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Sooner or later you are. I just don’t want you to be standin next to me when you do it.
You’re hard as nails, girl.
Not really.
I know.
She can feel his gaze on her, and she doesn’t want to meet it. She looks at the street. There’s something in the asphalt that makes it glisten under the streetlamps.
How about this, he says. How about you forget Point Comfort? Come with me to California instead. We’ll take the train to Dallas—and we’ll ride west from there, all three of us. What I hear, they got whole cities under protection. You could walk in a straight line for an hour and never come to a blockade. Like civilization restored.
What about Niagara Falls? Is that inside the blockade?
He sits back against the bench, defeated.
You get old, Temple. The wide world is a pretty adventure for a long time, it’s true. But then one day you wake up and you just want to drink a cup of coffee without thinking about livin or dyin.
Yeah, well, I ain’t there yet.
Goddamnit, girl, what happened to you? You got things to tell. You could tell me.
Maybe so, she says. But I ain’t there yet either.
ON THE road south, Maury is silent. He plays with his fingers and looks out the window, his eyes focusing on nothing in particular. In the morning, a light rain grays out the sky and falls in speckles on the windshield—but an hour out of Longview, the rain clears and the sky breaks apart into clouds that look like rag piles against the brilliant blue.
All around is flatland—desert waste dotted with tufts of pricking weeds and dry grass. Along the road, cars are pulled off to the shoulder or half rolled over in ditches. She peers into each as she goes by, looking for sheltered survivors and being relieved to find none. At the wheels of some of the cars are corpses, most of them skeletal, the skin and flesh eaten away, the bone ground clean and white by sandstorms. Others, undiscovered by slugs or locked away behind doors that slugs can’t open, are untouched, their skin leathery, burned brown, shrunk taut over the bones of the fingers and the face.
Otherwise nothing. She stops the car and shuts down the engine, she rolls down the windows to listen. Barren and empty, the landscape speaks nothing to her. This is a world of deafness.
Her thoughts go to sorry places. She thinks of God and of the angels who will decide whether or not she enters heaven. She thinks of all her crimes—of all the blood she has spilled on the earth. She thinks of the Todd brothers, one of whom she stole the very breath from, her hands as good as throttling his windpipe, and the other of whom she let die by the hands of others when she could have saved him. She thinks of Ruby and her pretty dresses and the pink nail polish that is completely chipped away—and the Griersons, who had pretty things too, like record players and pianos and model ships and grandfather clocks and polished marble tabletops and iced tea with leaves in it. But thinking of the Griersons also makes her think of the lonesome men trapped in that big house, sorrowful James Grierson, and Richard Grierson, whose horizons were always beyond fences he wouldn’t dare climb, and the clear-eyed patriarch caged in the basement confused about what he was. Him too she stole the life from.
It’s true she must have hands of death for so much of life to get extinguished by their touch.
And she thinks about an iron giant of a man, and a boy called Malcolm who may have been her actual blooden brother, and the shape of his body, so loose in her arms and so light like he was made of thread.
SHE KNOWS she’s outside of Nacogdoches when she begins to see signs for the 59. There, framed against the ruins of a derelict carnival, she discovers an old woman gathering the flowering buds from a cactus.
She gets out of the car and approaches the woman, who doesn’t seem to notice her.
Are you all right, ma’am?
Mis hijos tendrán hambre.
The old woman continues to pick the cactus flowers, gathering them in an apron wrapped around her waist.
I don’t speak nothin but English. Do you speak English?
Mis hijos necesitarán comida para cuando regresen.
Do you live around here?
The old woman seems to notice Temple for the first time.
Venga. Usted también come . . .
She gestures for Temple to follow. Temple fetches Maury from the car, and the two follow the old woman to the high sturdy fence surrounding the old carnival. They follow the length of the fence until they come to a gate closed with a chain and a lock. The old woman pulls a key from a fold in her skirt and unlocks the gate and ushers them inside and guides them through the strange colorful machines, broken-down things with long necks and lines of colored bulbs and torn vinyl seats and twisting tracks.
She would like to study the machines, and she imagines them in action, grinding away with grease and glitter like gaudy dinosaurs.
The old woman leads them to a sheltered place where a large wooden awning provides shade over the top of a number of picnic tables. In the center of the area, there is a fire pit with a makeshift hob built over the top of it and a blackened pot.
Siéntese, the woman says. Siéntese.
Do you live here? Temple asks. Nearby is a trailer with its door ajar. Is that where you sleep?
Temple waits for a response. When she gets none, she shrugs.
It’s safe enough, I guess, Temple says. You been doin all right so far, haven’t you?
The old woman does something with the cactus flowers and puts some of them in the pot, which is already steaming with other ingredients, and she stirs it with a wooden spoon. A short distance from the fire Temple finds two grave markers—just wooden crosses with photographs of two young men nailed to them.
La guerra se llevó muchos hombres buenos. La luz del día dura demasiado tiempo.
I don’t understand what you’re sayin, Temple says. She points to her own ear and shakes her head. I can’t understand it.
The old woman breathes in the steam rising from the pot then ladles some of the soup into a plastic bowl and hands it to Temple with an old metal spoon. Temple tastes it, and it tastes good, it tastes like what the desert would taste like if places had flavors, and they do—and she eats it up and most of Maury’s too since he is reluctant to do anything but explore the textures of the place with his fingers, paint peeling from fiberglass clown faces, splintered wooden platforms, rust caked on gears and wheels, colorful plastic flags whip-snapping in the hot wind.
She thanks the old woman, though the woman pays her no mind and collects the bowls into a pile and puts them aside and sits with her legs crossed on the ground and starts to chant something that sounds like a prayer or an incantation.
Soy una sepultura—
doy a luz a los muertos.
Acojo a los muertos—
Soy una sepultura.
The old woman repeats the words over and over, her voice never deviating, ceaseless and monotone, and the sharp edge of shade cast by the overhang creeps farther away—as though evening were something that grew larger in patches, seeded by the shade spots of day. Then the voice terminates suddenly, cut off as though by the removal of a plug from a socket, and the woman takes an impossibly long scarf from a wooden chest and begins knitting with two needles at one end of it. The scarf snakes away, dusty from being dragged along the ground, patchy with a harlequin assortment of yarns, its tail end buried somewhere in that trunk behind her.
Temple waits, but the woman says nothing more, and the shadow crawls farther away.
Maury is in the distance, looking into the eyes of a painted dragon.
Temple speaks. She explains to the woman that she has traveled a long way, and that for knowing all the names of the places she has been she still feels lost even though she knows that’s impossible because God is a slick god and wherever you are is where He wants you to be. She tells the woman that she has done bad things—things G
od would not like—and that sometimes she wonders if God could be angry at her, and if she would know the difference between a blessing and a punishment because the world is wondrous even when your stomach is empty and there is dried blood in your hair.
She tells the woman that she has been traveling all her life that’s worth remembering, and that her mind feels almost filled up already, with people and sights and words and sins and redemptions.
She tells of how you have a special amazement for all the beauty in the world when you are evil like she is—probably because beauty and evil are on the opposite sides of a wall like lovers who can never really touch.
She tells of the people she has killed, she lists the names for the ones she knows and describes the others, but she can’t remember them all, and she knows she shouldn’t forget things like that and she would write them down except that she can’t read or write because when she was supposed to be learning her letters she was busy hiding in a drainage ditch because her foster home got eaten up by meatskins.
And she tells of her biggest sin of all, the thing that turned her from one thing to another, from a human into an abomination. She tells of a boy named Malcolm, whom she killed—and how it happened at the feet of an iron giant because God wanted to remind her of her smallness. How she got itchy to explore the factory warehouse behind the iron giant because of what marvels might be hidden there and how she told the boy Malcolm to wait in case there was a nest of meatskins inside. How she only intended to pop in and pop back out when she saw it was safe, but she found a little office up an iron stairway overlooking the warehouse, and in the office there were blueprints on the walls, covering all the walls, that blue not quite like any other blue she had ever seen. She tells of how magical they were, those white lines like chalk fibers against that blue, the figures and numbers and arrows like the very nomenclature of man’s grandeur, the objects they described like artifacts lost and gone and hinted at in undecipherable etchings for future races smarter than herself to puzzle over. And they were a wonder, those mortal imaginations splayed wide on paper, testaments to vision far beyond her own weary head, testimonials to the faith in the power of human ingenuity to shape something out of nothing and to stand back and behold it and to nod and to say, Yes, this is what I have made, this is a thing that did not exist before in the history of the world.