Wendy laughed and Alicia, though she disapproved of such facile prevarication, couldn’t keep from grinning herself.
“Your home, now, I have yet to visit,” he concluded, looking down at Mouse.
“If you can get there you will not soon forget it.”
“Bet you’ve met some interesting people,” Wendy said.
“Soon-woman, I have been with sturgeon fishermen in the Black Sea and Lake Superior both. I’ve talked with representatives of every Indian tribe on both the north and south continents, including some the anthropologists don’t know about. In Patagonia a tribe keeps young ground-sloths for pets and hides them from visitors. I’ve gathered giant pearls with divers from a lost linguistic group on an uncharted island in the South Pacific, dug out sapphires the size of hen’s eggs from river gravel in the mountains of Sri Lanka, and spent time with a lama in Bhutan who insisted he could teach me how to levitate.”
Wendy’s eyes widened. “Could he really do that?”
“Oh, that he could, but only upside-down.” Burnfingers shook his head sadly. “It’s not a very useful thing to know. After a while all the blood rushes to your head and all you want to do is throw up.”
Alicia smiled easily this time. Another joke, clearly one of many, cleverly designed to amuse them and relieve the tension in the motor home. Burnfingers knew what he was doing.
“What will you do now? I mean, once we drop you off in Nevada,” she asked him.
“Find another job.”
“In Las Vegas?” Wendy wondered.
“Why not? It is a very interesting place, good for studying people. That always interests me. A good place to find people like myself.”
“You mean other Indians?” said Wendy.
“No. I mean other crazy people. Vegas is like the Mad Hatter’s tea party, only with neon.”
Wendy giggled. This charming older man was helping her to forget the unhappy ordeal she’d suffered at the hands of their hellish captors. It all seemed like a bad dream now. Maybe she would wake up and find out that that was just what it had been. Only if that turned out to be the case, Burnfingers Begay would vanish like part of a dream, too, and she didn’t want that.
“Know anybody in Vegas?” Frank inquired casually.
“Don’t worry about me. I can get a job anyplace.”
Frank didn’t doubt Begay’s word. He checked his watch. Hades Junction lay far behind them. Probably below them as well, if half of what Mouse said about reality lines twisting and bending was accurate. The cars that passed them in the fast lane were filled with people. Anxious certainly, but not yet damned. Maybe they weren’t going to go mad, after all.
“What time do you think we’ll hit Las Vegas, dear?” Alicia appeared to have completely recovered from their recent otherworldly encounter. A resilient gal, his spouse, Frank mused. He checked the clock on the dash.
“If we don’t run into any more detours, we’ll be at the hotel before midnight.”
“Want me to drive for a while?”
“Naw, not yet. Lemme take it for another hour. Then we’ll switch.”
“If you folks get tired, I’m a pretty good driver.”
Frank glanced back at their oversized companion. “Thanks. I think we can manage.” Despite everything he’d done for them, Frank had no intention of letting Burnfingers Begay behind the wheel of the motor home. Wasn’t he a self-confessed crazy?
As for Mouse, she anticipated his next thought. “I am not very good with mechanical things. I’m far more comfortable with what you might call the citizenry of the natural world.”
“Everyone to their taste,” Frank jibed. “Give me a four-forty any day.” Of them all, only the motor home itself had emerged untouched by their experience. He found himself wondering what happened to old machines when they passed on. Was there a mechanical hell, a place where devilish mechanics ran sugar through engines and deliberately overtightened nuts and screws?
There he was, doing as Alicia did, ascribing human characteristics to inanimate objects. She had a word for it. Anthro—anthrosomething. The habit infuriated him. “Oh, that poor chair!” she’d wail when it was time to discard a crippled piece of furniture. “It’s been in the family for years!” At such times he would have to try to explain patiently that the chair was not dear, old Uncle Ned but simply a collage formed of wood and plastic. A soulless assemblage.
Like Burnfingers Begay? But if Begay was right and soulless, could not a machine have one in his place?
He wasn’t aware when he did it that he’d given the Winnebago a comforting pat on the steering wheel.
Steven was hungry, a sure sign everything was back to normal. Wendy had slithered back into her headphones and was twitching to some unheard electronic rhythm. And Alicia, sweet Alicia, was humming to herself.
But when the hour had come and gone and it was time for her to drive he did something he hadn’t done previously. Instead of stopping he made certain the road ahead was clear, then rose and stepped behind her, holding on to the wheel until she was able to take his seat, letting the cruise control handle the accelerator for them. When he’d said earlier that they weren’t stopping until they reached Vegas he’d meant exactly that. And when they got there he was going to drop his family off right on the main steps before parking the motor home. Though Hell had been painfully bright he planned on avoiding dark places for some time to come.
“As it seems all is well again, would you like for me to sing you a song? One of delight and relaxation this time, not of rejection and defense.”
Burnfingers answered her before his host and hostess had a chance to reply. “I would like that very much. A cappella.”
She looked at him in surprise, but only a little surprise. “Yes, of course. I’ll sing you a song,” she murmured, her expression turning dreamy, “of the far places you’ve never been. Wispy landscapes visible in dreams alone, seascapes beyond any blue paint, the worlds writers fight for words to describe. I’ll sing of the shadow folk who live on the fringe of reality, and of my own people, my own land. My home.”
And, as she sang, she soon had all the adults humming softly along with her. Wendy’s music remained hers alone and Steven went unnaturally silent, munching like a chipmunk in the woodwork on a sack of chocolate-covered raisins. Within the solid, middle-class rectangular world on wheels all was peace and contentment.
It relaxed Frank’s spirit if not his determination. One of the reasons he was rushing Vegasward was to be rid of their strange little passenger. Be it club, garbage can, manhole, or bus stop on the way to somewhere else, they would find her Vanishing Point and deposit her there. Let the fabric of existence unravel around her. He was convinced that if they could separate themselves from her, despite her warnings, they could distance themselves from her problem. Hadn’t she confessed to being some kind of focal point on which Evil and Chaos concentrated their efforts? If she needed to travel beyond Vegas, let her find another ride. She’d as much as promised to do that and he intended to hold her to her promise. So while he absorbed her wonderful music and smiled frequently and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the subtle melodies that poured effortlessly from her throat, the true joy he felt sprang from the vision of finally being rid of her.
No one suggested stopping in Needles for dinner, despite the tempting beacons of the billboards and road signs that announced the town’s presence like so many frozen TV screens. They roared past both off ramps, the gas gauge holding steady and the engine running cool. As they accelerated into Nevada, the desert night descended on them, clothing everything except the starry sky in black velvet.
Frank was driving again and the onset of night troubled him, though he didn’t show it. It was impossible to tell now if anything was crawling or flying or hopping toward them out in that vast dark emptiness. He was glad he wasn’t a particularly imaginative man. Better to be persistent and hardworking. This way he was able to drive steadily onward without glancing too often out the window in search of improbable manifestations. The road led northeastward, comfortingly eggshell-white in the glare of the headlights.
He decided he preferred the near total darkness to the shadows a full moon would have thrown up. The motor home droned on, trailing the scent of its own high beams.
Steven was sound asleep in back and Wendy drowsed in her own bed. Their original intention had been to use the motor home as a mobile hotel room, moving from trailer park to trailer park. The hotels maintained elaborate facilities for visitors who preferred to spend their time on wheels. Now he couldn’t wait to turn it in to the local representative of the rental company. Even though it was paid for, they were going to check into a hotel tonight. He’d ask for a noisy room, in the middle of the hotel, surrounded by hundreds of other rooms and thousands of people. He wanted to bathe in light and conversation and mumbled banalities. In his present state of mind, turgid reality was far preferable to the least excitement.
They’d had enough of that to last a lifetime. For the next ten days he planned to bury himself in activities utterly devoid of social value. Alicia could buy all the junk she desired and he wouldn’t say a word. His daughter could display herself in her less-than-there swimsuit and he wasn’t going to complain. Steven might personally send the price of sugar futures soaring without a single objection from his father. Let them all indulge themselves. He would derive his pleasure from watching them. It was an attitude that made him a good husband and father.
As for himself, he’d lounge around the pool squinting through his sunshades at showgirls and rich men’s mistresses and beauty-contest runners-up from Iowa and Tennessee, trying to keep his gut sucked in while not perishing from self-induced asphyxiation. Alicia would smile tolerantly on such behavior, knowing that all her husband would ever do was look.
They would be safe in Las Vegas, that mildly risqué middle-class Disneyland. Even the temptations of the casino posed no threat. Frank could gamble sensibly. He was too good a businessman to lose severely. Hard work was the best vaccination against gambling fever. So he would usually break even at craps, Alicia would lose on roulette, and he would make a little of it back at blackjack, where years of manipulating figures gave him a slight edge over his fellow gamblers.
The long miles tired him, but he became wide-awake when the glow from the lights of an approaching city lit the underside of lingering clouds not far ahead. Alicia sat up straighter in her seat.
“There it is. There it is.” The reality of it put paid to the last lingering memories of nightmare.
Sleeping soundly, the children didn’t react. Burnfingers Begay didn’t look up from the book he was reading as he sat cross-legged on the floor near the kitchen. Mouse might have nodded as she stared out a side window at the night. Big as her eyes were, Frank mused, maybe she could see in the dark.
A big green highway sign loomed up out of the darkness. Frank leaned slightly forward, grumbling, “Now what?”
The detour was clearly marked. Uneasy at the thought of leaving the main highway, he thought of running the barricade, but there were ample signs of heavy equipment at work not far ahead. Arc lamps illuminated a distant section of road. It made perfect sense. Naturally the highway department would try to do all its repair work at night, when it was cooler and there was less traffic.
A vehicle had paused just ahead of him. Now he followed it, as it turned right to travel the detour. It was a sleek, expensive-looking sports car. Ferrari or Lamborghini or something like that. In seconds it had accelerated into the night and was gone, though he could still see its lights moving long after the car itself was no longer visible. Ahead, the narrow road was so bright it might have been lit from within. Brand-new paving, he told himself.
“Must be a new way into town, or they’ve upgraded an older road to take some of the traffic off the highway,” he surmised aloud. “Not even oil-stained yet.”
