—Did you hit him back? he asked after a moment.
—No, said Emmett. Instead, I counted to ten.
Then Billy smiled at Emmett, and Emmett smiled right back.
Truly, Horatio, there are more things in heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
* * *
Shortly after midnight, I poked my head into Woolly’s room. From the sound of his breathing, I could tell that he was lost in his dreams. I crossed my fingers that he hadn’t taken too much of his medicine before going to bed since I was going to have to roust him soon enough.
The Watson brothers were sound asleep too, Emmett flat on his back and Billy curled on his side. In the moonlight I could see the kid’s book on the foot of the bed. If he happened to stretch his legs, it might drop to the floor, so I moved it to the spot on the bureau where his mother’s picture should have been.
I found Emmett’s pants hanging over the back of a chair—with all of its pockets empty. Tiptoeing around the bed, I squatted at the bedside table. The drawer wasn’t more than a foot from Emmett’s face, so I had to ease it open inch by inch. But the keys weren’t there either.
—Harrumph, I said to myself.
I had already looked for them in the car and in the kitchen before coming upstairs. Where in the hell could he have put them?
As I was mulling this over, the beam from a set of headlights swept across the room as a vehicle pulled into the Watsons’ drive and rolled to a stop.
Quietly, I headed down the hall and paused at the top of the stairs. Outside I heard the door of the vehicle open. After a moment, there were footsteps on and off the porch, then the door closed and the vehicle drove away.
When I was sure that no one had woken, I went down into the kitchen, opened the screen door, and stepped out onto the porch. In the distance I could see the lights of the vehicle headed back up the road. It took me a moment to notice the shoebox at my feet with big black letters scrawled across the top.
I may be no scholar, but I know my own name when I see it, even by the light of the moon. Getting down on my haunches, I gently lifted the lid, wondering what in God’s name could be inside.
—Well, I’ll be damned.
EIGHT
Emmett
When they pulled out of the driveway at five thirty in the morning, Emmett was in good spirits. The night before, with the help of Billy’s map, he had laid out an itinerary. The route from Morgen to San Francisco was a little over fifteen hundred miles. If they averaged forty miles an hour for ten hours a day—leaving time enough to eat and sleep—they could make the trip in four days.
Of course there was plenty to see between Morgen and San Francisco. As their mother’s postcards attested, there were motor courts and monuments, rodeos and parks. If you were willing to drive out of your way, there were Mount Rushmore, Old Faithful, and the Grand Canyon. But Emmett didn’t want to waste time or money on the journey west. The sooner they got to California, the sooner he could get to work; and the more money they had in hand when they got there, the better a house they would be able to buy. If they began frittering away what little they had while in transit, they’d have to settle for buying a marginally worse house in a marginally worse neighborhood, which, when the time came to sell, would result in a marginally worse profit. As far as Emmett was concerned, the faster they crossed the country the better.
Emmett’s primary worry when he’d gone to bed had been that he wouldn’t be able to rouse the others, that he’d waste the first hours of daylight getting them up and out the door. But he needn’t have worried. When he rose at five, Duchess was already in the shower and he could hear Woolly humming down the hall. Billy had gone so far as to sleep in his clothes so he wouldn’t have to get dressed when he woke. By the time Emmett took his place behind the wheel and retrieved his keys from above the visor, Duchess was already in the passenger seat and Billy was sitting beside Woolly in the back with his map in his lap. And when, shortly before dawn, they turned out of the driveway, not one of them cast a backward glance.
Maybe they all had reasons for wanting to make an early start, thought Emmett. Maybe they all were ready to be someplace else.
* * *
? ? ?
As Duchess was sitting in front, Billy asked if he wanted to hold the map. When Duchess declined on the grounds that reading in cars made him queasy, Emmett felt a little relieved, recognizing that Duchess didn’t always pay the closest attention to details, while Billy was practically born to navigate. Not only did he have his compass and pencils at the ready, he had a ruler so he could calculate mileage off the one-inch scale. But when Emmett signaled a right-hand turn onto Route 34, he found himself wishing that Duchess had taken on the job, after all.