Star was the only one who said anything, and she could barely hear herself over the ratcheting of the bike. “Yeah,” she said. “It's a plan.”
Up ahead, the night bloomed with artificial light, trucks braking amidst the fading ghosts of cars, the Peace Arch aglow like an alien spaceship set down in a field of darkened wheat. There were gray metal booths bright with windows, figures in some kind of uniform moving like skaters across the shimmer of pavement. Ronnie's car swung out ahead of the bus, out in the left lane, and everybody pressed their faces to the windows. They watched as the Studebaker's taillights flashed red in a shroud of smoldering exhaust and a figure emerged from the near booth. The rain had quickened, beating with real authority now at the roof of the bus and driving pewter spikes into the roadway and the soft shrouded chassis of the cars. The figure leaned into Ronnie's window-fifteen seconds, that was all it took-then straightened up and waved him on. Star watched the Studebaker ease forward and fold itself back into the night.
Norm had pulled in behind a truck and the truck was taking its time. Nobody could see what the delay was because the back end of the truck was blocking their view, but the guitars kept strumming and half a dozen people were singing Beatles songs now-first “Rocky Raccoon,” and then “Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” the choice of which would have struck Star as nothing short of hilarious if it weren't for Marco. Poor Marco. He was huddled against the window in the seat beside her, sunk into the upturned collar of his denim jacket. His hair was like tarnished gold, like winter-killed weeds in a vacant lot. His eyes were drawn down to nothing. “I'm doing this for you,” he said. “I hope you know that.”
Then it was Lester's car, pulling up into the space vacated by Ronnie's. The same figure emerged from the booth, only the figure was wearing a rain slicker now and it-he-produced a flashlight and shined it in Lester's face. In the next moment, the truck was creeping forward, its blinkers flashing, and Norm was moving up to the booth even as the man with the flashlight waved Lester into the farthest lane over-the lane reserved for searches and seizures-and Lester, Franklin and Sky Dog all climbed out of the car and into the rain.
But before anybody could even think to worry about that, the bus lurched to a stop, the door folded back with a wheeze and a man in a yellow rain slicker came up the steps. “Greetings,” Norm shouted. “It's a bear out there, huh?”
The man nodded and said something in a low voice to Norm and Premstar. From where she was sitting, Star could see him only as a dull yellow glow, like something growing in the dirt of a cellar. Behind her, all the way in the back, people were singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“American,” Norm said, and then Premstar, her voice floating back to Star like a fluff of dander on a sterile breeze, pulled her chin down and concurred: “American,” she said.
The man in the slicker said something else, and Star couldn't catch it.
“Just passing through,” Norm said in a ringing voice. “We're a rock band. Big dates in Alaska, they're just dying for us up there-not that we wouldn't want to perform for you Canadians too, but that'll have to wait till next time. We're booked, know what I mean?”
One by one, the people in the back stopped singing, aware now that something was going on up front. Star leaned forward. Marco shrank into the seat.
“What _band__?” Norm called out in disbelief. “You mean you don't recognize us?”
The man in the slicker shook his head from side to side. Star could see his face now-he was grinning. She saw the flash of his teeth in a face so red he might have been holding his breath all this time for all anyone knew.
“Oh, man, you're hurtin' me,” Norm said, and he shot a look down the length of the aisle, mugging now, “you're really hurtin' me. Give you a hint,” he said. “ 'Sugar Magnolia'? 'Truckin”? 'Friend of the Devil'? No? Oh, man, you're killin' me. All right, Premstar, you tell him-"
The tiny wisp of her voice: “The Grateful Dead.”
The man in the yellow slicker was grinning still, and so was Norm, as if it were some kind of contest. “You've heard of us, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” the man said, his voice muffled by the floppy yellow rain hat, “sure, yeah, I've heard of you.”
“I'll be happy to give you an autograph if you want, no problem, man,” Norm said, and he held out his hand and the man took it.
Then the man said something Star missed, and Norm swiveled around in the seat and looked down the length of the bus. “All right, people, just give this gentleman your attention a minute here now, because he just wants to ask everybody if they're a citizen, okay? Okay, now?”
Down the aisle the man in the slicker came, red-faced and grinning, and Star saw that he was older-gray hair in his sideburns-older even than Norm. He didn't want any trouble. He didn't want anything, except to be out of the bus and back in his booth. “American citizen?” he asked. “American citizen?” And everybody said yes, and then, just for variety, he asked, “Where were you born?” and people said Buffalo, San Diego, Charleston, Staten Island, Kansas City, Hornell. They watched his face as he came down the aisle, and they watched his shoulders as he made his way back up it. Che and Sunshine slept on. The dogs never even lifted their heads.
There was a smattering of nervous laughter when he descended the steps, and the laughter boiled up into a wild irrepressible storm of hoots and catcalls and whinnying shrieks as the door pulled shut and Norm put the bus in gear and headed off toward the lights of Canada. Star alone looked back. The last thing she saw was Lester, up against the rain-washed Lincoln, and a man in a yellow slicker patting him down.
20
Though they hammered it twenty-four hours a day up through Canada and over the infinite roaring dirt incline that was the Alaska Highway, stopping only for gas and the bodily needs of thirty-one tight-lipped claustrophobes, the bus held up. By Marco's count, it broke down three times, once just outside of Prince George, the second time at the crest of Muncho Pass, and then in a place that was no place at all, but Mendocino Bill and Tom Krishna were equal to the task and they were never stranded more than an hour or two. People played cards, read, slouched, strummed guitars. They made love under blankets, passed mugs of coffee, Coke and herbal tea from hand to hand and row to row, got stoned, dozed and woke and dozed again. Norm barely slept. And when he did sleep, crumpled across one of the seats as if he'd been deboned, Marco or Alfredo took over at the wheel, humping through country that made your eyes ache with the emptiness of it. Even Pan pitched in, turning the Studebaker over to Star and propelling the bus on through the dwindling hours of the night when nobody else could keep their eyes open. There were no Mounties, no speed traps, no cops of any kind anywhere. The scenery bared its claws. All anybody wanted was to get there, just that.
Vanderhoof, Smithers, Cranberry Junction, Johnson's Crossing, Whitehorse, Marsh Lake, Destruction Bay, Burwash Landing, so many ticks on a map, hello and goodbye. They saw a big rig folded up on itself in Wonowon, a dead moose stretched out in the dirt beside it and a calf the size of a quarter horse running wild with grief. There was a fire burning along the banks of the Donjek River, flames peeling off the tops of the trees and riding up into the night sky and not a human being in sight. They made a pit stop at Haines Junction and inadvertently left Jiminy behind, looping back nearly a hundred miles to find him standing in the rain by the gas pumps, his thumb outstretched and a look of cosmic incapacity bleeding out of his eyes. Out the window the rivers fled in gray streaks, the Takini, the Good-paster, the Tetsa, the Sikanni Chief, the Prophet, the Rabbit and the Blue.