Free Memory Wall: Stories by Anthony Doerr Page A

money, don’t you?”
    It’s afternoon when Luvo clambers off at the intersection for Prince Albert Road. A gas station and a few aluminum trailers huddle under a brass-colored sun. Black eagles trace slow ovals a half-mile above the road. Three friendly-looking women sit beneath a vinyl umbrella and sell cheese and marmalade and sticky rolls. “It’s warm,” they tease. “Take off your hat.” Luvo shakes his head. He chews a roll and waits with his duffel bag. It’s nearly dusk before a Bantu sales representative in a rented Honda slows for him.
    “Where you going?”
    “The Swartberg.”
    “You mean over the Swartberg?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The driver reaches across and pushes the door open. Luvo climbs in. They turn southeast. The sun goes down in a wash of orange and moonlight spills onto the Karoo.
    The pavement ends. The man drives the last hour through the badlands in silence, with the startled eyes of bat-eared foxesreflecting now and then in the high beams and a vast spread of stars keeping pace above and curtains of dust floating up behind the rear tires.
    The car vibrates beneath them. Soon there is no traffic in either direction. Great walls of stone rear up, darker than the sky. They come around a turn and a rectangular brown sign, its top half pocked from a shotgun blast, reads
Swartbergpas.
Luvo thinks: Harold and Alma saw this same sign. Before Harold died they drove right past this spot.
    Fifteen minutes later the Honda is climbing past one of the road’s countless switchbacks when Luvo says, “Please stop the car here.”
    The man slows. “Stop?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You sick?”
    “No, sir.”
    The little car shudders as it idles. Luvo unclips his seat belt. The man blinks at him in the darkness. “You’re getting out here?”
    “Yes, sir. Just below the top.”
    “You’re joking.”
    “No, sir.”
    “Ag, it gets cold up here. It
snows
up here. You ever seen snow?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Snow is terrible cold.” The man tugs at his collar. He seems about to asphyxiate with the strangeness of Luvo’s request.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I can’t let you out here.”
    Luvo stays silent.
    “Any chance I can talk you out of this?”
    “No, sir.”
    Luvo takes his big duffel and four bottles of water from the backseat and steps out into the darkness. The man looks at him a full half-minute before pulling off. It’s warm in the moonlight but Luvo stands shivering for a moment, holding his things, and then walks to the edge of the road and peers over the retaining wall into the shadows below. He finds a thin path, cut into the slope, and hikes maybe two hundred meters north of the road, pausing every now and then to watch the twin red taillights of the salesman’s Honda as it eases up the switchbacks high above him toward the top of the pass.
    Luvo finds a lumpy, level area of dry grass and rocks roughly the size of Alma Konachek’s upstairs bedroom. He unrolls his sleeping bag and urinates and looks out over the starlit talus below, running mile after mile down onto the plains of the Karoo far beneath him.
    He takes a drink of water and climbs into his sleeping bag and tries to swallow back his fear. The rocks on the ground are still warm from the sun. The stars are bright and impossibly numerous. The longer he looks into a patch of sky, the more stars emerge within it. Range upon range of suns burning out beyond the power of his vision.
    No cars show themselves on the road. No airplanes cross the sky. The wind makes the only sound. What’s out here? Millipedes. Buzzards. Snakes. Warthogs, ostriches, bushbuck. Farther off, on the northern tablelands: jackals, wild dogs, leopards. A last few rhinos.
    F IRST D AY
    Dawn finds Luvo warm and bareheaded inside his sleeping bag with a breeze washing over the ports in his scalp. A truckgrinds up the switchbacks of the road in the distance,
Happy Chips
painted across its side.
    He sits up. Around his sleeping bag are rocks, and beyond his little