“Four-wheel freedom.”
“Exactly.”
“It’s something big-city folks just don’t understand,” he said. “Same way I’ll never understand how millions of people a day can march down piss-stained stairs into the underworld and commit their lives to a bunch of coked-out Puerto Rican subway jockeys.”
“Let’s hear it for the all-white West,” she said sardonically.
“My mother’s mother was born in Chihuahua. My father’s mother was Sioux. Two of my great-grandparents were Scots. The rest were garden-variety third-generation American mongrels.”
She looked curiously at him. “Quite a mix.”
“Common as dust out West. My only quarrel is with the choices people make, not their bloodlines. Cities give me a rash.”
There was a finality in his tone that struck her.
“Was it a city where you…?” She hesitated, not sure quite how to ask. “Is that where you got in trouble?”
His smile reminded her of Moki’s toothy grin, more than a bit savage.
“Yeah, a city was where I killed a man. Boy, actually.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“What makes you think it wasn’t just for the hell of it?”
“Because you aren’t a just-for-the-hell-of-it kind of man,” she said impatiently.
“Thanks. I think.” He flexed his hands on the wheel and let out a harsh breath. “I was a boy too. Rob was twenty. I was eighteen. It was a rowdy beer bar in Oakland.”
She waited, holding her breath without realizing it.
“We were both students,” Cain said evenly. “The judge called it ‘mutual combat.’”
“Then why did you go to jail?”
“Under California law, mutual combat is good for a manslaughter conviction.”
Christy tried to think of a tactful way to ask her next question. There wasn’t one. “How long were you in jail?”
“Two years, two months, and six and a half days.”
She looked at Cain and tried to imagine him locked up. He was so fiercely independent. “It must have been hell.”
“The second half of my sentence was spent in a forestry camp called Susanville, up near the Oregon border.”
“At least…” She winced and didn’t say any more.
“I wasn’t caged the whole time?” Cain finished bitterly. “Yeah, semi-freedom is better than none. But anything less than real freedom isn’t worth the name.”
The little canyon narrowed to a slot, then suddenly widened out again into a mile-long valley. On both sides white and rust-colored sandstone cliffs rose more than five hundred feet high.
She was amazed at how quickly and unexpectedly the land could change, and at how many nooks and crannies time and weather had carved in the edges of the mesas. The land was like the man next to her, full of surprises, rough yet compelling, alive its own way and on its own terms.
“Well, Red? Are we on Hutton’s ranch yet?”
She thought back over the twists and turns in the road and shook her head. “Without a compass and a map, I wouldn’t even guess.”
“Even with a compass, it’s impossible to be certain. God didn’t get around to painting geodesic survey lines here.”
“That’s why you like it.”
“It’s a place where a man can be as free as he wants to be,” he agreed.
Her hand touched his arm and she pointed to the left. “Look,” she said in a hushed voice.
A herd of eight dark, shaggy elk broke and scattered across the valley, startled by the truck’s sudden appearance. The leader was a big bull with a rack of horns that spread like a wall trophy waiting to be claimed. He stood his ground on a little rise and bellowed a challenge.
“He won’t feel so confident in a month,” Cain said.
“Why?”
“Hunting season opens.”
“Ah, yes. Blood sports. Welcome to the Wild West.”
“You think the beef you ate at Hutton’s party volunteered for the job?”
She sighed. “No. And yes, I loved each politically and medically incorrect bite.”
He laughed. “Supermarkets and plastic wrap insulates you from reality.”
“Some of it. On the other hand, I don’t think you’d be able to walk past a psychotic or simply alcoholic human being in Manhattan with anything like the callousness I’ve had to learn.”
“Is living in the city worth it?”
“It’s better than what I came from.”
“I didn’t know farm life was so bad,” he said.
“You were never a poor girl who was smart instead of pretty,” she said in a clipped voice. “You were never raised in a rural hell where men looked you over like a pony they might want to ride or a heifer they might want to breed. Nothing personal. Just another farm animal.”
“Pretty girls always—”
“I wasn’t pretty,” Christy said flatly. “My sister got all the looks in the family. I got the brains.”
The certainty in her voice amazed Cain. He looked at her and saw she wasn’t fishing for compliments. She believed every word she’d said.
Amazing.
“Your sister must be drop-dead beautiful,” he said after a moment.
“She is. What about you? Sisters? Brothers? Parents?”
“Yes. Parents in San Francisco. One sister in London, married to a diplomat. Another in Seattle running a coffee shop. A brother in Boston. Lawyer. I see them all when I make my rare-book rounds.”
“Your…When do you do that?”
“Winter. Too cold to do much else then. What about your sister?”
“What about her?”
The complex emotions in Christy’s voice made Cain glance sideways at her.
“Not close, huh?” he said sympathetically.
“Not the way you mean. But in other ways…” She hesitated.
He waited.
“Our parents died when I was eight,” Christy said. “Not that I noticed. Dad was in and out of jail so often I barely knew him.”
“So that’s why you didn’t run the other direction at the thought of an ex-con.”
She shrugged. “Jail was a fact of life. Dad was a drinker. Mother drank right along with him. They had a high old time, right up until they drove into a train at eighty miles an hour.”
“They missed a hell of a daughter.”
Startled, she turned and looked into Cain’s amber eyes.
“Who raised you?” he asked.
“Gramma. Mother’s mother. She died the year I left home.”
“What about your sister?”
“She takes after Mother. Wild. But—” Christy stopped abruptly. She could barely explain it to herself, much less to Cain.
“But?” he asked in a soft voice.
“She’s all I have left,” Christy said with barely leashed emotion, wanting him to understand. “In a whole world of strangers, she’s the only one alive who shares the first half of my life, of my memories, of myself. There are times I want to strangle her, a lot more times I want to scream at her to grow up, but I love her anyway. I just don’t always like her a whole lot.”
He smiled crookedly. “Sounds like me and my brother. Don’t get along most of the time, but when it counts, we’ll back each other right to the wall, no questions asked.”
“Yes,” she said. “And each time, you hope this time it will work.”
She didn’t notice his look or the intensity of her own voice. She was caught up in a dream that was as old as her childhood and as deep as her need to love and be loved in return.
Right to the wall.
“This time,” she said fiercely, “this time it will be different.”
Chapter 21
“How much do you know about the Anasazi?” Cain asked without looking away from the road.
Christy blinked and realized it was the second time he’d asked the question. She took a deep breath and let the past go for the moment. And wished she could get rid of the past fo
rever. Or some of it.
Most of it.
“I know the Anasazi are called Moki by the locals,” she said.
He smiled slightly.
“And Peter gave me the spiel yesterday afternoon,” she said. “All about the new theories of the Anasazi empire in the San Juan Basin.”
“What Hutton knows about the Anasazi empire could be put into a one-paragraph press release.”
“So says the Moki poacher.”
“This Moki poacher has a Ph.D. in archaeology.”
She stared at him.
“Like I said, there’s not much to do around here in the winter,” he added dryly.
“Should I call you doctor?”
“I won’t answer. I studied because I wanted to know, not because I wanted the world to know I knew.”
Tilting her head, she studied him the way she would a design of unknown origin and fascinating complexity.
“You’re looking at me the way Moki looks at a rabbit,” he said after a minute.
“Cultural synthesis.”
“You do and you clean it up.”
Smiling, she shook her head. “Too late. You’ve already given the game away. You’re not a tongue-tied cowboy. You’re not a stump-dumb bar brawler. You’re quite civilized under all the—”
“Don’t count on it,” he interrupted roughly. “A fancy degree doesn’t make silk out of pigskin.”
“No, but it makes some really intriguing patterns on even the toughest hide,” she shot back. “The most elegant and powerful designs often come from cultural synthesis.”
He steered the truck around a hole in the road. “The story of humanity. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Repeat as necessary.”
“You studied some philosophy along with pots and bones.”
“Like I said. Winters are long.”
“What did you specialize in for your doctorate?” she asked.
“Guess.”
She smiled. “So, Professor, according to your studies, what did the Anasazi do to amuse themselves during the long winters?”
“Beyond the obvious?” he asked, grinning. “I’ve found small polished pieces of bone that could have been markers in various games.”
“But no sign of written language?”
He shook his head. “They almost certainly had a fine and complex oral tradition. The Pueblo Indians still do. Much of it is secret, though.”
“Medicine men?”
“Medicine women.”
From the corner of his eyes he saw the gotcha expression on Christy’s face.
“Matriarchy,” she said with satisfaction. “Those Mokis were no fools.”
“I don’t know about matriarchy. I suspect it was more a matter of women being given half of the cosmos to look after and men taking care of the other half.”
“Good God. A nonabsolutist approach to the universe. What makes you think the Anasazi were that unusual?”
“The Pueblo tribes today have a system rather like that. Each sex has vital work to do in ensuring the continuation of the clan and the universe.”
“Yin and yang,” she said softly. “The most subtle, elegant, and powerful symbol yet devised by human beings. Of course, because the Chinese created it, the women got the short end of the symbol.”
Cain laughed outright. “Only in the written description. The symbol itself is neutral. Male in the heart of all that is most female. Female in the heart of all that is most male.”
She gave him another surprised look.
“The Anasazi were sophisticated,” he said. “Their empire spread all over the San Juan Basin, everywhere you can see from here.”
Christy stared out over the rugged land, trying to imagine an empire spreading away on all sides. Wherever she looked, mountain peaks either distant or close rose like elegant stone crowns.
“What you’re looking at is a geologic feature called the Colorado Plateau,” he said. “It’s a maze of piñon and cedar, big sage, and creeks lined by willow and alder, mesas, mountains, aspen, and a sky as big as God.”
Without hesitating, he steered around a boulder just slightly smaller than the truck.
“The Anasazi lived all over the Colorado Plateau?” she asked.
“Yes, but it was along the southern and western edges they built cliff houses into the bones of the land itself, in places where the plateau eroded down to the desert in a series of mesas separated by finger canyons and joined by the endless sky.”
She looked at the rugged land, as beautiful as it was empty. “It’s hard to believe there was ever an empire in the San Juan Basin.”
“Maybe not an empire in the way you mean,” he said. “Armies and cities and a single powerful emperor. I don’t think things worked that way. There was power, but it wasn’t just one person’s.”
She turned from the land to the man who was more interesting the longer she was with him. That alone was enough to surprise her. Most people she met became less intriguing as they became more familiar.
“I think we’re talking about informal domination,” Cain said, “an integrated system of communities with its religious and social center in Chaco Canyon.”
“Where’s that?”
“Over in northwestern New Mexico. We’re at the far northern reach of the Anasazi empire or sphere of direct influence or whatever right now.”
Christy frowned, vaguely remembering something she’d read years before. “I thought Mesa Verde was the northern edge of the Anasazi range.”
“The academics used to think so too. The locals knew better. You can’t walk out here without kicking up some sherds.”
He slowed the truck, letting it creep over a patch of deeply rutted road.
“Then how did we miss the signs of the Anasazi for so long?” she asked.
“You don’t find what you’re not looking for.”
“Okay. Why are we looking now?”
“A few years back, Uncle Sam decided that a place couldn’t be flooded, filled in, paved over, or even plowed if there were signs that the area might have archaeological interest.”
“So?”
“So every time someone wants to put in a road to a distant site to wildcat for oil, or the Army Corps of Engineers pursues its mandate to dam up everything bigger than a stream of piss, potsherds and walls are found.”
“You’re joking.”
He shook his head without looking away from the bad road. “There are thousands of sites in the San Juan Basin. Hundreds of thousands, more likely. Hell, there were more people living in some parts of the basin seven hundred years ago than there are today.”
“Good-bye dams and oil drilling.”
He gave her a sidelong glance. “You really think so?”
She grimaced. “No. How do they get around the rules?”
“They use other rules. The construction crews call in archaeologists to go over the site and see if there’s anything really unique that has to be saved.”
The tires thumped and Moki’s claws scrabbled for purchase as the truck “walked” over another rough patch of road. Christy braced the big dog, much to Cain’s amusement.
“If the site looks special,” he said, still smiling, “the archaeologists work like hell to save what they can before the bulldozers arrive or the dam is finished and the site is flooded.”
“Does that happen often?”
“So often there’s a name for it. Salvage archaeology.”
“Sounds grim.”
“It’s better than no archaeology at all,” he said. “There are probably five hundred professionals digging and exploring in the San Juan Basin right now, and the more work that’s done, the more sites they find to explore. The situation sort of defines an embarrassment of riches.”
The truck settled onto a less rugged course. He didn’t accelerate. He knew the road would just get worse. Much worse.
“How rich?” she asked.
“Most of the Colorado Plateau could quite easily fit the definition of an archaeological site
, which wouldn’t leave room for the people who live here now.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Why? They’ve discovered a network of roads that reaches all the way over into Utah and up into this part of Colorado,” Cain said.
“Roads? Real roads like the Roman roads in Britain?”
“As real as it gets. Thirty feet wide and straight as a ruler, come hell or high mountains. When the terrain got too steep for roads, they cut stairs.”
“Must have been the male half of the Anasazi power structure that built the roads,” she said. “Women are smart enough to go around an obstacle.”
Cain’s smile showed white against his short black beard.
She knew she watched for that smile more than she should. The contrast of light and dark, laughter and bleakness fascinated her.
“The Anasazi built those roads long before the Spaniards came,” he said. “There were no wheels or four-footed beasts of burden to worry about on the stairs.”
“So what did they use?”
“Slave labor is the most logical possibility,” he said, “though a lot of the university folks would as soon lynch you as discuss it. They prefer to think white men invented slavery, war, disease, sin, and everything else bad.”
Christy tried not to laugh, but gave in. “I hope you got your degrees by correspondence course.”
Laughing quietly, he shook his head. “Reality has a way of sneaking past ivory towers. The Anasazi weren’t simple, noble savages or New Age collectivists. Despite their lack of written language and metallurgy, they developed a unique, sophisticated civilization. Astronomers have even found evidence that Chaco Canyon could have been laid out as a giant solar and lunar observatory.”
“Like Stonehenge?” she asked, startled.
“Same principle, different means. Same need.”
“Religion?”
“Survival. When your growing season is measured in weeks rather than months, planting at the best time is a matter of life and death.”
Christy listened, watching the man rather than the land. The excitement buried in his voice reminded her of herself on the trail of a new style, one that transcended simple fashion and became something very close to art. Half closing her eyes, she settled more deeply in the seat, enjoying the intensity of Cain’s deep voice as he talked about something he obviously loved.