Excavation

Chapter 6

Something that had to be done…

Reed had changed his mind twice about whether he should return to Simpson Creeks. He was tired and disgusted with his own indecisiveness. Carol was too. She’d taken the kids with her to her aunt and uncle’s farm out in eastern Colorado. He was to call her when he made his decision.

He was only six months away from his doctorate in archaeology with some of the highest grades in the graduate program. He grinned self-consciously at his success. But he wasn’t interested in that kind of excavating at the moment.

Concentrating on his Mesa Verde project had become next to impossible for Reed. Fist-sized balls of paper lay scattered like hail over his desk; he’d suddenly find himself pulling one apart, shredding it with stiff fingers. He’d been poring over site reports, feature and survey reports, data records, photographs of artifacts, correspondence with participants in the digs, his own notes from trips down to Cortez… and the sameness, the repetition of observation that was always so much a part of the paperwork relating to archaeological digs seemed especially irritating now.

Most archaeology is boring, hard work. But there are those moments, those sudden discoveries and realizations, that make it all worth it. Reed remembered the first time he ever visited Mesa Verde, on a special summer class with Dr. Simms. They’d camped out on the grounds for a month, visiting the sites during the day and attending additional lectures around a campfire at night. He and Carol had been married a year, and the students had been allowed to bring their spouses along. They’d both had a wonderful time for a while.

Reed found the landscape startling. The great escarpment that contains Mesa Verde dominates the Montezuma Valley region between Cortez and Mancos, Colorado, the result of a great uplift taking place during the Cenozoic era twenty-five million years ago. That, in combination with steady downcutting by the river, created deep, narrow canyons that peeled away at the original block of stone until a series of fingerlike projections were created. On the surface of these mesas and on the cliffsides of the intervening canyons, the ancient Anasazi made their homes.

Reaching the top of this escarpment around sunset, the canyons adrift with rich browns and reds, had been like stepping backward into the past. Dr. Simms’s talk about the “spirit of a place” suddenly came alive for Reed. This place was a living, powerful presence. Looking down from the top of the escarpment, past two thousand years of human history arranged in strata on the canyon wall, to a far more ancient, prehuman history lying secretively in the shadows below, Reed knew he would never be the same.

Carol had been quite taken with the place as well; she’d shown a great deal of interest in the peoples who had lived here, from the Basket Makers contemporaneous with Christ to the Pueblo builders hiding from as-yet-unknown invaders in their fortified cliff houses.

Reed really enjoyed her interest—few of his friends had ever shared his obsessions. “You know at one time early archaeologists thought there had been two types of people living here,” he explained to her. “The Basket Makers, and then a race with a slight deformity—unusually broad heads, flattened in the back. Then later archaeologists discovered it was merely because of the introduction of a new type of cradle during the eighth century. Originally the cradle was a basket with a pillow to protect the baby’s head. But then someone invented a wooden cradle board without a pillow whose repeated use caused the baby’s head to deform. Everyone started using them, and soon almost an entire generation grew up with heads of that shape.”

Her eyes were shiny from the campfire. Maybe that had made her seem more interested than she actually was. But no… she did find the surfaces of archaeology fascinating. It was just when they went deeper…

“You know, it’s amazing to think about,” she said. “I mean, how different styles of parenting can affect the future. Here these people chose one style of cradle over another, and it affected the actual physical appearance of the next generation of their people.”

“And think about how someone from our future might look at us,” he’d said. “This outsider will look at the distant past and conclude, ‘See here… these were humans, but there were always these alien elements in their culture… which finally took over.’“ He’d thought it thrilling to think about, but the look in Carol’s eyes as she thought about it, and looked at him, and obviously thought about what Reed had told her about his own upbringing—it showed that the conversation had obviously unsettled her. That night Reed had seen the beginnings of Carol’s discomfort with his chosen field.

Her unease had become obvious when Dr. Simms and the class began examination of Site 1453, the Badger House area. At one time there had been an enormous trash mound here, whose excavation had yielded a great number of interesting data about its people. One of Reed’s first great interests in archaeology had been the whole idea of ancient trash piles. Farming groups who had lived in one place for a long time—the spiritual forebears to his own ancestors in Simpson Creeks, he supposed—left wonderful garbage piles for the archaeologist. There was nothing more delightful to Reed than a big garbage dump. Each piece told part of a story.

The trash pile at Badger House had yielded corrugated pottery, pendant disks, scrapers and hammerstones, choppers, knives, projectile points, bone awls, the discarded bones of rock squirrels, badgers, porcupines, gray and red foxes, wolves, coyotes, dogs, bighorn sheep, mule deer, turkeys, and even an occasional horned owl. Rare finds included various unfired animal effigies and clay balls, fetishes, and a whetstone. And finally, after stripping away most of the mound, they’d found evidence of even earlier buildings, pit houses and the like. These people often built on top of the ruins of even earlier people, so that layer upon layer of houses, of lives lived out undramatically before ending in fire or drought or old age, were not uncommon.

“I can’t go near that thing,” Carol had said. “I won’t go in there, Reed. It’s just too much.” So she’d left the trash pile and returned to camp, and didn’t go to any of the sites after that, just stayed in their tent and read. That’s what finally got to Carol. The layers. Death upon death. To dig beneath someone’s house and find the skull of someone who had lived there before. To find the ghost of someone else’s last meal mixed in with your own garbage. To find the central artifacts of someone else’s dead life drifting up through the ground into your living room. She’d talked about those things at the time, and Reed had thought she shared his obsession with it. Later he realized she only shared his occasional fear of it.

Carol didn’t like looking down, or digging into the layers. And she didn’t like that part of Reed that found such excavating to be of central importance. It made her profoundly uncomfortable.

If Reed had known more, if he had dug a little deeper, he would be even more frightened than she. He had hints of it even back then.

The Anasazi abandoned the Mesa Verde area during the great drought of A.D. 1276 to 1299, never to return. But there had been droughts before, and they’d remained. There is evidence of various nomadic tribes raiding them; perhaps that’s why they moved off the top of the mesa into the cliffs in the first place. No one knows. Reed liked to think they were haunted by the history, the overwhelming sense of a past here. As he was, though he didn’t know it then. The “spirit of the place” had finally gotten to them. They left their homes to the spreading vegetation, and the drifting earth.

For a time he’d convinced himself that the phone call from his parents was a dream, part of his dream of the flood. But as he went over that night again and again, he knew it could not have been a dream. It was simply too vivid, and he could remember being awake—he knew he had been awake. Some sort of prank, then, although he knew no one who could have pulled it off so convincingly. He had to know, but he was afraid to know.

He broke off studies for a day and played several hours of racquetball with Terry, a slightly overweight, redheaded classmate whose physical presence never seemed to change no matter how much he exercised. Terry referred to Reed as his “fit friend,” but he was neither. They just played racquetball together, and occasionally drank afterward. Reed’s own body had always felt strange to him, as if he weren’t really at home there. He was generally thin, and extremely pale, a pasty white that made his black hair and pink lips and nostrils almost a shock. It made him look slightly ill most of the time, actually. That used to bother him, to think of other people seeing him that way, but it didn’t anymore. After all, he didn’t really feel ill. He just had to take special care on the digs, always wearing a wide-brimmed hat and thin, long-sleeved khaki shirts.

Although his shoulders and legs were strong, showing some muscle, his arms were long and thin, and never seemed to change no matter how many weights he lifted. He knew some people thought of him as hyperactive, and he did have this agitated, can’t-sit-down presence much of the time, but he felt calmer in his mind than he looked. It was the body that was agitated.

He put on a lot of weight after he was married, which seemed to round off some of those slightly sharp, agitated angles in his physique, though he was still aware of them underneath the roundness—he sometimes imagined he saw the shadows of them in his mirror. But marriage had made him healthier—more color in the cheeks, and the almost continual colds that had given the nostrils their pinkness were gone now. Only his eyes seemed the same—a slightly feverish, wet look that he knew others took for intensity.

He’d begun losing weight steadily the past few months, and his nose was feeling vaguely sore again. As the layers of fat were stripped away, the nervous angles came back; his hidden body took over completely, changing his gestures, stance, expressions, everything. Friends from his early married days no longer recognized him on the street.

The red ball came at him fast; he felt his shoulders creaking as he slammed it back at the wall. Terry maneuvered slowly to intercept its return—Reed moving restlessly, his face feeling uncomfortably warm, aware of his mouth extending slightly as his facial muscles tensed—and slammed it back at the wall. Reed returned it awkwardly, his legs crossed, his body hesitating, then overcompensating in response to his commands.

The physical activity—the slamming of the red or blue or green ball against a stark white wall—seemed to help him focus, made him feel a little more in touch. The last few years he’d found it necessary to focus self-consciously like that at least once each day. Sometimes it consisted merely of lying in the grass and observing what was there, how the grass felt, what the insects were doing, what it looked like up close.

Reed felt suddenly in a hurry after the games, but Terry wanted a drink. They dropped into a dim bar downtown with faded-looking moose heads, stuffed squirrels, and mounted birds decorating the walls and the shelves behind the bar.

“You’re looking tired, Reed. Working hard on that Mesa Verde thing?” Terry downed his drink quickly, coughed, almost choking.

Reed glanced away and spoke into his drink. “I think I’m going to quit for a while, Terry. I think I am.”

“No shit? What brought this on?” He drank again, jerking the glass up so quickly Reed found it distracting. “You having a hard time… troubles with your wife and kids?” He looked embarrassed. “Adoption… that’s a real hard thing. I don’t think I could handle that, and school both…” He shrugged helplessly.

Reed looked at him wearily. He decided to let the stupid remark on the nature of adoption pass. “I don’t know… I’m tired, I suppose.” Reed sipped slowly at the beer, wiping the foam from his lip awkwardly, with the back of his hand. “Do you have a hometown, Terry?”

“Sure… doesn’t everybody? Minneapolis.”

“Ever visit?”

“Oh, last time was a year and a half ago to see my folks. We had sort of a reunion with the rest of the family. Funny to see where you came from… all those old folks, I mean. They’d bring out their albums with the pictures of the houses and cars, and the clippings from the old country. Once in a while that’s kinda nice to see.”

“Well, I think I’m going to be going home for a while. I haven’t been home in ten years.”

“No shit! A reunion?”

“Yes… yes, I think so.”

The rest of the day he read, or rather tasted, books. It had become an obsessive activity with him; he’d read long into the night in a darkened house, the only illumination a floor lamp tilted over the worn green chair, pizza and a quart of beer sitting on the footstool pulled up between his legs.

He rarely finished a book. They were stacked two feet deep around the green chair, sometimes spread-eagled on the floor to mark a halt, but usually with one bookmark or several to note the places where he had stopped, unable to continue with the thing.

The reasons he could not continue with a book were usually the same: he would reach a particularly vivid image or a passage that threatened to pull him into another reality, and it frightened him, sometimes even into terror.

Something that had to be done…

He’d changed the light bulbs over much of the house tonight and redirected lamps so that the floors and wainscoting were almost entirely in darkness. He even went to the trouble of locking several rooms.

He had obscured the bottom layers of the house, the strata of the child. He couldn’t bear to think about them—Alicia and Michael. Unaccountably, he felt as if he would never see them again. A child leaves a strong presence in a place—he would have had to scrub the floors down to bare wood, replacing planks and borders showing the obvious scuffing of small shoes and roller skates and the impact of thrown toys, to cover the walls and replace furniture, and still there’d be the occasional piece of a toy he’d overlooked, the green soldier dropped down a radiator grating or the marble rolling suddenly out of a closet.

And still he walked carefully here, listening for the sudden fall of a ball, or a jack-in-the-box accidentally jarred to action because of a spring wound too tight when there were a child’s hands to wind it.