Other Earths (22 page)

“This is a lot of trouble for nothing,” Em muttered. Within hours she’d be a corpse, anyway.

Perhaps three hours later, Em awoke from a sleep of fever dreams about snakes and alligators and great radioactive lizards stomping the Holy City at the behest of God. Her head pounded with dehydration. Her tongue was wood. She looked up from the sand, where she’d fallen, to find herself surrounded by men in robes colored the blues and greens of the sea. They stood beside llamas bigger than those Em had ever seen at petting zoos, bigger even than any she’d seen in pictures in
National Geographic
. The men wore seashell necklaces and elaborate, spiky wreaths of dried date palm fronds around cloth headcovers. The blades of scrap metal they carried glinted painfully in the sun.

Only when the animals’ pungent reek reached her nostrils did Em know the llamas and the men were not a mere vision.

Em swore in a parched whisper that she’d die before she let these Hawaiians take her bag.

For a time, they consulted with each other, their language strange to Em’s ears, full of repeated syllables and rhythmic halts, but she recognized an argument when she heard one in any language. Some of the men gestured at the heat mirage on the horizon. Others pointed their weapons at her. If Em had to guess, she would have said the two sides of the dispute could be summed up as “kill her now or take her home and kill her there.”

This went on for at least ten minutes. Em couldn’t be sure, not only because she wasn’t wearing a watch but because she had fainted at least once during the discussion.

When the conversation came to an abrupt halt, one of the men tightened his grip on his axe, the letters “USAF” faded but still visibly stenciled on the blade, and raised it in the air like Daddy about to slaughter a chicken. He came forward.

Em screamed, trying to tell them to wait, but it came out in a choked, inarticulate shriek, not unlike a chicken upon whom the axe has fallen. She tore open the blanket, plunged her hands into the bag, and held its contents aloft, the sun reflecting off the treasure in blinding rays. The man with the axe made a sound almost exactly like the one Em had and threw his forearm across his eyes.

The awed silence that followed lasted perhaps the span of twenty heartbeats.

Then, “Put it back in the bag,” one of the men said. “You’re coming with us. If you try to run, we’ll cut your feet off.”

They led her across the sand to a sprawling shanty village of caliche huts and rusted travel trailers, with skeletal corrals for the llamas made of sun-grayed wood. The sand glittered painfully, sprinkled with fragments of greenish glass, fused sand from the bomb blasts that had given Atomic Golgotha its name.

Em had hopes that she’d be brought into the large tent in the center of the village and that there she would be given water; then she would explain that her presence in Atomic Golgotha was not her fault, that the Templars were to blame (surely the Hawaiians spared no love for the Crusaders who’d nuked the Hawaiians’ desert), and she would beg for her life. Maybe they would let her return to Oasis Town. Maybe they’d even let her borrow a llama.

Instead, she was left by herself in a pen with two llamas and their dung. She drank from the same rusty trough the animals did and was grateful for it. The Hawaiians had left her with the alligator-hide bag, seeming unwilling to touch it with their own hands. Fear and attraction were powerful forces, Em well knew. It was the twin engine that generated awe, and as Daddy said, awe was a lever to move men.

The Hawaiians were the poorest people Em had ever seen. Enslaved and persecuted by the Mayans, cheated and exploited by Continentals and Indians, Christians and Muslims alike, the few surviving bands of nomadic Hawaiians occupied niches of America that few others were interested in. Em had seen a film about them at school. The film had emphasized how much Christians and Hawaiians had in common. After all, hadn’t Christ been born an islander? In most paintings, Jesus was depicted as a white Continental, even as Christ the Mariner, coming across the Pacific on his balsa raft, to preach and die in the Holy City. But if you thought about it, he must have been brown skinned himself.

One of her guards, the man who’d threatened to cut off her feet, told her to get up and escorted her to the big tent. There, he shoved her to her knees to kneel before a huge, glowering man with a broad face and commanding black eyebrows. He was shirtless, wearing only a long sort of skirt, and he was draped in so many necklaces that Em could only assume he was their chief.

She clutched the bag to her lap.

“Where is home?” the man said.

What kind of question was this? A riddle? Some kind of test, for sure. The Hawaiians had been driven out of every home they’d ever had. The story that Christ had been crucified out here in Atomic Golgotha instead of just outside the City was declared apocryphal by Pope George, but the Church still wanted the Hawaiians gone and had even used hundreds of square miles of desert for atomic testing.

Where was home for a Hawaiian? There could only be one answer to that.

“Hawaii,” said Em.

The man frowned, and despite herself, Em winced.

Then he laughed, a huge boom that seemed to make the tent billow. “Miss,” he said, “I was asking where you are from.”

“Oh.” Em’s cheeks burned. “I’m from Oasis Town, New Assyria. I live on a reptile farm there with my daddy and brother. My name is Em.”

“You are a long way from your home, Em.”

And then it all came tumbling out of her, a rapid-fire, half-sobbing torrent of words. She told him about the reptile farm, and Daddy’s grim calculations at the kitchen table, about Trail 66 and Via-40 and the raffle at the Garden Tomb. She told him about Mark and Solomon’s Temple and how she’d evaded the Templars in the Holy City, and she intended to beg for her life and to be allowed to return home, even if it meant parting with the bag and thing inside.

At least, that was what she had intended to ask for.

Instead, not fully understanding why, she found herself saying, “The bag isn’t yours. I have to take it home. It’s important.”

The chief’s eyes were big and dark as charcoal briquettes, and they seemed to express sorrow, amusement, and smoldering anger, all at the same time.

“It is not a small thing to steal from the Templars, girl. They are wealthy as nations and even more dangerous, for their faith is true. When they realize their stolen treasure has come to Atomic Golgotha, my people will be the ones who suffer for it. I am not without compassion for lost souls in the desert, but I can’t think of a good enough reason not to present the Templars with their . . . item . . . as well as your head.”

Again, Em intended to plea for her life. “The thing in the bag shouldn’t be hidden away,” she said. “That’s what the Templars will do with it. I won’t.”

The chief nodded, as though he’d reached a firm decision. “We are of different faiths,” he said, which was certainly true, because despite baptism and Sunday school, Em wasn’t sure she really had any faith at all. “But perhaps our ways are not so dissimilar,” the chief continued. “I will allow you to prove your purity by facing an ordeal. Should you please God, I will allow you to go home, and the treasure will remain in your custody.”

Em didn’t ask what would happen if her faith proved insufficient, though she was certain that would be the outcome.

There were no rattlesnakes on the Pacific islands, but the Hawaiians had lost their homeland ages ago and had adapted their customs to the lands they’d settled and been driven from, from the South American jungles to the North American deserts. They had suffered some of their greatest hardships in their Exodus from Texas, and it was there that they had been subjected to the trials of the snake pits. They’d learned some lessons from that.

Under a cloth canopy, in a deep rectangular hole dug in the sand, the snakes buzzed like a lightning machine in an electric circus. Em had never liked their sweet, musky smell, a little like cucumbers, but now it was so strong it threatened to knock her down into the writhing mass.

The Hawaiians stood around the edge of the pit, which for some reason Em imagined as the rim of a volcano. Had the film at school talked about pushing human sacrifices into lava-filled craters? She couldn’t remember now.

The chief looked at her expectantly, and when expectation turned first to impatience and then to unmistakable anger, he said something, and two of the guards rushed at Em.

“I’ll go,” she said simply, stopping them in their tracks. Better to climb down slowly than to be thrown in and upset the snakes. She clutched the bag to her side and went down the ladder.

They had a snake pit back at the reptile farm, but Em had never done any work in it. That was a job for Judd or Daddy. They had some tricks for surviving a walk across the pit. The first trick was wearing thick boots with steel reinforced toes. Daddy and Judd also wore rubber pads fashioned from an old truck tire under their pants, which made for an awkward gait, but it had saved their lives and their dignity more than a few times.

Em had no such protection. Just her dungarees and her thin canvas sneakers, worn even thinner by her desert ordeals. She took the last step down the ladder, and the snakes scorched the air with their rattling.

Snakes don’t like to bite folks, Daddy had always told her. They knew people were too big to eat, and it could take them weeks to replenish their venom, and they were vulnerable during that time, so they much preferred to retreat and hide. Indeed, the snakes jerked away from her as she gently set her feet down. But there were a lot of snakes in this pit—four dozen? a hundred?—and though they scrambled into piles against the walls, there wasn’t much room for them to hide from this towering, two-legged intrusion in their midst. And if they were as much an overrated threat as Daddy insisted, then why wouldn’t he ever let her do work in the pit?

She tried to step lightly, but her feet felt as big as clown shoes.

People liked to say that snakes could strike faster than a blink of the eye, but Em knew that to be an exaggeration. Rattlesnakes only moved about as fast as a person could throw a punch. That wasn’t very fast, was it? Of course, people got punched all the time.

She knew the bite was coming before it struck home.

Dusky gray, the rattler was as thick around as Judd’s wrist. It lay straight across her path, not coiled but stretched out over the bodies of its nest mates, and it seemed to Em that this one was particularly angry. It knew Em’s faith was weak, it knew that what she had in the bag wasn’t rightfully hers, that any claim she had on it was driven by greed, and if it was greed to keep the reptile farm alive, it was still greed, no better than the Templars’, no better than any thief’s.

The rattler snapped its body forward, and Em’s reflexes took over. She toppled backward and fell, the one thing Daddy said meant certain death in the snake pit.

There was no pain, no sensation of thorns breaking flesh, no ballooning with burning poison. Where she had fallen, there were no snakes.

She dared to open her eyes. The big rattler was wrestling with the bag, which lay on the ground at Em’s feet, where she had evidently dropped it.

Thinking profane thoughts about pilgrims and profit, about showing wonders in plain sight, about letting people see whatever they wanted to see, be it albino boa constrictors or miracles, she reached into the bag to remove the cup, then stood, and finished her walk through the serpents.

Climbing up the ladder at the end of the pit, she looked up to face the Hawaiian chief.

“I guess I know what I believe in,” Em said.

 

They fed her and gave her water to drink and to carry with her, and they gave her one of the chief’s own llamas, which she rode through Zion and south to Kingman. There she let the llama loose to join the feral herds, and she hitched rides back to Oasis Town, where, upon her return, she submitted herself to Daddy’s scolding until he dissolved into tears of relief.

Not until days later did she gather Daddy and Judd at the kitchen table. After finishing a breakfast of chicken eggs and alligator meat, she set the bag on the table. It was dusty and battered, with two prominent punctures that gave Em shivers to think about.

When she displayed what the bag contained, there were more tears.

Then Em told Daddy what they were going to do.

First, they made billboards.

There were still hard months, and Daddy had to sell the Ford Goliath to keep the bank from repossessing the house and the farm. But things got better as word got out.

The barn got a new roof. The paths around the croc pond were paved. Daddy even paid out of his own pocket to repair the cracks and potholes on Trail 66 for three miles in either direction of the farm. The road brought pilgrims, lots of them, and when the reopened motor lodge down the way could no longer accommodate them, Daddy built a new motel right next to the reptile farm. It had a swimming pool and a restaurant called Mark’s, which served the best burgers in the state, and it also had a separate halal and kosher kitchen.

Pilgrims still loved the critters. They loved to see the Bobsey twins and Betty the albino boa. But the critters were no longer the main draw of Oasis Town. Under Em’s direction, the Templar treasure was housed in a little house all its own, set on a small green lawn that never went brown.

The Templars came for it once. They set out from their temple with a great rumbling caravan of trucks and Jeeps and tanks, bristling with guns, and they lost two hundred vehicles and a thousand men in a mighty sandstorm. Not long after, reports started to appear in the papers about the problems they were having within their banking and gaming empire.

Never, not even in jest, not even to impress the pilgrims, would Em ever claim the cup had miraculous properties. She just knew that it made pilgrims happy to see it. For ten dollars, they could have their picture taken with it.