Recapture. Erica Olsen

come out to Utah with the oil company in ’21 and stayed on to do some prospecting myself. I set up camp a mile or so from the river. Later, I built a little house, a dugout, one room, that stayed warm and dry all winter. Next door to the dugout, I devised a root cellar. They looked fine, the root cellar and the dugout.

      My wife was back in California all that time. Most of the letters I’d ever gotten in my life, and all the best ones, had come from her. But there hadn’t been a letter in a while. That was the day I stopped asking for one, the day I had my first clumsy thoughts about what else in life a man might want.

      Down by the San Juan there’s a layer of limestone made up entirely of tiny shells. There’s a place where oil flows straight out of the rock into the river. Everything is red. The rocks, and the soil, and the thick fast-moving water in the river.

      The trader’s wife resumed her work on my hand. The slim needle nipped—ten, twelve times. The ends of the threads floated up like spider’s silk. She took away the soaked pad of gauze and put down another. She wrapped a clean bandage around my wrist and across my palm and between my thumb and fingers.

      “There,” she said. “There.”

      Her hands were warm. They held mine for a moment. Under the bandages, I could feel the wet gauze, the blood still flowing.

      Driveaway

      On certain days in the city, a golden smog filtered through the streets, a kind of pollen falling on our upturned faces. I’d get glimpses—the crispness of possibility, the vitamin smell of a new twenty-dollar bill.

      ***

      Derelicts stood around on the sidewalk in front of the Basque hotel. It was part of my job to escort them off the steps. Looking at them was like looking back into the last century. These men were daguerreotypes. They didn’t know what a city was doing around them. There was one with a magnificent head of hair and a curled white beard. He looked like the mountain man in the painting, all brown and gold, that hung in the old library before the renovation. His canvas clothes had stiffened into a kind of leather, and his eyes remembered the endless views from the high passes where snow doesn’t melt.

      It was the other ones I was afraid of, the ones dressed normal. Get up close to them and it was fucker, fucker, fucker, walking fast down Market Street, or on the bus.

      The homeless! Under my window, they worked for hours lettering their cardboard signs, while discussing the Bible in amiable voices. “Did you hear about the tower of Babel?” One of them posed this question to the other. It was news.

      This was in San Francisco in 1999. I’d left Salt Lake without my belongings. At the Catholic thrift shops on Sutter I’d found some shirts and pants in my size, and a pair of shoes that were still shaped like someone else’s feet. Only later did it occur to me that these clothes had probably belonged to some young man who had died, and I was walking around the city dressed as his ghost.

      ***

      In April the snow, I knew, would be melting from the mesa tops. I went looking for Prine, who I thought might be willing to drive me back to Utah.

      I’d found a site, the previous autumn, in a little side canyon past the long house on the mesa. The floor of the alcove was already all dug up. Some of those holes were a hundred years old. The ruins were tumbled over. But the late summer rains loosened things up, and the artifacts—some baskets and a cache of unfinished sandals—were popping out of the ground.

      My friends had gone back to the long house with a backhoe, and that’s how they got caught. They implicated me, but for lack of evidence, I was let go with a fine and a five-hundred-word essay on how what I’d done was wrong.

      All this time, I’d been carrying around some Polaroids of what I’d found. I liked to think about the money I could make, just by going back.

      ***

      Prine was out at Ocean Beach, watching over his rods—five of them planted in the black, oily sand. He used to work for the airlines, until he hurt his back. Now he spent his days at the beach, here in the city, or down in Pacifica, fishing for salmon.

      He shook his head in a mournful way. “That car,” he said. “I’ve got it parked somewhere. I’m having trouble with it.”

      I was embarrassed to ask outright, but I was hoping he would give me the money for a bus ticket.

      “Let me see those pictures again,” he said.

      I fanned out my Polaroids. Nothing was the slightest bit frayed or eaten away. For Basketmaker artifacts that was as good as it got.

      “I’ll come with you, but I’m not getting involved in anything illegal.” He wanted some assurance.

      “It’s all public land,” I told him.

      “We’ll go, and then we’ll come right back,” he agreed.

      “It won’t take more than three or four days.” I could hardly believe I’d succeeded in devising a workable plan. What a beautiful vision I had, then, of these shores, the gentle licking of the green waves, and myself far from here. There was hope.

      Then I remembered. “How are we going to get there?”

      “A car will be the least of our problems,” Prine said.

      ***

      We got off the Samtrans bus down past the airport, where the driveaway places were.

      “Which one of you is the driver?” the man at the counter asked.

      “He is,” I said.

      “I am.” Prine confirmed it.

      “Do you have a reference?” the man asked. “Someone who can vouch for your character?”

      “That would be me,” I said.

      “How long have you known the driver?” the manager asked me.

      “I don’t know. Eight, nine years.” I had to think.

      “Relationship?”

      “He’s my brother-in-law.” The ease of this testimony surprised me, as if I’d opened my mouth and fluent Dutch came out. Lynne wasn’t my wife anymore, but he was her brother.

      We signed the paper for our car—a white Saab just a few years old, belonging to a marketing manager who was being transferred to Salt Lake. Out of the printer came a sheet of directions to the drop-off point in West Jordan.

      That was all there was to it! I had to laugh. In my mind we were all over the country in this car.

      “There’s something I want to know. Why doesn’t everyone do this?” I asked, as we were driving out of the city.

      “Most people don’t have the imagination.”

      I did. In the canyon, it was likely we’d find a burial, with jewelry—shell beads and bracelets.

      We were driving the Emigrant Trail backwards, reverse pioneers. The discards were everywhere, on the side of the road. All we had to do was gather them up.

      In Winnemucca, the fast-food restaurants and motels had been built right up to the edges of the cemetery, surrounding the graves. That’s probably how it was in the mining camps.

      “Do you want me to drive?” I asked. We’d stopped for gas.

      “That’s all right,” Prine said.

      “Well, I can drive if you want me to. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes.” I was taking some medicine to help me pay attention, and also, I’d finally gotten around to keeping a list of things I needed to do, as a high school counselor had once suggested.

      But he didn’t want me to. So, until it got dark, I worked puzzles out of a book I found under the seat—mazes and jumbles, where you rearrange the letters to answer the question in the little cartoon. There weren’t any surprises on the road. Just nightfall—the sky pressing down.