“Roxana Primavera Rivera,” she says in a proud careful voice like she might have once used in front of a classroom.
Once again he motions to the seat with his thumb. “Hop on board, Roxana.”
This time she does just as he says and gets on the bike, wrapping her tiny hands around him, looping her fingers through his denim belt loops. When the engine growls alive she releases a little scream and buries her head into his back.
They ride—out of the parking lot, out of the town, into the Willamette Valley—and the clouds open up and pieces of light drop down and skitter across the asphalt. He looks for Mexicans, for someone to drop off the girl with, but sees nothing except overgrown fields, tangled vineyards. An hour passes and the low-slung sun burns the horizon into a shriveling purpley brown piece of hot plastic. Night rises from the mountains like smoke, fingering its way across the sky.
In the morning, Darren decides, I’ll find someplace for her then.
Just outside St. Helens a mule deer bounds across the highway and springs into the air, so impossibly high, hurdling a barbed-wire fence with a white swish of tail, disappearing into the forest, where the shadows fuse together.
“Did you see that?” Darren yells over his shoulder. She gives him no response, her head still burrowed into his back, a warm heaviness, a nice feeling. “That was beautiful.”
Darren spends most nights in an underground concrete bunker the size of a rich man’s closet. His father built it in their backyard—in case the capital-B Bomb ever dropped. That he might drop the bomb never occurred to him. The bunker is dark and dank with a thick lead door and Darren figures it’s as good a place as any—it’s home, anyway—and down here the Geiger only reads thirty microrems per hour.
Here, in the absolute quiet of underground, he reads himself to sleep with a flashlight tucked between his neck and pillow. He has loads of books—Westerns, science-fiction stories, even romances—stolen from houses and libraries and stores, and he finds in them not just entertainment, but comfort, the comfort of reading about smart people who say all the right things and in the end figure stuff out.
Katie is like that, like someone out of a book. Always saying snappy things that ought to be written down, such as when she told Darren, “If you don’t have a home, you’ve got nowhere to hang your heart.” She was right about that. Nights he spends elsewhere, away from the bunker, sleeping under the stars, a vast black continent stretched out above him, he feels lost, erased.
The bunker is where he takes Roxana.
There is no electricity—he uses propane for cooking, candles for light, and a battery-powered stereo for music—and there is no running water. He boils and bottles what he drinks and he bathes in a nearby stream. The water is cold, white with minerals, and comes from the old glaciers way up in the Cascades. When he bathes, huge fish, salmon the size of dolphins, curl around him, flapping their tails as if they own the river. Sometimes they taste him, taking his toes or fingers into their prickly mouths, chewing, and he finds the sensation strangely pleasant. They dart all up and down the river, their reddish scales glowing beneath the water like the magic woods outside Trojan. For a time he worried whether the water was cleaning him or dirtying him—the radiation washed right off the mountains and into his skin—but then he stopped worrying.
He keys the bunker’s deadbolt and holds open the door like a bellhop, giving Roxana a little after-you-ma’am bow. She doesn’t budge from the top of the stairs. Her expression belongs to someone who just swallowed a bitter pill. “It’s no palace,” he says with an apologetic shrug, “but hey.” He leaves her there and goes about lighting candles, making the place more welcoming, and eventually, when the black bug-filled air gets to be too much for her, she makes her way down to join him.
With the perfect stillness of the bunker air and the red glow of the candles and the awkwardness of sharing a small space with a stranger, a little girl no less, Darren feels weird. He wants to turn on the stereo or get the hell away. When she goes to the bed and plops down on it, he squats in the far corner and examines his hands.
For a long time there is a silence between them until finally she says, “I’m starving.” She holds her belly for emphasis.
“Okay,” Darren says and goes to a shelving unit stacked with flour and sugar and canned vegetables and soups. “I’ve got some stuff here I could warm up. Do you like chicken-noodle soup?”
“I want cookies. Do you have chocolate-chip cookies?”
“Cookies,” he says. “Are you kidding me?”
She scratches her arm as a response.
Making cookies, to Darren, is like wearing cologne. An extravagance he never would have considered. The world falls apart and who wants to play hopscotch? Who wants to plant a flower garden? Who wants to make cookies? But now that he thinks about it, the other day he did collect some bird eggs—he does more or less have every ingredient—so he says, “All right. What the hell. Let’s make cookies.”
She says, “Yay,” and tucks her hair behind her ears and gives him a hundred-watt smile.
He doesn’t know why, but when he goes about mixing the flour and sugar and Crisco, chopping a Snickers bar into tiny bits, lighting the camping stove, he grins like an idiot. He grins so big his cheeks ache.
The last time he smiled like this, he realizes, was months ago, with Katie, when he told her about this dream he had. In it his parents drove around the Dead Zone on Vespa motor scooters, wearing sombreros and Hawaiian shirts, and when he tried to flag them down, they waved enthusiastically but didn’t stop. “You’re missing out on all the fun,” they yelled, their voices riding the wind.
He asked Katie what she thought about that. She said she thought he was sweet and funny and maybe, just maybe, his parents had a point.
Now he and Roxana make hungry noises and hunch over the camping stove and watch globs of chocolate-chunked dough melt on a pan, and for the first time in a long time he feels something akin to the warm swelling of the cookies.
She takes the bed and he takes the floor. The Pendleton blanket over concrete isn’t very comfortable, but that’s not why he can’t sleep. He rarely sleeps. Nights, a dead man comes to visit him.
Here is the story of the dead man: Darren was working a Karbala traffic checkpoint near the U.S. Embassy when it happened. The day was hot as only the desert can get. He had been searching cars for eight hours, and he was angry and tired and unfocused, until a pistol appeared from behind a rolled-down window. The man screamed something in Arabic and squeezed the trigger. It jammed. Darren’s did not. He remembers the man looking up at him, wide-eyed and surprised, his mouth a black O, the kind of look Darren’s father no doubt wore when the reactor came apart all around him.
Darren wonders what the Iraqi man saw, what he felt? The cold rush of metal into his mouth. The internal blossoming of blood as teeth and gum and bone evaporated, as the back of his head opened up and ejected what looked like a handful of rotten watermelon. Did he feel the wind whistling through his newly rendered cavity?
Darren killed many others, but none whose faces he saw so clearly.
So whenever he falls into dreams, the dead man emerges from the dark, and Darren wakes up with an asthmatic gasp, squeezing his hands into fists so hard the fingernails cut into his palms little half-moons of blood.
Lying on the floor, he recognizes a similar sort of haunting in Roxana. In her dreams she wails, sometimes softly, sometimes at the top of her lungs, like some air-raid siren.
For a while he just lies there, listening. Then he gets up and paces the bunker, back and forth, back and forth, running his hands through his hair like an expectant father. Every few minutes he stands over her and squeezes her shoulder and whispers, “Roxana? You okay?” But she won’t respond. She goes on moaning and he goes back to pacing.
Finally, in a wave of desperation—he wants so badly to silence and comfort her—he scoops her up and holds her in his arms, tight against his chest, rocking her, saying shhh. He doe
sn’t know if she wakes up or not, but she calms down. Her moaning softens to a sort of purr and her muscles relax and after a good fifteen minutes he sets her down and covers her with a blanket and falls asleep kneeling beside her.
Darren occasionally gets the feeling—this dread surging through him—that he is never going to find what he wants, even though he doesn’t know exactly what he wants. Before, every goal was so material: I want a fast red car, I want a sexy wife, I want a house with a field out back where I can play catch with my kid. Now every need—besides those of hunger and shelter—has become an abstraction. When he gets like this, usually lying in his bunker with all the lights off, he is left with a carved-out soreness he recognizes as homesickness.
Fed up with the silence and the loneliness, he rides to the perimeter, parking his bike some three miles away. He waits for nightfall and hikes to the checkpoint, keeping to the blue-black shadows when he can, hunkering down behind a moonlit sagebrush. With his binoculars he peers into the barrack windows. The people inside them are like characters on a television screen, drinking and playing cards and Ping-Pong, so unreal to him. Times like these he thinks what he thought when he first pulled up to his St. Helens home: I used to live here.
Inside the barracks—its windows white, pulsing, as if by some miracle a star had been pulled from the sky and trapped there—he sees Katie. She rakes back her hair in a slick brown pile. She has beautiful hair. He wants to kiss it.
Usually that is enough. Seeing her is enough. An antidote to the hollow feeling in his guts. He returns to his bike and speeds off to his own private corner of the universe until the next time he gets that desperate homesick feeling.
Such as now, when he wakes up with Roxana and Katie coming together in his brain like a constellation he can’t quite figure out. He knows this place is no place for a child. And he knows he is not the best sort of man to watch after a child. He will take Roxana to the perimeter. Katie will know what to do with her.
Darren is flying—he is nothing but air—with Roxana curled tight as a shrimp against his back. The road twists over the Cascades and bottoms out in Central Oregon where they find themselves surrounded by ponderosa forests, the trees’ bark a scraped-skin red. The bike hums beneath him and the wind is like a woman’s fingers in his hair, bearing the smell of sage and sap.
Then he notices a gray cloud of smoke rising in the distance. Too big for a campfire, too indistinct for a burning house or field. And the cloud, Darren realizes, is moving toward them.
He brakes and rolls onto the shoulder with a slurred crush of cinder. Dust drifts up and sticks to their sweat. Roxana says, “Como?” and he holds up a hand that tells her to be quiet. “Something’s coming,” he says. Up ahead the road elbows into the trees. He focuses his eyes there, as if through the crosshairs of a scope, and the rest of the world falls away.
Roxana says, “What’s coming?” and he says, “Sh.” He is concentrating. He senses, in a certain vibration of the air and the asphalt, engines. Lots of them.
His throat constricts, a lava-hot rush of blood makes his heart do a backflip, and deep inside him big chunks of black matter, stuff that has been lodged there forever, begins to melt away and infect him with a sick feeling. He can’t remember ever being afraid in his entire life, but this is fear. Unmistakable, remarkable fear.
Not for him, but for Roxana.
All hopped up with adrenaline, he doesn’t quite know how to act, so he acts angry, a state of mind he understands better. He blazes off the highway—into and out of the drainage ditch, its swampish bottom slippery, the bike almost sliding out from under them—and when Roxana says, “Are you loco?” he says, “Shut up! Just shut up!”
Instantly he regrets it and feels his face tighten into a cringe, but he doesn’t have time to apologize. He zigzags through the trees like a rabbit under fire. Stiff weeds and clumps of sagebrush claw at the bike, screeching on its metal, and about thirty feet off the road—which seems too, too close—he brings the bike around a fallen tree and lays it on its side and starts covering it with branches.
Roxana hugs her chest protectively and jogs her eyes between him and the road. He can tell by her expression, a sort of scowl, she wants to be angry, but fear is getting in the way.
The fallen tree is a pine, its needles a crisp brown, its bark interrupted by a jagged black vein made by lightning. When he pushes his way into its nest of branches—getting right up against the trunk—his hair prickles, his veins tighten. It is as if he can feel the residual electricity. He says, “Come on,” and Roxana joins him.
By now a faint growl is audible and they duck down—their bodies bent in half like question marks—and listen to the noise get louder and louder still, and then around the corner comes a train of vehicles: motorcycles, jacked-up pickups, Cadillacs with red flames painted along their sides. All of them cough up oil like outboards, their ruined shocks and cracked mufflers and shrieking brakes rolling together to make a musical noise, like some junkyard circus, surrounded by this mystically blue exhaust that rises up and joins the sky.
On top of one Cadillac, bodies are tied down like trophy stags. If they are not dead they are near it. Blood runs off the roof, down the windshield, where the wipers wipe it away. Darren can see the man behind the wheel, hunched over and squinting through all that redness, smiling. A rosary swings from his rearview mirror.
Just five minutes ago the world seemed weirdly clean and calm. Now, in the drifting fog of smoke, engines snarl and horns beep and mariachi music blasts from tape decks and tattooed men grin into the wind and for a second it’s as if the meltdown never happened.
Darren looks at Roxana: her eyes are burning with tears, her mouth is opening and closing without any sound. He sees in her face terrible fear and hatred. She recognizes these men and Darren knows without a doubt what happened to her family. He unholsters his revolver.
The caboose of the nightmare parade is a semi dragging a flatbed. On the flatbed are couches and chairs, arranged helter-skelter, with many men and women splayed out on them. Beer cans roll around their feet. Mexican trumpets blasting from a boom box overwhelm the noise of the diesel engine. Five men circle a woman in a green bikini and dance—slightly off-kilter from drink or turbulence—their hands outstretched like Halloween scarecrows. They are dirty and they are excited.
At the rear of the flatbed a shirtless man swings logging chains above his head. He is as big as an outhouse. With his revolver Darren sights the man’s chest, where excess flesh ripples down his rib cage, surrounding his guts, as if he has begun to melt after a too-long exposure to Trojan’s furnace. Beneath the noise of the music and the engines, Darren imagines he can hear the chains making a hissing noise, a noise associated with flat tires and snakes, with imminent danger.
Darren’s chest is a drum. Inside the drum, the fist of his heart bangs away and he feels clenched and jumpy and oblivious to the reckless stupidity of what he is about to do. His finger tightens around the trigger—in pure reflex—and the trigger gives. The gun jumps in his hand. Time stops. The mariachi music fades, replaced by a thundering crack. With a blue puff of smoke, the bullet tunnels through thirty feet of air and opens up a tiny mouth just below the man’s left nipple. He doesn’t cry out or clutch his chest—or anything—he just drops. He ceases to live. The physics of the impact work out like this: an ugly twist of limbs thrown from the flatbed, now baking on the hot pavement.
Darren feels certain the semi will grind to a halt—and then the sun will glint off the Night Train’s exposed muffler and the woman in the green bikini will point a finger in their direction and yell, “There!” and that will be it—they will be dead.
But no, the gang growls off into the distance, aware of nothing but themselves.
Nearby a bird shrieks all clear and the forest returns to its business, twittering and chattering. With a gush of air Darren realizes he has been holding his breath. At first he feels elated, as if he has found something given up for lost, and the
n he notices Roxana staring at his revolver, and his body suffers some weird jolt—a power surge of guilt—followed by a draining sensation.
He returns the gun to its holster and she says, “You killed that guy.”
He reaches out and combs some pine dander from her hair. “Sorry.”
There are little gold sunbursts mixed into the brown of her eyes. “I hope you blow all their guts out.” She says this point-blank, without a trace of humor or pity, and then takes a few steps away from him, as if to escape the memory attached to her words.
In the Westerns he reads, the heroes spend a lot of time seeking revenge. If somebody, usually a guy with a black mustache, kills a pal or a family member, it is your duty to pay him back in lead. It is the just and courageous thing to do, the only thing to do.
He wishes he felt this way about Iraq. He wishes dropping bombs and putting bullets into people felt like the only thing to do.
As if the taste of blood has given him a great appetite, he considers lining Los Angeles up and tearing into them, one by one, reciprocating the pain they have caused. Even if they outnumber him thirty-to-one, even if his head ends up on a pike, he feels he owes it to Roxana, he owes it to his parents, he owes it to the people, himself included, seeking some sort of absolution.
Whereas before Roxana struck him as scarily adult, she now looks all of ten, just a child, when she tugs at his hand, tugs him out of his thoughts, and says, “Let’s go. I’m scared.”
He hauls up the Night Train and she takes one of the handlebars and helps him roll it over to the road. They try not to look at the body, the blood pooling around it like an oil slick, as he gets on the bike and she gets on behind him, wrapping her arms tight around his belly, his safety belt. He lets the engine run for a minute, then guns the accelerator, spraying dust and cinder everywhere, and heads due east, his eyes black-bagged and full of pain, like the wounded who return home from a lost war.
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