Most people thought Em was short for Emma or Emily, but Daddy had named her Em for the Mother Road, Steinbeck’s name for Trail 66, and she took its loss somewhat personally.
Inside the Snake House, a sagging, chipped-paint barn lined with terrariums, Em dropped a white mouse into Bobsey’s tank. The king snake—a pair of Siamese twins, actually, joined two inches below their heads—came out from behind their heated rock and curled toward the terrified mouse.
“Poor Right-e-o,” Em cooed. No matter how eagerly he flicked his forked tongue, Right-e-o always lost out to the more aggressive Lefty. Today, even more than usual, Em empathized with the weaker twin.
Inside the house, Daddy was up and stationed before a sea of paper at the kitchen table. With a pencil nub, he scribbled figures in columns, adding and subtracting. He’d been doing this for months.
“You had breakfast yet, Daddy?”
He looked up and smiled at her, but his smile couldn’t conceal the stoop of his shoulders. She knew as well as he did that his pencil couldn’t hold off the bank from foreclosing.
“Wouldn’t say no to a cup of coffee.”
The hell with that. He’d eat a proper breakfast. Eggs, and ham, and biscuits, and fried potatoes. But rooting around in the kitchen, she realized it’d have to be just eggs and biscuits. Funds were low, and Ocotillo Grocery, eleven miles down the road, had shut down last month.
She poured flour and water in a bowl and got down to mixing. When she thought about what Judd had told her, about the Garden raffle, her spoon got a little violent.
Giving away a piece of the Cross. She supposed that was sacrilegious. Even worse, it was unfair that some folks had so much while others had so little. It would be like her giving Bobsey away as a door prize because she had a whole crate of six-headed snakes in the attic.
It wasn’t right. The Holy City’s temples grew fat and fatter while the smaller stations along the traditional pilgrimage route faded away. The least they could do was send some of their spare relics their way.
The mixing spoon flew out of her hand and clanked against the sink.
Daddy called, “You okay in there?”
“Fine,” Em said. “I’m fine.”
Just struck by a bit of inspiration, was all. Though possibly not divine inspiration.
She came into the Holy City from the desert, sunburned, dehydrated, and nauseated. She’d walked the last mile, the van—full of pilgrims she’d hitched a ride with—having suffered a burst water pump, and Em had been too impatient to wait with them for repair. In retrospect, walking had been a mistake.
She’d been on the Strip for an hour, stumbling along on the verge of delirium. At least she assumed it was delirium, for what else could explain the obscenely lit spectacle around her? The lesser temples stretched into the distance ahead and behind her, flashing and dancing with neon lights so bright they turned the night sky a dusty orange. She staggered past the neon palm trees and Crosses and fish and halos that fronted the temples of worship and gambling. Her head pounded from the bright lights and from thirst, but as something of a professional in the business of drawing pilgrims, she could only admire the audacity of the Strip.
Her admiration was tinged with envy, for there were more pilgrims in her field of vision than would visit Oasis Town in a year, even before Via-40: parades of flagellants, retirees with white legs and sunburned faces, cripples looking for miracles, pilgrims looking for buffets.
The thirst, the noise, the midnight heat—Em realized with alarm that she was going to faint. And what then? She’d be trampled to death by pilgrims and freaks, right here on the sidewalk. She wished she’d left Daddy and Judd a note before she’d left or had managed to send them a postcard from the road. At least then they might take some comfort knowing she’d died in the Holy City. Though Daddy didn’t really go in for that sort of thing.
The world went gray.
There were steel bars digging into her back, and her flesh was burning on a griddle, just like Saladin during the Sixty-fourth English Crusade to take back the Holy Land. Em remembered learning those stories in Sunday school, and she wished she were back in Oasis Town now, with her crayons, coloring Saladin’s skin Indian Red.
Cold water splashed on her lips. She sputtered and opened her eyes to find herself staring up at a crinkly brown face.
“Now try drinking some,” the man said, putting a bottle of water in her hand. The glass felt deliciously cold, and the water felt even better when she took a good, long swallow.
She wasn’t being tortured like Saladin. The bars at her back were the railings of the gate she was leaning against, in front of one of the temples. The griddle was just the sidewalk, hot on her skin, even through her clothes.
She tried to stand, but the man put his hand on her shoulder and gently pushed down. “Don’t get up too fast. You got overheated. Desert heat’s nothing to take lightly. The Krauts found that out the hard way, didn’t they?” He winked and smiled beatifically.
With a wine-red felt tarboosh on his head and a billowing white shirt tucked into baggy sherwals, he looked like a Prohibition-era gangster. “Mark Yiska, from Queen of the City of Angels,” he said, holding out a huge, leathery paw.
His hand looked as though it could crush walnuts, but he’d probably saved her life. She gave it a weary shake. “I’m Em . . . from Oasis Town.”
She tried to get up again, and this time Mark helped her to her feet, not letting go of her hand until she assured him she wouldn’t fall.
“Bless you for your water and kindness,” she said, blinking through a wave of dizziness. “I should be going.”
Mark shook his head in disapproval. “Miss, you don’t look well. Let’s find you some shade to rest in. There are some nice palms outside Solomon’s Palace—”
“No, no, thank you, but I have to get to the Garden Tomb.”
“The Garden will still be there after you rest. What’s your rush?”
“I’m entering the raffle,” she said, her hand going to her money belt, but instead finding only empty belt loops. Thieves, when she’d passed out. Right here, in front of everybody, on a path full of pilgrims to the Holy City. She would not curse them, not here on the street. She would not cry.
Mark gave her a sad, knowing look. “You’re not the first to get robbed in front of the temples, and you won’t be the last,” he said with a sigh. “Besides, you know the odds on that raffle? You’d be better off playing dice.”
“Damn them,” Em spat. “Damn them, and may Albion take their souls.” And now that she’d gone and cursed them, maybe she could also go back on her intention not to cry. Her eyes filled with precious water. Without money, she didn’t know where she’d sleep, or how she’d eat and drink, and worst of all, she wouldn’t be able to enter the raffle, and the reptile farm would be buried and forgotten in the desert sands.
Not that she actually thought she would have walked away from the city with a piece of the True Cross in her pocket. Mark was right about the odds. But if she could have at least gotten close to it. Close enough maybe to be able to whittle a credible fake . . .
“Now, don’t you despair, miss. Things may not be all as grim as they seem. If you’re willing to do a little work for me, I can help you earn some of your money back.”
Em braced herself. She’d never been under any illusions that the Holy City was a place of virtue and clean souls. The city of Christ was home to the great, most sacred sites, where Jesus preached and died, but it was also home to the lost and the depraved, and not all favors were acts of kindness. This was where Mark would suggest she sleep with him, or sleep with his friends or business associates, or at least pose for naughty pictures.
He looked at her, deep into her, and what he said was, “Can you drive a truck?”
Even in a city of ostentatious temples, Solomon’s Temple impressed. Its high walls blazed with eye-gouging pure white light under blue domes and fiery gold minarets, an island palace in a broad lake of blood. Fountains
shot jets of water, dyed and lit red, with arcs and spirals and cascades, as if the giant corpse of Jesus were bleeding under the surface and entertaining the crowds with spurting wounds, all synchronized to blaring Virginian opera. From the center of the temple complex a red neon Cross rose thirty-three stories high, shining a bright crimson beam into the heavens. The temple stated in inarguable terms that the Knights of the Templar were the wealthiest and most powerful men on the continent, and they’d built God’s own roadside attraction to prove it.
Em’s job was simple enough. Mark had some business inside the temple, and all Em needed to do was stay with his rotten-apple Chevy pickup, parked on the ramp to an underground parking lot, with the engine running.
“I could be five minutes, I could be thirty,” Mark said, getting out of the truck. “If I take longer than that . . . Well, just stay with the truck. Don’t turn the engine off, because we may not be able to get it started again.”
He looked at her very seriously. “Will you be here when I get back, Em?”
He didn’t ask her to swear on her immortal soul. At least not in words.
“I’ll be here,” Em said.
A man approached Mark, full of bluster and officiousness, the red cross on his brown overalls marking him as a Templar squire. After a handshake exchange so smooth Em almost missed it, the sergeant said something sharply and moved off, and Mark withdrew into a service entrance. Em supposed he’d bought himself some parking time.
Em settled in to wait. She was starting to feel nervous about this arrangement.
No, she should be honest with herself. She knew Mark was engaged in some kind of criminal enterprise and that out of desperation, she’d agreed to be his accomplice; what she should do was leave a note thanking him again for giving her water and then climb out of the driver’s seat and try to beg and hitch-hike her way back to Oasis Town.
Ten minutes passed.
Em opened the glove compartment. It contained a bag of dried dates, a well-worn Navajo Koran, and a girlie magazine. She blushed and slammed the glove box shut.
Fifteen minutes, then twenty. Then thirty, and then, the minutes crawling like a tortoise in the sand, forty.
The Templar squire came back and rapped on her window. “He’s got five minutes to get back, and then I’m having this piece of crap towed.”
“But he paid for forty-five,” Em protested. Of course, she had no idea what Mark had paid for, or why.
“He paid me to look the other way for a while, and his ‘while’ is up. I’m not a parking meter.” Not waiting for her to put up an argument, he hollered something, and in the rearview mirror Em saw a younger squire nod sharply and run off. Moments later a tow truck was backing down the driveway, its fat, rusty hook swaying menacingly.
Should she move the truck, even though Mark had issued strict instructions not to? Leave the truck and try to find Mark inside? Abandon both truck and Mark and try to figure out some other way to raise funds for the Garden Tomb raffle? Maybe she could get a job as a cocktail waitress. She wouldn’t be old enough to legally work in bars for four years, but maybe the temple saloons off the Strip wouldn’t care.
Mark came sauntering out of the service entrance, smiling and waving at the tow truck with one hand and swinging a small alligator-hide case, like a doctor’s bag, in the other. He settled into the passenger seat, banged the door shut, and through his smiling teeth, said, “Drive.”
Em shifted gears and let Mark know exactly what she thought of his tardiness, using language unfit for her own ears; but then she noticed how gray his skin looked and how his smile had tightened into a grimace.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
Mark carefully shifted to find a more comfortable position in his seat and tucked the alligator-hide bag between his knees. “Some of my friends inside turned out to be not as good friends as I’d thought. Turn left at the Altar of Burnt Offerings—No, no, just go around the cab, we don’t have time for traffic lights.”
Wiping sweat out of his eyes with his tarboosh, Mark spat staccato driving directions at Em, telling her to cut through the parking lot of the Trumpet Tower, race down an alley behind the Samoans Camp, and wind through the garages at the Road of Horse Entry.
Behind them in traffic, Em heard a squeal of tires and horns blaring, coming ever closer. “Those would be your ‘friends’ you mentioned?”
“Some of them. My real friends are right now answering some awkward questions back at the temple.”
“I see,” she said tartly. “So this was an inside job?” Mark smirked, as though he were about to say something glib, but then his fingers touched the alligator-hide bag, and the smirk disappeared, as though it’d been slapped right off his face. His eyes gleamed. “A job like this can only be arranged on the inside. I was just one link in the chain. I was supposed to carry it from Solomon’s to the Fountain and Water Gate, hand if off from there.” He swallowed in pain and told Em to go around the Hippodrome, and for God’s sake, speed up.
“But the plan’s changed,” Em said.
“Not really. I was going to backstab my partners and keep it for myself.”
Em slammed the brakes, skidding to a stop in front of the flashing, spinning neon stars of the Sepulcher of David, and popped open her door.
Mark reached out and gently touched her hand with his dry old fingers. “I can’t drive myself,” he said.
“It’s the Templars, Mark.”
Mark smiled, and it reminded Em so much of her Daddy’s smile when he was drunk and sad and most vulnerable.
He indicated the bag in his lap with a dip of his chin, a gesture that resembled the bow of a penitent. “What right do they have to possess something like this? The ground Solomon’s stands on is sacred to my people, and they took it from us by force, burned our temple, and built their own from the leftover rubble. The thing in the bag was kept safe for hundreds of years before the Templars came along.”
“And what do you plan to do with it?”
“I was going to keep it just as safe.”
Em would have been less angry if he’d said he were going to sell it. “You mean you were going to lock it up in a vault away from human sight,” she said, “like a manacled skeleton in a dungeon, where it can’t do anybody any good. It’s, it’s . . .”
“Bad showmanship?”
Emily crossed her arms over her chest and glared at the steering wheel. “People have a right to see,” she said, her voice almost as strong as her conviction.
Mark licked his lips. Em heard them crackle, and she searched the floorboards for water but found none.
“It’s not up to me what happens to the thing in the bag any more,” he said. “I think that’s why I found you in the streets of the Holy City, Em. Because you’re going to bring it to a better place.”
Em saw the look in his eyes. “You mean you’re going to bring it. Or we—”
“I’ll get you out of the city,” he promised. “After that, it’s up to you.”
Em said another word not fit for her ears and slammed the door shut. She pulled back into traffic and let Mark guide her the wrong way down one-way streets. He told her not to interrupt, and in addition to driving directions, he whispered other things to her as well. He told her things he thought might help her once she got out of the city. He told her things about God, some of which was Sunday school stuff to her, and other things from his people’s beliefs, their corrupted faith, as Father Thomas back in Oasis Town would have called it. Mark seemed confused, as if he were trying to work things out for himself but was too tired to do any good thinking. He kept stroking the bag. Em half-hoped and half-dreaded that he would open it up and look inside and that she might catch a glimpse. His speech became more and more interspersed with words of Navajo, until Em could no longer understand what he was saying, but toward the end he asked her in English to bury him before sun-down. Em promised she would.
After he died and the sweat on his skin dried, his face still seemed to shine.
>
The next morning, the Chevy ran out of gas on a hot gravel track in Atomic Golgotha. White earth, lightly tinged with pale green, spread out in dizzying shimmers in all directions. Even with the sun low on the horizon, heat leached through the windshield, cooking the oxygen in Em’s lungs. Em grew up knowing the desert around Oasis Town, and she knew her best chance of survival lay in staying with the truck. By noon, it could be 120 degrees, and the truck would provide a little shade and would make her easier to find. But that was the problem. If the Templars tracked her out here, they would take the bag and its contents and torture and rape her, just to make a point. The truck was a bright red spot on the bleached earth, as noticeable from a distance as a bloodstain on a white altar cloth.
In the backseat she found a Navajo tourist blanket that Mark had been using as upholstery. Except for the generations of dust and grime embedded in the fabric, it was identical to the ones she sold in the reptile farm’s gift shop. She draped it over her head, and even though it stifled, keeping the sun off her was critical. The blanket hung far enough down that, by threading one of her shoelaces through the handles of the alligator-hide bag and through her belt loops, she could walk with it concealed on her hip.
“This is a lot of trouble for nothing,” Em muttered. Within hours she’d be a corpse, anyway.
Perhaps three hours later, Em awoke from a sleep of fever dreams about snakes and alligators and great radioactive lizards stomping the Holy City at the behest of God. Her head pounded with dehydration. Her tongue was wood. She looked up from the sand, where she’d fallen, to find herself surrounded by men in robes colored the blues and greens of the sea. They stood beside llamas bigger than those Em had ever seen at petting zoos, bigger even than any she’d seen in pictures in National Geographic. The men wore seashell necklaces and elaborate, spiky wreaths of dried date palm fronds around cloth headcovers. The blades of scrap metal they carried glinted painfully in the sun.
Only when the animals’ pungent reek reached her nostrils did Em know the llamas and the men were not a mere vision.
Other Earths Page 16
