“I felt something coming too,” Calliope said. “Andres and I were planning for it. That’s why I thought he’d be at my tía’s.”
They drove in silence until long after the sun rose, Eunjoo sleeping against Calliope, Mara against Chance.
Finally, Calliope said, “Chance, did you ever believe we would find my family?”
“I should’ve taken you to my people first. I still think we can find them. But we shouldn’t have gone to Silver City. I realize that now.”
Calliope squeezed her eyes shut as a fresh contraction wrung her into a dishrag, sodden with pain vibrating from her belly down her thighs.
“I’ll get you there, fast as I can, momma. Don’t have those babies in this truck.”
“I’ll try my best,” Calliope said, between short, panting breaths, no longer deluding herself that they weren’t due for two months. The babies were coming, she felt it. She only hoped they’d wait a little longer.
* * * *
As they rose through the winding pass of the Mogollon Mountains, the temperature dropped and the wind grew stronger. Snowflakes gathered on the windshield in six-fold symmetry. These ancient roads had borne the first peoples, then later, her bisabuela’s people, the Chacoans; these roads had carried them northward into Chaco and southward into Mesoamerica to trade for cacao for frothy ritual drinks, Scarlet Macaws, copper bells, and colorful Mayan pottery. Calliope had long wanted to know what it felt like, being an ancient human—a cave dweller, one of the first in the Americas. Her research on the Clovis people in grad school had her trying out the atlatl, fastening a spear with a Clovis point affixed to the end, throwing it with the atlatl toward a target, a bullseye on a tree, where the only rules were these: nature and survival. Now, she’d experienced real hunting. She’d helped kill a beast. Unwittingly, she’d become a first person, and for better or worse, these people in the truck with her were her tribe. Until she found her family.
Mara awoke needing water, which they didn’t have in the truck.
Amy pulled to the side of the steep, narrow road, where Calliope gathered snow in an empty mason jar she’d found in the glove box, and held it to the heater.
Eunjoo asked Mara, “Why do you keep a glass jar in here?”
“To collect samples.” The woman’s voice was garbled but understandable.
“Of what?”
“Don’t bother her with questions, chica. She should save her strength.”
“The earth,” Mara answered anyway. “I collect Earth samples to paint and make colors. River water, mossy grass, cactus spines, white sands.” She coughed, and Calliope handed her the jar of melted snow, hoping it didn’t contain ash, though the ash had miraculously disappeared.
Miraculous, Calliope thought, wryly. She felt a pang of longing for her mother and family, who would have marveled at her use of the word, not in reference to any ancient belief but the present world. Miracles happen every day, her mother had said, if you know where to look, if you know how to look. Not through the microscope, mija. Through the kaleidoscope of your heart.
Calliope wished she would have told her mother what a beautiful thing that was to say, what a relevant piece of poetry, instead of bristling, arguing back in academic language she knew her mother couldn’t understand. What a petty child she’d been, thinking herself so high and intellectual, a crab who’d escaped the bucket—only to find herself in the fisherman’s mouth.
Her mother wasn’t dead. Calliope had to believe a miracle was keeping them alive—and her searching for them.
Mogollon Road narrowed to a bottleneck, and Amy slowed the truck to steer a hairpin turn. A thick clump of snow from a crag of rock above plopped into the road forming a snow hill reaching up to the bumper.
Amy said, “Shit. We’ll have to dig our way out.”
“I’ll do it,” Chance said, lifting Mara’s neck gingerly, placing her on the seat beside him as he slid out of the truck. “Got any tools in the back?”
“Yeah, a shovel,” Mara answered, her voice ragged. Eunjoo had turned to watch the commotion, and Mara said to the girl, “To dig out Earth samples.”
Eunjoo nodded, wisely.
“I’m gonna help the monster slayer,” Amy said, sliding out of the driver’s side. “Whoa.” She skirted close to the side of the truck. “It’s a long way down. Whoever dug this road forgot a shoulder.”
“Or it wasn’t built for trucks,” Mara said.
Chance was already digging with a long metal shovel as Amy scooted along the edge of the truck, grabbed a small garden trowel, rounding the passenger side. “Look, I get the baby shovel,” she muttered to Calliope as she passed her window.
Calliope felt useless, sitting inside, watching them work while she breathed deeply, counting cramps. Irregular, sporadic, nowhere near ready, nevertheless painful aggravations.
Eunjoo asked if she could drink snow too. Calliope reached to the back seat for the mason jar, stuck her hand out the open window, refilled the jar from a pile of clean snow heaped atop the rock wall, and handed it to the girl, who smiled wide and said, “Snowcone.”
Eunjoo set to eating, as Calliope breathed and counted through a contraction, comfort in numbers, and watched Chance and Amy scooping snow and throwing it over the cliff’s edge.
“You know Mara’s right,” Calliope told Eunjoo as the girl crunched the ice in her teeth. “These roads weren’t built for us. The mountain we’re on is called Mogollon, for the people who lived here thousands and thousands of years ago. They’re part of the Ancient Ancestors.”
“A’łashshina’we,” Eunjoo said, a Zuni word Calliope didn’t know.
“What does that mean?”
“Keepers of the path.”
“Chance teach you that?”
Eunjoo shook her head, bit another mouthful of ice. “Coyote.”
“You’re a very intelligent child, to remember everything Coyote told you in that one brief encounter … you have an incredible memory.”
Eunjoo shrugged. “I guess. Have you figured out Coyote’s story yet, like he said you should?”
“I think so. Though it doesn’t make sense, the stories are real? The stories are the reason we knew how to defeat the Suuke.”
Eunjoo slurped thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Yeah, that’s good. But Coyote dies anyway. In the story.”
“If Coyote died, how could he have told you the story?”
Mara said again, “It’s Chaiwa’s Lizard’s Tail, I’m telling you. No one ever listens to the artist with the arrow sticking out of her chest.”
Calliope laughed. Was Mara always this bizarre, this funny? Calliope could see what her tía liked about her. Could see why Tía loved her. Calliope felt ashamed of how angry she’d been at Mara when she’d first arrived at Tía’s hacienda, how she’d accused Mara of killing her family when Mara was just as invested in finding her family as she was. When Mara had taken an arrow for her. Calliope owed her a debt of gratitude. “Okay, Lizard flees. Escapes. Maybe even vanishes, as you say. Can Lizard ever return? Can she reappear?”
“Now you’re thinking, girl. Now you’re thinking.” Mara coughed a phlegmy cough. “Those scientists, and my father. They were there for a trigger, for a millionth of a second, for a violent chain reaction that treated us for what we are.”
“What are we?” Eunjoo squeaked.
The old woman closed her eyes, and in her gargled voice replied, “We’re matter.”
Outside, Amy slapped the hood, yelled, “We’re unstuck.” She pressed her body against the side of the truck, shuffling gingerly back to the driver’s-side door. Chance put the shovels away, then slid into the back seat, resuming his position as Mara’s pillow.
“Careful,” Calliope told Amy. “Eunjoo’s afraid we’re going to fall off the cliff, like Coyote in the story.”
“That right? Don’t worry, Eunjoo
. I’m an expert driver. Remember I flew that plane?”
Calliope said, “Yeah, you might not want to bring that up. We all remember how you flew that plane away from us so we had to walk the desert for hours …”
Amy cleared her throat, her face red. “I’m really sorry about that guys. Heat of the moment, you know? No hard feelings?”
Eunjoo said, “At least you came back.”
“There’s the spirit,” Amy said, grinning. “What’s family for, right?”
Chance gave directions: the road would soon descend. Within an hour they should have been out in the clearing, then an hour to the salt lake (he didn’t call it “sacred” when he instructed Amy on how to get there). After that, it was a straight shot to Zuni.
He checked Mara’s bandage, a torn-off piece of his shirt.
“Hang in there,” he said. “Our healers will fix you up.”
“Oh, I’m hanging, honey,” Mara gurgled. “You’re a fine caregiver, you know that? You’d make a fine husband. You got yourself a wife in Zuni?”
Calliope’s heart raced. She stared out the side window at the snow-covered hillside, counting her breaths in Spanish, focusing on her body.
“Yes, ma’am … she and my daughter passed on to the Spirit world a few years back. I stay in touch with her brother, Arlen. He lets me know how things are getting on with her family. I haven’t had much other connection to the rez since they passed.”
The air around Calliope went cold. Reflexively, she turned around to face Chance.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” Mara said, reaching her hand painstakingly from beneath her blanket, patting his.
Chance held Calliope’s gaze, their eyes locked on the sad thing huddled between them.
She hadn’t realized they’d both died. How had she missed that? His whole family, gone.
She pictured his wife and daughter with his ancestors dancing in that underwater dancehall. Though Calliope wasn’t Zuni, she imagined Bisabuela there too.
But not her family. Not her mother, not her husband, not her son.
The truck jolted, lurched forward, then stalled. The engine had died. Amy turned the ignition, a cranking sound. “Shit-shit-shit.”
The silence between them broken, Chance said, “I’ll see what’s wrong,” and got out. He lifted the hood, clanking metal.
“Can’t trust a man,” Amy said, and shimmied out too, sliding against the truck.
“We’re cursed,” Mara whispered.
“For what?” Eunjoo’s eyes were wide.
“We’re not cursed,” Calliope said, staunchly. Though Chance’s words reverberated through her mind, I don’t know what the punishment is for killing a god.
They hadn’t killed a god; they’d stopped a monster from killing them. It was self-defense.
A gust of wind. A pounding in the trees like a drumbeat. Crows shrieking in the sky.
“Mujer, lock the doors. Get down.”
“Not again,” Mara moaned. “I won’t live through another attack.”
“It’s coming,” Eunjoo said, her small body scampering mouselike below the dashboard.
“Amy,” Calliope called through the window. “Come back inside.”
“Like hell,” Amy shouted. “I’m hardcore too, momma.”
And the second Suuke was upon them.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE ARROW
Calliope locked the doors. Her contractions came stronger, burning her stomach, her groin, her thighs. She struggled to breathe deeply, struggled to breathe at all. She had felt brave earlier in the night, with the rush of adrenaline, the rush of triumph. Now, replaying the image of Buick’s lifeless body twisted stiffly in death, she felt sick.
The Suuke in the light of day was even more terrifying, if that were possible. It cleared the cliff, jumping on the rocky crags, landing on its haunches. They’d killed its partner, and in its eyes glowed the fire of revenge. Whatever they’d done before to warrant the Suuke’s ire was nothing compared to this.
“You don’t even have a gun,” Calliope called to Amy.
“Hand it to me, then.” Amy’s voice sounded exhilarated.
Calliope rolled down the window, handed Amy the gun. “You have to get its bow and arrow. That’s the only way to kill it. Chance knows.”
The Suuke watched from the cliff above as if planning its move.
Calliope scanned the rock face. She could do nothing, stuck in the truck in labor. She was worse than useless. What other weapons did they have? Shovels in the back. A glass jar in Eunjoo’s hands.
“I threw a peach at it,” Eunjoo said. “In my dreams.”
“Not now, chica.”
“In my dreams before my parents disappeared.”
“What?”
“I knew this would all happen. I dreamt it before.”
A rumbling outside.
“What do you want, beast?” Chance yelled. The Suuke snarled, revealing tusklike teeth. It raised its bow, steadied an arrow, released.
Chance dropped to his knees, tucked his chin to his chest, and the arrow struck the metal frame of the truck and wilted as a dead flower into the snow.
Rooted in the road, her lean body poised, a fury, an Artemis, Amy began shooting.
“Chance, the arrow,” Calliope called, nodding toward where it had fallen in the snow, six feet away from where he knelt.
Eunjoo wriggled across the floorboard toward the driver’s side and was opening the door. “Chica, no!” Calliope screamed, lunging forward.
The car door swung open and the little girl flew over the ravine, holding onto the car door. Calliope screamed for Amy—“Help her!”—then, holding the steering wheel, grabbed hold of the door. She pulled it, slowly, calling, “Don’t let go” to Eunjoo. The girl’s face was scrunched in fear and effort, her hands clasped around the doorjamb.
Calliope’s spine knotted in pain.
Below the dangling girl, a drop at least a hundred feet, snow belying the craggy rocks and jagged skeletons of forest.
She couldn’t fall.
Calliope couldn’t let her fall.
“Don’t let go,” she repeated, her voice a whisper as she struggled to reach the girl without losing her grip on the steering wheel.
Mara sat up, groaning, leaned forward, and entwined her arms around Calliope’s chest as Calliope leaned out of the car, pulled the door closer, straining as far as she could, lifting the girl back toward the snowy ledge.
Amy had stopped shooting, shuffled beside the driver’s side, and grabbed Eunjoo. She pushed her back into the truck.
“What were you thinking?” Calliope yelled.
The girl’s face streaked with tears, she breathed rapidly, a small, frightened bird.
Calliope repeated the question, gentler.
Eunjoo sniffled, wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I wanted to help.”
Calliope hugged Eunjoo, hard. She understood the futile helplessness of hiding and waiting. She wanted to help too.
Amy still perched on the shoulderless ledge, leaning across the hood, aiming the gun.
She shot, and the gun clicked without firing, empty.
“Come back in, Amy. You’re out of bullets.” To Eunjoo, “Stay down this time, please chica.” She understood now how Chance felt when Calliope had habitually ignored his instructions. She hunched low in the seat and Mara resumed her prone position in the back seat.
The arrow in the snow was gone—as was Chance.
Calliope scanned the rock face from her low vantage point of the passenger window.
He was nowhere.
The Suuke had jumped down to a lower rock, was stringing another arrow in its bow.
Chance emerged in Calliope’s peripheral vision, crawling up the rock wall to the right of the Suuke, who didn’t seem to notice, its gaze directed on
the truck’s passengers.
Amy nodded, abandoned the gun on the hood, and shuffled toward the road ahead, running twenty feet away from the truck. She waved her arms and screamed, “Bring it, monster.”
The Suuke turned swiftly and shot.
Amy fell flat on her belly, the arrow whirring past her into the ravine.
She stood again, flailing her arms, mocking the monster.
The Suuke seemed unaware Amy was a ruse, and continued shooting at her, while Chance inched closer, hauling himself down from the precipice, onto a crag above the Suuke, its feathered arrow projecting from his back pocket.
Calliope’s pulse jangling like keys in her throat, she watched the plan unfolding before her as though they were not cursed, as though they had luck on their side, for once, Amy playing well her part of distraction while Chance crept toward his target, pulling the arrow from his pocket and pointing its sharp tip toward the Suuke’s neck as he readied to jump. Calliope could see the determination that furrowed Chance’s face—demon or consequences be damned.
He lunged.
Trinity Sight Page 20
