For some reason, that made me think of the transport that had fallen into the arroyo and had either been swept away or had flooded and sunk. I said a little prayer for the men who went down with it, because maybe not all of them were evil. Maybe some of them truly thought it was righteous, even noble, to zip tie old men and lock them in car trunks, to brace innocent citizens at a lunch counter and attempt to spirit them away for the purpose of interrogating them and testing them to destruction in a laboratory, for the noble purpose of protecting the establishment from the possibility of a diminishment of its power.
All that and more occupied my feverish thoughts as we moved blindly through the night. I was as nervous as Samson might have been when, eyeless in Gaza, he felt for the pillars with which he would pull the roof down on the Philistines who had blinded and imprisoned him. That legend might have been inspiring if I hadn’t remembered that, when all of Samson’s tormentors were killed in the collapse, he died with them.
The rain began to relent, and thunder rolled no longer. In a drizzle, under a thinning cloud cover that revealed a veiled moon, we came out of the rough land onto a two-lane blacktop road that no doubt dated to the 1950s; it was in middling repair.
The interstate lay beyond view, and in spite of the county road under our wheels, we remained in a place so remote that not a light was visible in any direction.
Bridget started south, then hung a U-turn and cruised north.
I felt drawn that way as well.
“Do you see anything, Panthea?” Bridget asked.
“Yes, I was just struck with a quick vision, but I don’t know what it means. I saw an old man sitting in a throne-like chair with carved-wood heads of dogs, German shepherds, at the top of the two stiles that supported the back rail. He was eating what appeared to be a brownie and drinking a beer.”
Movies and novels have conditioned us to believe that when a clairvoyant is assaulted by a vision of something yet to happen, she or he always glimpses a moment of high drama—a bridge collapsing, an assassin with a rifle taking aim at a head of state. I wondered if sometimes Panthea foresaw John Kennedy Ching, of Ching Station, restocking the candy display the day after tomorrow or maybe a mail carrier delivering a new issue of Arizona! magazine next Tuesday. The idea of a seer glimpsing mundane moments of the future rather charmed me, although it would be regrettable if seeing the geezer with the brownie and beer distracted her from seeing, instead, that my head would be cut off by a guy with a chainsaw.
As if Panthea was embarrassed by the apparent uselessness of her vision and felt the need to make it seem a little more relevant, she said, “He was sort of a weird old man. He was wearing a white shirt with a string tie, khaki shorts, white kneesocks, and saddle shoes. Oh, and a Tyrolean hat.”
In the unlikely event that this detail would eventually prove to be a matter of life or death, I said, “What’s a Tyrolean hat?”
“It was slightly more boat shaped than round. A soft-brimmed green-felt number with a small red and green feather tucked in the band.”
“Do you think he’s evil?” I wondered. “He doesn’t sound very menacing.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t get much of a feel about him. Maybe something more will come. We must not wait for the equivalent of a Wikipedia entry on this old man. Our gifts assist us, but they don’t control us. We distinguish ourselves by the efforts we make, by taking the initiative whatever the risks.”
“We aren’t puppets,” I said, recalling her brief dissertation on that subject at the end of dinner in her Quonset hut.
“Indeed, we are not,” Panthea said. “Nor would we want to be even if that assured our triumph. It’s by our choices and actions that we succeed or fail. Without the freedom of choices, we would have no dignity.”
“You’ve given all this a lot of thought,” I said.
“When you live alone in the true desert, miles from Peptoe and even farther from Sulphur Flats, when you also work at home, making your living as an artist, you have a lot of time on your hands. You either think deeply about everything or you go mad. I have not gone mad, so far as I am aware. I credit my adoptive parents for that. There is a certain Ching attitude that nurtures sanity.”
During the next mile, the sky went dry. Bridget switched off the windshield wipers.
As tattered clouds alternately unraveled from the face of the moon and raveled over it again, the pall of darkness fluctuated.
A signpost loomed on the left. Six feet high, the tallest object in sight, it was the first sign of any kind that we had seen on this lonely road. Bridget braked to a stop alongside it and put her window down, the better to read the black hand-painted notice on the white placard.