Track of the Scorpion

by R. R. Irvine

“I’m here, aren’t I? Like always, spending my summers hauling supplies and running errands.”

  “All digs depend on logistics, you know that as well as I do. If Elliot left that up to one of his students, something could go wrong. His work could be compromised.”

  “I heard that speech already today.”

  “It’s true nevertheless.”

  “If I hadn’t left the University of New Mexico after graduation,” she said, “people would be yelling nepotism behind my back. I want to be accepted for my own work, not Elliot’s.”

  Guthrie laid a hand on hers. “The National Geographic may not be the Journal of Archaeological Research, but it’s bound to get you taken seriously.”

  “I’ve loved airplanes ever since I was old enough to read about them, but I’m not crazy enough to think I can make a career out of them. To make it as an historical archaeologist, you have to restore Colonial Williamsburg or Civil War battlefields. Otherwise, the grant money isn’t there.”

  “Maybe we can find you something like that if you come back to us. Towns along the old Santa Fe Trail need restoring if we’re not going to lose our heritage to subdivisions. You know the drill. Renovate a frontier town, spruce up boot hill, and the next thing you know you’ll have a tourist attraction.”

  “The Professor Guthrie who taught me Archaeology 101 would have flunked any student who suggested something like that.”

  “So stick to the Anasazi, that’s my advice. Besides, Elliot already told me he’s found some promising artifacts. He’ll share the credit with you, you know that.”

  “Or the blame.”

  Guthrie ducked his head. “Seriously, Nick, I think your father depends on you more than you realize. The Anasazi may not be your specialty, but you know more about them than anyone else in the department, with the exception of your father.”

  She sighed. “Don’t think I haven’t agonized over my decision to leave you two, but I’m tired of protecting him. I’ve been doing it all my life.”

  Her comment provoked an inquisitive stare, which she escaped by sliding out of the booth and stepping behind the lunch counter.

  “Mom,” she called, “I’m going to get us some sodas.”

  “You know where they are, dear,” a woman called back. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “What kind of protection?” Guthrie asked.

  Nick turned her back on him long enough to retrieve cans of Coke from the refrigerator. The cool air soothed her and made her wonder if she wasn’t dehydrated, maybe on the verge of heat prostration. Why else would she have blurted out something so personal? That part of her life was off-limits.

  “This damn place is getting to me,” she said, returning to the booth. “I need a real summer vacation, or at least a real air conditioner.”

  “It was a hundred and twelve degrees when you found that plane in Texas last year, and you were living in a tent, not a motel.”

  She shrugged.

  “You’re a natural in this business. I said so when you were my student. You’re like Schliemann. He read about Troy and believed it was real when everybody said it was a city Homer made up. So he went out and found it, just like you did with that bomber. You’ve already had two major finds. That’s more than most archaeologists achieve in a lifetime.”

  She sipped her soda. Guthrie was right about one thing. Finding that bomber in Texas, a twin-engine B-25, the same kind Jimmy Doolittle flew off an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo, had been so exciting she hadn’t thought about the heat for one moment, not even while scouring the badlands of Texas, talking to old-timers who had nothing better to do than tell stories about lost mines and lost planes. Painstakingly, she’d sorted out fact and fiction, cross-referencing everything with Army Air Corps records, until finally she was ready to go out into the desert to look for herself.

  Mom Bennett appeared, wearing her usual flowered apron, her gray hair done up in a bun like a Norman Rockwell grandmother. One look at Guthrie, a new man in town in her age group, and Mom’s face lit up.

  “I make my own pies,” she told him. “Mom’s home cooking. The first slice is on the house.”

  Since Nick wasn’t included in the offer, she headed for the door. “I’ll leave you to your pie, Professor.”

  Guthrie looked trapped.

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she added, “as soon as I load the supplies we need for tomorrow morning.”

  A sign on the front door of Turtle’s store said BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. Nick’s supplies were stacked on the porch next to the door.

  “You could have put them in the Trooper for me,” she muttered, then realized the mayor would never risk it while her Isuzu was parked in the sun.

  Gritting her teeth, she went to work. By the time she’d finished, Nick was soaking wet and thirsty enough to tear open one of the cardboard cartons containing the new brand of bottled water she’d ordered. She drank half a liter and poured the rest over her head, feeling refreshed until she caught sight of her disheveled reflection in the plate glass. She ran her fingers through her short red hair, but that made matters worse, creating droopy-looking spikes. All she could do was hide the mess under her Cubs’ cap. On top of everything else, the new brand of water tasted as bad as the old one.

  Feeling bedraggled, not to mention outgeneraled by Mayor Ralph, she U-turned the Trooper, parked in front of the cafe, and went inside to collect Guthrie. Mom Bennett was sitting across from him in the booth, as well as an older man Nick had never seen before. Both were studying the National Geographic.

  “You look exhausted, dear,” Mom said the moment Nick sat next to Guthrie. “Let me get you another cold drink.”

  Nick shook her head. “I’m not thirsty. I think my blood sugar’s low.”

  “One piece of pie, coming up. Anybody else?”

  “Apple pie à la mode all around,” Guthrie said. “On me.” When Mom went to fetch the pie, Guthrie added, “This is Gus Beckstead, Nick. He’s a fan of yours.”

  Beckstead, bone thin with a sun-wrinkled face the color of old leather, looked from Nick to her photograph and back again. Finally, squinting skeptically, he tapped a stained fingernail on the magazine. “It says here you dig up airplanes.”

  “I’ve been lucky enough to find a couple.”

  “Is there any money in it?”

  “That picture’s all the payment I’m likely to get.”

  “It’s like I told you,” Guthrie said. “Nick Scott is a famous archaeologist, and one of my best students. Planes are more of a hobby with her than anything else. Mostly, she digs up Indians like the rest of us. You see, her specialty, historical archaeology, deals with only the last few hundred years. In this country, excluding the Indians, that begins with the arrival of Columbus.”

  “Is there money in any of this?”

  “Mostly we do it for love,” Guthrie said. “And for the universities who pay us.”

  Beckstead’s gaze settled on Nick’s breasts, no doubt accentuated by the water she’d spilled down the front of her shirt. The look on his face was more doubtful than sexual, as if having breasts somehow disqualified her from scientific work. She’d seen it on men his age before. He was, she guessed, somewhere in his seventies.

  “Gus is a prospector,” Guthrie said. “He digs for gold.”

  The man raised his sights to stare her in the eye. “There’s not much digging to it. Mostly, I use a metal detector. It beats the old days, I can tell you, scratching around out there in the desert, eating dirt and dust. Now I just turn the damned thing on and wander around. You should hear the bastard beep when I find a big nugget.”

  Mom served the pie. “You’d better dig right in. The ice cream won’t last long in this kind of heat.”

  “Aren’t you having one?” Guthrie asked her.

  “It’s getting close to dinnertime. My first customers will be arriving in the next few minutes. You come back sometime when we can be alone and get to know each other and I’ll let you buy me a piece of pie.”
Mom disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Like I was saying,” Beckstead said, “Gold nuggets have been washing down from the Chuska Mountains west of here for thousands of years, not that we get much rain. But when it does come, it’s a gully washer, by God.”

  “Do you make a living looking for nuggets?” Nick asked.

  “Among other things,” he said, winking.

  “Ask him what other things,” Guthrie said.

  Nick stared at her old professor, who looked as sly as when he asked trick questions on his final exams.

  “All right,” she said, “what’s going on?”

  While Beckstead grinned, Guthrie said, “Gus tells me he’s found an airplane out in the desert.”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to fall for that one.”

  “It’s the truth. Gus wasn’t going to do anything about it until we got to talking and I showed him your picture in the magazine.”

  “I can’t say I’m going to do anything about it now,” Beckstead added.

  Nick toyed with her pie, now swimming in melted ice cream. “What kind of airplane?”

  “How the hell would I know? I don’t have the time to dig it up.”

  “You say it’s buried?”

  “Sandstorms cover up anything that’s not moving out in the desert. I wouldn’t have found it without my metal detector.”

  “If it’s covered up, how do you know what it is?”

  “I shifted enough sand to see part of a wing. It had an insignia on it.”

  “Show me.”

  He pulled a paper napkin from the booth’s dispenser, then used Guthrie’s pen to make a rough sketch.

  “It could be a World War Two emblem,” Nick said.

  He eyed her closely. “You weren’t born in time for that war.”

  “I’ve known her since she was a child,” Guthrie said. “When other little girls were playing with dolls, she was a tomboy building model planes.”

  Nick smiled grimly. Building models had nothing to do with being a tomboy. She’d built Spitfires, Mustangs, and B-17s as a means of escape, the same way her father had done when he spent his weekends absorbed in scale models of his beloved Indian cliff dwellings. Studying cockpit layouts was preferable to dealing with her mother.

  “Tell me, Gus,” she said, “have you heard any stories of a plane being lost around here?”

  “Until I heard about you, I didn’t know anybody who’d give a damn.”

  “Are you asking me to take a look at it?”

  “If you dig up my plane, I want my picture in a magazine, too.”

  Beneath the table top, Nick nudged Guthrie with her knee, prompting him to say, “Archaeology isn’t as easy as it seems. There’s a lot of hard work involved, not to mention the cost.’’

  “Does that mean you’ll charge me to take a look-see?”

  Guthrie chuckled. “If I know my Nick, you couldn’t keep her away from an airplane. You might be able to charge her admission.”

  Beckstead scratched a sideburn as if thinking that over. “How about we take a look first thing in the morning?”

  “I think my father can get by without me for a couple of hours,” Nick said.

  Guthrie snorted. “He’ll be so busy showing me his site, he won’t even miss you, Nick. I’ll ride out with him tomorrow and you can play with your airplane.”

  Beckstead fingered the National Geographic. “What about my picture?”

  “I’ll do my best for you,” she said.

  “You’re at the Seven Cities like everyone else, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  Beckstead stood up. “I’ll meet you there first thing tomorrow morning.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Nick sat up in the dark, wondering what had awakened her. The knock on the door repeated itself.

  “It’s me, Gus Beckstead.”

  She switched on the bedside light. For Christ’s sake, it was five o’clock. To her, first thing in the morning meant sometime after eight o’clock.

  She swung out of bed, went to the door, and opened it the length of the security chain. “Did you bring coffee?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “That’s what I figured. Women are always late starters. I’ll be waiting in the truck.”

  Sighing, Nick closed the door, plugged in the coffeemaker she’d filled the night before, then headed for the shower. Ten minutes later, with a trowel in one hand and a full thermos in the other, she climbed into Beckstead’s pickup truck, a battered Chevy that rode high on oversize tires. The tires looked new, the tools in the back well kept. Five-gallon gas cans had been lashed to the truck’s side panels, along with fiberglass water jugs.

  As they pulled out of the parking lot, the rising sun was in their eyes but had yet to erase the desert chill.

  The air smelled damp, though there wasn’t a trace of surface water for fifty miles in any direction.

  “I brought an extra cup,” she said, adjusting her position on the tattered truck seat to accommodate the hand trowel in her pocket.

  “My father used to say, „You can judge a woman by the coffee she makes.’ ” He blew on his cup, took a careful sip, and swished the coffee around in his mouth. When he finally swallowed, he made a face and shook his head.

  She tested it for herself. It tasted worse than usual.

  “The water in this town is terrible,” Beckstead said. “If you ask me you scientists polluted it with your atomic bomb testing. Now fasten your seat belt. It’s a rough ride where we’re going.” He handed back the cup. “Too rough to be drinking coffee.”

  “It’s rough anywhere in this desert.”

  “If it was paradise, it would be too expensive for the likes of me.”

  Heading out of town, they crossed the old concrete WPA bridge that spanned Conejos Wash. At that time of the morning the hundred-foot gorge was still in deep shade. Looking down its steep bank with the wind rushing by, Nick had the impression that the Conejos River was running, though she knew its short life was confined to the rainy season.

  Halfway to her father’s dig site, Beckstead swung off the highway, following tire tracks that Nick had never noticed before. The tracks wound northwest in the general direction of the Navajo Indian reservation, crossing a landscape that was only slightly less barren than the red-rock canyon where the Anasazi had chosen to live a thousand years ago.

  When Beckstead slowed the truck to a crawl, Nick took the opportunity to pour herself a second cup of coffee. It was on the way to her lips when the truck careened into a shallow gully. The jolt splashed hot coffee down the front of her workshirt.

  “That’s where I find my nuggets,” Beckstead said, “in gullies like this. They crisscross this whole area.”

  Between gullies, Nick stowed the thermos under the seat and cranked down the window to dry out her shirt. In the few minutes since leaving town, the sun had gone to work. The air temperature was up, well into the seventies, she guessed, with no hint of dew. The locals claimed that the desert vegetation was ideal for range cattle, though Nick had yet to see anything worth eating.

  “There it is, up ahead,” Beckstead said ten minutes later. “I call it my oasis.”

  A quarter of a mile ahead a yellow ribbon fluttered from the top of a metal rod. When they got closer, she saw that the ribbon was really plastic tape and the rod was a telescoping car antenna.

  Beckstead stopped beside the marker. “From here on, this is my land. If you ever drive out here on your own, stick to the road. Otherwise, you’ll hit deep sand. I made that mistake my first trip out and got stuck up to the axle. If I hadn’t had four- wheel drive, my bones would be here instead of me.”

  In low gear, Beckstead crept ahead another fifty yards before parking the truck.

  From an archaeologist’s point of view, a low mound, maybe a hundred feet long, was the only possible burial site in an otherwise barren and deeply eroded landscape. There were no trees, no brush larg
e enough to provide shade. The only shelter was a shack maybe twice the size of an outhouse. As Nick paced along the base of the mound, she began to sweat, a combination of excitement and the quickly rising temperature.

  “The locals call this Hospah Flats,” he said, “though you won’t find it on the maps. All they show is badlands, lucky for me. Otherwise, some big company might have come in here and stolen my gold claim out from under me.”

  Nick nodded at Beckstead’s truck. “Do you mind if I stand on the cab?”

  His indifferent shrug sent her scrambling onto the hot metal. From that vantage point, the mound looked more compact than she’d first thought.

  “You told me you’d dug up a wing?” she said.

  “I covered it back up again, didn’t I? I didn’t want anybody else poking around what belongs to me.” He grabbed a shovel from the truck bed and waited for Nick to climb down before leading the way out into the soft sand. He started digging at a spot marked by a football-size rock. Nick pulled work gloves from her pocket and got down on her knees, waiting for him to strike metal. The moment he did, she waved him off and began clearing away the loose dirt and sand with her fingers.

  “Jesus Christ,” Beckstead said, “is that the way you have to do it, by hand?”

  “If you want to preserve your find, you have to be careful.”

  The moment she touched the edge of the wing her fingers tingled with an electric shock of excitement. It took her breath away, as did all such discoveries. She sat back on her haunches to savor the moment.

  “Well?” Beckstead said.

  She wanted to shout for joy. Instead, she nodded at the prospector and began to dig, using her hand trowel. Within minutes, she’d exposed a perfectly preserved wingtip. Painted on it was a white five-pointed star centered in a faded blue circle, with white bars on either side. Despite the heat, goose bumps climbed her spine.

  “Well?” Beckstead demanded.

  “It looks like a World War Two insignia all right.”

  “What kind of plane?”

  “Guessing isn’t good for an archaeologist’s reputation.”

  “Shit. What difference does it make? It’s a plane, isn’t it, just like I said?”