Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin
his scalp and ears from too much sun. He favored one of his old camo hats, painted in desert camouflage.
Brenda did not join him as he welcomed the sun and worked his muscles. Relishing the feel of thrusts and blocks, ingrained in muscle memory from long practice, he reviewed in his mind the physics of moving the stone, which weighed at least a ton. In Kuwait he had worked with a combat engineering battalion and had learned a lot from them, impressed with how human ingenuity, levers, and pulleys could be made to move anything.
As the sun painted the land with its early morning colors, he went to Brenda’s tent and clapped his hands. “Wake up, sleepyhead!”
The mumbling from inside encouraged him to stick his head inside the tent, a three-man igloo type. She was still in her sleeping bag, showing only a mop of red hair with earphones attached to a battery-powered satellite radio. He could hear the faint sounds of ’70s folk music.
“I’ll be back in about two hours. I may have to go all the way to Farmington if I don’t find what I need in Bloomfield.”
He took another mumble from Brenda as an answer.
* * * *
His wife had gotten half his military retirement in the divorce, and he still paid child support, which left him on a lean budget. Unlike many of his fellow retirees with a divorce and kids, he did not begrudge her the money—his years of service had been hard on her. He tried to save as much money as possible, to fund travel, and refused to buy a new truck. Besides, he liked his ten-year-old full-size Dodge pickup; it fit him like a comfortable glove and he knew all its quirks. A shell on the back gave him a large cargo space where he sometimes slept on a foam pad. He usually spent summers at a dig, keeping most of his gear and mementos in a storage garage in Salt Lake City. For the last five years he had only rented apartments during the winter while working on his doctorate at the University of Utah. Now that he had earned the degree, he would have to move to wherever archaeological projects took him. He had already decided that he didn’t want a faculty position, being much too adverse to academic politics. He just liked to dig.
Twenty-four miles of gravel roads led to Nageezi. According to the map, Nageezi was the nearest town to Chaco Canyon, really no more than a collection of houses and a Navajo chapter house, a kind of town hall for the locals. A new four-lane road, US 550, led north to Bloomfield. An occasional ranch house or trailer was pretty much the only human habitation, other than a solitary trading post with some gas pumps. Closer to the San Juan River, the rolling desert gave way to steep hills covered with sage and some juniper trees. Small oil and gas wells dotted the landscape. A large power plant outside of Bloomfield spewed smoke and prosperity.
Along fifty miles of the northern bank of the San Juan River, the whole stretch from Bloomfield to Farmington to Shiprock formed an erratic sprawl of houses and businesses. Driven by the gas and coal business, the area was booming, with all the big box stores you would expect to find anywhere else in America, along with a mall, car dealerships, pawnshops, liquor stores, and the Sunray Park & Casino, built on Indian land to avoid state law.
Harry pulled into a favorite strip mall. He started two machines at the laundromat going with Brenda’s and his accumulated laundry and bought two bagels for breakfast at Marie’s Café next door. Some of the local customers directed him to a commercial rental place in Bloomfield.
By ten he was back at the dig. The tents tended to act as mini-greenhouses, so one could not really stay in bed too long; apparently Brenda had roused herself and joined the world. Her usual ponytail again tamed her red hair, and a retro Joan Baez t-shirt tugged at her breasts.
“What ya got?” she asked as she helped him unload the pipes and chain.
“It’s a tripod hoist, used to lift out car engines. And this is a brace bar, which we can use to hook under the sides of the rock and lift it. We’re going to lift up one edge and see what’s underneath.”
“Sweet. Just like Indiana Jones.” She winked at him.
“Yes, Indiana Jones. Archaeologist extraordinaire, treasure-hunter at heart, willing to destroy everything that gets in his way. That scene in the first movie still irritates me.”
“Which one?” she asked as they hauled the heavy pipes over to the dig.
“When he and the girl get trapped with the snakes in the underground room. They are surrounded by the finest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world, but to escape he destroys everything. It made for nice eye candy, but any archaeologist worth his salt would have died rather than do that.”
“I wasn’t even born when they made that movie,” she said. “But didn’t they need to stop the bad guys from using the Ark of the Covenant and save the world? Wasn’t that worth busting up a few artifacts?”
Harry felt old at her comment. He had first seen the movie as a young teenager. “I guess that the story demanded that he destroy everything,” he admitted. “But it still irritates me.”
Harry showed Brenda how to set up the hoist and secure it. They attached the hooks of the brace bar across the rock at one end so that they could open it like a lid. Harry made sure to fasten the bolts on the hooks as tightly as he could, then stood on the rock and set the hoist. He pulled up the slack on the hoist chain and, through the wonders of mechanical magic, worked the lever back and forth, using only his muscle power. The basalt rock twitched as it broke free of the surrounding dirt and slowly rose several inches into the air.
“Want to give it a try?” Harry asked.
Brenda was game and traded places with Harry on the rock in order to reach the hoist handle. “It moves so easily,” she said, slowly working the chain links through the hoist.
Harry peered under the rock. A space was opening up, but the sun was too bright to see anything in the cavity. “Can’t see a thing. We need a flashlight.”
Brenda stopped the hoist. “I’ll get one.” She scampered off the rock and raced to her tent.
Harry admired her enthusiasm, though he knew that there was probably nothing more than dirt or rocks in the cavity. He stepped onto the rock and worked the hoist to raise it a few more inches.
She returned and knelt down, shining the flashlight beneath the stone. “Ohmigod!” she exclaimed. “It’s stairs!”
“What?” Harry leaped down next to her.
Damned if she wasn’t right. There were stairs underneath the rock, made of smaller pieces of basalt, laid edgewise to their vantage point. The beam of the flashlight acted as a strobe, showing pockets of dirt on the stairs that must have drifted in over the years, particle by particle. A musty smell combined with the irritation of dust in his nostrils.
“This is extraordinary,” Brenda breathed. “This isn’t like the Chacoans at all.”
Harry grinned, feeling foolish and giddy. This is how Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered King Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Brenda threw her arms around him in her excitement. He hugged her back, happy to feel the warmth of her body.
“Let’s do this right,” he said. “We need the digital camera and recorder.”
Brenda narrated their find with the recorder, while Harry used the camera. He had room for hundreds of high resolution pictures on his memory card and the attached flash was fully charged. He started clicking away, documenting the hoist, stone lid, and what he could see so far, then worked the hoist until there was a good twelve inches of clearance.
“That’s far enough,” Brenda said. “I want to get inside.”
“Wait for me to brace it.”
He found a floor jack in his truck and placed it on the edge of the stairs, pumping it up to push firmly against the lid. He hoped that it would hold if the hoist failed.
Brenda dropped to her stomach and wiggled inside, her feet churning for purchase in the sand. Her butt disappeared and then her legs.
“There’s