Page 2 of Snake-Eater
“Thank you,” she said.Was that enough? Probably not.“I’d appreciate that a lot.”There, that should be good. Just enough, not too much.
“Hop in,” said the old man, jerking his thumb toward the back.
The other man was riding in the back alongside the crates from the train. He lowered the tailgate and Copper leapt up. “Hey girl,” he said to the dog, and she thumped her tail twice, then settled at Selena’s feet. “Ma’am,” he added, dipping his head to Selena, and helped her settle her suitcase.
It was too loud in the back of the truck to talk, for which Selena was grateful. She gave the man a quick smile and then looked away, at the desert. Copper was a reassuring weight against her shins.
She wondered if the men knew her aunt. She could ask. What little she could see of Quartz Creek looked too tiny for anyone to bea stranger. Aunt Amelia had always said it was a small town, but she hadn’t realized quitehowsmall.
She practiced what to say to the driver in her head.Thank you for the ride. You were right, it would have been a long walk.That sounded pretty good. That was a normal thing somebody would say, right?
Thank you for the ride. You were right, it would have been a long walk.
She ran it through a couple of times, staring at the landscape bouncing over the side of the truck bed. The dust cloud that rose up behind them was four or five times the height of the truck and looked like a plume of ash.
Was the desert beautiful? It would be hard to tell. It was hard and dry, which Selena had expected, andintricate, which she hadn’t. She’d been picturing sand and stone and scouring winds. Not the little bushes fitted all together with strips of dust in between, not the stacked paddles of prickly pear. It looked like a complicated mosaic with white mortar, or one of those paintings made out of hundreds of dots. If she were far up in the hard-blue sky, would the desert resolve into a picture?
Thank you for the ride. You were right, it would have been a long walk.
Lord, I must be tired.She almost always had to repeat a script in her head, but not so many times, and not such a simple one. Most of her scripts had been memorized long ago. It was only lately, with the funeral and wrapping everything up—and now the train—that she’d had to make so many new ones, and maybe they were crowding out old ones, like how you thanked someone for giving you a ride.
The truck rattled and cracked down the dry road, the wheels fitted into the ruts like train tracks. A line of fat, gray bodies ran alongside for a moment. Selena blinked, surprised, at a flock of plump little birds with black topknots and stubby wings.
Are thosequail? Real quail?
She supposed she knew that quail existed somewhere, but she’d never expected to see them. They were creatures out of children’s books, more like stuffed animals than real flesh and feather and bone. But here they were, plump and ridiculous and very much alive.
Selena realized that she was grinning foolishly. She darted a glance at the other passenger, and saw him smiling. He said something, but she couldn’t hear it over the roar of the engine. She shook her head.
He was middle-aged, probably the driver’s son. He wore a bandanna over his hair, and his skin was deeply tanned. There were thick silver rings on three of his fingers and black rings of grease under the nails.
When the truck slowed, entering Quartz Creek, and the wind died down, he leaned forward. “What brings you to town?” he asked.
Selena felt the little muscles along the back of her neck go wire tense.It’s a normal question. It’s perfectly normal. You know what to say. You practiced this.
She reached into her chest, and the words were there, just as she’d practiced them. “I’m looking for my aunt,” she said. “She lives out here. I’m just not sure what her address is.”
To her intense relief, he nodded, as if this wasn’t strange at all. “Go up to the post office,” he suggested. “It’s right across the street. If you’ve got people here, Miss Jenny will know where they’re at.”
“Thank you,” said Selena, although she had already planned to try the post office. “That’s a good idea.” Compliments were good, though not flattery. She thought she’d done it right. She had praised the idea, not him, and not extravagantly. She dropped her hand to Copper’s collar, and the dog thumped her tail.
The town wasn’t very large, a few dozen houses. They stood wide apart with ditches between them, and small roads arranged like the spokes of a wheel. The buildings were pale adobe with flat roofs, wide porches, and what looked like whole logs sticking out the sides. It was a very strange look, as if they’d built the rafters too long for the walls. One of the buildings was taller, an old Spanish Mission–style church, with double doors thrown wide.
Most of the houses had solar panels on the roof or the garage, the old, ugly kind—cheap and nearly indestructible. The sort that Selena associated with poverty one step up from corrugated-steel siding.
I’ve got twenty-seven dollars left to my name. I don’t get to talk to anybody about poverty, I guess.
Did one of the houses belong to her aunt? Was one of those scruffy, speckled chickens hers?
Somehow Selena had never thought of her aunt as poor.She has a house! People with houses aren’t poor.
At least . . . not in the city . . .
They passed an old garage, a temple to cars where mechanic-priests sat around in their overalls. There was a line of electric charging poles, but no stoplights. Chickens scattered along the road as the truck passed, and dogs lay panting in the shade. There were a couple of ragged pine trees, and some strange trees that Selena didn’t know—one that was all green, even the trunk, with fine slender needles, and one with slick red bark that peeled like a burn.
The truck stopped.
Her companion unhooked the tailgate and jumped out. He reached up a hand to her.
