“There’s a clearing at the City of Rocks,” Chance said. “It’s a state park.”
“I don’t need a tour guide, I need directions.”
Chance took the map from Calliope’s hands, whispered to her, “We’ll be alright, mujer.” To Amy, “We should be right over it. There’s a spur of road to the southeast of the rocks.”
While Chance leaned closer to the pilot’s seat giving Amy directions, Calliope unbuckled, turned around. Her stomach still ached and her body was shaking. But the girl should have been the one buckled, not her. “Eunjoo, crawl up here, chica. Hurry.” Her little braided head appeared, from a crawlspace covered with maps. Calliope scooped the featherlight girl over the mess she had made on the floor. She buckled Eunjoo in her seat, haunching beside her the way Chance had been hovering the whole ride. She squeezed the girl’s hand tightly, more for herself than Eunjoo, who didn’t seem terrified at all. Whenever Calliope had flown, most children’s composure had reassured her—happily chatting to their parents about the clouds, coloring or laughing above the turbulence. If children were calm, she should have been too. Or maybe they just didn’t understand the danger they were in.
Eunjoo squeezed back, leaned toward Calliope’s ear, whispered, “This isn’t the end of the dream, Phoenix’s mama. Don’t worry. We haven’t thrown the peach at the creature’s eye, we haven’t found the pit.” Calliope feigned a smile, reassured in the way of childhood hope and imagination. But Eunjoo continued, solemnly, “We still have to find the path.”
Calliope snapped her head toward Eunjoo’s face, looked sternly at the girl. Had she heard what Bisabuela had told her? About a path, una camina? Bisabuela had said Calliope was lost, but there was a path, a light.
The plane jerked violently, Amy yelling expletives as they dipped. Calliope forced herself to keep her eyes open. They were descending but not falling. An open field of withered yellow grass swayed into view, alongside a long strip of empty dirt road. Amy chanted as she pulled the wheel, steadied it, turned it toward the road, “I got this.”
Calliope wrapped her arms as far as she could around the seat, holding on for balance. Her legs and back ached from hunching, but she held tightly as they dipped again, bumping toward the dirt. Several skittering thuds as the wheels touched ground, knocking Calliope against the cabin wall, her head hitting thick glass. A loud screeching and backward force of momentum, and they stopped moving.
“Hell yes,” Amy called out. “That’s how you land a goddamn plane!”
THIRTEEN
INTRUDER
The Native American woman introduced herself as Dr. Yolanda Toya, then took Mara begrudgingly downstairs to the hospital basement where they kept the laundry to show her that, truly, believe her, there was no one hiding in the hospital, and she did not know where everyone had gone, least of all Trudy and her son.
Amidst the smell of bleach and starched white hospital-thick sheets, Mara felt empty.
“I’m going down to Acoma to check on my people,” Dr. Toya said. “I’ve lost someone here too. I suggest you go find your people, make sure they’re safe.”
“I don’t have anyone but Trudy.”
Dr. Toya unlatched the beaded cross at her neck, removed her necklace. In the center was a stone pendant.
“Take this,” she said briskly. “No one should be without their people.”
“How will a necklace help?”
Dr. Toya sighed. “It’s not the necklace but what it represents. The stone inside.” She extended her hand, nudging Mara to take the necklace. When she did, Dr. Toya said, “If you can’t find your people, come find me in Acoma. You know it?”
“Sky City.”
“Yes.”
Dr. Toya patted Mara’s hand, and again Mara was reminded of Chaiwa. She knew it was stupid but she asked, “Do you know about Lizard’s Tail?”
The doctor narrowed her obsidian-black eyes, squint lines creasing her sunbaked skin, examining Mara closely. “You’re of the earth, aren’t you?”
Mara thought about it a moment, nodded.
Dr. Toya pushed her long black hair back from her shoulders, turned to leave.
Before she walked away, leaving Mara with the beaded stone necklace amidst a hallway of clean sheets, she said, “Remember, if you can’t find your people, come find mine.”
Mara couldn’t ponder long on Dr. Toya’s cryptic message, though she put the necklace around her neck, tucked it into her flannel shirt.
When she returned to the ranch and pulled up to Loren’s little house on the back lot, she gagged at what she saw, vomited on Loren’s dirt driveway.
In his rocking chair facing the now dark sky where they’d watched the sunset hours before, Loren’s mangled and bloodied body.
She ran back to her truck, seizing her rifle from the back seat.
FOURTEEN
MYTH VERSUS PARABLE
The City of Rocks State Park was a labyrinth of giants, families of tall rocks huddling together in formation, as if fending off an attack or staunching the rain or protecting some rock god within their circular bodies. Calliope marveled at the unusual group of rounded volcanic boulders, surrounded by flat, dying prairie. These rolling desert plains were not an obvious place to find unusual, eroded rock formations, but a half-mile expanse of large volcanic columns loomed ahead, some at least forty feet tall. One encampment of rocks, if she’d seen it isolated in a photograph, she would have sworn were human-constructed, human-placed—they so clearly resembled the wonder of Stonehenge, that most famous megalith among other ancient stone circles. Why hadn’t she ever camped here before? It was stunning, these mossy-backed giants huddling around firepits, picnic benches, sharing the secrets of the land they guarded. She could almost hear them whispering against the fierce winds.
Calliope strode closer, spellbound, Eunjoo at her side, holding her hand. Sparse vegetation grew around the boulders, an occasional oak or emory between the rocks, bare, sandy chambers or narrow, slot-like passages. In one passage of the campsite, a blue canvas tent. Calliope looked inside. Sleeping bag, backpack, flashlight, boots. All the accoutrements of life. But no one living.
The rocks themselves were light brown to pink in color, many covered by lichen and eroded into surreal shapes remarkably like statues, intentional, like people. Calliope reached out with her free hand to feel the rock, half expecting it to be warm with breath, shuddering at what they’d witnessed in the hangar—those Kachina creatures. But these rocks were cold. Calliope could tell they were the result of wind and water erosion of compacted tuff, formed by the eruption of some nearby volcano millions of years ago. Not human-formed. There must have been a caldera nearby, a large cauldron-like depression in the earth, along with other volcanic residues. She glanced away from the stone encampment, into the distance. Dark mountain ranges past the valley—the Gilas. She’d cut through them at the end of last winter to see her tía. She’d thought the snow was over then, but the roads had been slippery with black ice.
They weren’t far from Silver City. She looked toward the sky; though the red bird swirling from the ash was gone, the clouds behind the Gilas were dark with rainstorm. Thunder padded in the distance, heavy streaks connecting sky and mountaintops that meant it was raining there already. The lightning they’d avoided in the plane was drawing nearer. “We should get moving again,” she called to Chance and Amy. “Chance, where’s the map? I don’t think we’re far from my tía’s hacienda.”
He came toward her, the aviation chart folded in his hand. “Your head hurt, mujer? I saw you smack it against the window in our rough landing.”
Calliope’s face burned. He’d also seen her vomit and freeze when they’d needed her to be strong. He didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he reached out, placed his hand above her forehead, smoothed her hair at her widow’s peak.
“You have a bump?”
She resisted the urge to
rest her check against his palm, to let him cradle her head in his hands. She pulled away, brushed her curls back over the place he’d just touched. “I’m fine.”
He cleared his throat, stepped back, curtly. “Good.” He handed her the map.
Calliope let go of Eunjoo’s hand and unfolded the map as the girl followed Amy to the campsite. A minute later Amy called out, her voice cavernous, muffled, “Hey, I found a tent. One of those two-family, double-wides, the fancy kind they sell at REI and shit. I’ll bet there’s food.” Calliope smiled in spite of herself. She was growing fond of Amy. She’d landed them safely. There was much more to her than a college kid who danced, Calliope could tell. She made her way toward the camp, where Amy emerged with a bottle of Pepsi.
Calliope asked, “Amy, how’d you know how to fly a plane?” Amy rolled her eyes, opened the bottle and drank a large gulp, and Calliope guessed Amy would answer with her usual snark, so she added, “Why did you take flying lessons, I mean.”
Amy held the bottle against her chest, fingered the metal buttons on her faux leather jacket, and said, as if it pained her, “I’m a smart girl. Dirt poor, seen only for my body, but mostly, I’m smart. I got into this engineering charter high school, SAMS, you heard of it?”
Calliope shook her head.
“Southwest Aeronautics, Mathematics, and Science Academy. It’s a flight school too. I earned my pilot’s license when I graduated.”
“Why didn’t you go to an engineering college? MIT? Stanford?”
A flush of shame crossed Amy’s face, briefly, then dissipated into defiance, a fiery streak in her eyes. “I followed a guy to art school.”
Calliope understood regret well enough to recognize its mask. “A Renaissance woman.”
Amy raised her eyebrows, in a show of toughness or apathy. Then she shrugged and said, “Are we done with the fifth degree? Am I dismissed?” before turning on her heels and marching toward the fancy REI double-wide.
As she disappeared inside the mesh flap, Calliope called after her, “Hey, grab me a soda too.”
While Amy and Eunjoo dug through the tent, Calliope studied the map.
Chance had climbed atop one of the boulders and was looking toward the Gilas.
As she’d thought, they were less than an hour from Silver City. They could take Highway 61 to the 180 and be there in forty minutes. She almost laughed aloud. She imagined the look on Phoenix’s face when she stepped through the door of Tía’s house, the same as when she’d come home from an out-of-town conference. He would be sitting in front of the fireplace, drinking hot cocoa, listening to Tía’s stories, but he would jump when he saw her, spilling chocolate on the floor. Andres would be there. And her mother. They wouldn’t believe what she’d been through—how she’d finally turned into the Indiana Jones she’d always wanted to be.
She called out, “Let’s grab some food and go. We’re almost there.”
“How many miles?” Chance asked from his perch on the boulder above her.
She checked the map again, using the space of her finger and thumb in an open pinch to mark the miles of highway between her and Phoenix. “Only thirty-five if we take the 61 to the 180. It’s a little farther south before it shoots northwest, but it’s the quickest route.”
He sighed loudly. “And if we walk there instead?”
She didn’t laugh at his dumb joke. “Why would we walk?” She followed his gaze past the rock city. Yellow grass and shrubs as far as she could see. A small cabin-like structure in the distance, probably a visitor center. Dirt roads. A lake. Hills in the farther distance and the mountain range, inky black behind everything else. Her stomach dropped. What didn’t she see?
Cars. There were no cars. How long did it take to walk thirty-five miles?
A drizzle of rain. She pulled her arms around her body, wiping the water from her skin. “We’ll take the plane,” she said, defiantly, her eyes stinging against the drizzle.
Amy called from the tent, “I’m not flying that air pig again, momma. In fact, no one is.”
“I don’t mean fly. We could drive it, right? It’ll drive across the dirt, at least until we find a car.”
Amy emerged from the tent’s mesh doorway, holding an open bag of Chili Cheese Fritos, chomping away. “No, lady. It’s a miracle we made it down. I’m talking Jesus Christ Superstar, full-on, put-us-in-the-Bible miracle. We were out of fuel. I didn’t say anything ’cause of … you know … you were throwing up and stuff …” She shoved a few more chips in her mouth. “But yeah, I have no idea why we’re not all dead.” She paused a moment, then added, “Maybe we are dead. Do the dead like Fritos?” She tipped the open bag toward Calliope. The fake chili smelled chemically repugnant. Nausea uncoiled. Calliope turned away from the chips, face scrunched, shaking her head no, unable even to feign politeness.
Chance scaled back down the rock, jumped catlike onto the ground beside Calliope.
“Don’t despair, mujer. I said I’d take you to your family, and I will.”
She bristled. He and Amy kept belittling her, insulting her with their diminutives. He kept calling her mujer. She wasn’t his woman. She wasn’t anyone’s woman—especially not his. She was her own. And she was going home. “Then let’s go,” she said. “Let’s walk to the highway. We’ll follow it until we find a car. The roads were stockpiled with cars up in Albuquerque, and you said the same of Texas. Why should it be different down here? Come on.”
She turned northwest, began to walk.
No one else moved.
She turned back to face them.
“What’s going on? Let’s go.” She yelled out for Eunjoo in the tent the way she would’ve called Phoenix running late for school. “Vámonos.”
Eunjoo appeared in the mesh doorway holding a juice box and an apple. Rain pebbled the nylon tent. Amy moved back, stood beside Eunjoo in the mesh doorway, holding her chips. Calliope looked to Amy for help, but Amy shifted her gaze to her feet, swept dirt from the tent with her boots. Fine, let the white girl stay. Calliope was going home. “Let’s go,” she called again to Eunjoo, reaching her hand out for the girl’s.
“I’m hungry,” Eunjoo said.
“You can eat while we walk.”
Chance sighed. “Mujer, you’re not thinking rationally.”
“Stop calling me mujer. And stop treating me like your damn wife. I’m a professor, I have a PhD. Don’t tell me I’m not thinking rationally.” Her face was sweltering, although the rest of her body was already numb in the cold.
His voice calm, unwavering, “I understand, I do. But we’re not going anywhere tonight. It wouldn’t be smart, or safe, to walk in this rain, in the dark. Not that far.”
Tears were streaming down her cheeks, so she couldn’t tell her tears from the rain on her chest. She turned away from them again, northwest. Before her family had been south of her—now she’d overreached, she’d passed them, she was on the wrong side, still lost, still alone.
She wasn’t being fair. These people had agreed to follow her, postponing their own journeys. They were here, in the City of Rocks, for her. She choked back the lump in her throat, wiped her tears away, turned, and, without looking at anyone, hurried past Eunjoo and Amy into the warmth of the tent.
Amy was not lying about how fancy it was inside—and spacious, with three separate rooms divided by mesh and zippered doors, the first with folding chairs, the last with sleeping bags, and the middle like a kitchen with bags of dry food and an ice chest still cool with ice packs. How long had its owners been gone, and why hadn’t they taken their expensive gear with them? Would they return? Calliope felt a bit like Goldilocks as she took an Arizona iced tea in a glass bottle from the ice chest, popped open the top, gulped it down. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she’d been, how exhausted. She wanted to apologize to her friends, who were talking quietly in the lawn-chair room of the tent. Instead, she finished her
iced tea in the makeshift kitchen and returned to the bedroom where she unrolled a sleeping bag and curled herself inside. She took Susana’s gun from the pouch of her leggings, placed it on the ground beside a flashlight she presumed belonged to the camper whose tent they were occupying, and for the first time in two days, since she’d awoken from her blackout on the bridge, since her whole family had disappeared, she fell hard asleep.
* * * *
The rain pelted the tent in a continuous stream like static on a radio.
She dreamt of the Suuke. His body was spotted white, with two snakes painted on his chest. On his feet were blue-and-orange dance moccasins; on his right calf, tortoise shells and antelope hooves rattling. He carried a large knife, sweeping the hair from his mask with it. He also carried a bow and arrows and bloody eagle feathers.
An old woman in buckskin leggings and a dress made of rabbit skins, her arms and shoulders bare, carried Eunjoo away from the Suuke. In her hair was an eagle feather dyed red. On her back was a large woven basket, cornucopia-shaped and filled with twigs. She too carried eagle feathers and a crook. Calliope wanted to come closer, to see if Eunjoo was asleep. Or dead.
She awoke. It had been nagging at her, only she hadn’t realized it until she’d dreamt it. How had the girl known there was a monster chasing them from her crouching place in the back of the airplane? She’d asked, did we get away from the monster? The only windows were the cabin and the front, but the Suuke was behind them. Was there a spy hole? Had she heard it somehow?
Calliope squinted in the dark. The rain had stopped, the static gone.
She groped around the tent floor for the flashlight, turned it on. Eunjoo’s shiny black braids emerged from the top of the sleeping bag beside Calliope’s. Amy snored rhythmically, a doleful percussion, from the bag opposite the girl, her black boots and clothes laid between her bag and the tent wall. For a brief moment Calliope wondered if Amy was sleeping nude. Then she noticed an open suitcase at Amy’s feet. Clean clothes. Calliope must have smelled like a garbage compost. The whole sleeping compartment smelled of damp onions. She peeled herself from her bag and crept around the girl, quietly rustling through the contents, shining the light on the tags to check for sizes. Amy was much smaller than Calliope—what size were these campers? Child-sized clothes tucked to side of the suitcase, then a man’s and a woman’s. A family. The woman wore a medium, which would have fit under normal circumstances, but with her belly … She opted instead for the man’s gray sweatpants, rolled over at her hips, and a white thermal undershirt, long enough to cover her protruding midsection. Deodorant. She applied it profligately under her arms, her breasts, and in between her thighs. If she couldn’t wash, she could mask. She also found thick socks and a pair of women’s hiking boots that should have been too large but fit her swollen feet in wool socks. She finally felt appropriately dressed to wander the chilling desert.
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