to the police station, where he reported the robbery and beating and waited while an officer filled out forms. He had to tell the story twice. They said they would check on the watchman, Dave Petra. They wanted him to go back with them to the scene of the crime, but he resisted, saying he was late already. “Besides,” he said, “the scene of the crime is portable. It's parked outside.” It was barely seven o'clock, and the nightshift was still on duty. Two drunks sat on a bench with their heads between their knees, and a lunatic mouthed inaudible screams from within the soundproof holding pen at the far end of the room. The officer asked if anyone else had been in the truck cab lately. “Not for a long time,” Lafleur said, remembering how sometimes one of the children, or even Penny, used to ride with him on short runs. The officer glanced alertly at him, then touched his arm and asked if he was all right. “Sure,” Lafleur said.
He waited again while two officers prowled around the inside of his cab. They dusted for prints. Lafleur walked several blocks down to a cash machine to get more money. There was morning fog, growing radiant in the sunlight. He called Rome from a phone booth to let them know he was coming. Again he got the woman with the impeccable voice. He called Zymanski's to ask about Dave Petra. The graveyard watchman told him Dave hadn't said anything about a robbery. Lafleur set the receiver on its hooks and stood for a moment, puzzled. He walked back to the station. The police said they would let him know of any developments, and he left, jigsawing along the streets to the freeway, which took him over the river, across town, and then southward on an upgrade. The fog dwindled.
He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the shift lever. He felt more than listened for the raw roar of the truck's engine, for the vibration of the suspension and wheels, and for the load, the weight of the trailer on the hitch, for how weight bore up on the swivel when he took a curve. The motion and manipulation of the truck, and the taking in of data, touching the wheel and shift knob, those palpable tools of leverage, began to clear his head. The rain had stopped during the night, but the pavement was wet. His tires hummed and hissed.
At Multnomah Boulevard he hit the half-mile downgrade and let the truck ride up to seventy for the sake of the coming mile-and-a-half grade. On the grade he geared down and had slowed to forty-five by the time he reached the crest. He passed the Lake Oswego exit, the Ethan Allen funeral home—an excessively imposing place with a line of pillars in front. It was set in manicured grounds and designed in the federal style, like the back of a nickel. His mother was there in the adjoining cemetery. Gus had reserved a plot. Nicole had a plaque. He passed an industrial park. The warehouses looked ghostly against the backdrop of forest. He crossed the Tualatin River, eased back up to seventy, and entered the flat of the rural valley.
The sun glinted horizontally at his mirrors. The moisture on the pavement lifted in steamy curls. Again he crossed the Willamette, then geared down for the off-ramp, took it, and headed west toward his place. He drove seven miles on a paved road through the seed fields. Dense mist hung above the ground. He drove into the woods. The mist draped the tree trunks. He turned onto the gravel road, drove another half mile, and unconsciously began to ease up on the accelerator as he approached Blaylock's place. He saw pink, an expanse of wall shining like fluorescence through the fog, then bits of equipment, dark shovels, booms, and engine compartments sticking through the fog. As he neared he saw the tangled saplings and blackberry bushes, and the equipment in greater detail, and the looming pink house with its shades drawn, everywhere the shadow and damp and diaphanous white shrouding of fog the same color exactly as the metal roofs of the outbuildings in back. What he saw was how he felt, his mind in a shimmering ground fog with the shapes inexactly perceived. This was where he should have been twelve hours ago. His hand rested on the shift lever. The LeTourneau was gone. His truck slid slowly by. He discovered that he'd been holding his breath.
He let air out and accelerated. The trailer boomed as the hitch took up slack. The silver, fog-draped woods slithered by, then he slowed again for the toolshed. Alder branches strummed the ribs of his truck as he turned into the drive. The fog deepened. The front of his shed became obscurely visible. Jones leaped out of the fog and balanced on her hind legs, making him jerk with surprise. The taut chain held her up like a man. A blue heron sailed over the shed with its wings spread, braking for the shallows at the edge of the river. Jones stayed there like an ape with a flat dog head. Her front paws wagged eagerly and her tongue flapped at the side of her misshapen snout.
7
The great Basin stretches from southeastern Oregon southward through Nevada and inland southern California nearly to Arizona, and eastward across Nevada into Utah. Cut off from the sea, it is actually a series of basins that drain into one another. The evaporation rate exceeds ten inches a month, more than a hundred times the average rainfall.
In the old days, the people ate roots, seeds, piñon nuts, and grass, any plant that gave nourishment, and rabbits, squirrels, insects, worms, birds, lizards, every form of animal. They collected fish at the annual runs on the few waterways that entered the basin. This was their trade, interior and stable. Goods came in occasionally, but rarely went out. “Almost like plants,” wrote Colonel Fremont, “these people seemed to have adapted themselves to the soil and to be growing on what the immediate locality afforded.”
They were like air ferns, economical to the extreme. They lived the lateral existence of gatherers, attuned to natural detail. Their skin was like the sand, moistened by blood. Even today, most of the small towns are like tiny conductive densenings on a vast circuit board, while the big towns, Reno, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City, soak up money and religion for their densely inward games of chance.
Hector Zeta, Manifesto for Spirits
LAFLEUR LOADED UP his personal articles at the tool shed, changed his clothes, and pulled out. To Rome, he took the route out of the valley and through the mountains by way of Corvallis, Lebanon, Waterloo, Foster, Sweet Home, and Cascadia to Sisters, the last town low on the eastern slope of the Cascade Range and named after the mountains, the snow-capped Three Sisters. The mountain country was cool and dense, a tangle of waterways, rock, and woods. The winding roadway made the driving intense. He pulled off not far beyond Santiam Pass to let his brakes cool. Jones jumped out from the seat, grunting heavily when she hit the ground.
He looked at his dozer, secure in its chocks, and stepped up on the truck bumper to check the backhoe. The chains were snug. He circled the rig, kicking tires, then stopped, leaned against the front bumper, and stared out at a charcoal-colored lava flow ringed sparsely with ponderosa pines. The conversation with Penny this morning and the robbery at Zymanski's last night seemed like figments, small as cocoons and heavy and elusive as mercury. He needed to bathe. He could smell his own odor coming through his shirt.
A magpie dropped out of a pine and jumped across the lava flow near the road. A second magpie scolded from the tree. Jones pissed on the rock. It was clear that this was the eastern side of the summit: dry earth and desiccated rock, twisted ponderosas, bright sky, bright black-and-white scavenger birds. One magpie made the needles at the ends of the limbs quiver as it jumped and cawed at the other's stiff-legged tour—looking for what, he wondered: seeds, granules, moth wings, larvae, mouse feces, bits of animal hide? Jones crapped, and when she left it, the bird hopped over and pecked at the pile. Jones looked back at the bird. The bird in the tree jumped and cawed. It sounded like a crow, like Gus trying to laugh.
Lafleur helped the dog into the truck, got in himself, and drove down from the mountains with surprising quickness to Sisters. The town was dressed up for the tourist trade. It had harmonized facades on its buildings and was organized, he imagined, to circulate bills of small denomination with great rapidity. A place of scrubbing, wiping, and arduous quickness, clean fingernails and shiny shoes and an infinity of price tags, Sisters sold curiosities along with the hamburgers, milkshakes, and fishing tackle: postcards, decals, signs, “Back Off!” mud flaps, dancing “Fuck You” fingers to mount in the rear windows of cars, bumper stickers that ranged from scatology to moral advice, something for everyone, toy guns, pocket knives, paperweights, ashtrays, polished rocks on chains, Indian headdresses made out of turkey feathers, scorpion and rattler tails mounted in clear plastic blocks, pornographic playing cards, coffee mugs with obscene slogans, crystal balls with naked women inside them, crucifixes, Saint Christopher