But when I punched the accelerator, the little orange needle in the speedometer dropped from twenty-five to twenty. When I pushed the pedal to the floor, we slowed to fifteen, and when I pulled onto the shoulder, we rolled to a stop.
Turning the key off and on, I counted to three and pushed the starter to no effect.
Fucking Studebaker, I muttered to myself. It’s probably the battery again. But even as I thought this, I realized the radio was still playing, so it couldn’t be the battery. Maybe it had something to do with the spark plug . . . ?
—Are we out of gas? asked Woolly.
After looking at Woolly for a second, I looked at the fuel gauge. It too had a thin orange needle, and sure enough, the needle was sitting on the bottom.
—So it would seem, Woolly. So it would seem.
As luck would have it, we were still in the Ames city limits, and not far up the road I could see the flying red horse of a Mobil station. Putting my hands in my pockets, I withdrew what change was left from Mr. Watson’s desk drawer. After accounting for the hamburger and ice cream cone I’d purchased back in Morgen, it amounted to seven cents.
—Woolly, you wouldn’t happen to have any money on you?
—Money? he replied.
Why is it, I wondered, that people born with money are always the ones who say the word like it’s in a foreign language?
Getting out of the car, I looked up and down the road. Across the street was a diner beginning to get busy with the lunch crowd. Next was a laundromat with two cars in the lot. But farther up the way was a liquor store that didn’t look like it had opened yet.
In New York City, no liquor store owner worth his salt would leave cash on the premises overnight. But we weren’t in New York City. We were in the heartland, where most of the people who read In God We Trust on a dollar bill took the words literally. But on the off chance there wasn’t any money sitting in the till, I figured I could grab a case of whiskey and offer a few bottles to the gas station attendant in exchange for filling the tank.
The only problem was how to get in.
—Hand me the keys, would you?
Leaning over, Woolly removed the keys from the ignition and passed them through the window.
—Thanks, I said, turning toward the trunk.
—Duchess?
—Yeah, Woolly?
—Do you think it’s possible . . . ? Do you think I might . . . ?
Generally, I don’t like to tinker with another man’s habits. If he wants to get up early and go to mass, let him get up early and go to mass; and if he wants to sleep until noon wearing last night’s clothes, let him sleep until noon wearing last night’s clothes. But given that Woolly was down to his last few bottles of medicine and I needed help with the navigation, I had asked him to forgo his midmorning dose.
I took another glance at the liquor store. I had no idea how long it was going to take for me to get in and out. So in the meantime, it was probably just as well if Woolly was lost in his thoughts.
—All right, I said. But why don’t you keep it to a drop or two.
He was already reaching for the glove compartment as I headed to the back of the car.
When I opened the trunk, I had to smile. Because when Billy had said that he and Emmett were heading for California with what little they could fit in a kit bag, I figured he was speaking figuratively. But there was nothing figurative about it. It was a kit bag, all right. Setting it aside, I folded back the felt that covered the spare. Nesting beside the tire, I found the jack and handle. The handle was about the width of a candy cane, but if it was strong enough to crank up a Studebaker, I figured it would be strong enough to open a country door.
Picking up the handle with my left hand, I went to fold the felt back in place with my right. And that’s when I saw it: a little corner of paper sticking up from behind the black of the tire, looking as white as an angel’s wing.
Emmett
It took Emmett half an hour to find his way to the gates of the freight yard. While the passenger and freight lines were adjacent, they had their backs to each other. So even though their respective terminals were just a few hundred yards apart, to get from the entrance of one to the entrance of the other, you had to walk a circumventing mile. The route initially took Emmett along a well-groomed thoroughfare of shops, but then over the tracks and into a zone of foundries, scrapyards, and garages.
As he followed the wire fence that bordered the rail yard, Emmett began to sense the enormity of the task before him. For while the passenger terminal was just large enough to accommodate the few hundred travelers who arrived or departed from this midsized city in a day—the freight yard sprawled. Fanning out over five acres, it encompassed a receiving yard, a switching yard, wheelhouses, offices, and maintenance areas, but most of all, boxcars. Hundreds of them. Rectilinear and rust-colored, they were lined end to end and row by row for almost as far as the eye could see. And whether they were slotted to head east or west, north or south, laden or empty, they were exactly as common sense should have told him they would be: anonymous and interchangeable.