When I entered the enclosed porch for breakfast I saw at once from Katharine’s face that she’d reached the same understanding. The pressure at the table with us was so intense that afterward I couldn’t remember what I’d eaten; which is undoubtedly a shame, given Mrs. Hilyerd’s class as a cook. We ate, Katharine paid, we loaded the cab, the Hilyerds came out to wave us goodbye, and we drove silently to Route 70. Katharine rode up front with me, but I think that was only because the tension would have become even more blatant if she’d sat in the back.
Interstate 70 is discontinuous through western Colorado, so from time to time we were dumped onto US 6 for several miles, a slower and narrower road, where the slow-moving big rigs crawling through the endless curving hilly no-passing zones came very close to snapping my taut brain. On the existing stretches of 70 I floored the accelerator, and the poor cab quivered as I strained it at the very limit of its capacity. If my father had seen me, he’d have torn out his last six hairs.
Fortunately, 70 was complete for the bypass of Grand Junction, the only town of any size we came to during the morning. We were running along beside the Colorado River now, through rough tumbling magnificent scenic country, and neither of us cared about it at all.
Not far from Grand Junction we crossed into Utah, and the countryside became wilder and wilder, the towns fewer and smaller and more temporary looking. The landscape was like something from another planet, like movie recreations of Mars; barren chalky cliffs, great gray hills of what looked like ashes, pink and purple stony valleys. It was an unpleasant land, inhospitable, perfectly matching our mood, and we fled through it like Bonnie and Clyde.
Route 70 failed again in the middle of this wasteland, leaving us more of US 6 to contend with, and when signs began to appear warning of a hundred-mile stretch ahead without gas stations we stopped to fill up and Katharine said, “I have to call Barry.”
“Yes.”
She looked small and forlorn in the phone booth at the edge of the station’s blacktop. She was still on the call when I’d finished at the pump, so I drove the cab over and stopped by the booth. After a minute she stuck her head out and said, “Barry wants to talk to you.”
“All right,” I said.
There was a small fitful breeze and the air was dry, but it was very hot. My T-shirt stuck to me, front and back, and the phone booth was like a sauna. Katharine stood outside it, watching me worriedly, and I said, “Yes?”
“First of all, Thomas,” said the voice, “I want to apologize for the way I talked to you last time.”
“That’s okay,” I said. It was okay; we were far beyond that now.
“I can’t bring myself to get mad at Katharine,” he explained, “and I just took it out on you. I’m sorry.”
“Situation understood,” I assured him.
“Okay. Thank you. Katharine tells me you’re in Utah.”
“Right.”
“How far do you figure you’ll get today?”
“Nevada,” I said. “We’ll go down Interstate 15, and I’ll stop at the first Holiday Inn I see the other side of the Nevada line.”
Surprised, he said, “That’s a hell of a long distance, isn’t it?”
“About six hundred miles. We got an early start today, we’re making good time. And that’ll give us less than four hundred miles to Los Angeles tomorrow.”
“Then I apologize all over again,” he said. “Not only shouldn’t I have taken my frustration out on you, but you were right and I was wrong. You know your business, Thomas.”
“It’s Tom,” I said.
“Tom? I’m Barry, Tom, and I’m looking forward to shaking your hand.”
“Yeah,” I said, and then felt impelled to add, “Me, too.”
He wanted to talk to Katharine again. I waited in the car, feeling the sweat driblets running down my body beneath my shirt, and when Katharine finished and got back in I started up at once, wanting that breeze. She said, “You told Barry we’d get to Los Angeles tomorrow.”
“Right.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes, it is.”
I could sense her looking at my profile, but I kept my own eyes facing front. After a minute, very softly she said, “I’m sorry, Tom.”
“Hush,” I said.
41
Westward into increasingly inhuman country. Route 70 re-appeared, as a two-lane road, a straight lonely line across the broken landscape, and we ran and ran under the hot dry sun, past black cliff faces and tortured boulders parodying trees, where nothing grew.
After Salina there was no Route 70 at all, and our path turned south along US 89. We found a sun-bleached diner for lunch, where the customers and waitresses were all uniformly parched and bitter, made juiceless and ancient by the sun and the hostile terrain. Our hamburgers were small and dry and gray, our french fries were twisted like torture victims, our coffee was watery.
During lunch Katharine said, “Tom, I can’t stand us not talking to one another.”
“I’m talking to you,” I said. “Constantly, in the cab, I’m saying whole sentences to you, pointing at weird rocks and so on. I’m just not saying them out loud.”
Smiling, she said, “I’m doing the same thing. It’s only this afternoon and tomorrow, could we try actually saying them out loud to one another?”
“There are things I could say about this hamburger.”
“Don’t. It may have been someone we know.”
Things were somewhat better after that, with casual conversation once more, but it wasn’t exactly the same as before. We were now like those radio call-in shows that put a seven-second delay between the person on the phone saying something and the statement actually going out over the air; just in case the caller has something obscene or libelous or otherwise unacceptable to say. I had a seven-second delay tape working in my head, checking all my statements before releasing them, and from her timing I suspected Katharine had the same. We were almost as we had been, but we were no longer quite live.
By circuitous paths we attained Interstate 15, a highway that rises in Montana at the Canadian border and runs south through Idaho and Utah before angling southwestward through a tiny corridor of Arizona and the bottom of Nevada — including Las Vegas — then crossing the Mojave Desert down into Los Angeles. This was to be our road from now on, and the simple absurd fact that we were traveling down the map rather than across it made the trip seem somehow easier, faster.
The countryside continued huge and dry and mostly empty, but it was gradually losing that alien quality; we were returning to Terra. The buttes and valleys were now like those in Western movies rather than science-fiction, and here and there were farms and low tundra-like forests. The descending sun today was off to our right, watching us benignly for a change. Katharine and I played Superghost and laughed at one another’s jokes.
It was around seven when we left Utah for our thirty-mile slice of Arizona. “These are called the Virgin Mountains,” Katharine said, reading yet another roadmap. I looked around at the tumbled striated barren lifeless sandstone all around us; not a soft place anywhere to put your foot, not a flat place to spread your blanket, not a shadow that wasn’t the transient shadow of a rock. The road was an undulating ribbon over chasms and gorges, between tall serrated peaks. “They can stay Virgins as far as I’m concerned,” I said.
There was one exit in Arizona, where a sign promised a town called Littlefield, but among the sharp boulders I saw only a small corkscrew road climbing painfully away into silence and absence. And ten miles later we attained Nevada, at a town called Mesquite. And crossed from Mountain to Pacific Time; our last lost hour.