SUMMER 1977
She spent most of her paycheck and tips at a sporting goods store not far from the crematorium. The checkout girl keyed in the prices of the tent and kerosene lantern, the sleeping bags, two pairs of hiking boots. It would cost nearly all she had, leaving only a couple hundred dollars to take with them on the trip. Martha watched the receipt lurch up from the register, line by line, her body charged with a swirl of fear and hope, what she imagined gamblers must feel when they finally resolved to bet it all.
“When I was younger, I was scared of directions,” Izzy said. “They made the world seem flat, like a map.”
They headed south on an empty county road, the mountains at their back, the desert ahead. In the passenger seat, Isabella looked up from the map in her lap and stared out the windshield across the long red view.
“Thinking of north as climbing up and south as sliding down,” she said. “I was scared of the word. South. I wouldn’t say it. It felt like you could take a step in that direction and fall forever.”
They stopped for dinner at a truck stop about an hour from the pilgrims’ path. A few men sitting at the counter eyed them all through their meal and when Martha walked to the restroom, one of the men followed. She came back out to find him leaning against the wall, the payphone receiver to his ear, but she could hear the dial tone’s drone as she passed back to their booth. She decided they would spend the night in the car. Martha felt safer knowing they could drive away if they needed to.
In an empty post office parking lot they put the seats back and cracked the windows for some fresh air. Izzy slept soundly, but Martha left the key in the ignition, trying to stay vigilant.
In the middle of the night she woke to a single point of orange light in the dark distance, what seemed like a baleful, roving eye, but which she soon realized was a cigarette lighter, along with the shadowed form of a man standing by the front doors of the post office. Martha’s heart sped up, her pulse thudding in her ears. The man lifted his arm, slowly, and Martha felt her breath rise with the movement. Then the lighter went out and the figure moved away, off down the street, visible only in the short gaps between buildings, a darker shape against the dark night.
The next morning, as Martha and Izzy organized their gear in the parking lot, a young man approached and asked if they were heading to the trail. He was squat and muscular and spoke softly, with an accent. Martha was wary, so even though this young man seemed gentle she turned down his offer. He looked slightly hurt by her rejection, but then he smiled again. He said his name was Danny and he hoped to see them out along the trail.
The ground was hard and rocky and she was out of shape. Her knees and thighs ached, and the calluses that had formed on the balls of her feet from working the casino floor began to tear and bleed, her body’s last remaining armor peeled away.
They hadn’t brought enough water. After only half a day they had already run out, and Martha wondered if they would need to turn back, aborting the journey before it had even begun. But then they began to find milk jugs full of water at the side of the path, left by pilgrims with experience and compassion.
When the wind blew they covered their faces with bandanas against the swirling dust and Martha couldn’t help but see it as crematory ash. She tried to push the vision to the side of her mind but it was insistent: this was a trail of the granulated dead, lifted by the wind to cover her boots and clothes, her hands and hair, inhaled through the bandana’s thin fabric. Bodies within her body. The idea terrified her for most of the first day’s walking and that night’s restless sleep in the tent, but when she woke at the second dawn she thought of it in a different way. What if these were the souls of all those who had dreamed of making this walk but had been unable to reach this place? What if she could carry those souls with her along the path?
The thought was no longer fearful; it was a responsibility, an honor. When they began to walk again Martha left her bandana rolled in her backpack and when the wind blew she breathed freely. Izzy asked why she no longer covered her face and Martha explained her realization. For a moment, spoken aloud, it sounded crazy again, but then Izzy nodded and untied her bandana and walked uncovered for the rest of the day, too.
At times, Martha saw two figures walking side by side up ahead on the trail. Usually, after a few moments they disappeared in a shift of light, but every so often she saw that the figure on the left was Danny. The other was a tall, thin man who spoke continuously while they walked, his long hair swaying from beneath the bandana tied over the crown of his head.
Every once in a while, the man lifted his hand to make a point and Martha saw what she thought was the same movement that had raised the lighter outside the post office, that languid intensity, confident and controlled, a conductor gathering the moment to a single point of focus.
She knew that she should be afraid, or at least wary, but so much had changed within her since that last night at the casino, so many useless alarms had finally fallen silent, that she found herself staring after the man whenever she saw him far ahead, and waiting for that movement, hoping for it, almost—the pull in the air he created just by lifting his hand.
For the last hour, Martha had watched the lone figure approaching from the opposite direction. It wasn’t Danny, or the taller man. Eventually Martha saw that it was a woman. When she was maybe fifty yards away, the woman raised her hand in greeting and quickened her pace.
The woman was out of breath but smiling, happy for the company. She was older, in her sixties, maybe, a weathered and energetic presence, with bright white grooves in her sunburned face and her gray hair pulled back in a loose ponytail.
“Are you on your way to the room?” she asked, drinking from a canteen on a strap slung crossways over her body, her eyes open and alight while she swallowed.
“What room?” Izzy said.
The woman told them that an artist had built a structure at the midpoint of the trail, just north of the old army base. “I’m calling it a room,” she said, “because it seems like part of something larger, as if it isn’t really complete in and of itself. And God was it hot in there. I was only able to stay for an hour or so before I worried I would start to cook. But I loved that someone had made it—this surprise rising up in the middle of what I thought I knew.”
They moved into the patchy shade of a short, bristly yucca, and the woman, whose name was Helen, lifted a pear from her backpack and sliced it with a pocketknife, sharing its wedges with Martha and Izzy.
The fruit had ripened perfectly in the heat. Each slice was soft and sweet and heavy with juice. Martha couldn’t help licking her fingers, the taste of the pear sharpened by sweat and dust.
“Did you pass a big guy going that way?” Martha asked. “Hispanic?”
Helen nodded. “He and another young man came into the room just as I left. You could be there by nightfall. Do you know them?”
Martha shook her head. She wasn’t sure why she had asked. It had less to do with Danny than with the man traveling with him.
“You meet all sorts of interesting people along the path,” Helen said. “Everyone comes for their own reasons, and everyone finds their own way.” She finished her last slice of pear and readjusted her pack, ready to walk again. “Stay open to those surprises that rise up in the middle of what you thought you knew.”
It wasn’t there, the trail ahead was empty except for the ever-present mountains in the far distance, and then it appeared, maybe a quarter mile away, a short gray rectangle that looked as if it had been cut out of the sky at the horizon, slowly gaining texture and depth as they approached.
“The room,” Izzy said, and Martha knew, from the way the entire world seemed to funnel into that space, that the man was inside.
She stopped and Izzy turned and asked what was wrong. Martha wanted to run; her body screamed for flight. But there was another feeling behind the fear—a sense that events were falling into place. Stones surfacing in a stream, waiting for her to cross. She thought of Misty’s journal, the photo of two pilgrims on the path.
Izzy reached out to her. Martha took her hand and they walked toward the room.
He was only handsome from a distance. A tall, commanding silhouette in the doorway, his hair falling over his shoulders. Then Martha was close enough to see his face, the hard, round pustules or tumors that bubbled from his skin, forehead to neck. He lifted his hand in greeting and she shook again at the familiar gesture and saw more pustules ringing his wrist, in the gaps between his fingers. He wore long sleeves and hiking pants but even without seeing the rest of him Martha knew that his body was covered. When they were a few yards from the doorway he smiled. Even his lips were crowded with those hard growths, and Martha wondered if they hurt.
He looked at them with an intensity that was impossible to turn from, his blue eyes like magnets. Martha felt herself pulled, her body bending toward him, into the doorway beyond.
When he spoke, his voice was a surprise, warm and smooth, the sound of the sun rising, finally, after an interminable night.
“Welcome,” he said. “You’re finally here.”