Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“There’s a police car on the corner,” she replied.

We waited until the traffic light turned green, then crossed the street and stood in front of a hardware store so we could use the display window as a mirror. The police cruiser went through the intersection and turned at the corner, then drove slowly up a hill toward a stone building that looked like a courthouse or a city hall. The driver seemed to be looking on both sides of the street.

“We’re getting on the road,” I said.

I paid the filling station attendant for the oil change and for fueling the car. “You headed north?” he said.

“No, we’re staying in to

wn. What’s up north?”

“A front is moving in. Warm air rises up from the plateau in New Mexico and hits the cold air, and we get dump-truck loads of snow dropped on us. We can have bright, sunny weather, and in ten minutes the sky can turn black as midnight.”

“Glad we’re staying in town,” I said.

We drove out of the business district and onto the highway, past the auction barn, into a buffeting wind, into uncertainty of every kind. I stayed in second gear, the accelerator to the floor, until the transmission was screaming.

It’s hard to describe the feeling I had. It was one of those moments when mortality becomes real. It wasn’t like the war. War gives you choices, not of the best kind, certainly, but choices just the same, or at least the illusion of them. When mortality steals upon you in an improbable fashion, in a totally innocuous environment, you know it’s real because it’s not supposed to be there. It’s not a crossroads; it’s a cul-de-sac.

When I was fifteen, I went to visit my uncle Cody on his ranch in the Gunnison Valley. The train trip was a splendid adventure for a boy my age, particularly during the privation of the Great Depression. My mother fixed me a bag of fried chicken, and my father gave me a dollar watch so I could get myself up before my four A.M. arrival in Walsenburg, where my uncle was meeting me at the station. When my father gave me the watch, he said, “It’s probably good for only one trip, but it’ll do you.”

He was right. The day after I arrived in Colorado, the spring broke. The dollar watch had served its purpose and was no longer of any value. That’s how I felt as we sped up the highway into hail clicking on the windshield and glistening like glass on the asphalt. Perhaps our race was almost done, and this was the way our denouement had been written. Perhaps the Fates never intended me to survive Saint-Lô or the Ardennes and I had escaped my destiny by accident. Or maybe Rosita wasn’t supposed to leave the camp where I found her; maybe both of us had interfered in a design that was much larger than we were.

I had learned only one lesson in life: History does not correct itself in its own sequence. The moment of correction comes in ways we never anticipate. I believed then and I believe now that we drove into another dimension, one that was not spatial, one that had nothing to do with the banal world of rationality and cause and effect, one that was not imaginary but more real than the one where we measure our lives in teaspoons. In some ways, I had come to feel I was a self-­deluded prisoner of The Song of Roland. I thought I’d bought into medieval notions of chivalry and cloaks rolled in blood and the clang of swords upon shields because I couldn’t deal with the savagery of my fellow man. Now I knew that was not the case. The story of Roncevaux was real, and so were the horns blowing in the canyons high up in the Pyrenees. It was the story that ennobled us and showed us we were more than we thought we could ever be. It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.

There’s another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water. Just south of Ludlow, where the striking miners and their wives and children were murdered by the Colorado state militia and Rockefeller’s gunmen, I saw the blue and red lights of several emergency vehicles parked diagonally on the highway, all of them pointed at us, like schooled-up sharks.

I swerved off the highway onto a dirt road, the back end of the Confederate fishtailing in a cloud of dust. I floored the accelerator and followed the road across the hardpan, past the site where the eleven children and two women had died in a pit under a burning tent. I climbed steadily into the high country, out of piñon trees and sage into spruce and grand fir and ponderosa and larch and lodgepole pine. In the rearview mirror, I could see at least three vehicles in pursuit. I worked the Luger from under the seat and set it on the dashboard. Rosita stared at me, her eyes filled with alarm.

The transition from the Southern Plateau into the mountains was dramatic. The road forked three times, and at each juncture I chose one road or the other arbitrarily. The peaks of the mountains were over eleven thousand feet, the fir trees shining with snowmelt in the sun, the boulders in their midst gray and smooth and stained with lichen in the shade. We climbed over a rise and descended an incline that gave us a brief view of a blue mountain higher than all the rest, so high the trees stopped at least two thousand feet below the peak.

Between the mountaintops was a ribbon of blue sky, and beyond it, on both sides of the mountains, rolling black clouds of a kind the filling station attendant had warned us about. The pistons in the Confederate were clattering like bones, the needle on the heat gauge trembling inside the red zone. I had no doubt we would soon blow a rod. Just as we started up the next incline, I saw the same twin-­engine plane I had seen in Trinidad. It was making a wide turn, leveling out, coming back toward us for a flyover. I suspected it was a spotter plane working for the state police.

There was another fork ahead. I double-clutched the transmission and shifted into first and gave the engine all the gas it would take. We went around a curve into thicker timber, and I took my eyes off the dirt road to look quickly in the rearview mirror. The police cruisers below had temporarily lost sight of us and probably stopped to see which fork in the road we had taken. I looked back through the windshield and saw immediately in front of us a cliff extending into space with no guardrail. I swerved the car back on the road within two or three seconds of plunging at least a thousand feet to the forest below.

I had to fight to catch my breath. Rosita had not said a word. She had propped one hand against the dashboard, the other on the armrest. Steam was boiling off the hood. The Luger had clattered to the floor. “We should have gone over the edge,” she said.

“What?”

“I’d rather have it end that way.”

“We mustn’t think in those terms, Rosita. Please don’t say things like that again.”

“They’re going to get us. You know it. Don’t pretend.”

“Wrong. These bastards had better not catch up with us. If anyone pays a price, it will be them. We don’t punish ourselves for what others have done to us.”

“Stop lying. Our car is going to fall apart. Listen to the engine.”

“We’re never going to give up,” I said.

“That’s not the point. You’re not listening to me.”

She was right. I wasn’t listening to her, and I didn’t plan to, because I knew too well what was on her mind.

Suddenly, we were out of the trees and on a long, windswept, snow-streaked stretch of gray rock that overlooked a valley so far below that the fir trees looked one inch tall.

“Here,” she said.