East looked down. Bro was right.
Just ten minutes here, but his morning calm was plucked. The dark string inside blurred and buzzed. He followed Michael to the van, every bit of air a puzzle, every person a future event. He climbed into the back and slid the door shut.
“Awesome station, man,” said Walter, a fragrant family box of chicken biscuits steaming up his lap. “They all need to be like that.”
East buckled his belt. “Who is Manny Ramirez?”
Both boys in the front let go a snort.
“Ninety-nine, Easy,” said Michael Wilson.
“You ever check your shirt?”
East looked down. Dodgers. “What?”
“On the back. His name is on the back of your shirt, man.”
“Yard boy don’t get out much,” Michael Wilson crowed.
After an hour, they crossed into Colorado. East felt the ground rising. He rode up front as Walter drove, Michael dozing, soft-eyed, in the middle. The hot food had upset East’s stomach.
Mountains stood before them, above them, like in LA. But in The Boxes, the mountains were only a thing, like a wall or a tree: a sun-baked ridge above the valley full of everything. Here the ground was nearly empty of buildings and the mountains were like people, huddled figures, blue and gray and white, so high.
They were unmoving stone, but they tore East’s eyes from the boys in the van and the unidentifiable people motoring up the same road. East gave up watching the people so much. They didn’t stare back as much as they had in Utah. The people seemed younger, fitter. Some gazed at the mountains too. Some rode hollow-eyed. Families with kids drowned in their movie players; mountain boys with their racks of bikes and skis and packs; thin, straight-haired white women in their Subarus. They didn’t stare back. Unsurprised by him.
Only one black man they saw, driving a moving truck.
Come noon they bought a tank of gas and two pizzas at an exit called Glenwood Springs. A bathroom stop, a round of sodas, little wooden buffalo roaming the counter near the gray cash register. Boxes so hot they singed East’s fingers; they steamed on the van’s floor till the windows ran wet.
They drove on until a sign announced a turnoff: SCENIC OVERLOOK. “Let’s hit that,” Walter said. “We can eat there.”
“Oh, we?” laughed Michael Wilson, but Walter took it well.
The view, framed between two immense, square boulders, revealed just how far up they’d come. A gorge opened below, green, vertiginous. Two little kids from the gigantic white Navigator next to them hollered, “Wow! Wow!” East started, expecting them to be staring at him.
But they were just teetering on the edge, gaping down into the gorge below.
He slid out of the van. Again he had to find his legs, find his stance. Behind the handrail the ground was slippery pebbles. He approached the edge and looked down gingerly.
It took a moment for East’s eyes to read the scene. He could see the valley’s depth, feel the real wind dipping down it. But he could not convince himself that it was real. Space both vast and unattainable, opening up between the blue walls of stone. The air below was cold, he could feel it, a reservoir, and he could sense something about the chasm, all the time piled up there. Close to forever. More time than he had in a hundred lives like his.
Birds wheeled in midair, far below.
“Mommy, Daddy!” the kids cheered again. “Look! It’s amazing!” East stood there too, the cold air streaming up his face, full of the smell of snow and stone.
—
For hours they worked in and out through the passes: town-size shadows sliding over the mountainsides, dark mossy valleys, clouds on the road that blinded their way. How blank it had looked on the map, this space, this state. How different to have to cross it. The road sank in and swelled out, like intestines. East asked for a turn at the wheel, but his stomach made him give it up right away. Sitting shotgun, next to the guardrail, was worse.
Their next stop was so that he could throw up. He was awake, dripping sweat; he had been dreaming of a terrible yellow goldfish. “Stop the van,” he gasped.
Michael Wilson skidded off along the guardrail.
East fell out, a first taste like cement; then his backbone arched and his lunch rained over the rail.
Pizza, Coke, the rest. Jesus. He looked away, at the miles between him and the next solid ground. Same birds, flecks beneath him. The air smelled wet, like the rock.
He felt better—for a moment, he knew. But he breathed in wetly, the air of that moment.
“Who’s next?” Michael Wilson said. Nobody in the van was even laughing.
“Never been up in the mountains before, huh, Easy?”
“I don’t know,” East grunted. “It’s different than I thought.”
“Never been nowhere, huh?”
It wasn’t in him to argue.