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