Headlights hit her. An enclosed vehicle on treads was coming toward her, snow whirling up in its wake. When it reached her, a man in a cowboy hat and a long brown coat got out and grasped her shoulder, guiding her around to the passenger side. “Anybody else behind you?” he shouted into her ear, and she shook her head.
When they were inside the snow buggy, the heater on full blast, the man picked up a CB radio’s microphone and said, “Found the new arrivals, Jody. Takin’ ’em in.”
“That’s a big ten-four,” a man’s voice answered through crackling static. Mary figured it was one of the pigs down on I-80. Then the cowboy turned the buggy around and started driving toward the inn, and he said, “Get you good and warm in just a few minutes, ma’am.”
The Silver Cloud Inn was made of bleached stones and had a huge pair of antlers over the front door. The cowboy pulled the buggy up to the steps, and Mary got out with Drummer pressed against her. Then the cowboy came around and started to take her shoulder bag, but Mary pulled back and said, “I’ve got it,” and he opened the inn’s door for her. Inside, there was a large lobby with oak beams and a stone fireplace that a car could have parked in. The fire was popping sparks, the lobby sweet with the smell of woodsmoke and delicious warmth. Twenty or more people of all ages and descriptions were on cots or in sleeping bags around the fireplace, and another dozen or so were talking or playing cards. Their attention was drawn to Mary and the baby for a few seconds, and then they went back to what they were doing.
“Lord, what a night! Storm’s a screamer, for sure!” The cowboy took off his hat, revealing thinning white hair and a braided ponytail with a band around it made of multicolored Indian beads. He had a grizzled, heavily lined face and bright blue eyes beneath white brows. “Rachel, let’s get this lady some hot coffee!”
A gray-haired, plump Indian woman in a red sweater and bluejeans began to draw coffee from a metal dispenser into a plastic cup. On the table beside the coffeemaker were a few sandwiches, some cheese, fruit, and slices of poundcake. “Name’s Sam Jiles,” the cowboy said. “Welcome to the Silver Cloud Inn. I’m sorry you couldn’t see it on a better day.”
“That’s all right. I’m glad to be here.”
“Rooms were all gone around seven o’clock. Cots ran out around nine, but we might have a sleepin’ bag left. You travelin’ alone with your baby?”
“Yes. Going to California.” She felt him waiting for more. “To meet my husband,” she added.
“Bad night to be on the road, I swanee.” Jiles walked to the registration desk, where another CB radio was set up. “Excuse me just a minute.” He picked up the mike. “Silver Cloud to Big Smokey, come on back, Smokey.” The static crackled and hissed, and the pig’s voice answered, “Big Smokey. You got an ear, Silver Cloud.”
Rachel brought Mary the coffee, and she looked at Drummer in the parka’s folds. “Oh, that’s a new one!” she said, her eyes large and dark brown. “Boy or girl?”
“Boy.”
“What’s his name?”
“Brought ’em in real fine, Jody,” Sam Jiles was saying over the radio. “You fellas want me to bring you down some eats?”
“I hear you talkin’, Sam. We’re stuck here till I-80’s open.”
“Okay, bring you down some grub and coffee pronto.”
“Does he have a name yet?”
Mary blinked, looking into the Indian woman’s eyes. What was going through her head was the thought that she was trapped with strangers at her back and two pigs guarding the only way out. “David,” she said, and the name was foul in her mouth, but Drummer was his real and secret name, not to be shared with everyone.
“That’s a nice, strong name. I’m Rachel Jiles.”
“I’m… Mary Brown.” It had come from the color of the woman’s eyes.
“We have some food left.” Rachel motioned toward the table. “Ham and cheese sandwiches. Some beef stew there, too.” She nodded at bowls and a clay pot. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks, I will.” Mary limped over to the table, and Rachel stayed with her.
“Did you hurt your leg?” Rachel asked.
“No, it’s an old injury. Broken ankle didn’t heal right.” Drummer began to cry at that moment, as if shouting to the world that Mary Terror was lying. She rocked him and cooed to him, but his crying soared up and up with increasing power. Rachel suddenly held out her stocky arms and said, “I’ve had three boys. Maybe I can try it?”
What would it hurt? Besides, the pain in Mary’s leg was so bad it was sapping her strength. She handed Drummer over and fed herself while Rachel rocked him and sang softly in a language Mary didn’t understand. Drummer’s crying began to quiet, his head cocked to one side as if listening to the woman’s singing. In about two minutes he had ceased crying altogether, and Rachel sang and smiled, her round face almost radiant with care for a stranger’s child.
Sam Jiles made food packages for the two troopers, loading up sandwiches, fruit, and cake into two sacks and adding cups and a thermos of coffee. He asked one of the men to go with him in the tracked snow buggy, and he kissed Rachel on the cheek and said he’d be back quicker than a skillet sizzles grease. Then he and his companion left the Silver Cloud, a gust of freezing wind and snow coming through the front door with their departure.
Rachel seemed to enjoy cradling Drummer, so Mary let her hold the baby while she ate and drank her fill. She limped over to the fireplace to warm herself, threading a path through the other people, and she took off her gloves and offered her palms to the flames. Her fever had returned, throbbing with a hot pulse at her temples, and she couldn’t stay near the fire very long. She glanced at the faces around her, judging them: predominant in the mix were middle-aged people, but there was a couple who might have been in their sixties and two young couples who had the tanned, fit look of ardent skiers. She moved away from the hearth, back toward where Rachel stood with Drummer, and that was when she felt someone watching her.
Mary looked to her right, and found a young man sitting against the wall, his legs crossed beneath him. He had a thin, hawk-nosed face and sandy-brown hair that spilled down over his shoulders, and he wore black horn-rimmed glasses, faded jeans with patches on the knees, and a dark blue turtleneck sweater. Beside him was a battered army jacket and a rolled-up sleeping bag. He was watching her intently with deep-socketed eyes the color of ashes. His stare didn’t waver as she returned it, and then he frowned slightly and began to examine his fingernails.
She didn’t like him. He made her nervous. She went back to Rachel and took her child. Rachel said, “He’s sure a good baby! All three of my boys used to holler like screech owls when they were as little as him. How old is he?”
“He was born on…” She didn’t know the exact date. “The third of February,” she said, which was when she’d taken him from the hospital.
“Do you have any other children?”
“No, just Drum—” Mary smiled. “Just David.” Her gaze skittered back to the young man. He was staring at her again. She felt fever sweat on her cheeks. What was that fucking hippie looking at?
“I’ll see if I can find a sleeping bag for you,” Rachel said. “We always keep a supply on hand for the campers.” She went off across the lobby and through another door, and Mary found a place to sit on the floor away from everyone else.
She kissed Drummer’s forehead and crooned softly to him. His skin was cool against her lips. “Going to California, yes we are. Going to California, Mama and her sweet baby.” She realized with a start that there were two spots of blood, each about the size of a quarter, on the thigh of her jeans. The blood was seeping up through her makeshift bandage. She set Drummer aside, took off her coat, and laid it across her lap.
She looked up, and saw the hippie watching her.
Mary pulled her shoulder bag, with its small Magnum automatic and the .38 from Rocky Road’s gun cabinet, against her side.
“He knows.”
The voice sent chill bumps shive
ring up her spine. It had been spoken from her left, and close to her ear. She turned her head. God was there, hunkered down beside her, his glacial face gaunt and his eyes dark with truth. He wore skin-tight black velvet and a gold chain with a crucifix on it. On his head was a floppy-brimmed black hat with a snake-skin band. It was the same outfit he’d worn when she’d seen him up close in Hollywood. Except for one thing: God wore a yellow Smiley Face button on his lapel. “He knows,” the cruel mouth repeated in a whisper.
Mary Terror stared at the young hippie. He was looking at his fingernails again; he darted a glance at her, then shifted his position and studied the fire.
Or pretended to.
“Road’s closed,” God said. “Pigs at the roadblock. Your leg’s busted open again. And that fucker knows. What’cha gonna do, Mary?”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
She leaned her back against the wall and closed her eyes. She could feel him watching, but every time she opened her eyes she couldn’t catch him at it. Rachel returned with a tattered but usable sleeping bag, and Mary spread it out like a mattress and laid on top of it instead of confining herself inside. She kept the shoulder bag’s strap around her arm, its top zippered shut, and Drummer alternately drowsed and fretted beside her.
“He knows,” she heard God whisper in her ear as she drifted toward sleep. His voice pulled her away from rest. She felt swollen with damp, pulsing heat, her thigh and forearm wounds heavy with crusted blood under the bandages. A firm touch to her thigh made searing pain travel from her hip to her knee, and the blood spots were growing.
“What’cha gonna do, Mary?” God asked, and she thought he might have laughed a little.
“Damn you,” she rasped, and she pulled Drummer closer. It was the two of them against a hateful world.
The exhaustion won over pain and fear, at least for a while. Mary slept, Drummer sucked busily on his pacifier, and the young hippie scratched his chin and watched the woman and her infant.
4
Thunder Lizards
TWO O’CLOCK PASSED, AND the cutlass kept going into the white whirlwinds.
Didi was at the wheel, her face a bleached mask of tension. The Cutlass, traveling at thirty miles an hour, was alone on I-80. Laura had driven for several hours back in Nebraska, between Lincoln and North Platte, and she’d gotten good at guiding the car with one hand and an elbow. The snowstorm’s intensity had strengthened near North Platte, the wind broadsiding the car like a bull’s charge, and Laura had pulled over to let somebody with two hands drive. The last tractor-trailer truck they’d seen had been turning off at Laramie, ten miles behind them, and the snowswept highway was climbing steadily toward the Rocky Mountains.
“Should’ve stopped at Laramie,” Didi said. This had been her refrain ever since they’d left its lights. “We can’t keep going in this.” The wiper in front of her face shrieked with effort as it plowed the snow away, while the wiper on Laura’s side had ground to a halt just east of Cheyenne. “Should’ve stopped at Laramie, like I wanted to.”
“She didn’t,” Laura said.
“How do you know? She might be back in Nebraska, sleeping in a warm Holiday Inn!”
“She’ll go as far as she can. She’ll go until she can’t drive anymore. I would.”
“Mary might be crazy, but she’s not a fool! She’s not going to get herself and David killed out here! Look! Even the trucks can’t make it in this!” Didi dared to unhinge the fingers of her right hand from the wheel and point to the tractor-trailer rig that was abandoned on the shoulder, its emergency lights flashing. Then she gripped the wheel hard again, because a gust of wind slapped the Cutlass and fishtailed it into the left lane. Didi let off on the accelerator and fought the car straight again, her heart pounding and a coil of fear deep in her belly. “Jesus, what a mess!”
The snowfall, made up of flakes the size of half dollars, was spinning into their headlights on almost a horizontal plane. Laura was scared, too, and every time the tires slipped and slid she felt her heart rise to her throat and lodge there like a peach pit, but the violence of the wind was keeping the snow from piling up on the pavement. Patches of ice glistened on the highway like silver lakes, but the road itself was clear. She scanned the snowy darkness, her broken hand mercifully numb. Where are you? she thought. In front of us, or behind? Mary wouldn’t have turned off I-80 for a secondary route because the road atlas they’d gotten at their last gas-and-food stop showed no other way west across the state but I-80’s broad blue line. Somewhere on the highway, probably in Utah by now, Mary Terror was cleaving the night with David at her side. An overnight stop in Laramie would only increase the distance between Laura and Mary by at least four hours. No, Mary was on her way to find Jack. The storm might slow her down to a crawl, but she wasn’t going to stop unless she was forced to, either by hunger or weariness.
Laura had her own cure for the latter. She swallowed another Black Cat tablet—“the truck driver’s friend,” the man behind the counter at the Shell station had said when they’d asked for something strong—and followed it with a sip of cold coffee. And then Didi shouted “Christ!” and the Cutlass swerved to the right as its tires hit an ice patch, and the last of the coffee went all over Laura’s lap.
The car skidded out of control as Didi tried to muscle the wheel back toward the center line. It slammed into the guardrail, the right-side headlight exploding. The Cutlass scraped along the rail, sparks flying back with the snow-flakes, and then the car shuddered as the tires gripped gravel and responded to Didi’s hands. The Cutlass swerved away from the guardrail and onto the highway again, casting a single beam of light before it.
“Should’ve stopped at Laramie.” Didi’s voice was as tight as her face, a pulse beating quickly at her temple. She had cut the speed to just under thirty. “No way we can keep going in this!”
The highway was getting steeper, the Cutlass’s engine rattling with the strain. They passed two more abandoned cars, almost completely shrouded in white, and after another minute Didi said, “Something in front of us.”
Laura could see flashing yellow lights. Didi began to slow down. A blinking sign emerged from the blowing snow: STOP ROAD CLOSED. A highway patrol car was there, too, its blue lights going around. Didi eased the Cutlass to a halt, and a bundled-up state trooper holding a flashlight with a red lens cap walked around to the passenger side and motioned for Didi to lower her window.
Mary’s eyes opened. She heard the shrilling of the wind outside and the crackle of burning wood in the fireplace. Beads of sweat shivered on her skin.
The young hippie was sitting cross-legged five feet from her, his chin supported by his palms and his elbows on his knees.
Mary sucked in her breath and sat up. She looked at Drummer, who was in baby dreamland, his eyes moving behind the thin pink lids and the pacifier gripped in his mouth. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, her coat over her thighs and hips to hide the bloodstains. “What is it?” she asked, her brain still fogged with fever and her voice thick.
“Sorry,” the hippie said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.” He had a Yankee accent, a voice like a reedy flute.
“What is it?” she asked again, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Her bones throbbed like bad teeth, and her thigh felt sticky-wet. She looked around. Most of the people in the lobby were asleep, but a few were still playing cards. Rachel Jiles was sleeping in a chair, and her cowboy husband was talking on the CB radio. Mary returned her attention to the young hippie, who was maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. “You woke me up.”
“I went to the bathroom,” he said as if this were important news. “When I came back, I couldn’t sleep.” He stared at her, with his spooky, ashy eyes. “I swear I know you from somewhere.”
Mary heard the ringing of alarm bells. She slipped the shoulder bag’s strap off her arm. “I don’t think so.”
“When you came in with your baby…I thought I recognized you, but I couldn’t figure it out. Real weird
seeing somebody you think you know but you can’t figure out from where. Know what I mean?”
“I’ve never seen you before.” She glanced at Sam Jiles. He was putting on his coat, then his gloves and hat.
“You ever been to Sioux Falls, South Dakota?”
“No.” She watched Sam Jiles awaken his wife with a gentle nudge, and he said something to her that got her on her feet. “Never.”
“I’m a reporter on the paper there. I write a music column.” He leaned forward and held out his hand. “My name’s Austin Peevey.”
Mary ignored the hand. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people. It’s not cool.” The front door opened and closed: the cowboy had gone out into the storm. Rachel Jiles lifted the coffee dispenser’s lid and peered inside, then left the lobby area.
Austin Peevey withdrew his hand. He was smiling with his thin-lipped mouth, a little tuft of sandy hairs on the point of his chin. “Are you somebody famous?” he asked.
“No.”
“I swear your face is familiar. See, I’ve got like tons of old records and tapes. I’m into, like, sixties stuff. I was trying to figure out if I’d seen your face on a record jacket…you know, like Smith or Blue Cheer or some old band like that. It’s right here”—he tapped his skull—“but I can’t see it.”
“I’m nobody.” Mary summoned up a yawn and delivered it into his face. “How about leaving me alone now.”
He stayed where he was, ignoring what she’d said as she’d ignored his hand. “I’m going to Salt Lake City for a record collectors’ convention. It’s my vacation. Thought I’d drive it and see the sights, but I didn’t count on getting stuck in a snowstorm.”
“Look, I’m real tired. Okay?”
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