“And this little drop goes to market, and this little drop stays home—”
“A little of the worlds energy is gathered up into a river,” she said, “and the water makes sure it’s never empty.”
Iowa City and Des Moines. Rolling hills in eastern Iowa, then the plains in the west. The highway was straight as a die west of Des Moines, and almost perfectly flat. They crossed the Missouri into Nebraska and stopped at the terminal in Omaha. They had covered almost five hundred miles since leaving Chicago ten hours ago.
They had half an hour to eat before they had to reboard the bus. There was a restaurant in the bus terminal but it didn’t feel right energetically, and when she closed her eyes she saw slivers of broken glass. The people in the booths and at the counter had the air of the hunt about them, as if they were all at once predators and victims.
She took Thom’s arm and led him back into the terminal and across the lobby to the Farnam Avenue entrance. On the sidewalk, she turned without hesitation to the right and walked half a block, where they found a brightly-lit cafeteria between two stores that had closed for the weekend.
The place was clean, the prices reasonable, and the food decent. An old man with wispy white hair smiled shyly from an adjacent table, then went back to his newspaper crossword puzzle. On the sound system, an orchestra was playing “Moonlight in Vermont.”
He went back for a second glass of milk. She sipped her tea. He said, “Mom, you knew this place’d be here, didn’t you?”
“I knew something would be here.”
“Did you like see a picture of it?”
“Not exactly. Let me try to remember.” She closed her eyes. “I sort of saw us sitting at a table.”
“You saw us?”
“I saw the idea of us,” she said. “And I walked to where that would be, and here we are.”
“This is pretty weird, Mom.”
“No kidding.”
“Were those Indians in the bus station? Over by the lockers?”
“They certainly looked like Indians.”
“Is this the West?”
“Well, I think so. We’re west of the Mississippi. We just crossed the Missouri. Of course you don’t have to be this far west to see Indians. There are Indians all over the country.”
“Indians. Can I have a horse?”
“A seeing-eye horse.”
He started to giggle and was quickly convulsed with laughter. “Oh, you’re bad,” he said. “You’re really bad.”
They were back in their same seats when the bus pulled out of Omaha. The thin man with the cough syrup had gone, and in his place sat a light-skinned black woman wearing a scarf. The middle-aged hand-holders were gone, too, and a young soldier in uniform sprawled over both the seats they had occupied.
They crossed the Platte, skirted Lincoln, crossed the Platte again at Grand Island, hugged its northern bank for a hundred miles and crossed it a third time, following the south fork and then Lodgepole Creek into southern Wyoming. They had another meal break in Cheyenne, let off passengers, took on passengers, and rolled on west through Laramie and Rock Springs.
It was dark as they rode through Wyoming. But she could see. They reached the foothills of the Rockies as they neared Laramie, and she saw the mountains and felt the magnetic power of them. She saw bighorn sheep, surefooted on the sheer slopes, the rutting males clashing head-on in ritual combat, saw mountain goats white and silent, gazing motionless over the valleys. She saw the mountains forming, willing their way upward out of the earth’s convexity, stretching like plant growth toward the sun. She saw mountain men, fur-clad hunters and trappers as solitary as bears or badgers. She saw prospectors, she saw hard-rock miners from Wales and Cornwall. She saw the buffalo dying, carcasses rotting in the sun, and she saw the land sliced by rail lines and cordoned off with fences. She saw Stone Age people who’d lived in the mountains and left not a trace of their presence, and she saw Indian wars, and she saw ranch houses with big dish TV antennas and solar-powered generators.
Thom slept at her side. He woke up once outside of Rock Springs and walked up the aisle to the lavatory, then returned smelling faintly of liquid soap and slipped back effortlessly into sleep. She dozed off herself, and when she opened her eyes he was already awake and they were coming into Salt Lake City.
They had almost four hours before their bus left for Portland. They checked their bags and had breakfast, then followed signs to Temple Square, where they joined a group for a guided tour of Mormon headquarters. You couldn’t enter the temple unless you were a paid-up tithing Mormon, but there was a great deal else to see, and just by standing in front of the temple she could sense the spiritual balance within it.
After the tour he said, “Mom, your eyes are getting worse, aren’t they?”
“How can you tell?”
“I don’t know, I just can. They are, aren’t they?”
“The tunnel’s narrowing. And there’s a little less light at the end of it.”
“But you’re not afraid?”
“Oh, a little bit, Thommy. The idea of not having my eyes to see with is scary. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m getting more vision than I’m giving up.”
“Why can’t you have both?”
“Some people probably can. But in my case I evidently have to let go of one in order to open up to the other.”
“And the way you can see now is better?”
“It’s better for me. At least it is right now.”
“That was great the way we found that place in Omaha. Can you see where we’re going to have lunch?”
“We just had breakfast.”
“Well, aren’t we going to eat before our bus leaves?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well—”
“How does Chinese sound?”
“Is that what you see when you close your eyes?”
“Nope. It just occurred to me we haven’t had any in a while.”
“You know where there’s a Chinese restaurant?”
“No, but somebody else probably does. Sometimes you let your inner vision guide you, Sport, and other times you ask a cop for directions.”
On the bus he said, “What happens when we get to Portland?”
“I think we get a room for the night. We could probably both stand a night’s sleep in a real bed. And I know we could use a bath, and we’re not likely to smell all that sweeter twelve hours from now.”
“Is that when we get into Portland?”
“He said fourteen hours. I forget where we stop. Boise, but there was someplace else.”
“I wasn’t paying attention. Mom? Besides a hotel room, what else do we do in Portland?”
“Get on another bus.”
“We’re not staying in Portland?”
“Just long enough to sleep and shower. And eat — God knows I wouldn’t dream of making you miss a meal.”
“Those spareribs were good.”
“I’m glad you approved.”
“So was the lo mein. Do you suppose the Chinese people at the restaurant were Mormons?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Aha, something you don’t know. Are there any Chinese Mormons?”
“Didn’t they say so on the tour? There must be, they send missionaries everywhere. Why?”
“I just wondered. Where do we go from Portland?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But I will.”
In downtown Portland they shared a fifteen-dollar room at the Jack London Hotel on South Alder. The bathroom was down the hall. They took turns soaking in the huge footed tub, then got into their beds. He fell asleep right away. She lay awake for a while listening to the man next door, whose cough sounded serious, and possibly tubercular.