“Well,” he says, “I was planning on taking a farewell trip anyway. And it sounds like you should get out of town for a while. Here, just sit down, Jim. Sit down! Now, I’m going to stuff another sleeping bag, and get you a pack packed. We’ll have to buy more food in Lone Pine in the morning. You just sit there.”

Jim sits there. It’s possible he couldn’t do anything else.

An hour later Tash has them packed. He puts one compact backpack over Jim’s shoulders, picks up another for himself, and they’re off. They descend to Tashi’s little car, get onto the freeway.

Jim, in the passenger seat, stares at the lightflood of red/white, white/red. Autopia courses by. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, his stomach begins to unknot. His breathing gets better. Somewhere north of L.A. he jerks convulsively, shudders.

“My God, you won’t believe what I did tonight.”

“No lie.”

Jim tries to tell it. Over and over Tashi exclaims “Why? But why?”

And over and over Jim says, “I don’t know! I don’t know.”

When he finishes they are on an empty dark road, up on the high desert northeast of L.A. Jim, shivering lightly, jerking upright from time to time, falls into a restless sleep.

Chapter 76

76

(And meanwhile, out at sea, a small boat is drifting onshore, rising and falling on a small swell, coming ever closer to the short bluff at Reef Point. Then as it nears the reefs searchlights burst into being, their glare blinds everyone around, the black water sparkles, the heavy boom of a shot blasts the air, reverberates—

A warning shot only. But the two men obey the voice hammering over the loudspeakers, they stand hands overhead, eyes terrified, looking like the figures in the Goya sketch of insurgents executed by soldiers under a tree—)

Chapter 77

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When Jim wakes they are tracking through the Alabama Hills in the Owens Valley. The oldest rocks in North America look strange in this hour before dawn, rounded boulders piled on each other in weird, impossible formations. Beyond them the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada rises like a black wall under the indigo sky. Tashi sits in the driver’s seat listening to Japanese space music, a flute wandering over Oriental harp twanging; he looks awake, but lost in some inner realm.

In the roadside town of Independence, which looks like a museum of the previous century, Tashi rouses. “We need more food.” They stop at an all-night place and buy some ramen, cheese, candy. Outside Tash goes to a phone box and closes himself in for a call. It really is like a museum. When he comes out he is nodding thoughtfully, a little smile on his face. “Let’s go.”