Girls Burn Brighter

by Shobha Rao

  “Well, on their last day in the desert, the neighbor boy came over, as he always did, and they wandered around out back. The grandfather and his wife were inside, making sandwiches for lunch. And right then—right when the grandfather was putting mustard on the slices of bread—they heard a huge explosion. I mean, massive. It rocked the house; it knocked the butter knife out of his hand. Frames fell off the walls; the lights swung from the ceiling. They thought it was an earthquake, or a bomb of some sort. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all. When the grandfather ran outside, he saw a huge plume of smoke rising from the edge of his property. The very edge, and he also saw flames. He ran at top speed, which, given his age, was remarkably fast. But they say that, don’t they? They say in times of incredible strain, emergency, in times that require great acts, the human being is strangely capable of them: these great acts. But he wasn’t fast enough. You see, the three boys had been playing with matches, and they had been near a propane tank. I don’t want to be overly graphic, you understand, but they weren’t near it anymore. The neighbor boy had second-degree burns; Freddie Jr.’s younger brother was also burned, but not as bad. But Freddie Jr. Now, Freddie Jr. had third-degree burns. The explosion burned away every layer of skin he had, and then it reached into his bloodstream, damaged organs. He was in the hospital for over two weeks, suffered terribly, and finally died of sepsis. He was thirteen. And his father, Freddie Sr., he was at his son’s bedside every one of those days. He refused to leave, I mean refused to leave: even after the boy died, he just went right on sitting. He went into some sort of shock, they say. His hair turned completely gray in the two weeks he was at the hospital, and when he punched a hole in one of the hospital mirrors, a shard sliced a major nerve and he was never able to fully lift his right arm again. Of course, the grandfather was broken, too. He blamed himself, naturally. He died a few years later, but he’d died long before then. The surviving brother was never the same either. He refused to speak for the first couple of months after his brother died—does that sound familiar?—and when he finally did start talking, it was mostly to buy drugs.”

  The man was quiet again, in a way Savitha had never known: the silence a substance, water, the air in the car a lake of light.

  The man smiled into the rearview mirror, but he didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “What is your name again? Saveeta? Well, Saveeta, I’m not a mulling man, but don’t this strike you as—oh, I don’t know—unnerving? All right, sure, sure, you could say these things were random, not at all linked, that life isn’t poetic like that. Hell, maybe it was all the mother’s fault. The one who ran away with the traveling salesman. But I’ve got my money on poetry. On its symmetry, sure, but also on its inadequacy. Its meanness. Its slaughter of lambs along with the lions. Everything of value. Don’t you agree?” And then he stopped, and then he smiled again. “You’re a pretty one, you know that? You’re Indian, aren’t you? You all brown up real nice in the sun. I’ve noticed that. Real nice. Yes, you do. Don’t they, Mill?”

  His wife woke with a start and said, “Huh? What was that?”

  He laughed a little and ate another handful of peanuts.

  2

  They dropped Savitha off in the main section of Butte, Montana. The old man said, “Stay on the ninety. You got that? Ninety. That should get you over to New York or thereabouts.” Then they each embraced her, the old man and the old woman, and they wished her well and gave her the remainder of the bag of peanuts. The woman waved as they pulled away. “Good luck,” she said, the last of her hand out of the window waving like a flag. Where were they going? What was their hurry? They’d told her, certainly, but Savitha hadn’t known what they were saying. She’d wanted to say to them, Maybe I can come with you, just for a while, but that, too, she hadn’t had the words to speak. Where they’d left her was in downtown Butte.

  She thought, They won’t come this far, will they?

  The town was ringed by mountains. She was on the corner of a sloping street, sloping down to the south and the west, and sloping up toward the north. To the east, which was where Savitha focused her gaze, there was another huge mountain. But this one, unlike the others, wasn’t whole. Its face had been mined, skinned from the nose down, and all that remained was pink, exposed flesh, throbbing in the coming twilight. She turned away and looked along the sloped streets and saw that most of the brick buildings around her were shuttered. Her heart sank.

  She ate one peanut at a time, trying to make them last, and wandered up and down the streets. She couldn’t have known this, but many of the streets in downtown Butte were named after gems, minerals, metals, some shining thing that had once been hidden deep in the bodies of the surrounding mountains. She walked from Porphyry Street up to Silver. At Mercury, she turned and stood in front of another brick building, this one lighted. Inside, people sat on high stools and laughed and talked, and Savitha felt such a pang that her eyes watered. She saw plates of food, and tall glasses shot through with golden light, as if they, too, were mined from the hills. But standing outside, despite the heaping plates of nachos and buffalo wings and french fries, all she smelled was stale beer: cutting through the brick and the glass and the slope of the street, the stand and measure of her body, and reaching inside of her, through her. Suresh and the room and the bottle of clear liquid. She wanted to cry out, put her fist through the window, but instead she swallowed, pushed back bile, let out a smaller sound—that of an animal trapped in a distant cave, a faraway hollow—and hurried down the street.

  At its base, she saw a sign. Rooms, $10.

  It was musty, the sheets grayish and rumpled, not very clean. But there was a shared bathroom at the end of the hallway, and the shower was hot. She washed the clothes she’d been wearing in the sink. She hung them to dry by the tiny, dirty window in her room. She saw, in the falling light, that the mountains looked higher, closer, more sinister. There was something white and shining at the top of one, and she wondered if it was a deepa. When she slept, her sleep was dreamless, and she held the knapsack to her chest all through the night.

  * * *

  In the morning, she understood.

  She understood that she had sixty dollars remaining. She further understood that sixty dollars would either get her six nights in a dingy room in Butte, hardly a third of the way to New York, or back to Seattle.

  She took the room for another night, and then another.

  At a coffee shop on the third morning, she sat down without a word on the round stool at the counter. She’d only eaten a prepackaged sandwich and a stolen apple on the previous day, and felt weak with hunger. The waitress passed by her a dozen times, though, without even a glance, until Savitha finally motioned to her, and then pointed to a little girl’s plate of eggs and toast and sliced banana. When she returned with a glass of water and utensils, Savitha said, “Coffee, please, madam.”

  The man sitting beside her laughed. “I thought you was mute,” he said, “and then out you pop with ‘coffee, please.’” He laughed some more.

  He paid his bill and left. The seat was empty until Savitha was almost finished with her toast, saving the banana for last, when another man sat down next to her. This one looked more stoic, she thought. He was old and black and his woolly hair was gray at the temples, balding on top. Savitha had never been this close to a black person before, and with each of their arms resting on the counter, she saw that they were nearly the same shade of brown. Her skin more yellowish-brown, and his more reddish-brown. The thought was a comfort to her, though why should it be? He saw her looking but said nothing.

  He was eating from a plate stacked with what looked like uthapams, though these were only dough, without the onions and green chilies and tomato and cilantro. He poured a brown syrup on them, and when he caught her looking again, he pointed to her banana slices and said, “Sometimes I like some of them on top. Chocolate chips, if I’m feeling frisky. But not today. Today I’m feeling simple.”

  His voice was deep, with a
slight, subterranean roar to it, somehow pained but mostly good-natured. He seemed to sense her pleasure at the sound of his voice. He said, “We’re two fish out of water, aren’t we? Out here. A black man, and what? Indian? Out here. Where you headed?”

  She understood the word Indian. She smiled and nodded.

  “You speak English? Enough to order you some breakfast, I know that much. Excuse me, excuse me, young lady,” he said to the waitress as she walked by. “Can we get more coffee over here?” The waitress poured them more coffee, and Savitha was delighted, not realizing she could get another cup, grateful that he’d had hers filled along with his. “Rapid City. That’s where I’m headed. You know Rapid City? I have a daughter out there. About your age. Nothing but a mess. A mess and a half. How did I raise such a mess? Her mother’s white. Maybe that’s what it is, but I don’t know. She was just born a mess.”

  No, Savitha thought, not at all stoic.

  “I’ll tell you what, though. Not much else out there, but that Spearfish Canyon is nice. Only been once. She’s not one to stay in a place long. But I’ll tell you what: that Spearfish Canyon is something else. You understand me? I’m headed down on the ninety. You?”

  Savitha’s head shot up.

  The man seemed startled. “You too? Where, though? Where to?”

  “New York,” she said, hardly listening. She knew those words; she knew the words Spearfish Canyon.

  “New York,” he guffawed. After some thought, he said, “Might be better off on the eighty, but this’ll get you there eventually, I suppose.”

  Savitha nodded vaguely. The perfect place, Mohan had said.

  “You got a car? Are you driving?” He motioned with his hands, as if positioned on a steering wheel.

  Savitha shook her head. “Bus,” she said, rummaging in her sack.

  “Bus! Sweetheart, there’s no buses to New York from Butte. Who told you there was?”

  Savitha looked up; she sensed a crisis. And where was that photo? Where? She watched the man’s face, wondering if hers, too, flushed darker with heat. She delved again into the sack.

  “Might do better in Rapid City. You might. At least you’re headed the right way. Might be able to connect up through Chicago. Eventually. Who told you anyway?”

  There! There it was.

  Savitha looked at him again, and it struck her that there was nothing as concerned as this man, not just for her, but for all girls of a certain age, maybe, or for those with a certain ache. She held the ripped photograph out to him and pointed to the back.

  His eyes grew wide. He flipped it to the front, and then stared again at the back. “You know Spearfish Canyon too?” he asked. “You got people there? Why didn’t you say so? I thought you said New York. Hell, Spearfish Canyon is on my way to Rapid.” Then he looked, for the first time, or so Savitha thought, at her stub. His gaze didn’t linger, nor did it turn away too soon. He handed the photograph back to her, took a sip of his coffee, smiled real wide, handed the waitress a twenty, indicating both their checks, and said, “Want to come along?”

  Come? Yes, she nodded, yes.

  * * *

  On the drive out of Butte, stone spires rose up out of the mountains. Trees grew from sheer rock. Beyond, the mountains stretched out, flattened. The road curved past vast ranches and farms, and bales of hay dotted the land. Sunlight sparkled off the wheatgrass, lighting the very tips like candles.

  “No,” the man was saying, “no, I can’t tell her anything. Not a thing. She knows it all, or thinks she does. Has since the age of two weeks, give or take. Half of her family is white. But the other half is black. And I say to her, I say, Look. Look what we’ve endured. What we’ve survived. You are a part of that survival. That endurance. I say, Your great-great-grandparents were slaves. They picked cotton in—”

  “Cotton,” Savitha said, smiling wide, suddenly listening.

  “Don’t smile like that,” the man said. “Don’t smile. It ain’t shit. Anybody, and I mean anybody, says the words cotton or plantation, or hell, the word ship, you run the other way. You hear? You think you’re not black, but when it comes down to it, when it comes down to cotton, you are. Everybody who isn’t white is black. You understand? Now, like I was saying—”

  Savitha looked out the window and watched the fields and the mountains and the sky. The ridges first softened as they drove east—the valleys like bowls of golden light—and then the peaks rose up again, muscled and towering. There is no way to explain a thing that is perfect, he’d said.

  Toward midafternoon, the man stopped in one of the towns and split cheese sandwiches with her out of a cooler he had in the backseat. He handed her a soda, and then he unfolded a paper napkin and filled it with potato chips. She took it and began eating the chips one by one, but he signaled to her and said, “Like this.” She watched as he disassembled his sandwich and placed a thick layer of potato chips over the slice of cheese, and then replaced the bread on top, and then bit into it with a loud crunch. Savitha did the same and after her first bite decided she’d never again eat a sandwich without potato chips tucked inside.

  They were in Spearfish by late afternoon. The man stopped at a gas station, and he seemed sad. He said, “You don’t have an address? A phone number? They’ll pick you up, won’t they? This is as good a place as any, I guess. Pay phone over there. Maybe your people can find you somebody going east. Maybe not New York, but east. You’ll get there. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

  Savitha looked at him.

  He took out his wallet and handed her a ten-dollar bill. “Get you something to eat,” he said, and then he left.

  * * *

  It was not yet dark. She stood, undecided, at the gas station for a few minutes. No one pulled in or out, and so she walked to the corner and looked up and down the street. On the opposite side was a car dealership. There was a liquor store next door. There were low hills in the distance, dotted with clumps of trees and dry grass. Was that the canyon? On the opposite side, to the southwest, was more of the town, and so she headed toward it. There were brick buildings here as well, just as in Butte, but these were all open and unshuttered. Better maintained. Some of the buildings were freshly painted, she could see, and people roamed around among them, families, some of them pushing strollers or with older children running ahead of them. It seemed a nice town, one where night fell slowly and comfortably. She thought of staying in one of the hotels, seeking out the canyon in the morning, but they all looked expensive. One had a blinking sign out front that advertised rooms for $79.99.

  She only had fifty dollars left.

  Savitha turned away from the closed doors of the warm rooms. She was not yet hungry, but she knew she soon would be. With the ten dollars the man had given her, she went into a small shop and bought a banana, an apple, a loaf of sliced bread, and a bag of potato chips. She put her purchases into her knapsack and walked back toward the gas station, hoping to get back on Interstate 90 and to the next big town with a bus station. On her way, she passed a bank and a restaurant and a hardware store. She stood at the window of an art gallery and looked at each of the paintings. There was a sculpture in the center of the gallery of a bird about to take flight; Savitha compared it to the only other sculpted birds she’d ever seen, the sugar birds, and decided that they had been prettier. On the next block there was another art gallery; this one had a display of native Sioux quilts in the window. She studied these even more carefully—the thread, the bold colors, the integrity of the weaving, the patterns and the workings of the loom. So different from the saris made in Indravalli, she thought, and yet cloth just the same. She wondered who’d made them and how far the quilts had traveled to be in this window.

  At a nearby park, she stopped at a wooden bench and carefully assembled her potato chip sandwich, making sure there were two even layers of chips, and then she pressed the bread down around the edges so the chips wouldn’t fall out. She ate her banana next. She saved her apple for later.

  * * * />
  There was more traffic back at the gas station. She didn’t run up to any of the cars; she waited by the door, a little away, and spoke only to those who smiled or looked kindly in her direction. One woman, her short dark hair neatly cut, rummaged in her purse and then looked up at Savitha, smiling. Savitha smiled back and said, “You go canyon, madam? You go ninety?” The woman seemed to panic and slipped quickly into the gas station without a word. A few minutes later, another woman emerged from the station, herding her two children. The children were holding candy bars, and all three were laughing. “Pardon me, madam,” she said. “Canyon? New York?” All three of them—the woman and the two children—stood and stared at Savitha’s face, and then, all of them, all at once, lowered their gazes and gawped at her stub. Finally the woman said, “Sorry. I don’t have any spare change,” and hurried the children away.

  Savitha thought she might have better luck with a man, so she picked an old man, his hair white, his face wrinkled and friendly. He looked at her and held the door open, thinking Savitha meant to go inside. “No, sir. No. You go canyon? I come?” The man’s face was confused for a moment, and then closed in some way, Savitha thought, somehow slammed shut, and he said, “Do your business somewhere else, for god’s sakes. Families come through here.”

  There was no one else for a long while. It was getting darker. She went inside and asked to use the bathroom. The large man behind the counter, with gray eyes and a suspicious stare, looked at Savitha for a moment, brought up a large block of wood with a key attached to it from under the counter, and said, “Out back,” and then, “You Mexican?” Savitha smiled and took the key. When she came back, the man was busy with a customer, so she set the key on the counter, by the cash register, and left.