Road to Paradise (37 page)

The server looked at her strangely, looked her up and down.

“I just want to know what people here do for work, that’s all.” Candy smiled.

“Well,” the check-out girl drew out grudgingly, “the men pretty much all work at the mine.”

“Mine?”

“Yeah. Thunder Mountain Mine. You’ll pass it if you’re headed to Casper.”

Were we headed to Casper?

Thunder
Mountain
Mine? I wanted to ask her if that name was decided ironically but was afraid she might not know the meaning of the word.

“What about the women?” Candy asked. Such an innocent question, yet how could she keep her life out of her voice? She couldn’t.

“The women stay home mainly,” the girl replied, frowning,
rushing through the order. “But many of them work in the mine, too. Why?”

“No reason. Is the mine the only employer in town?”

“Well, this
is
a mining town,” said the girl, trying to keep her life out of her voice, too.

“Or you could work here at Subway,” Gina said to Candy.

“We’re not hiring,” the girl said quickly, wrapping the sandwiches in paper and pushing them toward us on the counter. “Will there be anything else?”

Now it was Candy’s turn to look the girl up and down. “So where do you go shopping?”

“Casper.”

I perked up in surprise. “On the map it looks a hundred miles away.”

“It is,” the girl said, in a voice that said, so what? “But there’s nobody on the road. You can make that in an hour.”

“Hour, really. Hmm. You must have a pretty fast car.” Candy smiled politely, taking her sandwich.

A man came in wearing plaid overalls. He gave Candy the eye. Even in church clothes, she was a male eye magnet. She smiled at him. The girl behind the counter glowered. “Will that be all?”

“Actually, one more thing,” said Candy. “Is there a drugstore around here?” She pointed to her head. “Need an aspirin.”

“Casper,” the girl said, turning away. “Everything’s in Casper.”

When we hit the road again, Candy talked animatedly about the town, and I said, “Candy, that girl has lived in Wright her whole life. I’m sure her parents were miners. And she’s going to marry a miner. There is not even a bar in this town.”

“Oh, you can be sure,” said Candy, with a short giggle, “if it’s a town of miners, there will be a bar in this town.”

“And what are you going to do? Serve drinks to men?”

“Sure, why not? I can be a bartender.”

“The women will stone you for sure.” Gina laughed.

“Aren’t you the parable-teller,” said Candy.

“I’m not being parabolic. I mean that literally. They’ll stone you. For sure.”

After we left the deli at Wright, there was once again nothing around us. A few miles down we passed several orange signs that said, “B
LASTING
A
REA UP AHEAD
. S
TAY AWAY FROM FLYING DEBRIS
.” Next sign we saw we realized it said
falling
debris, not flying. Flying was better. Funnier. Thunder Mountain is the largest open-pit mine in the United States, and after we drove past it, there were no more llamas, no other grazing animals either. There was nothing at all, soon not even sagebrush.

Candy said that perhaps Wyoming wasn’t for her since, except for Wright, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to live. “Aren’t there any people?”

“It’s the least populated state in America,” said Gina.

“No shit.”

“Less than half a million people and half of those live in Cheyenne, the capital.”

“Hmm.” We debated whether it was better to hide in a small town in the middle of desolation or a large exposed town, heavily populated. That discussion took us fifty miles to I-25, but when Candy saw it, she said we couldn’t go on it.

“Not even here?”

“Not even here.”

“But there’s no one on the road! And they’re not looking for you here.”

“I know. But all a trucker has to do is hear the call once on his CB, and think about that call. A 5000-dollar reward for locating a yellow ’Stang and three girls. That’s something you don’t soon forget. You might forget a red Camaro, because you see a million of them, but not this. He’ll be calling me in as soon as he sets eyes on your yellow prize. This time it’ll be on the open road near Casper.”

“All right, so he calls you in,” said Gina. “What’s Erv going to do? Helicopter his way into the grassland?”

“You want him to know where we are?” asked Candy. “He
can do math, you know. All he’s got to do is figure out how long it’ll take us to get to the next Wyoming town, and goodness knows there aren’t that many of them, and he’ll be calling in for truckers passing through to be on the lookout. You want him that close?”

“Oh, you’re just paranoid now,” said Gina, but we all agreed we didn’t want him that close. Reluctantly I stayed off the highway. We found U.S. 87, a dilapidated highway badly in need of repair that ran almost parallel to I-25, which allowed us to get nice and lost right as it started to downpour and the mountains we saw in the distance behind Casper disappeared in the mist. At least I think they were mountains. They could’ve been black clouds. We had to stop and assess our location by the side of the road called Lone Bear Road, near the barbed wire that kept in the llamas. No way around it—map said we were headed south to I-80. It was the only road leading to Salt Lake City, and the only road leading from Salt Lake to Reno. On the map it looked so deceptively close and the thought of being done, of getting Candy to her destination was so tempting, I just wanted to get on the road and drive a hundred without stopping. Three days, and it would be over. I hadn’t yet figured out how I was going to let Candy go, but I’d deal with that later. I didn’t want to think about Gina’s words.
What do you think will happen when you get to Paradise? You think
you’ll be able to leave her there? Any more than you were able to leave
her at a rest stop in Iowa?

And other words, too.
How long are you going to be carrying her
water?

Candy said no to I-80. She didn’t care what the map said about highways and mountain ranges. I thought the mapmaker had a sense of humor, a dry sense of wit. Whoever drew the map clearly had never been to Wyoming and discovered what I discovered—it was flat like a grill pan. All I knew was this: we were nowhere, it was still pouring, it was nearing evening, and we couldn’t go
on the Interstate. That was my now. Cramped by the side of Lone Bear Road in the flat, treeless, grass sageland.

So where could we go?

Which way did we run?

I handed Candy the map, more like threw it at her. The ’Stang was getting all fogged up on the inside, but if we opened the windows, water poured in from the sky onto my black vinyl seats. It was Biblical rain, Candy said, it was Noah’s flood.

“That’s just great,” said Gina. “And how long was that guy out? Forty years? Wonderful.”

Dejectedly we sat by the side of the road with my emergency lights on. “How long are we going to sit here?” Gina wanted to know.

“Until the rain stops.”

“But you heard Candy! It’s going to be forty years.”

“I can’t see. I can’t drive if I can’t see. You want to drive? Be my guest.”

“Girls, girls,” said Candy. “Come now.”

“Yes, thank you, Miss Peacemaker,” snapped Gina.

Candy thought the rain was cleansing— “That’s the literal and figurative meaning of rain: it washes things away”—but I said, “Yes. Good things too,” thinking it was a bad omen for the many off roads still to come. Gina said, “
That’s
a bad omen?” and glared at Candy, who begged us not to talk anymore.

I watched Candy in the rearview. She wasn’t sleeping. Her face pressed against the windowpane, she stared at the fields, perhaps searching for the place of her imaginings—as vivid as Australia, as remote as Australia, as safe as Australia. Except beyond her window all was black, the rain loudly drumming.

We must have sat in that car an hour. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and got going.

“How much money would you need?” I blurted on impulse. It was pitch dark all around me, the rain hardening to hail now, which mercilessly pounded the car. To say we were traveling slow would be to say that turtles traveled slow, or clams.

“How much would who need of what?” Gina asked, startled out of her reverie.

I tried to think quickly and managed no thought at all. “To get settled in a place.”

“Well, I don’t know, do I?” Candy didn’t move her head from the window. “There are trucks on the road.”

“Yes, but since visibility is zero,” I said, “it’s not an issue.”

“I see them,” she said doggedly. “They must see us.”

“What, you want to go a different way? Gina, how long to Riverton?”

“About an inch,” replied Gina. The traffic on U.S. 26 moved at the speed of water erosion on rocks.

Rubbing the damp moisture from the window, Candy said, “Look at this place. Maybe here?”

“Nirvana,” the sign read. “Pop. 62.”

“Candy, they’d all know you by name after a week. Not very good getting lost.”

Coming soon, the green sign said, “Hell’s Half-Acre.”

“Wanna live in Hell’s Half-Acre, Cand?”

I know she kept hoping for something else. I kept hoping for mountains, like in “Jeremiah Johnson.” I loved that movie when I was a kid. Watched it with Emma every time it was on. It was so romantic in the mountains with broody Robert Redford. Emma liked it, too. And now that I thought about it, I realized I’d missed a great opportunity to tease her, as I hadn’t connected the dots until now. It wasn’t just “Jeremiah Johnson” Emma had liked. It was also “The Great Waldo Pepper” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting,” “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Candidate,” and Emma’s favorite movie of all time, “This Property is Condemned.” Oh, how she would wax rhapsodic about Tennessee Williams and Natalie Wood! They were just decoys. It had been Robert Redford all along! That Emma.

I should have heeded the last line in “The Candidate,” should’ve listened to Robert Redford. After he wins the brutal, no-holds-barred, all-stops-pulled-out campaign, he sits in his
election chambers, puts his hands over his head and says, “Now what?”

That’s what we should’ve been asking ourselves. That’s what Candy should have been asking herself every day of her life. I took Erv’s film, now what? Floyd mainlined my 20,000 dollars, now what? I got into a car with two bystanders, involving them in my squalid life, now what? I, all seventeen years of me, take my baby girl and go somewhere, now what?

Eventually we’re going to get to Riverton, now what?

The rain stopped, slowly, and the trucks became more visible; rather, we became more visible to the trucks. On a slick two-lane road, stuck between two eighteen-wheelers, no one in the car could relax. We sat like upright spring coils. There were still no mountains, but beyond the yellow wheatfields in the dark turquoise sky shone a double rainbow.

“Aw, shucks, look,” said Gina. “A rainbow. But there’s irony in there, no? I mean, wasn’t the rainbow originally meant to remind man of God’s promise that he would never again send a flood to cleanse mankind of wickedness?”

“Oh, look at her with her Genesis tales.” Candy was almost smiling. “So where’s the irony?”

“So what the hell was that just now,” said Gina, “if not another one of God’s broken promises?”

“So every time it rains and there’s a rainbow, it’s a reminder of God’s
broken
promise to man?” Candy shook her head. “Man, Gina, that glass is almost all empty with you, ain’t it?”

“Ain’t it just.”

“Candy, come on, tell me a story,” I said. “Take your head away from the window. You’re not going to live here, not anywhere near a town called Hell’s Half-Acre, so stop looking. God, what a name. Gina, tell me, how much longer?”

“I’m not thinking about living anywhere right now,” said Candy. “Just living. I wonder if they’re calling us in on the CB radio. I wonder how long before Erv’s in Riverton.”

“About an inch,” said Gina.

“Gina, shut up! They’re not calling us in, Cand. They’re trying not to crash, like us. They’re not paying attention.”

“You don’t think?”

I groaned. I wish someone else would drive. I wish I could sit with
my
head pressed to the window. I wanted a nap, a drink, a blanket. I wanted out. I wanted Emma.

“When we get to Riverton, I’m going to call Eddie,” said Gina. “Tell him I’m close.”

Now Candy and I both groaned. “Yes, do that,” Candy said, bouncing up and down on the backseat. “Ask him if Riverton is close enough for him to come see his future wife.”

I got a black hole around my heart. What if it was? What if Eddie got in his truck and drove out to Riverton to meet us?

“Sloane,” asked Gina, “when do you think I should tell him we’ll be there?”

“About six inches,” I replied, pleased by her har-de-har-har in a car full of long faces. “Tell me a story, Candy,” I repeated.

“A parable?” she asked. “The parable of the twelve talents?”

“Okay.”

“Or the story of Christ’s fourteen stations with a miracle at the end?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Candy was thoughtful. “Nah,” she said. “I’m going to tell you the story of rugby players in the Andes.”