One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 32

BOY, DOG, AND GRIZZLED GRUMP arrive at the barn-what-ain't-a-barn, but to Curtis it appears to be a barn and nothing more. In fact, it looks like merely the ruins of a barn.

The structure stands by itself, two hundred yards northwest of the town, past clumps of stunted sage and bristles of wild sorrel and foot-snaring tendrils of creeping sandbur. At a surprisingly sharp line of demarcation, all forms of desert scrub and weeds and cactus surrender to the saline soil, and the inhospitable desert gives way to the utterly barren salt flats — which seems to be a curious place to have built a barn.

Even in the dark-drenched night, where shadows drip off shadows, the building's decrepit condition is obvious. Instead of describing a straight line, the steeply pitched roof swags from peak to eave. The walls are a little catawampus to the foundation, time-tweaked and weather-warped at the corners.

Unless the ramshackle barn is actually a secret armory stocked with futuristic weapons — plasma swords, laser-pulse rifles, neutron grenades — Curtis can't imagine what hope it offers them. No shelter will be safe in this storm.

In the strife-torn town behind them, the tempest already rages. Much of the screaming and the shouting fails to carry across the intervening desert, but few faint cries are chilling enough to plate his spine with ice. Gunfire, familiar to this territory for a century and a half, is answered by battle sounds never heard before in the Old West or the New: an ominous tolling that shivers the air and shudders the earth, a high-pitched oscillating whistle, a pulsing bleat, a tortured metallic groan.

As Gabby wrenches open a man-size door next to the larger doors of the barn, a hard flat crump draws Curtis's attention to the town just in time to see one of the larger structures — perhaps the saloon and gambling hall — implode upon itself, as if collapsing into a black hole. The reverse-pressure wave pulls eddies of salt from the dry bed of the ancient ocean, sucking them toward the town, and Curtis rocks on the balls of his feet.

A second crump, following close after the first, is accompanied by a whirlpool of fiery orange light where the saloon had stood. In that churning blaze, the imploded structure seems to disgorge itself: Planks and shingles, posts and balcony railings, doors, cocked window frames — plus two flights of stairs like a portion of a brontosaurus spine — erupt from the darkness that had swallowed them, spinning in midair, in tornado like suspension, silhouetted by the flames. As a pressure wave casts back the eddies of salt and chases them with showers of sand, nearly rocking Curtis off his feet once more, it's possible to believe that the whirling rubble of the saloon will magically reassemble into a historic structure once more.

Gabby has no time for the spectacle, and Curtis should have none, either. He follows the caretaker and the dog into the barn.

The door isn't as rickety as he expects. Rough wood on the exterior but steel on the inside, heavy, solid, it swings smoothly shut behind him on well-oiled hinges.

Inside lies a short shadowy corridor with light beyond an open doorway at the end. Not the light of an oil lamp, but a constant fluorescent glow.

The air contains neither the faint cindery scent of the desert nor the alkali breath of the salt flats. And it's cool.

Pine trees, pine trees, close to the floor, pine on the floor. Pine-scented wax on the vinyl tiles. Cinnamon and sugar, crumbs of a cookie, butter and sugar and cinnamon and flour. Good, good.

The fluorescent light arises in a windowless office with two desks and filing cabinets. And a refrigerator. Chilled air floods out of a ventilation duct near the ceiling.

Barely detectable vibrations in the floor suggest a subterranean vault containing a gasoline-powered generator. This is a barn worthy of DisneyLand: entirely new, but crafted to resemble the battered remains of a homesteader's farm. The building provides office and work space for the support staff that oversees maintenance of the ghost town, without introducing either contemporary structures or visible utilities that would detract from the otherwise meticulously maintained period ambience.

On the nearest of the desks stands a cup of coffee and a large thermos bottle. Beside the cup lies a paperback romance novel by Nora Roberts. Unless the official night-shift support staff includes a ghost or two, the coffee and the book belong to Gabby.

Although they are on the run, with the prospect of heavily armed searchers bursting into this building behind them at any second, the caretaker pauses to sweep the paperback off the desk. He shoves it under a sheaf of papers in one of the drawers.

He glances sheepishly at Curtis. His deeply tanned face acquires a rubescent-bronze tint.

The dilapidated barn isn't at all what it appears to be from outside, and Gabby isn't entirely what he appears to be, either. The not-entirely-what-he-or-she-or-it-appears-to-be club has an enormous membership.

"Judas jump to hellfire, boy, we're in dangerous territory here! Don't just stand there till you're growed over with clockface an' cow's-tongue! Let's go, let's go!"

Curtis stopped at the desk only because Gabby stopped there first, and he realizes that the caretaker is shouting at him merely to distract his attention from the incident with the romance novel.

As he follows Gabby across the room to another door, however, Curtis wonders what sort of plants clockface and cow's-tongue might be and whether in this territory they really grow so fast that you could be completely overtaken by them if you stand too still even for a few seconds. He wonders, too, whether these are carnivorous plants that not only cocoon you, but then also feed on you while you're still alive.

The sooner he gets out of Utah, the better.

Beyond the first office lies a second and larger office. The four doors leading from this space suggest additional rooms beyond.

Gimping like a dog with two short legs on the left side, Gabby leads Old Yeller and Curtis to the farthest door, snares a set of keys off a pegboard, and proceeds into a garage with bays for four vehicles. Three spaces are empty, and an SUV waits in the fourth, facing toward the roll-up door: a white Mercury Mountaineer.

As Curtis hurries around to the passenger's side, Gabby pulls open the driver's door and says, "That dog, she broke?"

"She fixed, sir."

"Say what?"

"Say fixed, sir," says Curtis as he frantically jerks open the front door on the passenger's side.

Levering himself in behind the steering wheel, Gabby shouts at him, "Tarnation, I ain't havin' no biscuit-eater pissin' in my new Mercury!"

"All we had was frankfurters, sir, and then some orange juice," Curtis replies reassuringly as, not without difficulty, he clambers into the passenger's seat with the dog in his arms.

"Spinnin' syphilitic sheep! What for you bringin' her in the front seat, boy?"

"What for shouldn't I, sir?"

As he pushes a button on a remote-control unit to put up the garage door, and starts the engine, the caretaker says, "Iffen God made little fishes, then passengers what has a tail ought to load up through the tailgate!"

Pulling shut the passenger's door, Curtis says, "God made little fishes, sure enough, sir, but I don't see what one has to do with the other."

"You got about as much common sense as a bucket. Better hold tight to your mongrel 'less you want she should wind up bug-spattered on the wrong side of the windshield."

Old Yeller perches in Curtis's lap, facing front, and he locks his arms around the dog to hold her in place.

"We gonna burn the wind haulin' ass outta here!" Gabby loudly declares as he shifts the Mountaineer out of park.

Curtis takes this to be a warning against the likelihood that they're going to experience flatulence, but he can't imagine why that will happen.

Gabby tramps on the accelerator, and the Mountaineer shoots out of the garage, under the still-rising door.

First pinned back in his seat, then jammed against the door when the caretaker turns west-southwest almost sharply enough to roll the SUV Curtis remembers the applicable law and raises his voice over the racing engine: "Law says we have to wear seat belts, sir!"

Even in the weak light from the instrument panel, the boy can see Gabby's face darken as though someone from the gov'ment were throttling him at this very moment, and the old man proves that he can rant and drive at the same time. "Whole passel of politicians between 'em ain't got a brain worth bug dust! No scaly-assed, wart-necked, fly-eatin', toad-brained politician an' no twelve-toed, fat-assed, pointy-headed bureaucrat ain't goin' to tell me iffen I got to wear a seat belt nor iffen I don't got to wear one, as far as that goes! Iffen I want to stand on these brakes an' bust through the windshield with my face, damn if I won't, an' no one can tell me I ain't got the right! Next thing them power-crazy bastards be tellin' us the law says wear a jockstrap when you drive!"

While the caretaker continues in this vein, Curtis turns in his seat as best he can, still holding on to Old Yeller, and looks back, to the east and north, toward the embattled ghost town. It's a light show back there, violent enough to make even Wyatt Earp hide in the church. When the shootout ends, whatever historical society oversees this site is going to be hard-pressed to restore the town from the splinters, bent nails, and ashes that will be left.

He remains amazed that the FBI is aware of him and of the forces pursuing him, that they have intervened in this matter, and that they actually think they have a chance of locating him and taking him into protective custody before his enemies can find and destroy him. They must know how outgunned they are, but they've plunged in nonetheless. He can't help but admire their kick-butt attitude and their courage, even though they would eventually subject him to experiments if they had custody of him long enough.

Gabby can drive even faster than he can talk. They are rocketing across the salt flats.

To avoid drawing unwanted attention, they're traveling without headlights.

Failure to employ headlights between dusk and dawn is against the law, of course, but he decides that to broach this subject with Gabby would qualify as poor socializing. Besides, Curtis has, after all, broken the law himself more than once during his flight for freedom, though he's not proud of his criminality.

The clouded sky casts down no light whatsoever, but the natural fluorescence of the land ensures that they aren't driving blind, and fortunately Gabby is familiar with this territory. He avoids whatever roads might cross this desolate valley and stays on the open land, so there's no risk of turning a bend and ramming head-on into innocent motorists, with all the unfortunate physical and moral consequences that would ensue.

The salt flats glow white, and the Mercury Mountaineer is white, so the vehicle shouldn't be easily visible from a distance. The tires spin up a white plume behind them, but this is a wispy telltale, not a thick billowing cloud, and it quickly settles.

If FBI agents or the worse scalawags are using motion- detection gear to sweep the flats either from a point atop the valley crest or from an aerial platform, then Gabby might as well not just turn on the headlights but fire off flares, as well, because this white-on-white strategy won't be clever enough to save them from being turned into buzzard grub like the man who had come tumbling in flaming ruin between the buildings.

"… hogtie 'em with one of their aggravatin' seat belts, douse 'em with some bacon grease, throw 'em in a root cellar with maybe ten thousand half-starved STINK BUGS, an' just see how all-fired safe the God-mockin' bastards feel then!" Gabby concludes.

Seizing this opportunity to change the subject, Curtis says, "Speakin' of stink, sir, I ain't farted, and I don't think I'm goin' to, neither."

Though he doesn't reduce their speed and might even accelerate a little, the old caretaker shifts his attention away from the salt flats hurtling towards them. He fixes Curtis with a look of such open-mouthed bewilderment that for a moment it prevents him from talking.

But only for a moment, whereafter he smacks his lips together and gets his tongue working again: "Judas humpin' hacksaws in Hell! Boy, what the blazes did you just say an' why'd you say it?"

Disconcerted that his well-meaning attempt at small talk has excited something like outrage from the caretaker, Curtis says, "Sir, no offense meant, but you're the one who first said about burnin' the wind and haulin' ass."

"Here's that spit-in-the-eye-malefactor side of you what ain't a pretty thing to see."

"No offense, sir, but you did say it, and I was just observin' that I ain't farted, like you expected, and you ain't neither, and neither ain't my dog."

"You keep sayin' no offense, boy, but I'm tellin' you right now, I'm bound to take some offense iffen your dog starts fartin' in my new Mercury."

This conversation is going so badly and they are tearing across the salt flats at such a scary speed that changing the subject seems to be a matter of life and death, so Curtis figures the time has come to compliment Gabby on his celebrity lineage. "Sir, I dearly loved Helldorado, Heart of the Golden West, and Roll on Texas Moon."

"What in tarnation's wrong with you, boy?" The dog whines and twitches in Curtis's lap. "Look ahead, sir!" the boy exclaims.

Gabby glances at the onrushing salt flats. "Just tumbleweed," he says dismissively as an enormous prickly ball bounces off the front fender, rolls across the hood, over the windshield, and spins front to back across the roof with a clitter-click like skeleton fingers clawing at the underside of a coffin lid.

Nervously but valiantly making another effort to establish better rapport with the caretaker, Curtis says, "Along the Navajo Trail was really a fine movie, and The Lights of Old Santa Fe. But maybe the best of them was Sons of the Pioneers."

"You say movies?"

"I say movies, sir."

Even as Gabby presses the Mountaineer still faster, faster, he disregards the land ahead, as though confident that he can perceive oncoming catastrophe through a sixth sense, and he focuses on Curtis with disconcerting intensity. "With gov'ment maniacs blowin' up the world behind us, what in the name of the beheaded baptist are you talkin' movies for"?"

" 'Cause they're your grandfather's movies, sir."

"My grandpa's movies? Criminy spit an' call it wine, an' give me two bottles! What are you babblin' about? My grandpa was a mercantile porch-squatter, sellin' Bibles an' useless 'cyclopedias if you was crazy enough to open your door to him."

"But if your grandpa was a porch-squatter, then what about Roy Rogers?" Curtis pleads.

Gabby's wiry beard, eyebrows, and ear hairs bristle with either exasperation or static electricity generated by a combination of high speed and dry desert air. "Roy Rogers?" He's shouting again. He holds the steering wheel with one hand and pounds it with the other. "What in the blue blazes does a fancy-boots, picture-show, singin', dead cowboy got to do with you or me, or the price of beans?"

Curtis doesn't know the price of beans or why the price is of sudden importance to the caretaker at this particular time, but he knows that they are going far too fast — and still gaining speed. The more perturbed that Gabby becomes, the heavier his foot grows on the accelerator, and everything that Curtis says perturbs him further. The floor of the valley is remarkably flat, but at this reckless velocity, even the smallest runnel or bump rattles the Mountaineer. If they encounter a deep rut or a rock, or one of those sun-bleached cow skulls that so often show up in Western movies, the best Detroit engineering won't save them, and the SUV will roll like, well, like Judas strapped to a log and tumbled down the mill chute to Hell.

Curtis is afraid to say anything, but Gabby appears to be ready to thump the steering wheel again if he doesn't say something. So without any desire to argue, intending only to express an alternative opinion, and by engaging in some pleasant conversation to reduce the caretaker's agitation and also the speed of the Mountaineer, he says, "No offense, sir, but Roy Rogers's boots didn't seem to me to be all that fancy."

Gabby glances at the road ahead, which is a relief to Curtis, but immediately he looks at Curtis once more, and yet again the SUV accelerates. "Boy, you 'member way to hell back there at the pump, when I asked was you stupid or somethin'?"

"Yes, sir, I 'member."

"An' you 'member what you said?"

"Yes, sir, I said I guessed I was somethin'."

"Ever any fool was to ask you that question again, boy, you'd be better advised to tell 'em stupid!" Pounding the steering wheel again, he's off on another rant. "Shove a bottle rocket in my butt an' call me Yankee Doodle! Here I put myself at war with the whole egg-suckin' gov'ment, with their bombs an' tanks an' tax collectors, all 'cause you claim they done killed your folks, an' now I see you're liable to say anythin' what makes no more sense than chicken gabble, and maybe the gov'ment never done killed your folks at all."

Appalled to discover this misunderstanding, fighting back tears, Curtis hastens to correct the caretaker: "Sir, I never done said the government done killed my folks."

Flabbergasted and outraged, Gabby roars, "Cut off my co-jones an' call me a princess, but don't you ever tell me that ain't what you claimed!"

"Sir, I claimed it was the worse scalawags what done killed my folks, not the government."

"Ain't no worse scalawags than the gov'ment!"

"Oh, big-time worse, sir."

Old Yeller fidgets in Curtis's lap. She whimpers nervously, and icy sweat drips rapidly from her black nose onto his hands, and he senses that she wants to relieve herself. Through their special boy-dog bond, he encourages her to keep control of her bladder, but now he's reminded that their relationship is dog-boy as well as boy-dog, that it can work both ways if he isn't careful, and her need to pee is rapidly becoming his need to pee. He can too easily imagine the catastrophe that would ensue if he and the dog both peed in Gabby's new Mercury, causing the caretaker to have a stroke and lose control of the vehicle at high speed.

For the first time since the truck-stop restaurant, the boy is losing confidence in his ability to be Curtis Hammond. Lacking adequate self-assurance, no fugitive can maintain a credible deception. Perfect poise is the key to survival. There you have Mother's wisdom as pure us it gets.

Gabby is ranting again, and the Mercury Mountaineer shudders and groans like a space shuttle blasting into orbit, and in spite of all the uproar, something that the caretaker said a moment ago makes a connection in Curtis's mind to another misunderstanding earlier in die evening. A small illumination follows, and Curtis desperately seizes upon his sudden insight to try to change the direction of the conversation and to reestablish the far-friendlier tone that existed between them such a short while ago.

According to the movies, most Americans strive always to better their lives and to improve themselves, and because movies provide reliable information, Curtis interrupts Gabby's blustering with the intention of offering a vocabulary lesson for which the caretaker will no doubt be grateful. "Sir, the reason I was confused is you weren't pronouncing it properly. You meant testicles!"

Every look of surprise that heretofore made such dramatic use of the caretaker's highly expressive face is as nothing to the brow-corrugating, eyebrow-steepling, eye-popping, wrinkle-stretching, beard-frizzling astonishment that now possesses his features.

Gabby's expression is such an obvious precursor to another rant that Curtis hurries on, frantic to explain himself: "Sir, you said 'co-jones,' when what you meant to say was 'kah-ho-nays.' Cojones. That's the English pronunciation, which is slightly different from the way you would say it in Spanish. If you—"

"Blast all the devils from Hell to Abilene!" Gabby bellows, and he looks away from Curtis with obvious disgust, which is good in one way and bad in another. Good because he's at last staring at the salt flats ahead of them. Bad because sooner or later, trembling from the offense that he's taken, he's going to look at Curtis again, and that look will peel the wet off water.

Like wet on water.

Another small enlightenment blossoms in Curtis, but he resists sharing it with the fuming caretaker. He has lost all confidence in his ability to socialize. Shaken, he is convinced that anything he says, even a wordless grunt delivered in the most inoffensive tone, will be misinterpreted and will trigger another furious oath from Gabby that will be loud enough to shatter all the windows in the Mountaineer.

The boy's failure even to attempt to hold up his end of the conversation results in only a brief silence. The caretaker splutters in exasperation after saying "Abilene," inhales with a rattling snort worthy of a horse, and blows out another gust of words: "You sassy-assed, spit-in-the-eye, ungrateful, snot-nosed little punk! Maybe I ain't been to no Harvard College, an' maybe I ain't had the better advantages of some what was born with silver spoons in their mouths, but from the time I worn diapers, I knowed it was pure bad manners criticizin' your elders. You don't got no call tellin' me how to say co-jones when the pathetic pair of co-jones you have ain't no bigger than two chickpeas!"

As Gabby continues to rave, he finally eases up on the gas pedal and lets the Mountaineer's speed fall. Maybe he's considering pulling to a stop and ordering Curtis to get out and fend for himself.

Right now, if they were in a boat in the middle of a stormy sea, the boy would go overboard without a protest; therefore, he won't argue about being left afoot on these salt flats. In fact, he'll welcome it. The stress of being a desperate fugitive, maintaining a credible false identity, resisting the urge to go a little dog wild, and socializing in a challenging dialect is more than he's able to handle. He feels as though his head is going to explode or that something even worse and more embarrassing will occur.

Apparently having vented enough anger to look at his snot-nosed passenger without risking cardiac infarction, Gabby at last turns his attention away from the flats. Maybe the old man is surprised that Curtis hasn't already thrown himself out of the Mountaineer or maybe he's surprised by the boy's tears, or maybe he's just surprised that this sassy-assed punk dares to look him in the eye. Whatever the reason, instead of the withering display of scorn and contempt that Curtis expects, the caretaker inflates his face into an expression of astonishment that so exceeds his previous look of astonishment that it seems more suitable to a cartoon character than to a human being. And he stomps on the brake pedal. Fortunately, their speed has fallen from in excess of a hundred miles an hour to under fifty. Shrieking brakes and screaming tires sound pretty much the same on hard-packed salt as on blacktop, though the combined odors of hot rubber and churning salt produce a smell that is unique to these conditions and strangely like ham sizzling in a skillet.

If Curtis hadn't been jammed down firmly in his seat, pinching the upholstery with his tailbone, and pressing his feet into the floorboard nearly hard enough to buckle it, he and Old Yeller might indeed have splattered like bugs on the wrong side of the windshield. Instead, the poor dog's life flashes through her mind, from whelping to puppy-hood to the frankfurters in the motor home, and Curtis's life flashes through his mind, too, which leaves both him and the mutt a little confused. But when the Mountaineer slides to a full stop, rocking on its springs, neither boy nor dog is hurt.

By surviving the sudden stop unscathed, Gabby, too, has proved that the miserable scaly-assed, wart-necked, fly-eatin', toad-brained politicians don't know everything. You might think that this small triumph of rugged individualism over the government and the laws of physics would inspire a mood change for the better. On the contrary, with an astounding rush of words referring to biological waste and sexual relations, the caretaker rams the gearshift into park, throws open his door, and exits the SUV in a state of such high agitation that he tangles in his own legs and falls out of sight.

"Criminy!" Curtis exclaims.

He slides out from under Old Yeller and across the console, leaving the dog in the passenger's seat, slipping behind the wheel.

Beyond the open door, in the fall of pale light from the SUV's ceiling lamp, Gabby lies on his back, on the ground. His rumpled and sweat-stained cowboy hat rests upside down next to him, as though he will produce that banjo at last and play for quarters. His white hair bristles as it might if he'd been the conduit for a lightning bolt, and grains of salt glitter in this postelectrocution coiffure. He looks dazed, perhaps having tested the firmness of the salt bed with a rap or two of his head.

"Holy howlin' saints alive!" Curtis declares. "Sir, are you all right?"

This question so alarms the caretaker that you would think he had just been threatened with decapitation, lie scoots backward, away from the Mountaineer, thoroughly salting the seat of his pants, and he takes the time to scramble to his feel only after he has put some distance between himself and the vehicle.

To this point, Curtis has assumed that much of what seems odd about this man's behavior is not in fact peculiar, but is simply a matter of poor communication, resulting in a series of unfortunate misunderstandings. Now he isn't so sure about that. Maybe Gabby is not cranky-but-lovable, not cranky-but-tender-hearted, not cranky-but-well-meaning, but just plain cranky. Maybe he's even somewhat unbalanced. Maybe he's been chewing on locoweed. He's probably not a serial killer, like the tooth fetishists in the motor home, unless serial killers are even a greater percentage of the population than the movies imply, which is a scary thought.

On the ground between Gabby and the Mountaineer are two objects: the hat and the 9-mm pistol. Frantically scuttling backward a moment ago, he now reverses course and tentatively approaches. Although Curtis would like to believe Gabby is a genuine amigo, cantankerous but compassionate, the caretaker's attention is not focused on the hat.

The handgun is close to Curtis. He hops out of the SUV to get the weapon.

The unpredictable caretaker doesn't try to beat him to the gun. He doesn't just halt or back off, either, but turns away and runs across the salt flats in his singular hitching gait, as fast as he can go.

Bewildered, Curtis watches the receding figure until it's clear the man won't attempt to sneak back. Gabby doesn't once look over his shoulder, but lights out for the eastern side of the valley as though he believes that all the devils between Hell and Abilene, which he had previously cursed, are now in vengeful pursuit of him. He fades into the darkness and the eerie fluorescence until he appears to be the mere mirage of a man.

How strange. The entire encounter with Gabby will require a lot of thoughtful analysis later, when Curtis has outlasted his enemies and can afford the leisure for contemplation.

When he has outlasted them, not if. Now that the obligation to socialize has been lilted from him for a while, Curtis feels his confidence returning.

A few miles to the north, where hard-bitten gunfighters once faced off in the.dusty street, a fierier and noisier confrontation is still underway, and while it doesn't look like Armageddon or the War of the Worlds, the level of combat remains impressive. Curtis expected the conflict to be over long ago; and he doesn't anticipate that these mismatched forces will be dueling much longer.

Besides, sooner rather than later, they may begin to suspect that the boy over whom they're battling has slipped out of town during the uproar and is riding the range once more. Then the two armies will disengage, rather than fight to the finish, and both the scalawags and the worse scalawags will return to the urgent boy-dog search that brought them into the same town at the same time in the first place.

Better move.

Leaving the pistol on the ground now that there's no need to worry about Gabby getting possession of it, Curtis climbs into the Mountaineer once more. He has never driven a vehicle like this. But the principles of its operation are obvious, and he's sure that he can handle it reasonably well, though most likely not with the skill of Steve McQueen in Bullitt or with the aplomb of Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit.

He is about to move from petty crimes to the commission of a major felony. Car theft. That's how the authorities will view it.

From his perspective, however, it's actually the unauthorized borrowing of a vehicle, because he has no intention of keeping the Mountaineer. If eventually he abandons it in as good a condition as he found it, his moral obligation will largely consist of making an apology to Gabby and compensating him for gasoline, time, and inconvenience. Because he doesn't relish coming face-to-face with the caretaker again, he hopes that his soul won't be tarnished too much if he makes both the apology and the payment by mail.

Height proves to be a problem. Curtis Hammond, a bit on the shorter side for a ten-year-old boy, can command a clear view of the terrain ahead or exercise full and easy control of the brakes and the accelerator, but not both at the same time. By slouching a little and stretching his right loot as might a leaping ballet dancer reaching for an on-point landing, he's able to proceed with a half-obstructed view and with compromised pedal control.

This slows him, however, and establishes a pace that seems more suitable to a funeral procession than to a run for freedom.

While he wants to put as much territory as possible between himself and his pursuers, he must remember that time, not distance, is his primary ally. Only by faithfully being Curtis Hammond hour after hour, day after day, is he likely to escape detection forever. Certain adjustments would allow him to handle the Mountaineer more easily, but if he were to indulge in them, he'd be more visible to his enemies the next time they came scanning in his vicinity. Which will be soon.

Mom's wisdom. The longer that you wear a disguise, the more completely you become the disguise. To maintain a credible deception, a fugitive must never slip out of character, not even for a moment. Establishing a new identity isn't merely a matter of acquiring a convincing set of ID documents; you aren't safe from discovery just because you look, talk, walk, and act in character. Establishing a new identity with total success requires you to become this new person with your every fiber, every cell — and for every minute of the day, when observed and unobserved.

Even in death, Mom remains the ultimate authority on this stuff, as well as a universal symbol of courage and freedom. She will be honored long after her passing. Even if she hadn't been his mom, he would conduct himself according to her advice; but as her son, he has a special obligation not just to survive but also to live by her teachings and eventually to pass them along to others.

Grief comes to him once more, and for a while he travels in its company.

He dares not continue southwest, for eventually the valley must bring him to the interstate, which will be patrolled. He came out of the east. The ghost town lies north. Therefore, he has little choice but to cross the width of the valley, heading due west.

Although he's in no danger of setting a land-speed record, and although he sometimes progresses in fits and starts as he cranes his neck to see over the steering wheel or ducks his head to peek between it and the top of the dashboard, he discovers that the salt flats arc negotiable terrain. When he reaches the slope of the western valley wall, however, he realizes that he can't go farther in this fashion.

Here, the saltless land doesn't have an accommodating natural glow. Visibility already limited by the boy's height immediately declines to a condition not much better than blindness. Switching on the SUV headlights will provide no solution — unless he wants to call attention to himself and thereby commit suicide.

Furthermore, the rising land will be rocky and uneven. Curtis will need to react to conditions more quickly with both the brake pedal and the accelerator than he's been able to do thus far.

He shifts into park and sits high, gazing at the route ahead, stymied by the challenge.

His sister-becoming provides the solution. During the slow ride across the last of the salt flats, Old Yeller sat in the passenger's seat, decorating the side window with a pattern of nose prints. Now she stands in her seat and gives Curtis a meaningful look.

Maybe because grief is weighing on his mind, maybe because he's still rattled by his strange encounter with the caretaker, Curtis is embarrassingly slow on the uptake. At first he thinks that she simply wants to be scratched gently behind the ears.

Because she will never object to being scratched gently behind the ears or virtually anywhere else, Old Yeller accepts a minute of this pleasantness before she turns away from Curtis and, still with hind legs on the seat, places her forepaws on the dashboard. This puts her in a perfect position to see the route ahead.

This boy-dog relationship would be worthless if Curtis still failed to get her drift, but he understands what she has in mind. He will operate the controls of the SUV, and she will be his eyes.

Good pup!

He slides far enough down in his seat to plant his right foot firmly on the accelerator and to be able to shift it quickly and easily to the brake pedal. He is also in a satisfactory position to steer. He just can't see out of the windshield.

Their bonding is not complete. She is still his sister-becoming rather than his sister-become; however, their special relationship grew considerably in that scarey moment when each of them saw both of their lives Hashing before their eyes.

Curtis shifts the SUV out of park, presses the accelerator, and steers up the relatively easy slope of the valley wall with the eyes of his dog to guide him. Together they gain confidence during the ascent, and they function in perfect harmony by the time they reach the top.

He halts on the ridge, sits up, and through his own eyes looks northeast. The fighting at the ghost town seems to have ceased. The scalawags and the worse scalawags have realized that neither of them has captured their quarry. No longer battling each other, they are turning their attention once more to the search for boy and dog.

The running lights of two helicopters float in the sky. A third is approaching from farther in the east. Reinforcements.

Slouching in his seat once more, Curtis drives down off the ridge, heading farther west into unknown territory that Old Yeller scouts for him with unwavering diligence.

He drives as fast as seems prudent, keeping in mind that his sister-becoming could be hurt if he hits the brakes suddenly at too high a speed.

They need to make good time, however, because he can't expect the dog to be his eyes as long as he would like. Curtis requires no rest. Old Yeller will eventually need to sleep, but Curtis has never slept in his life.

After all, he must remember that he and his sister-becoming are not merely members of different species with far different physical abilities and limitations. More significantly, they were born on different worlds.