her?»
«I didn't. I was looking for you.» He sat down beside Susan. «I had some luck and I followed a hunch or two. And the
Susan brought Eugene Junior right side up and hugged him while smiling at John. «Never a dull moment when Mom's around, that's for sure. Hey, know what? I know your home phone number.»
«Really now?»
She told him.
«Aren't
«Eugene.»
«Eugene?»
«He was two last week.»
«You gonna go talk to your mother?»
«I suppose I have to.» Susan grabbed him by the arm. «You want me, you better see this, too.»
The two walked over to Marilyn, who had the lost look of a seabird covered in oil. Susan was going to speak, made a false start and stopped. It turned out for once, Susan didn't have to say anything. Marilyn whispered, «I'm sorry about those pageants.»
Susan made a noise, emptying her lungs of air and stress. She said, «Mom, look. If I
Marilyn sighed.
Susan and John went over to the minivan and sat down beside it, Eugene on Susan's lap. Susan said, «I got your number from a friend at the Director's Guild. I was about to call you when the shit hit the fan known as my mother.» She gave a lusty yawn. John picked up a piece of cardboard and played peekaboo with Eugene.
«I can't act,» Susan said.
John snorted. «Oh God, where did
Susan smiled. «Well, I don't want you getting it in your head you can save me from myself by starring me in one of your movies. I'm a crap actress. I really am.»
«You can take lessons and — »
«
«So you still want to change, then?» John tried to ask this casually.
«Well, yeah. Don't you?»
«How about I'll stop if
«You think you can?»
John thought this over. The wind seemed to get stronger, blowing down from the Rockies onto the Plains. «Look at us,» said John, «two clowns who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.»
Susan put her hands in her face and said, «Oh God, my
Ivan had finished his phone call and sidled over. He reached John and Susan just as their hands touched. «
«Ivan, this is Susan. Susan, Ivan.»
John's and Susan's hands were carelessly touching. «John-O, I tell you what — why don't I pile everybody into the rental car and take them back to Los Angeles?»
Susan's eyes were as wide and as open as the cobalt sky above.
«Okay,» John said.
Susan got behind the wheel of the minivan and John jumped in and rode shotgun with Eugene Junior on his lap. Susan started the van and drove off.
Looking back, John saw the mystified crowd, with Ivan preparing a plot synopsis for their next six hours.
Susan, exhausted or not, was a confident driver. The three sped across the dark flat continent, nobody in the minivan knowing where they might be heading, just that they were heading away from where they had been before.
Eugene Junior fell asleep in John's lap. John turned his head and looked out the window. Outside, there was a barbed-wire fence, a road sign sayingOMAHA 480, and John also saw what he thought were the eyes of an animal.
He looked at Susan's reflection in the black window glass. John remembered once yelling at a cameraman on a film, whom he was convinced was color-blind. During a break John went off to props and brought back with him a piece of shiny black plastic. He gave it to the cameraman, and the cameraman asked him, «What's this for?» and John said, «It's something the Impressionist painters used to do. Whenever they were unsure of the true color of something, they'd look at its reflection in a piece of black glass. They thought that the only way they could ever see the true nature of something was to reflect it onto something dark.»
Police lights erupted behind them, but the police were after another car, not theirs. Susan looked over at John and arched her eyebrows in conspiracy. John watched the pale black road, and he remembered a single moment during his time away in the wilderness. He wished he had told Doris about it — a single moment in Needles, California, months and months ago, facing west in the late afternoon. There had been a heavy rainstorm over just a small, localized patch of the desert, and from the patch beside it, a dust storm blew in. The sun caught the dust and the moisture in a way John had never seen before, and even though he knew it was backward, it seemed to him the sun was radiating black sunbeams down onto the Earth, onto Interstate 40 and the silver river of endless pioneers that flowed from one part of the continent to the other. John felt that he and everybody in the New World was a part of a mixed curse and blessing from God, that they were a race of strangers, perpetually casting themselves into new fires, yearning to burn, yearning to rise from the charcoal, always newer and more wonderful, always thirsty, always starving, always believing that whatever came to them next would mercifully erase the creatures they'd already become as they crawled along the plastic radiant way.
