“Yeah, well, turns out I do.”
“Good man,” Robert said. “Well, when word gets out about your daughter, you’ll have to fight the women off with a stick.” He cooed into the baby’s face. Man and girl smiled at each other. Robert wasn’t going to stay jealous for long; it wasn’t in his nature.
“Hot damn, poontang! Una ni?a!” Robert said as he straightened and turned to Collin and Luis. “Boys, get the bags inside. We’d better tidy up; we’ll be expecting company of the feminine kind!”
Later Collin and Luis got into a shoving match. Lopez broke it up and took his boy onto the porch. A brisk ocean wind rushed through the redwoods. They sat on the steps.
Luis scowled at his toes. “Collin says you’re chickenshit because you weren’t reincarnated.” Luis spoke in sullen English; sometimes he did that when angry with his father.
“Mijo, I don’t know what will happen to me when I die. It makes things uncertain.”
“Papá, why weren’t you reincarnated?”
Lopez sighed. How to explain to a child? “Way back when, there were many people in the world, as many women as men. But when the heavens came, the world fell apart. It happened south of here, in the Valley of Melted Sand, where the smartest people had a technology magic that made the heavens. You were one of the men who made the heavens.”
“I was?”
Lopez nodded. “So was your Uncle Robert and Collin and anyone else who’s reincarnated. All that happened a hundred years ago.”
“I’m older than you, Papá?”
“Much older.”
“How do the heavens work?”
“No one knows any more. After the reincarnated people went into the sky, the mightiest nations made war on the heavens, but you all sent down a plague of very tiny machines that got into naturally born humans so we can’t make many children and hardly no girls. That’s why your sister is special.”
“I still wish you hadn’t found her.”
Lopez pointed at the moonless night sky, the host of stars. “You see that stretch of stars that twinkle more than the others?”
“I see it.”
“They are twinkling more because they are shining through one of the heavens. That particular heaven is called the Floating Bridge. It was passing over when we found you. Your sister might be from there too. When you leave this world, maybe you two will go back there together.”
“What if I don’t want to go?”
“You don’t have to anytime soon.”
“Why did I come back down from the heaven, Papá?”
“No one knows why you all come back. My guess is that it’s a bit like camping.”
“Camping?”
“Sometimes you’ll go with me and Uncle Robert to the coast and we’ll sleep in tents and hunt deer. We don’t have to do that. We got a cabin with a stove. But we like sleeping on the beach and drinking from streams and hiking up mountains.”
Luis frowned with concentration. “Because it reminds us of what it was like back before we built cabins or used stoves?”
“Exactly what I think. You got tired of being clouds and thinking lighting. You wanted to hear thunder again and remember sunsets and tamales and mosquitoes and laughter. So you reincarnated yourselves.”
Luis thought about this. “Why are baby girls so dangerous?”
“No one knows exactly why, but any man who picks up a reincarnating baby girl is bound to her through a special infection of small machines. If the girl dies, the father dies. So now all fathers have to be very good about protecting their daughters and keeping them well fed and healthy.”
“So why does Collin say you’re chickenshit? You picked up the girl.”
Lopez sighed. “I am scared of dying.”
“You’re scared because you won’t go to a heaven?”
“I won’t go to one of your heavens. I won’t go where you will go.”
The boy hugged his arm.
Lopez continued. “I might go somewhere else or I might just go out like a candle flame. No one knows.”
Luis didn’t say anything.
“But for now everything’s going to be fine.”
“I wish you could come with me when I go up there.”
“So do I.”
Two days later, in the late morning, Lopez was working in the root cellar when he heard Robert call out. He took his daughter up to find Robert crouching on the patio, the Remington laid across his knees. The boys were nowhere to be seen. Robert gestured uphill. Two men were standing on the path as it came out of the redwoods. One held the halter to a shaggy palomino. A pale woman sat on the horse’s back. She raised a hand. When Lopez did the same, she and her group approached.