Free Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips Page A

don’t know that they were eaten.”
    â€œJust how many boiled human bones would you say are required?”
    â€œIt’s a very Hollywood kind of explanation.”
    â€œIt was not a nice place,” he insisted. “Or, rather, maybe it was, but it was also ugly and brutal. And beautiful. Chaco made beautiful buildings, and they also probably ate people occasionally. Life is blood and death and fear and joy and fierce architecture, man.”
    They walked deeper into the canyon, wading through the creek, only the soles of their shoes getting wet. The pebbles crunched under their feet. Ren was feeling irritated. Something about Silas’s tone was getting on her nerves.
    â€œYou should get that on a bumper sticker,” she said.
    He stepped onto the shore and motioned toward the hillside rooms. “That’s always what life is.
Esta casa es su casa.
”
    â€œAnother good bumper sticker,” said Paul, still splashing through the water.
    â€œThis house is not my house,” said Ren. “My life is not blood and death and fierce architecture. And it may not be what life at Chaco was. You talk about it—joke about it—as if it were fact.”
    â€œOh, no,” said Silas. “Not fact. I’m very stingy with what I consider a fact. I believe in margins of error.”
    She shook her head. “Violence is not inevitable. It’s not a given, not at Chaco, even. I mean, we don’t know that the Mimbres were anything but peaceful agrarians.”
    â€œThere’ve been references to fighting on Mimbres bowls,” he said.
    â€œI know that.” She stopped, and so did he. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t peaceable people.”
    â€œAnd it doesn’t mean they were.” He licked his lips and rubbed a hand over his chin. At first she took the pause as a reluctance to argue with her. Then she looked at his eyes and saw only pleasure.
    â€œLook,” he said, “you’re trying to say that where we have gaps in our knowledge, there is nothing. We know the Mimbreños were farmers. We know that they were artists. So they are defined only by what we know. They are nothing else. I’m saying they can be anything until it’s disproven. They are everything that’s possible all at once. All those possibilities are out there, all existing at the same time, a million different variations floating around until we can prove they are not the case.”
    â€œâ€˜I am large, I contain multitudes,’” said Ed.
    Ren exhaled. “Now you’re quoting Whitman at me, Ed? Are you saying you agree with Silas?”
    â€œI find it interesting,” Ed said. “The idea that we are not filling a blank space. We’re not creating a people, creating a history. It all exists—we’re just trying to choose which reality is the correct one.”
    â€œBut only one reality is correct,” said Ren. This seemed inarguable. She turned back to Silas. “The others are false. We just don’t know which ones. We do not know that the people at Chaco were cannibals. You should not say they are cannibals when there is not substantive evidence. You’re saying, I think, that until we have proof either way, they are both. They both are and aren’t cannibals. The Mimbres were both peaceful and warlike.”
    â€œExactly,” said Silas, sounding satisfied. His face was lit up like he’d just found Atlantis at the bottom of the creek bed. “We can’t know the reality, not for sure. There are always other possibilities. And I’m not sure reality is as concrete as you make it out. I think it can be, even in our current time, more complex. An entire person, much less an entire civilization, is not just one definable thing.”
    â€œIf we’re not out here searching for one empirical truth, then what’s the point of being out here at all?” she said. “If we can’t know