Come In and Cover Me

by Gin Phillips

  “I scared you,” he said. “Sorry about that. I didn’t think about you hearing the shot. No problem, though—could have been one if I didn’t have a gun. I don’t know that I’m as good at javelina wrestling as I once was.”

  That was her cue to smile, but she did not.

  He nodded toward his ankle, lifted it, and winced. “It ran off back that way, squealing like a, well, like a pig. But I tripped over my own feet when I was backing away from the thing, and I twisted my bad ankle. Slowed me down. I can’t make the climb down with this—not that last bit down the rocks. I was heading the long way, out the other side of the canyon.”

  She nodded, trying to keep her face under control.

  “Ren?” he asked.

  “I thought the ghosts were telling me I was going to lose you.”

  He sobered. “They said that?”

  “I misunderstood. I think I misunderstood.”

  The wrinkle between his eyebrows deepened. “But now you’re wondering whether or not you’re going to lose me?”

  It sounded stupid to her when he said it aloud. Hell, it sounded stupid when she said it aloud. But she could still taste the panic and the tears in her throat. She shrugged.

  He had pulled up his khakis, and she could see his swollen ankle—no sign of bone, thick as his calf, flushed and soft-looking. She wished for a glimpse of the curve of his arches.

  “You are,” he said.

  She tilted her head to meet his eyes.

  “What?”

  “You are going to lose me,” he said. “Or I’m going to lose you. That’s the way this works. It’s got to end someday. I wouldn’t mind that day being fifty or sixty years from now, but it will end, and one of us will be in god-awful pain.”

  “Fifty or sixty years from now?”

  “That’s my general plan at the moment.”

  She digested this.

  “Would that be okay with you?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She reached to a waist-high outcrop of rock. It was rough and warm against her hand.

  “Good.” He shifted more of his weight to the bad ankle and took a step. “Walk with me?”

  She matched his pace, staying close in case he stumbled. He walked slowly, not exactly limping but treading carefully. She found herself still looking, above and below, watching for snakes, for rocks, for any manner of thing that could bite or sting or smash.

  He reached one hand behind him without slowing, and she allowed him to pull her closer. He looped an arm around her shoulder, leaning on her slightly.

  “I don’t plan to die today, Ren,” he said. “Stop looking for omens. Look at me.”

  She did, still moving forward, trusting she would not step wrong. She took in the curtains of eyelashes and the gold flecks in his eyes, the beard that needed tidying up, dirt on his face, thick hair, and soft mouth. He smiled, flashing the crooked edges of his teeth. She liked the way he looked at her. A bee or wasp buzzed past her face and drew her attention. She could hear its hum.

  Ed and Paul. She had forgotten about them.

  “Stay here,” she said, easing away from him. “Let me go tell Ed and Paul that I’m going the long way with you. They can head on back. Maybe they can at least bring one of the trucks up to the fields and save us a little time.”

  “I’ll keep going,” he said over his shoulder. “I have a feeling you’ll be able to catch up with me.”

  She worked her way back through the canyon and called out occasionally, but she couldn’t find Paul and Ed. Why hadn’t they brought the walkie-talkies? Why hadn’t they brought water, for that matter? She hadn’t noticed her thirst until she saw Silas, but once the fear was gone, thirst had replaced it. Just one good cool mouthful of water, just enough to wet her tongue—that’s all she needed. Or a pitcherful, maybe, enough that she could drink it gulp after gulp and let it run down the sides of her mouth. She needed water. Her lips were dry; her skin was dry. Even her eyeballs were dry. Just looking at the dirt made her thirstier.

  She licked her lips and swallowed, making her way to the agreed-upon meeting place. She did not have too long to wait before the two men appeared, almost at the same time, from two opposite directions. They were breathing heavily, and the relief washed over their faces when she told them Silas was fine.

  Once she had sent them on their way, she turned back to catch up with Silas. He was moving slowly, but still he had maybe a half-hour head start on her. She needed to hurry. She would find him, and then they would, eventually, find water. Although now that Silas had been out of her sight for this long, some of the earlier groundless fear had crept back. He was fine. It was only a twisted ankle.

  Thoughts of his swollen ankle seemed to tamp down her thirst.

  She retraced her steps, setting a quick pace, but without the desperation to it that had driven her an hour before. Focused on steps and drops and turns, she saw only the rock in front of her. She pictured Silas’s slow, one-sided gait and looked forward to making her way through the rest of the canyon more slowly once she reached him.

  Then she stopped altogether.

  Lynay was sitting in the dirt, surrounded by clay parrots, like a child with rubber ducks in the bathtub. Her face had a joy to it that Ren hadn’t seen since she first saw the girl cutting her hair off at Crow Creek. But it was clearly an older face. An older body, too, with a softness to it, lacking the long lines and sharp angles of youth.

  Lynay moved one parrot slightly, leaving a trail in the dirt. “Come sit next to me.”

  “I’m sort of in a hurry,” said Ren.

  Lynay smiled, and Ren realized she was smiling back. She looked toward the dirt.

  The parrots rested on their bellies, and finally Ren could see the logic behind the truncated tails. If they had been a realistic length, the figures couldn’t have stayed upright. They were designed to be handled and posed.

  Giving in, Ren lowered herself to the ground, her right knee nearly touching Lynay’s left one.

  “He’s safe, you know,” said Lynay, and Ren thought again of Lynay standing over Silas sleeping, not seeing him, not wanting him, but wanting a man long dead. She thought of Lynay dripping blood-paint on Silas’s shirt, of the blades flying at Crow Creek, and she thought maybe none of it had been a warning. Maybe she had been so sure of the answers that she had made all the pieces fit. Maybe sometimes tools broke and skin bled for no reason other than a loose screw or a slippery rock.

  Or maybe the ghosts had been at work. Maybe they wanted to sharpen her fear, because it was the fear that made her feel more. It was feeling—the love and the fear—that left her wide open and reachable. And they had wanted her to be reached.

  “I know,” said Ren.

  “He won’t always be,” said Lynay.

  “I know.”

  “The knowing can be a good thing. The knowing can deepen it all, make you see clearer.” Lynay reached for one parrot, skimming her fingers over its smooth head. “I did not make these. For a long time, I did not make anything. I did not want to see anything under the surface. All the patterns flattened themselves out like a chunk of ice melted. I had a man here”—she noticed the lift of Ren’s eyebrows—“yes, another one, and I had two children who lived. But I still managed to keep everything flat.”

  She lifted the parrot, cradling it in her hand. “I did not touch the clay. For years. And then”—she turned over the parrot, and Ren could see the shallow imprint of a small thumb on its belly—“and then there was a girl.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “No. Someone else’s daughter.” She raised her face to the sun. “She had an aunt across the canyon who worked with clay, so she knew how to make a simple bowl, a small jar. And Non had told her that I was a maker. She begged and begged, and eventually I agreed to pull out the powder and turn it to clay. We made
parrots that day. And the day after. And then more children came. Girls, and even some boys.”

  Ren stretched out one finger toward a parrot and found that she could touch it. It felt just as concrete as the ones she had collected in cardboard boxes. “And you showed them all how to work the clay?”

  “Yes. They asked.”

  “And then you started making bowls again?”

  “I did. I ran my hands through the patterns again and let them sift through my fingers until I plucked out the ones I wanted. And it felt good to feel the clay again. Each bowl, each second of wind and sun. I’d forgotten how it could feel.”

  “I’ve only found one bowl here.”

  “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t here,” Lynay said, and there was teasing in her tone. Ren had never heard any lightness in her voice.

  Ren nodded. She dug the toe of her boot into the dirt. “Are you here?”

  Lynay lifted her chin and didn’t answer.

  Her hands were covered in clay again, the color etched into her knuckles and under her nails. Her shoulders were straight. She smiled, and Ren couldn’t remember seeing the girl’s teeth—small and worn—before the last few moments.

  It struck her that maybe this girl did not need her to solve a mystery or to avenge a wrong or to spell out a name that had been forgotten. Lynay needed clay in the creases of her skin and hot ground under her feet and the touch of Non’s hand and children clamoring for small parrots.

  “Why me?” Ren said. “Why did you come to me?”

  Lynay tossed the parrot once, lightly. “I liked the way your hands moved and the way you touched the dirt. I liked how you closed your eyes when you waded in the water. I recognized the patterns in you.”

  “I thought you wanted me to tell your story.” She felt embarrassed to say it.

  “Yes,” Lynay said quickly. Eagerly. “It’s a nice thing to be remembered. But I have many stories.”

  “And are they like the bowls? Where I may never get to them?”

  “There’s a pleasure in the looking, isn’t there?”

  Ren half stood, exasperated. “Then why have you gone through all this if you won’t tell them to me?”

  The sun was in the girl’s eyes. She lifted a hand to shade her face. She took her time answering, and when she did, she sounded amused again. “I can’t tell you all my stories, of course. I don’t even know all of them. But you can look and listen, and we will see how it all shapes up.”

  Ren smelled juniper in the air. Now she did stand, brushing the dirt from her hands and the backs of her thighs. She looked down at the top of Lynay’s head, with its black shining twists of hair, and Lynay craned her neck to meet Ren’s gaze.

  “You also have many stories,” Lynay said. “Perhaps you will tell them sometime.”

  Ren turned away. Two steps forward, and then she rounded a boulder. She didn’t look behind her. She wanted Silas, separate from all signs and portents. She wanted to stay wide open, and if ghosts came, fine. But she wanted other things more. Once the walls of Santina Canyon shallowed, she could see the outline of the larger canyon, see the ledge where the Delgado site began. Lynay was likely there. And perhaps more bowls were there as well. She would see. She would look and listen.

  The rock under her feet was the color of a child’s eraser. It was shot through with mica or silver or starlight, and it sparkled as she moved. The peaks and valleys of the canyon were shadows of purples and pinks and blues, and the sky still had rose streaks in it. She could smell the soil, could smell the chill of the night evaporating into day.

  Silas. He was there ahead, drinking water from a Gatorade bottle.

  “Hey,” she called.

  “Hey yourself.” He wiped his mouth.

  “You have water?”

  “You don’t?” He handed it over to her. “What kind of morons come up here with no water?”

  “I barely remembered to put on pants,” she said. She cut her eyes at his expression.

  Something in the canyon had erased the pain from Lynay’s face. Whatever she had left behind her at Crow Creek, she had brought along the pain. Maybe it was the husband or the children who had siphoned out the sadness. Maybe it was miles and years. Maybe she poured the loss and the pain into the pottery itself until it all drained out of her, or perhaps the unfamiliar soil soaked it up and channeled it into succulent roots and cactus spines.

  These were fanciful thoughts, Ren knew. She would not get an answer to this question. Not just one certain answer. She hoped she would see Lynay smiling again, running or laughing or tossing sun-warmed parrots. She hoped she would learn more of her stories. But she would not try to raise the ghosts from the ground—they could come to her if they liked.

  “I missed you,” Silas said.

  She rubbed her hand along his shoulder blades and kissed his chin. The sweat mark on the front of his shirt was shaped like a cat.

  She wondered if Lynay had ever asked Non to remind her of Crow Creek, to tell her stories of days she was too young to remember. Ren could see a picture of them, of Lynay and Non, one that was much less concrete than the visions that had walked and talked in front of her. She pictured the older Lynay, the one she had just seen, with children of her own around her, children she could lift with one arm so they could wrap their legs around her waist. She saw the children sleeping as Lynay leaned against Non’s side, and the fire caught the gray in Non’s hair. Lynay would lay her head on Non’s lap, and Non would stroke her hair and run rough-soft fingers over her forehead and tell her stories of the things that used to be. And Lynay’s face would show that there was a pleasure to those stories after a while. She would listen to the stories, and she would start to see patterns, multiple patterns, designs she had not seen at first. The patterns were not simple, but they were beautiful. The television would cast a shimmering light on her face as her mother touched her hair. She would lean into the sleepy-safe feel of her mother’s hands, and she would wish desperately for this to go on and on for always.

  Ren lay her head against Silas’s arm, and she meant to speak of Lynay. Instead she slid her fingers against his and saw that her hands were long and elegant, like a pianist’s hands or an artist’s. She thought how much she would like to taste her mother’s orange rolls, and how Silas could scrape the icing from the pan. She thought of sitting with him on the back porch swing.

  And she told him, “My mother’s name is Anna.”

  acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I’d like to thank Karl Laumbach, archaeologist and storyteller extraordinaire. I’m convinced there is no detail about New Mexico archaeology that he does not know and no story that he cannot spin. Without him, there would be no Cañada Rosa in this story, no Lynay and Non, no intersection point between Mimbres and Northern Pueblo cultures. I went to Karl as a blank slate, and he resurrected a world for me. Thanks also to Toni Laumbach, who knows everything anyone could ever want to know about ceramics. Karl and Toni both answered endless questions with patience and amazing detail. They astonish me. The archaeological knowledge here is theirs, not mine. Any mistakes are mine alone.

  Important bits and pieces of this story came from a variety of people and places. Thanks to John Fitch, another expert and a charming character in his own right. To Earthwatch and all the archaeologists and staff in the excavation at the Cañada Alamosa: Michael Wylde, Morgan Seamont, Dean Hood, Marc Bacon, and Delton and Mary Lou Estes. To Denny and Trudy O’Toole—your hospitality made all this possible. John Herzog gave a lesson on Ruth and Naomi at just the right time. The Reverend Shannon Webster complicated the story of Ruth in interesting ways. Sandra Sprayberry helped point me in the right direction on Native American legends. I found myself thinking fondly of Santina Lonergan, a lovely lady whose name I borrowed for a canyon. My dad, Donny Phillips, will notice that I’ve purlo
ined a story or two of his, and I appreciate my brother Dabney’s letting girls write on him in middle school.

  As helpful as all the living, breathing sources were, I found these published works to be crucial: Mimbres Society, edited by Valli S. Powell-Martí and Patricia A. Gilman; Mimbres Classic Mysteries: Reconstructing a Lost Culture Through Its Pottery by Tom Steinbach, Sr.; The Chaco Meridian by Stephen H. Lekson; Collapse by Jared Diamond; Painted by a Distant Hand: Mimbres Pottery from the Southwest by Steven A. LeBlanc; Anasazi America by David E. Stuart; Book of the Hopi by Frank Waters; Navajo Folk Tales by Franc Johnson Newcomb; and Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands by James F. Brooks. I found the following articles particularly relevant: “A Mimbres Burial with Associated Colon Remains from the NAN Ruin Ranch, New Mexico” by Harry J. Shafer, Marianne Marek, and Karl J. Reinhard, Journal of Field Archaeology, vol. 16, 1989; “Prehistoric Macaws and Parrots in the Mimbres Area, New Mexico” by Darrell Creel and Charmion McKusick, American Antiquity, vol. 59, 1994; “New Interpretations of Mimbres Public Architecture and Space: Implications for Cultural Change” by Darrell Creel and Roger Anyon, American Antiquity, vol. 68, 2003; and “Social Organization and Classic Mimbres Period Burials in the SW United States” by Patricia A. Gilman, Journal of Field Archaeology, vol. 17, 1990.

  Thank you to Fred, who reads everything I write first and last. Much appreciation to my agent, Kim Witherspoon, for her insight and for making business calls much more enjoyable than they should be. To my editors, Sarah McGrath and Sarah Stein, who, thank goodness, saw the things I didn’t. Thanks to Rose Marie Morse for her editorial scalpel, to Jamie Roberts for her sharp eyes and smiley faces, and to Debbie Ashe for not trying to be nice. And extra thanks to my friend Ceridwen Dovey, who reads as brilliantly as she writes.