The sprinkled lights of Short Creek emerge. She can identify two thirds of the lights by family name. A tiny constellation, spinning around itself. She could find Dean’s place with her eyes closed. She remembers moving there. The ache of disaster in her heart. She remembers his visitation the night of their wedding. His hand on her knee. Holding her in place.
• • •
Baker says, “I guess you pups thought you were pretty smart.”
Jason doesn’t want to answer. He wants to throw up from somewhere deep inside his bones.
Baker says, “Pret-ty smart.” He acts very happy, pepped up. The smell of liquor fills the car. Baker taps a ring on the steering wheel, chews gum like he’s trying to kill it. The front end of his Nova shimmies, shaking the steering wheel, but he keeps the gas pedal pinned to the floor. The needle flutters past ninety.
He says, “Got balls, though. Gotta say.”
Every now and then they pass a semi, but mostly the freeway is deserted. The sun droops behind them, a blurred white disk with a golden rind. Far ahead, hanging above the horizon, a blurry gray storm smears the sky. They drive past Wells, and the next sign reads: WENDOVER 59, SALT LAKE CITY 179.
Back in Elko, Baker came into the hotel room asking questions, scanning the place. Jason felt groggy, stoned. It took him a long time to remember who Baker was. He kept saying, I don’t know, I don’t know, and Baker would ask again, screwing his head to one side while he squinted at Jason. Where’s Lori? Where’s your Indian buddy? Sure, you know. I guess I’m not as stupid as you might think, bud. Why’d they leave? What happened? You all have a falling-out? The road crew broke up? Answer me. I ain’t such a bad guy if you just answer me. Here. He took Jason’s ear between thumb and forefinger and twisted it so hard Jason thought it might rip. Jog your memory? No? Okay, try this: Where were you going before the breakup of the fun-time crew? Where were you pups headed? Nowhere? Just going nowhere? He wrenched the ear again, stretching the skin like taffy, and Jason howled in complete surrender. He kept saying, I don’t know, I don’t know, which was true, but he was also getting ready to say something else. It didn’t take much. Jason was lying on his side on the bed, trying to squirm away, and Baker was kneeling over him, the liquor smell making Jason sick. Baker wrenched again. Hush up now, Jason. So, were you all headed down to Hilldale? Jason shook his head. He said, I really don’t know, I really don’t know, they left me. Down to Nephi? He shook his head. Back to Short Creek? Jason doesn’t know what his face did then, but Baker let go, clapped briskly, and said, The Crick. All right. He stepped to the door, stopped with his hand on the knob, and looked back at Jason, curled on the bed. Pondered him for fifteen seconds, ticktocked his head sideways, made an aggravated face, shrugged, said, Get your crap. And then they were in his Nova, and they were going.
“Only thing is, you were not that smart,” Baker says now, waving his index finger back and forth like a windshield wiper. “There was a flaw in the design. Can you tell me what it was?”
“No.”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know,” Jason says, holding wadded-up toilet paper from the Stockmen’s against his ear.
“Jesus, you’re a baby.” He says this the way he’s been saying everything, as though nothing could puncture his happy mood. “I’d have guessed you were a little tougher.”
A thin, cold draft whines in along the door. The rearview mirror blazes with reflected sun, and the Nova’s shadow races ahead of them on the pale asphalt, veined and crossed with black tar. It will take seven hours or so, Jason knows, to get to Short Creek.
“The fatal error,” Baker says, “was the checks.”
“The checks?”
“The checks.”
“What do you mean?”
Baker laughs out loud.
“Are you shitting me?” He looks at Jason again with that screwed-in focus, as though he could auger the truth out of him, and then relaxes and laughs, deep and real. “Lori, Lori.”
“What?”
“Let me tell you something about our Loretta,” he says. He cocks his head and looks at the road thoughtfully. He smiles, starts to speak, then stops, frowns, smiles, scratches his jaw. “Naw. Never mind.”
“No, what?”
“Naw. So. They really ditched you. Just split.”
Jason doesn’t answer.
“That is unfortunate. That does suck.”
He hasn’t stopped smiling. He fidgets, snaps his fingers. He lifts a silver flask from his shirt pocket, unscrews, tips it, and gasps happily.
“She ain’t so great with the promises, little Loretta,” he says. “So, yeah, that does suck. But your deal was gonna go bad eventually, one way or another.”
Jason thinks about checks. Dean’s checks? Tries to piece it together.
“So you’re here for Dean?” he asks.
“Some for him, some for me.”
They drive. They pass West Wendover, a tiny town before the Utah border, and as they come to the state line, a white, flat plain opens, a cracked moonscape running so far and so flat that Jason thinks he can see the earth curve. It could be purgatory, with Baker as guide. Jason has died and is being ferried to hell.
A sign says: BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS VISITORS CENTER 1.
“I love this place,” Baker says. “This is where the Donner Party got itself shitwise. Didn’t bring enough water. Lost livestock. Got weak and sick. Took too long crossing, so they were still in the mountains when winter came.”
He laughs. They round a bend and town lights appear, yellow in the dusk.
“Remember this for your next big adventure, kid,” he says. “Things don’t go bad at the end. That’s just when it becomes obvious. First, you cross a desert of salt without enough to drink. Then your oxes die. Your kids get scurvy.”
He laughs again. “Next thing, you’ve eaten all your horses and it won’t stop snowing.”
The lilac light on the salt pan is turning black, grain by grain. The world seems too large, too empty, for them to simply drive a few hours and catch up with Boyd and Loretta, but the car’s velocity and Baker’s focus convinces Jason that they will find them, and that it will be bad for Loretta, maybe very bad, and it will be bad for Boyd and bad for Jason. And that it is entirely Jason’s fault.
Baker says, “You hungry? I could eat the ass out of a cow.”
In the café, Baker gathers huge mouthfuls of hamburger and chews mightily, like he is working a hand crank. Every so often he yawns. The café hums with table noise, plate and fork, the talk of truckers and country people. The waitress tops Baker’s coffee.
“Looks like somebody’s got a long drive,” she says. “You hauling a load?”
“Naw,” he says, and winks. “In a rush to meet a gal.”
Baker looks at Jason’s plate and says, “Your hamburger ain’t gonna eat itself.”
“What happens if we find them?” Jason asks.
“When we find them. Think positive.”
He reaches over and grabs Jason’s burger. Bites off a third of it, chews and chews, staring at Jason, then takes another bite, then says, “One step at a time.”
The snow starts as they drive past the southern tip of the Great Salt Lake, which lies like a great blankness under the cloudy night. Everywhere else, the valley between the mountain spines glitters with light, and a thickening layer of white covers the freeway but for the parallel lines of wheel paths. The Nova slides and spins, but Baker doesn’t ease up on the gas. He grips the wheel with both hands and leans forward, as if he can keep them on track with sheer will.
Jason wishes for a crash. He might be praying for one. He’s not sure he really understands the difference between wishing and praying. But he notices — here, where the Mormon Trail ground to a halt, where the pioneer handcarts stopped and Brigham Young declared this was the place, where God sent the seagulls to save the crops, and where a shining new city was built, where the church settled and grew, where the temple and the tabernacle arose, where the Saints gathered twice a year to worship, to separate themselves from the world; here, where his parents would bring him every couple of years, to visit Temple Square and stay at the Hotel Utah, their capital, their Mecca — even here, feeling desperate and forsaken, he is not turning to prayer. Not really. He remembers the long-ago game of Yes or No? Boyd and him playacting at a serious business, and realizes that he has arrived at an answer that is really just a feeling. A guess. Just another kind of faith.