Friday morning I woke up with the light hitting my eyes through the windshield. When I sat up I saw that the sun was just rising and that Wade had covered me and Ruby with a couple of sweatshirts dotted with paint stains and one of his old coats. It was chilly inside the car, and I knew it was early by the way the light looked outside-all soft and glowing.
The car sat in a paved parking lot surrounded by mountains that were covered in fog; that fog could’ve even been clouds for how high it seemed like we were. Ours was the only car in the parking lot. I slipped my shoes on as quiet as I could and wrapped one of Wade’s sweatshirts around my shoulders, and I opened the door and slipped out and pushed it shut behind me. Wade was laying across the front seat, his eyes closed and his arms pulled up inside the sleeves of his T-shirt.
A little sidewalk ran around the edge of the parking lot, and just beyond it a guardrail kept you from getting too close to the edge. I walked right up to it and leaned against it and looked down into the valley, where the fog was thicker than it was up where we’d spent the night. When I was in the fifth grade my class took a field trip to Crowders Mountain in Gastonia, and that seemed like the tallest thing I’d ever seen, especially after we hiked all the way to the top. But now, standing where I was standing and seeing what I was seeing, I realized that I’d never seen anything like these mountains before.
Behind me, a car door opened and closed quietly, and when I turned I saw Wade standing there looking around like I’d just been doing a few minutes before.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re on the Blue Ridge Parkway,” Wade said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a road that runs through the mountains from Virginia clear down to South Carolina.” He rubbed at his eyes. “It’s the country’s most visited national park,” he said, his words turning into a yawn that finished with him stretching his arms over his head.
“You wouldn’t know it right now,” I said, looking around at all the empty parking spaces.
“It’s early,” he said. “People will be up here soon enough to check out the leaves.”
I hadn’t noticed the leaves yet. You could see their color through the fog in the valley right below us: gold and red and some green here and there. It seemed like the fog couldn’t cover the tops of the tall mountains, and up on top of them almost all the leaves were gold. I couldn’t believe that just last night we’d been down in Charleston, where the air was salty and hot and sticky, and now we were up here looking at these mountains, my breath coming out of my mouth like smoke every time I breathed.
“Look back here,” Wade said. “Back behind us.” He pointed to a huge mountain on the other side of the parking lot that you could just barely see through the clouds. A red-and-white antenna tower sat up on top of it. “That’s Mount Pisgah,” he said, looking up at it with his hands cupped around his eyes even though the sun wasn’t hardly out yet. He dropped his hands and looked over at me. “You know where that name comes from?”
“No,” I said.
“From the Bible,” he said. “God told Moses to climb to the top of Mount Pisgah so that he could finally see the Promised Land.” He looked back over at the mountain. “It wasn’t this mountain-that one was out in the desert somewhere-but that’s where the name comes from.”
“Did you make that up?”
“No,” he said.
“Then how’d you know it?”
“What?” he said. “You think I can’t know things just because I know them?” He stood there looking at me like I’d hurt his feelings, and then he smiled and pulled a brochure out of his back pocket and showed it to me. “I got this at the rest stop last night,” he said. “I needed a little bedtime reading.” He opened it and spread it out on the hood of the car. “The early explorers who found this mountain climbed to the top of it and thought they’d found the Promised Land when they saw what waited for them on the other side. Those guys were heading west, just like us.”
“Where are we going exactly?” I asked.
“St. Louis,” he said. “I thought y’all wanted to see some baseball.”
“After that.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Oklahoma? Texas? California?” His eyes got bigger as he listed the names. “We could keep going clear on to the Pacific Ocean if we wanted to.”
“Then what?” I asked. “We can’t live in this car forever.”
“I don’t know,” Wade said again. “I guess that’s why they call it an adventure.”
Ruby opened the car door and climbed out. Wade’s other sweatshirt was wrapped around her shoulders. She looked around the parking lot at all the mountains and the fog; she’d never even been to Crowders Mountain like I had, and I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Mount Pisgah,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because we’re looking for the Promised Land,” Wade said, folding up the brochure and sliding it into his back pocket. He winked at me. “And we’re almost there.”
The next couple days passed by like blurry dreams of riding in the car on back roads and getting lost late at night in places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Cookeville, Tennessee, where no stores or restaurants were ever open and there was never any place to use the bathroom. Wade had told us it would take about fifteen hours to drive from Charleston to St. Louis, but we were in the car a lot longer than that. It began to feel like we were just driving in circles, and it seemed like there were times when Wade had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do once we got there. We went long stretches without talking, me and Ruby looking out the windows and Wade trying to tune in baseball games on the radio to see where McGwire and Sosa were in the home-run race. It seemed like Wade hadn’t hardly closed his eyes since we’d left Myrtle Beach, and while he drove he told us long stories about playing for the Rangers and throwing batting practice to Sosa: how Sammy couldn’t hit any of his pitches except his fastball; how, back then, Sammy was just a skinny little Dominican kid who didn’t even speak English. The stories and the radio games all ran together, and before long I started picturing Sammy Sosa as a poor, skinny teenager in a Cubs uniform catching McGwire’s pop-ups out in the outfield.
By Saturday night, McGwire had hit sixty home runs to Sosa’s fifty-eight, which meant that McGwire only needed one more to tie Maris’s record. Saturday’s game was in Cincinnati, and Wade said there was no way McGwire would tie the record there; he said that was the kind of thing a ballplayer wanted to do on his home field, and he had no doubt that McGwire would wait on the record until him and Sosa were both in St. Louis on Monday, and he promised us that we’d all be there to see it.
Wade didn’t have tickets to Monday’s game, but he told us he had a feeling they wouldn’t be too hard to come by. The radio had been saying that just one ticket might cost as much as $1,000, so I knew Wade’s hope for a ticket had more to do with the money he had hidden in that black bag than any kind of luck or know-how he pretended to have.
Late Monday morning we drove into St. Louis. Just as we were crossing a river, Wade slowed down and pointed at something on the other side of the bridge. “See that right there?” he asked. It was a huge white half circle that looked to be sitting in a field off to our right. “That’s the St. Louis Arch.” He looked at us in the rearview mirror. “They call it the ‘Gateway to the West.’ ”
Ruby moved over to my side of the backseat to see it better. “What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a sculpture, kind of,” Wade said. “And it’s a monument too.”
“How’s it a gateway?” I asked.
“That’s just symbolism,” he said. “Like a metaphor or an analogy. You know what that means?”