Trinity Sight

by Jennifer Givhan

  She looked away, salt water trickling down her fevered forehead. She wiped the sweat from her eyes.

  What invisible damage had the heat inflicted, she wondered. She’d once read that a woman had cooked herself in a tanning bed, charbroiling her organs. Calliope pictured hard-boiled eggs, how she’d once cracked a rubbery egg open and found blood in the yolk. Now, pressing her hands to her belly, she waited for the familiar kicking in return. Knock, knock, anybody home?

  FOUR

  LIZARD’S TAIL

  Trudy’s truck wasn’t in the driveway. She must’ve gone to town. Should Mara wait or go looking for her? She stared into the overcast sky, which bore an uncanny resemblance to Trinity Site. Her stomach churned a warning.

  She collected pieces of scattered metal shorn to the ground like scrapped limbs of baby dolls. She’d had baby dolls once, and a nanny. Her father had worked on the military compound up on the hill, his mission secret. Even Mara had felt undercover. Her mother did not work, but she’d managed to convince the Los Alamos committee she needed domestic help anyway. There were rules about who could receive help and who couldn’t, but pregnancy and illness moved a mother to the top of the list, so her mother often stayed in bed until noon while Chaiwa, a housekeeper from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, came to care for Mara, who’d listen each morning for the sound of moccasins shuffling against concrete. A wake-up song. The furnace in their small apartment overheated, so they’d crack open the windows at night, even when it snowed. Chaiwa would turn off the furnace. Her mother and the other mothers on base called Chaiwa a girl, though she wasn’t a teenager like the rest who came over from the Indian high school, but a much older woman, grandmotherly really, though she didn’t have kids. She sang to Mara in Tewa.

  Mother didn’t like Chaiwa. But Mara loved her. She loved Chaiwa’s long black hair, shining with singular strands of silver as dragonfly wings, whispering a melody Mara couldn’t understand but couldn’t shake. Chaiwa had taught her about Lizard’s Tail—about the strength and cunning that a person needed to utilize its secret escape hatch, as Chaiwa had. Mara needed Lizard’s Tail now, though she couldn’t yet tell why. Chaiwa felt close. Like she’d never left.

  Mara checked Trudy’s house, a sprawling cabin with high-beamed ceilings. Nothing seemed amiss. The usual clutter—the disarray of clean laundry folded but left out, bills, flyers, and magazines strewn across couch cushions and coffee tables, chopped wood shrouding the entire mantle and floor around the brick, tools, gardening supplies, knickknacks and books. The house smelled of coffee beans and rich, nutty oak. The cast-iron fireplace, unused since winter, still released the scent of burning paper curled at the edges. Georgia O’Keeffe paintings colored the walls, bone desert and bright flowers. Why was Trudy’s truck gone? She usually checked with Mara before she went into town to see if Mara needed anything or wanted to tag along. They didn’t make the twenty-mile trip more than a couple times a week; it was nice to go together. Was Trudy checking on her son at the hospital? It was unlike Trudy not to tell Mara. She would wait for her at the ranch a few minutes before setting out to town. In the meantime, she’d check on Trudy’s father, Loren, who lived in the smaller cabin up the hill, near the water tank.

  Deerflies sank into Mara’s skin like needle pricks as she tramped toward Loren’s place. The air felt monsoon muggy. It was hot and swampy between the tall grasses behind Trudy’s cabin. Mara peered around. Something felt off. No cows grazed in the fields. The past several months, she’d noticed the deer hadn’t bedded down here as often. Maybe from drought? Deer were smart. They knew not to breed when conditions changed. They knew not to make babies when the earth could not sustain them.

  Trudy should have been out taking pictures or tending her garden—picking tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, all blooming wild as weeds. Why had she left? An empty bird feeder swung from a splintered fencepost. A low vibrating hum twitched in her ears, a crick in the neck, sallow, like the machinery of crickets, beetles, burnt-orange dragonflies. Except these weren’t bug sounds. She couldn’t tell what made the noise, but it wasn’t the bugs she’d grown accustomed to on the ranch.

  A rustling in the sagebrush caught her attention. She turned.

  “Trudy? That you, darling?”

  A low growl rooted her to the ground. Her heart rapped, her mouth sandpapered. A mountain lion skulked in the brush. What was it doing here? They didn’t wander this far downhill. Never onto the ranch. A hiker had been attacked in the hills last year. What had she done to survive? Fought back? Mara couldn’t remember, and spry as she felt, she wasn’t strong enough to fend off an attack. As she considered her odds of staying still and hoping the lion moved on without noticing her versus defying her age and sprinting back toward Trudy’s cabin, she heard a loud grunting sound. The mountain lion was hunting a javelina, the skunk pig defeated before Mara had time to react. The lion gripped its prey as Mara circled back around to Trudy’s cabin and toward her own trailer. She needed a truck.

  Something inside her siren-wailed. She should leave, hitch up her trailer and drive, that familiar tugging away. Her father had swept her to Europe, and she’d grown up, away. She hadn’t stopped running since. Until Trudy.

  She’d almost made it to her truck when she noticed the moths, sheer-winged and flutterless on the hard-packed dirt. She stepped on them, but they were newly, softly dead. Nothing crunched beneath her boots. It was like stepping on wet leaves. Hundreds of them, moths dropped from the sky. She couldn’t leave. She had to check on Loren and find Trudy.

  Seat pushed all the way forward so she could reach the pedal, Mara plowed the landscape. Still wearing her yellow coveralls and indigo bandanna, her hiking boots covered in mud, she splashed through the creek at its shallowest point, cut through the field behind Trudy’s house, smashing grass and weeds, across the gravel toward Loren’s cabin.

  She left the engine running, called out, “Loren, you okay in there?”

  She knocked, but he didn’t answer.

  Behind the house, the creak of wood scraping wood and humming.

  “Loren, that you?”

  His voice came from the back porch. “You see that out there?” He rocked in the chair she’d made him a few years back, staring at the sky. “That light show?”

  “I saw it.” She glanced around. He wore a white cotton undershirt tucked into his jeans and a pair of walking shoes. His gray hair slicked as usual, his face shaved. Nothing seemed amiss. “Why are you out here in this heat instead of using your AC?” September in New Mexico still rose into the nineties. Loren didn’t usually sit outside until after sunset. Too many bugs.

  “Sun’s going down early … just had lunch, and now it’s suppertime. Look.” He motioned with his chin toward the dusky orange sky, cloud-cover blurring sunlight. It was a strange sky. Strangest she’d seen in seventy-­five years.

  “Do you know where Trudy went?” she asked.

  “Nah, ain’t seen her since lunch. AC ain’t working. Reckon you can fix it?”

  Mara was the handyman around here, could fix electricals. “Is it plugged in?” She wouldn’t put it past him not to have checked.

  “Course. Coffee pot’s not working either.”

  “Fine, I’ll look. Loren, you seen anything else strange? Heard anything?” She thought of the mountain lion pouncing the javelina and shuddered.

  “That light show sure was strange, wasn’t it?”

  Inside the cabin, framed black and white photographs of Loren from his service in the navy. He looked smart in his uniform. Another picture featured his wedding day. Trudy’s mom had died in her recliner chair there a year ago, a few feet from where Mara stood. He hadn’t been the same since. She switched on the AC. Nothing happened. Nothing in the house glowed. Blank screen where the microwave should’ve blinked the time. She tried the light switch. No electricity. At the circuit breaker on the side of the house, she flipped all the switches. Nothi
ng.

  Back on the porch, Mara stood arms akimbo, her fingers through the tool-belt loops of her coveralls, shaking her head. “It’s strange, Loren. No power. I’ll stop by the electric company when I get into town.”

  “Why are you going to town?”

  “To find your daughter.”

  “Why would you need to find her?”

  Mara stared toward the blank space of sky Loren was watching. Sunset orange, clouds dripping with rust. She shook her head. “I don’t know, old man. Just have a funny feeling.”

  FIVE

  MUD WOMAN, CORN WOMAN

  Two other cars on the highway—or rather, two moving cars, both heading away from the Sisters. Calliope grabbed the flashlight, told Eunjoo to stay put, and scrambled out to flag the drivers down. The first didn’t stop, didn’t even acknowledge she was on the road but sped past her as though afraid the lava could reach all the way to the bridge. Calliope knew that those five volcanoes would burn her neighborhood to ashes, yes, but their slopes weren’t tall enough to reach the Río Grande. Even if the lava could reach them, the river’s wide depression was deep enough to staunch the molten flow.

  The first car disappeared into the dark stretch of highway looming to the east.

  When the other car pulled over, her heart cantered. Small flashlight in hand, she faltered toward the dark-tinted driver’s-side window. It rolled down revealing the driver, a middle-aged white man with a gray spackling of stubble across his jawline, wearing a puffy orange camouflage vest and hunting cap. He nodded at Calliope like she was a police officer pulling him over. The gesture unsettled her.

  “What’s the trouble, miss?”

  Calliope narrowed her eyes, searching his pasty face for clues. The trouble? Besides everyone disappearing and five dormant volcanoes erupting, likely killing anyone who’d managed to survive whatever had stolen everyone else? Was he serious? She cleared her throat. “I’m trying to find my family.”

  “You lost your family?” He took off his cap, scratched his matted gray hair. “That’s very sad.” His blue eyes went opaque. He stared past her toward the Sandia Mountains, glowing pink in the blaze.

  Sad? That was it? “Yes, in the, um …” she trailed off, unsure what to call it. “In the event. Didn’t you see it? We both did, Eunjoo and I.” She gestured toward her car.

  “Miss, can’t say I know what you’re referring to. Myself, I’m trying to get up past Taos before sunrise.”

  “What’s in Taos? Relief efforts?” Had he heard something on the radio? Could Andres have gone north toward Taos instead?

  “I’m meeting a hunting buddy. Been planning this trip all year.”

  Calliope’s lips peeled back reflexively, and she sucked in her breath. What was he talking about? The ungodly heat mingled with the cold rising from her chest; a rush of adrenaline pumped through her veins. She looked past him into his car, his hunting rifle on the seat beside him. Maybe she shouldn’t have stopped this man. An ice chest jutted from the floor of the passenger side, secreting the smell of rotting meat. Her gut lurched.

  “The flash? Didn’t you see it?” she asked. “People are missing.” She felt sick. She wanted to sit on the gravel and let the dizziness wash over her.

  The hunter narrowed his eyes, scrunching his eyebrows, two white centipedes across his forehead. “Lady, I don’t know what you’re selling, but I ain’t seen nothing wrong except you making me late for hunting.” He fumbled for something beside him. The hairs on the back of Calliope’s neck stood on edge. What was wrong with this man? She backed away, but he pulled out a cigarette and lit it. She looked back at Eunjoo, still in her booster seat. She’d never thought before that she might need a gun. Out in the country, her students told her, everyone carried guns. She should protect herself, though she wasn’t sure from what.

  “The volcanoes behind us,” she said, with more force. “Look!” She wasn’t crazy.

  “Those volcanoes been dead thousands of years.”

  She searched his eyes, but he was unreadable. She felt nebulous, a dream in which one is floating and must awaken or disappear into the ether. “Your hunting buddy, have you been in contact with him tonight?”

  He raised his eyebrows, centipedes outstretched. “No. These are long-standing plans. Why?”

  “Can you try calling him? Just to check?”

  “Now why would I want to do a thing like that?”

  “Please.” She kept her voice steady despite her trembling.

  “I don’t have a cellphone,” he grumbled.

  “A radio, then?” She nodded toward the CB radio on his dashboard.

  He turned the dial. Static.

  “No signal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Darned if I know.”

  “So maybe he won’t be there.”

  “Look, miss, I don’t know who you are, but I ain’t got time for this.”

  She stepped back, hand on her belly. She wanted to ask how she could have been responsible for his lack of radio signal but let it go. Something was clearly wrong. Talking to him was useless. He flicked his cigarette out the window, inches from her ballet-slippered feet, and drove away. She slouched into her car, started the ignition. They needed food and water, that much she knew. The babies teemed inside her, pulling knots and rubber bands in her gut, heavier than usual. She had to get to the South Valley. She had a colleague there, Susana, who would know what to do. Susana was tough. She grew her own food, raised animals, used the acequias for farming. The smell of smoke grew stronger although she was heading farther away from the volcanoes. Still no lights. She felt like a cave creature, eyeless.

  Eunjoo began crying.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I had an accident.”

  “We’re going to my friend’s house. I’ll clean you up there.” Calliope was thinking like the hunter. Assuming Susana would be there. Susana Díaz, PhD. A big-boned woman with skin the color of banana bread, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and the thick, straight black hair of her Chihuahua ancestors. Her partner, Reina, was a petite woman with short graying hair and skin the hue of gingerbread. Clean-cut in her pantsuits, Susana was an activist in the community and a poet. A few years earlier, Susana had welcomed Calliope to the Anthropology department at the university. Calliope specialized in archaeology, and Susana specialized in ethnology, which meant that while Calliope studied rocks, Susana studied people. On the surface, a coveted tenure-track position had called her back to New Mexico, but the truer reason she had returned to Bisabuela’s homeland was to revise her dissertation, to find new research that would undo the harm she’d done. She owed her bisabuela that much. The Puebloans had an emergence myth, that this land was the center of the world—and she’d wanted to do right by Bisabuela. Make up for the mistakes she’d made. Their ancestors had renamed themselves The People. And this was The Place.

  In the South Valley, panaderías clouded behind dirt streets and chile ristras strung from porches like red ropes around necks. She whispered into the blackness, Give me back my boy.

  She pulled up to the casita. A woman sat cross-legged on the ground. Her friend was alive. Calliope unbuckled Eunjoo, holding her closely despite the girl’s wetness. She pulled Phoenix’s backpack from the trunk since she hadn’t managed to grab Eunjoo’s after the eruption. She trudged up the muddy walkway, past the cornfield, Eunjoo clinging to her, smelling of a sickly pungent straw bed. Why was Susana on the ground? Woman in the mud like petrified wood or a rock formation. Chickens squawked from their roosts, flinging feathers into Susana’s dark hair. The petrified woman, Calliope’s friend, drew scribbles in the dirt. Circles, tree rings.

  “Susana? Estás bien, amiga?”

  Her friend, the feminist scholar, barefoot and sundressed on the hard-packed driveway, buried her toes in mud. Her face, ashen and wrinkled, cellophane-papered. She didn’t respond. C
alliope set Eunjoo on the ground, knelt, and took Susana’s hands in her own. “Susana? Qué ha pasado? Dónde está Reina?”

  Susana hummed under her breath, began singing, childlike, an eerie pitch to her voice. “Los pollitos dicen, pío pío pío, cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.” Calliope knew this song from childhood. She’d always found it pitiful that the little chicks were so cold and hungry. But Susana sang it the way a ghost mother would. Like La Llorona searching for lost babies, swept away in floodwater. Or rather, like the babies, calling for their mama—their bodies washed onto embankments, bluish and waterlogged.

  Calliope closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, then cupped Susana’s face with her hands. “Amiga? Qué pasó? Are you hurt?” She searched her friend’s copper-penny eyes, watching the ensconcing crow’s-feet shrivel and shrink-wrap around them. When Susana didn’t respond, Calliope tried again, “Voy a la casa, al baño. Ven conmigo?”

  Susana’s gaze dropped; she retraced circles in the mud. When she still didn’t answer, Calliope told her she would be right back, and, holding Eunjoo, strode up the red porch steps that covered the length of the anterior. Tonight, in the eerie shadows, the steps cracked like teeth from the mouth of the house. Inside, she called for Reina, but the women’s farmhouse, the house she and Andres loved, wore the same pattern as Calliope’s and Eunjoo’s. Untouched. A picture, static and unmoving. The women had bought the old farmhouse inexpensively ten years before and restored it. They’d spent their weekends tearing out floors and knocking down walls, refinishing the hardwood floors, rebuilding the kitchen.

  Calliope led Eunjoo toward the bathroom, calling again, “Reina? Are you home, amiga?”

  Wind through branches. Chicken scratches.

  “What’s wrong with your friend?” the girl asked. “Is she sick?”

  “I think so.”

  “Did she lose her family, too?”

  Calliope nodded, sucking in her breath. The smell of pee caught her throat again, churning her stomach. During her first trimester, both with Phoenix and with the twins, she’d held unlit candles to her nose in a constant vigil of nausea. Her mother’s pots of garlicky pinto beans forever on the stove roiled her gut, and the small tin of eucalyptus-lavender wax protected her the way vinaigrette boxes that aristocratic women once filled with perfume-soaked sponges defended them from city odors, from waste and filth and death.