His farewell kiss had true affection. He said his arms would always be open. As we said in junior high, ‘Is that cool, or what?’ He was wearing his ‘Eyes of Texas’ belt buckle when he waved good-bye.
I decided I couldn’t spend a thousand dollars on drugs without spending at least that much on Mia. She’d been sleeping ever since her nightmare in the barn. I tried to wake her up for a little mother- daughter shopping spree. When I couldn’t wake her, I almost panicked. But I could hear her heartbeat, slow but strong.
I tried to imagine what she was dreaming, what she was doing, but I couldn’t get inside her. I think she’s in a trance, maybe trying to imagine something herself. We have to imagine each other to reach each other, so maybe that’s why I feel blocked out. That’s okay. I have to trust her to know what’s best for herself.
But for that moment I thought she was dead, so scared my first instinct was to rush her to the hospital. That’s what I’ve got to be careful about – acting as if she were real. That’s when I get in trouble. Terror makes me forget. Pain makes me forget.
I bought Mia an amazingly soft, thick, pale-blue silk comforter big enough for a double bed. I wrapped it around her in the backseat, fluffed the two matching plush pillows to cushion her head.
I’m sitting in my Porsche at Uncle Bill’s Bugle Burger Drive-In, where I’ve just finished half a Bugle Burger and both a large and a medium Pepsi. As Longshot warned, cocaine discourages gluttony for anything but cocaine. Sure makes you thirsty, though. Better buy a case of mineral water before I hit the road.
My new Easter outfit, a back-zippered sheath with a slit skirt, is made of raw silk, the color of buffed cream, the lines clean and supple. My Easter bonnet is a wide-brimmed straw hat, airy and light, with a rainbow of silks braided around the crown, the unraveled ends trailing down my shoulders like a waterfall of color. I’m wearing these crazy platform shoes with a four-leaf clover cast into each of the three-inch clear-plastic heels. Keep luck rolling. I also bought a sleek black suit with a black hat and veil for the meeting with the DJ on Jim Bridger’s grave.
Now for a few toots and the long highway to Wyoming. I’ll have plenty of drugs left for the DJ. I’m already a little tired of them. That’s how I’ve always been – I adore them for a while, but then I get tired of the same point of view all the time.
On my road map, I–80 looks like the straightest shot to eastern Wyoming. But I’m intrigued by Highway 50, which is so barren on the map there’s plenty of room to note: ‘Highway 50, the Loneliest Highway in the World.’ That sounded like a tourist attraction for explorers of the psyche, something of a lonesome highway itself. From 50 I can cut north to Wyoming. A difference of hours. If the DJ is serious, he’ll wait. If he isn’t there, I’ll be so heartbroken crazy I’ll give Longshot’s cure a shot and fight fire with fire, wired to Kansas City and burning the return. I shall return. But now I’ve got to go.
Four: FIRE
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
—Shakespeare, Macbeth IV.i
The mind is a full moon rising in a warm spring rain.
Daniel felt lighter and lighter and lighter, despite the rain soaking his buckskins, despite the Diamond in his sack that seemed to be gaining an ounce every fifteen minutes, lighter and lighter until he thought he might actually rise with the moon. He stood where his ride from the Reno Shell Station had left him. The old guy had apologized for not being able to invite him for the night, but space was cramped what with the granddaughter and all, and Ma wasn’t much on strangers.
Daniel had been sorry, too. The granddaughter was no toddler but a drop-you-to-your-knees smoldering redhead about nineteen years old. Daniel had gathered from the old guy’s brief conversation while waiting for the women to return from the restroom that she had been sent to her grandparents’ desolate ranch because she’d gone boy-crazy in Santa Rosa. Twice in the course of the ride he’d pressed his hand against the cab’s rain-streaked rear window in an unconscious attempt to touch her hair. He’d been sorely tempted to vanish, go sit on the dashboard, and just watch her. He’d resisted, cursing his strength.
Now, as he watched the moon rise, he tried to imagine what she was feeling miles away, and he received a sensation of alien pleasure, the friction between pressed thighs as the old truck seat vibrated down the dirt road. The sensation made him feel lighter yet.
Blinking against the rain, he watched the blurred moon rise with a majestic inevitability so erotic he wanted to vanish. He sensed a powerful and mutual receptivity slowly opening in the warm, moonlit rain, a rain so warm for a Nevada April the old guy had said he damn near couldn’t believe it. Daniel believed it. Daniel believed if he vanished he could rise with the moon, float up through the top of his skull and join the moon’s constancy, its fastness, its light. He was gathering himself to vanish when a low sexual growl snapped his focus.
The cardinal Porsche shot past in a blink, but one blink was sufficient for a glimpse of the striking woman at the wheel. Stop, he thought, as the rain-smeared glow of taillights faded.
When the car was almost out of sight, he caught the sudden brightness of brake lights. Daniel ran toward the car, hoping his glimpse of her hadn’t been some rain-blurred moonlight mirage.
The mind is a mirage with real water.
When he reached the passenger door and bent to look inside, her loveliness took his breath away. The door was locked.
She leaned across the seat – to unlock it, he hoped – but only rolled the window down a crack.
She examined him a moment then said, ‘Are you Jim Bridger?’
She might as well have said, You’re in love with me now.
‘No ma’am, I’m not,’ Daniel said with the drawl of an old beaver- trapper, ‘but I knew the Bridger boy when he was greener’n a mountain meadow. Fact is, he an’ that worthless John Fitzpatrick left me in the mountains to die. I’d gotten chawed on somethin’ pitiful by a she-grizzly. The Mountain Code is to stay till you’re sure, but the Bridger boy and that Fitzpatrick fool was in a tizzy about some marauding Indians nearby, so they left me for dead. That wasn’t so bad, but they took my rifle and my possibles with ’em. Had to live on what the wolves left on buffler carcasses, and had to fight the damn buzzards for that. Had a broken leg and back tore raw, so I had to go it on my hands and knees. Made pads out of dried buffler hide. Two hundred fifty miles to Fort Kiowa and the only thing that kept me going was revenge. You shoulda seen that Bridger boy’s face when he spied me crawling through the gates, like I was nightmare turned real, come to collect.’