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right again."
"Meaning Steven'll come back to us? You can promise that?"
She just looked at him. It was not an answer.
They learned they were in Lee Vining, a little tourist town that catered to
fishers and hikers. It sat on the eastern slope of the Sierra
Nevada, not far from Yosemite National Park. A straight drive of six to eight
hours would put them back in Los Angeles Back home.
It meant driving through the desert again, a different part of the same
Mojave they'd traversed when starting out, so long ago, on their interrupted
journey to Las Vegas. They would pass uncomfortably close to Barstow, to the
beginnings of bad memories and disconcerting images. No one paid any attention
to them as they exited the restaurant and returned to the motor home.
"What will you do when we reach Los Angeles?" Alicia spoke as she settled back
into her seat.
"Continue on my way, with or without you," Mouse replied. "We have shaken the
Anarchis for a while. I feel confident."
"When we picked you up you were going away from L.A.," Frank reminded her.
"Sometimes to get where you are going you have to return to where you have
been. Traveling a Moebius strip, you would call it. Not all roads take
familiar turnings."
"I don't understand," said Alicia.
"I barely understand myself. The way is difficult and complex. The
Vanishing Point does not lie on a map, but rather beyond it." She put a hand
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on the other woman's shoulder. "Do not worry about your son. He's all right.
I'm sure of it."
"I wish I could believe that. I wish I could believe you. I'd feel better if I
knew what this obulating was."
"Someday I think he'll explain it himself."
Only exhaustion prevented Frank from driving straight through. After what
they'd been through, what they'd experienced, it was a joy to eat ordinary
food, to use plain cash and receive change in kind, and to talk with people
who looked back at you out of eyes that did not glow. Even Burnfingers
Begay, who insisted he needed no sleep, confessed to being tired.
So they spent the night in the town of Mohave, luxuriating in the sappy,
reassuring programs and loud commercials on the TV in their room. Not even the
rattle of the freight trains that rumbled down the tracks that paralleled the
main street could prevent them from sleeping deeply and soundly. Nor could
Frank's unease at closing his eyes one more time in the desert.
He awoke with a start, to what he thought was growling outside their door. It
was only a couple of college students starting up their aged, reluctant sedan.
He slipped out of bed and cracked the door of their room. The morning smelled
of desert dampness, old boxcars, oil, and grease, and coffee.
All was as it had been when they'd turned out the lights and gone to sleep,
with the addition of sun. He felt almost human as he gently woke Alicia.
He made himself linger over breakfast. Waffles and bacon, eggs and hashbrowns
and toast. Burnfingers offered to pay for his own, but Frank grandly refused
the proffered doubloon.
It was evening when they finally entered Los Angeles. A bad time to be on the
road, but Frank didn't mind. There were only two kinds of traffic in
Los Angeles anymore anyway: rush hour and not quite rush hour. He delighted in
the sight of the overloaded eighteen-wheeler that crowded him from behind,
cheered the Corvette that cut him off in the slow lane. The freeway at rush
hour was an old friend newly revisited, harbinger of normalcy, a great rough
pet sucking in the sharp odor of unleaded gas and exhaling huge gouts of smog.
The lungs of the city breathed around him, and he knew he was home at last.
All that was missing was a familiar, whiny, complaining face from the back of
the motor home. Steven's continued absence was proof that memory and
imagination were not the same. Everything he remembered had happened. In his
mind's eye he saw his son happily paddling away into the sky accompanied by a
school of oversized angelfish. Not the last image one expected to have of
one's youngest child.
What had been so fascinating? What pull had been strong enough to draw him
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