33
Outside the church, Ben tosses me the keys, like he knows that I need to drive. At Twin Falls we cut off the interstate onto Highway 93. Ben starts yawning, his eyes drooping. He camped on the floor of Richard and Gary’s room, and he says between Richard’s snoring and Gary talking in his sleep, he didn’t get much rest.
“Why don’t you take a nap?” I suggest.
He shakes his head. “Goes against the code.”
“What code?”
“Touring code. Someone always has to stay up with the driver.”
“That makes sense if there’s a bunch of you, but there’s only two of us, and you’re tired.”
He looks at me, considering.
“Look,” I go on. “We can just make up a new code.”
He continues to look at me. But then he gives in. He turns his face toward the window and falls asleep, staying that way for the next three hours.
There’s something nourishing about seeing him sleep. Maybe it’s the sun, or maybe my imagination, but the bluish tinge from underneath his eyes seems to fade a bit. He sleeps until the highway ends and I pull into a gas station to fill up the tank. Inside the station there’s a big map with a red circle denoting where we are: the junction of Highway 93 and Interstate 80. To get to Laughlin, we jog east on 80 until we go south on Interstate 15 near Salt Lake City. But if we were to go west, the interstate would take us into California, dipping above Lake Tahoe.
After Harry had gotten back to me with the address, I’d looked at the lake for hours. Though the town where he lived wasn’t on the lake, it was near it. The lake looked so pretty, the water so clear and blue.
“How far is Truckee, California, from here?” I ask the guy behind the counter.
He shrugs. But a trucker in a Peterbilt hat tells me it’s about three hundred miles.
“Do you know how far it is from Truckee to Laughlin, Nevada? I mean, how far of a detour is it?”
The trucker rubs his beard. “You’re probably adding three hundred miles to the trip. It’s about five or six hundred miles from Truckee, and about five hundred miles from here. Either way, you got a ways to go.”
I thank the trucker, buy $40 worth of gas, a California map, a couple of burritos, and a liter of Dr Pepper. Then I go back to the car, where Ben is digging around for his sunglasses.
“Think we’ll make Laughlin tonight?” he asks me.
“We’d be pushing it. We got off to a late start, so we wouldn’t get there till midnight.” I start to pump the gas.
Ben gets out of the car and starts squegeeing the windows. “We might as well push through. I’m all caught up on my sleep now. How long was I out for?”
“Two hundred and fifty miles.”
“So we can make it by tonight. I’ll take over.”
I stop squeezing. The pump goes silent.
“What?” Ben asks. He glances at the California map in my other hand. “Did you change your mind?”
I shake my head. I didn’t. I haven’t. I still need to do this. To see it through. But we’re close. I mean, we’re not that close. We’re three hundred miles away. And this might not be the right address, or the current one. Harry said he’d moved around a lot. But three hundred miles away is as close as I’ve been in a long time.
“When do you have to be back by?” I ask.
Ben scrapes a moth off the windshield, then shrugs.
“I might want to take a detour.”
“Detour? Where to?”
“Truckee. It’s in California, near Reno.”
“What’s in Truckee?”
If anyone will understand, it will be Ben. “My father.”