Dark of the Moon

nice as the dell in its own way, and I want to see where that guy was when he was shooting at us.”
    “I was already up there,” Virgil said. “First thing this morning.”
    “You were?”
    “It was a shooting site, Joanie. I had to go up and look around,” Virgil said. “Didn’t find a thing.”
    “Did you go to the flat rock?” she asked.
    “What flat rock?”
    “Ah—didn’t go to the flat rock.” She was being mysterious about it.
     
    T HEY WENT PAST the farm, followed the road around behind the hill, cut into the hillside where the shooter had gotten off, and where Virgil was that morning. Joan looked over the spot where the shooter had hidden his truck. Then Virgil got the shotgun out of the back of the 4Runner, and walked her along the now-faint track through the weeds to the stump where the shooter had made his nest. The day had turned hot, the humidity climbing, and far down to the southwest, they could see the puffy white tops of clouds that would become thunderheads; the world smelled of warm prairie weed.
    “He might not have known the hillside that well,” Joan said, when she saw the shooting nest. She pointed far down to her left. “There’s a spot down there where you can come in—that’s where kids come in when they’re sneaking out to the dell. Good hidden place to park, too. Then, you’d come up from the side of the dell, where there’s a really sharp break. We never would have seen him. He would have been right over our heads.”
    “So he messed up in a couple of ways,” Virgil said. “I was wondering if he meant to miss us…but I can’t see why he would. And he wasn’t that far off. If he meant to miss us, he was playing a dangerous game.”
    They probed around some more, then headed back to the truck. Joanie pointed him west, to a clump of shrubs where they left the car, out of the sun. “Ground’s too broken up above here, you can screw up a tire,” she said. “Get the pizza. I’ll get the blanket and cooler.”
    She led the way up the hill to a formation that almost looked like an eroded castle, a natural amphitheater in the red quartzite, at the very summit of the hill. They found a spot with shorter grass, in the shade of a clump of wild plum trees, and put down the blanket. Virgil braced the shotgun against one of the trees.
    “I need pizza,” Virgil said. “Beer. Hot out here.”
    “Get a beer. I’ll show you the flat rock. Put the pizza on the rock in the sun, it’ll stay warm…”
     
    H E FOLLOWED HER across the hillside to a narrow bed of flat red rock, twenty feet long, six or eight feet wide, sloping just a few degrees to the south. When he saw it, Virgil thought, “Blackboard,” and Joan said, “Look.”
    He looked, but he didn’t see for a moment. Then he saw a handprint, a small hand, the size of a woman’s. Then another, and another, and then a cartoon arrow with a tip and fletching, and a turtle and a man with horns, and then more hands, and circles and squares of things that he didn’t recognize.
    “Petroglyphs,” Joan said. “Chipped out of the rock. Pecked out with another stone. Something between three hundred and a thousand years old. There are older ones at Jeffers, but these are pretty old.”
    “Jeez…Joanie.” Virgil was fascinated. He got down on his hands and knees, crawling around the rock. “How many people know about these things?”
    “The Historical Society people, and folks who are interested in petroglyphs and who won’t mess them up. My grandfather told a reporter that there used to be a circle of stones here, not this red quartzite, they looked like glacial rocks, or river rocks. They were arranged around the flat rock like a clock, and each stone had a symbol on it. People stole them over the years. Nobody knows where they are now—probably some big museum, or Manhattan decorator shop or something.”
    “Look at this…” He was pointing. “That looks like an elk. Did they have elk here?”
    “That’s what they say. There are three buffalo over in the corner up here.”
     
    “T HERE ’ S A MAGAZINE article in this,” Virgil said, eventually. “Something about plains hunting in the Indian days…take a lot of photographs, mess them around in Photoshop, make a story out of it.”
    “Leave them alone,” Joan said, shaking her head. “It’s nice to know that they’re out here. That they have nothing to do with magazines or television.”
     
    S O THEY SAT under the plum trees and talked,