Moonlight Water (11 page)

“Except you no longer have big bucks.”

“It's probably not for sale, anyway.” He laughed.

It made a long, curving line against the cliff wall. In some places the ancient architecture stood twice the height of a man's head, and in others the stone walls had crumbled to knee-high. The sun lit the stone bright and made deep shadows inside, shadows where human beings once made their lives.

He made a strange sound in his chest, and he felt as if the air was being sucked out of him.

“It's a nice one, Leaning Bird,” she said.

She could see that her words jolted him. He inhaled deeply and let his breath out. It sounded like years of breath and secrets withheld.

She went on impersonally, “Leaning Bird. Single family, dating from about eleven hundred
A.D.
, lots of potsherds and corncobs still in it because it's on the Navajo side and it's hard to land there. If you take the time…”

He struggled not to get sucked into the magnetism that sang to him from Leaning Bird. He grabbed Zahnie's words as a lifeline to the present and held on.

“I mentioned time. You've heard about Navajo time?”

“Kind of, yes.”

“It's similar to what Anglos call mañana land—it'll get done when it gets done. Maybe. Makes them very impatient. Navajos, we think it's what whites don't know, what they don't hear. Leaning Bird reminds people of that rhythm. That things happen when they happen, no rush, give everything the attention it needs, get to the next thing whenever you get there. Which will piss off an employer who is expecting you at nine o'clock.”

He paid attention to the ebb and flow of her words.

She said, “This is amazing country, ruins and rivers and red-rock walls. You want the short, white-man version of where you are?”

“Sure.”

“These rock walls date to more than two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs were roaming around. Further downriver, the walls rise higher. The whole area was pushed up by a collision between oceanic and continental plates. When they collided, the rock layers were folded up, just like when you push on a rug. The river has since cut its way down the crevices into the fold.

“This place is a map of time on the earth, geologic time. The river cuts a giant slice and lays it bare so you can see it, where the ocean once was, where all the layers were formed, fossils from sea creatures. A million years here, a million there. You understand time passing, shaping the earth, how things changed and how they keep changing, going on forever. You don't feel it with head knowledge. It's bone knowledge.”

“And there were people here.”

“Lots of them, Desert Archaic, then Basket Makers, then Anasazi. The rock art is their message, what they wrote down, not for us, but for themselves and their children, to describe their world. We're part of that chain going back in time, forward in time, one link as important as another.”

“I saw rock art yesterday. It vibrated.”

He saw her look at him strangely, and felt a little embarrassed. “I'm not sure what the Anasazi story is,” she went on, “the real story, beyond the facts. New Agers imagine them as an ideal society, farmers who lived in tune with the earth.

“Some archeological evidence says the Anasazi had the same troubles we have, including war.

“Whatever we can know of the truth, it's in the rocks. Rock is what lasts, so that's where the story is told, the rock of the cliffs and the rock of the ruins.”

Red gazed down into the water as it rolled by.
I'm doing it, Winsonfred,
he thought.
I'm listening to the stories.

He grinned to himself.

“What are you thinking?”

“It's smart-ass.”

“Just like you. What are you thinking?”

“About that old Bill Haley and the Comets song, ‘Rock Around the Clock.'” He sang out the first line smart and sassy.

“I give you all that great stuff, hand you mysteries, and you're reeling old rock and roll through your head!”

He shrugged. “It's a funny head.”

*   *   *

First he heard it. A blast of sound loud as a Tchaikovsky symphony with all 120 instruments blaring full bore, except that this sound was chaos—slams, sucks, swooshes, gushes, every sound water makes, fighting its way between boulders.

She pulled for the left bank, where the current was strong. “Echo Rapids is just around that bend. Serpent House is right there beyond those tammies, in the cliff face,” she said, “but you can't see it from here.” She worked hard for several strokes.

“They've gone on,” she said, a little breathless. “If they were at the ruin, the boat would be tied somewhere right along there.” It looked like just another stretch of bushes to Red. “Let's get into the eddy.”

She muscled them there, and the eddy actually eased them back upstream. Zahnie jumped out, painter in hand. “Help me!”

He plunged in and helped pull the boat most of the way out of the water. Grabbing the painter, he threw a clove hitch around a stub on a downed cottonwood, grinned, and said nothing about being a sailor.

They climbed a sandy hillock and she glassed the rapids with her binocs. A hundred fifty to two hundred feet long, he guessed. She took her time, sliding the binocs slowly downriver. “They're not here. Not at the ruin.” Her voice was tight, low. “They made it downriver.”

“Easy from here?”

“Easy enough.” Her voice relaxed a little. “C'mon, let's scrub our way through these tammies, see Serpent House. Just a couple of hundred yards.”

“Tammies?”

“Tamarisks, those big bushes that line the bank.”

In a couple of minutes they were bushwhacking across a flat.

“Up there is Neville Canyon,” she said, pointing off to the right to a break in the rock wall.

They hand-fought their way through tammies. Suddenly they were in a clearing and the ancient Serpent House ruin gazed down upon them.

 

12

SERPENT HOUSE MAGIC

Don't cross a snake's path unless you slide or shuffle your feet.

—Navajo saying

 

In one breath he lost his heart.

He gasped, drawing his life back in.

It was higher up the wall than the other ruin, and bigger, maybe three stories high. It had a couple of round towers that blew harmonicas through his skin. From the high buildings in the center small structures rambled sideways along the cliff, like flowering vines. It had the magic of paintings in fairy-tale books.

Then he saw. A huge snake was painted bloodred on the wall above the ruin.

He wandered forward, toward Serpent House, enchanted, and came to the base of the rock. Odd steps led upward, cut into the stone, now smoothed by wind, water, and time.

“Forget it,” she said. “Higher up they're worn too smooth. You have to be a daredevil or use a rope.” She handed him the binoculars. “These aren't the same as being there, but they're better than nothing.”

Red glassed from building to building like a sleepwalker. He knew he could make it up there, touch the rock, smell the musty air.

“Check out that snake,” she said softly.

He trained the glasses on it. Spectacular, as thick as a man's thigh and undulating about twenty-five feet across the wall above the buildings. The color was a red that probably was once bold, but now faded with age. In form it was a wave, perfectly regular in the way of no earth-born snake. Mysteriously, it had neither head nor tail.

He noticed Zahnie eyeing him peculiarly, but he had no time for that, only for the strange new feelings lifting his chest and spinning his head.

Red felt her touch his shoulder. “Let's have another swig,” she said. “You're probably dehydrated.”

They sat on a rock in the shade of a giant sagebrush. Red pulled deep on the water bottle.

“The big snake,” she said to him, “how do we know it's not a painting of the river?”

“Don't know. How do we?”

“We ask the descendants of the Anasazi, the modern pueblo people, the Hopi, the Laguna, all those tribes.”

“And what do they say?”

“That's the problem. One tribe says snake. Another may say river, another maybe something else.”

Red gazed up at the big … whatever it was … and wondered whether it mattered to him what it was supposed to represent. He couldn't decide.

“Look over there.”

A low boulder ten feet away was covered with shards of pottery, arrow points, and miniature corncobs.

“Those were found in the ruin,” Zahnie said. “Normally we ask people to leave them where they lay, but these had already been moved.”

He turned the ancient pot pieces over on his palm, traced their designs with his finger. He especially fingered a big piece with a smooth rim and a handsome geometrical design.

“Black on red, the Moonlight Water style.” She looked on the ground next to the rock. “Oh hell!”

Zahnie held out a plastic barrette decorated with pink and blue flowers, baby colors. “This belongs to Wandafene.”

Red chuckled. “A brand-new relic to add to the old.” He stepped to the far side of the sagebrush and gingerly lifted a small bra up by one strap half-buried in the sand. “Seems the shade looked good to them, too.”

Zahnie's expression said she wanted to do anything but think about her niece's underwear. She snatched the bra and shoved it in her jeans pocket. “We try to keep telling them ‘graduation before pregnancy.' I'm going to look around. You stay here.”

Good.
Red wanted to be alone in this place. He could feel the low drum of the ancient earth.

Red held the glasses on the ruin. Everything was different here, wavy-lighted, as if he might catch something out of the corner of his eye, something from another dimension. Grandpa had believed in other worlds and said pookahs opened the doors between them. Didn't seem a likely place for a Celtic pookah, but Red was beginning to realize that the more he knew the less he understood. Another prism of freedom revealed itself to him.

He remembered dioramas from a museum in Los Angeles. Women using handheld rocks to grind wild seeds. Men shaping arrowheads. Children playing with rattles made of dewclaws. Women making sandals from strands of yucca, others building a wall from stone and mud. One man pecking at the cliff with an antler, drawing a deer. Meat drying on a rack.

Those people might be around the next corner. He tossed thoughts away, spun reason out into space, and ate the ruin with his eyes. The people became a swing of pictures, like music, people dancing life here, dancing eternally.

Red smiled, and again he sucked air so deep inside his lungs, it was like drinking it, like having a transfusion of it. He let all words go and tasted the briney lick of time.

*   *   *

“I didn't find anything else,” she said.

Red snapped out of it.
Was I asleep?

“The people who lived here are fascinating.” Again, her voice had the ring of a tour guide's. Red looked at Zahnie, thought of asking her not to tell him about them. He wanted to keep his own impressions, which felt misty and too big for words.

She plunged in. “This region has been inhabited for at least two thousand years, starting with Anasazi. Ancestral Puebloans, to be PC.”

Her words hung like strands in front of Red, but he paid them no attention. Colored motes in his eyes, they were pretty, but they made it harder to see. He kept staring at the ruin, like opening a hungry maw. Half-willingly, he began to come back to the ordinary world.

She said, “There are ruins all over this country.”

“Like this? Incredible.”

“Some much bigger, more complex. Most smaller. Maybe most of them still under the ground. The thought of how many are undiscovered is mind-boggling.”

“Way too much to get my head around.”

“Red, I see this place speaks to you. That's really good. Spend some time here alone.” She chuckled. “You might even get over yourself.”

Hey, lady, I left myself floating with the great white sharks.
But Red couldn't help grinning. She was more right than she knew. He still had plenty of his old self to shed.

“Find a place that calls you and just hang out there. The way I see it, the Ancient Ones welcome us.”

He felt close to her. He wanted to say thank you for the gift of this place (or something like that but not quite so sappy), maybe tell her about the advice from Winsonfred.

“It's ruins like this where looters come and steal things.”

He snapped his head toward her, and his words came out with a bite. “You don't mean
here
?”

“No, not such public spots. The looters do their dirty work in out-of-the-way places.” She let that sit a moment. “I would like to flay them and nail their hides on the barn to dry.”

She cocked her head.

“You hear something?”

“Slam. Car door.”

“Me too.” She clicked her head in several directions, holding still at each, like a bird. She grinned. “Want to do a little cop work?”

Red had no idea what she had in mind. “Why not?”

 

13

TONTO TO THE RESCUE

Don't open your mouth when you see a snake. It will jump in.

—Navajo saying

 

Ed watched the slate-colored Suburban proceed in a stately manner down the wash, almost to the river. He turned the other way on the thermal so he could keep an eye on it. His buzzard brain was pulsing,
Trouble, trouble, trouble, in the form of the Emperor and Empress.

He knew these two. Even the way the Emperor steered his car down the faint track annoyed Ed—only the Emperor could bump down a dirt track pretending to be a road and make it look like an imperial procession.
Bleck.

The Suburban stopped at a washout, and the Emperor and Empress exited. Ed felt a nasty spasm in his gut. The rotund man and skinny woman started unloading. Ed's buzzard brain didn't need to know their names to be angry. Ed noticed that everywhere the Emperor and Empress traveled in the wilds the trees, the grass and cactuses, even the animals seemed more dried up after they left. It was like they sucked the vitality out of everyone and everything around them. The Navajos would say they were stealing a creature's life force. Hosteen Manygoats said you couldn't catch a coyote, for instance, unless you got the tip of his nose and the tip of his tail, both, because that's where he hid his life force. And hiding your life force is a smart thing to do.