Martin opened and closed his mouth without saying anything. Whatever he said, he was sure that it was going to come out cockeyed. How could he tell Peta how he felt about the world, when he didn’t really know himself? Yet here she was looking him with such renewed confidence, even though he had hurt her so much; and here was Ella looking at him too, and Ella had such hope in her eyes.
He was about to ask Peta to wait until they had reached Lost Girl Lake, so that they could sit down together and decide how they were going to plan their future, but then Saskia came up behind him and patted him on the shoulder. It was on a spot where she had bitten him very hard, and he couldn’t help flinching.
‘Martin?’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you.’
‘OK,’ Martin told her. ‘Give me a couple of minutes, could you?’
‘It’s urgent, Martin. I need to talk to you right now.’
He was about to insist that she waited until he had finished talking to Peta, but when he saw the expression on her face he said, ‘Oh … right. Peta – I won’t be a moment.’
Saskia walked toward the cabin that she was supposed to have been sharing with Rita and Martin followed her. The cabin door was ajar but she stopped before she went in and turned around to face him.
‘I think Rita’s dead,’ she said.
‘Dead? Are you serious?’
‘I’m sure of it. Go in and take a look at her.’
‘Oh, Jesus. When did you realize?’
He went up to the cabin and pushed the door wider. Rita was lying on her bunk with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Her hair was tangled and her face was a blueish-gray color, almost metallic. Her mouth was caked with orange vomit.
Martin pressed his fingertips against her neck but he couldn’t feel a pulse. Then he leaned over her, with his ear almost touching her lips, but he couldn’t feel her breathing. She smelled strongly of stale alcohol and bile and although she was tightly bundled up in her blanket, he could smell that she had emptied her bowels.
Saskia said, ‘When I got up this morning the blanket was covering her face completely and I assumed that she was still asleep. I came back because I had forgotten my watch and I thought it was time she got up, too, and had some breakfast. I lifted up the blanket and that was when I saw that she was dead.’
‘Choked on her own vomit,’ said Martin. ‘What the hell do we tell her kids?’
Saskia said, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll tell Susan first, and then she and I can explain it to Mikey and Nathan and the little ones.’
Martin drew the blanket back to cover Rita’s face. He didn’t want her children to see her like this. Strangely, she didn’t look like herself at all. Martin had seen more than twenty of his fellow marines killed in Afghanistan, and he had noticed the same thing with them. Once they were dead, they did nothing more than superficially resemble the people they had been when they were alive. That was one of the reasons he believed in souls.
They went back outside. Susan and Mikey were standing there, waiting for them. Susan’s eyes were puffy and Mikey’s hair was sticking up like a cockerel.
‘My mom’s dead, isn’t she?’ said Mikey.
Martin put his arm around his shoulders. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How did you know?’
‘We saw you go in there, and we kind of guessed that was why.’
Susan said, ‘We’ve been expecting it. She’s been sick so much lately. She hasn’t been eating anything and after she used the toilet it was full of blood.’
‘We’ll have to break it to your brothers and your little sister,’ said Saskia. ‘Do you want to do it, or shall I?’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t think that they’ll be surprised. They’ve heard me often enough, telling her that drinking so much is going to kill her.’ She paused, and shook her head, and said, ‘Stupid, stupid woman! She used to be so beautiful. Hard to believe now, isn’t it?’
‘We can’t take her with us so we’ll have to bury her here for now,’ said Martin. ‘Once this drought thing is over, though, we can come back and take her home and give her a proper funeral.’
‘Like, dig her up again?’ said Mikey.
Martin nodded.
‘What’s the matter?’ Santos called out. ‘Nobody coming for breakfast? The bagels were kind of stale, but I toasted them, and I made some coffee, too!’
Using the signboard that said Camp Knobcone, and a small yellow plastic bucket which Mikey found in the back of Santos’ truck, Martin and Saskia and Mikey cleared the ground of pine needles and then dug a shallow grave in the fine sandy loam.
Martin tightly wrapped up Rita’s body in a second blanket, and then he and Santos carried her out of the cabin and laid her gently in the ground. Nathan and George and Mina were all sobbing, and even though he wasn’t crying out loud, Mikey was wiping the tears from his eyes with his fingers.
‘Want to say a few words, anybody?’ asked Martin.
Santos stepped forward and raised both of his hands. ‘Today I leave my daughter behind, but not for ever. I will return here to give her the Yuhaviatam ceremony that she deserves, and cremate her in the way that our people have always cremated our dead, so that the smoke of her spirit returns to the sky and the ashes of her body return to the soil.’ He looked down at the body wrapped in blankets and said, ‘You do not bring children into this world and expect them to leave it before you. My heart hurts, Rita, more than you can ever know. While I am gone, may Taamit the sun and Muat the moon shine down on you constantly, so that you know no more darkness.’
As he said these words, they saw lightning flashing, somewhere to the north of them, over Heartbreak Ridge. After a long pause, they heard the grumbling of thunder.
‘Don’t say it’s going to rain,’ said Susan. ‘That would be so sad, if it started to rain again, right now.’
More lightning flashed, followed by a long drumroll of thunder that seemed to go on and on for almost a minute.
Martin said, ‘It’s not going to rain, Susan. That’s just static. We used to get the same thing in the mountains in Afghanistan.’ He sniffed, and said, ‘If it was going to rain, you could smell it.’
They filled up the grave with soil and pine needles, and then covered it all over with large granite rocks, not only to mark where it was, but to prevent it from being dug up by coyotes or raccoons.
Once Martin had lifted the last rock into place, and smacked the soil from his hands, Saskia came up to him and said, ‘You and your lovely ex-wife seem to be getting along well.’
‘Do we? We have our children to take care of, that’s why.’
‘But you enjoyed it last night?’
‘I’m a little sore, if that’s what you mean.’
She reached out and touched his arm and gave him a slanted smile. ‘Sore but satisfied, I hope?’
‘Oh, yeah, satisfied,’ he said, and started to walk back toward the clearing, where Santos and Susan were chivvying the children back into Santos’ truck. Thunder rumbled from the north again, but there was still no smell of rain in the air, and the forest remained hot and claustrophobic and utterly still, except for the intermittent dropping of pine cones.
‘We’ll do it again, then, when we get the chance?’ said Saskia, keeping pace with him.
He had reached his car now. Ella was waiting for him in the back seat, and she could obviously see that Saskia was asking him something intense. Ella’s eyes darted from one to the other.
‘We really need to get going,’ said Martin. He opened the passenger door for Saskia and waited for her to climb in. ‘We can talk about it later, OK?’
Santos took them back down the narrow trail that led to the highway, but they had driven only about five or six miles before he pulled into the side of the road, and so Peta and Martin pulled in behind him. He got out of his Suburban and walked back toward them, his legs as thin as two mahogany walking sticks, his face kept in shadow by his Panama hat.
‘See that turn-off right ahead of us?’ he said, pointi
ng to a gap in the dusty green chaparral.
‘Not really, no,’ said Martin.
‘Take my word for it, Martin, that is a turn-off. You won’t find it on the map. You can just about make it out on the satellite picture, but even so you wouldn’t guess that it was a track. It’s the path that the Yuhaviatam used when they traveled between what is now the Joshua Tree National Forest and Arrowhead Springs. They named it the Path of the Sacred Bear. Of course that was in the days when many black bears lived in these mountains.’
‘They still do.’
‘Not the native bears. Your people killed them all, made them extinct, just like you tried to make us extinct. Didn’t you know that all the bears that live in these mountains now were imported from Yosemite, as a tourist attraction? For your people, there is nothing sacred about the natural world. You see it only as an entertainment.’
Martin said, ‘OK, Santos, I think I’ve had enough of your ethnic resentment for one day. Are you seriously suggesting we drive down that turn-off? It might be different if we all had off-road SUVs.’
‘It will be difficult, yes. But it is the only way that we can descend from the mountains without anybody understanding which way we have gone.’
‘Right, then. If you’re game to do it, then so am I. Lead on, Macduff.’
‘Macduff? Who is Macduff? I thought I was Kemo Sabay.’
Martin stared at Santos narrowly, but he couldn’t detect even the hint of a smile on his face.
‘You know something?’ he said. ‘I’m gradually beginning to understand why we tried to make you extinct.’
Santos returned to his truck, started it up, and turned off the highway on to the Path of the Sacred Bear. Peta and Martin followed. Martin could make out some rutted indentations in the ground which might have been described as a path, but for most of the time he found that they were driving through dense chaparral, with the branches squeaking and scraping against the sides of his car.
‘Daddy!’ said Ella, in alarm. ‘Are you sure this is the right way?’
Saskia turned around in her seat and said, ‘Don’t worry, Ella. As far as your Daddy’s concerned, the rougher the better.’
Martin gave her a quick, sharp look, but Saskia only crossed her legs and gave him the tartest of smiles. Normally he would have come back to her with a smart retort, but he was too preoccupied with wrestling his Eldorado through the scrub. The so-called Path of the Sacred Bear was so deeply furrowed that the car kept trying to steer itself, and the front and rear overhangs repeatedly banged against the ground. Santos had switched his Suburban to four-wheel drive, and so he was plowing steadily forward at nearly ten miles an hour. Peta’s Hilux had four-wheel drive, too, so she was keeping up with him; but Martin’s front-wheel drive Eldorado was bouncing and jostling and wallowing with every rut and ridge that it encountered.
‘Daddy, I feel seasick!’ Ella cried out.
‘Hold on, sweetheart! It can’t be too much further!’
But as they drove further and further south-eastward, the terrain became increasingly rugged. Not only that, it began to slope sharply downward and sideways, at almost forty-five degrees. Martin had to keep his foot jammed on the Eldorado’s brake pedal to prevent it from careering into the rear of Peta’s pickup.
The ride downhill was jarring and tumultuous, with all three vehicles swaying wildly from side to side. All Martin could see was rocks – sky – trees – rocks – steering-wheel – sky.
Even Saskia had to brace her feet against the floor and cling on to the door handle. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘This is worse than Goliath!’
The banging of their suspension against the rocks was so loud that Ella started to cry; and Martin had to shout out, ‘It’s OK, sweetheart! It’s going to be OK!’ But then his muffler hit a boulder with an even louder bang, and he was sure that it had been knocked right off.
Very gradually, however, the ground began to level off. After a final violent shaking up as they crunched and bumped and slid through a slew of dry gray gravel, they suddenly dipped down into a natural granite trench, with high rocky walls on either side of them. The bottom of the trench undulated up and down, and was ribbed in places like a washboard, but it was much smoother than the ground that they had been driving over so far, and they could drive much faster. Martin guessed that once upon a time, maybe thousands of years ago, it had probably been a watercourse.
He could see why the Yuhaviatam had chosen to come this way. The trench ran with only a few wide curves for more than three miles, and for most of its distance, anyone who was walking or riding or driving along it would be completely unseen from the foothills all around it.
At last the sides of the trench began to fall away, and they found themselves driving out over the scrubby gray desert of Morongo Valley, with the mountains behind them now. They had descended more than five thousand feet in less than two hours, and even though their vehicles had all taken a battering, they were all still running. Martin’s muffler was scraping along the ground, but when he stopped and ducked down beside the car to take a look at it, he could see that it was still hanging on by one twisted bracket.
Santos and Peta stopped, too, and all of them got out of their vehicles and stood together and passed round warm two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Far to the south-east, in the distance, they could see the occasional glitter of a car traveling along the Twentynine Palms Highway.
‘So where do we go from here?’ Martin asked Santos. ‘Do we take the road, or what?’
Santos shook his head. ‘No. All the way to Lost Girl Lake, we will travel along the sacred pathway used by my ancestors.’
‘Your ancestors weren’t driving Cadillacs. I don’t know how much more my poor old car can take.’
‘We will get there, I promise you,’ said Santos. ‘And if your car gives up its ghost, we will find you another.’
‘I see. The sacred ritual of grand theft auto.’
‘Make no mistake,’ said Santos. ‘This is a war. Those who have water have declared war against those who have not. In a war, everything is permissible, so you can take whatever you need. It was your people who taught us that, again and again. You wanted what we had, so you took it from us, without any feeling of conscience.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Martin. ‘Let’s just get going again before you start blaming me for Wounded Knee.’
FIVE
Joseph Wrack was standing in his office on the fifth floor of the ESS Building on East 4th Street, holding a mug of Kupi Luwak coffee and staring unblinkingly at the brown palls of smoke that were still rising from the Inland Center further downtown.
He had never been philosophical. To him, there was no difference between right and wrong. All that mattered was the outcome. But he had just received a phone call from the Odyssey Hospice at Riverside to tell him that his mother probably had less than forty-eight hours left to live, and he was wondering what the purpose of her life had been, except to give birth to him.
His mother had never enjoyed much in the way of happiness. Her own parents had both been academics, cold and critical, and her life had been no better when she escaped them to get married. Joseph’s father had always spoken to her as if she were an imbecile, although she had been clever and quite pretty and been able to play the piano.
But Joseph thought: what difference does it all make, in the end? Even if she had been blissfully happy all her life and played Chopin to concert standard, the outcome would still have been the same. She still would have ended up in the Odyssey Hospice, half-blind and half-deaf and doubly incontinent. Life’s a shit and then you shit.
There was a complicated rapping at his office door and his operations director Jim Broader bustled in. Jim was a big, busy man. Before joining ESS, he had been a district resource officer for the Los Angeles Police Department, but he had conveniently resigned three months ahead of an official investigation into the misappropriation of departmental expenses. He had a swarthy, coarse-pored face with
shaggy black eyebrows and a nose like a blob of modeling clay. His shirt collars curled up because they were always too tight for him, and his belly hung pendulously over his belt. He smelled strongly of Perry Ellis aftershave and cigarettes.
‘Morning, boss! You want the good news or the good news?’
Joseph Wrack didn’t answer, or even turn away from the window. He didn’t like being called ‘boss’ and he didn’t like Jim Broader very much. Jim Broader however was a bully and everybody in ESS was afraid of him and Joseph Wrack was a great believer in management by intimidation, especially in the security business. In his opinion, his security guards would only be truly effective if they were more frightened of him than they were of being shot by armed robbers.
Apart from that, Jim Broader was a schmoozer. He knew everybody who was anybody, and a great many people who were nobody, but still extremely useful.
‘Would you believe it, we’ve located them! Saskia Vane and that Makepeace character! And we have a pretty good idea where they might be headed!’
Now Joseph Wrack did turn around. He carefully set down his mug of coffee on his desk and said, ‘How far have they gone? Have they made it to LAX yet?’
‘No, boss, they haven’t. And the reason for that is, they’re not going to LAX. They’re headed in totally the opposite direction.’
Joseph Wrack walked across his office to the large laminated map of Southern California that was mounted on his wall. ‘So where?’ he demanded.
Jim Broader came up behind him and pointed to Big Bear City. ‘Three times a week we send an armored van to pick up cash from the First Mountain Bank. This morning the crew went to a local bed and breakfast to get themselves something to eat before the bank opened – same place they always go, apparently. But the owner told them he was closed, on account of the water supply being cut off. He complained that it was killing his business.’
‘So? What does this have to do with Makepeace and Saskia Vane?’
‘Ah,’ said Jim Broader, looking deeply pleased with himself. ‘The owner happened to mention that yesterday evening he had been forced to turn away a party of twelve, including several kids. They had pleaded with him, but he couldn’t risk losing his license.’
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