The Girl of the Lake Page 5

  As Judith obeyed my father’s quiet authority, Claire read the self- guided tour booklet she’d found in the school library, paraphrasing for the rest of us: “This place was excavated around 1910. They just left all the original earthen mortar and mud plaster out in the rain to dissolve. The bricks have lasted—they were cut out of the local rock, which is volcanic. Um, later, the park service fixed everything up with cement. The kiva here was restored more recently. There would be an altar at one end and a hole in the floor at the other—an entrance to the underworld, the entrance that all souls, all animals and humans came through. The women kept them in repair. The men did all the worshipping.” She snapped the booklet closed, said, “Apparently, sexism was part of nature to them! Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, kivas were just pits for heathen men to conjure up destructive forces. They actually give me the heebie-jeebies.”

  My father grinned, gave me a wink. “Males can be quite stupid,” he said.

  “I’m all for religious tolerance,” Claire said.

  I didn’t quite get what was so funny about that but laughed heartily with the two of them. We continued past Tyuonyi, took a right on a path that brought us directly to the foot of the cliffs, where ground-level thatch-roofed dwellings had been reconstructed.

  “Very dark inside,” Father noted, never having been a fan of darkness.

  The path climbed upward, and then higher yet, and we looked into cavity after cave after excavation, beautiful little rooms—“cavates,” Claire’s booklet called them—higher and higher above the canyon floor, great views of the ruined village below, petroglyphs in zigzags, prints of ancient hands.

  “Cliff kiva,” Claire said, pointing above us, still reading. “Large room, small anterooms.”

  I left Father and Claire on the path, climbed a new ladder built authentically as the Ancestral Pueblo Peoples had built ladders, looked stupidly into a warren of rooms, seeing nothing as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. A thin stripe of hot sunlight lit the smooth rock floor. The ceiling was black with ancient soot. I wriggled inside as into the maw of the leviathan Claire and I had just read about in classics. Suddenly I heard a splashing sound. Startled, I stared.

  “Don’t look,” Antonia hissed. And that’s when I made her out, a dim figure squatting with tiny skirt hiked up and white underpants down, clearly peeing into a hole in the floor, peeing into the underworld from whence all life came, nothing untoward to see but those long legs shining, underpants practically glowing.

  “Sorry,” I said, and backed away, feet first right out the entrance and back down the shaky ladder.

  “Claire says that each kiva is thought to indicate a family group,” said Baba, skeptical.

  Antonia appeared at the top of the ladder with her skirt askew, climbed down: best not to look.

  “There you are, Toni,” Claire said.

  As a troupe we followed the path, looked into further evocative rooms, trying to imagine what had once gone on here, what the air in the place must have smelled like.

  Judith came running up from behind us, when I’d thought she was ahead.

  “I lived here in a past life,” she said, breathing passionately.

  “You were an insect,” Antonia said.

  Baba laughed at that.

  Antonia scowled, wheeled, trotted away from us.

  I followed, trying to be discreet, hurried after I made it around a corner and Father and Claire couldn’t see. Ahead, Antonia suddenly left the path and headed upward, climbing bare rock—easy handholds—even using the DANGER: NO CLIMBING sign for a step. Twenty feet up, she disappeared into the cliff face.

  Then her bright face appeared, high above. “Check this out,” she called.

  I hurried, climbed up as she had, looking back to see if Father were in view, and Claire. They were not. I followed Antonia into a big cavate, beautifully shaped, much more light than the earlier example, perfect round windows, hearth, small secondary rooms, heartening view across the valley.

  I said, “This must be the men’s restroom.”

  “Go ahead,” Antonia said sharply.

  “Don’t worry. I thought your peeing was funny. Just sort of, maybe, sacrilegious.”

  I hadn’t ever seen her smile before. “Just sort of, maybe yourself,” she said. “It’s totally religious. I’m an anointer. You’ll be anointed next if you don’t watch out. This place is so fucking boring.”

  “I like it,” I said.

  “What we need is a big fat joint.”

  “You take drugs?” I said.

  “WELL,” BABA SAID, “ALL this climbing about is making me hungry. Let me go prepare our picnic. You teens go on down into the canyon—it continues on a mile more—and let’s meet up back here in an hour or so. Twelve fifteen? Okay? Twelve thirty?”

  “Oh, I’ll help you,” said Claire.

  “Not necessary,” said my dad. “Not necessary at all.”

  But Claire insisted. She was alpha property all the way, and in this crowd Dad Hammad was number one. The beta male was to spend his time with the beta females.

  So Antonia and Judith and I set out on the diminishing trail through the extraordinary canyon, at first strolling three abreast, then Judith skipping far ahead, finally Antonia and I alone, shuffling under cliffs filled with yet more carved-out chambers, the ruins of ancient housing. In a slight meadow I spotted a mule deer buck, its antlers very like the plants it stood among, good camouflage. “Deer,” I said, pointing.

  “So what’s all this shit about braiding hair?” Antonia said, trying to pick the animal out of the background.

  “Just an interest,” I said. “Hair. My mother.”

  “My ass, your fucking mother. Claire’s never going to go out with you, dickwad.”

  “Well, no, I know . . . I mean, I didn’t ask her to go out. I have no interest, is what I’m trying to say. In going out with Claire.”

  “Never, never. You hear me? She will never go out with you.” She put a quick hand on my chest, said, “Let’s slow down here.”

  I knew from anatomy class exactly where my adrenal gland was and felt a squeeze there, just under her hand, as if in my heart (which is the confusion countless generations have suffered). We silently watched Judith skip around the shaded corner ahead and disappear.

  “A big fat joint,” Antonia said. And tugged me to her and gave me my first kiss, and then my second, and then instructions: “Open your mouth a little, pretty-boy.”

  Her tongue was a revelation, carefully compact, finding mine, probing my molars. She kept her eyes open, still looking for that mule deer over my shoulder.

  Quickly arose a virginal teen boy’s most profound embarrassment: the happy erection of nights and private musings arriving in the presence of company, arriving out there in the light of day under the cliffs of glowering ancients, pushing at my trousers, practically knocking, as at a locked door. And then more so, Antonia’s gripping hand, even as the kiss continued, even as her eyes continued to search for antlers. Embarrassment building toward disaster, I lost my reserve, pointed my tongue like hers, found her individual teeth, the ridged roof of her mouth, pressed her lips with mine. I had barely the nerve to put my hands on her back.

  Judith’s call in the nick of time was like a fire alarm, an extended shriek.

  Antonia and I unclenched in a millisecond—but the shriek hadn’t been about us. Judith wasn’t even in sight. The youngest Hesterly shrieked again. Adrenaline squirt upon adrenaline squirt, we kissers loped to catch up, I increasingly less hobbled with every step, but Antonia very much in the lead. I put on the afterburners and we made the corner together. Judith was arms wide like a statue in the middle of the path, and just beyond her—and I mean just a harrowing couple of feet—a large diamondback rattlesnake curled with head raised, ready to strike.

  “Back up slowly,” I shouted.

  But Antonia was more proactive. She picked up a large rock, barreled forward for the attack, her tiny skirt swishing about her businesslike fanny. S
he shoved Judith out of harm’s way with one hand, flung the rock with the other, a dust-raising thud unfortunately just behind the animal, which lunged toward her, clearly perceiving no other way to go. In hiking boots and bare legs, she kicked the creature even as it struck her boot, kicked again, and again, until the awful, innocent thing—fully six feet long—sidewound its way out of her purview.

  “Motherfucker,” Antonia said, breathing hard.

  Judith, having fallen in tall weeds that might have been hiding any kind of creature at all, shrieked again.

  I may very possibly have shrieked as well.

  AFTER SOME TREMULOUS DISCUSSION of the close call—Judith wanting to go back and find my father, Antonia not, I voting despite my better judgment with Antonia—the three of us continued on.

  “It’s an ancestor spirit,” Judith kept saying. And, “The snake is my spirit animal.”

  “You know nothing about that shit,” Antonia said. “It’s nothing but a snake. There are snakes around here. Get over it.”

  Ahead there was a path, I knew, one that would take us to the cliff face and then up almost vertically through rocks and crags to a series of reproduction ladders that led to a remarkable, fully intact kiva dug inside a cavate halfway up the cliff face, the best and most complete of all the kivas on the site.

  I told the girls about it.

  “How big can this thing be?” Antonia said.

  “Yeah,” Judith said accusingly.

  “It’s not big,” I told them. I’d been up there with Baba, and just the two of us fit inside. We’d taken the occasion to breathe together, as he would say, something on the order of meditation, not quite prayer. I’d found it unsettling: the kiva had been built for different lives altogether.

  “Then, okay, if there’s only room for two, you better go up with Ju-ju, and then come back and you and me can go up.”

  “I’m not waiting down here alone,” Judith said.

  “We can all go up,” I said.

  “Judith’s afraid to be alone, and you’re afraid to be alone with me,” Antonia said.

  “Let’s put fear behind and climb,” I said, consciously sounding like Baba.

  Up at the kiva I descended first, making my way through the little opening in the roof (authentically re-created by the park service out of loosely plaited pine branches and cornstalks) and down the ladder, which was nothing more than a pegged pole. Plenty of light penetrated the thatch.

  “No snakes,” I called, sitting.

  Judith came down then. She sat with her back to me.

  “Okay, I will have a French braid,” she said. She was very different from Antonia and from Claire, now that I looked at her. Her hair was lighter, finer. She smelled like baby powder. She held her shoulders high, always perfect posture. She was skinny, but she was no little kid.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay what?”

  “You can braid my hair. A snake braid. Do you know it?”

  “I don’t. I don’t think I know any braids, not really. And, anyway, we need a comb.”

  “Just use your hands,” she said, shoulders square. “The snake will guide you.”

  I tried not to scoff but put my hands in her hair, pulled it back, tried to remember the book instructions, divided the shockingly soft locks into three parcels, pushed one aside (that long, delicate neck), got to work braiding. When I was done she felt the braid all over with both hands, turned and smiled for me. She said, “Claire says you’re a loser, but I don’t think so.” And then she fell into me, threw her hands around my neck, tucked her head on my chest, pulled herself up into my lap where she curled up like a puppy and bit me on my left pectoral muscle with her strong teeth, like biting my heart. The effect on me was profound, not exactly sexual, a first experience of caring, I would say now, a rush of feeling, a commotion.

  Suddenly the kiva entrance darkened, and Antonia’s face was above us. “Perverts,” she said calmly.

  “Ta-ha,” Judith said.

  “It’s time to get back,” Antonia said. “I’m fucking starving.”

  JUDITH AND ANTONIA AND I made it back to the circle village considerably more than one hour after we’d left, but there on a blanket was one of Baba’s wonderful meals, dozens of small plates of dishes, exotic and familiar. There also was Baba, sitting peaceably, rapt in serious discussion with Claire, whom, I felt, I’d just seriously betrayed in advance. Antonia turned up her nose at the victuals, gave her big sister a hostile look, wandered off unfed, kicking rocks.

  “We saw a rattlesnake,” Judith said. “It almost got me!”

  “Antonia chased it off,” I said.

  Baba looked alarmed.

  “Snakes are a valuable part of the ecosystem,” Claire said. And she turned to me, a distinct change in her voice—something more possessive—said, “Let’s you and I go up there after lunch.”

  “He’ll do your hair,” Judith said.

  Claire’s look lingered. I recalled my mother saying I was a very beautiful boy, something I hated. And the girls at school called me cute or pretty, or even worse, sweet, or lovely, always feminizing the beta! Claire herself had once said my eyes were so dark it looked like I was wearing makeup. But she would never call anyone a loser—that was Judith’s word. And of course Claire would go out with me—and soon. Antonia just wanted to mess her up as she messed up everything, including puking on the school bus once, some kind of green alcohol.

  Judith picked up her charcoal-baked bread with wonderment, played at using it to pinch up bites of cucumber yogurt. I avoided Baba’s eye. I avoided Claire’s. There was nothing innocent about her sister’s fancy braid.

  “Antonia never eats,” Claire said, holding her napkin with aplomb. I felt the adrenal squeeze once again, my mouth go dry: all sorts of physiology, all unbidden. My stomach dropped. I was no longer hungry. I had in addition a strong case of what one of my human ecology books called epididymal edema, something I’d never before experienced, exquisite pain in my balls, which if they weren’t blue might as well have been.

  “Your father and I counted two hundred forty rooms,” Claire said.

  “And that of course was simply the ground floor of the original,” said Baba.

  “There are more dwellings all the way down along the cliffs,” I said.

  “What a paradise this must have been,” said Claire hotly. “Your Baba and I have been trying to map out the agriculture.”

  Judith played with her braid, seemed to see visions in the food, which she shuffled into arrangements before shuttling it to her mouth. Claire made a kind of sandwich. My father ate one item at a time making a perfect circuit of the dishes clockwise. I worked counterclockwise, though he didn’t seem to notice. Anyway, we ate the lovely meal. Afterward Dad pulled his ornate box of dominoes from the basket and showed them to Judith, who was delighted, captured. The old man set up a children’s version of the game, one I remembered well: only two could play.

  Antonia had disappeared altogether. “She’ll be in the car,” Claire said. “She’s always in the car.”

  BIG SISTER HESTERLY AND I walked side by side down the wide path into the throat of Frijoles Canyon. I pointed to the petroglyphs her sisters and I had spotted earlier, pointed out the deer still in its place, now with two females, showed her the spot the snake had stopped Judith.

  “I’m so sad about your mother,” Claire said out of nowhere. “So very sad. Your dad told me more about her. I didn’t know she’d chopped her hair. Do you remember that? Was that the first indication?”

  Yes it was. “I feel ugly,” I said, not really meaning to.

  “No,” she said. “You are honestly the most, most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen. And such nice skin.”

  “Not that looks mean much,” I said.

  “They mean nothing,” Claire said, someone who could afford the sentiment.

  We walked in silence to the path that led to the ladders up the cliff and to the intact kiva, climbed silently, she first, a revelation
of musculature above me.

  In the kiva we sat side by side. I endeavored to take her hand.

  “I’m a very loyal person,” she said. “I can’t betray the Brick.”

  “I know.”

  “You were nice to walk with my sisters. They are both nuts, you know.”

  “I like them.”

  “I have a new bra,” she said.

  Punch to the chest. And this time it really was my heart. I mean, it’s not all physiology.

  Claire pulled her shirt up to show me. The bra did look new. It was blue and very plain, and her living breasts were cosseted there. She pulled the shirt back down. We were very close together.

  “Antonia kissed me,” I said.

  “As I said: nuts.”

  “And Judith bit my chest.” I pulled my own shirt up, showed her the tooth marks.

  “I shouldn’t have let you alone with them.”

  I pulled my shirt back down. “As I said.”

  “You like them.” She moved subtly closer to me. The light dimmed, perhaps a cloud above, or the sun leaving the canyon. Her kiss was of a different order than Antonia’s, more stately, less impulsive, cautious almost, a little dry, no great hunger: she wasn’t going to bite me. “There,” she said.

  “More,” I said.

  “My family will move away soon,” she said. “We always move away.”

  “I’ll find you,” I said.

  “You may hate us by then,” she said.

  “Listen, Claire, we know all about your father and his investigation.”

  Long silence. “He’d say he’s only doing his job.” She kissed me again. “He’s heinous,” she said. “Even he admits it: your father’s done nothing wrong.”

  We kept kissing, me somehow without the urge to take it further despite my new sense of the possibilities, despite the blueness of her bra, despite the increasingly unbearable pressure inside my scrotum.

  “Brick just jams his fingers in me,” Claire murmured.

  “He should respect you,” I said.

  “He respects me. It’s just that he never lingers anywhere,” she said.

  I lingered at her lips—no idea what else to do.

  “He’s never kissed me this long, not once.”