Picnic in the Ruins
Page 19
The last photo, one he’d taken in the middle of the night, was a rectangle of black and pixel noise. This was the experience he wanted to share. It happened late last night when he’d arrived in Kanab to find all the motel signs lit to say NO VACANCY. He ventured inside their shabby offices once or twice to inquire, but they all shook their heads and said they were sorry. He drove out of town, branching off onto a series of ever-narrowing dirt roads, then he parked the car behind a dark clump of rustling bushes, retrieved his cheap new sleeping bag from its box, and tried to fold down the back seats and arrange himself inside the trunk compartment. Eventually, he curled into the fetal position and managed to fall asleep.
When he woke in the night, he heard what he thought was a group of girls talking. He was embarrassed, and he thrashed around in the car until he could look out into the surrounding terrain. There was nothing but darkness. He lay back down and again heard the voices. His head popped up a number of times, and he scanned the darkness, then lay back down. When the voices returned, they were louder. The sky was lighter, but he couldn’t see anything. Even though it was ridiculous, Reinhardt lifted his phone and took a picture.
As he looked at the photo, he saw something in it, and he tapped the edit button. When he dragged the brightness slider to the left, three pixelated coyotes materialized in the middle of a blue field. They were nearly white, like creatures from another planet, and their metallic eyes glowed. They were trotting along the road, their legs blurred. One coyote stared straight into the lens. Reinhardt gasped, then checked to see if anyone was watching. They were all eating and staring blankly at their own cell phones.
He selected this ragged image for upload. He tagged @doktor_tomahawk and added the caption MEET YOUR COUSINS, THE COYOTES. He thought Wolf would laugh at the joke, but mostly he wanted to document something about his new quest. He tapped the map icon and located the image in Kanab, Utah, at @thehoodoodiner, then he uploaded the image. He watched the blue bar span the width of his phone, and then the image appeared in his feed. Wolf, in far-off Berlin, would see it at suppertime.
Just as he closed his phone, the waitress slid a massive plate in front of him, and with the other hand refilled his coffee.
A bell hanging on the door jangled. Reinhardt glanced over his shoulder when he heard it and saw two filthy men enter. One was tall with a slow, simian gait. The other was short, with a ponytail and a massive hunting knife on his belt. The short one carried a large roll of paper under his arm. The cook glanced at the waitress and the waitress shrugged.
The two men sat at the booth right behind Reinhardt and resumed an argument that seemed to have been under way for a while. Reinhardt set his phone down and began to work on his meal. The men made a racket rolling out the paper and holding it down with various items from the table.
“Why do you get to have it right side up?” one of the men complained.
“Because I can’t read it upside down.”
“And I can?”
“I’m the one driving.”
“If you turn it a little, then it’s halfway for both of us.”
Reinhardt twisted around to ask them if they could be a little quieter, and the short one said, “Mind your own business, jackass.” Reinhardt tried to make eye contact with someone else in the diner to verify that the man had actually talked to him like that. Everyone was keeping their heads down.
The waitress said, “The cook wants you boys to mind your p’s and q’s.”
Reinhardt craned his neck back to the window above the grill and watched the cook fold his massive arms and frown. His neck sloped directly into his shoulders like a tree trunk just above the roots. “I’m letting you Ashdowns eat here out of respect for your Uncle Pete,” he said, pointing at them. “You hear me, Lonnie?”
“We’re cool,” Lonnie said.
“Byron?” the cook said. “You’re the one I’m really talking to.”
“Yeah, we’re cool. How about some coffee?” Byron said.
The two men went right back to their conversation. The taller one, who sat directly behind Reinhardt, said, “What do you think we’re going to find out there?”
“Those little circles show where the pots are.”
“Pots?”
“Yes, Lonnie. Pots.”
“We don’t need pots. We need, you know, like some place to . . .” There was a pause, then Lonnie lowered his voice, making what he said inaudible.
“I told you what we’re doing. We sell the pots to that guy in Fredonia,” Byron said, “which’ll get us that tacos-and-cervezas-on-the-beach cash money. There’s all kinds of circles up there around Swallow Valley.”
“But there’s no roads,” Lonnie said. “I don’t want to have to hike in, B. My knees are crap.”
“This is the place Uncle Pete and Dad used to talk about. Dad said the Aztec gold was up there, not in Johnson Canyon like everyone thinks.”
“There ain’t no Aztec gold, even I know that. People been looking for it since, like, forever. Don’t tell me you stole this off Scissors because of gold fever.”
“Shut up and listen. This map has all the old places on it. Antelope Flats. Dutch John’s Butte. Las Casas Altas. Swallow Valley. Since they put in the monument, people don’t go to the old places anymore. They just follow the signs. Only a couple of guys know where any of these places are, and one of them was you know who. I feel like I keep telling you this.”
“Right,” Lonnie said, then more softly, “yeah, okay. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Reinhardt ate more of his breakfast and washed it down with the coffee. He noticed the waitress and the cook whispering to each other through the grill window, which made him nervous.
“Can’t drive to Swallow Valley,” Lonnie pointed out. “It’s up on the plateau. Plus, after the rain last night, who knows what’s washed out up there.”
“I know that, but we can get to here, here, or here,” Byron said, thumping the table three times. “I say we try Las Casas Altas or Antelope Flats. It’s a good road, and there’s tons of them little circles. We could make short work of it. We got all weekend.”
“Well that’s good luck, for once, I guess,” Lonnie said.
“Right?” Byron said. “Where’s that coffee? Man, I’m starving.” He got up, approached the waitress, and asked when she was going to get to them.
Reinhardt turned on his phone and switched to the selfie mode so he could spy on them over the table. With a little tilt of the wrist, he was able to get a good picture of the map. He shot a quick burst, then ate more of his breakfast, trying to look nonchalant.
Byron sat back down and rolled up the map.
“There’s gotta be easier ways to make money, rob a bank or something,” Lonnie said.
“But we need clean cash at this point. Ain’t no time for a real job, Lonnie. Ain’t no time for paychecks or taxes or dye packs blowing up in our faces.”
“How come you rolled it up?” Lonnie asked.
“Cause they’re bringing the coffee. Last thing we need is you spilling something all over it.”
“Last thing we need is you spilling something on it,” Lonnie said. Reinhardt heard him skootch out of the booth. “I gotta see a man about a horse.”
“What should I order?”
“Ranch breakfast and some yogurt, like a parfait or something. My guts aren’t feeling great.”
The taller one walked past Reinhardt, his long arms swinging slowly. Reinhardt finished his breakfast, and when the waitress passed, he asked for his check. “I’ll get you at the register, hon,” she said.
Reinhardt left a tip, paid the bill, and went to the car. From behind the wheel, he pulled up the first image and zoomed in. He could see the map with pretty good detail: the roads, the contour lines, the little circles, all skewed because of the angle, but all there, hand drawn, and amazing. In the Antelope Flats area, he could see five treasure circles. In faint handwriting, there were the words Pueblo II, five vessels returned, and burial
site—human remains.
A treasure map, he thought, a real treasure map. He set down his phone and picked up Mythstructures for Blockbusters, thumbing through it to the chapter on the first threshold gatekeeper. He skimmed until he came to the term “herald,” where he slowed, learning about how people or objects or letters can announce the need for change and point the hero in the right direction. He looked up and took stock of himself sitting alone in a strange town and began to create a mental list: the woman lecturing at Bryce, the Kwons, his flying dream, Kenji, the coyotes, and now this map. He was normally a rational person, but here it was, all lined up.
Just then his phone buzzed. It was a text from Wolf: I SAW THAT PHOTO OF YOUR SPIRIT GUIDES. FOLLOW YOUR BLISS, MY FRIEND. WE’LL TALK WHEN YOU RETURN.
Yes, Reinhardt thought, and he began to lay plans for an adventure to Antelope Flats.
___
When they came to the spot where the canyon narrowed to a high-walled chute flanked on each side by pines, Sophia noticed the slick rock transitioning to cobble and larger stones. Beyond that was a massive boulder, and after that, the sixty-foot drop to the level below.
Paul stopped by a pinyon pine and pulled on it from a number of different directions.
“We climbed that? It looks worse from up here,” she said.
“It does. But don’t worry, we’ll rappel down.” Paul removed his pack and pulled out his rope along with the other gear.
While he tied a series of arcane knots around the pine, Sophia said, “So, I’m putting it together, I think.” She pointed to a section of the canyon wall above and behind them. There was a pathway smashed through the trees and a trail of rubble behind. “Cluff blasted this boulder out from up there.” She pointed to a spot halfway up the side of the canyon.
“Yep,” Paul said.
“I’m surprised he didn’t kill himself in the process.”
“So was he,” Paul said.
They harnessed up, then lowered their packs and prepared for the belay, and after a moment, Sophia swallowed hard and backed over the brow of the rock, hopping a few feet at a time, past an empty spot where the tiny tenacious pine tree had grown. At the bottom, when she was clear of the rope, she called to Paul, who whistled over the edge, then lowered himself with the delicacy of an aerialist.
“Fun, huh?” he said, uncoupling from the rope.
“Don’t push it,” she said. “You still occupy a complicated place in my head.”
Paul’s face grew sad, then he exhaled and performed some kind of magic with one end of the rope, and the length of it fell, unspooling, to the ground. The ease with which it came free made Sophia unsure about wanting to repeat the process.
Once the gear was repacked, they continued on. The sky above them was blue, and there was no sign of flooding in any of the canyons. The view of the return hike was disorienting. The descent was beginning to take its toll on her knees and ankles, but she distracted herself by thinking through her photos and notes and by justifying her feelings about Paul and his stupid off-the-books project. No wonder he kept going on about hiding the vehicle and having her drive. Returning artifacts this way would probably cost him his job. The whole ends-justify-the-means attitude was common in archeology. You see it in salvage divers and in Howard Carter’s journals from the Valley of the Kings. Their belief in the greater good was overpowering. She felt science was the only way to keep self-interest out of it, but even the science was accomplished by politics and bureaucracy and personalities. In graduate school, they talked about the emic and etic. There were insiders and outsiders. The more she moved about in this desert landscape, exploring these ruins, the more she felt like a foreigner. You could try to grow close to another culture, but that wouldn’t make you part of it. You’d always be an observer. And if you were exploring the past, then that rift would become a gulf.
Her thoughts flowed through these channels all morning. As the hours passed, the sky became white, and the landscape around them went specular as the sun blazed down. Sophia thought about people who sought out a life in this environment, the ones who did not gather with others in the larger pueblos but instead retreated here. These lives were not accidental; neither could they be known except by the people who lived here and passed on. What she felt now was another aspect of the emptiness and absence she felt yesterday at the granary.
She paused at a switchback and sipped her water. As she adjusted the sternum strap on her pack, she realized that she had one Jolly Rancher left in the breast pocket of her shirt. Paul had rationed them out that morning, and she’d gone through them. She quickly popped the candy into her mouth only to discover it was grape. She would have to deal with it. She wrapped the luxurious rectangle in her tongue, and as she hiked, she turned it over and over until it was nothing more than a purple ribbon.
And then it was gone.
They came again to the vista of the lava field. Paul was waiting for her. “You doing okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
“You’ve been quiet.”
“I’ve got a lot on my mind. Obviously.”
They hiked on, stopping regularly to stretch and drink.
During one break, Paul said, “You’re not going to tell anyone about what happened up there—you know—with the bowl, are you?”
“I haven’t decided,” Sophia said, adjusting her backpack.
Paul moved his hands to his hips and adjusted his sunglasses. “You’re still mad.”
“Very observant.”
“I really hoped this trip might go in an entirely different direction.”
“Me too.”
“I was thinking if I had a chance to meet the me going up the trail two days ago, I’d pull him aside and give him some advice.”
“Like, don’t ruin everything?” she said.
“Well, more like don’t lie to Sophia.”
Sophia exhaled and tried not to roll her eyes. “Not lying to people is really important. I hope this isn’t a brand-new insight for you.”
“I made a promise to Bruce, and I wanted to see it through. But it’s bigger than that. Political stuff. We all know it’s coming, but we don’t know when. It’s like the bad guys are gaining on us, trying to unwrite a hundred years of hard work, sell it all off to the highest bidder. Sometimes, when you’re here in the middle, the only thing you can do to make a difference is break the rules. It’s just hard to be the one who has to enforce them at the same time.”
Sophia did not know what to say and what to hold back, so instead of speaking, she looked through a gap in the low hills toward Antelope Flats and then back up at the way they’d come down. She felt many responses come to the surface of her mind, then depart. During her silence, she saw Paul’s impeccable posture eroding, and she felt as if her message was coming across just fine.
“How much longer do we have?”
“At this pace, maybe an hour.”
They continued on, her feet growing sore from the hammering of the trail. The way flattened out, and eventually her truck materialized out of the junipers. She dropped her pack in the truck bed and opened her cooler, which was full of ice water. She removed two cans of Dr Pepper and placed one on the back of her neck. She offered the other to Paul, who declined.
“Suit yourself. More for me,” she said. She cracked open the soda and drank half of it in a single, long, burning, delicious stream, then unlocked the truck.
They drove in welcome silence down the steadily widening paths to the county road, until they came to Paul’s Jeep.
“I’m sorry I ruined everything,” he said.
Sophia shrugged. “I’m sorry I set my expectations so high.” Sophia got out of the truck but left it idling.
Paul unbuckled his seatbelt and said, “At least you got to prove that people actually do suck. It’s not just confirmation bias.” He smiled weakly, got out, and started transferring his gear from Sophia’s truck into his vehicle. After a couple of trips, he stopped, swore, and be
gan hurriedly checking his vehicle top to bottom, saying, “This isn’t possible. No. No. No. It couldn’t just disappear.”
“What’s gone?”
“My weapon—the M16—it’s gone.”
“Are you sure you brought it?”
“The SIG Sauer and the Remington are here, still locked up. The vehicle was locked.” He checked the doors and windows and threw his arms in the air.
“Maybe your mind was somewhere else. When was the last time you saw it?” Sophia said, not minding at all that she came across as smug.
“I serviced it last week,” he said, slumping against the vehicle. “So, it’s got to be back on my workbench. It’s the only thing that makes sense. With all the crap going on right now, I’m just not on top of things.”
“It’s okay to be imperfect,” Sophia said.
“Not right now it’s not, not for me,” Paul said. “I’m going to have to hustle back to Dellenbaugh Station. I’m so sorry. I’ll be in touch. We should talk about all of this at some point.”
“We should,” Sophia said and watched Paul speed off to the south.
___
Reinhardt arrived at a gas station that perched on the edge of the Paiute Indian Reservation, thirty miles southwest of Kanab. It was a standard American highway oasis with a massive open roof sheltering eight self-service fuel pumps. He had seen so many photographs of places like this that it did not seem foreign to him at all. During the drive, the wind had picked up, and percussive gusts shoved his car with enough force to make him veer out of his lane. As he pulled into the station from the side road, dust exploded into the air like waves breaking on a dry beach. In the open, flat ground between the station and the highway stood a huge green fiberglass brontosaurus.