“What is going on?” I ask Cat.
She narrows her eyes. “You don’t recognize me, do you, child? Do your eyes not see? Can your nose not scent?”
She stares at me, a challenge.
I stare back. “I don’t give a—”
“Maggie,” Clive warns. “Drop it.”
“But—”
He shakes he head. “Don’t go borrowing trouble from strangers. We’ve got bigger problems right now.”
“Then you can share,” I say, reaching over and pulling his half-full bowl to me.
He doesn’t argue. In fact, he rips his bread in half and hands me some. I eat. A few more bites stop my stomach from complaining, but it’s not enough to fill me, to replenish what I spent fighting the locusts earlier, what I spent on the mountain the day before. But it will have to do.
I pass the bowl back to Clive. Shoot a glance toward the counter where Cat was, but she’s turned away from us, busy in her tiny kitchen.
“What were you saying about the Wall?” I ask Clive, ready to listen.
“Just that the direction Ben’s suggesting, there’s nothing there. Only empty desert until you hit the town of Lupton, and from there, the Wall.”
“The map!” I exclaim, remembering. In the chaos of the afternoon, I’d forgotten all about the map. “There was a map, back at the camp at Lake Asááyi. There was a route marked that led to Lupton. I’d forgotten about it until now.”
“What’s at Lupton?” Ben asks.
“It’s the southern entrance into Dinétah. There’s a refugee post, like Rock Springs. Remember Rock Springs, Maggie?” He turns back to Ben. “They process people wanting to enter, check your CIB, find a relative who will vouch for you. Immigration stuff.”
I scratch absently at my neck, thinking. The southern entrance. That means it’s also the southern exit. But surely not . . .
“Do you think they left Dinétah?” Ben asks, the very thing I was thinking.
“No.” Clive’s voice is definite. Final. “Nobody wants to go to the Malpais.”
“The Malpais?” Ben asks. A tiny piece of corn flies out of her mouth and lands on the table. I give her a look. She wipes it away, sheepish.
“It’s everything south of the Wall, along the old highway,” I explain. “What was it called?”
“Interstate 40,” Clive says. “And it’s a wasteland.”
“It was Route 66,” a voice behind me interrupts. I look over my shoulder as Cat sets a fresh bowl of stew in front of me. Bread, too, the grease shining under the artificial light. I look at Clive. He shrugs. Ben shakes her head and mouths, Poisoned?
To my shock, Cat pulls out the empty chair to my left and sits. Tears off a piece of my bread, runs it through the grease, and starts eating. “It was always Route 66. Some terrible men called it I-40 for a while, but that didn’t make it so. It didn’t change its soul. It will always be Route 66.”
She smiles when she says it, like the name means something. And maybe it does. Maybe giving a road a name is not so different from giving a person a name. Outside of the main highways, most roads on the rez don’t even have names. They’re simply “the road right after the big red rock” or “the road near that abandoned school bus.” Easy enough. But maybe when you give a road a name, it changes it.
“Sometimes they called her the Mother Road,” Cat says, eyes still dreamy. “She ran from Chicago all the way to the ocean in Santa Monica.”
“What’s a Chicago?” Ben asks, sounding confused. “Or for that matter, a Santa Monica?”
“They were major cities before the Big Water,” Clive says. “We learned about them in school and on TV shows. They’re long gone now. But part of the road is still there. She’s right about that. I think it’s a refugee road now. It starts somewhere around the Burque and ends at Flagstaff, or wherever the ocean starts these days.”
“What do you know about the road?” I ask our new suddenly friendly tablemate.
“They wrote songs in her honor,” she says, chin in hands. “Built museums so generations would know her greatness.”
“We’re still talking about a road, right?” I ask.
“Yes. A place a cat—” She clears her throat almost delicately. “A place that I have dreamed of seeing.”
“It’s probably not much to look at now,” Clive says.
The woman doesn’t seem to hear him. She starts softly humming a tune I’ve never heard before, maybe one of her road songs.
I have a thought. “So, you know this road, then?”
She rubs her cheek against the back of her hand and smiles. “I have a treasure collection here at the pawn shop devoted to her.”
“And in this collection, do you have a map?”
“Of course. Several.”
“And pictures, maybe? Landmarks? Postcards? Things like that?”
She runs the back of her hand across her forehead. “Certainly.”
“Can we see them?”
She pauses her grooming. Looks questioningly at me.
“Because it looks like that’s where we’re headed,” I explain.
She shifts her eyes to me, focusing. Nods a slow, deliberate yes. “You may see it all, everything I have. The maps, the cards, the tiny cars replicas. For a price.” Her eyes blink slowly, shifting from brown to yellow, her pupils becoming vertical slits. “Battle Child.”
Ben gasps. Clive chokes on his food.
I turn to our waitress. And I greet the shape-shifting cat, former bookie at the Shalimar, purveyor of all things macabre, and the only person who has ever called me “Battle Child.”
“Hello, Mósí.”
Chapter 16
Mósí the human grooms herself in a decidedly feline way as we all finish our meal, and then with a swish of her long skirt, she leads us to a corner of the trading post. Sure enough, there’s a treasure trove of toys, trinkets, key chains, coffee mugs, aprons, candies, postcards, and yes, tiny replica cars, devoted to Route 66. Or at least the Americana that was America’s Freeway.
“Come, child,” Mósí commands, waving a thick rectangular paper in my direction. “Let me show you the Mother Road.”
She’s holding a map, folded over six ways, with a picture of the Window Rock on the front. Across the top it reads ROAD MAP OF THE NAVAJO NATION in a font that’s vaguely Indian feeling, a sort of generic Southwest print pattern filling in the blue letters. Mósí unfolds the map and lays it out in a space she clears on a table. Motions us closer.
The map itself is a couple of feet across, wider than it is long. Hundreds of town names cover the face, the boundaries of Dinétah clearly marked by a solid black border. I immediately look for Crystal, my home, mentally tracing the road that runs between it and Tse Bonito. I wonder if Rissa and Grace made it to Tah’s okay.
My eyes cut across, almost unwillingly, to Black Mesa. The exact place where I trapped Neizghání won’t be marked on any map, but I search for it anyway.
“This is where we are,” Mósí says, pointing with her thumb to Tse Bonito and pulling my attention back to the present. “And this is where the Mother Road runs, just below Dinétah.” Sure enough, there’s a long red line there, following almost parallel with the southern border. “The only way out of Dinétah on the southern side is here.” She points to a place about fifty miles southwest of Tse Bonito, a town called Lupton. “You cross here to enter the Malpais.”
“But do we head east or west?” Clive asks.
“If Kai were going east, he would have left through the eastern wall at Rock Springs. Why go this far west just to backtrack?”
“The silver-eyed boy?” Mósí purrs. “Is that who you hunt?”
Clive starts to answer her, and I raise my hand to stop him. I remember what Neizghání said at Black Mesa, that Mósí was the one who told him of Kai’s clan power. If she hadn’t spoken, who know what would have happened? Maybe Neizghání wouldn’t have felt compelled to make sure Kai was dead before he left. Maybe my heart wouldn’t have been shattered into a million pieces by Kai’s deceitfulness. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to shoot him. I don’t blame the Cat for what happened, but I don’t trust her either.