Trinity Sight

by Jennifer Givhan

  “Got ya.” Amy yawned. “I’m glad she didn’t name you Martha.”

  They traveled in silence after that, and Calliope wondered if Amy had fallen asleep same as Eunjoo, she’d become so quiet. Time passed by with the shrubs and tumbleweeds, in the muted grays of the landscape, usually shades of brown and ocher, now washed out in charcoals, as if they’d gone black and white too, like her father in his imaginary circus. The dashboard flashed. “Dammit,” Calliope muttered under her breath. What had happened? They’d had half a tank just half an hour ago. Had the odometer been wrong? Had they ripped a fuel line? She stared at the dashboard light, afraid of what this meant in the middle of the desert with nowhere to stop.

  Amy turned her head toward Calliope without opening her eyes, not lifting herself from the position she’d been sprawled in for the last thirty minutes, spindly legs stretched in front of her like vines growing from the front seat, dirty boots on the dashboard. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re out of gas.”

  Amy’s eyes shot open. She sprang forward, dropping her legs and boots to the floorboard with a thud. “What the shit? I thought you said we had enough.” She leaned over the center console. “Completely empty?”

  Calliope nodded toward the light beneath the last rung of the fuel gauge. Her voice an apology, she said, “I don’t know what happened.” They should have stopped again when Amy had suggested it.

  “Most cars can make it another thirty or forty miles. Did it just turn on?”

  “I don’t know,” Calliope admitted, another thing she’d miscalculated, another thing she’d done wrong. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “You want to turn around?”

  Calliope shook her head. They couldn’t go back to the station overrun with coyotes. Anyway, there might not have been enough gas left to get them there if they were brave or stupid enough to risk it.

  “Me neither.” Amy rolled down the window and spit her gum into the air. “Guess we’ll have to hijack a car.”

  “It’s not hijacking if there’s no one in it.”

  “Steal then.”

  Calliope’s stomach roiled. She felt dizzy. She’d heard a study on the radio, how even sober drivers tend to make the mistakes of drunk drivers when dehydrated. She needed water again. Though she didn’t want to steal anything, what choice did they have? She nodded. The desert broiled beneath clouds of ash, concealing a storm. Past the shrubs and cactus spines in the distance, the charcoaled skyline touched the dirt; lightning crackled a warning. Where the highway in Albuquerque had been a burial ground of dead vehicles, on this thin strip of road nothing remained. They were miles from the fertile valley beside the Río Grande, no farms nearby, no trucks or tractors. Tumbleweed scattered in the wind, scuttling spiderlike across the dirt-blanketed road.

  “There, you see it?” Amy pointed out the open window toward a mesquite tree in the distance. A thick dust storm was picking up a few feet ahead.

  Calliope squinted through the haze. “All I see is a tree.”

  “It’s a truck, I’m sure.”

  Calliope flipped on the high beams. Sure enough, adjacent to the tree, jutting into the thick trunk, a raised pickup, tires half the size of Calliope’s whole car. Mesquite leaves draped the truck bed like a canopy. It reminded Calliope of an art exhibit, metal and bark. How had the tree sustained that crash and not split?

  “It’ll run.” Amy peeled another piece of gum from her tight jeans pocket, stuck it in her mouth with a smacking sound, then pulled her blond hair into a ponytail with the rubber band on her wrist. Calliope’s mouth curled into a smile at Amy’s fighting stance.

  “Do you know how to drive that thing?”

  “Sure. My brothers and I’d go to the dunes outside Cruces all the time in White Sands.”

  Calliope nodded. She knew of the Trinity Site army base down there, though she’d never been. Andres had driven through on his way to Lincoln National Forest to help his crew fight a fire. He’d said it was beautiful, like hills of snow for sledding. Warm snow. He’d brought her a plastic bagful and they’d put it in a jar on the kitchen windowsill, promising Phoenix they’d take him closer to Halloween. Trinity Site was open to the public then, and Calliope had wanted a historical tour. She had a grim fascination for the atomic splitting, that nuclear explosion that had left cattle at a nearby ranch without hair, and when it had grown back, it was white and mottled, pocked with the evidence of the bomb—where lightning had burned sand into green glass and carbon bodies had clotted together. But Cruces in the summertime was scorching. 106 degrees some days. Warm snow Calliope could handle, but not hell snow. A pang of guilt sprang from her stomach to her chest like heartburn. Or were the twins kicking? She should’ve taken Phoenix anyway. She should’ve let him roll down the white hills like a desert snow angel. She should’ve done so many things. She berated herself thinking he were dead, that she might not find him and take him to White Sands. No. She wouldn’t be able to move one swollen foot in front of the other if she didn’t stop thinking that way.

  “Let’s hope whoever crashed it left the keys,” Amy said. “Or I’ll have to hot-wire it. Haven’t done that in forever.”

  Amy was one piece of kismet in this nightmare. One shiny penny.

  “You have a screwdriver in here?”

  “I’m sure Andres left one in the trunk. He’s got all sorts of tools back there.”

  Twenty yards from the mesquite truck sculpture, Calliope stopped the car. The accident made her uneasy. She checked on Eunjoo, still sleeping, still wearing Phoenix’s backpack like a child’s comfort blanket. A small red bloom seeped through the bandage on Eunjoo’s hand.

  Amy was already out of the car, tromping through dirt and brush in her high black combat boots, reminding Calliope of a tattooed soldier. She wanted to call out for her to wait, be careful, but instead she pushed open the glove compartment. There was Susana’s gun. It startled Calliope, cold in her hand. She got out, looped her finger through the trigger, and pointed it toward the scrub on the ground. She should’ve worn thicker socks and boots, each step kicking up sand, filling her ballet flats with pebbles. Creosote scratched her calves. She squinted against the wind. “Amy?” Her voice came out a whisper. She didn’t want to find dead bodies.

  The truck’s ignition roared to life, and Calliope aimed the gun at the driver’s side.

  “What the hell is that, and why are you aiming it at me?” Amy’s voice was high-pitched. She jumped down, landing like a gymnast on both feet in the sand. She barreled toward Calliope, seeming much larger than she was. “You gonna shoot me?”

  Calliope lowered the gun. “Chica, if I’d wanted to kill you, why in God’s name would I have helped you escape those coyotes?” Truth was, she didn’t know why she’d aimed at Amy or what she’d been scared of.

  Amy stared at her like she’d just cursed in church. “You helped me escape?” She nodded toward the gun. “Where’d you get that thing?”

  Calliope didn’t want to explain Susana’s suicide. It still didn’t make sense. She shrugged, clicked the safety, then tried to tuck the gun into the waist of her leggings, but it was too heavy, and started slipping. She pushed the elastic down to her hip and tucked the excess material over the gun again, pouch-like, a makeshift holster.

  “I checked the gas gauge. Three quarters of a tank should get us to Cruces.”

  Calliope looked away. She wasn’t going to Las Cruces. They’d have to split up. Or she’d have to convince Amy to stay with her until they got to Tía’s. Calliope needed Amy; it wasn’t safe out here. But she couldn’t rationalize the wasted time detouring to Cruces instead of finding her son.

  They switched supplies from car to truck and woke Eunjoo. “Whose truck is that?” the girl asked in her bird’s voice as she stumbled across the bramble toward the truck. Thunder roiled in the distance. “Has the man come yet?”

  Calli
ope’s pulse spidered. “What man?”

  “The man with the black hair.”

  Calliope scanned the landscape. She saw no one. “Chica, you were dreaming. There’s no man. Hop in the truck.”

  Calliope grabbed three Gatorades, handed them out. “Straight on till sunset?” Calliope asked Amy, who held a map across the steering wheel.

  “Ain’t no sun out here, momma.” She folded the map, slammed her door, and backed the truck out of the tree.

  In the tape deck, a cassette stuck out like a black tongue. Calliope pushed it in. Blaring from the speakers, Credence Clearwater Revival. I hear hurricanes a blowing. I know the end is coming soon … Don’t go around tonight. It’s bound to take your life. There’s a bad moon on the rise.

  “Tell me about it,” Amy shouted over the music.

  The sky so inky Calliope couldn’t even see a moon, bad or not, she remembered a windstorm she’d driven through before she’d met Andres, before she’d become a mother and her life was bound to anyone other than her own mother, and that only tenuously so. She’d been freer then. Her stomach constricted at the realization: she’d missed that feeling, driving toward no one, home to no one. When she’d suspected morning sickness, the first time, she’d been too impatient to take the pregnancy test home, and found out she was pregnant in the Rite Aid customer’s bathroom. She’d wept in the drugstore parking lot. Googled abortion clinics on her cellphone. The windstorm with Bisabuela, after Chaco Canyon. How those ruins had predicted her whole future, set her on this path. The first entry in the A–Z encyclopedia of the Chaco Canyon Handbook was Abandonment. She’d marked the page with a sticky note and highlighter yellowing the word for her dissertation. She’d wanted to prove what Bisabuela’s people had known, before Catholicism and her mother’s novenas. Abandonment. The Ancient Ancestors had erected these magnificent structures and then departed. They’d sometimes left potsherds, tools, and debris of living, which meant the moves had been hurried, unplanned, perhaps from lack of rainfall and not warring tribes, not external threat. The answer lay buried in the land itself. Bisabuela’s people, wrought from the Chacoans a thousand years later, believed the ruins were anything but—not ruins but breathing still. When Calliope had explored Chaco Canyon as a graduate student she’d wondered why the ancestors would have chosen a place so remote, built a city center in the vast unbroken nothingness, save muted gray-green sagebrush cropping from the dirt. Bisabuela had warned her, Don’t pick up the broken pottery on the ground. The potsherds were for honoring the Ancestors.

  The windstorm that had taken Bisabuela had left Calliope with a PhD and a hole in her heart. In the parking lot, she’d held the number for a clinic in her hand and thought of shattered pottery, remnants on the ground. Abandonment. She’d wanted to swallow the shards. She’d gone back into the drugstore, bought a bottle of prenatal vitamins. She’d chosen family, then. Now, six years later, she’d still managed to abandon her family, or they’d abandoned her.

  “Momma?”

  Calliope bristled.

  “Hey, momma? You all right over there?”

  “Stop calling me momma.”

  Amy sucked air in through her teeth, whistling. Calliope heard Amy whisper “mood swings” sardonically under her breath, but she let it go, wiping her face with the back of her hand. They said nothing. Then, “I didn’t mean any harm,” Amy said. “I just meant ’cause of your belly.”

  Calliope couldn’t explain to Amy why it bothered her. She stayed silent, observing through the window the alterations in her bisabuela’s homeland, this place Calliope had returned to searching for answers. Clouding the sky, a brick red swirling that seemed to morph into a bird then split at the wings and separate into two distinct creatures. This wasn’t a normal storm approaching, Calliope felt it, and they didn’t have anywhere safe to hide. Anvil crawler lightning spread like limbs of a tree, branching purple across the birdlike clouds. But the sky remained illuminated much longer than normal, discharging in slow motion. How long until the strange lightning reached them?

  When Eunjoo awoke, she had to go to the bathroom. Traveling with children was the same stop and go and stop again, no matter whose children they were.

  They pulled over, Calliope instructing Eunjoo to squat beside the sagebrush in the arroyo wash. She’d let Andres take Phoenix to the roadside on day trips, show him how men can unzip and stand, relieving themselves beside any tree or bush. With girls it was an ordeal. Andres always teased Calliope for her squeamishness, her fear of outhouses and pit toilets. It could grow tentacles and snatch me, she’d tell him. I could fall in and drown in a pit of shit. It wasn’t her mother’s hellfire and damnation that scared her anymore but drowning in sewage.

  From the truck, Calliope could hear Amy swearing and digging around. “Fuck. I’m all out of gum. Who doesn’t keep gum in the glove compartment?” After a moment, “Camels? Camels? Dammit. Calliope, it okay with you if I smoke? I’ll move away from the truck.” Calliope called back that she didn’t care. If she could handle volcanic ash, she could handle secondhand smoke.

  Although Eunjoo was still a stranger she’d only known a day, Calliope felt almost comfortable showing the girl how it was done, if not motherly, then sisterly. Her protruding belly tipping her center of gravity, Calliope steadied herself and pulled down her own leggings and stuck her nalgas backward toward the sand, careful to keep her chonies, leggings, and Susana’s gun that she’d pouched there for safety bundled together at her knees, away from the stream, toward a patch of reddish wildflowers wilting against a rock.

  Amy’s screams sounded like a barn owl screeching.

  “Get the fuck off me, motherfucker!”

  Calliope hustled into her leggings, quickly, whispered to Eunjoo, “Pull up your pants. Hide in the sage.” She motioned with her chin five feet further from their squatting spot. “Don’t move.”

  Eunjoo’s black eyes filled with fear, but she nodded and followed Calliope’s instructions.

  Calliope unrolled Susana’s gun from her makeshift pouch and disengaged the safety. She was sweating, although the storm clouds had made the hazy air cold, and the gun was slick in her palms. From the driver’s side, she heard a scuffling against the blacktop, boots against asphalt. Calliope’s stomach clutched. She steadied her quavering hand as she stepped around the back of the truck, and faced Amy, stomach to the ground, her blond hair loose around her face, a hand over her mouth, a man in an olive-green jumpsuit crouched atop her, his stubbled face pressed against hers, a knife at her neck. A pack of Camels beside her on the blacktop. The man’s jumpsuit was open. He was whispering something in Amy’s ear, and she was shaking her head, crying. He scratched the side of her face with the knife; Calliope saw the blood. She pointed the gun at his head. She braced herself. What if she accidentally hit Amy? She’d never fired a gun. She’d refused to go with Andres to the shooting range, refused to let Phoenix even practice with a BB gun and soda cans.

  They didn’t hear Calliope standing there. Amy was grasping the belt of her jeans at the hips, the man whispering furiously into her ear, his hand tightening at her mouth, the knife digging into her neck. What was Calliope waiting for? She needed to shoot before he hurt her friend. She meant to pull the trigger—

  His olive-green body slumped forward, his head slamming onto the road, his hands slack. Blood pooled at his head, staining the ground around him. Amy screamed, pushed him off, and scrambled out of the blood. Calliope stared at her hands. She hadn’t pulled the trigger. She hadn’t killed him. She was poised to pull the trigger, but she hadn’t. She’d hesitated. She hadn’t saved her friend.

  Then who had?

  Still pointing the gun in front of her, Calliope whipped around to search the road behind them. A hundred feet away, a man holding a rifle.

  NINE

  CHANCE

  The man walked toward them, rifle slung over his shoulder with a leather strap. Calliope
called out to Eunjoo in the underbrush, “Stay hidden, chica. Don’t move.” To Amy, “Are you hurt?” Amy made a shrilling noise like a chipmunk, part sob, part inscrutable. “Pick up the knife. That man might have saved us, but he could be as insane as the rest of them.” Three days ago, Calliope had been planning tenure and compiling notes for her dissertation. Her anthropology department was throwing a baby shower. Now she felt like she’d stepped into a horror show, and she knew what kinds of things happened to women in horror films after the cliffhanger.

  As if the gun were glued to her hands, she held it steadily. The man didn’t even halt, just walked calmly toward Calliope. He was tall and thick, muscular, wearing a button-down plaid flannel the color of hickory, only a shade or two darker than his skin, and brown cowboy boots. His glossy black hair swayed at his shoulders as he moved.

  At twenty feet, Calliope called, “Stay back.”

  He didn’t flinch or halt, but put his hands in the air, perhaps to show they were empty, which Calliope could already see.

  “I’m serious. Stop moving,” Calliope called again, her voice keeling sharply. “I’ll shoot.”

  “No, you won’t.” His voice was deep, melodic, his accent familiar. “No soy como él, señorita.”

  “Hablas español?”

  He smiled, his square jaw crackling into softer lines. “Sí.”

  “A donde eres?”

  His smile widened. “The rez.”

  “You’re not Hispanic?”