Joe was already in the black water. Harvey bobbed like a rubber duck. Anna Weiss laid her clothes on the edge and stepped in. As she sank, her eyes looked directly into Joe’s and she said, “Joy through strength.” She went under and came up, her hair molded to the sides of her face.

“Too bad Klaus didn’t want to come up from the car,” Harvey said. “He’s getting a little testy. It’s the pressure from Trinity. Only a month to go.”

“Why Trinity?” she asked. “Why does Oppy call the test site that?”

“From an English sonnet. By John Donne, according to Oppy,” Harvey said, and mimicked Oppy’s hoarse whisper. “ ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God, for you as yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.’ ”

“Doesn’t it have a name already?” Anna asked.

“Stallion Gate,” said Joe.

“An American name. I like that better.”

“So do I.”

“This is the perfect example of average temperature,” Harvey said. “Half of me is cooking and half of me is freezing, but the average is very comfortable.”

Every time one of them stirred, water—pungent, buoyant, black—spilled from the well and over moss soaked with the same sharp smell. Between branches they could see the peaks of the Jemez, some hanging in shadow, some shining with scree. Clouds on an easterly wind made the mountains move forward like a wave.

“There was a volcano here as big as Everest about a million years ago.” Joe spread his arms along the rim of the well. “When it blew, it threw rocks as far as Kansas. There’s still a volcanic vent beneath us.”

“Like a deep-banked ember,” Anna said.

“And all these hills are sacred to the old people. Shrines in the caves. You never know what you’re going to stumble into. My father and I were hunting one day when we both fell into a hole. A hole in the ground, dust swirling around. We’d fallen into an old kiva. We were sitting on the floor of it. All around us were these figures. A man with blue skin, blue as a bluebird, and the head of a buffalo. A purple swallow with the head of a girl. A mountain lion sitting like a man. The kiva could have been five hundred, maybe a thousand years old, but the colors were as bright as if they’d been painted the day before. In about an hour they faded. In two hours you could hardly see them. I couldn’t even find the place now. It’s filled in with dirt and disappeared, but there are more.”

Joe was surprised at himself for telling the story. First, that he remembered it. Second, because it smacked of noble-red-man-seduces-tourist. Maybe that’s what he was trying to do, though. Obviously that’s what he was after.