An hour later, Jude was in a slum village on the outskirts of Phoenix. Dirt roads crossed other dirt roads and skirted trailer parks and dusty lots packed with shacks and lean-tos overflowing with children and chickens. It looked like parts of Mexico City.
He had to stop every five minutes to ask directions; he thought some of the locals were feigning ignorance. At last, he spotted the small handwritten sign he had been told to look for, reading DOCUMENTOS. He parked the car and started to walk inside, but his path was blocked by a heavyset Mexican who leaned across the doorway with a ham-sized forearm. Over his shoulder Jude spotted a large Xerox machine, incongruous against the chicken-coop whitewashed wall.
It took him forty-five minutes, six more cigarettes, a hundred and forty dollars and all the persuasive power of his inadequate Spanish to get what he wanted. He sat sipping a warm beer while the machine did its work and the man sat at a makeshift workbench like a master craftsman, wielding the knives and scissors and pieces of plastic that were his trade.
"But why two?" he had asked. "And why with the same surname but two different Christian names?"
"Family reasons" was all that Jude had replied, and that had settled the matter.
Driving away, Jude came to a small ravine that was banked on one side by rocky cliffs. He spied openings high up on ledges and wondered if they were caves once inhabited by desert Indians. They would have used them as the last redoubt, farming in the valley and then retreating up there with as much food as they could carry during times of siege.
Farther on, he came to civilization — a gas station and a cement factory. The road widened and turned to black tarmac. He saw a sign that caught his attention and started him thinking — thinking about something that had been bothering him, like a name he couldn't remember. He had been first struck by the memory, unformed but strong, when he'd gone up to the Indian reservation in the mountains. He had had it several times since.
He checked his watch. It was hours out of the way, but if he hurried, he would have time. When he reached the main highway, he turned south — toward Tucson. Farther on the rolling gray hills were dotted with saguaro cacti, their arms raised like hold-up victims.
The Sonora Desert Museum on Kinney Road was set in a valley down a steep, winding road through Gates Pass in Tucson Mountain Park. At the entrance was a landscaped patio with shaded spaces and ramadas made from saguaro ribs. Behind, like an adobe dwelling, was the terra-cotta stucco of the main building.
He parked next to a charter bus disgorging junior high school students. On the sidewalk, they formed into cliques self-segregated by sex. The girls skittered ahead whispering and conspiring. The boys hung back, lunging into one another and trading the occasional punch.
Jude paid $8.95 admission and waited for them to pass. He spent the time in the gift shop, looking at postcards, silver bracelets, beaded necklaces and Indian sand paintings. On a rack was a stack of papers; by reflex he checked the headlines. Nothing big happening.
He hoped the visit would be worth the money. He was beginning to worry about the bankroll. They would run through it quickly if Skyler had to stay in the hospital for any length of time. He could switch identities and put the bill on his own health insurance, but that meant he could be traced. And the longer they stayed there, the more clues they left for their trackers.
He went outside where the museum began, a series of paths connecting low-slung terra-cotta buildings. The coast was clear, so he headed straight for the tan building to the right with the flat roof and thick walls, clearly marked REPTILES & INVERTEBRATES. Inside, it was dark and he was momentarily blinded. His nostrils were assaulted by the acrid smell of urine and sweat. His eyes gradually adjusted. To his right was a glass-enclosed pen of worn, compacted earth interspersed with tree branches and barkless logs. Here and there were large turtles, motionless under their thick, humped shells. To his left was another picture window containing foot-long Gila monsters, their dull black bodies spotted with reddish-orange markings.
Then farther on came the snakes, sleeping or slithering around rocks and branches. A cluster of young children clutched the railing and stared, as motionless as the turtles had been, fascinated by the lure of a diamond-back rattler splayed along a log. Its head was raised and poked in slow motion at the air.
Finally, Jude came to the lizards. There were scores of them, all different sizes, in browns and greens and speckled shades in between. Some were stump-tailed, others long-tailed. Some had spiny necks standing up like a row of teeth; others had thin, scaly flaps of skin hanging down from their chins like beards. Some disappeared against the mud, others stood out in silhouette, standing on logs like sentinels. The more he looked into the glass-enclosed cages, the more he saw. Most of them stayed where they were, as immobile as scenery, but others occasionally darted here and there, seemingly without purpose, moving with a speed that was somehow alarming.
He could stand close and look them in the eye. There was a Texas horned lizard (Phynosoma cornutum) with a flattened body trimmed around with spikes and a devilish cast to the skull. And a two-foot-long green iguana (Iguana iguana) clinging to a tree with delicate speckled fingers that ended in long black nails. And the iguanid chuckwalla (Sauromalus obesus), sixteen inches long, with a strange two-tone luminescent body, which as the sign informed him, had the habit of hiding in crevices and, when sensing danger, puffing itself up so that it could not be extricated. Not a bad defense, thought Jude.
Still he had not found what he was looking for.
He wandered outside and followed a winding path. He walked through a mineral gallery, under ground caves, an amphitheater. He passed by open pens separated by dry moats — mountain lions, black bears, porcupines, Mexican wolves, white-tailed deer.
Then, he saw it — on an island all by itself in a corner that was arid and hot as blazes.
The lizard was just like the one that had watched him balefully two days ago at the office on the reservation. It gripped a log, just as that one had, and it looked back at him with a single unblinking eye.
Jude stepped closer. He looked at the thick skin, the diamond-shaped scales piled in layers like shingles, the curvature of the mouth. The mouth looked cruel. He saw the sides expanding slowly, barely perceptibly. He looked straight into the eye, into the spherical black pupil. It seemed to spiral inward, bottomless in its blackness.
And suddenly it called to him. He knew it. He knew it from his childhood, had seen it close by for years. Of course, he said to himself. That was it. We had lizards. We kept these lizards. An image floated up from somewhere — himself as a young boy, his hands pressed against glass, staring at the lizards, at those deep black pupils.
His reverie was interrupted by a figure that appeared on his left, so suddenly he was startled. He turned to look at a woman in her thirties, blonde hair tied in a ponytail, a pair of large-rimmed glasses perched jauntily on her nose. She smiled.
"I see you're engrossed," she said. "They're my favorites."
He saw now that she was wearing a trim suit jacket. Above her left breast was a tag: CURATOR OF REPTILES.
She followed his eyes. "It's a better job title than 'reptilian curator,'" she said. "That's what they wanted to call me."
Now he smiled. "Why are they your favorites?"
He realized there were more than the one he had been looking at on the island, a half dozen or so of them. For the first time he read the sign attached to the railing, which said: DESERT GRASSLAND WHIPTAIL.