"What's that face?" I asked, hopping down from the spiral rock.

He sighed and said, "More intrigue back home. It's...I'll let my lawyers deal with it."

His face had turned hard as the stone walls looming around us. So I knew I wasn't going to get a real answer.

I was trying to learn how to crowbar my way through when the doors slammed shut like that. But I'm not good at wheedling and whining. And I try to respect people's feelings as much as possible, too.

See, where I come from when somebody says to leave them alone, you do that and just wait for a little moment of weakness to flicker in their eyes sometime.

That's how we dealt with decades of deep pain over in The Quarters. Pain so bad you wouldn't want to force someone to talk about it.

Pain that started when they shoved us on those ships back in Africa and continues to this very day. Words and whining hadn't changed it in all this time, so we just hauled those burdens back up on our strong shoulders and got on with it.

This, though...

Well, I loved this man. Yeah, I said it. My whole body and soul knew it even if it wasn't necessarily time to be talking about it out loud so soon.

And whenever those doors closed on me...it was like an eclipse of the Sun, you know? My world went dark.

So, I tried, "You know I'm going to be worrying about this all day now, right?"

And he put his hands on my cheeks and said, "Look where we are, aegiya (baby). Millions of years, it took that river to make all this beauty. I mean, our little silly problems are like...well..."

"I hear you, but—"

"Let's just be here together in this place and not thinking about things that don't even matter, okay?"

Yeah. He'd shut that door good and tight.

So, I let out a little groan and pressed my forehead to his.

And he kissed my nose and said, "I can almost feel the presence of all those people who touched that wall thousands of years ago. Now, they had problems, huh? Just trying to survive."

I hooked arms with him and walked on down that path they'd all traveled. That had been cut through the stone over millions of years.

But I didn't have millennia to cut through the obstacles in our way. I could feel them looming over us just like the salmon pink walls we were walking past. Obstacles I might never be able to climb over or break through.

When we got to the little pools of rainwater or places where the old stream got a little wider and deeper, he hoisted me up on his back like I was just a 10-pound sack of flour.

It'd been a long, long time since a man had done something like that for me.

I used to watch women in the parking lots of stores or in the doctor's office leaning on their long-time loves—the old couples, especially, I'd envy. Shuffling in holding onto each other, knowing they had someone they could hold onto 'til death, like they'd vowed.

And I'd tell myself it just made them helpless, the women who'd been cared for like that. Which is bullshit, of course.

Having a mighty love to lean on would probably make you 'way stronger than someone who'd never had anything to rest up against their whole life.

So I let myself be cared for, for once. Lord knows, it felt delicious to just lay there letting myself be carried away in more ways than one.

And when we came out through another big crack in the cliff face, I whooped at the sight of the tall trees and the glistening stream snaking off into the distance for as far as we could see.

And AJ shaded his eyes to take it all in. "I hope it stays like this for at least another million years."

"Is that them up there? The Lamars?" I asked as I caught some movement back in the trees.

It was them, Ronnie and Yoli and some other people, too. And Lulu was running around and through the big trees with two children about her age.

"Hey, y'all," Lyle called to us. "We're settin' up here. Fitzgeralds and Gibbons families come by, too."

A seriously hippie-ish young woman in a tiered skirt, peasant blouse and sandals like Star's gave us a wave from over where a huge stainless pot had been set over a fire pit.

"We're purging the critters with salt water," Star said. "Gotta get 'em to spit out all the gook they've been scuttling around in."

I knew about purging. You did it just before you threw 'em in the pot—any sooner and they'd spoil on you.

"Well, it looks like I'd better get that roux goin'," I said. "AJ, that dish of yours—"

"It's quick. Throw 'em in the sauce, let 'em simmer a little..."

"Well, we got some shrimp and some sausage and stuff, too," Lyle said. "Stretch it a little bit."

"They put on a big feed once a month or so," the hippie woman told us.

Her name was Darlene—"Dar," they called her. And she swept her kind of lank, dishwater blonde hair up into a ponytail she tied with a lock of that hair and said, "Kiddies'll eat good today! Look at 'em laughin'!"

I "got it," then. I think AJ did, too, because he caught hold of my hand and said, "Well, let's get it, then," right quick, so as not to let on that we knew this dinner might've been the only one they'd had for days.

I got to use a little propane stove thing to brown the roux 'til it looked like a skillet full of melted chocolate.

AJ's mala sauce smelled lethal even with some of the hottest stuff left out. Lyle's eyes lit up every time he sniffed it—dare devil, he was. Robo Dude's daddy through and through.

Ronnie and Yoli made fry bread and gave each kid a piece drizzled with honey. The male child—Bobby--tore his in half and ran right over to give one half to Dar.

Who said, "Thank you, baby," as he ran back to the other kids.

"Sweet," I said.

And she nodded and said, "Man o' the family, that one. Always lookin' out." But then her eyes got a little...well, haunted is the best word. "It's been hard on them, not havin' a real home. Course we been livin' out here for about...four years now. Law don't come out lookin' here like they do on some BLM land. You can usually only do 14 days at a stretch, tops, legally."

"Yeah, a cousin of mine crossed the whole country for almost free doing that," Ronnie said. "Dude was down and out in the worst way and wouldn't let anybody do anything for 'im—still is. We're just waitin' for that call, you know? Cops, lettin' us know they found 'im somewhere."

"Lotta people like him out there," Dar said. "Lost souls can't live in the real world no more. After a few years we all get spooky like that, to be honest. You get tired o' the pity in people's eyes."

That hit me hard—had she seen that in our eyes, too?

"Well, when it looks like the Law's snoopin' around, they head on over to our place," Lyle said. "Bill bought our piece 'way back in the day. Wasn't as hard as he thought, apparently. It was what they called 'of historic and economic significance' or somethin' like that. Cause of the tourists and his artwork and all."

There was only one man in their little group. Beau Fitz, they called him. Older gentleman with sloping green eyes that made my heart ache whenever I looked into them longer than a few seconds.

He said, "Grateful for it, too." Looking out over the landscape and not at anyone in particular, thank God. "Got sick o' havin' to move from the campgrounds every coupla weeks. And them off the grid type places...people will steal you blind. Lotta crazy kids, too, runnin' around there. Mental cases can't live nowhere else."

"I was afraid they'd get after my kids when we were livin' in one over in New Mexico," Dar said. "Or turn 'em bad as they were. Cops was always cruisin' in, lookin' for somebody'd stole somethin' or broke into some place—they'd make night raids, them kids, into the towns around. Everybody knew it was them but they'd get shed of whatever they stole so fast...couldn't pin nothin' on 'em. They sold it, some kinda way. For money'n'...drugs..."

"We had a little settlement like that a few miles off for a bit," Lyle said. "But boy, the state police came in there one day with some tractors right behind 'em. Cause this event goin' on now, it makes good money for the county every year. So they didn't want those off grid people wandering in, scarin' off the tourists, right?"

"Pretty soon, they'll want this, too," Beau predicted with a shrug. "Damned near every place we stayed they've built on by now. Tore down all the trees'n' cactus'n' whatnot. One mornin' you hear the Caterpillar tractors comin' like in that Grapes of Wrath movie and that's that."

Beau's wife, Connie, was a stout, stern faced, frizzy/curly haired woman who seemed a little bit uneasy around us strangers. So while we were talking to her man, she kept watching and stirring pots and pans so we couldn't look into those eyes that had seen those "Cats" coming a few too many times.

Another family arrived just as Star was dumping the critters into the pot—the Williamses. Four kids and a rambunctious German Shepherd. Took my mind off the "murder" I'd just committed.

After all these years of cooking I still hate dumping living creatures into hot water or grease. AJ told me how they cut up and eat octopus and shrimp and lots of sea creatures while they're still wiggling over in Korea--too gruesome for me, man.

So I walked up behind AJ while he was mixing up the mala and put my arms around his waist. And together we let the reality of what we were witnessing sink in.

This was not the America he'd come home to see.

It was an America none of the tourists out at the fairgrounds knew about, either. Though I had a hunch some of these families probably went over that way to sell something they cooked or crafted or found in the desert. They probably knew all kinds of things to sell that wouldn't cost them much to make.

Every time the kids squealed and laughed and ran through where we were cooking, tears welled up. And I'd look over at AJ to make myself feel...well...he couldn't make me feel entirely better but if I just concentrated on how pretty he was for a few minutes it took the edge off the ache.

"We should do something like this maybe," I finally told him. "Like, we could put something by or buy more stuff and drive over to a shelter after hours or...I don't know. Sadie did it, sort of. Some weekends, she'd drop off all these plates at a couple of nursing homes. Sunday dinner, you know? The works, like they would've had at home back in the day."

He hugged me and said, "That's my girl." Like just hearing the idea had relieved some of the inner turmoil he'd been feeling.

Which only heightened my own inner turmoil.

Cause while he was busy mixing up the mala, I'd snuck off to shoot a text to Hae Won to see if she would tell me what he hadn't wanted to.

Looking at him, knowing I'd done that...well, it felt just like when I dumped all those little mudbugs into that big pot of boiling water...