language. He lifted up his hand and found a surprise. “My sleeves have been rolled up,” he said.
“Let’s get you in the shade,” the mother said.
TWO
Harry’s face was painted with sunlight and shade as he lay in the sand under a piñon tree. Beth continued to watch him while her mom rummaged inside the Rambler to find something to eat. The piñon tree, gray and stunted, was no bigger than a climbing limb of their backyard maple (meaning their backyard back there, a million miles away), and its branches shielded Harry’s face about as well as the fingers of a hand. Before falling backward into a sound sleep he had accepted two cups of water but had not downed them with any kind of urgent thirst. He kept pausing to talk, the cup held by his mouth. Eventually her mom had pushed the cup to his lips practically forcing the water upon him. He waved away a third cup as if it were medicine. He said, “That’s an interesting piece of equipment, isn’t it?” to Charlie, who sat in the dirt worshiping the Geiger counter before him, and then Harry’s head lolled back and he was gone before Charlie’s question about what’s this part for? could reach him.
Beth thought of him already as Harry and not Mr. Lindstrom or him or that man. Maybe because Harry was someone who forgot to put his pants on, who had to be taught to drink, who had an excitable way of talking that most men didn’t, and who could fall asleep so contentedly he did not register the light baking his eyes. The way that Charlie’s hands hovered around the Geiger counter instead of diving in and exploring like he so clearly wanted to do meant that Harry was still Mr. Lindstrom to him. Giving Charlie permission wasn’t up to her, but if she’d been interested in Geiger counters she’d already have been experimenting with it by now.
The sun on Harry’s face was painful to witness. Beth had experienced for herself what the sun could do. She and Charlie almost first thing had unpacked the magnifying glass and set a strip of paper on fire. It took maybe ten seconds. As much as possible she stayed in the shade. She was nervous now about her skin, which she viewed as a sheet of paper that might go up in flames, and she thought of her grandma and her white nearly transparent skin. A corner spot by the canyon wall managed to stay protected no matter where the sun moved. That was where she tended to stay when she wasn’t working for Charlie, doing the slave labor for his experiments. She leaned against the cool flat rock. She dropped one of Charlie’s marbles on top of the other. She did that over and over until her brain began to play tricks on her. Her mind was jumping in the hot bronze emptiness of the desert’s palm, it was jumping like a jumping bean from nothing to nothing, and the only thing keeping her occupied was writing book reports on the complete works of Lois Lenski: Strawberry Girl, Coal Camp Girl, Houseboat Girl. She was already way ahead of schedule and almost to the end of her supply and pretty soon she’d have to write reports on make-believe books or write the books herself and then report on them.
Charlie couldn’t be bothered with books. He had his compass and his chemistry set and he was working on a topographical map, and of course, most importantly, he had his own sister to use for all his calculations of heights and distances, shamefully exploiting her so his map could be as precise as possible. He may have been the inventor of the bethometer measuring system, one bethometer equaling one of her strides, her height equaling two bethometers, but she was the guinea pig who enacted his theory in all its dangerous glory, thereby proving its worthiness. Her legs were tied off for complete accuracy. In case she thought the bethometer system silly, Charlie reminded her about twelve inches being the foot of the king of England. He sent her tied up over the rocks, twice, and up the outcroppings, twice, while she counted off her hobbled strides. Three times if the counts didn’t match. Beth Waterman, Human Surveying Tool. This would probably be the first book she wrote after her Lois Lenski supply ran out, and in it she would detail the many desert adventures she’d been having, starting with her death-defying climbs in the name of science and ending with—at the moment, ending with a man taking a nap.
She couldn’t stand it any longer. She found the straw boater, crawled over, and dropped it over Harry’s face.
Her mom called and Charlie went over and they started discussing the upcoming meal as if it could be something out of a restaurant, as if it could come with dessert, which was what she wanted more than anything. Up until now she hadn’t asked a lot of questions. She knew the main answer, Charlie’s Adventure, to the main unasked question, but she didn’t know any of the smaller answers to the smaller questions, for example, what exactly are we doing? What are we doing tomorrow? Maybe that had been a mistake, not asking questions. Her mom was starting to remind her of someone on a trampoline who wouldn’t get off.
In the brown silence Beth was always hearing voices. A whisper between Charlie and her mother echoed back to her in a near scream. The air blocked nothing; everything traveled through it undiminished. And the rock walls sent the words back amplified. It was not such a big deal after all that Indians had such great hearing. If she lived out here, she’d have great hearing, too. She could guess, for example, that the engine she found herself listening to was miles away though it sounded directly upon them. She could guess big truck coming, many cylinders. The motor churned to a pitch, then rewound itself and wrenched and churned again.
When the truck doors opened and slammed shut, it became real. Her mother had already turned from the cooking and was standing alertly. Her hair was tied back but the strands that always escaped were hanging down her face. Before she could push them back, two men walked into the camp, hands on their hats as if to remove them. “Hello,” one of them said. “Sorry for the interruption.” They bowed their heads, fingers dipped into the felt creases, but the hats stayed on. “Hello there. Good afternoon.”
“Hello,” her mother said plainly. A big metal spoon in her hand was hanging by her side but her grip was tight and the spoon arched upward. The men were probably amused, thinking, This lady figures she’s holding a weapon.
“Saw Harry’s truck out there, supplies on the road. Everything okay? That is Harry’s truck.”
Her mother nodded toward Harry, still lying asleep under the piñon tree with the straw boater over his face. The two men chuckled through their noses and gave each other a raised eyebrow.
“Don’t want to interrupt his nap, but his truck’s blocking our way,” the one man said.
Her mother didn’t say anything, just stood there with her spoon.
“So how do you know Harry?” the man asked.
“I don’t,” her mother said. “I just met him.” Her hands started toward her hair but stopped, and Beth knew the strands hanging in her mother’s face were driving her crazy. “He introduced himself to me,” her mother said pointedly.
“And went directly to his naptime. Sounds like Harry, doesn’t it?” The men’s clothes were nice but dirty. They were precisely donned. The pants were pushed into high work boots. The shirts were tucked in and the belts looked buckled too tight, above their belly buttons. The underarms of the shirts revealed lapping salt patterns like the white dustings around the waterhole she and Charlie had found (the unappetizing waterhole that was waiting for them when their own supply ran out. Soon). And the men wore unzipped khaki vests with lots of pockets. One of the men dug into his vest pocket as he went over to Harry. He lifted the boater, felt Harry’s cheeks with his fingers, and shook his head. “Dry and crepey. Right, oh right, sorry, ma’am, I’m slow to catch on.” Whatever was in his vest pocket he put in his mouth as he stood up. “Didn’t mean to be rude. I’m Paul Morrison, and this is my partner, Ralph Graver. We run the mining camp down the road. Well, six miles down the road—if you take the road. A whole afternoon’s outing, in other words.”
The man who was Ralph Graver laughed.
“What’s
