or for your collection? I’ve seen what you do,” he said.
I’ve seen him too—him and his wife. A savory blue smoke comes from their camp. Behind it is the smell of the earth, sweet iron and rust and snow. The low, brush-covered mounds are pregnant with artifacts. The painted kivas lift their skirts.
The trader’s wife set the bottle of antiseptic down. She held up a hand to the archaeologist. Then she eyed the reporter. “You’ve got your mail,” she said, pointedly.
“I was just leaving,” he said.
***
The door dropped shut. We heard the car start. The trader’s wife put some gauze over my palm and pressed my other hand hard on top of it.
The archaeologist resumed his pacing. When the trader’s wife went to the counter where she had left the bag with the surgical needles and the thread, he asked, “How much does Burnett owe on his account?”
The book was open on the counter. The trader’s wife glanced at it.
“Twenty-two dollars and sixty cents,” she said.
The archaeologist reached into his pocket.
“Call it twenty-three even,” he said and laid the money on the counter. “I want that pot.”
She sighed. “All right,” she said. “But if Burnett takes it up with you—”
“I’ll be responsible,” he said.
He let himself behind the counter and took down the pot. He embraced it tenderly as he shouldered the door open. The bright sun knifed into the room. Motes of dust rose and fell around him, and there was a shock of green from the cottonwood leaves.
***
For the second time that morning I watched her monitor the closing of the door. At the sound of the catch she gave a little nod—whether of satisfaction or resignation, I couldn’t say. To my ear, the scrape of wood on wood suggested something conjugal.
She gave me the same kind of long, measured look she’d just given the door. Measuring me—as if to ask what I’d have done in all these circumstances—or maybe just measuring the distance between us.
The wood hissed in the stove, and the floorboards creaked, and I looked away.
The trader’s wife said, “There weren’t any letters for you this week.”
“I figured there weren’t,” I said. “I figured you would have said if there were.” I said, “That’s all right, Barb.”
“Still,” she said. “I should have mentioned it, earlier. I should have said.”
I’d come out to Utah with the oil company in ’21 and stayed on to do some prospecting myself. I set up camp a mile or so from the river. Later, I built a little house, a dugout, one room, that stayed warm and dry all winter. Next door to the dugout, I devised a root cellar. They looked fine, the root cellar and the dugout.
My wife was back in California all that time. Most of the letters I’d ever gotten in my life, and all the best ones, had come from her. But there hadn’t been a letter in a while. That was the day I stopped asking for one, the day I had my first clumsy thoughts about what else in life a man might want.
Down by the San Juan there’s a layer of limestone made up entirely of tiny shells. There’s a place where oil flows straight out of the rock into the river. Everything is red. The rocks, and the soil, and the thick fast-moving water in the river.
The trader’s wife resumed her work on my hand. The slim needle nipped—ten, twelve times. The ends of the threads floated up like spider’s silk. She took away the soaked pad of gauze and put down another. She wrapped a clean bandage around my wrist and across my palm and between my thumb and fingers.
“There,” she said. “There.”
Her hands were warm. They held mine for a moment. Under the bandages, I could feel the wet gauze, the blood still flowing.
Driveaway
On certain days in the city, a golden smog filtered through the streets, a kind of pollen falling on our upturned faces. I’d get glimpses—the crispness of possibility, the vitamin smell of a new twenty-dollar bill.
***
Derelicts stood around on the sidewalk in front of the Basque hotel. It was part of my job to escort them off the steps. Looking at them was like looking back into the last century. These men were daguerreotypes. They didn’t know what a city was doing around them. There was one with a magnificent head of hair and a curled white beard. He looked like the mountain man in the painting, all brown and gold, that hung in the old library before the renovation. His canvas clothes had stiffened into a kind of leather, and his eyes remembered the endless views from the high passes where snow doesn’t melt.
It was the other ones I was afraid of, the ones dressed normal. Get up close to them and it was fucker, fucker, fucker, walking fast down Market Street, or on the bus.
The homeless! Under my window, they worked for hours lettering their cardboard signs, while discussing the Bible in amiable voices. “Did you hear about the tower of Babel?” One of them posed this question to the other. It was news.
This was in San Francisco in 1999. I’d left Salt Lake without my belongings. At the Catholic thrift shops on Sutter I’d found some shirts and pants in my size, and a pair of shoes that were still shaped like someone else’s feet. Only later did it occur to me that these clothes had probably belonged to some young man who had died, and I was walking around the city dressed as his ghost.
***
In April the snow, I knew, would be melting from the mesa tops. I went looking for Prine, who I thought might be willing to drive me back to Utah.
I’d found a site, the previous autumn, in a little side canyon past the long house on the mesa. The floor of the alcove was already all dug up. Some of those holes were a hundred years old. The ruins were tumbled over. But the late summer rains loosened things up, and the artifacts—some baskets and a cache of unfinished sandals—were popping out of the ground.
My friends had gone back to the long house with a backhoe, and that’s how they got caught. They implicated me, but for lack of evidence, I was let go with a fine and a five-hundred-word essay on how what I’d done was wrong.
All this time, I’d been carrying around some Polaroids of what I’d found. I liked to think about the money I could make, just by going back.
***
Prine was out at Ocean Beach, watching over his rods—five of them planted in the black, oily sand. He used to work for the airlines, until he hurt his back. Now he spent his days at the beach, here in the city, or down in Pacifica, fishing for salmon.
He shook his head in a mournful way. “That car,” he said. “I’ve got it parked somewhere. I’m having trouble with it.”
I was embarrassed to ask outright, but I was hoping he would give me the money for a bus ticket.
“Let me see those pictures again,” he
