It had been so long since he’d looked upon his father’s face, and upon his own as a child, that the somber pair in the photo seemed holograms, ghost-town twins of themselves. His stomach tore at the top. He could make out Bailey just barely in his own boyhood stare.
“I can keep this?”
“It’s more yours than mine,” she said. “I only click a button. Your face belongs to you, fella. It’s a good-lookin’ face.”
“That one too?” He pointed to the newest photo, pinned to the far right corner of the corkboard.
“You know this one? She was just here. You missed her by a week and a half. She stayed a few nights. Strange thing is she shrieked a little when I took that picture. That was something new to me, I’d say. Who’s she to you?”
“My family.”
“That’s an odd family traveling apart this far out, if I can say so. But you’re welcome to the picture. I make duplicates. I was a photographer before I came into the country. Where’re you in from?”
“Keelut.”
“There’s no road from there to here. Not directly.”
“Not directly.”
“Been here thirty years or more and I can say there’s no easy road from there to here. My husband and me came up into this country from the lower forty-eight, to stake our claims. And here we still are. Most others are gone except for the twenty-odd of us. We like it, though. The others left for oil, when they were saying oil was the new silver and gold. Nothing quite matches precious metals, you ask me. We did mine this place bare, but it was good while it lasted, you bet.”
“Why was she here?”
“No place else to be if you’re in these parts, I suppose. She wanted to see our Indian hunter for some reason. We call him that, our Indian hunter, as a joke, you know, but he’s just John, he’s been around here forever. He’s not a forty-eighter like the rest of us. He was raised on the Yukon, in a river tribe. He was here in this spot before a single miner showed up. And he’s still here.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Your girl there? Heck if I know. If she knew, she wasn’t saying it to me. I like to talk, as you might imagine, living in the country, but she didn’t want to hear any of it. This one stayed in the room, mostly. I cooked her food but she just stared out that window there, like she was waiting for something to come in and grab her. A pretty girl, too. But a bit odd, if I can say so, no offense. She had your same color hair. And nose, too, I think. Real pretty, but odd, like I say.”
This photo in his fingers—her face just a week ago, a look of longing in it and something else not nameable, her irises all pupil. That green wool turtleneck was knitted by her two winters ago. She’d chopped her hair to her chin—it was waist-length when Slone had left. When he looked up he looked into the flashbulb of the woman’s camera and it sent bolts through his eyes.
“You’re a handsome fella,” she said, trying to fix her hair. She rubbed lip balm across her mouth. Her lips were so thin they were barely there, eyebrow like an underline, whiskers in half sprout from her chin.
“Another storm’s coming late tonight,” she said. “Or else by morning, the radio says. You staying with us?”
Slone nodded, blinked the flashes from his eyes.
“I don’t have any more bread, I have to warn you. Plane hasn’t been back in two weeks. We’re expecting Hank again any day now, if the storms slow. Last time he tried to land that ski plane in weather, he missed the runway and hit the bluff. We call it a runway, you know, but it’s just a bulldozed road tamped down.”
He looked again at the photo of Medora.
“Of course, there are some roads from the city to here, but you can’t get a big enough truck along most of them, and anyway it takes more than a day. Plus you better know how to drive in snow because if you get stuck in a storm on one of those little roads you can forget being found till breakup. So we don’t mind waiting for Hank and his plane. He takes supplies way beyond us even, where no roads go. Hank’s a real good man, you bet.”
“I want to stay in the same room she stayed in.”
“There’s only two rooms up there. You can have your choice, fella. No one’s fighting over those rooms. Honestly, I haven’t changed the sheets in there, if you don’t mind it.”
Slone stayed fixed on the photo and said nothing.
“Not sure what sort of battery you have in your vehicle but you might wanna pull it inside the garage there across the way. We call it the garage, you know, it’s just a big corrugated metal hangar on a concrete slab. But there’s a gas heater in there to keep the trucks from freezing up and it stays warm as the devil in fifty below. What’re you driving?”
She bent to the window and with a sleeve wiped away the moisture to look out.
“That a Ford? Hard to see. I used to have a Ford, owned nothing but American, and then my husband said to me one day, he said, We’re not American anymore, we’re Alaskan. Last year after breakup he drove off to the city in the Ford and a week later drove back in a Jap model, a Nissan truck, or one of those SUV thingies. It’s real roomy, better than the Ford, I have to say, what little I do drive of it.”
“What’s the room price?”
“Do you have any magazines?”
Slone stared.
“Magazines,” she said. “No magazines? You didn’t bring any with you to look at while you’re traveling?”
“What magazines?”
“I’m not real picky about them,” she said. “Any kind with pictures. I like them all. I usually just get paid in magazines.”
Upstairs in the guest room—a compressed rectangle of wooded slats with the cold scent of stagnation—he looked in drawers, checked the closet, then beneath the bed. He peeled back the military-issue blanket and on his knees pressed his face into the sheet where Medora had slept. The vaguest outline of a fluid stain midway on the twin mattress—she slept nude no matter the month—and he thought he could smell her there. He breathed that way with his face to the sheet, then licked the stain.
He ignited the kerosene heater beneath the window, dimmed the lantern to a slow burn. Despite his hunger he stripped bare and reclined on the creaking bed as if his body could fit into the mold her own body had made. As if he could enter the morass of her dreams and learn her destination. He spent himself beneath the blanket, the first release in weeks, and fell asleep before he had the chance to clean his hand.
An ungodly night in some sere village east of the capital, the heat at ninety still, hours after the drape of dark. He’d been in the desert ten months and two days. A roundup of men now, shoulder to shoulder against the wall of a building chafed by sand and time. A score of bearded ghouls, hands zip-tied behind them, filthy bare feet, toenails like impacted corn. Molesting lights from the vehicles made their shadows on the wall as black as macadam.
Wet through with sweat and fighting to keep awake, Slone sat on a low porch step while others kept howling women at bay, ransacked more homes, guarded men at gunpoint. An inept translator spat gibber to these seized ones who shook their heads in ire and spat back. Shoddy rifles collected and stacked in a mound. Chickens in cluck on the road, a goat roped to a pole. Somewhere the skirl of an infant, and beyond the slap of spotlights a perplexing desert murk.
Now a chaos of conflicting reports, unabsorbed information. A corporal on the radio sucking on a clot of gum, getting no answer, none they wanted to hear. The man they sought was either among the seized or not, guilty or not. Eyes shut, Slone leaned back against the mud-brick wall of the house and sweated some more.