“And you know what’s most interesting,” the man continued. “It’s not what happened to the little four-year-old boy. No. He just grew up like the rest of us. A grown man by now.” He paused; he seemed to Savitha to be studying the road. “Living somewhere, I guess. Mostly unhappy, like the rest of us, but mostly getting by. But you know what’s most interesting? What’s most interesting is what happened to Freddie. The boy who built the porch. He went off to college eventually—using the money he’d saved up from his odd jobs—and then, in one of his college classes, he met a pretty gal by the name of Myra, and they got married. After graduating, they moved to Albuquerque, and then to Houston. Freddie got a job at an oil company, paid good money, and he and Myra had three children, two boys and a girl. Before you know it, they had a five-bedroom house in the suburbs, and two cars, and eventually, even an in-ground pool.”
The old woman let out a little snort, adjusted in her seat, and went right on sleeping. The man looked over at his wife and, as if he were talking to her, as if she were awake, he said, “Now, as I was saying, Freddie had three kids. Two boys first, and then a little girl. Freddie Jr. was the oldest boy, and he was his namesake, all right. Took after his dad, and did everything with him: they went hunting and fishing, threw the ball around. In fact, Freddie Jr. got so good that his Little League team went to Williamsport one year. Well, one summer, the two boys, Freddie Sr.’s two boys, went to stay with their grandfather, Freddie’s dad, and his new wife back in Tucson. He’d been widowed, you see, and had married a woman he met while golfing in Palm Springs. He still lived out in Tucson, and besides, it was only for a couple of weeks. So the two boys got on a plane, just the two of them, and headed to the desert. Sound familiar?” He let out a laugh, and then he said, “As you can imagine, it was boring at first for them. They sat around the house and watched television or played video games. Their grandfather, you see, had a large plot of land just west of town, but unlike the first little boy, these boys weren’t at all interested. They found it dull. But eventually, a few days in, a boy about their age, a neighbor of the grandfather’s, came over and the three became fast friends. He showed them how to have fun in the desert: how to hunt for Gila monsters and go sand sliding and dig for whiptail eggs. The neighbor boy only went home for dinner, and sometimes not even that. In fact, toward the end of the two weeks, Freddie Jr. and his brother didn’t even want to go back to Houston.
“Well, on their last day in the desert, the neighbor boy came over, as he always did, and they wandered around out back. The grandfather and his wife were inside, making sandwiches for lunch. And right then—right when the grandfather was putting mustard on the slices of bread—they heard a huge explosion. I mean, massive. It rocked the house; it knocked the butter knife out of his hand. Frames fell off the walls; the lights swung from the ceiling. They thought it was an earthquake, or a bomb of some sort. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all. When the grandfather ran outside, he saw a huge plume of smoke rising from the edge of his property. The very edge, and he also saw flames. He ran at top speed, which, given his age, was remarkably fast. But they say that, don’t they? They say in times of incredible strain, emergency, in times that require great acts, the human being is strangely capable of them: these great acts. But he wasn’t fast enough. You see, the three boys had been playing with matches, and they had been near a propane tank. I don’t want to be overly graphic, you understand, but they weren’t near it anymore. The neighbor boy had second-degree burns; Freddie Jr.’s younger brother was also burned, but not as bad. But Freddie Jr. Now, Freddie Jr. had third-degree burns. The explosion burned away every layer of skin he had, and then it reached into his bloodstream, damaged organs. He was in the hospital for over two weeks, suffered terribly, and finally died of sepsis. He was thirteen. And his father, Freddie Sr., he was at his son’s bedside every one of those days. He refused to leave, I mean refused to leave: even after the boy died, he just went right on sitting. He went into some sort of shock, they say. His hair turned completely gray in the two weeks he was at the hospital, and when he punched a hole in one of the hospital mirrors, a shard sliced a major nerve and he was never able to fully lift his right arm again. Of course, the grandfather was broken, too. He blamed himself, naturally. He died a few years later, but he’d died long before then. The surviving brother was never the same either. He refused to speak for the first couple of months after his brother died—does that sound familiar?—and when he finally did start talking, it was mostly to buy drugs.”
The man was quiet again, in a way Savitha had never known: the silence a substance, water, the air in the car a lake of light.
The man smiled into the rearview mirror, but he didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “What is your name again? Saveeta? Well, Saveeta, I’m not a mulling man, but don’t this strike you as—oh, I don’t know—unnerving? All right, sure, sure, you could say these things were random, not at all linked, that life isn’t poetic like that. Hell, maybe it was all the mother’s fault. The one who ran away with the traveling salesman. But I’ve got my money on poetry. On its symmetry, sure, but also on its inadequacy. Its meanness. Its slaughter of lambs along with the lions. Everything of value. Don’t you agree?” And then he stopped, and then he smiled again. “You’re a pretty one, you know that? You’re Indian, aren’t you? You all brown up real nice in the sun. I’ve noticed that. Real nice. Yes, you do. Don’t they, Mill?”
His wife woke with a start and said, “Huh? What was that?”
He laughed a little and ate another handful of peanuts.
2
They dropped Savitha off in the main section of Butte, Montana. The old man said, “Stay on the ninety. You got that? Ninety. That should get you over to New York or thereabouts.” Then they each embraced her, the old man and the old woman, and they wished her well and gave her the remainder of the bag of peanuts. The woman waved as they pulled away. “Good luck,” she said, the last of her hand out of the window waving like a flag. Where were they going? What was their hurry? They’d told her, certainly, but Savitha hadn’t known what they were saying. She’d wanted to say to them, Maybe I can come with you, just for a while, but that, too, she hadn’t had the words to speak. Where they’d left her was in downtown Butte.
She thought, They won’t come this far, will they?
The town was ringed by mountains. She was on the corner of a sloping street, sloping down to the south and the west, and sloping up toward the north. To the east, which was where Savitha focused her gaze, there was another huge mountain. But this one, unlike the others, wasn’t whole. Its face had been mined, skinned from the nose down, and all that remained was pink, exposed flesh, throbbing in the coming twilight. She turned away and looked along the sloped streets and saw that most of the brick buildings around her were shuttered. Her heart sank.
She ate one peanut at a time, trying to make them last, and wandered up and down the streets. She couldn’t have known this, but many of the streets in downtown Butte were named after gems, minerals, metals, some shining thing that had once been hidden deep in the bodies of the surrounding mountains. She walked from Porphyry Street up to Silver. At Mercury, she turned and stood in front of another brick building, this one lighted. Inside, people sat on high stools and laughed and talked, and Savitha felt such a pang that her eyes watered. She saw plates of food, and tall glasses shot through with golden light, as if they, too, were mined from the hills. But standing outside, despite the heaping plates of nachos and buffalo wings and french fries, all she smelled was stale beer: cutting through the brick and the glass and the slope of the street, the stand and measure of her body, and reaching inside of her, through her. Suresh and the room and the bottle of clear liquid. She wanted to cry out, put her fist through the window, but instead she swallowed, pushed back bile, let out a smaller sound—that of an animal trapped in a distant cave, a faraway hollow—and hurried down the street.