but then where?
Home, she thought. Home was a little speck called Blakeman, up in Rawlins County in the northwest corner of Kansas. She’d run away when she was sixteen, after her mother had died of cancer and her father had started going crazy on religion. She knew the old man hated her, and that’s why she’d left. What would home be like now, she wondered. She imagined her father would drop his teeth when he found out he had a granddaughter. Hell, no! I can’t go back there!
But she was already calculating the route she would take if she did decide to go to Blakeman: north on 135 to Salina, west through the sweeping corn and wheat fields on Interstate 70, north again on arrow-straight country roads. She could get enough money from Frankie to pay for the gas. “How’d you like to take a trip in the mornin’?”
“Where to?” She clutched the Cookie Monster tighter.
“Oh, just somewhere. A little town called Blakeman. Not much going on, the last time I was there. Maybe we could go there and rest for a few days. Get our heads together and think. Right?”
Swan shrugged. “I guess,” she said, but she didn’t care one way or the other.
Darleen turned the radio down and put her arm around her daughter. Looking up, she thought she saw a glimmer of light in the sky, but then it was gone. She squeezed Swan’s shoulder. “Just you and me against the world, kid,” she said. “And know what? We’re gonna win out yet, if we just keep on sluggin’.”
Swan looked at her mother and wanted-wanted very badly-to believe.
The Camaro continued into the night along the unfolding highway, and in the clouds hundreds of feet above, living chains of light linked across the heavens.
Five - [The Point of No Return]
11:50 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time
Blue Dome Mountain, Idaho
A gunmetal gray Ford Roamer recreational vehicle climbed the narrow, winding road that led to the top of Blue Dome Mountain, eleven thousand feet above sea level and sixty miles northwest of Idaho Falls. On both sides of the road, dense pine forests clung to harsh ribs of stone. The RV’s headlights bored holes in a low-lying mist, and the lights of the instrument panel glowed green on the drawn, tired face of the middle-aged man behind the wheel. In the reclined seat beside him, his wife was sleeping with a map of Idaho unfolded on her lap.
On the next long curve, the headlights hit a sign on the roadside that said, in bright orange luminescent letters: PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
Phil Croninger slowed the RV, but he had the plastic ID card they’d mailed him in his wallet, so he kept going past the forbidding sign and onward up the mountain road.
“Would they really do that, Dad?” his son asked, in a reedy voice, from the seat behind him.
“Do what?”
“Shoot trespassers. Would they really?”
“You know it. They don’t want anybody up here who doesn’t belong.” He glanced at the rearview mirror and caught his son’s green-daubed face floating like a Halloween mask over his shoulder. Father and son closely resembled each other; they both wore thick-lensed eyeglasses, had thin, lank hair and were slight and bony. Phil’s hair was threaded with gray and was receding rapidly, and the thirteen-year-old boy’s was dark brown, cut in straight bangs to hide the height of his forehead. The boy’s face was a study in sharp angles, like his mother’s; his nose, chin and cheekbones all seemed to be about to slice through his pallid skin, as if a second face were underneath the first and on the edge of being revealed. His eyes, magnified slightly by the lenses, were the color of ashes. He wore a T-shirt done in military camouflage colors, a pair of khaki shorts and hiking boots.
Elise Croninger stirred. “Are we there yet?” she asked sleepily.
“Almost. We should see something pretty soon.” It had been a long, tiring trip from Flagstaff, and Phil had insisted on traveling at night because, by his calculations,
Home, she thought. Home was a little speck called Blakeman, up in Rawlins County in the northwest corner of Kansas. She’d run away when she was sixteen, after her mother had died of cancer and her father had started going crazy on religion. She knew the old man hated her, and that’s why she’d left. What would home be like now, she wondered. She imagined her father would drop his teeth when he found out he had a granddaughter. Hell, no! I can’t go back there!
But she was already calculating the route she would take if she did decide to go to Blakeman: north on 135 to Salina, west through the sweeping corn and wheat fields on Interstate 70, north again on arrow-straight country roads. She could get enough money from Frankie to pay for the gas. “How’d you like to take a trip in the mornin’?”
“Where to?” She clutched the Cookie Monster tighter.
“Oh, just somewhere. A little town called Blakeman. Not much going on, the last time I was there. Maybe we could go there and rest for a few days. Get our heads together and think. Right?”
Swan shrugged. “I guess,” she said, but she didn’t care one way or the other.
Darleen turned the radio down and put her arm around her daughter. Looking up, she thought she saw a glimmer of light in the sky, but then it was gone. She squeezed Swan’s shoulder. “Just you and me against the world, kid,” she said. “And know what? We’re gonna win out yet, if we just keep on sluggin’.”
Swan looked at her mother and wanted-wanted very badly-to believe.
The Camaro continued into the night along the unfolding highway, and in the clouds hundreds of feet above, living chains of light linked across the heavens.
Five - [The Point of No Return]
11:50 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time
Blue Dome Mountain, Idaho
A gunmetal gray Ford Roamer recreational vehicle climbed the narrow, winding road that led to the top of Blue Dome Mountain, eleven thousand feet above sea level and sixty miles northwest of Idaho Falls. On both sides of the road, dense pine forests clung to harsh ribs of stone. The RV’s headlights bored holes in a low-lying mist, and the lights of the instrument panel glowed green on the drawn, tired face of the middle-aged man behind the wheel. In the reclined seat beside him, his wife was sleeping with a map of Idaho unfolded on her lap.
On the next long curve, the headlights hit a sign on the roadside that said, in bright orange luminescent letters: PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
Phil Croninger slowed the RV, but he had the plastic ID card they’d mailed him in his wallet, so he kept going past the forbidding sign and onward up the mountain road.
“Would they really do that, Dad?” his son asked, in a reedy voice, from the seat behind him.
“Do what?”
“Shoot trespassers. Would they really?”
“You know it. They don’t want anybody up here who doesn’t belong.” He glanced at the rearview mirror and caught his son’s green-daubed face floating like a Halloween mask over his shoulder. Father and son closely resembled each other; they both wore thick-lensed eyeglasses, had thin, lank hair and were slight and bony. Phil’s hair was threaded with gray and was receding rapidly, and the thirteen-year-old boy’s was dark brown, cut in straight bangs to hide the height of his forehead. The boy’s face was a study in sharp angles, like his mother’s; his nose, chin and cheekbones all seemed to be about to slice through his pallid skin, as if a second face were underneath the first and on the edge of being revealed. His eyes, magnified slightly by the lenses, were the color of ashes. He wore a T-shirt done in military camouflage colors, a pair of khaki shorts and hiking boots.
Elise Croninger stirred. “Are we there yet?” she asked sleepily.
“Almost. We should see something pretty soon.” It had been a long, tiring trip from Flagstaff, and Phil had insisted on traveling at night because, by his calculations,
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