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