“It just gave me a turn, that’s all. I must be mad to do this. I run off with a man and I’ve got the police onto me before I’m even down the mountain.”
He laughed.
“I suppose it is funny. But it’s not. The police. What if-?”
“Do you want me to drive?”
“It’s not the driving.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t like being married off so fast. Maybe I’m not very good at this.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to buy you a dress.”
She smiled. “No, you wouldn’t.” She drove quietly for a minute. “I just don’t want anybody to get hurt,” she said softly.
“Nobody’s going to get hurt.”
“Yes they are,” she said, her voice distant. “We’re all going to get hurt.”
He waited, afraid now of easy reassurance. “Does it make any difference?” he said finally.
She didn’t answer, then slowly shook her head. “No. That’s what’s so awful. It doesn’t make any difference.” She shifted. “Oh, to hell with it,” she said suddenly, stepping on the gas. The car shot forward. “You never get two tickets in one day, do you? We might as well do as we like.”
The road continued twisting downward, its curves even narrower, bordered only by a margin of soft shoulder. Emma hugged the center line, letting the sloping grade make its own speed, trusting the road. Connolly felt his ears pop. Here and there he saw signs of settlement, the surprise of a few fruit trees blossoming after so many miles of dark pine. The views began to open out to a wider sky, until finally they were near the bottom and the hills disappeared entirely, like curtains pulled back to show an immense panorama of red sandstone buttes and mesas, a sky beyond measuring. It was the most spectacular landscape Connolly had ever seen.
On 44 they drove on a highway river, entering sandstone canyons dotted with slides of red rock and juniper whose walls grew higher and higher around them until they were completely surrounded by rock and then, a bend in the road, opening out again to a blue tent of sky. This was the West he had always imagined and never seen, not the cactus emptiness of the desert at Trinity, not even the greasewood and sage arroyo country of the Rio Grande, but land that seemed to exist at the beginning of time, monumental, so resistant to man that it found its beauty in geology, as if vegetation were a hapless afterthought. The mountains to the right seemed the border of the known world. Before them, the giant mesas rose up like islands from an old ocean floor, the distances between them whole seas of sandy earth. The walls were striated, discrete sediment layers of white and yellow and maroon and red, a color map of time, with slabs of rock broken or withered into shapes, statues of what might have been gods.
He felt her smiling beside him, enjoying his reaction. When they finally left the twists of canyon walls and headed straight across the empty flat plateau, the promised heat arrived in a bright glare that flooded the open country with light. They rolled down the windows now to catch the dry air, baked with dust and sage. Clouds were everywhere, darting back and forth making shadows, so that the tawny grass would turn gray for an instant, then gleam yellow again when they passed. He saw chollo cactus and thin bushes whose names he didn’t know, survivors. The sun burned through the windshield. They were alone on the road, nothing around them for miles but a desolate landscape alive with clouds and shadows and hot wind.
When they entered Chaco wash, they left the highway and bounced along a narrow dirt road, trailing dust behind them like smoke. Emma slowed down, dodging ruts and dry potholes with only a trace of moisture on their cracked muddy bottoms.
“You said it was remote,” Connolly said. “How much more of this?”
“Twenty miles or so.” She grinned. “It discourages the fainthearted.”
“God. Let’s not break down.”
“Think of the Anasazi. They walked.”
He looked out at the desert again, trying to imagine it filled with people. “Why here?”
“No one knows. Presumably it was wetter then, but not much. They’ve found logs that must have been carried over forty miles-so why not build where the trees were? But they didn’t. It’s one of the mysteries.”
“What are the others?”
“Mainly what happened to them. They disappeared about eight hundred years ago. Just like that. It all just stopped. There were settlements everywhere-there’s a big one near the Hill, in Frijoles Canyon-and then nothing.”
“They all died?”
“Well, the archaeological record did. Probably they became the Hopis. Pueblo architecture’s much the same- block dwelling, kivas, the lot. But no one really knows. It’s difficult without writing. Imagine the Egyptians without hieroglyphics.”
“Then how do we know their name?”
“We don’t know what they called themselves. Anasazi’s our name for them. Navajo. Park Service says it means ‘the ancient ones,’ but I read somewhere that it actually means ‘ancestors of my enemies.’ Quite a difference. Of course, that fits perfectly with the Hopi theory-they’re still fighting the Navajos. Here we are. Watch out for the park ranger. Nobody comes here anymore, since gas rationing, and he’ll talk your head off if you let him.”
They were entering a broad open canyon formed by a long mesa along the north and two smaller ones on the south that opened like gates to the desert beyond. Connolly could see clumps of stone ruins backed against the walls of the canyon, small villages placed up and down the valley. A dusty official pickup truck was parked next to the building at the southeast end of the canyon road. The park ranger, an incongruous uniform in the emptiness, stared casually at her legs as he warned them to take water on the trail. But Emma seemed not to notice his interest, as if she had left all that behind in the miles of desert that separated them from the world. In fifteen minutes they were back on their own, the ranger another shadow, as they ate sandwiches on the kiva wall of the Bonito ruin, their faces lifted to the sun. With his eyes closed, he could hear the faint movement of insects. When he opened them, the sound retreated back into the stillness of the canyon. He looked over at her, at the line of her raised throat running into the now blazing white of her blouse, and marveled at their being here, away from everything.
She guided him through the site, pointing out the masonry patterns, the low chamber entrances, the arrangement of the rooms, so that what had been an inexplicable maze of stones now became real, filled with imagined life. People had lived here, moving from ceremonial kiva to irrigated field to storage room. The valley floor had hummed with noise. As they walked from room to room, the place began to make sense, there was an order to things, and he wondered suddenly if years from now people would walk like this on the Hill, picking their way through its buildings and rituals and puzzles until they arranged themselves in the simple pattern of a town. Maybe it would keep its mysteries too, and maybe they would seem just as inconsequential.
“But why here?” he asked again. “It can’t have been easy to farm here.”
“No,” Emma said. “Frijoles makes sense-there’s a river there. And Mesa Verde-I haven’t been, but presumably it’s green. Of course, they liked difficult places, they were always building on cliff faces and overhangs. But I agree it’s a problem. The archaeologists think there were as many as five thousand people here at the peak, so it may have been an administrative center of some sort. Perhaps religious. I think it’s more likely it was geographic-you’ll see what I mean at the top. It’s pretty much in the middle of their territory, so they may have picked it for just that reason. You know, an artificial capital. Like Canberra or Ottawa.”
“Or Washington.”
“Or Washington. What are you looking at?”
He took her hand. “I’m just looking.”
She was flustered but pleased. “You haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said.”
“Yes I have. They built in the middle of nowhere because it was the middle. Keep the bureaucrats away from the fleshpots.”
He leaned over and kissed her, a soft, long kiss because now there was so much more time.
“That’s never a bad idea, is it?” she said, her face still close to his.
“I don’t know. Maybe they need it more than anybody.” He kissed her again, but then she drew away.
“He’ll see,” she said, nodding her head toward the park station.
