Chapter 5: Bones Beneath the Red Dust

The bus hummed along the two-lane highway, its tired shocks jolting with every bump in the road. Out the window, the terrain had changed—drastically. Gone were the lush rows of olive orchards or the golden haze of almond trees. Now, red earth stretched in all directions, interrupted by jagged mesas, tufts of stubborn shrubs, and skies so vast they threatened to swallow the world. I pressed my forehead against the glass—Patrick George Bates, age nine but feeling much older—the dry warmth of Arizona already seeping into my bones. I wasn’t nervous, not really. Not anymore. That part had been worn out of me years ago, like thread unraveling from a jacket sleeve.

Window Rock. That’s where I was heading now.

The new foster home was a squat, faded building just off a dusty road that veined its way toward the jagged cliff formation that gave the town its name. The family was small and economically strangled—a couple in their late forties, graying early under the pressure of bills and disappointment. I was greeted with a distracted nod and shown to a room I would share with a younger boy named Devin. Seven years old, pale, quiet, and seemingly unmoored from reality, Devin said almost nothing and blinked like someone waking from a long, sad dream.

Meals were sparse and rationed. Rice with barely-there beans, dry tortillas, canned corn. It wasn’t cruelty, not overtly. It was poverty. I could see it in the strained smiles, the unopened mail, the moments of silence when the phone rang and wasn’t answered.

Still, hunger gnawed at me, especially after the bounty of the orchard homes in California. There, I could always sneak a handful of almonds or olives or stolen fruit. Here, everything looked dead—or dangerous.