I wheeled Rosita slowly down the walk to the edge of the parking lot and paused by the curb, as though we were looking at the dust clouds gathering on the horizon. I helped her from the chair and put her in the front seat of the Confederate and set the chair in the backseat and closed the doors. I removed the overcoat and the oversize cowboy hat from the paper bag and put them on Rosita and tucked her hair inside the hat. I turned the car around and drove toward the security booth. Then I rolled down the driver’s window and leaned my head out as though I wanted to thank the guard. He came out of the booth and waved at me and pushed back the gate, and just that fast, we were out on the street and headed for the highway and the Great American Desert, a ball of tumbleweed smacking the windshield.

THIRTY MILES FROM town, a fine mist began blowing out of the south, mixing with the dust, and the sun seemed to dull over and grow cold and smaller inside its own glow. Then a shadow moved across the entirety of the landscape like a shade being pulled down on a window. I turned off on a side road and drove down to a creek bed among a grove of cottonwoods whose limbs glistened with mist and were as pointed and stark as the tips on a deer’s antlers. A ribbon of red water wound its way through the bottom of the creek, and I saw raindrops splashing in it like drops of lead. I kept the engine and the heater running. Rosita had fallen asleep with her head on her chest, the brim of the cowboy hat slanted over her eyes. I didn’t know how many or what kinds of drugs she had been administered. I suspected the dosage was large. She raised her head, maybe because the car had stopped.

“We need to stay off the road until dark,” I said.

She looked into my eyes as though trying to make sense out of my words.

“It’s all right to go back to sleep,” I said. “We’re safe.”

“Weldon?”

“I’m right here.”

“I was having a dream.” She touched my face. Then she touched her own, the way people do when they’re looking for the source of a toothache. “Is it morning?”

“No, it’s almost nightfall. You’ve been sleeping. You have your times mixed up.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing.”

“We’re leaving hospitals and drugs behind us. We have a good car and a lot of money. We’ll stay in a nice hotel someplace. We’ll eat in a fine restaurant, maybe even tonight. How do you like this car?”

She pushed down on the softness of the leather upholstery. “It’s elegant.”

“It’s funny you choose that word. That’s what I thought when I first saw it.” I was saying too much, burdening her at a time when her mind was probably on the edge of breaking. “See, the sky is completely dark in the north. In another half hour, we’ll be back on the highway.”

She pulled her knees up on the seat, canting them sideways, and held on to my arm with both hands and pointed her forehead into my shoulder, mashing the crown of her hat flat.

We drove through the night into Amarillo and ate steak and eggs in a truck stop and saw the sun rise on the badlands. I thought of selling the car and buying another, but any business transaction with an automobile dealer at this point invited a number of risks that could be our undoing. The dust was blowing in serpentine lines on the asphalt. In an army-surplus store, I bought a large piece of canvas with eyelets on the corners, and we parked at a rest stop and I covered the car with the tarp, and we slept for three hours, snug and safe and warm inside our little Bedouin tent on the plains.

When I pulled off the canvas, a sheriff’s car and the Texas Highway Patrol passed us without slowing down, although they may not have been able to see the car clearly from the highway.

We changed radio stations constantly but heard nothing on the news about ourselves. By evening we were in New Mexico. Snow was spitting against the windshield, sliding in crystals down the glass, the clouds charged with electricity. The topography had probably changed little since the Ice Age. For miles we could not see a human structure. By sunset, the snow had stopped and columns of smoke or dust seemed to rise of their own accord from atop the mesas and break apart in the wind. Against the horizon, we could see a solitary mountain whose top had caved inward, forming a cone like that of a dead volcano. Along the roadsides were piles of igneous rock that resembled slag scraped from a furnace. Later, I saw the lights of emergency vehicles blinking ahead of us and turned onto a side road and drove fifteen miles before I got back on the asphalt. Rosita watched the country go by as you would on a train.

We spent two days in a motor court downwind from a feeder lot full of Angus that bawled through the night. I could see the influences of the drugs that had been injected into Rosita’s body gradually leaving her system. I had turned out the light and gone to bed when she came out of the shower and got under the covers without putting on her nightgown, her hair damp, her body glowing. She made me think of a mermaid rising from dark water. I held her against me and pressed my face in the coolness of her hair and kissed the top of her shoulder.

“Hello, stranger,” I said.

“Hello, yourself,” she replied.

“Do you know the song ‘Hello, Stranger’ by A. P. Carter?”

“I don’t think so. Is it special for some reason?”

“Once you hear it, you don’t forget it. It’s like you. A man sees you once, and he never gets you out of his mind.”

“If they catch us and take me to another sanitarium, I want you to put me out of your mind forever.”

“I’ll never do that.”

“I’ll take my life, Weldon.”

“No, you will not. They’re never going to beat us, Rosita. We beat them in Germany. We’ll beat them here.”

She put her arm across my chest and closed her eyes and was soon asleep.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON we checked into a motor court at the bottom of Raton Pass. We had reached a crossroads in our odyssey. Each night a passenger train came down the Pass, actually sliding down the rails, the wheels deliberately locked because of the steepness of the grade, on its way to the coast. We could sell the car and board the train to Albuquerque, Flagstaff, or Los Angeles. Or we could head for the high country in Nevada. Or we could continue north, up Raton Canyon and through Trinidad and into Denver. From there, if we wished, we could take a plane to any city in the United States.

The car was parked under the porte cochere attached to the side of our cottage at the motor court. I walked down the main street to buy a newspaper. The sky was green. A layer of warm air was rising from the desert into the abrupt ascent of the Southern Colorado Plateau. The juxtaposition of miles and miles of flatlands and buttes and mesas, all of it lit by a flaming red sun low on the horizon, and the great, darkening massivity of the Rocky Mountains behind me was head-reeling. I tried to see the tops of the mountains, but

Tags: James Lee Burke Holland Family Saga Historical
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