Travelers (Nel Bently Books, #1) Page 4

  SEVEN

  THE RUMBLE OF HEAVY treads on dirt heralded Chad’s arrival several minutes before his Land Rover trundled to a stop beside their vehicles. He swung out, waving a tanned hand at her before reaching into the back to grab his field pack.

  Nel jogged over with a smile. “Hey, Paleo-man!”

  “Hey, Cave-woman.” His hug was tight and exactly what she needed after Monday. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of work done.”

  “A fair amount. We’ve got a shovel-test transect headed east. You said you missed contract work, I thought you could help them.”

  “Show me the maps and I’ll jump in.”

  Nel beckoned Annie over. “You just finished B3, right?” When she nodded, Nel pointed to the line of squares drawn between the rocks. “I want to you do this transect. Annie, you remember Chad?”

  Annie smiled and offered her hand. “You were on site two years ago?”

  “Yep. Good to see you.” Chad shook her hand before tying a faded bandana around his black hair.

  Nel handed Annie a stack of shovel-test paperwork. “Do true 50cm squares and don’t stop until you’re 10cm into the C, regardless of what you find.”

  “Why’re we doing this? Determine the boundary of the site?”

  Nel glanced out at the stones. “Yeah.” She didn’t want them biased to find something and two lines of rocks were nothing to get a grad student excited about yet. “Let me know if you get anything weird, and please don’t lump any strats—there might be alluvial deposits.”

  Annie trotted off to grab a round shovel and screen.

  Nel tossed Chad a bundle of artifact bags and tags with a bright smile. “Here, I hope you need these.”

  Chad caught them and bent over the map. “What are these rocks? You’re not checking the boundary of the site, you’re testing those.”

  “Fuck if I know. I just don’t want her getting excited.”

  “If you don’t trust her, why are you letting her do this?”

  “She’s fast and thorough, but not confident.”

  Chad’s dark brows rose. “None of us were, Nel. She’s got to start somewhere.”

  “CAN I TALK TO YOU?” Mikey leaned out of his doorway as Nel climbed the stairs to their rooms.

  She unlocked her door and edged in. “Yeah, come on in.”

  “No, I need you to actually listen.”

  Nel frowned. That sounds ominous. She dropped her pack in her room and crossed the hall to his. It was messy, but lacked the distinct war-zone feel of hers. “What’s up?”

  Mikey sat on the edge of his bed. “You’ve got to handle the students better.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you need to teach them.”

  She frowned. Mikey rarely got so earnest, but if there was one thing he took seriously, it was education. “It’s field school, Mikey, I am teaching them.”

  “Really? Because the past week I’ve watched you snap twice at Sally, blatantly take something out of Henri’s hands to do it yourself without clarification, and you’ve only explained the whys of things on a need-to-know basis.”

  “This site is weird. I don’t want to confuse them.”

  “Dammit, Nel, they’re adults — this is what they want to do for a living. Part of field school is learning what to do when the weird stuff happens. I want you to do your damn job. Say what’s going on or why you don’t know. I want you to explain things before you have to. You shouldn’t be waiting for them to mess up and then correcting them. You should show them the proper way.”

  Nel’s stomach was in knots. She hated when Mikey was mad at her. He was so patient that when he lost his temper it was closer to disappointment than anger. Disappointment felt far worse on the receiving end. “Mikey, we approach things differently. I’m a throw-you-in kind of person.”

  “This is why Martos questioned whether you should run the school at all this year. You can’t even accept the fact that you’ve been an ass to half of them. At other field schools, the teachers and students eat together every night. They’re so terrified of dealing with you we only see them one night a week.”

  Nel rose. “Are you done? Because I’m not up to listening to you tear me down right now.”

  “Neither were they.”

  She slammed the door behind her and stalked into the bathroom. She jerked the curtain closed and turned the water on hot. I’ll take the longest shower of the season and he’ll deal with cold water.

  NEL’S BOOTS THUMPED against the bar stool rungs. Violetta Parra was not her favorite musician, and her music in this bar felt a bit too fitting. Still, the rhythm got under her skin. Songs with good rhythm were the heartbeat of an archaeologist. The pounding of shovels on dirt echoes in our favorite music.

  Dirt was the reason Nel breathed, the reason her feet walked, the reason she grinned even after a shit day.

  “Buy you a drink?”

  Nel turned. The owner of Padritos perched on the stool next to her. His face was written in contrasts. The expression was open but belied the unfathomed depths in his dark eyes. The faint lines in his face deepened as his brows inched upwards.

  “Ah, Emilio, was it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She shifted. This was easy in the States, but she had never had to actually come out while in Chile. She assumed the locals were less than interested in her looks. “Ah, you’re not quite what I go for, Emilio.” She slipped into her serviceable Spanish.

  He snorted. “And you aren't what I go for. Buying you a drink doesn’t mean I want in your sheets. It means you seem interesting.”

  She grinned. “Alright, a gin and tonic then.” She shifted towards him. Though they ate at his place almost every week during the season, she knew little about him. “Did you grow up here?”

  “Born and raised. My family has lived on this land forever.”

  She raised her brows. Most of the locals drifted in from larger towns when they grew too crowded. The discovery of Mont Verde brought in enough tourists to the south, but this was still a hidden gem. “Your family open the restaurant or was that you?”

  “My brother, actually. When he died I took over.”

  “I’m sorry to hear. What did you do before that?”

  He held up a finger and nodded at the music. “These are my favorite words of hers:

  ...el arco de las alianzas ha penetrado en mi nido con todo su colorido, se ha paseado por mis venas...”

  He hummed the next line then turned back to her with a smile. “I worked for the government—roads, survey, and so forth. The restaurant is nice, but I miss being outside. You come here for the archaeology?”

  “I did.” The subject of her studies often met with mixed opinions. “I study the first people here.”

  “The Mapuche? You don’t like the Aztec? Or the Conquistadors?”

  “I think the Aztec were phenomenal — very advanced. Conquistadors were less so. I started with the Mapuche, but the older the better. I like simple times, simple lives, and you look back far enough, to when we only worried about food and shelter, I think you learn a lot about what humans are.”

  He nodded sagely. “I see. You want to know about who we were, who we are.”

  “I guess. I think to understand where we’re going, we need to know where we’ve been.” She had written an entire essay on why she dug. It was difficult to articulate, but the search for self was high on her list of reasons.

  “I think every part of our lives is one long search for home. I think true humanity comes from that search, the understanding that everyone searches.”

  “You’re a smart one, Emilio.” She nudged him. “I think we should have gone for drinks a long time ago.”

  “Perhaps. I was a different man three years ago. I used to think that humanity was the search for the future — building roads, building ourselves up, growing greater and greater, and dreaming of all we could be. The ‘where we’re going’ you spoke of. Now I know I was wrong.”

  “How so?”<
br />
  “That is not the right of it. That is the path to losing our humanity. We break ourselves when we build too high. The tree cannot be mighty without the roots, if you pardon the metaphor.”

  Nel shrugged. “We must agree to disagree then. I think our greatest achievements have been through leaping, untethered. Certainly look back, but leaping is when we grow.”

  “And what have you discovered, in your leaping? Anything on your site that tells you where to leap?”

  She laughed. “It’s a nice site, but nothing spectacular. We’ve got mostly Jack and Shit, and Jack left town.”

  His laugh was low and rolling, the sound of a storm too far to feel the rain. “Well, I wish you luck.”

  She grinned. “And I hope you find your roots.”

  “Why do you think I haven’t already?”

  “Because you said it was the search that gave us humanity.”

  His eyes crinkled deeper. “Here, let us take a picture together — for the wall of my restaurant. I can say the famous archaeologist ate here every summer. The crowds will come from miles.”

  She rolled her eyes and pulled her best plastic grin on while he fumbled his camera phone out and leaned in. His shoulder was warm and hard from work. The faux shutter clacked and he sat back. “Good.”

  She knocked back her drink. “I think I better walk this off before morning. Thanks for the talk.”

  “Thank you as well. I’ll see you next week?”

  “Sure thing.” Quiet and cool washed over her as she stepped out onto the porch. The air was just shy of warm, but the waves in the distance would be comfortable. As a rule, Nel didn’t often join the crew on their various excursions, whether they were drinking, eating, or swimming. She was good at faking, but at the end of the day, she wasn’t a people person. “I prefer my people buried bones.” The words crackled in the perfect loneliness of the night.

  She thrust her hands into her pockets and trudged down the road towards the ocean. She perched on a rock to unlace her boots. The coarse sand felt smooth under her rough feet, and within a minute her clothes were a forgotten pile. The Pacific was cold for only a moment, the discomfort erased by a laughing yelp. The salt water lifted her, echoing the weightlessness of space, the buoyancy before birth. Her eyes found the Southern Cross in the sky, and she struck out, arms propelling her into colder, deeper waters. We might need our roots, but only as reminders. It was a leap that brought humans to the Americas — across Beringia, across the Atlantic and Pacific. It will be a leap that carries us to Mars, to other as yet unnamed worlds. She flipped onto her back, swimming a tiny metaphor for the belief twisted deep in her heart.

  EIGHT

  CHAD JOGGED OVER TO where Nel crouched in one of the units. “Hey, want to take a look at this?”

  She rose with a groan. “Sure. What’s up?”

  “We got a weird strat. And I checked out those rocks earlier. You know they're all hematite?”

  She grabbed his hand and let him pull her out of the block. “I didn't. I'll have to note that. How many pits have you done?”

  “Half. First one looked like these, but the last five have been strange. They have this lens of black shit. Thought you’d want to check it out.”

  Nel grabbed her field book and began sketching the numbers for a profile map. “How deep have you gone?”

  “80 on average. Lens is at 40cm.”

  Nel frowned. “That’s right in the middle of our occupation.”

  “Yep.” Chad crouched beside their second pit. “This is where it came in. It’s thin here, but levels out around 2cm thick in the last one.”

  Nel glanced at Annie. “Mind if I check it out?”

  Annie stepped back with a headshake.

  Nel jerked her trowel out of her side pocket and crouched at the edge of the pit. She scraped the inside of the wall roughly, exposing fresh stratigraphy. She hummed thoughtfully, brows twisted. “You found anything?”

  “Nothing in the way of tools,” Chad answered. “A few flakes in the first two, but not much compared to the others.”

  “Dr. Bently? There’s a sheen to that layer, like there’s mica or something.” Annnie pointed to the strata.

  Nel’s gaze flicked to Annie. She had forgotten the girl was there. “Good eye. You think it’s shiny like silt? You know, when you kick up the bed of a stream?”

  Annie lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I don’t think so. Hard to say in these, though, it’s easier to get an idea for that in the units. It doesn’t seem dark enough for charcoal, though, so it’s not a fire feature.”

  Nel surprised herself with a smile. “Alright, keep going with this line. Let me think about what I want to do with it. Maybe a unit or two would be a good idea, Annie.”

  NEL OPENED THE SCREEN door and poked her head out. Annie sat in one of the chairs, an e-reader held in one hand, a lemonade in the other. “Mind if I join you?”

  Annie glanced up then shook her head. “I just wanted some fresh air. Not a lot of air moving and my room’s like a hot-box.”

  Nel slid into the chair opposite the girl, slouching with her legs splayed. She hated awkward talks. “What are you reading?”

  “How to get Arrested by Cameron J Quinn.”

  “Haven’t read it.”

  “It’s a paranormal novella-thing, like Buffy grown up.”

  “Cool.” Nel lapsed into silence. She loved reading, but paranormal wasn’t her style. A dark thriller or crime was good on a winter day. She looked at the clouds then at the balcony when a door slammed upstairs. After counting the number of flowers on the vines along the rail for the second time, she leaned forward. “Can I talk to you?”

  Annie’s face blanched and she flicked the e-reader off. “Yeah. What did I do?”

  “No, it’s nothing you did, Annie. That’s kind of the point.” Nel shifted again. “I suck at this. Um, here’s the thing about women and archaeology — we’re strong and smart and rough. We know what it takes to cut it in a man’s world and how to take care of ourselves. We get used to giving no quarter and that makes for pretty shitty friendships between one another.”

  “Are you hitting on me?”

  Nel stuttered on her next prepared line. “Shit, no, Annie. You’re my student!”

  Annie shrugged. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to presume. I just have no idea what you’re getting at.”

  You and me both, kid. “What I’m trying to say—badly apparently—is that I’ve been a shit to you. I’m not good at nurturing, and I’m as hard on my students and my diggers as my teachers were on me. This isn’t an easy field and we’ve got to be tough. Sometimes I take that a little too far, though. You’re not going to learn, or have any confidence, if I don’t tell you when you’re right as well as wrong.”

  “Oh.” Annie fiddled with the hem of her jeans. “I think I get it. I just thought you didn’t want to be a teacher or I was a bad student.”

  Nel looked down. “It’s not easy for me, but I love field schools. You’re not bad — you’re one of the best archaeologists I have out here. I paired you with Chad because I know you won’t learn anything with the others. You’re good enough to work with him and I trust you enough with something unusual.”

  Annie’s face lit up. “Really?”

  “Yeah. You’re gonna be one of the good ones, you just have to trust that. I guess, so do I.” She patted the chair arms. “Alright, well, I’ll see you tomorrow.” She rose abruptly and ducked back into the house. Chad leaned on the counter, grinning, as she stepped inside.

  “You’ve got a way with words.”

  Nel glowered at him. “Seriously? She thought I was asking her out.”

  “Yeah, but what you said was actually really nice and honest. I never think of being hard on each other because you’re women, but I guess it’s true.”

  She pulled up a stool across from him. “Yeah, it can get really bad.” She heaved a sigh. “You think Mikey’s still mad at me?”

  “I think he could never be mad
at you for long.”

  She shrugged. “I never know why, though. He’s so kind and then there’s me. I don’t get why he’s been my friend for so long when I’m this prickly.”

  THE NEEDLE HOVERED at north, minute trembles compensating for the slightest shifting in Nel’s hand. Her engineer’s sighting compass was old, older than herself. The hard black case was scratched and faded.

  “Hey.”

  She refused to turn around at Mikey’s voice. Her eyes narrowed on the north arrow.

  He sighed softly and swung his leg over the wall to sit beside her. “I know you’re angry. I deserve that.” His gaze fell to the compass. “Is it that? You only look at that thing when you’re really upset.”

  “It’s my dad’s. He gave it to me when I came out.”

  “That’s not what I was asking.”

  “You said I was a shitty teacher.”

  He looked down at his hands. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s a sensitive subject for me and I said some things I really shouldn’t have.”

  “Do you actually think that, though?”

  “I think you could be better, but you’re not bad. Teaching isn’t easy, especially in such a politically charged field.”

  Nel jerked a single nod at him. “This is the most reliable compass I have. Why doesn’t it work at our site?”

  “Can we talk about this, please? I hate when we fight.”

  Nel sighed and clicked her compass closed. “Alright.”

  “My first year of undergrad there was this teacher I admired so much. He was energetic and seemed to know everything there was to know. When I looked at him, I saw who I wanted to be. I took every class of his I possibly could. He was the worst grader I’ve ever seen. He never once admitted my verbal answers were right. He would only point out the details I’d missed. I spent three semesters thinking I was stupid. Finally, I went to get him to sign off on the paperwork for switching my major from Archaeology to Education. He asked why, and I told him I wasn’t smart enough for it. ‘Michael, you’re one of the brightest students I have,’ he said. He proceeded to explain that he was trying to push me. I lost it. I had grown to hate the man and in turn hate the part of me that still wanted to be him.” He glanced over at Nel. “I’m sorry what I said hurt you.”