"The simple things first," said Skyler.
They picked their way through Chicago and then to the west, where the Great Plains opened up and stretched before them, and their spirits lifted. They flew along the interstates, whizzing by small towns and fields dotted with cattle.
As they drove, they talked; Jude was increasingly impressed with Skyler, and he could tell that Tizzie was, too. He had learned quickly how to navigate the modern world; he had already mastered many of the minor everyday tasks that were second nature to them — placing phone calls, pumping gas, tipping in the roadside diners — and he was taking on new ones with gusto. His naivete had an optimistic strain to it that was appealing, Jude thought. He also thought it contrasted starkly with his own sometimes weary malaise.
They were barreling through Kansas on Route 70, when Skyler made a sudden announcement.
"I want to drive," he said. "Teach me."
"For Christ's sake," said Jude. "We're in a hurry. We can't stop for that."
But Tizzie, in the backseat, decided the issue.
"Why not?" she said. "It'll give us a break."
So they pulled off the interstate and found a back road between two fields of corn, waist high. Jude stopped the car in the center of the deserted road and walked around to the passenger seat; he felt the heat rising up from the concrete and heard cicadas buzzing in the heavy late morning air. Skyler slid over behind the wheel. Jude explained the controls, outlined the rules of the road, and helped him lift off the hand brake. The car moved forward slowly, tentatively. Skyler rotated the wheel to one side and then the other, and the car swayed gently, stuttering ahead as he gave it a bit more gas.
"Nothing to it," said Skyler, still gripping the wheel tightly. He concentrated on the road, then looked over at Jude and grinned.
"Way to go!" shouted Tizzie from the back.
"Not bad, just take it easy," put in Jude.
Skyler leaned into the gas pedal, and the engine leapt to life with a power that astonished him. He took his foot off, steered for a while, then gunned it, and the car took off at high speed, swerving madly. Jude was thrown into the door.
"Slow down! Slow down!" he screamed.
His head fell below the window, and he could see only Skyler, frozen in place. But he could feel the tires striking rocks and kicking up dirt, and he could hear grass slapping the undercarriage, and then suddenly the car rocked violently to one side, plunging downward but still moving ahead. Above, stalks of corn beat against the windshield.
The car stopped with a shudder. An ear of corn leaned in through the open window and dust circled inside. Skyler sat there, still with two hands on the wheel, stunned and white. Jude turned around to look at Tizzie, who was sitting on the floor, her eyes open wide in alarm. When she saw how alarmed Jude was, she began to giggle and then to laugh out loud, until Jude, too, began laughing. And then finally Skyler joined in, his laugh sounding an awful lot like Jude's, deep and resonant.
Later, they flagged down a farmer on a tractor, who hitched a chain to the car and pulled it out of the cornfield. They paid him ten bucks, then went to a diner for lunch, turkey sandwiches drowning in thick brown gravy. Halfway through, Jude looked across the table at Skyler and knew with an abrupt clarity what he was thinking.
"You want to try it again, don't you?" he said.
Skyler said he did.
"Not on my life."
And they all laughed again.
On the outskirts of Denver, they turned south on Route 25 and saw a blinking neon lasso, a Frontier Motel sign. They pulled up before a two-story lime green fake facade whose front entrance was flanked by wagon wheels missing three and four spokes. A young heavyset black woman in a checkered blouse with a gray cowboy hat sat behind the desk and slid registration cards over to them.
"Two rooms or three?" she said.
"Three," said Tizzie.
They filled out the small white cards with phony names — Skyler leaning over to crib the same surname as Jude — and carried their luggage down a claustrophobic hallway, turned a corner past an ice chest and Coke machine, and came to their rooms, side by side. Jude's was in the middle. Slipping the punch-coded cards into the slots at the same time, they heard three clicks in succession and opened their doors one after another — a sequence that struck Jude as vaguely comical.
"I'm beat," said Tizzie, looking at them. "See you tomorrow."
They exchanged good nights.
Jude's room was a standard L, built of cinder blocks painted a pale yellow. It contained a double bed without a headboard, polyurethane curtains of white and silver thread, and a long dresser of fake oak veneer under a mirror stuck to the wall with clear plastic fasteners. On the dresser, next to a metal beer bottle opener screwed into the wall, was a TV set. Light from a bedroom lamp cast an oval upon the ceiling.
Jude sat on the bed, reached for the phone receiver, and punched in a long sequence of numbers that he knew by heart. Six rings — it was slow this time of night in the city room — and a voice finally answered.
"Metro."
"Hello — who's this?"
A clerk paused — suspicious, but recognizing a certain authority behind the question — and gave his first name.
"This is Jude. I'm just calling to check in… to say, you know I've been out for a while, sick, and I'll probably be out for a while longer."
He thought he sounded a little too uncertain.
"I'll be in touch, when I'm feeling better, I just—"
"Jude." The clerk had finally cottoned on. "That you?"
"Yes."
The line went muffled, the sound of a receiver being covered. It lasted quite a while, maybe a minute or longer. Jude was about to hang up when the voice came back on.
"Where are you?"
"I'm here. Home. Still sick. I don't need anything. Just checking in, to let you know that, ah, I'm getting a little better."
The receiver was covered again, and this time Jude did hang up.
Afterward, he felt stupid. He shouldn't have called — or he should have called someone else, a reporter at home, to pass on the message. Could they trace the call? Why would they do that? Now you're really turning paranoid.
Still, the call preyed on him, made him feel exposed. Up to now, he had felt protected in that great anonymity of the vast American heartland, another piece of flotsam on that big prairie ocean. One phone call had ruined that — it had made him feel connected again to the whole damn nightmare.
He kicked off his shoes and lay on the bed to watch television. It didn't help. A vague depression settled over him, a mood of anxiety to which he was unaccustomed. He thought of knocking on Tizzie's door, or even Skyler's — inviting them out for a drink. He walked to the window, lifted an edge of the curtain and looked outside. A traffic light was blinking on a street across the parking lot — the night was gloomy, uninviting, a little threatening. He turned away, undressed and climbed into bed.
Night sounds came in from all sides. A murmur of conversation, the canned laughter from a TV. He strained to hear something from Tizzie's room, but without success. He shut the sounds out as best he could and then, mercifully, drifted off to sleep. But it was not a peaceful sleep because it was split with nightmares playing off his claustrophobia — long, harrowing dramas of running away from unspeakable horrors, crawling through tunnels, dashing across dark underground caverns. He awoke with a start, sweating, one sheet wrapped around his left leg.
Gradually, his heart stopped racing. He leaned over and looked at the numbers on the clock, gleaming like red cat's eyes: 3:00. He settled back, his head on the pillow, able now to distinguish shapes in the darkness, and he thought he heard something, a light tread in the corridor outside. He listened intently: was that not the sound of a doorknob turning slowly, a door creaking open? He leapt out of bed, put his ear to the door. Nothing. It was gone — but had it been there?