Day-Glo condoms, and rubber monster masks. It was a gateway, a complicated, thousand-headed creature of prey crouched at the verge of mountain and desert. Lafleur drove through.
Soon the three mountains rose from the flat on his right, white and looming. As he continued, they stood in his rearview mirrors, gradually growing smaller and more distinct. The Three Sisters became a measure of his progress. The pines were a measure. Back at the summit, the firs, cedars, spruces, and white pines had given way to yellow pulpwood, the ponderosas. Outside Sisters, the ponderosas dwindled. Water-starved, they grew scraggly and jackish, then they gave ground to the small piñon pines. When the piñons vanished it was just sand and scrub. He had slipped into the northwestern edge of the Great Basin. The aching in his head was a measure, too. It had spread down from his neck to his shoulders, slowly softened and enlarged like a web. Jones had her snout on his leg.
He would pass through two towns of size before reaching Rome, first Bend and then, better than a hundred miles later, Burns, those two dispersal centers where the sun would glint off the plastic and sheet metal of new construction. Otherwise, the tiny towns perched alongside the highway measured the hugeness of space, and his progress into something like nothingness…scrub, barren sand, harsh sun, and mountains in the distance, the three white ones quivering in his mirrors for miles, and the lower blue-colored ridges to the north and south like remote islands at sea, and the tiny towns that looked precisely like what they were and, he supposed, had been from the start: combination fuel sources, post offices, spare way stations for travelers—the faintly marked indices of a tenuous economy spread thinly across space.
The three white mountains occupied his mirrors, then they were lost in accordance with the long, slow rise and fall of the road. He would think they were gone, then they would come back again, surprising him with their whiteness, miles away, well after he had passed through Bend. Back and forth the mountains went. Long after they were gone for good he thought they must still return to his mirrors. They were there, all right, behind him somewhere, as luminous as memory.
Each little town consisted of two or three wind-scoured buildings, sometimes one, and had small mutilations of shed and fence, piles of metal, and had nurtured, usually, a few scorched trees. Sometimes there was just the one bleached, lonesome building standing against the waste. His road map gave them names: Tumalo, Millican, Brothers, Hampton, Riley, Hines, Lawen, Crane, Princeton, and Burns Junction on the way to Rome. He peered out at these places as he passed. Jones sat up and pressed her warm body against his. He pushed her off. She licked him in the face. He jerked and shoved her away. She snaked back to rest her snout on his leg again and left a widening patch of drool on his trousers.
The steering wheel trembled and the truck and trailer jolted rhythmically over the seams in the pavement. The engine roared softly. So straight was the highway and so monotonous the landscape it began to seem as if he were not there, hardly driving, hardly needing to touch the wheel. He wondered about the desolation of living in such a place. He made up sad, barely ambulatory lives: going to the hydrant outside, going to the cupboard for food, the husband and wife brushing shoulders, and the two of them staring across the table at each other with hollow eyes, wondering what to do, going to bed to make love, maybe, for a transfusion of entanglement, breath, and wet, and coming back out lightheaded and wondering what to do next, waiting for something to happen, a telephone call, a change in the weather, a breeze, a cloud, anything, or children watching the road, wondering what would happen if one of those vehicles that sped by, such as his, were to stop and pull in. He imagined such lives as he drove. It was his desolation he pondered, however. It was the half-crazed longing he had but only faintly understood in himself to be utterly empty, to scorch out his troubles and aching. Miles into the desert, beyond Burns, he passed under a line of high-tension wires mounted on derricks. Startled, he looked to his left, northward. A file of derricks strung together by gleaming cables extended to the distant hills. Metal glittered up there at the outer reach of visibility. Feed lines that he could not see dropped from the derricks to the ground. The Bonneville Power Administration had claimed an alley out of nothingness and filled it with high voltage.
A half hour later he was startled again by a Pacific Northwest Bell transmitting station: a low building, a tower made out of girders, steel guy lines tracing triangles in the air, and mounted on the tower four satellite receivers. The tower and cable and dish receivers shone in the sun. He cruised by at seventy-five. The transmitting station grew suddenly huge as he neared it and stuttered brilliantly in his eyes as he passed. He blinked and held the image in the back of his head, that thing that caught and sent on the voices from the airwaves through here—nowhere—to somewhere else.
He went through Crane, a slightly larger town than the others because of the station, he guessed, though with its line of square houses and dirty yards it still looked lonesome enough. His head felt big, but as he looked out at the desert his thinking tightened. His lassitude began to narrow toward the more alert melancholy of the good stranger. Maybe it was the vastness of the desert that did it to him, the barrenness of rock and sand growing insistent, and the way it refused to define itself as he roared through it, and something about the corporations—Bonneville Power, Pacific Northwest Bell—their extraneousness and their inevitability. The monoliths had left their tracings here, and his paranoia was stirred. He sharpened up. He was in transit as a loosely strung-together collection of disparate parts, truck and trailer joined by a hitch and loaded with cable and chain, a backhoe, bulldozer, cans, clothing, tools, dog, and tangled-up, stinking, earthbound man—on his way to scratch up the ground himself.
He rubbed Jones's ear, digging his fingers into the cartilage. The dog squirmed with gratitude. The cab reeked of dog and sweat. His shirt was stuck to the seat. He had a growing sense of the desert's abstractness, huge and undefining, which gave it the character of God. As he remembered, it was country near here for which the MX missiles on tracks had been proposed. Maybe it was a perfect place for a prison, too. He thought of the blueprints: housing unit and support building, gymnasium, industry building, high-security cells, shakedown rooms, contact and noncontact visiting areas, towers and control rooms, playing fields, and the cages and fences, fences upon fences, fences with razor wire, electrified fences…the monkey's tail. Growing apprehensive and a little wild as he neared his destination, he thought that he had entered one of those Biblical testing grounds he'd learned about in catechism classes, the tortuous wildernesses: Beer-sheba, Jeshimon, Shur, Paran, Negeb, or Zin. He wondered if he'd been longing for such emptiness, for a scorching. He almost felt as though he were at last entering the actual, barren, geometrical, overwhelming nightmare of his boyhood.
Rome was a three-building town. He pulled off onto the shoulder, dug his directions out of his hip pocket, and spread the moist paper out over the dashboard, studied it, then looked across the highway at the gravel road he was to take. It passed by one of the buildings, an old house freshly painted white that did multiple duty, it appeared, as a cafe, gas station, and post office. Its whiteness was brilliant in the early-evening sun. A bleached American flag hung dead in the air above the doorway. To his right was a second cafe, a rundown stucco affair. It sold gas, too. Out back were locust trees and a series of jerrybuilt pens. He saw a calf and a donkey, then a large sow dragged herself into view. The place had beer signs in its windows.
He could see the third building in his mirrors. It was a mobile home set off from the highway a half mile back. As he had passed it he had seen a sign advertising automotive parts and stones: geodes, agate, petrified wood. A small wrecking yard surrounded the mobile home. In his mirrors he saw the heat shimmering above the car bodies. Two pickups were parked in front of the cafe on his right. A car was parked at the cafe on the other side of the highway, but he saw no one, not a soul. Just ahead was a startling swatch of deep green, an irrigated alfalfa field, then a bridge that spanned the Owyhee River, and beyond the bridge and stretching into the distance along the far side of the riverbed was a line of pale-green limestone cliffs.
He glanced to the right at the beer signs in the windows of the second cafe. He was tempted to go get a cold six-pack, but he put his rig in gear and pulled across the highway onto the gravel road. Dust mushroomed behind him and his trailer clanked in the potholes. He passed irrigated fields and counted a dozen or more widely spaced farms, low wooden frame houses with attics, wooden barns, and the machinery in antic rows—protruding levers and perforated tractor seats and cockeyed wheels—alongside