grief.

  What if they were not driving toward a way home? What if they were driving into a trap?

  THIRTY-FIVE

  MIDDLE PLACE

  Sometime during the night, Calliope had finally dozed off and now awoke to alpenglow. Sunrise over the San Juan Basin overlooked Chaco, the sky bright pink and purple above the canyon, illuminating the ancient stone buildings, the Great House spanning the height of four stories, rising against the canyon wall so it loomed even larger, its seven hundred rooms and round ceremonial kivas expanding to the size of the Roman Colosseum. She blinked, her eyes still hazy from sleep, and the sunrays casting a glaze over the buildings. These were not ruins. Calliope wondered how much power a great-grandmother wielded in the Spirit world, for what she was seeing was powerful indeed. The biggest of the Great Houses—Pueblo Bonito, which she’d been fascinated with since her bisabuela had brought her here as a child, this home of the Ancients’ great unsolved mystery—had been restored. Had she expected anything less? Living six months with Chance and his family in the Zuni honeycombs of the Ancients should have prepared her.

  It had not.

  During her revisionist fieldwork, she’d knelt on the sandy loam of the posthole in Room 33, peeling sandstone and chinking rocks from the hundred-year-old excavation site (where the Hyde Exploring Expedition had trod the ancient, sacred grounds), searching for proof of her bisabuela’s stories, though she could never breathe that humiliating confession aloud to her colleagues. She was there to follow the research, not the other way around. She understood how unprofessional she would seem, what a zealot, a mystic. She’d have been laughed out of academia.

  She’d pared away at the sandstone that aspired to be anything but rock, that tried hard to look like broken pottery, chipped stone, even shell. It was the most common stone in Chaco for groundstone artifacts, manos and metates, and yet most of the time sandstone was just sandstone, shaped for masonry or hearths and hatches. Figuring out which pieces of sandstone were actual artifacts and which were just rock took time and experience. She’d spent long, dirt-covered days and nights in Chaco, devoted to uncovering its mysteries in khakis and a hard hat, crouching under crumbling walls that took five scaffoldings to keep from falling in on her and the rest of the crew, scribbling her field notes but finding nothing truly tangible to support her bisabuela’s emergence belief. Until now. If someone had told her then that she would reenter this place of her Ancestors, restored, made new, as if she had traveled back in time a thousand years, she would have laughed them off the ruins. She laughed now, tears streaming down her face. It was absurd. It was surreal. Yet here it was. Sometimes sandstone was just sandstone; other times it was a portal to another world.

  Chance, his voice somber, said, “Everything has two forms, mujer. The outer layer, which is all many Anglos tend to see, and the inner, the sacred, the Spirit. Before you came here, you only saw the outer form. It’s all you would allow yourself to see. Now, you see the inner.”

  Still laugh-crying, Calliope nodded, her tears landing on the corn girl’s dark hair. “Except I think there must be three forms, or a person will never fully see at all. The outer, yes, and the inner. But there is another, inchoate in the imagination. I think I had to believe this impossibility possible to understand there was another way. Bisabuela’s stories becoming real right in front of me …”

  Mara had awoken, said, “Honey, it’s quite a sight.”

  Calliope finally understood why the Ancients had chosen this unforgivably desolate patch of high desert where food and water were scarce, where they had to lug by foot massive timber from distant mountains to build the center of their culture. She understood the purpose of their dark enclosed rooms that were not intended for living, with no ventilation for a fire and deliberately sealed when they left. This was the Middle Place, cut through the middle of time. It was the heart of their cosmology. The Ancients hadn’t died out or migrated away or ab
andoned their sacred sites. They had used them to move through worlds. Somewhere the Ancients still existed. They had never ceased.

  She searched the sandstone building for figures, human or ghostly, but saw neither.

  Chance parked in the soft dirt, adjacent to the fortress wall surrounding the Great House.

  “We should hike up the mesa, check the sun dagger,” Calliope suggested. “Make sure it’s the equinox.” The others agreed, and she changed and fed the corn girl, drank plenty of water herself, and tied a scarf around her head and Eunjoo’s to keep from burning in the sun. They were at such a high elevation, the sun’s rays seemed magnified. Or perhaps space was stringier in this universe, enmeshed as it was in time and matter. She strapped the corn girl to her chest. Chance offered to carry Miwe e’le, but Calliope felt stronger with the corn girl, felt she needed to take her girl where Bisabuela had taken her.

  “Look!” Eunjoo pointed toward the mesa’s high flattop, the tabletop mountain itself glowing with sunrise, appearing as an ancient fortress, a stronghold. But that’s not what the girl was pointing out. Swirls of blackish-­gray smoke were rising into the morning-orange sky. Calliope’s heart thudded at the sight of the campfire. Had Arlen passed them in the night? Was he waiting atop the mesa with his masked militia to take them back to the rez? She’d brought Susana’s gun just in case, and as always, Chance had his rifle slung over his shoulder. Calliope couldn’t turn back now, not when she was so close to finding her family. For all she knew, Phoenix was a heartbeat away. If they each resided on a membrane containing an entire universe, then Chaco was the umbilicus holding them together. Though she had no proof, she felt it. Like two maps of New Mexico, representing everywhere—unfolded, side by side, pinned together on the canyon wall. She remembered her early labor fever dream and shivered. Phoenix, in the dream, had pummeled her with stones. Because she couldn’t reach him? No. She had to reach him. Bisabuela wouldn’t have brought Calliope this far for nothing. She set her jaw, breathed in the thick scent of campfire, and began hiking. Whatever waited at the top of the mesa, she could handle.