Relics (4 page)

Elliott and Fred and Jorge had gotten good-paying jobs from those government people. They didn’t have to do anything all day but dig some holes, and not many of them, and none of them very deep. They weren’t clear on why they were digging. It wasn’t like their old jobs at the mine where everybody knew what was supposed to come out of the ground.

Ronya had her own ideas about that Martinez woman, the one who was always asking people questions about their grandparents’ stories, who wanted to know who was born in the settlement and who was an outsider. She’d even been known to ask who had slept with who. And now there was this new woman archaeologist, who was sure to be wanting to dig up everybody’s old garbage pits and privies. No respect for privacy, there.

Well, everybody had secrets, and Ronya didn’t know why these people thought the Sujosa should give up theirs. What would they gain from spilling their guts to these outsiders who asked so many questions?

Brent Harbison had promised the Sujosa that the project would be good for them, and she believed he’d meant it. He’d thought the government money would come rolling in, money to open a clinic, patch roofs, and buy groceries. That wasn’t how it had turned out. The only jobs so far involved digging in the dirt, and the big money had gone to the outsiders, with their nosy questions that never helped anybody but themselves. Well, the little tutor girl was an exception, Ronya reflected. She was a sweet thing, and she seemed to be doing her best for the settlement kids.

The children needed her, no doubt about that. Children born to parents too tired and beaten down to even teach them their letters were doomed. Children like that started school too far behind to ever catch up. She’d made sure her own Zack heard the alphabet every day of his short life. Come fall, when he started school, his teacher would see that he could read all the letters and even some words. Zack’s teachers would always know that he came from folk who valued learning. But not every child had that chance.

Ronya hadn’t been surprised to see Carmen Martinez on the doorstep, but she hadn’t expected to see the skinny little woman archaeologist, the one who came from outside but was as brown as a Sujosa. She’d heard about Faye Longchamp from Elliott and Fred and Jorge. They were pretty sure their work would be harder when the boss lady arrived. Ronya wondered at folks who would go around digging up other people’s secrets, without first bothering to ask whether they cared.

Excerpt from an Interview with Mr. Leo Smiley, Wednesday, October 26

Interviewer: Carmen Martinez, Ph.D.

Chapter Five

DeWayne Montrose looked comfortable enough, resting in a faded recliner that seemed too big for the cluttered room, but his wife Kiki was a miserable thing. She sat in an old easy chair, swaddled in at least three blankets, her feet propped on a frayed ottoman. Illness had turned her naturally fair complexion to a gray-white, while failing to fade her lank hair from its original vibrant red. Withered skin clung to a set of patrician cheekbones that made Faye think of Katharine Hepburn. Carmen stood staring at Kiki, as if being in the same room with grave illness had wiped her mind clean. Faye wondered if Carmen was going to make it through this interview.

The Montroses’ daughter, Irene, an eighteen-year-old with hair and skin the color of honey, hovered near her mother. It hurt Faye to watch her ply Kiki with drinks and snacks that the sick woman didn’t want, while DeWayne sat there ignoring them both. Even the blare of the TV couldn’t hide the soul-killing atmosphere that pervades any room full of unhappiness and disease.

The click-click-click sound of a recliner being kicked back to its maximum angle punctuated the silence. “This thing is so comfortable, you never want to get up,” DeWayne sighed. “A man could lose a crop sitting in one of these things.”

Carmen roused herself into action. “As you know, I’m looking for stories from the early days of the Sujosa. Miss Dovey tells me that you come from some of the oldest Sujosa families she knows about, Mr. Montrose,” she said. “Most people in the settlement have at least one outsider on their family tree but we can’t find any on yours. So you must have heard a lot of stories in your day.”

“You can’t believe everything Miss Dovey tells you,” he said. “Sometimes she lets on that she remembers things that happened before she was born.” He fussed with the lever controlling the chair’s pitch. “Women’s tales don’t usually have much to do with the truth. If something happened before I was born, it don’t mean nothing to me. I like to live in the right-now. I got my health. I got a roof over my head. I got no need to think about the past. Why don’t you go bother somebody who cares about long-ago times? I got other things on my mind. Irene, turn up that volume. My show’s on.”

Irene glanced at Carmen, but did as her father asked. Then she returned to her mother’s side and pulled the blankets tighter around her neck. Kiki’s eyes slid closed and didn’t open again, not even when Carmen and Faye rose to leave.

***

Carmen muttered, “Can you believe that man?” for the fifth time since leaving the Montrose house.

“I thought a person in your profession would be used to the occasional snub,” said Faye as they walked along the long path that cut through the woods to the river. “Either that, or it’s me,” she added, thinking of the previous day’s adventure on the road. Maybe somebody had dropped a papier-mâché devil on her head on purpose, just because they knew they didn’t like her before they’d even met her.

“Oh, I’m used to it—although two in one day is unusual. But I was thinking of Kiki.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Faye asked. “AIDS?” Brent Harbison’s paper on disease resistance among the Sujosa had its roots in the AIDS epidemic, which had taken a heavy toll in the settlement during the 1990s. When Dr. Harbison recognized a pattern among the victims—people with mostly Sujosa ancestry were much less likely to contract AIDS than those with “outsider” blood—his future as a medical researcher was assured.

“She’s got Hepatitis C, and the story is that Irene has nearly killed her young self taking care of her mama. She dropped out of high school and took over Kiki’s old job at the dry cleaners in Alcaskaki to help make ends meet. From the looks of things, Irene’s not going to be taking care of her mother too much longer. It’s very sad.”

Faye, who had cared for both her grandmother and her mother in their final illnesses, again ached for Irene, but she was less certain than Carmen that the girl’s ordeal was nearly over. She knew that the human body could take a lot of punishment before it gave up its grasp on life. There had been no mistaking the shadow that fell on her loved ones’ faces in their final days. Kiki was a desperately ill woman, but she didn’t yet have the pinched features and sunken eyes of imminent death, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. She and Irene could be heading for months or years of suffering. Faye walked in silence and tried not to think about that.

Looking for a way to change the subject, Faye said, “Did you see DeWayne Montrose’s eyes? I’ve heard that some Sujosa have a distinctive eye color. Was that it?”

“Yeah. It’s a really pretty color—I’d call it turquoise, I guess—except it’s not so pretty when it’s in the middle of a face as mean as DeWayne Montrose’s. Could he have made it any plainer that he didn’t give a damn about the woman who’s dying in the chair right next to him? Can you believe—”

“Who else has eyes that color?”

“Well, even in the Sujosa, it’s not all that common. You see a lot more of those scalp birthmarks that make light streaks in their hair. Every generation or so, the oldest Sujosa families produce one or two kids with those eyes. And they’ve been doing it for a very long time. The earliest recorded description of the Sujosa comes from an eighteenth-century traveler who described a people with ‘nutt-browne Skynn and Eyes of blew-greene that put one in minde of Witchery.’”

“That description applies to DeWayne Montrose perfectly, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like his brand of witchery.” Faye glanced back to the house. “Do you know anyone else with those eyes, maybe a high school kid?”

“Amanda-Lynne Lavelle’s boy, Jimmie. Is he in his teens?” Carmen asked herself. After a second, she answered herself, “Yes. He’s in his last year of high school. Amanda-Lynne’s raised him by herself on just about no money since his daddy died of AIDS five or six years ago. She and DeWayne are related somehow. They’re cousins, I think, but his parents raised her after her parents died. She’s a little, well, eccentric, but what do you expect of a woman born to bluegrass musicians goofy enough to name her after her mother’s mandolin? Amanda-Lynne’s got those spooky eyes and a head full of dark hair just like DeWayne’s to go with them. And she’s passed her good looks down to Jimmie. If you want to see someone with classic Sujosa features, Amanda-Lynne’s the one. Or her son.”

“A boy with dark skin and turquoise eyes—I guess you’re telling me that those are classic Sujosa looks—nearly killed me and Joe yesterday. He rigged up a life-sized dummy and dropped it out of a tree right in front of my windshield with a sign on it saying ‘Devils go home.’ A nice welcome that was—I damn near ran my car off the road and down into a canyon.”

“Those roads are very dangerous, don’t you think?”

Faye didn’t think Carmen quite grasped the magnitude of Jimmie’s crime. “He could have killed us.”

“It must have been an accident. Jimmie is the sweetest boy you could ever hope to know. And so good to his mama. Jimmie wouldn’t have set out to hurt anybody.”

Carmen glanced at Faye, and she must have correctly read Faye’s stormy expression, because she quickly added, “I’ll talk to him. We’re pretty good friends, considering that I’m nearly twice his age. I’ll make sure he apologizes to you and Joe.”

“Thanks.”

“You want to talk about beautiful eyes that ‘put one in minde of witchery’?” continued Carmen, who was apparently the president of Jimmie Lavelle’s fan club. “Good Lord. When Jimmie looks you right in the face with those eyes, you’ll be glad you’re not a sixteen-year-old girl. That boy—”

Carmen was silenced by the sound of something large crashing through the underbrush behind them. A low growl told Faye that whatever was barreling in their direction was not friendly. Two more growling creatures topped the hill. The knowledge that she and Carmen were now outnumbered tripped something primitive in Faye. Grabbing Carmen by the hand, she dragged her down the path, looking for a safe harbor.

On her left, an army of ramrod-straight pines mocked her with branches that began thirty feet above her head. The pines sheltered spindly cedars that couldn’t support the weight of a housecat. On her right, an eroded gully was shrouded in brittle stems left behind by kudzu vines that had shed their summer leaves. Venturing into that thicket would be like throwing herself into a vegetative net where she would wait, entangled, for her pursuers to descend.

Faye knew that the path’s downward slope put them at a strategic disadvantage. With gravity on their side, the faceless beasts could pounce from far up the slope, using the momentum of their heavy and fast-moving bodies to roll their human prey downhill.

From fifty yards away, Faye spied a sycamore extending its lowest branch to offer shelter, and she focused on that single point. She knew only the pounding of her feet on the ground and the feel of Carmen’s hand clutching hers and the beckoning sight of her chosen tree. Later, she would wonder whether some ancient part of her brain was always watching for escape routes, just in case a predator appeared, but for that moment she simply ran.

She nearly ran straight into the sycamore’s solid trunk. “Climb!” she bellowed to Carmen, whose response to terror was not action, but paralysis. Faye jerked the hand she held upward, shaking it free of the heavy briefcase it clutched like a talisman. She forced Carmen to grab a branch, and was relieved to see her friend grasp it and haul herself up. Carmen continued climbing and Faye followed, one branch behind.

Their pursuers bounded out of the undergrowth that had concealed them, and Faye finally saw them for what they were. Hurling themselves at the trunk of the tree were three dogs, tremendous, barrel-chested dogs with dripping jowls and bared teeth. Their pelts were shiny, and their rounded flanks said that they were well-fed. Someone owned these dogs, yet they hadn’t trained them not to treat humans as prey. Maybe it was worse than that. Maybe they had been trained to track human prey.

Rearing up on their hind legs, all three animals stood taller than a man. Their claws cut gashes in the sycamore’s bark, and the largest one hooked a massive paw over the lowest branch. Faye knew that dogs couldn’t climb trees, but these slavering beasts might be capable of shaking her out of this one. One at a time, each of them backed away a few paces, then hurled itself into the air, howling in frustration when it failed to clamp its jaws into the flesh of her leg. How long would they continue their onslaught? Faye reached around to the back pocket of her cargo pants.

“What are you doing?”

“Cell phone,” said Faye.

“Don’t bother. No coverage, too remote. They’re building a tower but it won’t be ready till the spring.”

Faye put the phone away. “Let’s hope we’re not sitting in this tree until then.”

The rhythmic slapping of small feet running down the hard-packed footpath caught Faye’s ear. Someone small was running toward them.
Please, God, don’t let it be a child,
Faye prayed.

Irene Montrose was no longer a child, but she was far too slightly built to overpower even one of the beasts baying for Faye’s and Carmen’s blood. “Go back,” Faye yelled. “Get some help! These dogs will eat you alive!”

“Come, Bull!” Irene called. “You, too, Boss! Get away from that tree, Bruce! You boys should be ashamed of yourselves.”

The three brutes turned shame-faced so quickly, whining and whinkering as they slinked toward the slender young woman, that Faye would have laughed had her adrenaline level been a shade lower. The hound Irene called Boss reared up on his hind legs, planted two ham-sized paws on her shoulders, and slobbered all over his mistress’ face. “No kisses, Boss,” she said, pushing him away roughly. “You’ve been very bad.”

“Sometimes Daddy forgets to close the gate good,” Irene said. “He forgets how scary the boys look to someone who doesn’t know them.”

“What are they? Pit bulls?” Carmen asked.

“Bull is half pit bull and half Rottweiler. Boss is mostly German Shepherd and part bloodhound. Bruce is part Doberman and I don’t know what else. Something big.”

Well, yeah,
Faye thought.
Something big and mean.
Could anyone who owned dogs like Bull, Bruce, and Boss ever “forget” to keep them in their pen?

“You can come down,” Irene said. “I won’t let them hurt you.”

“That’s okay,” Carmen said from her perch on the limb above Faye. “We like it here. We’ll just hang out in this tree until you take the boys home. And don’t forget to lock the gate good, okay?”

Irene smiled up at them and turned to go home. Walking along the woodland path among the huge animals, she looked like Red Riding Hood out for a stroll with three Big Bad Wolves.

Faye and Carmen gave Irene ample time to get the “boys” in their pen. The cold dry air carried the
clank
of a heavy gate being closed, but they waited a while longer, just in case, listening to the pitiable baying of three hunters deprived of their kill.

“The Sujosa sure have a peculiar way of saying, ‘Welcome, stranger,’” said Faye, as she swung down from the tree.