The Return Read online

"Call me Al."

  They shook.

  "I must say, this is the oddest recruitment I've ever had. I just casually mentioned to Vince that we were shorthanded up at the site this summer, and all of a sudden he's calling me up and telling me he's found someone willing to dig." The professor smiled. "Not that I'm complaining. Recruiting on my own this year brought in a total of five people. I can use all the help I can get."

  "I'm not . . ." Glen cleared his throat. "I don't know what Vince told you, but I'm not any kind of archeologist. I just stumbled into this. I was taking a tour of the Indian ruins in Springerville, and he asked me if I would be interested in working at an archeological site. I've never done anything remotely like this before. I'm . . . I'm a computer programmer, for Christ's sake."

  "That doesn't make any difference. Even my students aren't all archeology or anthropology majors. One of them's getting his degree in business administration. He's here because he thinks it will be good life experience. So don't worry. You don't have to be an expert. You just have to be willing to take direction."

  "I guess I can do that."

  "Good, good. Let's head out to the site, then. I'll give you the ten-cent tour, introduce you to our intrepid band, then we'll get you settled in a cabin. I don't know what Vince told you about payment--"

  "Nothing."

  Al chuckled. "Well, there's a reason for that. We do provide free lodging. The university rented some cabins that used to be part of an old motor court on the south side of town. The only one still available has no air conditioning, but you can bunk up with Ron or Buck in one of the refurbished cabins if you want. As for wages, you get a small stipend of a hundred dollars a week. That barely pays for meals--if you stretch it--so you're not going to be making any money on this deal. I'd pay you more, but that's all my budget will allow, and I'm on the same scale as everyone else. We're not in it for the money. If you were thinking you were going to make a killing, now's the time to tell me and bow out gracefully."

  "No," Glen said. "That's fine."

  "Thank God!" Al grinned, clapped him on the back. "We need you. We really are shorthanded." He started toward the exit. "My Jeep's out front. You can follow me if you have a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Otherwise, we'll leave your car here and come back for it."

  Glen nodded out the window. "That's my Saturn. The white one there."

  "The Jeep it is, then." They walked out of the Jack in the Box into the dry eastern Arizona heat. "The site's not that far, but they never got around to making a real road to it. There's just a sort of half-assed trail, and you need high clearance to get through. Hop in and buckle up."

  Glen followed him out to a battered, open-topped Jeep with no discernible color, and they drove through the center of town, turning left on a narrow half-paved road next to the Circle K. They passed a block of small, slummy single-story homes. Then the road wound around an irregularly shaped trailer park before heading between two low hills. To Glen's surprise, the road stopped just on the other side, abruptly ending at the foot of a scrawny juniper tree.

  The professor did not hesitate. He swerved right before the tree, and then they were cutting through high dead weeds, bouncing over unseen bumps and troughs. If there was a trail here, Glen certainly couldn't see it, but Al steered the Jeep to the left and to the right confidently. A few moments later, Glen was able to discern the twin ruts created by the passage of tires, and then they were around another hill and bouncing down into a relatively flat, arid valley. Ahead, sunlight glinted off several parked vehicles, beyond which was an open excavation bordered by a mound of tilled soil.

  "Did Vince tell you how this site was discovered? They were scouting locations for a new landfill. This is all county property, and they chose this spot because of its relatively close proximity to the highway. But when they ran the first backhoe through here, they unearthed a bunch of pottery and arrowheads--most of which they shattered and destroyed with their machine. As these people usually do, they stopped digging, looked at what they'd found, then went back to work. But when they ran into a section of adobe wall, they knew they had something here. The supervisor didn't want to make any decisions on his own, so he stopped all work, called someone in county administration. The news went up the chain of command and then they called in the university.

  "It was kind of a last-minute thing. I was actually going to take my team to an old excavation near Rio Verde that has not been fully examined, but when this site was discovered, we altered our plans and came here." He glanced over at Glen. "This is a find."

  They came to a stop next to a mud-spattered van with oversize tires and a back window covered with faded environmental stickers.

  "Hop out. We'll have a quick look around; then I'll take you back to your cabin--"

  "There's no reason to take me back. I'm ready to go right to work. It's just a waste of time to make an extra trip."

  "I don't know if the good folks at our local Jack in the Box are going to be thrilled with your car sitting there all day."

  "Parking's reserved for customers, right? I bought a cup of coffee."

  Al laughed. "I'll back you on that. Push comes to shove and they have your car towed, we'll take them to court."

  "Deal."

  "All right, then. I'll introduce you, show you around, and get you started."

  They got out of the Jeep, walking up the mound of dirt and ducking under a waist-high rope strung between metal stakes that marked the perimeter of the site. On the other side of the mound, all grass and vegetation had been cleared. A succession of low trenches connected a series of increasingly large man-made depressions. Here and there, sections of extant adobe walls protruded from the hardpacked ground. In the center stood a freestanding canopy underneath which were tables, chairs, and several large ice chests.

  "This is our excavation. Like I said, we're a small crew this year. Just me, Melanie, Judi, Ron, Randy, and Buck. That's less than a third of the size I usually have. And we have to get as much done this summer as we can because there's no guarantee the site will be here next year. The university is petitioning to have this declared a state historic site, but this is county land, and they're under no legal requirement to preserve or protect it. All they have to do is grant us access for these three months, and allow us to cart away what valuables we can find. Unless we can prove that this is a unique archeological discovery or that it's extensive enough to warrant further study or has the potential to attract tourists, it's conceivable that by next summer this will all be a dump, or paved over and used to store maintenance equipment."

  "So, what kind of Indian ruin is this?"

  "It's an Anasazi pueblo, probably built between 900 to 1000 A.D., judging by the construction techniques and artifacts we're finding."

  "Anasazi?"

  Al chuckled. "You really are coming into this cold, aren't you?"

  "I--" Glen began, embarrassed.

  "Don't worry. It's fine. We'll teach you everything you need to know. Right now we're just looking for warm bodies and a willingness to work."

  With an ease born of long practice, he slipped into professorial mode. "The Anasazis were the North American equivalent of the Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs, a highly evolved, highly civilized people who created a sophisticated culture. They lived in great cities. Mesa Verde, in Colorado, for example, was home to some seven thousand people.

  "The word 'Anasazi' means 'the ancient ones' in Navajo. It's a reference to the fact that they were a people whose existence had passed into the realm of myth. The dominant culture in what is now the Four Corners states, the Anasazi disappeared sometime in the thirteenth century, abandoning their big cities much like their South American counterparts. Fiction writers have tried to portray this disappearance in a mysterious light, as though it occurred overnight, as though one morning everyone suddenly vanished. But most archeologists believe that a prolonged drought led to a gradual migration of the people, who scattered throughout the Southwest, reconvening in smaller, more easily sustaina
ble communities, primarily the pueblos of northern New Mexico." His eyes twinkled. "But I'm not at all sure that the fiction writers aren't right."

  They reached the first of the workers, a shirtless and seriously tanned young man using a fold-out foot shovel to dig a small round hole in the center of a larger square hole. He was sweating profusely, and when Al introduced him as Buck Hill, the young man stopped digging for a second, used the back of his hand to wipe the perspiration from his forehead, nodded a curt greeting, then went immediately back to work.

  Several feet away, two other students--a pudgy young black woman and a rail-thin white guy with red hair and a sunburn to match--were shaking a large open-ended box with wire mesh on the bottom. Dirt and gravel were falling through the mesh onto a soft-looking pile of soil below. Next to them was a folding table on which were situated various artifacts.

  "Judi Rhodes and Randy Tolleson," Al announced. The two looked over. "This is Glen Ridgeway. He's signed on with us for the rest of the trip."

  "Glad to meet you," Judi said, smiling broadly. "It's about time we had another person to share our joy."

  "Our misery," Randy corrected.

  They both laughed.

  Judi offered her hand. "Nice to meet you."

  "Thank you," Glen said, shaking. "Nice to meet you, too."

  Randy held out his hand. "Likewise."

  "So what are you doing?"

  "Sifting for the small stuff: teeth, beads, necklace fragments, what have you. Buck and Melanie have already gone through this pile, so there's probably nothing left. We're just double-checking."

  Glen nodded.

  "They're good kids," Al said as the two of them walked away. "They're both grad students, and they've been with me for the past three summers. Most thorough workers I've got. Ron, on the other hand . . ."

  On the opposite side of the biggest section of exposed adobe wall, a bald and heavily tattooed young man was photographing the site with the largest and oddest-looking camera Glen had ever seen. He wore a Walkman headset and didn't hear Al when the professor shouted out his name. But he must have seen the older man waving in his peripheral vision because he looked up at them and pulled down his earphones. "Yo."

  "Ron Sedaris, our resident photographer-slash-pottery reconstructor. This is Glen Ridgeway."

  Glen feigned a smile, nodded.

  The bald kid nodded back.

  An awkward pause followed, and then Al cleared his throat and started walking toward the southwest corner of the excavation. "Weird guy," the professor admitted after Ron had put his headphones back on and they were out of range. "But he knows his stuff."

  They stepped into a narrow shallow trench and followed it to a larger sunken square.

  "Finally, Melanie Black."

  A pretty woman with a dirty-blond ponytail, clearly several years older than the other students, was at the far end of the indented section of ground, kneeling on a green pad and cleaning off a piece of pottery with a small brush. She was frowning, and she stood, turning the artifact over in her hands, examining it. She looked up at them briefly, said hello, then went back to the pottery shard in her hand, the expression on her face one of confusion and consternation.

  Despite the professor's reassurances, Glen had been feeling hopelessly out of his depth. What was he doing? He knew nothing about archeology, had never even seen an Indian ruin until yesterday and was only here because of his idiotic resolve to act more spontaneously. With each worker he met, that feeling intensified. He'd been wondering whether to tell Al directly that he'd changed his mind and wasn't interested, or simply slink off in the middle of the night and disappear. He'd been leaning toward the latter.

  But seeing Melanie caused him to reevaluate that plan. Maybe it was the fact that she was his age, or because she looked like a normal person, someone he could relate to, but he suddenly felt that coming here wasn't such a dumb decision.

  Melanie dusted off the piece of pottery, her frown deepening. "This is strange."

  "Did you find something?" Glen could hear the excitement in the professor's voice.

  The woman nodded.

  "What is it?"

  "It's a shard from what looks to be a pitcher, judging by the pieces surrounding it."

  "What's so strange about that?"

  "There's a picture on it, a singular image rather than a continuous design."

  "Yes?"

  She held up the object, turned it toward him. "It's a picture of me."

  2

  Within two days, Glen had decided he definitely liked Melanie.

  She seemed to enjoy his company, too. Like Judi and Randy, they worked as a team on specific projects, Al having designated her as Glen's archeological mentor. Unlike the others, she was not one of Al's students but a schoolteacher from Bower, who spent her summers engaged in activities that both corresponded to her interests and dovetailed with her classroom curriculum. She taught Arizona history at Bower Junior High, and last summer she'd signed on at Wupatki to shepherd youth groups through the national monument. The year before that, she'd been down at Tubac, acting as a docent at the state park, giving tours of the fort. Her degree was in cultural anthropology, and over the years she'd made a lot of contacts, so when she applied for summertime positions at these various historic locations, she was inevitably hired. The discovery of this new pueblo, right in her own backyard, was apparently a dream come true.

  While Glen liked spending his days with Melanie, even enjoyed the work itself, nighttime accommodations were another matter.

  His motor court cabin was a green stucco building in the shape of a teepee that housed a small round room with a single bed and a kitchenette, as well as a microscopic bathroom that would have felt right at home in a Winnebago. Although Al had provided him with a portable electric fan, it was hot as hell in there, and he had a difficult time falling asleep at night. But he couldn't see himself bunking with either Ron or Buck. Buck was a smug, irritating narcissist, and Ron was . . . Ron was just too weird. Judi and Randy were an item, so they stayed in the same cabin. Al had a cabin all to himself and would not be a bad roommate, but he showed a distinct disinclination to share.

  Melanie went home at night to her own house.

  Glen wouldn't mind sharing a room with Melanie.

  In addition to working as a twosome, they had taken to carpooling together. She picked him up in the morning at the motor court, and they drove in her pickup over to the excavation. Judi and Randy carpooled as well in their van.

  On Friday, after they'd finished at the site, after they'd pulled tarps over their week's work and weighted down the corners with excavated rocks on the off chance that a storm might hit during the night, she offered to take him on a tour of the town, show him some local points of interest. He accepted gratefully, and this time, instead of dropping him off in front of his teepee cabin and then heading home, she parked the truck and got out with him.

  He had not made his bed that morning, last night's burger bag was still sitting atop the TV, his dirty razor was laying in the bathroom sink, and he was trying to think of a polite way to keep her out when she tapped his shoulder and motioned toward the sidewalk. "Let's take a walk."

  She smiled at him, and he realized that she'd understood his dilemma. He felt embarrassed all of a sudden. "If you--"

  "Come on," she told him, laughing. "I saw that look on your face. You didn't expect company. You're a guy. Need I say more?"

  He smiled sheepishly. "It's a pigsty," he admitted.

  "I don't care about seeing your little motel room anyway. Let me show you around town."

  From the beginning, they'd had an easy working comeraderie, both at the excavation and on their carpooling trips, but he expected an awkwardness to creep in now that they were on a purely social footing. It didn't happen. They talked comfortably as they walked past the used-car lot, past the Dairy Queen, into the center of town.

  Glen wiped the sweat from his forehead. They'd gone a little over a block, but he w
as already drenched. "I'm still not used to these temperatures."

  "It's a hot summer," she agreed.

  "I'm having fun, though. I mean, I have nothing to compare it to. I've seen archeology types sorting through the mud and tar by the La Brea Tar Pits on my way to the L.A. County Art Museum, but that's as close as I ever came to any kind of archeological experience. I like this, though. I think it's interesting."

  "Yeah," Melanie said. She gave him a quick, obligatory smile, but it faded quickly.

  "You don't think so?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "You didn't have to."

  They kept walking.

  "What's the matter?" he prodded.

  She shook her head. "Nothing."

  "What is it?"

  "I told you. Nothing."

  "Is it that pottery shard you found with your picture?"

  She didn't reply.

  "It is, isn't it?"

  "It's not . . . just that," she said.

  "What then?"

  She took a deep breath. "There's something weird about that pueblo."

  Glen felt a tiny surge of adrenaline, a slight increase in his pulse. He understood from her tone of voice what she meant. He had not felt anything himself, and he didn't really believe in the supernatural or the paranormal. But the drawing on the pottery, though crude, did look an awful lot like Melanie. "What makes you say that?" he asked.

  "We've found other things, other artifacts that don't belong or that simply aren't . . . right."

  "Like what?"

  "Buck found a figurine two weeks ago, a stone carving. It wasn't a totemic figure, it wasn't a god or a demon or any kind of spirit, as most of these are. It was of a woman, an ordinary, average Anasazi woman, dressed in everyday clothes--only her face was contorted into an expression I can't even describe. It was the most horrifying carving I've ever seen." She pointed to her bare arms. "I have goose bumps just thinking about it.

  "But that wasn't all. It was wrapped in rotted feathers bound together with strings of intricately beaded leather, as though it had been used as part of some shamanistic ritual. Attached to the bottom of the figurine, also by leather cord, was the mummified hand of an infant."