Page 40 of The Salt-Black Tree
Baby halted, her nose pointed at a small round adobe crouched on an apron of flat land starred with rock piles somewhere between erosion-carved and artistically stacked. A similarly round garden wall curved protectively close. Behind the wall, cactuses tangled together in vibrant profusion, wicked spikes protecting strangely fragile green skin. A large fire-blackened saguaro-esque monster lifted four arms around a central pillar. Far away from any of its cousins, it glowered on the right side of the garden, and each of its spines held a faint electric shimmer.
No mailbox. No sign of life other than the cacti and a few hardy, spiny bushes outside the garden’s enclosure. The adobe’s front entrance was an impossibly black arch holding no door in its lips; its red roof tiles were dust-free and burnished under a flood of glaring sunshine.
Baby’s engine settled into silence. Nat reached for the door handle and paused. That buzzing from the rock piles was probably snakes.
I am not very brave,she realized dismally, and shuddered.
Still, she’d come this far. Was the big forklike thing thesalt-black tree? It didn’tseemlike it, but there was no instruction manual for this divinity bullshit.
Just as her fingers curled over the handle, a flicker of motion in the doorway’s deep gloom made her breath catch.
It was an old woman, tall and sticklike, with a frowsty mess of iron-gray hair. She was incontrovertibly a divinity, and she looked very familiar indeed.
The sound of Baby’s door opening was loud in the humming stillness. Nat was painfully aware she was braless in a not-very-fresh T-shirt, and was thankful she was wearing jeans. Not that they’d do anything against a snakebite, but…
“Well?” The woman’s voice was a harsh, impatient cigarette-rasp, high and hard as if warning off a traveling salesman. “I’ve got light to catch, child. Come in, if you’re going to.”
Nat closed the door and set off for the house, patting Baby’s hood once as she passed.Guard my backpack, will you?
She didn’t want to leave the car’s safety, but there was no help for it.
TRUTH AND GEORGIA
“Georgia.” The woman’s slim, iron-strong hand was warm and leathery. Her knifelike nose was familiar, and her irises were so dark her pupils seemed almost brown in comparison. Wrinkles fanned from the corners of those eerie eyes and bracketed her mouth; her neck was a column of tendons. Her hair moved uneasily, gray curls sandpapering each other. “And you’re Maria’s child. Took you long enough.”
“Hello,” Nat managed faintly. “You look like…” This close, the woman resembled Baba de Winter even more strongly, only tanned instead of pale. Instead of Baba’s thread-fraying silk gown or pinstripe business chic, Georgia wore a loose dun button-up shirt and a pair of heavy canvas pants, both bleached to sand-color by long exposure to dry sunglare. A huge, black-veined turquoise set in tarnished silver peeked between the shirt’s top vee, the first two bone buttons undone.
“You think I only have one form, granddaughter? Or that you do, for that matter?” The old woman shook her head, turning into the house; clearly, she meant for Nat to follow. “It’s uncomfortable to be around them, though. Magnetic repulsion.”
The darkness was a high cool foyer with a red-tiled floor, stone stairs with risers worn into shallow U-shapes by long traffic on the left, an arch full of murmuring to the right. Every edge was worn and rounded; the woman’s shadow was a sword in the much brighter archway at the hallway’s far end. Nat hurried tokeep up, hoping she wouldn’t scatter sand inside—there was no mat to wipe your feet on. “That makes sense.”
“Sense,she says.” A buzzing, croaking laugh, almost like Raven’s but indisputably female, bounced off the smooth walls. Nothing hung to break their thoughtful, pale purity, no paintings or photographs, not even a nail.
The brightness at the hall’s end was a semicircular, airy kitchen, an antique black cast-iron cooking-stove-plus-oven crouching along the wall with its mended tin chimney rising to pierce the ceiling. An oblong window over the deep utility sink—holding a pump-handle that had once been painted red—was full of more potted cacti drinking in golden light. A butcher-block table, its top polished satin-smooth even in the scars from constant use, had two old metal barstools tucked underneath. Every surface was clean and bare; the sink had a tiled apron to its right and a metal dish drainer holding one glass, one plate along with a fork, a spoon, and a very sharp knife in a tiny wire cage next to two bowls, one much larger than the other. The dishes were earthenware, an indeterminate shade between brick and terracotta.
You could breathe in a house like this, despite the almost painful cleanliness. It was the home of a woman who lived alone and knew goddamn good and well why she did, as well as liking it that way.
The kitchen window gazed onto a bare stone courtyard. Outside in the bright new afternoon a glowing-white empty canvas sat upon an easel; the only clutter was a triangular wooden table to its right holding a jumble of brushes, paint tubes, scrapers, and other artistic tools.
“Tea?” Georgia coughed, a dry rattling sound of amusement. “Or something stronger? Surprised you made it across the river, but then again, I shouldn’t be.”
“I’m fine with anything—” Nat began, but the old woman whirled from the sink, her lip lifting and sharp white teethgleaming as her hair writhed. A shadow passed through the window’s indirect glow.
“Don’t fucking lie here, little girl,” Georgia hissed. “That’s the only warning you’ll get.”
Oh, fuck.Nat’s throat was so dry it clicked as she swallowed twice, painfully. “Vodka,” she said. “Neat, and very cold.”
A charged silence descended. The old woman sniffed, then turned back to the sink. “Mealymouth,” she muttered. “If there’s anything I despise, it’s those discreet little falsities. Have the fucking courage to say what you mean.”
Hard to shake a lifetime’s training, ma’am.Nat forced the words down.
They didn’t want to go. The sisters at school had always been big on manners and nice little white lies, and of course there were things you knew better than to say at home. Retail and office work was the same; the entire mortal world wanted a woman to play nice, go along, be polite.
Out here in the desert, you could say exactly what you wanted. Who was around to hear it, after all?
Of course, Mom got away with behaving badly. Probably because she visibly didn’t give a fuck, she was so far above what Dima would callthe rubes.
It must be nice,Nat thought, and an uncharacteristic vibration started in her chest. It wasn’t quite uncomfortable, but definitely unsettling. It halted, then returned, a fitful buzz.
