Jack talked about his brother all afternoon. Of course he stopped now and then and talked about something else, but every time he said, “That reminds me . . .” or, “One day we were at . . .” and then he would tell another story.

It was not long before he realized that the tree houses fashioned from scraps of wood and spruce boughs, rafts made from old logs, vines tied to the stoutest branch for vaulting precipices or quicksand, or swamps teeming with crocodiles, playing cowboys, gangsters or tag volleyball, and even, when they played softball behind the church, the home run his brother had hit into the graveyard — all those exploits as well his brother’s escapades at boarding school, the fact that he’d quit school to go to work, that he’d been the first to go out with a girl and that one day he had stuffed his belongings in a bag and left home to join the navy — he realized that they were not enough, so he added some more: he said that Théo had bought himself a Harley Davidson, that he could swim the St. Lawrence from Quebec City to Lévis, that he had spent two years with the Inuit at Povungnituk in the Far North, that he had driven Bruce McLaren’s Ford GT40 in the trials at Le Mans 24-Hours . . . And little by little the outline of his brother grew and took its place in an imaginary gallery that included an odd collection of characters, among them Maurice Richard, Ernest Hemingway, Jim Clark, Louis Riel, Burt Lancaster, Kit Carson, La Vérendrye, Vincent Van Gogh, Davy Crockett . . .

WHEN NIGHT FELL, the cool mountain air swept into the old Volks, and all at once Jack felt a sense of sorrow against which he was powerless.

He picked up the cat and petted it for a long time.

The girl asked what was wrong.

“I’m a champion, too,” he said with a woeful look. “I’m a champion at waking up in the middle of night and finding my old slippers with my toes and going to the kitchen in total darkness and making myself a hot chocolate WITHOUT EVEN TURNING ON THE STOVE LIGHT.”

XXIV. The Great Divide

XXIV

The Great Divide

The road continued to climb. They were now at an altitude of 2,000 metres. However, the rise was gradual and the Volks was performing well.

One afternoon they arrived at a place called South Pass. It was neither a mountain pass nor a defile, as they had imagined, but a very broad plateau.

“Don’t drive too fast,” said La Grande Sauterelle.

The girl, who was very worked up, was consulting simultaneously the map of Wyoming she had pinned to the dashboard, their beloved book, which was in her left hand, and the big map of the United States, which was spread across her lap.

Suddenly, at the side of the road, they saw a billboard that read: