A large blue and white sign with yellow letters — Best Western — caught Jude's eye. The motel restaurant advertised BREAKFAST, $2.99 on a green and white banner. Extending behind it was a two-story structure of brown brick, with wide brown doors and rectangular windows covered on the inside with heavy white blackout curtains. A staircase in the center, which had open slats between the steps, led to a walkway that lined the second floor.
Jude went inside to register. By habit, he asked for three rooms, and when filling out the forms, he checked a box for payment in cash. The woman behind the counter looked him over and stared across his shoulder at Tizzie and Skyler, now stirring inside the car. She asked for two nights' payment in advance. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of large bills — the remains of a $4,000 withdrawal he had made in New York — held it below the counter and peeled off $200. She made out a receipt and directed him to a parking space at the rear.
They settled in. The rooms were stuffy, so they turned on the air conditioning and met in the restaurant for a cup of coffee.
"Now what?" asked Tizzie.
"I'm going to poke around," said Jude. "You get to take the rest of the day off. As for him" — he gestured toward Skyler with his chin—"he looks like he needs some time in bed."
"Don't you want company?"
"No. I'm just going to get the lay of the land," he lied.
Jude headed south. It was a nondescript town, a scattering of stores and houses and schools, except for a scenic backdrop of distant peaks covered with crowns of snow. He found the town hall and located the records bureau in the basement. A buzzer on the counter summoned a clerk from a back room. A middle-aged man, he eyed Jude as if he were a welcome diversion.
"And what can I do for you?" he asked cheerily.
Jude pulled out a photostated copy of his birth certificate and said he was passing through town and was curious to see the original. The man peered at it, then sat down at a computer and punched a seemingly endless round of commands; he stared at the screen, punched some more, waited, and repeated the process several times. Finally, he shook his head and came back to the counter.
"Well, you must have been born way up in the mountains. 'Cause at that time, looking at your birth date here, babies that were born way up past Cottonwood weren't registered here. They were registered on the Mesa, way up there on the Indian reservation."
Jude looked at him quizzically.
"So I'd say," the clerk continued, "you want to see it, you got to go way up there."
He gave directions.
Jude thanked him and left. He turned right at the next intersection on 260 West, a narrow, winding road gutted on both sides by dry gullies. He passed through rolling hills covered with patches of green grass and creosote bushes and bleached boulders. He came to Dead Horse Park and felt the road rising continually, twisting as it made its way up toward the Mesa. The wind was strong, sending tumbleweeds crashing into the guardrails.
For a spell, the road followed a dried-up riverbed, passing from one side to the other over narrow bridges, and when he looked down, he saw a frozen stream of rocks, rounded and gleaming white in the sun. He came upon a huge boulder that thrust out so far the road veered around it; it had a peculiar shape, almost like a giant fist. Approaching it, Jude had an odd sensation; it seemed so familiar. And when he passed the boulder and continued climbing, that feeling persisted.
Everything he saw — the shimmering heat, the sun glinting off bits of mica, the scrub bushes and tufts of grass and red brown earth gashed out along the roadside — it all combined to thrust him backward, into his childhood. He knew he had been that way before. He sensed a recollection slowly forming, a snapshot taking shape in his mind's eye like a Polaroid. He was in the backseat of a car, a convertible, for the wind was whipping his hair and the sun beat down so hard that when he touched the nickel fasteners on the collapsed roof, it scalded his hand. Someone was driving. His father. When he focused his inner eye, he could see the back of his head, the hairs waving in the wind, the sloped shoulders. He felt safe and protected and excited all at the same time. Where were they going? He had no idea, but he did not need to know, for he had given himself over into the hands of an adult in that childlike way of total trust. It was a feeling he had not experienced for as long as he could remember.
He turned a corner and the vision evaporated. But it left him light-headed. He hit the gas pedal and enjoyed the sway of the car as it snaked around the curves, still climbing. Finally, he reached a small plateau and there off to the right, where the clerk at Camp Verde had said it would be, was a dirt road winding off down a canyon. A dusty sign there told him it was the way to the Camp Verde Indian Reservation.
He took the road. It traversed the bottom of the canyon for a half mile, the ruts and stones rocking the car wildly. Giant promontories moved in toward him until they formed sheer cliffs on either side, just far enough apart for the road to pass through. Then the cliffs abruptly fell away, so that driving past them felt like stepping through a grove of tall trees to enter a meadow. Ahead was a dusty field and a cluster of wooden buildings.
The car stopped in a dust cloud before the main building. A burro with a colored blanket draped across its back was tied to a log fence, and it turned its head slowly to look at Jude as he stepped out into a puddle of dust. The air felt humid, and when he stepped upon the grass, it broke under his shoes as if it were brittle and petrified, like glass.
He heard flies buzzing around the burro; its tail flicked the rear right flank, which twitched. On the log directly in front of the car, Jude saw a foot-long lizard, sitting immobile in the shade. Its feet were splayed, clasping the fence in an embrace, and it cocked its head to one side and watched Jude with one large eye, rocking its head ever so slightly. As Jude walked around the fence the eye trailed him slowly. When he reached the threshold of the building, the animal scampered in a half circle and turned the other eye and resumed its deep, blank stare.
Inside were three Indians, two women and an elderly man. Only the man acknowledged him, nodding once. Jude explained what he was after, and without a word the man led him to a back room lined on three sides with old filing cabinets, and left him there. There was a single window of thick glass, obscured by dust, and the floorboards creaked when he stepped on them. It was stiflingly hot, and round patches of sweat appeared in no time on the underarms of his shirt.
He located the drawer he wanted and opened it. An array of thick cards, smudged gray with thumbing on the upper edge, fell before him. Each was filled in: names, dates, some with a child's footprint in ink. Most of the names were Navajo. He flipped through and came, surprisingly quickly, to his own. It was done in a florid hand, in purple ink. Date of birth: November 20, 1968. Place of birth: Jerome, Arizona. Weight: 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Attending physician: the name was scribbled. He stopped and stared; his given name was Judah. That was strange. Why did he think all these years that it was Judas? Who had told him that — his father? There was his father's name: Harold. His mother's name looked as if it had been obliterated. That was strange.
Jude closed the drawer, and searched in another one. He soon found that name too, Joseph Peter Reilly. The date of birth was five months later than his own. He had guessed it would be there, but still it was surprising to see it in black-and-white, in that same florid script, to realize that he and the judge both traced their early years up into these mountains. Still, that did not explain why the judge had been so upset when he'd seen him — it was hardly likely that the judge would have recognized him after all that time. Somehow, he'd known who Jude was, and he'd known they shared this childhood connection, both members of a desert cult.