The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries (12 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries
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“Hey! That’s my equipment! My calipers, microscope, and my—”
“Relax,” he said. “If they survived the apes in baggage handling, they’ll survive anything I can do to them.”
As Maureen headed for the passenger door, she muttered, “Yeah, right.”
It takes an ape to know an ape.
As Stewart unlocked her door, Maureen glanced into the Bronco. It had a beige interior, she thought; the layer of dust made it impossible to tell for sure. The backseat burgeoned with bags labeled “soil sample, unit 2N2E, level 4,” or “Mesa Verde black-and-white potsherd, unit 4S4W, level 7.” Eight cases of beer—good stuff, Guinness stout—two more ice chests, and four bags of what looked like potato chips.
Maureen studied the stack of beer flats. “How many people are on your field crew?”
“Full time? Two. Me and Sylvia. The rest just went back to school.”
Her brows lifted. “You must not get into town much.”
“Sure we do. Every ten days. As a matter of fact, that’s where Sylvia is today. Shopping for next week’s supplies.”
Probably another truckload of beer.
“Who is Sylvia?”
“Sylvia Rhone. She’s finishing her B.A. at the University of New Mexico. A few other students show up when they can. Dale comes out on weekends. He spends most of his time at home in his lab cataloging and processing the artifacts and samples we’ve recovered. Why did you ask?” He gave her a cold smile. “Afraid to be alone with me?”
“No. With your beer.”
His smile froze. His fingers tightened on the door handle. “Don’t tell me. You’re the leader of a new prohibition movement in Canada, right?”
Maureen propped her hands on her hips. “Prohibition has too many cultural stereotypes. We call it
Teetotalism.
”
Stewart stared.
Maureen smiled. After her husband’s death, she’d started drinking to help her sleep, then to ease the pain and loneliness, then to forget how much she hated herself for drinking. The phrase, “drowning in the bottle,” had a personal meaning for her. She could proudly say she hadn’t had a drink in two and a half years, but the longing had never gone away. Especially not for the creamy richness of Guinness stout.
“Figures,” Stewart said. “I get stuck with a cross between Mary Baker Eddy and Atilla the Hun.”
“Best drop the Baker Eddy part,” Maureen informed him. “I’m Catholic.”
“Oh. How about, ‘Mary the Hun?’” He opened the Bronco door, and dust boiled out.
Maureen coughed, and waved it away.
Out of curiosity, she bent forward and rubbed her finger across the dash.
“What are you doing?” Stewart asked.
“Just checking. I was afraid the interior might be white and the scorching sun had blinded me.”
“White is a color for physical anthropologists who spend their lives in laboratories, Dr. Cole. No self-respecting archaeologist would own anything white.”
Maureen wondered about his underwear, but decided not to ask. Stewart was the kind of guy who’d feel compelled to show her, and she’d experienced enough nausea on the rocky flight in.
Despite her effort at self-control, her lip curled as she stuffed her pack into a space in the backseat. She kicked empty bottles out of the way to make room for her feet, and ground her teeth as she placed her beautiful Bison Legacy buffalohide purse on the filthy floor. As she settled into the seat, she could feel the dust sneaking into her clean clothing, infiltrating around her collar, and the waist of her pants. It took three tries to slam the door.
“The hinges are a little sprung,” Stewart explained.
“I noticed.” She smacked the dust off her palms.
Stewart stuck the key into the ignition and the Bronco roared to life. He watched the gauges closely. A slight frown lined his forehead.
“Something the matter?”
“The oil pressure gauge.” He knotted a fist and hammered the top of the dash.
Maureen jumped as dust billowed up in a mushroom cloud.
“There, see,” Stewart said happily. “Oil pressure. The gauge is working after all. It gets a little jammed up on occasion.”
He backed out of the parking space and drove down to pay the parking fee. The heat was boring into her, each pore screaming. Not even trips to the sweat lodge had prepared her for this.
As Stewart received his change, she turned the knob on the air conditioner and placed a hand on the dust-encrusted vents.
“Doesn’t work,” Stewart said, eyes on the traffic as he wheeled out of the airport drive and onto busy Gibson Boulevard. He turned west at the light, reached behind him with one hand for a battered straw hat, and flipped it onto his head. “I haven’t had time to take it to a mechanic. The system needs recharging, and a packrat ate the wiring that runs the fan.”
“I should have guessed,” Maureen whispered.
“You’ll have to make do with ‘two-seventy’ air until sunset.”
“Two-seventy?”
He grinned. With the mirrored sunglasses, gnarly straw hat, muscular arms, and worn T-shirt, he looked like a rednecked rapist from a Peckinpah movie. “Yeah, two windows open at seventy miles an hour.”
Maureen rolled her eyes, reached for the crank and started to roll the window down. She made a half a turn before the handle came off in her hand.
“Oh,” Dusty called over the roar of the truck, “I forgot. You have to use your other hand to keep the crank on. That little screw fell out last year.”
“Gee. Thanks for the warning.” She managed to crank the window down, then leaned back, and let the hot wind blow over her. Relief, of sorts. Her gaze scanned the plastic molding for the seat belt. “So, Stewart, where’s the seat belt?”
“Oh, that’s a story in itself.” He frowned at the traffic as he took the exit onto Interstate 25. “I got stuck in an arroyo south of Ganado. I finally found an old Navajo who’d pull me out. Problem was, I didn’t have a tow strap.”
“You used the seat belt for a tow strap?”
“It was that or walk twenty miles to the nearest phone.”
Maureen gripped her seat as Stewart accelerated into traffic, weaving to miss the potholes. “Good Lord, I’m going to die.”
“We all do, Dr. Cole. Wouldn’t be much call for people in our professions if we didn’t.”
He didn’t swerve fast enough, and the Bronco bounced through a hole. The window crank fell off and clattered to the floor. Stewart saw it out of the corner of his eye. “You might want to pick that up and shove it back onto the splines really hard. It can be a mess when you have to fish around for it in the dark on this floor.”
Maureen bent over, staring down between her knees for the crank. Among the detritus, she noticed Guinness bottles, Arizona iced teas, squashed plastic orange juice bottles, two screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, several empty sardine tins, the interiors lined with crusted brown deposits, a piece of fossilized toast, and no crank.
Must have bounced under the seat.
Maureen grimaced at the idea of reaching into that no-man’s-land. In Stewart’s Bronco, it might be reaching into a whole different universe inhabited by woman-eating mold monsters, or black widow spiders.
As she groped, her fingers slipped along a smooth handle. Not the window crank, but she pulled it out anyway. She let out a sharp cry, and dropped the pistol as if she’d just grabbed a snake. It thumped heavily onto the floorboards, and lay there among the empty bottles, malignant, deadly.
“Stewart,” she yelled, “why is there a pistol in your Bronco?”
He watched her through those enigmatic mirror glasses, mouth expressionless. “You don’t have guns in Canada, Dr. Cole?”
She gripped the fabric over her heart, and concentrated on breathing normally. “Is that
thing
loaded?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be much good if it wasn’t. But please don’t pull the trigger inside the truck. Discharging a pistol inside a dusty vehicle makes a hell of a mess. Once I took a shot at a coyote through the passenger window. You know, just like so.” Left hand on the wheel, he extended his right arm until his index finger pointed past her nose. “When I touched off that forty-one mag, it blew everything—dust, field notes, a can of Copenhagen, everything—right off the dash.”
Maureen shoved his hand away, and stared out the open window as they took the exit onto west I-40.
“Good God, I’m in hillbilly Hell.”
Dale, I’ll get you for this. I promise.
T
HE DESERT SPREAD AROUND CATKIN LIKE A VAST white blanket, rumpled here and there with low hills. She had run all night, eating only snow to quench her thirst, and her stomach kept reminding her that she carried deer jerky in her pack.
But she could not stop to eat or rest.
The fear she had seen in Browser’s eyes drove her onward. If the storm continued, it would take her two days to get home, and she did not know what he would do in the interim. He had no one else to talk to, no other friend. War chiefs dared not reveal their frailties to ordinary people for fear of losing their confidence, which meant they led lonely lives, able to speak only with their spouses late at night.
Browser had not even had that luxury.
Catkin focused on the butte that rose from the desert like a square tower, and pushed herself harder. Smoking Mirror Butte stood perhaps one thousand hands tall. Clouds encircled the top, creeping and curling over the tan sandstone.
On late nights, her mother used to whisper about the traps and invisible snares that lined the path to Stone Ghost’s house. The closer you ran, the more there were, and when a person neared Stone Ghost’s house, growls and screeches rose from the monsters he kept leashed to rocks.
Catkin didn’t believe the stories, of course. Only a fool would believe such things. But it wouldn’t be wise to discount them. She had learned the hard way that caution was the foundation of courage.
And survival.
She leaped a snow-covered bush, and continued on in her determined dogtrot. With each breath from her laboring lungs, a
white cloud formed, hung for a moment. Then she ran through it. Her legs felt like boiled grass stems. The trail slithered around bluffs and hills like a gigantic white snake, heading toward Smoking Mirror Butte.
From the depths of her memory, her mother’s soft voice murmured:
“Old Stone Ghost gives wicked, unholy feasts. They commence at sunset, and sometimes last until well after dawn. He holds them in dark caves, or canyons, away from the prying eyes of normal people, and Stone Ghost’s Spirit Helper, a gigantic white rattlesnake, always comes. Before revelers are allowed to enter the celebration, they must kiss the snake’s tail, and allow it to embrace them.”
Catkin shivered. She had suffered nightmares for a full moon after she’d first heard that tale. She still recalled the evil glint in the snake’s eyes, and the cold, clammy feel as its body wrapped around her throat. She …
She saw a house.
Catkin stopped dead in her tracks, breathing hard. The fragrances of damp leather and brush filled her nostrils.
Long ago, a huge square of stone had cracked away from the butte, and fallen. The owner had built his house into the remaining gap. The butte itself made up the south and east walls. The other two walls were fashioned of irregularly shaped stones, mortared together, and covered with tan mud, most of which had flaked off. Catkin squinted at the roof. It slanted to the west, toward the hide-covered doorway, and had holes the size of small dogs. She couldn’t tell which happened faster, smoke trying to get out of the holes, or snow trying to get in.
Hands propped on her hips, she gulped the cool air in an effort to regain her breath as she walked slowly forward.
Polite people did not shout in front of someone’s house. They waited, milling about, until the occupants noticed they had visitors.
As snowflakes collided with the sparks rising through the roof holes, a hissing filled the air.
An eerie sensation crept along Catkin’s arms. Without moving a muscle, her gaze searched the snow-covered ground and brush. In a snowstorm, a white Spirit snake would be virtually invisible.
Blood flushed her cheeks.
Catkin kicked the rabbitbrush in front of her, and leaped back, pulling her war club from her belt.
When nothing rattled, she lowered the club, and exhaled hard, feeling like an imbecile.
Her gaze went uneasily to the enormous boulders that piled around the base of the butte. The juniper trees rooted among them cast ominous shadows on the snow. An entire army could hide in that rocky forest. Why would a Spirit snake bother laying around in the middle of a trail?
Catkin scanned the snowy crevices, and proceeded toward the house on the balls of her feet, her club at the ready.
When she stood no more than five paces from the house, she caught movement, and whirled around.
“Look out!” an old white-haired man shouted, and charged forward with a digging stick lifted over his head. He wore a brown-and-white turkey-feather cape, and had three black spirals tattooed on his chin.
“Quickly!” he shouted, “before it leaps upon you! Kill it!” He started slamming his digging stick into the snow.
Catkin jumped to his side, and expertly wielded her club, smashing the snow, and the chunk of sandstone beneath it, to bits.
Finally, the old man staggered back, and panted, “Excellent work.”
Catkin studied the powdered stone that scattered the snow. She prodded it cautiously with the tip of her war club. “What was it?”
The old man tucked his digging stick under his arm and grinned. Half Catkin’s height, wispy white hair clung to his scalp, and his features seemed slightly too large for the lean frame of his face, his beaked nose too long, his mouth too wide. The digging stick he carried had been carved into the shape of a snake, and painted white.
“It was a rock,” he answered.
“What?” Catkin said, annoyed. “I just crushed a lifeless rock?”
“My dear girl, what makes you think it was dead? It might be dead now. But!” He lifted a finger and shook it. “This could be fortuitous. Did you know that the entire history of Our Mother Earth can be read in grains of sand? Of course, you have to smash
a lot of rocks, and make sure you scoop up every grain, then they must be rearranged just as the layers were in the rock, but somewhere here I have a drawing of the Age of Monsters …”
“Elder,” Catkin said, as the old man began patting himself down.
He halted with one hand in his belt pouch, and the other stuck through the front of his cape. “They don’t like being smashed, you know.”
“I suppose that’s a sign of intelligence.”
“Oh, they’re very intelligent.” He gazed up at her with wide, gentle, and curiously luminous eyes. “I once knew a rock who could recite every bird call known to humans. Can you do that?”
Catkin’s mouth opened; but, what did one say? She could see the falling snow reflected in the dark wells of his shining eyes. “Who are you, Elder? What are you doing out here in the storm?”
He used his digging stick to point. “I was planting a prayer,” he said, “over there by the corner of the butte. I was hoping Coyote Above would find it the next time he trots by.”
He paused, taking in the butte, and his dilapidated house, then his gaze came back to her. “Wait! Are you the Coyote Clan girl? Why, you must be!”
He rushed forward, walked right underneath her war club as if it were invisible, and seized Catkin’s hand, squeezing it with genuine delight. “You’re late, but I’m glad you’ve come.”
“Late?” Catkin jerked her hand away. “What do you mean late?”
“I expected you last night, but with the storm—”
“How did you know I was coming?” A creeping sense of dread tingled along her arms. She gripped her club more tightly.
“Well, that’s a long story. You must be starved. Please, come inside and let me give you food and drink while we discuss it.” He gripped Catkin’s hand and dragged her toward his house.
“Wait.” Catkin tugged him backward so hard he almost toppled.
The old man’s bushy white brows arched. “Yes, child?”
“Elder, I am Catkin, of Hillside village. I come at the request of my war chief to find Stone Ghost. Are you Stone Ghost?”
The little man’s black eyes went wide. “Why, of course, child. I’m sorry. I thought you knew that. Is there anything else you must know before you can allow yourself to rest?”
He seemed genuinely concerned about her. Catkin shook her head. “No.”
“Good. You’re shivering. You’ll feel better after a cup of warm tea, and some prairie dog soup.”
Stone Ghost hobbled to his door, ducked beneath the leather hanging, and Catkin heard him mutter, then pots clattered.
She gripped her war club. Clearly his souls flitted about like moths around a flame, but he didn’t seem dangerous. Though anyone who would pounce on a rock couldn’t be trusted. She cautiously headed for his door.
As she ducked beneath the curtain and into the cold blue shadows, she smelled the mingled fragrances of flower petals, and meat boiled with dried cactus fruits. Small and square, the house stretched barely two body-lengths across. A mound of snow had sifted down through the holes in the roof and drifted along the western wall near the door. She stepped over it, and stood awkwardly. After the brilliance of the snow, the house looked unnaturally black. To her right, along the southern wall, she saw six plain pots. To her left, three crudely woven baskets leaned against each other.
Stone Ghost sat on a mangy looking hide on the far side of the pit in front of her, humming to himself as he added twigs to the glowing coals. He had removed his tattered turkey-feather cape, and draped it over a pile of rolled blankets behind him.
As Catkin unslung her bow and quiver, she examined him. Ribs stuck out under his faded brown shirt, and she could see every bone in his skull, as though only a thin film of skin tied his head to his neck.
“Sit down, child.” Stone Ghost indicated the willow twig mat on the opposite side of the fire. “Once I have this fire blazing, we can talk.”
“Yes, Elder.” Catkin eased one knee down on the mat; her right hand still gripped her war club.
A teapot was sunken into the ashes near the hearthstones, and beside it, another pot hung from a tripod. Spirals of steam rose from both pots. Ceramic cups and spoons sat neatly stacked at the base of the tripod. Despite the extravagant ventilation and the drifted snow by the door, the house felt warm.
Catkin said, “Elder, how did you know I was Coyote clan?”
Stone Ghost grinned, and bent down to gently blow on the coals. Ash puffed, and spun. Finally, the twigs caught, and fire crackled to life. Sparks shot upward toward the soot-coated ceiling. As he added larger branches, he said, “There,” and sat back with his gnarled hands extended to the warmth of the flames. Orange light flickered over his white hair and wrinkled face. “I knew because Coyote loped through here last night around moonset. He told me you were coming, he also told me the Blue God is hunting.”
Catkin tilted her head. He could have known her clan just by studying the symbols on her war shirt, or club, though she didn’t entirely dismiss the notion that he’d spoken with Coyote. Catkin said, “The Blue God? That is an old belief. I recall hearing stories about her when I was a child.”
Stone Ghost’s lips parted, revealing toothless gums. “Do you no longer believe in her?”
“Well, no one I know believes in her. We are the Katsinas’ People. We follow different gods.”
Stone Ghost shook his head as if greatly distressed. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it makes you easier to hunt. You are like rabbits unaware that a cougar hides in the brush.” He shuffled through the cups at the base of the tripod. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes, Elder, please.”
Stone Ghost selected a plain red cup, chipped around the rim, and dipped it into the teapot. He handed the cup to Catkin, and the sweetness of silktassel petals rose.
Catkin sipped it. “This is delicious. Thank you.”
Stone Ghost drew up his knees and propped his elbows on them. “So,” he said. “Tell me who the Blue God is hunting?”
Trying not to sound disrespectful, Catkin replied, “I know nothing of the Blue God, Elder. I am here because yesterday morning we found our war chief’s wife sprawled in her own son’s freshly dug burial pit. A stone slab covered her crushed skull.”
Stone Ghost’s luminous eyes flared. “Tragic,” he said softly. “Your war chief lost his son and his wife in a matter of days. How is he?”
“I cannot say, Elder. I left immediately after we discovered his wife’s body.”
She could feel his eyes upon her, suddenly alert, probing, as if he’d heard something in her voice that she did not realize was there.
A branch broke in the fire, and the burst of light threaded the walls with bright gold.
For the first time, Catkin saw the fabric bags that hung from pegs at the junction of walls and roof. They appeared to hold large gourds.
Stone Ghost dipped a cup into the soup pot on the tripod, and tucked a horn spoon into it. As he handed it around the fire, he said, “Here. You will need your strength to fight the Blue God. I’ve tangled with her before, and she’s very tricky. She almost took my head off once. I was walking along the rim of Orphan Butte—”

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