The bats took no notice of him. They poured through the tunnel, out of the cave, and into the day, their eyes stabbed by light and their brains aflame with fear. In the harrowing radiance of afternoon they crashed into one another, as unmoored by light as the boy had been by darkness. From the shore of the lake their terror was invisible; they seemed to float upon the sky, as graceful as birds.
That night, by the lake Allelu, two boys became men. Before the ceremony, the old seer spoke for the first time in twelve summers. The missing boy had been taken by the bird gods, he said. It was a great honor. The people rejoiced, but the boy’s mother wept.
In the autumn the boy’s people moved on, tracking their prey south. Years passed. The boy’s mother died. The boys who became men died. Within a dozen generations the boy’s people were replaced by another people, born of the same distant land but with different gods and other names for the places the boy had known. More years passed, and another people replaced them, then another, and another. Allelu, allelu. Through it all the cave’s round, blank eye watched from the bluff, its darkness clenched like a fist around the boy who once sang songs and told stories and read the stars and who, one afternoon while his mother slept, climbed a cliff and touched the fabric of time.
His name meant nothing in the language of his people. But to his mother, it meant “beloved.”
Yesterday
There was no moon, only stars. Below them lay the flat land. Lights shone there, too, in scattered handfuls: streetlamps and headlights and the small square windows of houses. High above them, in the hills that once rimmed the lake, a fire burned. It leaped and played among the acacias, golden, laced with orange, and black at its heart. It danced for a long time, this fire did, singing its fevered song to the night.
It takes longer than you might think, for a man to burn.
Nora
The day they found the math teacher’s body, Nora was late to work. It was her father’s fault.
The morning started like any other. After she ate breakfast she carried her father’s tray across the backyard to his camper, stepping around the sandbox he’d built for her brother when Jeremy was five. After thirty-two years in the desert sun the sandbox’s wooden frame was rotten and the sand where Jeremy once drove his Tonka trucks was crusted with bird shit. Nora knew she should take it out, but she also knew she wouldn’t. Most days she didn’t even see it.
Her father’s camper was a 1990 Fleetwood Prowler, white with faded teal-and-brown trim, that he’d bought used when Nora was ten and Jeremy was thirteen. He’d been proud of it in the good-humored way he’d been proud of everything then, from his barbecue grill to his athletic son to his pretty auburn-haired wife. He’d never been farther from home than Elko, where his brother lived, but now that he had the camper he was going to drive his family all over the country, maybe as far as Florida. Nora’s mother’s smile was as dreamy as a child’s. Florida, she’d said. Just imagine.
That summer he drove them to Yellowstone. The park itself was a blur of neon-colored pools, but Nora never forgot how it felt to leave Nevada for the first time. Idaho hadn’t looked any different—scrubby desert, rolling hills—but when she saw the welcome to idaho sign something inside her opened. She loved that they would go somewhere else the next summer, and the summer after that, every trip widening the world a little bit more.
But that fall Nora’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and they never took the camper anywhere again. After she died, during Nora’s freshman year of high school, Nora assumed her father would sell it, but he didn’t, and while Nora was away at college it had migrated here, to the back fence. Since the accident it was where he lived, even though he still had his bedroom in the house. Nora had never questioned this arrangement, figuring it was part of some complicated penance only he understood.
She walked up the makeshift plywood ramp and opened the camper door to find him sitting at the banquette table in his undershirt and pajama bottoms. He hadn’t shaved, and when Nora saw this a thin band tightened around her forehead. The days he didn’t get dressed were bad. The ones he didn’t shave were worse.
She set the tray on the table—Wheaties, toast, and coffee—and put her hands on her hips. She had a tall, angular body, with long limbs and sharp elbows. She’d been a frilly girl, all tutus and spangles, then a teenaged beauty in Daisy Dukes and halter tops, but now she was a woman who didn’t make a fuss: crisp khaki pants and a plain blouse, hair in a ponytail, no makeup.
Her father stared at his breakfast, and Nora knew he wouldn’t eat it. She told herself she didn’t care. She had to be at the school in fifteen minutes; she didn’t have time for this. But when she reached the door she stopped. Through the worn screen she saw the back of their small ranch house, its white siding gone a ruddy gray. Her father’s rusted Weber and the empty planters where her mother used to grow tomatoes sat on the cracked cement patio, and the fenced yard was bald except for clutches of weeds in the corners. It all looked the same as it had yesterday, and the day before that, but for a moment Nora saw it the way it had been when she was a girl, with pansies along the fence, tomatoes in the boxes, the siding a crisp white. Even a few years ago there had been grass. She couldn’t think when the last blade had died.
Her father coughed a sodden, weepy cough. Nora took a steadying breath, then turned around. In the light from the window his blue eyes were watery. She sat on the vinyl seat and put her arm around him. “How about I come home for lunch today?”
“You don’t have to,” he said, but of course he wanted her to. Nora didn’t know what had set him off. A dream, maybe, or a memory. What was the date? March 14. It sounded familiar. It wasn’t the anniversary of anything she could think of, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the anniversary of something.
“It’s no trouble. I’ll heat up the pot roast.”
Usually Nora’s father defrosted a Stouffer’s in the camper’s microwave for lunch. He brightened at the thought of the pot roast, and she promised to be home at twelve fifteen. Then she had to reheat his coffee, because it had gotten cold, promise twice more to come home for lunch, and take the pot roast out of the freezer. When she grabbed her car keys it was five to eight. She drove too fast down Franklin, but it was still four minutes past the bell when she ran through the double doors of the middle school, feeling like her seventh grade self, dashing late into this same building, her face hot with the same shame she’d felt then.
When the math teacher didn’t show up, nobody thought much about it at first. Dee Pratzer, the office secretary and emergency substitute teacher, covered his first period class with her usual aggrieved competence. Between first and second period Mary Barnes, the science teacher, stopped by Nora’s social studies classroom and said, with a hint of malice, “Adam’s late. I wouldn’t want to be him when Dee gets hold of him.”
Adam Merkel had never been late before, but he’d only been teaching at the middle school for seven months, the replacement for old Jim Pfeiffer, who’d finally retired. He was new to the town, too, which was unusual in itself. Lovelock was a sand-blasted hamlet of ranch houses, prefabs, and mobile homes strung along a mile of Interstate 80 a hundred miles east of Reno and seventy-five miles west of Winnemucca, surrounded by a desert so vast it ran into three neighboring states. Nobody moved there except divorced second cousins from Sparks with no place else to go and the occasional mine supervisor doing hard time on his way up the corporate ladder. When Adam applied for the job it had created a buzz: a professor from the University of Nevada wants to teach here! Think what that will do for the school’s test scores! But when he turned out to be a curled-up middle-aged man whom the students promptly named Merkel the Turtle, the buzz died away.