This time, she got to pay it back pretty soon. No steam plume ascended to the heavens from some old clunker’s radiator. She inched along with everybody else, but she kept on inching. The accident involved four cars. Nobody seemed badly hurt. Men wearing wet clothes and glum expressions stalked around examining damage.
More gunk flew onto her windshield when the car ahead of her sped up as it found open road in front of it. Resignedly, she waited for the wipers to clear the smear, and to scratch up the glass some more. The only way she could have prevented that would have been to stay in Denver. This might be a bad bet, but that was a worse one-though poor Pickles would have disagreed.
She found more things to worry about. How much cash did she have left after that outrageous gas stop and air filter? Would it be enough to do her any good when she needed to fill up again? If it wasn’t, would the station guy take plastic? Or could she find a working ATM? Odds were decent, she supposed. If a gas pump was working, an ATM ought to be. For now, with the needle well above the H, she kept making miles.
Making miles, these days, came with a price, though, or at least it did in a big part of the country, very much including the part she was in. By the time she got over the state line into Kansas, her car was starting to sound like hell, even with the new air filter. How much volcanic crud was getting in despite the filter? Jesus, how much had got in when she took off the gas cap to fill the tank in Pueblo? What was all that shit doing to her engine? What was all the grit on the road doing to the rest of her moving parts? How long would they keep on moving? Long enough? She had to hope so.
In spite of the way the car snded, she smiled for a second. She must have been about ten years old when Rob, a couple of years older, opened some atlas or other to a map of the USA. “They’re gonna build a college right here,” he’d said, pointing to the border between the state she’d just left and the one she’d just entered.
She remembered going, “Yeah? So?” Big brothers were obnoxious enough even if you didn’t let them get the jump on you. When you did, they turned insufferable. She might not have known that word when she was ten, but she sure had understood the idea.
And she remembered his leer. He was just learning how to do it, which of course meant he overdid it. “So they’re gonna call it the First United Colorado-Kansas University,” he’d answered. “Only for short it’ll be-”
Vanessa had understood the idea of acronyms, too, even if she might not have known that word yet, either. “FUCK U!” she’d shrilled, and laughed so loud, and in such delighted horror, that their mother had come into her room to see what the hell was going on. They’d both solemnly denied everything, of course. With no more than an open atlas for evidence, Mom hadn’t been able to pin a crime on them.
Even then, you might have guessed Rob would end up playing in a band called Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. Vanessa didn’t much care for the music, though she had to admit some of the lyrics were clever. She had no idea where the band was right now-somewhere back East, if she remembered straight. If she did, the odds Rob was okay were good.
The odds on herself, or on Pickles, or on the Toyota… Red lights on the dashboard warned SERVICE ENGINE SOON. The car was running hot even though the eastbound US 50, heading away from the Rockies, tended downhill. If it crapped out, how far could she coast? Till the next hill, anyhow, and those were few and far between around here.
She drove through Coolidge, just over the border, almost before she realized it was there. If the place had ever had a hundred people, she would have been amazed. How many were still here, and how many had lit out when the supervolcano erupted? She’d never know.
US 50 paralleled the Arkansas River. The rain had washed some of the ash off the trees that grew alongside the river, so they looked a little more like their old selves. The river, by contrast, looked muddy and full and angry, even though it wasn’t raining all that hard.
For a little while, Vanessa wondered why. Then the old metaphorical lightbulb went on above her head. The rain was washing volcanic ash off the trees, sure, and off the grass, and off the ground generally. And it was washing that ash… straight into the river. Where else could the stuff go?
How long till the Arkansas started flooding? The Missouri was a lot closer to the eruption, which could only mean even more ash would be going into it. So it would start flooding sooner, if it hadn’t started already. The other rivers flowing from the Rockies toward the Mississippi would do the same thing.
They would also wash the volcanic ash toward and then into the Father of Waters. What would happen when the Big Muddy turned into the Big Muddier, and then into the Big Muddiest? Vanessa didn’t know in detail, but this was one of those times when the big picture did fine. The big picture was lots of muddy water spreading out over lots and lots of land.
Her motor coughed. She forgot about the big picture. Somebody might have dropped an ice cube down the back of her shirt. A human being who sounded like that would have been dying of emphysema. The enine was dying, too. A mechanic wouldn’t call it emphysema, but it amounted to the same thing.
Here came Syracuse. A roadside sign proudly proclaimed you could get gas there. It also said you could get food. Chances were you could get gas from the food, too, even if the sign didn’t tell you that.
Go? Stop? Did she want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere if the car quit between towns? Wasn’t this already the middle of nowhere? Was she better off with other people or as far away from them as she could get?
She kept going. Whether that made her an optimist or a pessimist was one more thing she’d think about when she had time. If she ever did. Which looked less and less likely.
After Syracuse, signs announced that the next town ahead was Garden City. By the way they announced it, Garden City might actually be something. It had hotels and motels and fast-food joints and meat-packing plants. Some of the signs for those were in both English and Spanish. She’d seen the like in L.A. and Denver, of
course. Spanish was the language in which a lot of hard work got done in the USA.
But in a place like Garden City, Kansas? Evidently. It turned out not to matter to Vanessa. The engine coughed again. This time, it sounded more like Cheyne-Stokes breathing than emphysema. And, like somebody with Cheyne-Stokes breathing, her car died. All the red and yellow warning lights came on. As she’d figured she would, she rolled as far as she could. Then she steered over to the shoulder and stopped.
As soon as the motion ceased, Pickles quit sounding like an air-raid siren. Relishing the silence, Vanessa spoke out loud: “Well, what do I do now?”
Her basic choices were sitting tight or getting out and walking toward Garden City. If she sat tight, she was counting on somebody halfway decent rescuing her before she had to start walking to Garden City. If she got out, she’d feel like a snail without its shell. And she and Pickles-especially Pickles-would be breathing the outside air that had just killed her car.
In a TV show, they’d go to commercials. When they came back, she’d find the right answer with the greatest of ease. Or they’d cut away to her somewhere else, and she’d explain to an admiring friend how she’d got there.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t cut away from life. She had no idea what the right answer was, or even if there was one. She hadn’t come this far by sitting tight, though. She got Pickles and an abridged version of her stuff-iron rations, tampons, a few socks and panties, and an umbrella-and started walking.
She was glad for the umbrella right away. The rain was so mixed with ash that everything it touched got dirtier. That included her jeans from the knees down, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t do anything about anything, except hope her feet didn’t blister before she got to Garden City.