A Trip to the Stars

  Revving the bike, I pulled out onto the gravel road and turned right, breaking the second rule Samax had laid down: rough and deserted as that road was, it belonged to the county, and at age fourteen, without a license, I was riding on it illegally.

  The name of the ghost town was Hydra—though there wasn’t a drop of water to be found in the place—and the name of the hotel was The Vega. Calzas had filled me in on its history: in its time, The Hotel Vega belonged to the man who discovered silver in the Spring Mountains; to a famous opera singer who came there to die of cancer; and, much later, to a former ship’s captain who shot himself and his bride in the bridal suite the night of their wedding. The rusted, bullet-riddled NO TRESPASSING sign posted above the boarded-up entrance seemed comical to me in a place so obviously abandoned; but later, to my dismay, I would learn that the hotel indeed had a current owner.

  When I ventured into the desert, I always kept two quarts of water and a gallon of gasoline in plastic containers in the minibike’s saddle-bags. After parking the bike in the shade of the water tower, Auro and I gulped down half the water. I soaked my bandanna and we wiped the grit from our faces. The goggles had left wide white circles around Auro’s eyes, making him appear even more owlish than usual. He came close to smiling for once, his small dark eyes blinking fast: unless he was accompanied by an adult, Ivy never let him stray far from the hotel, so this was a real adventure for him.

  Next, we climbed the winding rickety stairway to the top of the water tower. Since there was no moisture to speak of in the Mojave, none of the steps had rotted away, though many were cracked and splintered. Round and round we went until we reached the platform—two narrow planks with a flimsy railing—from which a ladder too broken to climb led to a triangular opening in the tower’s roof. For several minutes, we gazed around the wide vista, the thermals undulating on the horizon and the mountain peaks shimmering as the sun arced downward in the west. The gravel road, a long diminishing line, ran for as far as we could see without intersecting another road. Directly below, we could look into the top floor of the hotel through a huge hole in the roof. Remnants of shattered furniture, shards of a wall mirror, and a steel bed frame were spattered with droppings from long-dead birds that had once nested in the rafters. Two hundred feet from the ground, I could feel a slow wind from the mountains, so hot it prickled my skin. I hadn’t gone up there to admire the view, but when I saw how avidly Auro was doing just that, I paused for a moment. “It’s beautiful,” I said, indicating the mountains.

  “Beautiful,” he echoed, nodding eagerly.

  “Auro, since you decided to join me, you’re entitled to know why I came out here.”

  Hearing my tone, he gazed into my face intently. I sounded calm and logical, even to myself.

  I took the battered pendant from my pocket and showed it to him.

  “I came to burn this,” I said solemnly. My first impulse had been to bury it in the sand, in an unmarked place, but that didn’t seem enough now—I wanted to destroy it, to know it would not survive, buried or otherwise, in its mutilated state.

  Examining the pendant, rubbing the side the hummingbird had been on with his thumb, Auro looked at me questioningly.

  “Your mother,” I said in a low voice, and his eyes widened even further. “She obviously overheard me yesterday, with Eboli. You know how she feels about me, and she hated my mother,” I added, beginning to choke up. “She sneaked into my room and this is what she did.”

  He recoiled, opening his mouth to speak, though no words emerged.

  I touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have told you if you hadn’t come with me.”

  He shook his head, not in disbelief but disgust.

  “I can’t bear to have it like this,” I said, clenching my fists. “So I’m going to burn it.”

  He was trying to take all this in. Suddenly he nodded vigorously and shouted, “Burn it!” and it was the loudest I had ever heard his voice.

  Aiming carefully, I tossed the pendant and its chain up through the hole in the roof of the tower. We were both startled when it clattered to the floor just a few feet from us, on the other side of the tower’s shingled wall.

  “Come on,” I said, and we rushed down the stairs as fast as we could. I jumped down the last four steps in one bound and took the plastic container of gasoline from the saddlebag.

  Auro’s eyes lit up as he watched me.

  “You understand?” I said, uncapping the gasoline.

  “Understand,” he nodded, and grabbing the container he darted around the foot of the tower pouring gasoline on the stairs, the supporting posts, and the lower crossbeams. He poured out every last drop, and flung the container onto the stairs as I took out a book of matches.

  “Step back,” I said.

  “Back,” he said, prancing backward in his strangely hip-hop fashion, stork-like, with such light steps it was as if he were weightless.

  I only needed to strike a single match: the flames shot up with a hard flapping sound, nearly knocking me off my feet. When I reached him, Auro yanked me even farther back. In thin sheets the fire climbed the tower’s skeleton framework and its winding stairway, biting into the parched wood, crackling like gunfire. I was surprised how quickly it climbed. The rising hot desert air sucked the flames upward, vortex-like. It was a beautiful fire, gold and red in the blazing sunlight as it solidified into an evenly burning column which, to Auro and me, a hundred feet away, emanated the heat of an open furnace. Our cheeks and arms reddened, tears and dust smudged our eyes, and only later did I discover how badly my eyebrows and eyelashes had been singed in that initial burst of flames.

  Shoulder to shoulder we watched the fire dance the last few feet to the tower’s summit, its plume of smoke now nearly the same height as the tower itself. Within minutes the fire engulfed the big wooden tank that had once held the precious piped-in mountain water, jagged flames whipping around on the conical roof. Suddenly, without my saying a word, Auro cried out, “Look!” In fact, I had also seen what he was pointing at, and just as it had impelled him to speak, the sight turned my knees to jelly. Darting from the opening into which I had thrown the pendant a bird had flown free of the tower. A hummingbird. Silver, leaving a thin silver trail in its wake. At first, the hummingbird was lost to view in the smoke, then it shot out into the open air and climbed its own spiral, whirring high into the sky until, finally, no more than a speck, it blurred away.

  My head whirling, I grabbed Auro’s shoulders. “Can you believe it?” I shouted over the roar of the flames.

  For an instant his jaw quavered and his shoulders shook within my grip, as if he were struggling to speak again unprompted. But once again all he could do was echo me. “Believe it,” he said emphatically.

  Just then the tower swayed hard to the right, and collapsing as it fell, crashed onto the roof of the hotel. Something I hadn’t counted on—or had I? Because of their close proximity, and the certainty that desert fires spread wildly, there was little chance things could have happened any other way. When the tower hit The Hotel Vega, it was as if a two-hundred-foot torch had landed on a hill of tinder: the hotel seemed not so much to burn down as to combust all at once. Rising several hundred feet into the air, spewing a cloud of black smoke even higher, the fire would have been visible for many miles—maybe as far as the nearest real town, I thought, as the realization of what I had done began to sink in. To citizens in that area a fire—any fire—was a serious matter. Auro, his eyes wider than ever, had been thinking along the same lines, and moments later he nearly outran me to the minibike.

  I opened up the throttle and we bounced hard on that rough gravel road and didn’t look back until we reached the point where we turned into the desert. Pausing there, I raised my sunglasses and Auro wiped the goggles and we watched the fire in the distance. All that remained of The Hotel Vega was a pyramid of livid scarlet, streaming embers into the sky and glowing like a bonfire against the purple mountains, almost as brightly intense as
the setting sun to our left. Quite an enormous and dramatic bonfire, I would think many times afterward with a pit in my stomach, just to destroy a single silver pendant. But as Auro and I, reeking of gasoline and covered with ashes and sand, crossed the desert in the darkness beneath the first twinkling stars—breaking Samax’s third rule—I knew the fire had not been nearly large enough to consume the real object of my rage: the cold, implacable image of Ivy I couldn’t get out of my mind.

  For a while, nothing happened. I heard passing mention of the fire in the kitchen the next day, but not a word at the dinner table, even when Samax returned at the end of the week. This wasn’t particularly surprising. In a household where current events—including the Vietnam War, then at its height, and the race riots on both coasts—cropped up less in conversation than the wars, riots, and arcana of ancient Greece and Rome, a local fire would not arouse much interest. Only scientific breakthroughs and spectacular feats like the moon landing seemed to penetrate the filters, invisible and otherwise, with which Samax had insulated the Hotel Canopus.

  As for Ivy, I barely encountered her in the ensuing days, and when I did, she looked right past me, deadpan, as always, and I returned the favor. I could not prove she had disfigured the pendant; if I confronted her, she would just deny it. Somehow, some way, her day of reckoning would come, I told myself.

  After two weeks, I was both breathing easier and tormented by the notion that I had to confess to Samax what I had done. He had always trusted me completely—something which I understood better, and valued for its rarity, as I got older—and I never lied to him. At first I was afraid to tell him about the fire; then I had to admit to myself that, more than anything, I was ashamed. And so I vacillated, until one morning a pair of state troopers in taut khaki uniforms and white Stetsons drove up the cul-de-sac to the Hotel Canopus in a black and white patrol car and asked for Samax. Denise showed them up to the tenth floor and ten minutes later came down to the lounge where I sat disconsolately picking at the piano keys.

  “He wants to see you,” she said, expressionless as always. “Now.” Then, uncharacteristically breaking her studied detachment toward me, she added, “You’re going to catch it this time.”

  Samax was sitting behind the plain mahogany desk in his business office (in his study he worked at a quarter-moon-shaped desk of dazzling blue glass), a small stark room adorned with a long-needled red cactus and a rough Etruscan urn—singular adornments of pain and death. There were no fruit trees, none of his many works of art, and no personal effects. It was exactly the room he would choose to receive the police. From his prison stint he equated them with corrections officers, and bore them no love. The only other times I knew him to entertain in that room were when his accountant or lawyers came by, or, on a personal level, when he had to impart unpleasant news to a guest or relative. When he asked Ivy and Nestor to leave the hotel, for example, he did it in that office. So my associations with the room were decidedly gloomy, and until that moment I had never met with Samax there.

  He nodded toward a straight-back chair directly opposite his desk, identical to the ones the state troopers occupied. They both looked me over, then turned their attention back to Samax. Whatever his longstanding feelings toward the police, it was at me that he was staring hard, his pale blue eyes unflinching.

  “These officers have come here with some questions for you, Enzo. Answer them as honestly as I’ve always known you to answer me.”

  Two hunters tracking desert bighorns in the mountains had seen the fire and through their binoculars and rifle scopes watched me flee from it on the minibike. Making inquiries, the police had ascertained finally that my destination must have been the Hotel Canopus. They had no physical proof whatsoever that I had been in Hydra: just a sighting from miles away. And of course the hunters had reported seeing two boys.

  I listened to the troopers, but rather than wait for them to pose their questions, I turned back to Samax. “It was me, Uncle Junius. I went to Hydra that day.”

  Samax’s shoulders tensed up and he exhaled slowly. “You were there. And the fire: were you in any way responsible?”

  I nodded, and though my guts were churning, my voice remained calm. “I started it.”

  “Accidentally, you mean—were you smoking out there?”

  “No. I purposely set fire to the water tower. Then the fire got out of control and spread to the hotel.”

  Never in all my years with Samax—before or after that day—did I ever see him so shocked by anything I said. The troopers didn’t seem surprised: my frankness told them only that I was someone who had been waiting to confess.

  Samax’s hand had balled up into a fist, which he brought down onto the desk with exaggerated slowness—worse, I thought, than if he had pounded it. “But why would you do such a thing?” he said in a low voice, his most serious voice, for he seldom spoke loudly and never shouted.

  I sucked in my breath and tried to fix on a wavering circle, a watery reflection of sunlight off the desktop, on the wall beside him. “I had to burn something.”

  “You what? Enzo, I’ve never known you to be smart with me.”

  “I’m not being smart. Please don’t misunderstand me. I was really angry, and I had to burn something.”

  “You mean, just anything? What are you telling me—that suddenly you’re a pyromaniac?”

  That churning was spreading from my gut: my arms began trembling and I had to separate my knees so they wouldn’t knock. The troopers’ silence only reinforced the fact that I had just confessed to a crime, and suddenly I had visions of myself in reform school, behind fences, barred windows, locked doors, far from the friendly confines of the Hotel Canopus, far from Desirée, Calzas, and Sirius, institutionalized at last, the fate (in its more benign forms) I had precariously avoided so often before as an orphan—the fate that my aunt Alma had so feared for me before Samax snatched me away. “No,” I replied at last, “what I mean is that I had a thing in my possession which I had to burn. I threw it into the water tower and set the tower on fire.”

  “Something illegal?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “And to burn this thing, small enough presumably so that you were able to carry it into the desert, you set a whole tower on fire?”

  “I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s what happened.”

  “Enzo, you’re trying my patience. If you were smoking pot and the fire started, just say so.”

  “But I wasn’t. Uncle Junius, I’m telling you the truth. I’m sorry.”

  Samax tilted back in his chair and peered through the parted white curtains at the desert, then leaned forward again. “All right. You say you were angry. At what or whom?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Enzo …”

  “I can’t.”

  Samax shook his head. It was as if suddenly it weighed a hundred pounds on his neck. I knew he was in pain, not only because of what I’d done but because I’d kept it secret—I was still keeping it secret. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about Ivy and my mother’s pendant: I had made my choice not to go to him in the first place and I was going to stick to it. And, sitting there with the troopers, I thought the truth—already a muddle—would sound even more preposterous.

  “Who was the other boy?” one of the troopers asked suddenly.

  “There was no one with me, Officer.”

  “The hunters were certain there were two of you.”

  “They were wrong.”

  From his eyes I saw that Samax knew I was lying now. But I saw, too, that he didn’t want this point to be pursued. Gently he deflected the focus. “Why didn’t you tell me about the fire?” he asked. “Is it for the same reason you can’t tell me why you were angry?”

  “No,” I said, biting my lip, holding back tears, “it was because I felt so ashamed.”

  Looking him in the eye at that moment, seeing how he took in my grief without losing his temper, was my most difficult moment
in that room.

  The troopers piped in again with more specific questions: what had I used to start the fire; why had I chosen the ghost town; had I set any other fires in the area, and if so, when. At that point Samax cut them off, politely but firmly.

  “He’s fully admitted to starting the fire, gentlemen. He’s fourteen years old. He has lived with me for four years. His adoptive parents were killed seven years ago in an automobile accident. He’s never done anything wrong before—certainly nothing involving the law. That ghost town has been food for termites for over forty years. I’ll pay whoever owns the property whatever they ask. If they like, I’ll erect a new hotel on the site. Now, are you going to charge this boy with a crime? If so, I want to get my lawyers out here before any of us says another word. I can have them in this room within thirty minutes.”

  The troopers exchanged glances. Samax kept to himself more than most of the truly powerful people—on both sides of the law—in Las Vegas County, but he was no hermit, and many of those people were his friends and acquaintances on various levels. After conferring briefly, the troopers said they would have to take the matter up downtown with their superior after contacting the owner of the property.

  “And who might that be?” Samax inquired, and I could see in his face that he was sure they would never file charges against me.

  “Hydra is part of a large parcel owned by Xaphan Landshares. They’ve been buying up desert property.”

  “Never heard of them,” Samax said.

  “They’re a subsidiary of VC Enterprises up in Reno.”

  At this, Samax blanched. “Have you had contact with them?”

  “With VC? No. Just with the general manager down at Xaphan.”