Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (52 page)

T
OWARD THE TOP
of the grade, I saw an old mining town surrounded by piles of rust-colored slag. The streets were made of crushed rock. On one of them was a white stucco church with a small tower that I thought might have been an eighteenth-century Spanish mission. Then I remembered the story. After the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, the Rockefeller family built churches throughout the West to rehabilitate the reputation of their patriarch. The site of the massacre was midway between Trinidad and Pueblo. To me, the white stucco building among the slag heaps told a story that probably few were interested in: an armored personnel carrier firing into striking miners, the burning of their tents, the asphyxiation of eleven children and two women in an earthen pit. Americans did this to other Americans. To me, it seemed a shameful business. But that’s not why I mention this instance of egregious cruelty. I felt that somehow Rosita and I were entering the past, stepping into the roles of people who had already lived their lives and were watching us replicate them.

Most of the streets in Trinidad were brick, the buildings constructed of heavy gray stones, the city spread across a broad knoll at the bottom of mountains that soared straight into the sky, more like buttes than mountains. I don’t know what I had expected. Perhaps roadblocks or the Colorado state police. I guess everyone believes during a time of duress that the rest of the world is focused on his or her problems. According to Daniel Defoe in his
Journal of the Plague Year,
those afflicted by the Black Death wandered the cobblestone streets of London in 1665 shouting out their sins to anyone who would listen. No one was interested. The shutters of every house and cottage and apartment were slammed shut on their cries.

I pulled into a filling station and asked the attendant to change the oil in our car, primarily to get the Confederate out of view. Rosita and I walked to the public library and talked to the reference lady about the history of the city, all the time glancing out the windows for anything unusual on the streets or the highway. To the north was a huge cattle auction barn and, behind it, pastureland that was still green. The wind had died, and snowflakes were drifting down in the sunshine from a mountain that resembled a vertically serrated steel-blue skyscraper with no windows. I could not have imagined a more peaceful urban setting.

“Are you visiting?” the librarian asked. Her reading glasses hung from a velvet ribbon around her neck.

“We thought we might look around,” I replied. “Is it very difficult to drive out in the San Juan Mountains?”

“It can be. Up high, at least,” she said. “This time of year you have to be careful. The bad passes are Wolf Creek and Monarch. You’re not going there, are you?”

“No, we’re casual tourists,” I said. “We’re not looking for anything very adventurous.”

“Nothing exciting happens around here,” she said. “Maybe you should spend some time with us. If you like horse racing, summer is a much better time.”

“Thank you for the information,” I said.

“I hope I haven’t misled you.”

“Pardon?” I said.

“I said nothing exciting happens around here. Maybe it’s better you not pick up any hitchhikers today.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“A deputy sheriff was in the café earlier. He said something about a kidnapper on the loose.”

“Someone who kidnapped a child?” I said.

“I didn’t quite get it all.” The librarian put her reading glasses back on. “I hope you enjoy your stay.”

We went outside. Nothing of substance had changed in the streets. There was no police presence that I could see. But the day was not the same. The air smelled of tar and burned food and dust from a train yard; it had the dry smell of unending winter. The light was harsher, colder. The green pastures were dimmed by snow blowing down from the mountains. I saw cracks in the sidewalk and the asphalt that I hadn’t noticed earlier. The nineteenth-century buildings resembled prison houses and asylums rather than Victorian homes. A grayish-green twin-engine plane crossed the sky directly overhead, its color reminiscent of the camouflage paint on a German fighter-bomber. I wondered if doors were slamming all around us, as they had slammed on the afflicted in the time of Defoe.

“Where are we going?” Rosita asked.

“To get the car,” I replied, my voice sharper than it should have been.

“I mean after that.”

“There’s a town up the road called Walsenburg. We can take a train there. We’ll leave the car behind.”

She put her arm in mine. “Keep looking straight ahead,” she said.

“What is it?”

“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 town. 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.

“Here what?”

“We do it. I do it. I don’t care which of us does it. Give me the gun.”

I stopped the car and got out. I flung the Luger over the cliff. When I got back in the car, her eyes were shiny and wet. She started to open the door. I grabbed her by the arm. “Do you want to give in to these guys?”

“Someone left the door open on the electroshock room. I saw a woman being electrocuted. She had a rubber gag in her mouth. I’ll never forget her face.”

I popped the clutch and spun gravel off the tires and drove along the edge of the cliff, then turned onto a dirt track through the trees on the west side of the mountain. The descent was the steepest we’d attempted. Even in second gear, the brake bands were squealing, rocks as sharp as knives bouncing under the chassis, banging against the tie rods and oil pan, maybe slicing the tires.

We came out of the woods onto a corrugated road spanning two miles of swampy meadow that offered no cover and exposed us to the twin-engine plane turning out of the sun. The first of three police cruisers emerged from the woods, its red and blue emergency lights housed inside a Plexiglas dome of whirling mirrors on the roof. Two other police cruisers were bringing up the rear.

I can’t say I regretted throwing away the Luger. But I felt naked without it, the way you feel powerless in a dream, the way the tankers I saw at the Ardennes probably felt when they were trying to run in knee-deep snow while a German machine gunner locked down on them. There was no doubt in my mind this was it. The Confederate could not outrun the cruisers on a straight road. We would be arrested and separated, and Rosita would be at the mercy of the system.

Earlier I said I believed we had driven into another dimension. The events of the next few minutes would convince me that my perception was correct, but not because of any supernatural factor at work in our lives. I had acted on presumption about Roy Wiseheart, forgetting that presumption and arrogance are one and the same.