The Four Winds(63)

Hopefully steam.

She couldn’t add water until the engine cooled down. Tony had drilled that fact into her head as they’d prepared for the trip. She untied the jug of water from the hood, held it close.

All she could do was wait. And worry.

She looked up and down the road; no headlights for as far as she could see.

What would happen when the sun rose? Triple-digit heat.

How close was she to the end of the desert? They had maybe three gallons of water left in their canteens.

Don’t panic. They need you not to panic.

Elsa bowed her head in prayer. She felt small out here, beneath this immense, starlit sky. She imagined the desertscape around her was alive with animals who survived in the dark. Snakes. Bugs. Coyotes. Owls.

She prayed to the Virgin Mary. Begged, really.

Finally, protecting her face with her bandanna, she opened the radiator and poured in the water. Then she retied the empty jug onto the truck and went back to her seat.

“Please, God . . .” she said, and turned the key in the ignition.

A click, then nothing.

Elsa tried it again and again, pumping the gas, her panic bumping up with each failed attempt.

“Steady, Elsa.” She took a deep breath and tried again.

The engine coughed and sputtered to life.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Elsa drove back onto the road and kept going.

Sometime around four, the road began to rise, becoming a giant unfurling snake of a thing, turning and twisting.

The air coming in through the open window cooled. Elsa’s sweat dried in itchy patches.

She drove up the steep, winding road, following the beam of her headlights, trying not to look at the cliff that crumbled away beside her.

Finally, when she could barely keep her eyes open, she pulled off the road into a wide patch of dirt ringed by tall trees.

She climbed into bed with her sleeping children, exhausted, and closed her eyes.



“MOM.”

“Mom.”

Elsa opened her eyes.

Sunlight blinded her.

Loreda was standing by the truck. “Come here.”

“Can I sleep for just—”

“No. Come. Now.”

Elsa groaned. How long had she been asleep? Ten minutes? A glance at her watch told her that it was nine o’clock.

Numb with exhaustion, she climbed out of the truck. She and Loreda walked uphill, toward a break in the trees, where Ant was waiting impatiently, bobbing up and down on bare feet.

“I need coffee,” Elsa said.

“Look.”

Elsa glanced behind her, looking for a good spot to make a campfire.

“Look, Mom,” Loreda said, shaking her.

Elsa turned.

They were standing at the top of a mountain, on a wide patch of flat land. Far below lay a vast swath of farmland, fields of green. Great rectangles of brown, newly tilled earth.

“California,” Ant said.

Elsa had never seen land so beautiful. So fertile. So green.

California.

The Golden State.

Elsa swept her children into her arms and twirled them around, laughing so deeply it seemed to be the voice of her soul. Light returning to the dark. Relief.

Hope.



LOREDA SCREAMED.

Mom downshifted. The truck bucked and lurched and slowed, taking the hairpin turn at a crawl.

The cars behind them honked. They were a caravan of jalopies now, a bumper-to-bumper snake of cars going down a mountain.

Loreda clung to the metal door handle until her fingers ached and the sunburned ridge of her knuckles turned white.

The mountain road twisted again and again, some turns so sharp and unexpected that she was flung sideways.

Mom took a turn too fast, yelped in fear, and crammed the gearshift down.

Loreda screamed again. They barely missed hitting the wreckage of a jalopy in the ditch, lying on its side.

“Quit bouncing, Ant.”

“I can’t. My pee’s startin’ to come out.”

Loreda slid to the side again. The door handle pinched her skin hard enough that she cried out.

And then, at last, a huge valley stretched out in front of them, an explosion of color unlike anything Loreda had ever seen.

Bright green grass, flowering bits of color, maybe weeds or wildflowers. Orange and lemon trees. Olive trees grew in swaths of silvery gray-green.

Cultivated green fields lay on either side of the wide black roadway. Tractors tilled large swatches of land, turned up the soil for planting. Loreda thought of the facts she’d collected as they readied for this trip. This was the San Joaquin Valley, nestled between the Coast Mountains to the west and the Tehachapi Mountains to the east. Sixty miles north of Los Angeles.

Another mountain range dominated the northern horizon, rising up like something out of a fairy tale. These were the peaks John Muir thought should be named the Range of Light.

As Loreda stared out across the San Joaquin Valley, she felt a hunger open up inside her, one she’d never imagined. Seeing all of this unexpected beauty, such colors, such majesty, she wanted suddenly to see more. America the Beautiful—the wild blue Pacific, the snarling Atlantic, the Rockies. All the places she and Daddy had dreamed of seeing. She wondered what San Francisco looked like, the city built on hills, or Los Angeles, with its white-sand beaches and groves of orange trees.