“Hohokam,” said Grandma, which was a thing she hadn’t known she knew until she said it. “The ones who built all the canals. That’s what their name means, the used-up ones. Our enchanter’s squatting in some ruins, I guess.”
“Do you think he’s Hohokam, then?” asked Anna.
“Not unless he’s a thousand years old,” said Grandma. “Which I can’t rule out entirely. I’ll be going. Jun, thank you, and you too, Anna.” Her eyes slid over the cholla-bone girl and she nodded once and took her leave.
She rode back to Tomas’s stable with her mind full of shards, like a shattered clay pot. The Hohokam were all jumbled up with the trains and the folded world and the girl and the mockingbird.
Well, no matter. Things would sort themselves out. She’d know what she had to know when she needed it.
“Or I’ll get caught with my pants around my ankles,” she said to the mule’s ears, “and I’ll die with a stupid expression on my face. I suppose that counts as getting sorted out, though.”
The mule flicked her ears, but did not comment.
“I suppose I better try not to die,” she said after a little while. “That girl of Anna’s is gonna need some teaching.”
She tried to think about what she could teach anyone, let alone a girl who was already part of the desert, and the thought was overwhelming. She hadn’t been all that good with her own baby, and Eva had been as good and placid and easy a child as any born.
It was late when she reached the stable. A light burned in the window, though, and after a moment the door slammed, and one of Tomas’s sons came out to meet her.
“You didn’t have to stay up,” she said. “I might’ve been gone days.”
“We would have stayed up for you, Abuela Harken,” said Tomas’s son. He looped the mule’s reins over his hand and led her into her stall.
There was nothing much to say to kindness, particularly when you suspect that it’s because you’re old. Grandma walked the rest of the way, to the house with its back like the desert.
“At least I’ll get one more night in my own bed,” she said. “With my own Spook-cat on the pillow. Can’t ask for more than that.”
In the end she got two more nights. The garden was wreathed in beans and the little green husks of tomatillos were beginning to dangle from the sprawling plants. They needed staking. If Grandma Harken had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was going to die tomorrow, she would still have staked up the tomatillos and harvested the beans.
She had two ripe tomatoes and she ate them both, on bread with salt, and they were perfect.
On the morning of the second day, she got up before dawn. She petted Spook-cat, which first alarmed, and then delighted him. She strapped water bottles to herself like a bandolier and filled her pockets with sage and cigarettes; she put on her good boots and wrote a note for her daughter that said “I love you,” and then she closed the garden gate behind her and walked into the desert.
The pre-dawn air was sharp and gray and seamless. There were no mockingbirds to light her way. Still, here, she didn’t need them. This was a landscape she knew as well as she knew her own name.
The folds in the world that had gone out from the mockingbird’s wings had settled now, a paper ball crumpled and then smoothed out again. There were still small ridges here and there. Grandma Harken could see them if she looked—the shadow of a palo verde tree that fell a handspan too short, a place where, for an instant, there were two moons in the sky. But these were small things.
She reached the train tracks as the sun came up. It dyed the rails rose and chrome. Grandma Harken stood, thoughtful, and took a long drink of water.
“All right,” she muttered to herself. “All right. If I were a train …”
It was dangerous to walk on train tracks now. A train could appear out of nowhere, skipping from one world to the next, and give you only a bare moment of warning.
Still, it was no more dangerous than anything else. She cleared her throat and spoke to the rails: “The Mother of Trains knows my name.”
There was no overt acknowledgement. She hadn’t expected one. She stepped up onto the rails and began to walk between them. Her boots made a satisfying clomping sound on the railroad ties.
The desert heated rapidly. She passed saguaro standing tall, arms raised, filled with woodpecker holes. A thrasher called from the top of one, and she had to shade her eyes and see if it was actually a mockingbird.
There were no shadows on the tracks. The saguaros folded their arms to prevent it, and they were the only thing tall enough to cast a shadow here.
She walked until the sky was turquoise hard, until she had emptied one water bottle and begun another. Then she shaded her eyes and looked ahead, and there were five saguaros standing together, and a hill beyond them, crusted with stones.
Grandma Harken nodded to herself.
The tracks did bend there, an abrupt turn that no train that was not a god could have navigated. The metal rails held together, but the wooden ties were twisted up as if they were made of dough and not creosote-soaked wood.
There is a bend in the tracks.
“Quite a bend, too,” she said aloud.
A coyote trotted by, ears alert. It glanced at her, interested, and flicked its brush.
“Don’t you start,” she added.
The coyote grinned, that being the natural expression of coyotes. It trotted on.
She walked back and forth along the bend, and absolutely nothing happened.
“Huh,” she said. She’d been hoping … well, nothing was ever easy.
She went back a third time.
The coyote was back. Its eyes were the coldest thing in the desert.
She couldn’t see any edges. The shadows on the hill were clean and crisp.
The coyote was circling her.
I’m not looking to die just yet. Go find some other meat.
She knew that coyotes couldn’t hear thoughts, but sometimes she thought they could smell them. It winked at her, and then it passed on the far side of the tracks and vanished completely.
Grandma Harken grunted.
“I’ll be damned,” she said aloud.
Well. The enchanter—whatever or whoever he was—had folded up the world here, folded it so hard that it doubled back on itself, so that something on the far side vanished completely from view. The tracks had pulled away from the fold, like skin sloughing away from a burn.
The trains run in three worlds. We will not speak of the fourth.
Dammit, Anna.
Suppose the enchanter had folded all three worlds around him, to keep the trains away, and was living in the fourth world?
“Blessed Saint Anthony …”
The coyote reappeared on the far side of the hill. It trotted up to the tracks and sat down, tongue lolling, God’s dog amused at something.
Waiting to see how I do, I suppose.
She studied the hill carefully. It looked like any other small hillside in a desert, not large enough to be a mesa, merely a rise in the landscape, dotted with mesquite and teddy-bear cholla. An ocotillo spread a hundred fantastical arms near the base, where there might be a small seep of some sort. Ocotillo liked more water than other plants, when they could get it.
If there was water here, the Hohokam might have built near it. If there were a people better at using water in the desert, Grandma had never heard of it.
The hill had nothing that looked like ruins, though, not even two square stones beside each other. Not a temple mound nor—
Her eyes narrowed. The coyote tilted its head.
On a rock above the ocotillo, there was a pale splotch. She ambled over to it, and there it was, pecked out of the surface, a round-bodied lizard.