Road to Paradise

by Paullina Simons

  The trees had been left far behind, in South Dakota. The hills, too. There was nothing here in Wyoming, except us, the road, and the sagebrush. The only signs of civilization were the fences that ran along the miles of highway to keep the grazing animals from wandering out and getting killed. I wondered if it was to protect us or the animals. We didn’t see any grazing. Neither did we see men, women, children, buffalo. There was no gas station, nowhere to get a Coke, no motels. There was no wildlife, no deer, rabbits, or birds.

  “You want to live here?” I asked Candy.

  “I dunno,” she replied dully. “I have to live somewhere. Now that I’ve lost my money, I have to find a place where Erv can’t find me.”

  “This ain’t it,” said Gina. “Here you might as well put an orange hat on your head, and signal him. Yo, Erv, I’m the only resident of Wyoming.”

  “What about Custer? We passed that a few miles back.”

  “It made even you depressed,” said Gina. “I saw your face.”

  “It’s not Custer that made me depressed,” said Candy.

  Suppressing a sigh, a sound of anguish, I said to Gina, “Show me a grazing animal.”

  “Perhaps they’re all dead,” Gina said wisely. “Maybe their ecosystem is already ruined. That’s why compassionate people are fighting to save it.”

  Candy chuckled. “Look left, girls.” As we passed a small beat-down farm, near the barbed wire fence lay two llamas, lazing not grazing.

  “Llamas, Gina,” I said, slowing down to take a better look. “Llamas in Wyoming. Interesting. Are they, hmm, indigenous to the sagebrush?”

  Gina rolled her eyes. “Make fun. Go ahead. But when you can’t get a decent burger in your cute little Cambridge, Massachusetts, you’ll know why.”

  The grassland was like the Sand Hills in Nebraska. Infinite. After Custer and Newcastle there had been no towns. We’d gone a hundred miles.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are we stopping?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to find a place to live, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Here?” I threw out my arm to indicate the landscape, empty except for the interminable grassland, separated from the road by miles of chicken-wire fence. Candy laughed a little, then retreated once more to her window.

  Forty miles farther on, just as I was worrying about running out of gas, out of nowhere, small suburban tract houses rose from the ground, clustered together in a housing development. We stopped, rolled down our windows. Some kids were skateboarding while their dad washed the car. “Excuse me,” Gina said, “can you kids tell me what this place is called?”

  One of the kids pointed at the sidewalk. “This is Wright,” he said. “Who you looking for?”

  “Gas,” Gina said, glancing back at Candy. Slowly we drove through the development that was the town of Wright. The fascinating thing was that a quarter mile earlier there had been nothing, and now there were houses, but not a single business, no stores, supermarkets, or restaurants, no shops of any kind. Just private, close-together homes with small yards. A minute later, we were out of the housing development, and the sign on the road said, “Thank you for visiting Wright, Wyoming, a good place to live and work.”

  “Can I live here?” asked Candy, looking around.

  “Why not?” I said. “Llamas do.”

  Up ahead on the main road, we saw a gas station and a Subway deli in a separate building nearby. I pumped gas while the girls got out to stretch their legs, then we drove the five yards uphill to get a sandwich. The place looked closed, but only because there was almost no one in it. The only food game in town; yet there was just one customer inside, a burly tall man who looked like a truck driver. We saw him through the window, and even here in the middle of staggering nowhere, got a pang in our gut, and rolled around back, staying in the car until he left.

  The girl behind the counter was slicing cheese, the boy was wiping the shredded lettuce onto the floor. We ordered, and while the girl was making our tuna and salami and roast beef, Candy asked, “Excuse me, but what do all the men do in this town?”

  The server looked at her strangely, looked her up and down.

  “I just want to know what people here do for work, that’s all.” Candy smiled.

  “Well,” the checkout girl drew out grudgingly, “the men pretty much all work at the mine.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yeah. Thunder Mountain Mine. You’ll pass it if you’re headed to Casper.”

  Were we headed to Casper?

  Thunder Mountain Mine? I wanted to ask her if that name was decided ironically but was afraid she might not know what I meant.

  “What about the women?” Candy asked. Such an innocent question, yet how could she keep her life out of her voice? She couldn’t.

  “The women stay home mainly,” the girl replied, frowning, rushing through the order. “But many of them work in the mine, too. Why?”

  “No reason. Is the mine the only employer in town?”

  “Well, this is a mining town,” said the girl, trying to keep her life out of her voice, too.

  “Or you could work here at Subway,” Gina said to Candy.

  “We’re not hiring,” the girl said quickly, wrapping the sandwiches in paper and pushing them toward us on the counter. “Will there be anything else?”

  Now it was Candy’s turn to look the girl up and down. “So where do you go shopping?”

  “Casper.”

  I perked up in surprise. “On the map it looks a hundred miles away.”

  “It is,” the girl said, in a voice that said, so what? “But there’s nobody on the road. You can make that in an hour.”

  “Hour, really. Hmm. You must have a pretty fast car.” Candy smiled politely, taking her sandwich.

  A man came in wearing plaid overalls. He gave Candy the eye. Even in church clothes, she was a male eye magnet. She smiled at him. The girl behind the counter glowered. “Will that be all?”

  “Actually, one more thing,” said Candy. “Is there a drugstore around here?” She pointed to her head. “Need an aspirin.”

  “Casper,” the girl said, turning away. “Everything’s in Casper.”

  When we hit the road again, Candy talked animatedly about the town, and I said, “Candy, that girl has lived in Wright her whole life. I’m sure her parents were miners. And she’s going to marry a miner. There is not even a bar in this town.”

  “Oh, you can be sure,” said Candy, with a short giggle, “if it’s a town of miners, there will be a bar in this town.”

  “And what are you going to do? Serve drinks to men?”

  “Sure, why not? I can be a bartender.”

  “The women will stone you for sure.” Gina laughed.

  “Aren’t you the parable-teller,” said Candy.

  “I’m not being parabolic. I mean that literally. They’ll stone you. For sure.”

  After we left the deli at Wright, there was once again nothing around us. A few miles down we passed several orange signs that said, “BLASTING AREA UP AHEAD. STAY AWAY FROM FLYING DEBRIS.” Next sign we saw we realized it said falling debris, not flying. Flying was better. Funnier. Thunder Mountain is the largest open-pit mine in the United States, and after we drove past it, there were no more llamas, no other grazing animals, either. There was nothing at all, soon not even sagebrush.

  Candy said that perhaps Wyoming wasn’t for her since, except for Wright, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to live. “Aren’t there any people?”

  “It’s the least populated state in America,” said Gina.

  “No shit.”

  “Less than half a million people and half of those live in Cheyenne, the capital.”

  “Hmm.” We debated whether it was better to hide in a small town in the middle of desolation or a large exposed town, heavily populated. That discussion took us fifty miles to I-25, but when Candy saw it, she said we couldn’t go on it.

  “Not
even here?”

  “Not even here.”

  “But there’s no one on the road! And they’re not looking for you here.”

  “I know. But all a trucker has to do is hear the call once on his CB, and think about that call. A five-thousand-dollar reward for locating a yellow ’Stang and three girls. That’s something you don’t soon forget. You might forget a red Camaro, because you see a million of them, but not this. He’ll be calling me in as soon as he sets eyes on your yellow prize. This time it’ll be on the open road near Casper.”

  “All right, so he calls you in,” said Gina. “What’s Erv going to do? Helicopter his way into the grassland?”

  “You want him to know where we are?” asked Candy. “He can do math, you know. All he’s got to do is figure out how long it’ll take us to get to the next Wyoming town, and goodness knows there aren’t that many of them, and he’ll be calling in for truckers passing through to be on the lookout. You want him that close?”

  “Oh, you’re just paranoid now,” said Gina, but we all agreed we didn’t want him that close. Reluctantly I stayed off the highway. We found U.S. 87, a dilapidated highway badly in need of repair that ran almost parallel to I-25, which allowed us to get nice and lost right as it started to downpour and the mountains we saw in the distance behind Casper disappeared in the mist. At least I think they were mountains. They could’ve been black clouds. We had to stop and assess our location by the side of the road called Lone Bear Road, near the barbed wire that kept in the llamas. No way around it—map said we were headed south to I-80. It was the only road leading to Salt Lake City, and the only road leading from Salt Lake to Reno. On the map it looked so deceptively close and the thought of being done, of getting Candy to her destination was so tempting, I just wanted to get on the road and drive a hundred without stopping. Three days, and it would be over. I hadn’t yet figured out how I was going to let Candy go, but I’d deal with that later. I didn’t want to think about Gina’s words. What do you think will happen when you get to Paradise? You think you’ll be able to leave her there? Any more than you were able to leave her at a rest stop in Iowa?

  And other words, too. How long are you going to be carrying her water?

  Candy said no to I-80. She didn’t care what the map said about highways and mountain ranges. I thought the mapmaker had a sense of humor, a dry sense of wit. Whoever drew the map clearly had never been to Wyoming and discovered what I discovered—it was flat like a grill pan. All I knew was this: we were nowhere, it was still pouring, it was nearing evening, and we couldn’t go on the interstate. That was my now. Cramped by the side of Lone Bear Road in the flat treeless grass sageland.

  So where could we go?

  Which way did we run?

  I handed Candy the map, more like threw it at her. The ’Stang was getting all fogged up on the inside, but if we opened the windows, water poured in from the sky onto my black vinyl seats. It was Biblical rain, Candy said, it was Noah’s flood.

  “That’s just great,” said Gina. “And how long was that guy out at sea? Forty years? Wonderful.”

  Dejectedly we sat by the side of the road with my emergency lights on. “How long are we going to sit here?” Gina wanted to know.

  “Until the rain stops.”

  “But you heard Candy! It’s going to be forty years.”

  “I can’t see. I can’t drive if I can’t see. You want to drive? Be my guest.”

  “Girls, girls,” said Candy. “Come now.”

  “Yes, thank you, Miss Peacemaker,” snapped Gina.

  Candy thought the rain was cleansing—“That’s the literal and figurative meaning of rain: it washes things away”—but I said, “Yes. Good things too,” thinking it was a bad omen for the many off roads still to come. Gina said, “That’s a bad omen?” and glared at Candy, who begged us not to talk anymore.

  I watched Candy in the rearview. She wasn’t sleeping. Her face pressed against the windowpane, she stared at the fields, perhaps searching for the place of her imaginings—as vivid as Australia, as remote as Australia, as safe as Australia. Except beyond her window all was black, the rain loudly drumming.

  We must have sat in that car an hour. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and got going.

  “How much money would you need?” I blurted on impulse. It was pitch dark all around me, the rain hardening to hail now, which mercilessly pounded the car. To say we were traveling slow would be to say that turtles traveled slow, or clams.

  “How much would who need of what?” Gina asked, startled out of her reverie.

  I tried to think quickly and managed no thought at all. “To get settled in a place.”

  “Well, I don’t know, do I?” Candy didn’t move her head from the window. “There are trucks on the road.”

  “Yes, but since visibility is zero,” I said, “it’s not an issue.”

  “I see them,” she said doggedly. “They must see us.”

  “What, you want to go a different way? Gina, how long to Riverton?”

  “About an inch,” replied Gina. The traffic on U.S. 26 moved at the speed of water erosion on rocks.

  Rubbing the damp moisture from the window, Candy said, “Look at this place. Maybe here?”

  “Nirvana,” the sign read. “Pop. 62.”

  “Candy, they’d all know you by name after a week. Not very good getting lost.”

  Coming soon, the green sign said, “Hell’s Half-Acre.”

  “Wanna live in Hell’s Half-Acre, Cand?”

  I know she kept hoping for something else. I kept hoping for mountains, like in Jeremiah Johnson. I loved that movie when I was a kid. Watched it with Emma every time it was on. It was so romantic in the mountains with broody Robert Redford. Emma liked it, too. And now that I thought about it, I realized I’d missed a great opportunity to tease her, as I hadn’t connected the dots until now. It wasn’t just Jeremiah Johnson Emma had liked. It was also The Great Waldo Pepper and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Barefoot in the Park, The Candidate, and Emma’s favorite movie of all time, This Property is Condemned. Oh, how she would wax rhapsodic about Tennessee Williams and Natalie Wood. They were just decoys. It had been Robert Redford all along! That Emma.

  I should have heeded the last line in The Candidate, should’ve listened to Robert Redford. After he wins the brutal, no-holds-barred, all-stops-pulled-out campaign, he sits in his election chambers, puts his hands over his head, and says, “Now what?”

  That’s what we should’ve been asking ourselves. That’s what Candy should have been asking herself every day of her life. I took Erv’s film, now what? Floyd mainlined my twenty thousand dollars, now what? I got into a car with two bystanders, involving them in my squalid life, now what? I, all seventeen years of me, take my baby girl and go somewhere, now what?

  Eventually we’re going to get to Riverton, now what?

  The rain stopped, slowly, and the trucks became more visible; rather, we became more visible to the trucks. On a slick two-lane road, stuck between two eighteen-wheelers, no one in the car could relax. We sat like upright spring coils. There were still no mountains, but beyond the yellow wheat fields in the dark turquoise sky shone a double rainbow.

  “Aw, shucks, look,” said Gina. “A rainbow. But there’s irony in there, no? I mean, wasn’t the rainbow originally meant to remind man of God’s promise that he would never again send a flood to cleanse mankind of wickedness?”

  “Oh, look at her with her Genesis tales.” Candy was almost smiling. “So where’s the irony?”

  “So what the hell was that just now,” said Gina, “if not another one of God’s broken promises?”

  “So every time it rains and there’s a rainbow, it’s a reminder of God’s broken promise to man?” Candy shook her head. “Man, Gina, that glass is almost all empty with you, ain’t it?”

  “Ain’t it just.”

  “Candy, come on, tell me a story,” I said. “Take your head away from the window. You’re not going to live
here, not anywhere near a town called Hell’s Half-Acre, so stop looking. God, what a name. Gina, tell me, how much longer?”

  “I’m not thinking about living anywhere right now,” said Candy. “Just living. I wonder if they’re calling us in on the CB radio. I wonder how long before Erv’s in Riverton.”

  “About an inch,” said Gina.

  “Gina, shut up! They’re not calling us in, Cand. They’re trying not to crash, like us. They’re not paying attention.”

  “You don’t think?”

  I groaned. I wish someone else would drive. I wish I could sit with my head pressed to the window. I wanted a nap, a drink, a blanket. I wanted out. I wanted Emma.

  “When we get to Riverton, I’m going to call Eddie,” said Gina. “Tell him I’m close.”

  Now Candy and I both groaned. “Yes, do that,” Candy said, bouncing up and down on the backseat. “Ask him if Riverton is close enough for him to come see his future wife.”

  I got a black hole around my heart. What if it was? What if Eddie got in his truck and drove out to Riverton to meet us?

  “Sloane,” asked Gina, “when do you think I should tell him we’ll be there?”

  “About six inches,” I replied, pleased by her har-de-har-har in a car full of long faces. “Tell me a story, Candy,” I repeated.

  “A parable?” she asked. “The parable of the twelve talents?”

  “Okay.”

  “Or the story of Christ’s fourteen stations with a miracle at the end?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Candy was thoughtful. “Nah,” she said. “I’m going to tell you the story of rugby players in the Andes.”

  “I don’t think it’s as good as a miracle.” I was tired. I’d been driving all day, and it was nine at night. A little miracle might be just the ticket around here. Did we really leave Rapid City just this morning? It seemed a month ago. Wyoming was passing around us in slo-mo.

  A plane crashed in Chile one Friday the 13th, Candy told us, in the Andes, with the Old Christians rugby team and their families on board. Many of the forty-five people were injured, half died. The survivors thought they’d be rescued any minute, but they were covered by snow, and the rescue teams couldn’t spot them. So, with a broken fuselage, a little canned food, no heat, and no way to call for help they waited. No help came. More people died. The days passed. It continued to snow; they were utterly stranded in the blizzards. The cans of food had gone, and as time went on, the survivors eventually resorted to eating the freshly dead.