San Francisco waited out there, pining for them beyond the windshield. Terence named the dog Larry for Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti had recited the “Loud Prayer” in The Last Waltz , Peter’s favorite movie. They had loved the moment when Scorsese asks Rick Danko what he’s going to do with the rest of his life and Rick puts his felt hat over his face like a sad premonition.
Terence hit the brakes at the sign that read, welcome to antonito. They bought tamales at the Sinclair station. “Damn good tamales!” Julia said, as if she all of a sudden had experience. In the rearview mirror Terence could see that Larry had made himself a bed on top of Julia’s favorite suede jacket, but decided it best not to mention it.
So far, Colorado looked a lot like New Mexico, the Sangre de Cristos jagged and bright in late-afternoon sun to the east, the San Juan Mountains purple and backlit to the west. They had been following the Rio Grande all the way from Santa Fe, and now they were nearing the headwaters. The light was fading as they took tight turns along the river canyon, the surface of the water doing some kind of mercurial, silver-blue shimmer-dance. Julia was snoring softly in the leather bucket seat beside him, and Jeff Tweedy was singing about rehab and love. A little troop of animals with heavy curled horns and white butts were moving down the cliffs in front of him. This water was running fast back the way they had come, south and east and out into the Gulf of Mexico, where it might get drawn up into a summer thunderstorm and wash Peter’s ashes from Marie Laveau’s tomb. (It’s raining men.) Tomorrow he and Julia would take the Lexus up and over the Continental Divide.
Before she fell asleep Julia had read to him from the guidebook about Alferd Packer, a prospector who in 1874, stranded, starving, and snowbound, had shot, killed, and eaten all five of his companions on that pass before being convicted of manslaughter and converting, in his final years, to vegetarianism. There were cannibals all over the world, Terence thought, and the very best you could hope for was neither to have to eat nor to be eaten.
Terence looked out the moonroof at a tequila sunrise sky. His brother was dead. His wife-to-be was asleep in the car beside him. In one of the three bars in town, his mother was well on her way to seducing some two-stepping cowboy who wore a silk scarf around his neck and a rodeo buckle at his waist, a restraining order in his back pocket. On his knees, with his mouth full of dirt in Chimayo, Terence had promised himself to confront his mother about missing Peter’s service, to just start there and see if all the other things he blamed her for would follow.
The sun sank behind the San Juans, and Terence could feel the sudden drop in temperature. Larry moved from the back seat into Julia’s lap. She awoke and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She was a beautiful girl, she loved him, and she had chosen him to take to California even though he’d probably never get a book into print. None of this had anything whatsoever to do with his mother.
“Julia, honey. There are a couple of things I really need to tell you.”
“Okay,” she said, in the same singsong voice she’d used to say “Peanut Buster Parfait” at the Dairy Queen a hundred miles back.
“I was afraid of those cannibals,” Terence said, “the whole time I was there. And they weren’t even cannibals, really, not this century, anyhow, but I was afraid of their tattoos and their spears and the food and the water and the pit toilets and the snakes…in truth there was very little on that godforsaken island that didn’t scare the living crap out of me.”
Julia watched Terence’s face for a minute, then let her hand fall on top of Larry’s soft head. “Seems like a perfectly rational response to me,” she said. “What else?”
Terence glanced back at the river and it was still lit with some inexplicable afterglow. “I think that’s enough,” he said, “for today.”
He pulled the car back onto the highway and found the town of Creede—two blocks of weatherbeaten two-story buildings that dead-ended into the mouth of a jagged canyon. He stopped in front of a tavern with a bright sign that read west witch. Larry looked up, interested. “This would be the one,” Terence said. “She’s got a thing for neon.”
Julia put her hand on his wrist. “You have my permission not to do this.”
Just then the screen door banged back on its hinges and a cowboy wearing a black-banded hat and a red scarf at his Adam’s apple two-stepped out the door in time with the jukebox, one lanky arm extending back into the bar. Terence sucked in his breath as the woman attached to that arm stumbled through the doorway (not, he noted, in time to the music), her lips too red, her skirt hiked sideways, her hair doing its usual violence to her face.
“Mom,” Terence noted.
“What a hottie,” Julia said, which was just enough for him to slam the Lexus into reverse, back up the full two blocks without slowing, and then execute a K-turn that would have made any driver’s ed teacher beam.
In 34 miles they would go over Spring Creek Pass and be on the other side of the place where the country divides itself. He would find them a nice cabin outside Lake City, maybe on the banks of whatever the name of the river was on that side. He tried not to think about what Alferd Packer did to make it over the pass. It was a dog-eat-dog world.