Sure I will. You’re making me feel bad for messing up your day off.
Saad shuts Curtis’s door with an indifferent wave. Bah! he says. Why do you feel bad? I told you, I was working on my roof. Now what am I doing? I am driving in the beautiful mountains. Maybe you will give me a nice tip, and then I can pay some men to fix my roof, which is what my wife always has been telling me to do. You see? I am happy you called. And soon we will be gone from the mountains, and I will find some nice jazz on the radio. Yes?
The Honda turns left on the Valley of Fire Highway, and soon crosses the park’s western boundary. The radio starts to flicker and the scenery calms down. You are tired of the casinos, I see, Saad says. Your luck did not improve.
Curtis slumps in his seat. He’s worn out. He doesn’t want to think anymore. The early morning excitement and the long dry hike and the irritation in his eyesocket have ground him down to a nub. No, he says. It sure didn’t.
So you left the city, Saad says, and came to the desert. Just like Jesus. Yes?
Exactly like Jesus, Curtis says. Or Muhammad. Muhammad went to the desert too, didn’t he? After things got nasty for him in Mecca.
Or Moses! Moses led his people out of Egypt, yes? Led them into the desert. I understand this, you see. I also led my people out of Egypt. Now two of my people are at the university spending my money, and the other of my people, she asks me every day why the roof is not yet fixed. Yes, my friend. It is sometimes good to go to the desert.
Curtis smiles, wipes his cheek, leans his head back. Sleep sucks at him like quicksand; his arms and legs are already numb. I guess I’m more like Jesus than those other two guys, he says. When I went into the desert, nobody followed me.
You are wrong, my friend, Saad says. I followed you. You see? I am very loyal.
The drone of the tires works its way up Curtis’s spine and expands to fill his chest, warm and liquid. He’s seeing the landscape through closed eyes now. To the north, a field of pricklypear and tree-cactus, the cyclone fence of Camp Delta, the blue Caribbean beyond it. To the south, the smoke-curtain over Al Burgan, the blackened long-legged corpses of camels, the lake of burning oil. Curtis hears the crunch of gravel under the Honda’s wheels, imagines it cast from the pavement into his eyes, and jerks awake. Hey, Saad, he says, can you tell me anything about that old town in the lake?
I don’t know what you mean, my friend.
I was just down at the lake. The water’s really low, I guess from the drought, and there’s what looks like a little town that’s come out of the water. You can see streets, chimneys, some of the old foundations.
Oh yes, Saad says. I saw this on the news. They built the Hoover Dam, and then the water came, and this town was covered up. Like Atlantis, yes? Now there is no rain, so it comes back. The people who made this town, they were—how do you call them? The ones who build the white temples.
Mormons?
Yes. Mormons. But there is a different name.
LDS, Curtis says. Latter-Day Saints.
Yes, Saad says. That’s who. I am curious about these people. I meet them sometimes in my taxicab. The young men I see sometimes on their bicycles. Are these Christian people, these Latter-Day Saints?
Depends on who you ask, I guess. My dad’s a Black Muslim and my mom was a Jehovah’s Witness, so I’m not gonna talk any trash about Mormons.
Saad leans down to mess with the radio and coaxes a melody from the speakers: Sonny Rollins, “How High the Moon,” a West Coast session with Barney Kessell and Leroy Vinnegar. A quick regular thrum of static cuts against the swingtime, then fades. Curtis shuts his eyelids again.