Without raising an eyebrow or even looking in my direction, Lucy shrugged and sat back. “Your grandfather wants you to have it,” she said.
“I don’t want it.”
“Grow up.”
Edging as far from the nightstand as possible, I shed the sleeping bag and sat down on the blanket and ate. Everything tasted sweet and sandy. My skin prickled with the intensifying heat. I still had a piece of fry bread and half a sausage left when I put my plastic fork down and looked at Lucy, who was arranging a new candle, settling the water drum near me, tying her hair back with a red rubber-band.
“Where did it come from?” I asked.
That got Lucy to look at me, at least, and this time, there really were tears in her eyes. “I don’t understand your family,” she said.
I shook my head. “Neither do I.”
“Your grandfather’s been saving that for you, Seth.”
“Since when?”
“Since before you were born. Before your father was born. Before he ever imagined there could be a you.”
This time, when the guilt came for me, it mixed with my fear rather than chasing it away, and I broke out sweating. I thought I might be sick.
“You have to eat. Damn you,” said Lucy.
I picked up my fork and squashed a piece of sausage into the fry bread and put it in my mouth. My stomach convulsed, but it accepted the food.
As soon as I’d finished, Lucy shoved the drum onto my lap. I played while she chanted, and the sides of the hogan seemed to breathe in and out, very slowly. I felt drugged. Then I wondered if I had been. Had they sprinkled something over the bread? Was that the next step? And toward what? Erasing me, I thought, almost chanted. Erasing me, and my hands flew off the drum and Lucy stopped.
“All right,” she said. “That’s probably enough.” Then, to my surprise, she actually reached out and tucked some of my hair behind my ear, touched my face for a second as she took the drum from me. “It’s time for your Journey,” she said.
I stared at her. The walls, I noticed, had stilled. I didn’t feel any less strange, but a little more awake. “Journey where?”
“You’ll need water. And I’ve packed you a lunch.” She slipped through the hide curtain, and I followed, dazed, and almost walked into my grandfather, parked right outside the hogan with a black towel on his head, so that his eyes and splitting skin were in shadow. On his peeling hands, he wore black leather gloves. His hands, I thought, must be on fire.
Right at the moment I noticed that Lucy was no longer with us, the hiss from the oxygen tank sharpened, and my grandfather’s lips moved beneath the mask. Ruach.” This morning, the nickname sounded almost affectionate.
I waited, unable to look away. But the oxygen hiss settled again, like leaves after a gust of wind, and my grandfather said nothing more. A few seconds later, Lucy came back carrying a red backpack, which she handed to me.
“Follow the signs,” she said, and turned me around until I was facing straight out from the road into the empty desert.
Struggling to life, I shook her hand off my shoulder. “Signs of what? What am I supposed to be doing?”
“Finding. Bringing back.”
“I won’t go,” I said.
“You’ll go,” said Lucy coldly. “The signs will be easily recognizable and easy to locate. I have been assured of that. All you have to do is pay attention.”
“Assured by who?”
“The first sign, I am told, will be left by the tall flowering cactus.”
She pointed, which was unnecessary. A hundred yards or so from my grandfather’s house, a spiky green cactus poked out of the rock and sand, supported on either side by two miniature versions of itself. A little cactus family staggering in out of the waste.
I glanced at my grandfather under his mock cowl, then at Lucy with her ferocious black eyes trained on me. Tomorrow, I thought, my father would come for me, and with any luck I would never have to come here again.
Suddenly, I felt ridiculous and sad and guilty once more. Without even realizing what I was doing, I stuck my hand out and touched my grandfather’s arm. The skin under his thin cotton shirt depressed beneath my fingers like the squishy center of a misshapen pillow. It wasn’t hot. It didn’t feel alive at all. I yanked my hand back, and Lucy glared at me. Tears sprang to my eyes.
“Get out of here,” she said, and I stumbled away into the sand.
I don’t really think the heat intensified as soon as I stepped away from my grandfather’s house. But it seemed to. Along my bare arms and legs, I could feel the little hairs curling as though singed. The sun had scorched the sky white, and the only place to look that didn’t hurt my eyes was down. Usually when I walked in the desert, I was terrified of scorpions, but not that day. It was impossible to imagine anything scuttling or stinging or even breathing out there. Except me.
I don’t know what I expected to find. Footprints, maybe, or animal scat, or something dead. Instead, stuck to the stem by a cactus needle, I found a yellow stick-’em note. It said Pueblo.
Gently, avoiding the rest of the spiny needles, I removed the note. The writing was black and blocky. I glanced toward my grandfather’s house, but he and Lucy were gone. The ceremonial hogan looked silly from this distance, like a little kid’s pup tent.
Unlike the pueblo, I thought. I didn’t even want to look that way, let alone go there. Already I could hear it calling for me in a whisper that sounded way too much like my grandfather’s. I could head for the road, I thought. Start toward town instead of the pueblo and wait for a passing truck to carry me home. There would have to be a truck, sooner or later.
I did go to the road. But when I got there, I turned in the direction of the pueblo. I don’t know why. I didn’t feel as if I had a choice.
The walk, if anything, was too short. No cars passed. No road signs sprang from the dirt to point the way back to town and the world I knew. I watched the asphalt rise out of itself and roll in the heat like the surface of the sea, and I thought of my grandfather in the woods of Chelmno, digging graves in long, green shadows. Lucy had put ice in the thermos she gave me, and the cubes clicked against my teeth when I drank.
I walked, and I watched the desert, trying to spot a bird or a lizard. Even a scorpion would have been welcome. What I saw was sand, distant, colorless mountains, white sky, a world as empty of life and its echoes as the surface of Mars, and just as red.
Even the lone road sign pointing to the pueblo was rusted through, crusted with sand, the letters so scratched away that the name of the place was no longer legible. I’d never seen a tourist trailer here, or another living soul. Even calling it a pueblo seemed grandiose.
It was two sets of caves dug into the side of a cliff-face, the top one longer than the bottom, so that together they formed a sort of gigantic cracked harmonica for the desert wind to play. The roof and walls of the top set of caves had fallen in. The whole structure seemed more monument than ruin, a marker of a people who no longer existed rather than a place where they had lived.
The bottom stretch of caves was largely intact, and as I stumbled toward them along the cracking macadam I could feel their pull in my ankles. They seemed to be sucking the desert inside them, bit by bit. I stopped in front and listened.
I couldn’t hear anything. I looked at the cracked, nearly square window openings, the doorless entryways leading into what had once been living spaces, the low, shadowed caves of dirt and rock. The whole pueblo just squatted there, inhaling sand through its dozens of dead mouths in a mockery of breath. I waited a while longer, but the open air didn’t feel any safer, just hotter. If my grandfather’s enemies were inside him, I suddenly wondered, and if we were calling them out, then where were they going? Finally, I ducked through the nearest entryway and stood in the gloom.