By Lisa Polisar
 

 Mendoza Ruiz lagged behind me a few paces.  His footsteps dredged through the hot sand and brush like a tired shadow.  We were walking out to one of the sites together.  The weather had been what ranchers call dusty-hot for the past week.  In my periphery I could see my former assistant exiting her trailer, sand blowing in her face.  I turned to acknowledge her, and so did Mr. Ruiz.  She ran toward us and then stopped. 
 "Rowe, don't forget the scientists from Tucson," she yelled to me.  "They'll be here on the 15th.  A list of what you need to have ready is on your desk." 
 Mr. Ruiz looked confused.  "We'll be having chaperones soon," I translated in a mocking tone.  "Anything else?" I yelled. 
 Without an answer, she disappeared into the trailer.
   One of the sites I wanted to show him had been found by accident a mile's walk from our camp.  From his shadow, I saw Mr. Ruiz pull a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his brow.  "Who was that?" he yelled back in a disinterested voice.
 But I knew better.  Men had always been drawn to Farren.  Native New Mexicans called people like her "coyotes," meaning half-Anglo, half-Chicano.  She had the face of a stone fox, with a light tawny pigment.  And working outdoors for eight years hadn't done a day's damage to her flawless complexion.  I hated her for that.  This feature combined with a soft-petal voice and slight build made her irresistible to men.  Problems arose when we ventured out on long digs.  My crew had traveled south to Animas for a three month dig once, to catalogue some ruins excavated by another crew.  Farren and I were the only women in the company of four men.  Each day the tension grew. 
 Ruiz was still looking in her direction.  "Her name is Farren," I said, allowing a look to settle into my face.  "She was my assistant.  Until I fired her."  The first time we met, I knew Ruiz to be a man of purpose.  The kind of man who fails to attend to things like untied shoelaces or a runny nose, but who will drive a friend home thirty miles out of his way.  Hair grew on his head like weeds through cement -- here and there in unpredictable patterns.  He had been handsome once; he showed me an old picture of himself with his wife that he kept in his wallet.  Nicely proportioned, strong Spanish features beneath a lush swarm of black hair, ornamented oddly by a thin, orderly mustache.  This feature he still had.  In his face I saw imbalance -- his eyes held a childlike honesty, yet on his mouth a permanent convoluted expression of mistrust.  "Whatdayawant?" it seemed to ask with gritted teeth. 
 "I heard you need an assistant," he said barging through the door of my trailer once, after I'd worked a ten-hour shift.  His breath smelled of tobacco.  A girl's trailer, he'd thought to himself, eyeballing the decor.  I could tell.  Most anthropology offices fell somewhere between a neglected basement and a bear's den.  I had taken the time to hang skulls and artifacts on the walls, and on shelves set in the corners.  A framed photograph of Louis Leakey holding an Australopithecus skull sat on a ledge over my bed.  The rest of it, gingham curtains and formica, held as much charm as a truck stop bathroom. 
 "You want to work for me?" I asked him, incredulous.  He stared back with the disdain one has toward a woman who cheats on her disabled husband.  He nodded finally, lowering his eyes to inspect my chest. 
 There has to be something good about this man, my conscience told me.  On his first day of work, he arrived thirty minutes early and paced outside my door until I let him in.  "You understand there's not much money in the budget.  I can offer you exactly what I make myself.  Eight dollars an hour, no benefits."
 Mr. Ruiz, head bent down and looking at his hands, thought this over in a moment of tense silence.  "I am alone," he admitted.  "I do not need medical insurance.  I never get sick and I am dependable." 
 I had no trouble believing him. 
 When I asked about his background, he said nothing at first.  He seemed to comprehend my words, but was deciding how much to tell me.  "My parents died during a hurricane in 1950.  I was ten.  We had a small family farm in a village called Madera, south of Chihuahua, and I had to take care of my four brothers and sisters.  The youngest one died the first year."
 Listening to this, I had no feeling in my lower body.  He seemed to access this information with laser clarity, but from fifty miles away.  I noted his facial expression hadn't changed since the first day I met him.  I motioned for him to continue.
 "To this day my village has no plumbing or electricity.  My three brothers still live there.  In 1975 I met an American woman who was on vacation in Mexico -- we got married, and I ended up in Roswell."
 I fidgeted in my seat, dying from discomfort after just ten minutes.  I noticed he'd said "I" instead of "we".  The genuineness of his words made me feel uncomfortable, or somehow, fortunate.  I knew, though, that I hadn't had it so easy.  For twelve years I haven't been able to get the sand out from under my fingernails.  My hands look twenty years older than the rest of me, with the exception of my grooved, leathery face.  The grittiness I sensed from him was only part of it, though.  There was another part, I felt, that I hadn't yet been acquainted with.  While he kept on talking, I wondered.  Can he take direction from a woman?  A younger woman? 
 "Taos is a long way from Roswell." I commented. 
 He looked away at first.  "I saw your ad," he confessed with a slightly reddened face.  "I," he cleared his throat, "had a sense that I should come up here to work with you on this dig.  I cannot describe it any better than that."
 The site was a ninety-minute drive southwest of Taos.  I drove with Ruiz in my 1981 station wagon, back-filled with notebooks, tools, and plastic ziplock bags of potsherds which slid and shuffled around at every sharp turn.  This noise irritated Ruiz -- I had gotten used to it.  I told him about the plan.  Stay in camp for a week and go to one of the motels in town on the weekends.  He nodded.  Then I told him about the rules.  No drugs or alcohol in camp.  No sex between members of the crew.  The importance of this rule, I stressed, outweighed the alcohol rule ten to one.  He nodded again, probably thought of Farren.  Damn her!  It wasn't jealousy on my part, either.  I'd been married twice, and as a young woman never had trouble getting dates.  I knew ten years ago I passed over the word pretty, but I had a quality that at least some men found desirable.  I still fit into the same jeans I wore in college, and being childless had preserved some of my body's defense against gravity.  But Farren's unassuming, natural beauty brought a primal, disturbing and sometimes destructive element to my field work.  Being a woman, she of course could not be held blameless.  But in general, she cared as much about this as she did a hangnail.
 During the three weeks that my Field Worker ad appeared in the newspaper, I received letters from sixty applicants.  From that list, and besides Mr. Ruiz, I chose four men.  This gender disparity turned out to be just the boost my ego needed after three years with Farren.  Three of the other four men I hired were archaeology professors from various schools in the southwest who wanted to get their hands dirty.  When I asked about their field experience, they all lied.  "I mean other than your childhood sandbox," I said.  This loosened them up a little.  The fourth man was to be my crew/site supervisor.  Gerald.  I knew him and trusted him because he'd worked with me on sixteen excavations, and would do just fine watching over the others, being academics and all. 
 
 

 The others would be meeting Ruiz and I at a diner eight miles from the site.  Ruiz stayed quiet for most of the ride.  I tried to bait him out of silence by constantly changing the radio stations and sometimes driving on the wrong side of the road.  He said nothing until I pulled into the diner parking lot. 
 "May I ask what is our primary purpose?" 
 I snickered; couldn't help it.  And I knew immediately that this was a bad move on my part.  I lightly touched his hand and said, "I thought you'd never ask."  He smiled back with the left side of his mouth.  I glanced at my watch -- 4:40 p.m.  The afternoon sun hung low in the sky masked by a closet of gray clouds.  I put my hand to my forehead.  "Even in September it's still hot," I said. 
 "What's the altitude up here?" he asked me settling into a more comfortable position in the passenger seat, realizing the others weren't here yet. 
 "I don't know for sure.  Albuquerque's about 5500, Santa Fe's about 7000 and we're even higher than that I think.  I came up here last weekend to set up the tents and bring in some supplies.  There's even a portable bathroom," I said and grinned.  I knew this feature would be the last thing on his mind.  "We have two purposes here, Mr. Ruiz."  I made sure to address him properly every time.  I could tell by his accent and lack of contractions that, deep down, he felt alien to the English language.  He spoke each word with the care and competence of a British literature professor.
 He looked at me square in the face now.  Finally, some response.
 "Beneath all the tarps at this particular site are three months worth of work overseen by me during an excavation last Spring.  Because of the rough weather, who knows if we'll find any of what we recovered, but everything needs to be documented and catalogued."
 "Why wasn't that done by the crew before?" Ruiz asked with no emotion in his voice.
 It was an intelligent question.  "We discovered the site last May," I replied.
 He blinked, paused, and nodded his head.  "Before the monsoons," he mumbled.
 "Yes.  This whole area could have been one big mud puddle for all I know.  Every day, I pray that our work here wasn't for nothing."
 By 4:55, another car pulled into the parking lot, jam-packed with three adult men and piles of papers, sleeping bags, pillows, etc.  Our crew.  Before Ruiz and I exited the car to greet them, he grasped my arm and said, "I've been having dreams lately, about very old women." 
 I just stared at him, frightened somewhat by what I saw in him up close.  "Dreams?  Yeah, I have them all the time out here." 
 Then, again, silence.  "What is our second purpose?" he asked, sort of disappointed.
 "While the others dig up the artifacts, you and I will do some observing of pottery techniques at a pueblo ten miles north.  We'll be staying there with the residents; I've made all the arrangements.  We can leave as soon as the others are settled."
 
 

 Everything happened the way I hoped it wouldn't.  Only half of what we uncovered appeared to be at the site now.  The crew salvaged most of the larger polychrome shards, but they weren't anywhere near where I found them last Spring --   as though some god raised the entire burial site and dropped it two miles east.  The artifacts we found at our previous site were later pieces native to a pueblo not far from here.  According to what I'd read about them in textbooks, red and black designs were painted from home-made botanical dyes, made from plants and berries, in large shapes like claws and triangles on top of triangles.  Ruiz and I didn't let on to the others about our plan.  I told them we were heading back for additional tools and supplies, and that we'd return in two days. 
 I, too, began to have strange dreams, starting the first night we spent at the pueblo.  The elder of the community, a tiny hunched-over man named Ray, greeted us at the church and told us to leave our tools and cameras behind in our vehicle.  Everything else we needed for overnight could be carried in.  He set us up in quarters the size of a large bathroom, with two doors.  The old man said if it was dark out, the outhouse could be found exactly twenty paces north from the back entrance.
 As Mendoza Ruiz lay in the bed next to mine staring at the ceiling, I thought about Farren, and her disdain for the paleontologists who would be observing our cataloguing techniques in October.  She had objected strenuously to their presence.  This observation on their part, or impression as it was called, was largely dependent on my grant money for the next five years. 
 "Good-night, Rowena," he said just before turning over. 
 God, I thought.  No one's called me that since puberty.  "G'night," I replied.
 I dreamt that night of an old woman and a young woman.  The younger one, a painter, sat on a weathered, old pine bench.  She was painting a portrait of the elder  woman, who sat on the floor against a kiva with her legs folded in front of her.  And with every delicate stroke of the young woman's paintbrush, the old woman came closer and closer to death.  Each stroke drained color from her cheeks, and her clothing, her breathing became shallow; and by the time the painter had finished, the old woman slumped down on the hard, sandy floor.  The painter had painted the life right out of her!  I woke up sweaty and panting. 
 Ruiz rolled over in the bed next to mine, and looked over at me with wide eyes.   "Dreams," he said with knowing emphasis.
 "Yes.  Dreams," I replied and held on to the bed frame until the room stopped moving. 
 That morning I woke up before dawn, unsettled from the hard bed and unresolved from my night of terror.  How could someone dream such a thing?  I remembered Ruiz telling me, nearly one week ago, that he too had dreamt of very old women.  What is this place?  I wondered. 
 We were allowed to eat our meals with Ray, the hunched over man who greeted us, along with his two middle-aged daughters.  None of them uttered a word during breakfast -- wasn't the custom.  I saw Ruiz appraising the women, scoping out some spec of femininity to match the ancient stereotypes in his head.  After a meal of eggs, fruit, coffee and fry bread, Ray took us to the hut of two sisters, who he introduced as Agnes and Irma. 
 Their house was at the top of a rounded incline.  Ruiz and I stood gazing at the warm, September expanse.  When the heavy winds ebbed for a moment, I could hear the subtle murmur of a creek somewhere close to where we stood, seemingly right beneath us.
Just outside of their dwelling hung a delicate string of metallic chimes.  When I heard their jingle, I felt a tightness in my stomach dissolve.  One of the sisters sat on a hand-loomed rug on the floor, her face hidden but for the shadow of her nose -- the other sister on a bench in the corner of the room.  I gasped.  As I looked at it, I felt something buzz in my spine.  It was the same bench used by the artist in my dream!  I felt suddenly tipsy, and reached out for Ruiz.  Although strangers still, I sensed something solid and comforting about his quiet presence.  When our hands touched, his iron grip steadied me.  He seemed to know my thoughts.  One of the women saw this display and looked up with a kind face.  The two of them painted together but separate, disconnected by a thick adobe half-wall bisecting the center of the room.  A window whose sill had been painted a dull blue to match the old lady's bench provided a view of the Ortega mountains to the east, and the Sangre de Cristos north of them.  Another larger window opened into a green field of soft sage.
 The old man stood behind us, waiting for us to settle into the chairs he'd placed in the back corner of the room.  We were to be the quiet observers of this ancient artisan's ritual -- the decorating of pots.  I could hardly contain my excitement as I watched their brushes nibble at the rough enamel; a practice which traced back well beyond the Anasazi, who had been the subject of my research for the past twelve years. 
 "Agnes?" Ray said in slow English with a hand on the taller woman's shoulder.  Like a turtle peeking out of its shell, she turned toward him and looked up.  "These are the people I told you about.  They will be watching you and Irma paint."
 "Yes," the woman smiled, producing white teeth straight as aluminum siding.  One of the top ones was missing.  "This is my twin sister, Irma," she said directly to me, pointing to the other woman who didn't look up.  "She cannot hear or talk," she added, still smiling. 
 Ruiz and I looked at each other thinking the same thing.  These people spoke like residents of a nursing home, but I knew their pace had nothing to do with age.  Their minds were not slower than ours, but their lives were.  We noticed a patience, purpose and mindfulness to everything here, even to the way Ray and his two daughters ate a breakfast of eggs and toast.  In my work, I had come across this quality in other native, aboriginal cultures around the world.  Not only did I admire this particular slow-moving trait, but I had, from time to time, tried to adopt a similar way of life.  I spent the entire month of December, one year, practicing walking and talking slower than usual.  The consensus among my peers was that I had been taking drugs. 
 The bland colors of the floor and walls and ceiling seemed to have come alive within the last few minutes.  I resisted the urge to take out a notebook and jot down notes.  Every detail about their presence seemed long to me.  Their combed, wiry hair, clothing, hands, feet and faces.  I let my eyes peruse the objects in the room.  I saw pots everywhere, of every conceivable shape and size.  The largest ones, set in the corners, were of a standard mold, painted white in the background and ornamented by large, geometric shapes of red, black and gray.  Hanging from a nail on the wall were a string of five autumn corn husks, individually tied.  Above that sat a foot-long shelf made from tiny round wood logs and covered with a woven rug hanging off the ends, topped with a ceramic pot.  The skull of some animal hung on the wall behind the mute sister, along with an Indian rattle and folded, wool rug.  This array of touristy artifacts did not fit my preconceived image of a Native American dwelling.  They seemed fashioned to the merchandise I'd seen sold at trading posts in the southwest.
 I could hear Ruiz next to me scribbling something onto his notepad.  Something burned from a stick in the corner of the room.  Not tobacco, but something woody, perhaps, incense.  It made me think of my grandparents' woodstove in Vermont. 
 I rose from my hard wood seat and sat on the floor now, in perfect view of both artists.  And what I saw when I fixed my eyes on the movement of their long brushes brought about a chilling tingle in the base of my spine.  They appeared to scratch the surface of their enamel pots in complete synchronicity.  Not just a similarity, but the very same movements queued telepathically from one sister to the other, with a two or three second delay.  I watched some more, aware of the unlikelihood of my hypothesis.  How could this be?  After ten more minutes I placed my palm over Ruiz's scribbling hand to alert him to my discovery.  He stopped moving and turned toward me. 
 "Look!" I hissed in a harsh whisper.  Neither of the women looked up.  I fought the urge to get up and stand close to their pots.  I wanted to touch the surface, feel the sensation of wet paint on my fingers, the smell of vegetable dye, linseed oil and glue.  Ruiz had a puzzled look on his face.  I leaned to him and whispered.  "They're painting the same thing."
 He looked up to make his own observation.  "So," he said, waiting for my answer. 
 "Watch," I commanded.  "Watch their hands." 
 He did this, for some time, too, because he didn't say a word for fifteen minutes. 
 "Now look at how they're holding their pots; look at the design on the back and on the sides."
 He was with me now.  I could feel the cumulative sum of both our excitement and terror flood the room.  Agnes, without moving her head, raised her gaze to look at me, and then lowered it again.  This gesture of suspicion on her part alerted me to an odd, occultish vibe I'd felt all along but couldn't put into words.  While they painted in slow, metronomic strokes across the gritty terracotta of their ritual pots, I memorized every single design.  They could feel what we felt, I was sure.
 "Our spirits tell us that Irma and I share a common brain," Agnes offered, glancing up at me again.
 "Were you attached at birth?" I asked stupidly and then hid my eyes from them.  Idiot, I thought.  I knew better than that.  I had learned a long time ago to expect the unexpected, and to accept that which conflicts with  modern definitions of reason.  Luckily Agnes ignored the question.
 Ruiz and I slept on the hard slatted beds again in the hut adjacent to the old man's living quarters.  We ate with him and his daughters in silence, and after dinner Ruiz and I sat on the edges of our beds with our feet on the floor, almost touching.  When we first arrived here, I immediately started to feel a kind of kinship with him.  He stared at me now as if he were planning his words. 
 "These are not the women from my dream," he said as if responding to a question. 
 "Then who are they?" I asked, not quite knowing where the conversation would lead. 
 He thought this over, let his head fall into his hands.  He rubbed his head, eyes, and razor stubble on his face.  "I don't know, but my hands sweat during those dreams."
 I didn't know what he meant, until he put one of his hands up to my face and touched my cheek.  The hand felt moist and clammy. 
 
 

 The next day we drove back to camp and stopped at the Indian Trading Post to buy something which simulated digging supplies so the crew wouldn't get suspicious.  All of their shards had been set aside in a dry pool on the edge of the site, covered by a small piece of tarp.  They said their progress had been slow because of yesterday's intense afternoon winds. 
 The mostly-intact metate sadly made up for the pathetic little dusty stack of forty shards -- unaccountable were the remaining two hundred pieces we'd uncovered the previous Spring.  I swallowed a throatful of disappointment. 
 Ruiz and I sifted through the small pile of broken pottery fragments using the fats of our thumbs to brush off sand and debris.  Most of them were what I expected of this region -- glazed monochrome, some with ribbing or a subtle design on the back.  While I jotted down details of the pieces into my notebook, Ruiz did miniature sketches of the pottery into a drawing pad he'd brought with him from Roswell.  When we got to one of the pots, his hand stopped moving the pencil across the page. 
 "Look," he whispered in a barely audible voice.  For some reason, I glanced at his face before looking down at the object on the ground.  His natural speaking voice as I'd heard it over the past few days seemed twenty decibels louder than my own.  Thicker vocal chords, I surmised.  But when he whispered to me just now, I sensed an eerie reticence I hadn't thought possible in him.  Almost as if he hadn't moved his lips.  I looked at the object on the ground.  Ruiz was holding my hand, now, with sweaty palms.  The pot held the same design as the one being painted by Agnes and Irma. 
 I looked for the others in the group.  Two of them were in the trailer; I found Gerald digging for tools from a large cardboard box.  "Hey!" I yelled to him and wrestled the pot out from the clutches of Ruiz's slippery hands.  Gerald looked up at me from the cardboard box. 
 "This is what you found yesterday?" I asked him.
 I could see he was squinting his eyes.  "Yeah.  With the rest of those smaller pieces."
 Ruiz and I stared at one another, aware of the gravity of this discovery but unsure of its meaning. 
 By eight o'clock the next morning, we were driving again, now just two miles from the pueblo.  "What are we looking for?" he asked me with an expression that gave his words a deeper meaning.
 "I'm not sure.  I know we need to find the old women again.  But I'm not really sure of anything anymore."
 The hut we had visited, the residence and working studio of Agnes and her twin sister Irma, was empty. 
 The large pots still stood guard in the corners of the room, and the rattle, cow's skull and corn husks remained on the walls.  The room wore its original palette of dull colors.  Yet, just as it had in my dream, the worn, weathered blue bench leaned against one of the adobe walls glowing in a supernatural luminescence.  That bench, I said to myself now, walking along the dirt floor of the structure.  I advanced toward it, almost sat down, and then swiftly moved away. 
 I did this three times. 
 The fourth time I neared the bench, I pressed my hand into its seat and experienced the absence of all physical sensation.  Blood ceased to flow through the veins in my arms and wrists; I felt no chill or heat, no particular vibration coming from the bench.  But when I saw my fingertips meet its rough surface, the colors on the walls came alive once more.  Sand to honey, eggshell to wedding-day white.  The huge pots seemed to wobble back and forth.  These effects were as subtle as a silent auction; I didn't expect Ruiz to notice any of them. 
 But from somewhere undefined, I heard his voice say, "This room looks different now."  The strange part was that his mouth didn't move when he said it. 
 Was I hearing voices?
 I looked at Ruiz, anxious for an explanation but not willing to come out and ask just yet.  My hand felt suctioned to the bonded surface of the old bench.  I knew if I tried to pry it away at that moment, it's power would have held me. 
 "Where did the women go?" I heard Ruiz say to me, again without moving his lips.  The pit of my stomach clenched.  I stared at him now, at his mouth, and then into his eyes, attempting to communicate the terrified awe I felt in this place, in this room, attached to this bench.  He felt it too, his eyes seemed to say. 
 I began to panic, and remembered getting my tongue stuck on an ice cube when I was eight.  My heart raced, my palms and fingers began to sweat.  Hands.  Bench.  Oh, God, I thought.  I can hear his thoughts.  I can hear Mendoza Ruiz's thoughts because my hand is on this bench.  My back tingled --  as though my spine were about to be yanked out through my skin. 
 I bravely peeled my palm off the seat of the bench, and stood up with the kind assistance of Mr. Ruiz.  Beneath the sound of wind blowing through September cottonwood leaves and the communal slowness of this enchanted pueblo, we stood in a long silence looking at the familiar, comforting, dingy shade of the walls and dirt floor beneath our feet, and smiled. 

THE END

Copyright "2000, 2001  Lisa Polisar, Albuquerque, NM 
 

Biography:

Lisa Polisar, a native of Hingham, Massachusetts, shares her heritage between her French-Canadian ancestry on her mother's side (Cote/Poirier) and Italian on her father's (Striano).  She graduated from University of Hartford's Hartt School of Music in 1988 with a degree in Music and a minor in behavioral psychology.  She also studied music and psychology at University of Exeter in England in 1989.   

As a professional jazz flutist, Lisa has recorded on various CD's, live radio programs, and performs regularly with various jazz combo's throughout New Mexico.  Aside from her private flute students, she also plays the piano, piccolo, and oboe.  She has taught several workshops in Albuquerque on music, creativity and improvisation.

As a writer, Lisa has published a number of her poems in various literary journals under the name of Lisa Harris, including Pegusus, The Cafe Review, Coffeehouse Poets Quarterly and AMELIA.  As a Staff Writer for Up Front Magazine, she published various articles on music and jazz.  In 1998, Lisa wrote and self-published a book on jazz improvisation entitled Straight Ahead: A Musician's Guide to Learning Jazz and Staying Inspired.  Aside from this story, Lisa has written over twenty other short stories, volumes of poetry, two plays, and four mystery novels.  This is her first published work of fiction.  Lisa is married and lives in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico.