The rain had stopped. Silver clouds tumbled in the sky around the setting moon. When they reached his cave, it was nearing the end of night. Snorri removed the brush piled outside the entrance. He sniffed around. He checked his altar, a slab of pink granite piled with a collection of rocks, snake skins, a hawk wing, tortoise shell, and skull of a raccoon. Around the altar were twenty storm candles. He lit them all. In the shallow fire pit, he placed kindling and a small cedar branch, enough fire to remove the chill.
“Welcome!” he said, lifting Ruby over the threshold like a groom.
It was warm with smells of melting wax, aromatic smoke, sprigs of smoldering sage.
“Did you make this?” Her eyes widened with wonder at the dancing shadows, the stumps for tables and seats, the cartons of water and food.
Since Snorri arrived at Patriot Park, he’d explored the mountains, looking for a hideaway retreat. Late at night when he wouldn’t be missed, he liberated supplies from camp and transported them up the mountain.
“It’s sacred,” he said shyly.
“Magical,” she said. Away from the Jenkinses and other cadets, Snorri was different. Not hard-core but soft and tender. “Will you stay here long?”
“As long as you want,” he said.
“Me?” Ruby was astonished. “What do I have to do with it?”
He closed her hands inside his. He wanted to tell her she was the daughter of the Norn who had carried his fate in her heart since birth. But he had to choose his words carefully and prepare her slowly.
“The story is long,” he said. “It’s too late to begin now. When we wake up, it’ll be sunny and hot. After breakfast, I’ll show you the creek where we can swim.”
“I can’t swim with this,” Ruby wiggled her foot.
What was left of night and most of morning, they slept. Ruby dreamed she was in a passageway made of concrete blocks, stories high and roofless so she could see sky and treetops. In the dream, her father came to her. Not a boy or teenage athlete or the soldier she’d studied in photos but an old man. “Help, daddy!” Staring back were Edwin Ryan’s eyes that said there was no help.
Hours later when they awoke, the day was as Snorri predicted. The entrance to the cave was flooded with light. Snorri sang a song in an archaic language. He cut wedges of apples and stirred dry milk and water into a bowl of cereal. He sang well, Ruby thought. His voice was beautiful.
“One bowl, two spoons,” he said.
“Where’d you learn to cook?” she laughed.
“Hey, I worked as a cook.”
“Like where you unwrap a patty and slap it on a grill cook?”
“You tasted better?” he asked, crunching the cornflakes.
Ruby took a spoonful. “Awesome!”
“I told you,” he said.
“Better than mom’s homemade granola and my mom makes the best granola on the mountain.”
“You got a mom?” Snorri was surprised.
“Of course, dodo! If you born, you got a mom. But no problem if you tell me you flew in from another planet, I believe you.”
“But are you still in contact with your mom?”
Ruby touched her heart. “My mom and I, we’re connected.”
“Where’s your mom now?”
“Home in New Mexico, worrying about me. Sometimes I dream she died of worry.”
“What’s she like, your mom? You look like her?”
“She’s a white girl,” Ruby laughed.
“Really white?” Snorri liked that.
“Except she’s Jewish.”
“That’s not really white,” he said. “That’s pretend white.”
Snorri dug inside a carton, looking for a rectangular box. He lifted the lid and removed an Extreme Survival knife with a six-inch cutting blade and chainsaw-style teeth. He set it against the chain on Ruby’s ankle.
“They got a millennium stockpile back there at f ‘ing Patriot Park,” he said. “Excuse my f ‘ing language but they never opened half of it. We could live here for years on what they got.”
“Don’t cut me!”
“I’d never hurt you,” he said, taking a corner of his shirt and wedging it between the iron links and her ankle. “Justice is a f ‘ing sadist, you know that? Excuse my language, but ball-and-chain, he’s out of his mind! Bringing a tank into the forest, it’s a sacrilege!”
“He’s a Nazi.”
“Nazis ain’t all you think,” Snorri said.
“Nazis killed millions, that’s what I know, Jews, gypsies, gay people, Jehovah Witness, millions.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Snorri said. He moved the blade evenly across the chain. “People say it’s a lie. Jews made it up to get money.”
“That’s really ignorant.”
“Nazis got a few bad parts,” he conceded. “I give you that much. But Christians? They really fucked up. Excuse my language but they killed way more people than Nazis. They killed almost all the people in the New World. Two continents, three with Australia. So many millions, nobody can count them.”
Ruby shrugged. She knew about the tragedy of Native Americans. They lived down the road.
“My mom’s not Jewish anymore. She’s Indian and Buddhist.”
“If you born Jew or colored or gook, you don’t just forget it.”
“My mom really works at forgetting. She sits and meditates to empty her mind. She goes into the mountains and collects plants for medicine. She beads and weaves Indian baskets. My mom’s so strange, she put my umbilical cord in a beaded pouch.”
“No way!” Snorri laughed.
“When I turn eighteen, she told me I can have the pouch and do whatever I want. Like it’s my graduation present!”
“I like her,” Snorri said.
Ruby looked doubtful. “Sometimes she kills a chicken but other than that, she’s way peaceful. Too peaceful if you ask me. She tells peace stories. Like what happened when a holy man told his disciples to take a duck and kill it where no one could see.”
Snorri stopped moving the blade. “And what happened?”
“One killed the duck in an alley. The other wandered around for days. When he came back, the duck was alive. He told his teacher that everywhere he went, the duck could see.”
“Peaceful is what I wanna be,” Snorri said. “That’s why I brought us here. Maybe you see moose or bears or wolves but nothing like vicious humans.”
The saw-teeth on the knife worked well but Snorri’s fingers cramped. He had to stop and stretch his fingers.
“Nazis want everyone to be white and perfect,” Ruby said. “If you’re brown or black or mixed, you’re already fucked up. Nazis hate what I am.”
“I’m not a hater, Ruby. Sometimes I get angry about the fucked-up world but I’m not a hater. What I know is you can’t love everybody. You got to love your family first, right? You love your ancestry because that’s family. Roots is like that for you. It’s a lot of people, thousands if you do the genealogy. I did that. I found out about my origins. But today most people are either stupid or crazy. I don’t see any reason to love them.”
“My mom says she loves everybody, even scumbags. But I think it’s wishful thinking. She wants to love everybody but no one can do it. Maybe the Dalai Lama can do it. You know about him?”
“I’m over people,” Snorri said. “People make me think I’m crazy. Being outdoors doesn’t do that. When I go somewhere like here, everything is perfect, even me. My mom is a sicko. It runs in my family. Do I look pure white or something else?”
Except for his forehead and cheeks where the skin had peeled raw from sunburn, Snorri’s smooth baby face was the color of safflower oil, his eyes dark brown and traced with lines of gold, his hair and eyebrows black, his teeth yellow like his skin.
“Not so white,” she said.
“When you have a chance to hear the stories, you’ll understand how it fits together. Like you and me, we fit together.”
The iron chain was crumbling. Five, nine, fifteen more strokes of the blade and the chain fell off Ruby’s leg. She jumped up and kept jumping as high as she could.
“Fit together for what?” she laughed hysterically.
“To love,” Snorri confessed. “Because I’m not a hater, Ruby. All I wanna do is love.”
“I think I’m a hater,” she said.
“You hate me?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Ruby saw how much Snorri wanted her to love him. No one as handsome as Snorri had ever loved her. But his eyes were scary. He was old, almost twenty-five, and a born-again Nazi. On the positive side, he treated her gently. He recited poetry. She liked that he was a pagan and believed she was the daughter of a goddess. For certain, she didn’t want to die a virgin. That was in his favor.
He kissed her on the neck. His lips drifted to her mouth. They kissed and after they stopped, breathless and hungry for more, Snorri whispered, “I wanna start my own race.”