Collins shook his head. “Nope, I wasn’t exactly being conversational. I just wanted him and his pals out of here.”
Frank put the matchbook into his pocket. “Thanks, Jack. I really appreciate you telling me about this.” He pushed away from the bar and slid off the stool. “I better be getting back home. Come tomorrow, I gotta give Uncle Sam a day’s work for a day’s pay.”
“Stick around for some tamale pie. Today’s Wednesday. We serve tamale pie on Wednesdays.”
“Man, I really like tamale pie, but I’ve got miles to go before I sleep.”
Collins grinned, “And promises to keep. Listen, on Fridays we have cioppino. Come some Friday and have some cioppino.”
“So what’s your take? Think he suspects anything?” Bill Jerome looked down at the cards caught up in his sinewy hands.
The three of them were seated around the kitchen table. Ben Shaw’s pipe rested on the table. He fidgeted in his shirt pocket and produced a pipe tamper. A yellow cone of light thick with smoke illuminated the linoleum tabletop. Collins puffed on his cigar, shaking his head. “Nope, I don’t think so. Why would he? Be kinda dumb to question suspects and let them know they were suspects.”
“No one ever said cops were smart.” Ben Shaw glared back at Collins. “Cops catch criminals because criminals are dumber than dirt, not because cops are smart. He probably thinks he’s slicker than hell with his stories about braille trails and heartrending stuff like that.” He discarded the queen of spades on Jerome’s club lead.
“Shit, thanks a lot.” Collins gave Shaw a disgusted look and dropped the jack of clubs on the trick. Shaw grinned. Collins glanced up from his hand. “Seemed like a pretty sincere kid to me. Likes his beer, that’s for sure.” He set his jaw for the response he was sure would follow.
Shaw shook his head in disgust. “He’s a fucking cop, Jack.” He turned to Jerome. “Whaddya think, Bill? Cops your pals these days? Nothing like a guy in a uniform telling people what to do.” He poured beer into the side of his glass, careful not to raise a head.
“Ben’s right, Jack.” The sharp edges of Jerome’s features divided his face into planes of shade and light. “We played along with him because not to play along would just make him suspicious. I wish he’d just go away.”
Jack raised his glass and drank deeply. Beer dripped from his mustache, making small puddles on the table. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. My God, they never changed. “You guys are the most grudge-holding bastards in the world. He’s a kid playing detective. That’s all. Why be coming around here looking for us?” He led with the ten of diamonds. Jerome dropped the ten of hearts. Shaw followed with a small heart, giving Collins a wolfish grin. Fifteen and counting. Collins shuffled the cards around in his hand.
“Who the hell knows why he was here,” Shaw remarked, “but he was here.” He pointed across the table, arm outstretched, four fingers pointing at Collins. “Right here where we live, Jack, where we live.” Jerome nodded in agreement.
“Okay, then, we lay off for a while.”
“We’ll see.” Shaw grinned. “Maybe we’ll find the need upon us.”
“Suit yourself. Someone’s got to tend bar, cook meals, and run the business. So I’m out of it for now.”
Shaw smiled over at Jerome. “Hear that, Bill? Jack’s giving us time off.”
Collins laughed. “Hah, how the hell would I tell?” He led with another diamond. Shaw looked down at his cards. “Shit. You’re Mr. Slick, Jack.”
Collins grinned and laid down the four cards remaining in his hand, all diamonds. “Shot the moon, boys. Looks like old Jack stuck you with twenty-six big ones.”
4
Frank was paying the piper. Why had he agreed to do a guest lecture for Jan Rockford’s anthropology class? The sun glinted off the windshield into his eyes, painfully bright. What the hell was he going to talk about? Nobody really knew what rock art was all about. The Pleistocene artists were unavailable for comment, turned to dust for lo these thousands of years. All he had were theories. Well, he had this advantage: He could make it up as he went along. A lack of fact meant a lot of latitude. But this whole lecture bit made him uneasy. He preferred people in less concentrated doses, two or three at a time, not twenty or thirty.
Why had he agreed so readily? What had gotten into him? Oh hell, this was a favor for a nice lady. He’d met Jan Rockford at the dig near Barstow and immediately liked her. Despite his brown skin and shiny badge, she made no assumptions about his interests or intellect. Actually, she’d slyly conducted an oblique interview, listening attentively to his observations, tapping his knowledge of the desert, drawing him out.
She’d asked questions about the terrain. Could he spot the remnants of the shoreline of Lake Manix, the Pleistocene lake that had once filled the now-dry valleys of the central Mojave Desert? Did he know of any promising sites for digs? An actual native of the Mojave! How very interesting! He should have recognized the technique. Frank was a professional listener, but he had succumbed to personal vanity and babbled on about things he rarely voiced.
He spoke of his Mexican/Paiute mother, for the first time since her death. Told Jan about her marriage to Francis Flynn, railroad man, who died of grief, Jameson whiskey, and trying to stay on the catwalks while two sheets to the wind. He plunged between the cars, and they’d had to search more than a mile of track looking for body parts.
Of course, Jan had been plying him steadily with Beck’s beer. That was another thing he liked about Jan. She drank good beer and in large quantities, seemingly without dimming her lights, matching him beer for beer without slurring her words. He’d had to nap alongside his truck for a couple hours before venturing back out onto paved roads. Slow learner, here he was again, suffering from a mild hangover. He shouldn’t have had a second Bishops Finger. It packed a wallop.
He thought about Jan. Never trust innocent-looking gray-haired ladies who reminded you of your mother, especially if they could down a six-pack and never bat an eyelash. The words had all rushed out of him in a stream of personal revelation. Then again, he hadn’t really talked with anyone since Mary Alice had departed the desert for Los Angeles, telling him she couldn’t bear the isolation and emptiness.
“Oh Frank, I can’t stand it. It’s all brown and gray. There’re no trees. Just vultures and crows picking at dead animals on the highway,” she’d said. He had pointed out that crows didn’t live in the desert. The birds she’d seen were ravens, not crows. “Crows gather in flocks called ‘murders,’” he’d explained. “Ravens travel in mated pairs.” He’d given her a flat stare. “They mate for life.”
“Jesus, Frank. What is it with you? ‘They’re ravens, not crows.’ Is that it? Ravens not crows, another wildlife lecture. Did I get it wrong again? Would you try really listening to me? Could you live in Los Angeles or up in Washington, where you told me how all those trees made you feel like you were trapped, closed in? Here in the desert, I feel exposed, like I’m disappearing. It’s so damned empty. God, six miles to the highway and twelve miles to the turnoff for Ridgecrest. Frank, there are only six buildings at Olancha, and two of them are boarded up. I can’t live in this place. Could you live away from your picture rocks, Joshua trees, and Artemisia tridentata—I got it right, Artemisia tridentata—and your beloved bighorn sheep, which no one but you ever sees?”
What was there to say? He’d been born in the Mojave. His mother’s mother had been a Paiute. The desert had claimed the child, and the man had given himself up to the desert. Emptiness? Vast, uncluttered, rigorously frugal, but never empty. It was full of shapes and colors and the stillness of open spaces, a land of illusions, a place where cloud shadows moved across a dreamscape of empty lakes whose dry beds miraculously filled with water when the desert gods emptied the sky in dark torrents, washing the rocks and filling the canyons with ephemeral rivers of brown water.
The smell of damp creosote bush rising in tendrils of moisture after a thundershower filled him with primeval j
oy. Its destruction filled him with primeval rage. The gods he sought lived here, and he drank life from the land they had created.
Frank disliked driving through Ridgecrest. The Naval Weapons Test Center had given birth to urban sprawl. There was no there there. At the University of Arizona, in Tucson, he’d witnessed the encroachment of urban sprawl into the fragile Colorado Desert, the inevitable capitulation of the land to development and the accumulation of wealth. The voices of expediency proclaimed a brave new utilitarian world, but the so-called reclamation of “wasteland” was nothing more than smash and grab on a scale unimaginable to the inept thugs who wandered aimlessly in the exercise yards of penal institutions.
It was happening in the Mojave, too, so seemingly endless and barren. To most people, the Mojave was too stark, too apparently devoid of life to attract the average tourist or provide a haven for urban refugees. To the denizens of the speeding cars on Interstate 15, rushing to Las Vegas to part with their money, the Mojave was a land inhabited by rocks turned dark in the sun, where ancient lava flows spilled out of barren hills and lay like black tongues on the desert floor.
Frank looked out the window at the land sliding by, the folded mountains, cinder rock, and creosote bush. Trees were okay, but they blocked the view. Too moist. Cottonwoods by a spring, the spiny Joshua tree on the flats and slopes, juniper and piñon higher up, just right. Some shade, good fuel, and tasty nuts.
Frank turned his truck into a parking slot reserved for guests at Arroyo Seco Community College. As he stepped out of the truck, the heat rushed up at him from asphalt already made soft by the sun. He thought about that first cold beer, how good it would taste. But first the penance.
He moved quickly into the shade of the covered walkways that sheltered the students against the sun as they passed from one class to another. He followed the walkway to a small central park protected from the heat by sun cloth suspended from plastic piping that supplied water to overhead outlets, discharging a spray so fine that most of it evaporated before reaching the ground, like desert rain. It was a good place to wait and gather his thoughts. The park was an island of damp green, thriving in the softened light and moisture. For a moment, Frank’s inner eye flashed on the cascade of water falling from the cliff in Surprise Canyon, a pocket of tender plants surviving in the harshest of climates.
He glanced down at the torn scrap of paper he held in his hand. It said, Social and Behavioral Sciences Building, Room 6. Bring slides. He had them. He took a deep breath. He’d done this before, but facing a group of people—no, an audience—that was the hard part, meeting their expectations. Once he got into it, he knew it wasn’t going to be so bad, but the first ten minutes being the designated expert were never that comfortable.
Jan’s classroom was windowless, low-ceilinged, and claustrophobic. The student desks had been shoved toward the far wall to make room for additional folding chairs. Those who couldn’t find a place to sit stood at the back. Someone had put up posters of Ansel Adams’s desert photographs: giant saguaros standing in the moonlight in the Sonoran Desert, far away from the high desert of the Mojave, where no saguaros grew.
Jan Rockford was seated at a long table at the front of the room, talking with a scruffy-looking male in jeans and a T-shirt and an emaciated girl in cutoff shorts, a tank top, and sandals. The male student’s bare arms were covered with intricate tattoos. A tiny tulip tattooed on the girl’s neck, just under her ear, reminded Frank of the death’s-head tattoo on the neck of the dead man in Surprise Canyon. Picture people.
Now the girl was talking to Jan. The guy nodded as she talked. They were obviously a team. Jan looked up at them, smiling. He couldn’t hear her, but she seemed to be getting along with them okay. He must have caught her eye, because she smiled and waved him over as she rose to greet him.
Taking Frank by the arm, she led him to the front of the room. “Class, this is Frank Flynn, ranger for the Bureau of Land Management.” As the buzz of conversation died, the tinny tune of a cell phone caught Frank’s ear. A young woman with pouty lips and spiky blond hair tilted her head into the hand holding a tiny cell phone. Jan had caught it, too, and shot the woman a steely look.
The young woman began shaking her head back and forth, a vertical frown creasing her smooth forehead. “That’s bullshit. That’s what she always says.” She nodded. “Yeah. Well, she can kiss my ass.” This last admonition was clearly audible in the descending silence.
She’s not even here; we’re invisible, Frank thought. He wanted to reach over and take the phone out of her hand. Tell her she couldn’t have it back until she learned to be polite. He hated the damn intrusive things.
Jan looked out over the class. Clearly, they were expectantly watching for her reaction. “We’ll just have to wait for a bit until Eloise can rejoin us.” She smiled. “Something has obviously displeased her.” There were titters and guffaws. The students stared at Eloise in amused group cruelty.
“Hey, I’ve gotta go.” This was uttered sotto voce. “Sorry, Ms. Rockford.” Eloise looked around the room as if reemerging from another realm. Jan nodded in her direction. “Now that we’re together again, may I remind you all to turn off phones, pagers, chiming clocks, and other modern noisemakers, so we can proceed without too much interruption.” She smiled in the student’s direction. “I know it was just an oversight, Eloise.”
She turned to Frank. “Officer Flynn watches over the land, rescues the foolish, and helps to protect the sites of early human activity, which—as you know—are very fragile. I asked him to come to our class and share some of his knowledge of the rock art in the Mojave Desert, and he was kind enough to spare us some time.
“Officer Flynn, this is my Introduction to Anthropology class, and a few guests”—she gave him a sly smile—“who have been waiting in anticipation for your words of knowledge. So now why don’t you tell us about what you know about the pictures on the rocks.” She turned to Frank. “Here, let me take that, and I’ll set it up for you.” Jan pulled down a projection screen and seated herself at the back of the room.
The students looked up at him, silent, waiting for him to speak. The thin blond girl with the tulip sat primly at the front, knees pressed together, hands gently grasping the edge of the desk. Her companion sprawled next to her in studied nonchalance, his eyes fixed intently on Frank’s face. He was the only male up front. The younger male students clustered toward the back, in a protective knot near the door. There were several older women in the class, older than Frank, at least—more than thirty-four. Serious and intent, ring binders open, they waited expectantly, ready to take down his words of wisdom.
He began nervously. “Um, for most people, the desert is something they drive through going someplace else, and that’s okay. But it’s hard to see the details of things when you’re going too fast, just passing through at seventy miles an hour.” There was no place to put his hands. “If you’re really going to see the desert, you have to get out of your car and walk around, so that lets a lot of people out.”
Frank could hear himself talking. “Snakes, heat, cactus, prickly plants, and rocks blackened by the sun aren’t a particularly inviting prospect.” Not a sound. He glimpsed a faintly amused face framed by thick dark hair, cut to just below a determined chin. She nodded almost imperceptibly.
He pushed on. “But to tell you the truth, there are a few of us who like the prickly plants. The cacti and the Joshua trees lead an interesting existence, but for me, it’s the dark rocks that are the most interesting of all, because some of them have pictures on them made thousands of years ago by the people who lived here before the birth of Christ. When you see them, you can’t help but wonder, Why were they made? Why this rock and not another rock? Who made them? The truth of the matter is that nobody knows for sure, but there are some reasonable theories.”
The young males clustered near the door carried on a private conversation, talking to one another in inaudible voices, exchanging remarks that, Frank surmised, amused the
m. At least they weren’t loud. He drew a breath. “Art doesn’t serve a pragmatic purpose. When you find an ax head or an arrow point, you can say with a degree of certainty that these were used for building, hunting, or warfare. So the question is, Why would the aboriginal inhabitants of the Mojave make pictures on rocks?”
The young man he had seen talking with Jan stuck up his hand. His gangly frame flopped at angles around the too-small student desk, his legs thrust in front of him. Frank wondered how he had managed to fold himself into his seat in the first place.
“Yes.” Frank pointed to the raised hand.
“Maybe they were bored. Maybe they had too much time on their hands.”
Frank wondered briefly if the kid had done some time. He had some of the earmarks—the tattoos, the edgy cool. He nodded slowly in agreement and seemed to catch the questioner by surprise.
“You know, I think that could’ve had something to do with it. If you think about some aboriginal hunter, hiding behind some rocks, waiting for a deer or a sheep to come trotting by, you figure it must have been a long wait. So maybe he passed the time by doodling on the rocks. It makes sense, but I think there was more to it than that. Let me show you some pictures.”
He threaded his way between the students to the back of the room where a projector rested on a raised stand. Jan dimmed the lights as Frank focused the projector for the first slide. Large, brightly painted figures in varying shades of reds, yellows, and dark browns stretched up the underside of an arched overhang. The figures seemed to be stopped in time, their dance steps caught on the face of the cliff. As the cliff face diminished in height, the figures diminished in size, creating an odd three-dimensional perspective.
“This first slide is from Baja California,” Frank began. “It’s of a pictograph, not a petroglyph. Because these figures were painted under an overhanging cliff, they have survived weathering. Painted rock figures are pictographs. Most of the surviving pictographs in the United States are in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, where there are more overhanging cliffs.
Shadow of the Raven Page 4
