gone—but she had. I bit down hard on my lower lip and looked out the window, concentrating on what was
We were just pulling off the Interstate, toward a little town called Bernalillo. The Indian threw a quick left and crossed back over the Interstate, and then we were rolling along Highway 44, heading northwest according to the dash compass. For a while, there was nothing but open desert. A hideous tumor of a subdivision—from the look of it, already metastasizing—appeared on the left. Farther along, the desert on the other side of the highway turned spectacular, stretching to high mesas ranging in color from light brown to almost yellow. As we moved along, we got so close I could see their individual layers of rock.
Less than a half-hour later, we passed a pueblo. It wasn’t anything they’d photograph for
Next we turned onto Highway 4, which turned out to be a little road that was mostly curves, dotted with a few scattered trees and even fewer houses.
Then another pueblo. This one had bigger houses, most of them actual adobe. But it was still a rez-type setup with a lot of junker cars scattered around like refuse on dirt roads. There was a wall of rock on the right, sheer and unbroken, going up maybe a hundred feet in some places. It was such a bright red I thought it must be a trick of the afternoon sun.
Down the road a piece, I saw the signs for Jemez Springs. After we passed through the town, the road started to get steep. The Indian nodded his head in the direction of a church. There was a row of rooms behind it, like some motel out of the fifties, but very neat and well maintained. “Servants of the Paraclete,” he said.
I’d never been near the place, but I’d heard about it for years. A safehouse for pedophile priests, where they could hole up for a while … and then go back into a new parish, all “cured.” The church doesn’t call them child molesters, or baby-rapers, or anything so terribly stigmatizing. No, predatory priests were “ephebophiles,” part of the church’s PR campaign to “dimensionalize” its own degenerates.
They know exactly how to play it. First you make up some “syndrome” or “disorder” that covers the crime. Then you give it some fancy-sounding name, and count on the whores and fools to spread the word. You don’t have to prove anything, just repeat it often enough, preferably through a good media machine. Doesn’t matter if the entire scientific community sneers at it. What counts is that it gives defense attorneys an argument for a “nonincarcerative alternative.” And black-robed collaborators all the excuse they need.
I could see why they wouldn’t have a sign out front. But I didn’t know if the Indian was offering to educate me, or trying another test to see if I was who I claimed to be. So I just said: “Oh yeah. The recycling center.”
He grunted an acknowledgment. Or maybe it was an agreement.
We kept climbing. The altimeter read six thousand, and jumped up another fifteen hundred in the next few miles along a paved two-laner. A faint smell of something like
The Land Rover negotiated the curves slowly until we passed a huge rock formation that looked like the bow of an old battleship, cut into a V, the prow vertical. We kept on climbing until we reached a fork in the road. The Indian went left, and we started climbing again.
The higher we climbed, the higher the pines grew—some of them were redwood-size giants. The road made one big looping turn, and then we were moving due west. I spotted a few occupied-looking houses, way back among the trees. And the shell of one that looked like it had been abandoned during the Civil War.
As we kept climbing, we left the pavement behind again. After we passed eight thousand, we came to a good- sized lake, maybe a half-mile across, the water very blue. Here the shoulder of the road was about the same height as the Land Rover. The Indian kept it moving, but very slowly.
We passed the lake, and then the road got worse. The skyscraper pines spiked up between enormous rock formations—sheer walls of stone that went up higher than I could crane my neck to see.
The air felt almost supernaturally clean, but it felt thin in my chest, too. I knew only the sun was keeping the temperature from getting dangerous … and we were going in and out of shade as we drove.
For the next few miles, we saw houses again, spaced real far apart. The terrain was nothing but dirt with occasional low grass. We rolled past a place called Seven Springs. And a sign that read this road is not maintained in the winter months, followed immediately by a drop from a bumpy, potholed dirt road to just plain dirt, with ruts wherever the water cared to run. We were at eighty-five hundred feet. And still climbing.
“We’re in the national forest now,” the Indian said. If that meant we were trespassing, it didn’t seem to concern him much.
There were no more houses. Sometimes on the right, but mostly on the left, there was either dirt or rock going very nearly straight up where the road had been cut into the side of a hill. Whenever the rise was on the left, we were plunged into deep shadow. Huge trees met overhead, almost like the jungle canopies I remembered from Biafra. Except now the only chill in the air was from the altitude.
The road was so deeply rutted that, sometimes, the Indian had to work up speed and just bounce over them. Other times, when the ruts were running in the same direction we were traveling, he slowed to a crawl and drove the narrow little spaces between them, carefully placing all four tires. I wouldn’t have tried with anything less than the Land Rover’s ground clearance. Huge pines stood sentinel on either side of the road, which had clearly been cut right out of mountain rock, twisty and steep. It was all as familiar to me as Mars.
Finally, we came to what looked liked a little spur, just a place where the road swung out and widened a bit. But the Indian slowed even more, and soon there was no road at all … just a clearing. And that’s where he brought the Land Rover to a halt.
“Are we—?” Gem started to ask. I made a hand gesture for her to be quiet. It was the Indian’s call; no point pretending otherwise.
He climbed out, walked around the front of the Land Rover as he had before, and released his dog. At his signal, we got out, too.
“It’s about three klicks,” he said to me, the vaguest trace of a question in his voice.
“Let’s go, then,” I said, shouldering my duffel and picking up Gem’s little suitcase in my right hand.
The Indian went back to the Land Rover and took out a scoped rifle from somewhere. He slipped the sling on and started off without another word.
