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.
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.