American Elsewhere

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE




They drive.

They drive far and fast, the great red machine singing joyously as it eats up the miles. They cruise over mountains, over drifting peaks drizzled with wildflowers, over waterfalls cheerily spewing white-water diamonds onto the rocks. Thousands of curves, thousands of bridges, thousands of slopes and twists and turns. Enough pines and grasping trees to outnumber the stars.

They pass cars. They pass motorcycles. They pass great rattling trucks. They pass vegetable vendors and crafts stores and highway patrolmen parked on the side of the road. They pass parking lots and highway junctions and stoplights and ghost towns. Strangers and strangers and strangers.

A man sits on his porch, smoking and playing solitaire, and as they pass he raises a hand in a lazy wave. “Who was that?” asks Gracie.

“I don’t know,” says Mona.

“You don’t?” says Gracie.

“No. I don’t.”

Gracie stares back at him, amazed, perplexed.

They drive and drive and drive until evening. The sky changes from the great, trumpeting blue they have seen since dawn into a regal, courtly purple that comes blooming up from the horizon. Every crevice and pothole is filled with deep violet hues: it is as if some painter has spent so much time working on the sky they did not notice the colors dripping to pool on the earth.

Then, slowly, the stars come out.

“Slow down,” says Gracie.

“There’s a speed limit,” says Mona.

“Just for a bit.”

Mona tsks. “Okay.”

Mona slows down. Gracie sticks her head out her window and looks up. “Wow,” she says. “There are so many. I never saw them all, not all of them. Because of the lightning.”

“I guess you wouldn’t have.”

Gracie’s awe is infectious. Mona waits for a straightaway and leans out her own window.

Thousands of them. As if someone smashed a jewel on the fundament of sky.

It is all like a dream. Like a dream she had long ago and forgot, of a dark road through the mountains, and a million lights ahead and all that lay beyond them, waiting for her, waiting for them, waiting for everyone to see.

“What will we do tomorrow?” asks Gracie.

“I don’t know,” says Mona. “Something.”

And they drive.