At its base, she saw a sign. Rooms, $10.
It was musty, the sheets grayish and rumpled, not very clean. But there was a shared bathroom at the end of the hallway, and the shower was hot. She washed the clothes she’d been wearing in the sink. She hung them to dry by the tiny, dirty window in her room. She saw, in the falling light, that the mountains looked higher, closer, more sinister. There was something white and shining at the top of one, and she wondered if it was a deepa. When she slept, her sleep was dreamless, and she held the knapsack to her chest all through the night.
*
In the morning, she understood.
She understood that she had sixty dollars remaining. She further understood that sixty dollars would either get her six nights in a dingy room in Butte, hardly a third of the way to New York, or back to Seattle.
She took the room for another night, and then another.
At a coffee shop on the third morning, she sat down without a word on the round stool at the counter. She’d only eaten a prepackaged sandwich and a stolen apple on the previous day, and felt weak with hunger. The waitress passed by her a dozen times, though, without even a glance, until Savitha finally motioned to her, and then pointed to a little girl’s plate of eggs and toast and sliced banana. When she returned with a glass of water and utensils, Savitha said, “Coffee, please, madam.”
The man sitting beside her laughed. “I thought you was mute,” he said, “and then out you pop with ‘coffee, please.’” He laughed some more.
He paid his bill and left. The seat was empty until Savitha was almost finished with her toast, saving the banana for last, when another man sat down next to her. This one looked more stoic, she thought. He was old and black and his woolly hair was gray at the temples, balding on top. Savitha had never been this close to a black person before, and with each of their arms resting on the counter, she saw that they were nearly the same shade of brown. Her skin more yellowish-brown, and his more reddish-brown. The thought was a comfort to her, though why should it be? He saw her looking but said nothing.
He was eating from a plate stacked with what looked like uthapams, though these were only dough, without the onions and green chilies and tomato and cilantro. He poured a brown syrup on them, and when he caught her looking again, he pointed to her banana slices and said, “Sometimes I like some of them on top. Chocolate chips, if I’m feeling frisky. But not today. Today I’m feeling simple.”
His voice was deep, with a slight, subterranean roar to it, somehow pained but mostly good-natured. He seemed to sense her pleasure at the sound of his voice. He said, “We’re two fish out of water, aren’t we? Out here. A black man, and what? Indian? Out here. Where you headed?”
She understood the word Indian. She smiled and nodded.
“You speak English? Enough to order you some breakfast, I know that much. Excuse me, excuse me, young lady,” he said to the waitress as she walked by. “Can we get more coffee over here?” The waitress poured them more coffee, and Savitha was delighted, not realizing she could get another cup, grateful that he’d had hers filled along with his. “Rapid City. That’s where I’m headed. You know Rapid City? I have a daughter out there. About your age. Nothing but a mess. A mess and a half. How did I raise such a mess? Her mother’s white. Maybe that’s what it is, but I don’t know. She was just born a mess.”
No, Savitha thought, not at all stoic.
“I’ll tell you what, though. Not much else out there, but that Spearfish Canyon is nice. Only been once. She’s not one to stay in a place long. But I’ll tell you what: that Spearfish Canyon is something else. You understand me? I’m headed down on the ninety. You?”
Savitha’s head shot up.
The man seemed startled. “You too? Where, though? Where to?”
“New York,” she said, hardly listening. She knew those words; she knew the words Spearfish Canyon.
“New York,” he guffawed. After some thought, he said, “Might be better off on the eighty, but this’ll get you there eventually, I suppose.”
Savitha nodded vaguely. The perfect place, Mohan had said.
“You got a car? Are you driving?” He motioned with his hands, as if positioned on a steering wheel.
Savitha shook her head. “Bus,” she said, rummaging in her sack.
“Bus! Sweetheart, there’s no buses to New York from Butte. Who told you there was?”
Savitha looked up; she sensed a crisis. And where was that photo? Where? She watched the man’s face, wondering if hers, too, flushed darker with heat. She delved again into the sack.
“Might do better in Rapid City. You might. At least you’re headed the right way. Might be able to connect up through Chicago. Eventually. Who told you anyway?”
There! There it was.
Savitha looked at him again, and it struck her that there was nothing as concerned as this man, not just for her, but for all girls of a certain age, maybe, or for those with a certain ache. She held the ripped photograph out to him and pointed to the back.
His eyes grew wide. He flipped it to the front, and then stared again at the back. “You know Spearfish Canyon too?” he asked. “You got people there? Why didn’t you say so? I thought you said New York. Hell, Spearfish Canyon is on my way to Rapid.” Then he looked, for the first time, or so Savitha thought, at her stub. His gaze didn’t linger, nor did it turn away too soon. He handed the photograph back to her, took a sip of his coffee, smiled real wide, handed the waitress a twenty, indicating both their checks, and said, “Want to come along?”
Come? Yes, she nodded, yes.
*
On the drive out of Butte, stone spires rose up out of the mountains. Trees grew from sheer rock. Beyond, the mountains stretched out, flattened. The road curved past vast ranches and farms, and bales of hay dotted the land. Sunlight sparkled off the wheatgrass, lighting the very tips like candles.
“No,” the man was saying, “no, I can’t tell her anything. Not a thing. She knows it all, or thinks she does. Has since the age of two weeks, give or take. Half of her family is white. But the other half is black. And I say to her, I say, Look. Look what we’ve endured. What we’ve survived. You are a part of that survival. That endurance. I say, Your great-great-grandparents were slaves. They picked cotton in—”
“Cotton,” Savitha said, smiling wide, suddenly listening.
“Don’t smile like that,” the man said. “Don’t smile. It ain’t shit. Anybody, and I mean anybody, says the words cotton or plantation, or hell, the word ship, you run the other way. You hear? You think you’re not black, but when it comes down to it, when it comes down to cotton, you are. Everybody who isn’t white is black. You understand? Now, like I was saying—”
Savitha looked out the window and watched the fields and the mountains and the sky. The ridges first softened as they drove east—the valleys like bowls of golden light—and then the peaks rose up again, muscled and towering. There is no way to explain a thing that is perfect, he’d said.