Keet Seel is one of the more out-of-the-way cliff dwellings in northern Arizona, and I was alone when I got to the actual cliff, to the city that once existed in that cliff. The dwellings were made from the same red stone, built in the hollow where the cliff had fallen away, and now they were part of the cliff. I could see the actual mud mortar holding the buildings together, and I imagined the life of this village as it was when it was still alive, the women getting water, the men in their leather moccasins, not taking more than they needed, living with scarcity rather that constantly filling themselves with stuff. I was trying to make these dwellings in the desert stand for civilization or the effects of greed on civilization, but these people weren’t greedy. And yet at some point in the middle of their history they disappeared, and now even the remains of that history were crumbling back into the earth.
As I walked up a slope of fallen stone and adobe, I saw at the bottom of the talus, mixed in with the rubble, a small flat piece of something in the dirt. I picked it up. It was a piece of pottery, some part of a clay vessel with black and dark red markings, mostly worn away. I looked at the markings, just a couple of dark lines and a part of a triangle shape, and I held this clue like a talisman. With it I began searching for other shards that might fit together with my shard and make some sense. I was down on my hands and knees sifting through the rough red sand, holding my shard in one hand, digging with the other.
And then I heard a voice coming from somewhere in the dwelling above me. I followed the sound of the voice up into the first level of the building. I entered a miniature doorway at the base of the structure. I could see pieces of wood sticking out of the adobe walls; there was a ladder made of well-worn tree limbs. I climbed that and emerged in an open area. A round uncovered kiva was to my right and I didn’t climb any farther because I didn’t want to wear away the adobe. But I listened and as I listened I heard the voice, this time behind me. I turned, and the ranger, a woman ranger, was standing there.
“What’s that?” she said.
She was referring to the shard in my hand, the shard I’d found, and having found it, I wanted to keep it. I didn’t want to let go of it. I thought about running, that I could probably outrun the ranger, but then what? I’d have my piece of pottery but then what?
The ranger was tan, wearing sunglasses. I stepped forward and presented her with my piece of pottery.
And that was that. Until later, when I walked back to my car. I stopped at the trailhead, near some cottonwoods, and as I stood on the sand by the barely moving stream, I imagined that no more shards would ever be found, that my shard was the last shard and now it was gone and I’d never see it again. I wished I had looked at it more carefully. If only I’d had a little more time with the shard, maybe I could have deciphered what it meant, and what it might have meant to me if it were still mine.
3
I was traveling on the small roads now, meandering as much as I could so as to miss as little as possible. The hills of central Arizona aren’t treacherous, but some of them are steep, and I was winding my way up one of the steeper ones when I noticed the car starting to stall. Maybe it was the high altitude, or I was low on gas, or the engine was hot. Whatever it was, although it was sputtering, it didn’t die, and I made it to the top of the hill, to an Indian casino, and pulled into the parking area.
Inside the casino the air-conditioning was going full blast, and I sat down at a slot machine and since I had a few quarters I started to play. Each time I played I had hope. Each time I lost, a new hope took its place. My losing continued and it wasn’t even luck anymore, it was mathematics, probability, and because I had to be rewarded at some point I waited for the pictographs in the machine to come into a line. I said to myself I would leave when I won, and I was waiting for that to happen.
The casino was lit in a way that made it seem both dark and bright, and there was a lot of blinking and sounds, and I was slightly lost in my excitement, waiting to hit it big. And of course the big payoff never came. I walked back out to the parking lot, having lost some of my precious money, and feeling sick almost from my overindulgence, I got in the car. As I made the right turn out of the casino, on the way down the hill, the car engine stopped. It just stopping going. I felt it had something to do with that casino, or the corruption of the traditional Indian way of life, but it didn’t matter because the car was dead. I should say the engine was dead because the car itself hadn’t stopped moving. It was going down the hill and the wheels of the car didn’t know anything was wrong, they kept moving, and I coasted along, all the way down to a town at the bottom of the hill. As I turned a corner the car slowed and settled to a stop in front of a real estate office.
The car sounded, when I tried to start it, as if gas wasn’t getting to the engine. Pushing the pedal did nothing. A man coming out of the office directed me to an auto parts store and the man there told me to test the fuel filter by blowing through it to see if it was clear. And when I took off the old filter and couldn’t blow through it, I bought a new one. With a screwdriver and a pair of pliers I replaced the clogged fuel filter, but when I tried to start the car, it didn’t do any good.
A car-repair shop was visible at one end of the town, and when the traffic along the two-lane main street had passed, I pushed the car across the road and down to where the broken cars were parked. Fortunately for me, the Pulsar was a subcompact, and by standing at the open driver’s-side door, I could push and steer at the same time, which I did. A man in overalls told me it would take three days to fix, so I walked down the street to another place, where a guy named Larry suggested what might be the problem. Fuel pump, he said, which was a major repair, or major enough, because by this time I was beginning to be concerned about my dwindling supply of money. I still had credit cards, but because I wanted to conserve my resources, even though he told me it was imperative to repair the problem, I did something else.
I bought a Gatorade at a main-street market. I looked around at the pine-tree mountains, and after I drank my drink, the car, for some reason, started. I drove to Larry, who seemed like a compassionate mechanic. He found part of a broken vacuum tube that was causing the car to stall and he glued it together with epoxy, for free.
As I drove out of town, up through the switchback mountains, the landscape got prettier and greener, and I was hoping my car difficulties were over. I was tired of difficulties, tired of the stress on my system, and to relieve the stress, when I came upon a crater lake I pulled into the parking lot. It was a green lake with rock outcroppings around the edges, and I stood at the viewpoint and looked at the lake, and when I went back to the car it didn’t start. I was thinking I should have left it running, but my habit now was to wait a few minutes and try again, and after a few minutes of waiting, sure enough, it started.