Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips

pocket.
    â€œI’m done. You need to make more calls?” he asked. “I can wait. Or go on inside while you finish up.”
    â€œI’m done, too,” she said.
    He cocked an eyebrow. “Just the office?”
    â€œI’m a conscientious worker.”
    A pause, then a grin. “No boyfriends to call? No ex-husbands? Current husbands? Boy toys?”
    This, she knew with unusual certainty, was a joke but not a joke.
    â€œIf you wonder about my personal life, you could just ask me,” she said.
    He looked surprised, and she watched the possible responses play across his face. His expression shifted from amusement to self-consciousness and then something that she would almost swear was embarrassment.
    â€œWell, then,” he said finally, exhaling a short laugh. “Grocery shopping it is.”
    She had not meant to chastise him. She didn’t want him backing away from her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she knew it wasn’t distance. At least not right now. She stood and put a hand on his arm as he started to turn. He stopped moving.
    â€œAnd you had no girlfriends to call, either,” she said, voice light. “Unless Skillet is a girl.”
    â€œSkillet is not a girl,” he said, and she couldn’t look away from his face.
    She took her hand off his arm and stepped off the curb. “Skillet is a friend I used to play pick-up basketball with,” he said from behind her. “The name’s because when he shot, he sizzled.”
    At the restaurant, the tamales were hot and perfectly moist, and when Ren finished her helping, she peeled the strips of leftover breading from the corn husks and dropped them into her mouth bit by bit. When she wiped her hands, she could feel the cornmeal under her fingernails.
    â€œThe bulldozers would turn up the bowls in a cushion of dirt,” said Silas, ripping a tortilla in half. “Along with turning up the bodies, of course, because that’s where the bowls were. The landowner and Gardner would split the profits. Before the burial laws were passed, Gardner raked in the cash. Even reputable museums bought from him.”
    Silas was describing Bob Gardner, the best-known pothunter in New Mexico during the seventies and eighties, whose construction business had served as a front for large-scale bulldozings of archaeological sites. A landowner could find a pot, call up Gardner, and he’d send out the appropriate number of men with the appropriate number of bulldozers.
    â€œI was twenty,” said Silas, “doing an internship up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, and my boss wanted to go see Gardner about a cylinder jar he’d heard about. He told me I could come. A maid let us in the house, and when we walked into the living room, there were Mimbres bowls everywhere. Everywhere. In the entranceway, on the coffee table, on the shelves. On the mantel there was this one spectacular polychrome—a red-on-white-with-yellow misfire—with an image of a warrior. I bet it was worth more than any piece we had in the museum. And next to the mantel, there was a jaguar pelt stretched across the wall. I’d never seen a jaguar in the wild. It’s been illegal to hunt them for as long as I can remember. Then Gardner walked into the room, using a cane. He told my boss he’d sold the jar already, and we sort of lapsed into silence. So I asked him if that was a jaguar pelt on the wall.
    â€œHe said he’d bagged it himself, and he asked if I hunted any. I said yes, but that I’d never seen a jaguar. He told me they weren’t easy to come by.”
    Silas sipped his beer, setting it back on the table with a soft clank. “I said, ‘Aren’t they an endangered species?’ even though I knew they were.
    â€œAnd he said, ‘Everything has to die sometime.’”
    He glanced around the table. “And that, in a nutshell, was Bob Gardner.”
    â€œNot a good