He returned to the kitchen and filled a paper bag with a round loaf of white bread and some figs and dates and two plums. He topped off his canteen. He found some very old salt tablets in the odds-and-ends drawer. On the way out he heard a noise in the spare room. He waited, and then eased himself out the door and broke into a sprint as soon as he could.
It was still very early. He was chilly and the sun was barely up. He intended to skirt the busier streets and then head east on the national road. He passed a barefooted man sitting on a crate and reading The People’s Voice. Inside the house Karel could see a thin girl working a pump in the kitchen and could hear the sound the water made in her bucket. After that he saw no one, and he was struck by the emptiness of the roads.
The checkpoint was a sawhorse next to a shack of corrugated metal. A teenage soldier was manning it alone. Karel recognized him as the one with the swollen eye who’d harassed them before. He fought his despair and fear and kept walking toward him.
The soldier’s face and cap were coated with dirt. He leaned against the sawhorse and didn’t raise his rifle at Karel’s approach. What was this? he asked, when Karel stopped in front of him. Running away from home?
Karel took his pass card and held it out. His arm was trembling and he tried to make it stop.
The soldier did not take the card. His eye looked worse. He nudged Karel’s paper bag with the barrel of his rifle, and Karel opened it and showed him. The soldier took one of the plums.
“I know you from somewhere,” the soldier said. He peered at Karel with his good eye.
Karel held the pass out stubbornly.
The soldier took it and examined it as if he’d never seen such a thing before. “This means I’m supposed to let you pass?” he finally said.
Karel nodded. The soldier exhaled with exasperation and knitted his eyebrows and thought about it and then waved Karel through. Karel passed around the sawhorse and held his hand out for the card, and for a long terrifying moment the soldier pocketed it and clasped a hand over the pocket. Then he gave Karel a slow smile and took out the card and returned it.
When it felt as if he’d walked forever he had lunch. He was well out of town and there was nothing on either side of him but bunchgrass and creosote. He ate the figs and a piece of bread he sawed off with his clasp knife and looked back at the town. A convoy passed. There were seven or eight open-backed trucks filled with ordinary people of all ages. They were heading away from town. The trucks had wire mesh over their headlights and windshields, and the people in the back looked disturbed or thoughtful. Some of them waved or pointed at Karel.
He kept walking. He was headed for the nearest train station, at Naklo. It was too far away to walk to, he knew, but a bus from the south passed a junction that was only maybe two days’ walk by a shortcut trail, and that he could get to. From Naklo he’d take the train to the capital.
At the point the road turned north, he paused at the start of the trail, which continued east. It was a white gravelly track between spiny shrubs, and it cut across what looked like an endless number of deep washes.
It was quiet. Brush mice darted across open spaces and then sat motionless in the creosote, watching him. He was apprehensive about the desert but reassured by the map and filled with instructions, mostly from Albert when they’d traveled for the zoo. He should rest in the shade for ten minutes every hour. He shouldn’t remove his shirt because it would speed dehydration, and he needed to watch at all times for the symptoms. At night he should stay out of the washes and gullies, and watch what he picked up or handled. If he left the trail for some reason he could tell directions from the areas of plant growth along the culverts and inclines: south faces were bare, north mostly covered. There was usually water below the surface near bunchgrass, but when in doubt he should trust the rabbit and prairie dog and mouse tracks, even if they seemed wrong, because those animals weren’t guessing; they knew. He should watch coyotes at night, too, where they pawed and snuffed the ground. He could eat a lot of the berries, and some beans if they were pounded up. The one-leaf pines had edible cone-kernels. He should look for tender green shoots of other plants inside the prickle bushes and prickly pear.
On his map the trail crossed a stream and skirted a dead lake to the south like the one Leda had told him about and then climbed northeast across a low range and descended to the junction. It looked fairly simple. He remembered the stories about the northern mountains.
The sun was over his head for a long time, then behind him. The only sounds he heard were his shoes on the gravel and the swish of his shorts. His head still hurt but his collarbone felt better. As he walked he turned over memories of his father in his head the way he’d examine puzzle pieces, in search of a pattern.
He could see scavenger birds black in the distance against the treeless hills. The sunlight was so blindingly intense it seemed to be splitting the stones. The air was like breathing hot cotton wool. He walked as far as he could and finally found a fair-sized boojum tree and sank to a sitting position in its shade, stunned by the sun. Two sparrows with their beaks parted edged over in the shadow to make room for him, unwilling to be frightened in this heat. His head was buzzing and spinning, and he took some water and salt.
He woke with the colder air at night and the patter of sand against his cheek. He could feel the heat coming off him, still trapped in his clothes. When he stirred a large insect stalked a few feet away and then paused to see if it was being pursued. He stood up, sore and chilly, wrapping his arms around himself, spooked, and then continued walking, the slightly more trampled area of the trail whiter in the moonlight. He was not sleepy.
He walked all night. He passed skeletal silhouettes of dead bitter condalia trees and catclaws, and a dead lagoon that apparently had once fed the dead lake. It was filled with reeds that were gray in the moonlight and brittle to the touch. He passed more brush mice and a ground squirrel, and heard bats. In an uneven and rocky gully he found the trail alive with tarantulas moving like dull, sinister flowers.
In the morning he thought he might have seen a bicyclist off on the horizon, a small dark figure against the stillness, but he recognized that he could’ve been mistaken. He was dizzy. He walked as far as possible while it was still relatively cool and then finally lay down to rest again on the side of a steep wash overhung with peppergrass. The stream on the map was nearby, and he refilled his canteen and washed his face and eyes. He had more water and bread and ate the other plum and fell asleep with his head on his beltpack, his muscles twitchy from the endless walking, and his hands between his thighs.
He woke up terrified of the vague darkness and chill, his mind washed blank of its sense of where he was and what he was doing there. He drank some water in a wary crouch, surprised at how long he had slept, and ate the last of the bread.
The dead lake had been only a few hundred yards away. It was a huge wasteland flat, cratered and broken by traverse cracks so that it looked like an endless horrible cobblestone plain in the moonlight, with things moving distantly across it in various directions.
He changed his shoes and shirt and walked as fast as he could around it while keeping his mind on Leda, until the trail began to climb, and when he crested the ridge and looked back once more at the lake it stretched black and even and still in all directions below him.