Daniel pulled out of the Two Moons Rest Stop an hour before dark. He left five thousand dollars on top of the TV, more an endowment to the notion of rest than a tip for services. Wally Moon had his head under the hood of a battered pickup when Daniel drove by. Daniel tooted twice. Without looking up, Wally Moon lifted the box-wrench in his hand and made a gesture that was, at once, forward and farewell. THE NOTEBOOKS OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL
My name is Jennifer Raine Escapedangone; also known as you can kiss my sweet little ass good-bye. Me and Mia went out easy the way Clyde came in. Quick on tiptoes down the hall to the end of the wing and the unlocked janitor’s supply room and then feet first down the laundry chute into the basement, kids on a slide, landing on a pile of fear-rank, night-sweat sheets that Clyde had mounded there for us. The basement walls were ringed with huge washing machines and dryers, and right above them was a series of narrow, ground-level windows. The fifth window on the eastern wall had a broken lock. I slithered through onto the cool lawn, then reached back for Mia. I felt our hands touching in the darkness, the pain and trust between us giving me strength, and pulled her through the window. We scampered across the moon-shadowed grounds to the brick wall, six feet at most, more a screen than a barrier, and from there, as my dear DJ says, it was simply a matter of over and out, out, out, out, and free, good gods, at last!
The first place we stopped was your standard all-nite drug-dealing diner at the edge of town – chafed plastic glasses, tape-scabbed stools at the formica counter, the waitress in a frayed, ice-blue rayon dress, bra and slip straps showing through, country-and-western on the radio in the kitchen, the spattering grill-grease and the radio’s static indistinguishable, and four junk-grayed men nodding to the same slow rhythm as they dunked donuts in their cold coffee.
I ordered a chocolate milkshake to share with Mia. We’d just finished when two young strutters came in, sleaze-boys, the kind who live on what they roll from junkies. I didn’t like the way they looked at me. I wanted out of there so bad I left the whole five for the waitress and headed for the door.
The greasiest one waited until I’d passed before he called, ‘Hey mama, where you going? The party’s just about to get started.’
‘Sorry, I have a date with the DJ to dance on Jim Bridger’s grave.’ I walked away.
I hitched a ride around dawn from an old rancher in a battered flatbed who said he could only take me a little ways; I told him that was far enough. I lied to all his questions, and said nothing when he scolded me for hitching alone. ‘Lotsa bad men out driving. Drunked-up, too.’
He took me almost to Fairfield. I went to a Salvation Army store and bought some faded Levis and a men’s flannel shirt with my last five dollars.
After that I hitched a ride – another farmer – to here, somewhere in the central valley. I’m writing this by the scatter of moonlight through the cracked shakes of an abandoned barn. It’s ramshackle and smells like old piss, but it’s shelter enough on this warm spring night.
Ever since we got here (Mia’s already asleep – she had a tough day) I’ve been trying to remember that yeasty odor of bread rising in my grandmother’s warming oven from when I was four or five, and I just smelled it now, sharp and musky, and I remember my blue pajamas and the moonlight sheen on the goosedown quilt as soft as a goodnight kiss. And if I hold really still and forget myself, I feel the mist of my father’s seed in my mother’s pulse, can feel myself passing bodiless between them, my face erupting out of nothingness, my tiny mouth already hungry for a voice, and I can see my first dream shiver through the veins in my almost transparent eyelids, but I can’t remember what I was dreaming. The first dream – that’s what I want to know. I want to remember the first dream I ever had. And then I’ll use that knowledge to ransom my ghost from the lightning.
Daniel didn’t call Volta at the first opportunity, nor the hundredth. He couldn’t figure out if the second thoughts represented prudent doubts or were merely allowing him to put it off. His cover was clearly blown, and Daniel had to consider the possibility that Volta had decided that the Diamond was safer with the government than with him, and had turned him to CIA, rolled over on him, ‘dropped a dime’ as Mott said.
He had to consider it, but he didn’t believe it. More likely, there was a tap, or maybe an agent inside the Alliance. A tap would make it risky to even call Volta, since they probably would set it up for immediate trace. That would provide his general location, if nothing else. He wasn’t worried about being caught – he could vanish with the Diamond and walk through a wall of tanks – but he didn’t want the annoyance. Nor did he want to leave them the truck with Wally’s and Annie’s fingerprints and a paper trail they could perhaps follow back to the AMO people who had set it up. But when all that convenient logic was exhausted, Daniel, with the fiercest honesty he could muster, knew the reason for his reluctance was a decidedly unreasonable intuition that he would be sadder for the call. Sadness would weaken him in his attempt to see what the Diamond wanted to offer.
He was thinking about drawing a blind yes or no from a hat when it struck him that he had never tried looking into the Diamond’s center with his eyes closed. He pulled over at the next rest area and vanished with the Diamond. He looked into its center steadily and then closed his eyes. He saw an after-image of the spiral flame that faded quickly. He could imagine the Diamond, see the flame center clearly, but could not see inside it. After an hour, he forced himself to reappear with the Diamond and get back on the road.
He received two signs almost immediately. The first was premonitory: a mileage sign that read GLOBE 37. The second sign was so direct Daniel stopped the moment he saw it. The sign was on the wall of a fire-gutted gas station, written large on the outside face of the cinderblocks; the heat-blistered paint had peeled and fallen away, and of what was once a list of parts and services, all that remained were:
AKES
ARK PLUG
VOLTA REGULAT
The phone booth at the far end of the lot was unscathed except for a lingering odor of damp smoke.
Volta answered on the first ring: ‘Allied Furnace Repair, Night Service.’
Daniel said, ‘The place I’m calling from advertises “akes, ark plugs, volta regulats.” It left me no choice.’
‘Well,’ Volta replied mildly, ‘I’m glad to see you’re beginning to develop a sense of humor. You’re going to need it. First of all––’