Читать книгу Arches Enemy - Scott Graham - Страница 19

8

Two months ago in Durango, over pints at Steamworks, Janelle’s kid brother Clarence had posed a series of questions to Chuck concerning the Arches contract.

Clarence had followed Janelle to southwest Colorado a year earlier from Albuquerque. A graduate of the University of New Mexico School of Anthropology, Clarence tended bar at Steamworks between stints with Bender Archaeological and other contract archaeology firms in the region, making use of his degree when Chuck or other area companies needed an extra hand on a dig or site survey.

Tourists and locals alike flocked to Steamworks, Durango’s largest brewpub, housed in a 1920s-era former automobile showroom a block off Main Avenue. Chalk drawings by children covered the polished concrete floor. Muted televisions aired basketball and football games from walls shorn of plaster to reveal the building’s brick walls and ornate iron-lattice framework. Stainless steel air ducts webbed the high ceiling.

At twenty-eight, Clarence was three years younger than Janelle. He wore a checked flannel shirt over his sizable belly. His shoulder-length black hair, as lustrous as Janelle’s, was tucked behind his ears, revealing large silver studs glittering in both lobes. Deep laugh lines cupped his mouth, enhancing his bright white teeth. His brown eyes glittered almost constantly with mischief.

“I don’t trust it,” Clarence said to Chuck, his tone unusually serious. “This guy Sanford you’re telling me about, he’s in too much of a hurry.”

“He says he doesn’t have any choice,” Chuck replied. He took a swallow of his beer. The hazy wheat lager left a tart aftertaste at the back of his throat as he continued. “The Utah legislature convenes in January. The national monuments will be the first thing on the agenda.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with your contract at this secret site you’re so fired up about.”

“A coalition of tribes first proposed the monuments in southern Utah. They wanted to protect the sacred lands of their ancestors from bulldozing and drilling. But as soon as the feds created the monuments, Utah’s politicians pushed back, hard, on behalf of their Big Oil masters. They got the size of the monuments reduced by ninety percent. Now they’re talking about wiping out the monuments entirely. They care a lot more about easy oil money than they do about preserving the tribes’ ancestral lands.”

Clarence aimed a thumb at his face. “Digame, jefe. I already know a lot of them politician types got a problem with me ’cause of my brown skin and my inmigrante parents. It’s the same with them Indian folks, huh?”

“Well, the ‘Indian folks’—” Chuck made air quotes with his fingers “—sure as hell aren’t immigrants. But as long as there’s money to be made keeping them in their place, politicians will be willing to do it.”

“Keepin’ ’em down on the rez.”

Chuck took another sip from his pint and plopped it on the scarred wooden tabletop with a foam-raising thud. “Under thumb and under gun, as the tribes have been saying, ever since the white man showed up out here in the West a hundred and fifty years ago. Which is why, right after the monuments were created, Utah’s politicians had no problem getting the monument borders cut back to practically nothing, indigenous peoples be damned.”

Clarence tipped his glass on its cardboard coaster in front of him. Bubbles streamed from the bottom of the tumbler in curling lines. He straightened the pint and studied Chuck across the top of it. “And now, you’re saying this discovery in Arches could reverse that?”

“It’s a long shot, but yes, that’s Sanford’s idea. The tribes and environmentalists have been working together to get the monuments returned to their original size. Petitions, court cases, protest marches—nothing has worked. Then, a few weeks ago, a twelve-year-old girl from New York wandered off the trail in Devil’s Garden and, boom, Sanford saw opportunity knocking.”

Clarence plucked an unshelled peanut from a wicker basket on the table. He’d filled the basket from a large wooden barrel of the unshelled nuts at the back of the restaurant. The peanuts were offered free by the brewpub to all its patrons. Clarence had worked his way through the basket since returning to the table, cracking open the nuts and dropping the empty shells on the floor beside him.

“That may be all well and good for him, Chuck, but I gotta be honest—this contract doesn’t sound like you,” Clarence said, opening the shell and tossing the nuts into his mouth. “You always keep your head down. You work your digs and come home to Durango and write up your reports. Then you bid for your next contract and repeat the process, nice and quiet and steady. This thing’s different, though. All the secrecy with this discovery you’re talking about—I mean, it has politics written all over it. It could blow up in your face, big time.”

A boy of about six walked toward them, a basket of peanuts held chin-high before him in both hands, returning from the barrel in the back of the brewpub. As the youngster passed, Clarence plucked one of the unshelled nuts from the upraised basket.

“Hey!” The boy turned to face Clarence. His head barely reached the bar-height table at which Clarence and Chuck sat.

Clarence stuck the pilfered nut behind his ear. Leaning forward from his tall chair, he peered imperiously down at the youngster and held out his empty hands. “Hey what?”

The boy stared at the peanut, plainly visible between the top of Clarence’s ear and his head. “Give it back.”

Clarence plucked two peanuts from his basket on the table and dropped them on top of the pile of nuts in the boy’s basket. “Two for one. How’s that?”

The youngster looked with wide eyes from the newly added nuts to Clarence. “Um, okay, I guess.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Sounds like we got us a deal, then,” Clarence told him. “You’re good now.” He shooed the boy away with both hands. “You can skedaddle. Vamoose. Sayonara. Adiós.”

Chuck grinned and shook his head at Clarence as the boy returned to his family’s table. “I’m supposed to take advice from the likes of you?”

Clarence reached over his shoulder and patted himself on the back. “I’m your counselor of all counselors, primo.” He pulled the stolen peanut from behind his ear, cracked it open, and offered Chuck the nuts inside.

Chuck waved them off and attempted to get the conversation back on track. “The political stuff is for Sanford to deal with,” he said. “I’ll just be doing the grunt work. It’s a simple one-man contract. Two weeks, tops.”

“I dunno,” Clarence countered. “Sounds like this one could turn out to be a real headache for you. Seems it could cost you down the line—it could cost your bottom line—is all I’m saying.”

Chuck spread his hands on either side of his glass. “I’ve been doing this kind of work for a lot of years, Clarence. Most of my contracts have had ancestral findings associated with them in one way or another, which means I’ve been making the bulk of my living for more than twenty years digging up and cataloguing all the stuff left behind by the ancient ones who lived all around here a thousand years ago. Now, finally, I have the chance to offer a little payback to them and to their modern-day descendants.” He turned his palms up. “So that’s what I’m going to do.”

Clarence popped the stolen nuts in his mouth and raised his pint to Chuck. “Respect, man,” he said. He chewed and swallowed. “That’s why I call you jefe, jefe. ’Cause you’re da boss.”

Chuck considered Clarence’s warning as he watched Sanford slog back up the muddy trail from the Devil’s Garden parking lot.

The chief ranger disappeared between the low walls of sandstone flanking the sides of the trail fifty yards north of the trailhead, returning to the collapsed arch.

Chuck sighed and said to Janelle beside him, “I guess it’s time.”

Taking out his phone, he dialed Sheila’s number. Since moving from Los Angeles to Moab six months ago and reestablishing contact with Chuck after years of silence, Sheila had answered a number of his calls. This morning, however, he reached her voicemail.

A few bars of classical harp music played. The music died away and Sheila’s voice, soft and muted like the music that preceded it, invited “all seekers of truly enlightened energy” to describe to her their “desires for fulfillment, whether personal, emotional, or—” her tone grew husky “—physical.”

Chuck gulped. Sanford’s familiarity with Sheila’s “enlightened energy” voicemail pitch meant that since arriving in Moab in the spring, her marketing efforts had reached all the way to park headquarters.

Her voice fell to a whisper as she ended her recorded message with the promise to provide “complete satisfaction” to all those who reached out to her.

“It’s me,” Chuck said when the message ended. “Chuck. We’re all settled at Devil’s Garden.” No need to mention that they’d been settled in the park for three days now. “I’ve got a break in my work schedule and wanted to see if today might be a good time for us to swing by and say hello.”

He ended the call and drummed his phone against his leg. Why hadn’t she answered? Did she really know the woman crushed beneath the arch, as Sanford had indicated?

“Okay, the wheels are in motion,” he said to Janelle.

She eyed his phone as he tapped it against his thigh. “You’re nervous.”

He returned his phone to his pocket. “I should be. It’s been a long time.”

“Which is all her fault, you say.”

“All those years, she never called. She wouldn’t return my calls, either. She wanted to be forgotten after she moved to California, and she wanted to forget me, too, as near as I could tell.”

“Until she came to Moab, just a couple hours’ drive from Durango …”

“… and all of a sudden she decided to pick up the phone and dial my number. That was the first chance I’d had to tell her about you and the girls.”

“She’s been in touch pretty regularly since.”

“Almost every week,” Chuck agreed. “She’s been asking me all sorts of questions about you and Carm and Rosie the last few months—which is what makes me nervous about your meeting her.”

“The girls and I will be fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“She has this way about her.”

“Which you’ve brought up, what, a million times now?”

“She uses people. She used me.” Chuck blinked, angered at the tears welling suddenly in his eyes. He was a grown man, for Christ’s sake, in his mid-forties.

Janelle gave his arm a squeeze. “I get it,” she said gently. “She had responsibilities to you as your mother that you don’t feel she kept.”

“She didn’t keep them.”

“I know what you’ve told me, Chuck. She drank, she partied, she slept around. I get that she was troubled. But you’ve said she always kept a roof over your head.”

“Depends on what you call a roof. A boyfriend’s dumpy apartment, a crappy motel room, a falling-down trailer.”

Janelle’s lips curled upward. “You’ve got us living in a trailer right now ourselves.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“I was a single mom, too.”

He pulled her close. “I know that,” he said in her ear, his lips to her hair. He leaned back, his hands at her waist. “But you stood by your girls. When they came along, you made them the center of your world. You were, you are, the best mom Carm and Rosie could ever have asked for. Sheila, on the other hand, barely acknowledged my existence the whole time I was growing up. She made it clear I was a mistake, like I was some sort of penalty she was paying. She never beat me, I’ll grant her that. But that’s about the best I can say for her.”

“People can change, Chuck.”

“You were a good mom from day one, and you’ve stayed a good mom.”

“I’m not talking about me.”

“I know.”

“It’s been five years since you saw her last, right? I remember you telling me she came through Durango the year before you and I met.”

“She called out of the blue, looking for a place to stay. I happened to be in town between contracts.”

“You told me you got her a motel room.”

“If I had let her stay with me, she’d probably still be there on my couch.”

Janelle smiled as she looked up at him. “At least, if that was the case, the girls and I would have gotten to know her long before now.”

Chuck tightened his grip on Janelle’s waist and rocked her back and forth. “I admit it sounds like she may finally be getting her act together. And I know it’s time you met her.”

“I guess we can thank Sanford for making it happen.”

He dropped his hands from her sides. “Speaking of whom, I’d like to go check on the site, seeing’s how we’ve got a little time since Sheila didn’t answer.”

Janelle’s dark brows drew together. “You honestly think the collapsed arch and your contract might be related somehow?”

“I just want to make sure everything’s okay. It’ll take less than an hour. The girls will be fine.”

“That’s what you said earlier.”

“They’ve got the cat now. They won’t go anywhere till we get back.”

Janelle glanced toward the trailer. “Less than an hour?”

“Forty-five minutes. I promise.”

She rolled her eyes. “You and your promises.”

Chuck and Janelle paused where the path branched at the start of the loop. Boot marks pocked the muddy left fork between lines of plants flattened by the front-end loader. Chuck turned right, away from the collapsed arch, leading Janelle along the saturated path on a winding route across the open desert.

He pointed out a thick black mat covering an expanse of ground. “That’s why I gave Sanford the look I did when he let the backhoe drive to the arch.”

“What is that stuff?” Janelle asked, inspecting the knobby substance. “It looks like the ugliest hunk of shag carpeting I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s called biological soil crust. It takes years to recover when someone steps on it—or drives a front-end loader across it—because it’s alive. It’s not really soil at all.”

“What is it, then?”