sipped her coffee and let the tears run down her cheeks without wiping them away. I waited for the right moment to do what I had to do next, then realized there was no right moment. I turned to Caine and said, “I know this is an inappropriate time, Caine, but I have no choice.” I glanced at Opari. “Opari and I need to get to Montana. Can you fly us there?”
“Where in Montana?”
“Billings.”
“Of course, Z,” Caine answered. “When do you have to be there?”
“By dawn.”
“Dawn?”
“By dawn tomorrow. Can you do it?”
Caine looked at his watch. It was 9:20 P.M. on a Sunday. “The King Air can cruise at 280 mph,” he said. “If I can still get someone to service the plane and fuel us up, we can make it easily.”
At 11:20 P.M. we were taxiing out on a runway at Lambert Field, loaded with fuel and taking off, heading north by northwest. Caine had called in a few favors owed to get everything done so quickly, but we were in the air and on our way. He had also called ahead and made arrangements in Billings to have a car and driver waiting to pick up “a boy and a girl who are in a hurry.”
We climbed easily to twenty-six thousand feet and leveled out. Above the cloud cover the night sky sparkled with stars from horizon to horizon. As we flew on I asked Caine if he was going to be able to stay awake and he said he’d have no problem until we got to Billings, then he’d rent a room and get some sleep before returning home. Somewhere over South Dakota the drone of the engines began to lull me to sleep, and I drifted off while thinking about Opari and me and the Remembering. I now knew we were going to make it, but I kept thinking, what if we didn’t … what if we didn’t?
In the dream I was sitting on the same train in the same seat I’d been sitting in when the train crashed on the way to Central City, killing my mama and papa and dozens of others. As the train picked up speed, I was rubbing Mama’s glove and watching Papa at the front of our compartment. Then I looked down at the glove, and in the palm, or the pocket, there were words written in red ink. The words were the last three lines of the
“Z, wake up.”
I opened my eyes. It was Opari. “Where are we?” I asked.
“We are approaching Billings. You were talking in your sleep.”
I watched Opari’s mouth move as she talked, and her eyes seemed to be lit from inside. She was so beautiful. “What did I say?”
“You said something about ‘the answer.’ ”
I smiled and took her hand in mine, then kissed her fingers. “I know what to do now.”
Opari looked at me carefully. She wanted to be sure of something. She touched my lips and said, “Tell me.”
I leaned over and whispered in her ear, telling her everything. Opari listened until I was finished, then whispered back, “Yes, yes, yes, my love. Yes.”
Before we landed, I thanked Caine again for all that he’d done for us. I told him that I hoped Jack didn’t mind, and at that precise moment a pair of sunglasses dropped from a clipboard on the copilot side of the cockpit.
“Maybe he came with us,” Caine said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Caine laughed and said, “Those are Jack’s sunglasses.”
I looked out the window to the east. It was still dark, but there was a hint of a faint glow just over the horizon. Caine executed a perfect landing and we taxied to a private hangar adjacent to the main terminal. Idling inside the hangar with its headlights on was a blue van with the name Lewis & Clark Limousine and Shuttle painted on the side doors. Caine swiveled the plane around and came to a stop, then turned off the engines. As he unlocked and opened the door, I told him he might not see us for a while, but I promised to stay in touch, somehow, some way. Opari said to give her love to Star and Antoinette. We stepped out of the plane into the frigid Montana night. Opari ran ahead to the van and I turned back to Caine.
“Good-bye, Caine.”
“Good-bye, Z. Good luck.”
“As a great friend and a wise man used to always tell me—‘Zis is good business.’ ” I waved and ran to catch up with Opari. We had half an hour until first light and another hour and a half until the Remembering.
Our driver was a heavyset man in his fifties who looked at us in the mirror and talked incessantly. Before we had even turned out of Billings onto Highway 87, he said, “I suppose you kids are flyin’ in and tryin’ to beat the eclipse, am I right?”
“You sure are,” I said. “All our cousins are waiting for us.”
He winked in the mirror. “Don’t you worry. Lewis and Clark’ll get you there.”
But he was nearly wrong. Fifty miles north at Roundup, he missed a turn and didn’t realize it for several miles. The mistake and turnaround cost us forty miles and another thirty minutes. As dawn began to break, we were still miles from our destination, and our driver couldn’t increase our speed because of patches of black ice on the two-lane highway. Finally, just south of Grass Range, we turned onto the county road that led to the hunting lodge twelve miles away. Thin gray clouds in the east hid the sun. It was 7:32 A.M.
The entrance to the lodge was marked by a split-rail fence and an open gate, over which there was an eighteen-foot arch made entirely of antlers, spelling out the words “BLACK ELK RANCH.” We sped down the gravel drive another half mile to a compound of buildings in a wide semicircle. Our driver stopped the van next to the largest, an adobe Spanish-style ranch house with a red tile roof. A jeep was parked nearby with its motor running. Before we could get out of the van, Ray Ytuarte burst out of the jeep. I opened the side door just as Ray got to us. He grinned and said, “Damn, Z! Cuttin’ it kinda close, ain’t you?”
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“Always is, my friend, always is.” Ray glanced at Opari, then back to me. “There were some of us, I won’t name names, who thought you might not make it. I was not among them.”
“We’re here now, Ray. That’s what counts.”
He gave me an odd look. “Well, come with me and I mean quick. We only got a few minutes.”
I thanked our driver and Opari and I hopped into the jeep with Ray. He could barely reach the gas pedal, but he set out cross-country toward a rock outcropping in the distance, a small promontory in the middle of a cold, vast, and barren landscape.
I looked up at the sky, and the clouds obscuring the sun had vanished. I thought to myself, it might have looked just like this thirteen thousand five hundred years ago when the Stones were distributed. They were somewhere south of the ice, but close to it. They would have been close to the ice wherever they were. I thought about what Sailor had said last, “The Stones must cross,” and I felt for the Stone of Dreams in my pocket. I turned to look at Opari, and she was staring straight ahead with the hint of a smile on her face.
After a rough ride, mostly along a dry creek bed, Ray brought the Jeep to a jolting halt. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “Eight-eleven,” he said. “We got five minutes.”
We leaped out and Opari and I followed Ray as he scrambled around boulders and climbed up the south slope of the outcropping. At the top, standing in a ragged line, the others were waiting for us, all wearing heavy wool blankets around their shoulders. Against the empty sky and desolate landscape, they looked like abandoned children at the end of nowhere.
Opari and I ran to greet them with an embrace and the words
