eat if she was fed. She would perform the functions of elimination. She would not answer questions. She only really came alive in her sleep. Even with a heavy dose of Veronal, she often moaned and sometimes shrieked. Frannie thought she knew what the poor woman was dreaming of.
“It seems like a long way still to go, doesn’t it?” she said.
He didn’t answer for a moment, and then he said: “It’s further than we thought. That old woman, she’s not in Nebraska anymore.”
“I know—” she began, and then bit down on her words.
He glanced at her with a faint grin. “You’ve been skippin your medication, ma’am.”
“My secret’s out,” she said with a lame smile.
“We’re not the only ones,” Stu said. “I was talkin to Dayna this afternoon” (she felt that interior dig of jealousy—and fear—at the familiar way he used her name) “and she said neither she nor Susan wanted to take it.”
Fran nodded. “Why did you stop? Did they drug you… in that place?”
He tapped ashes into his bare earth ashtray. “Mild sedatives at night, that was all. They didn’t need to drug me. I was locked up nice and tight. No, I stopped three nights ago because I felt… out of touch.” He meditated for a moment and then expanded. “Glen and Harold going to get that CB radio, that was a real good idea. What’s a two-way for? To put you in touch. This buddy of mine back in Arnette, Tony Leominster, he had one in his Scout. Great gadget. You could talk to folks, or you could holler for help if you got in a jam of trouble. These dreams, they’re almost like having a CB in your head, except the transmit seems to be broken and we’re only receiving.”
“Maybe we
He looked at her, startled.
They sat quiet for a while. The sun peered through the clouds, as if to say a quick goodbye before sinking below the horizon. Fran could understand why primitive people worshiped it. As the gigantic quiet of the nearly empty country accumulated on her day by day, imprinting its truth on her brain by its very weight, the sun—the moon, too, for that matter—began to seem bigger and more important. More personal. Those bright skyships began to look to you as they had when you were a child.
“Anyway, I stopped,” Stu said. “Last night I dreamed about that black man again. It was the worst yet. He’s setting up somewhere out in the desert. Las Vegas, I think. And Frannie… I think he’s crucifying people. The ones who give him trouble.”
“He’s doing
“That’s what I dreamed. Lines of crosses along Highway 15 made out of barn-beams and telephone poles. People hanging off them.”
“Just a dream,” she said uneasily.
“Maybe.” He smoked and looked west at the red-tinged clouds. “But the other two nights, just before we run on those maniacs holding the women, I dreamed about her—the woman who calls herself Mother Abigail. She was sitting in the cab of an old pickup truck parked on the shoulder of Highway 76. I was standing on the ground with one arm leaning on the window, talking to her just as natural as I’m talking to you. And she says, ‘You got to move em along faster still, Stuart; if an old lady like me can do it, a big tough fella from Texas like you should be able to.’” Stu laughed, threw down his cigar, and crushed it under his heel. In kind of an absent way, as if not knowing what he was doing, he put an arm around Frannie’s shoulders.
“They’re going to Colorado,” she said.
“Why, yes, I think they are.”
“Has… has either Dayna or Susan dreamed of her?”
“Both. And last night Susan dreamed of the crosses. Just like I did.”
“There’s a lot of people with that old woman now.”
Stu agreed. “Twenty, maybe more. You know, we’re passing people nearly every day. They just hunker down and wait for us to go by. They’re scared of us, but her… they’ll come to her, I guess. In their own good time.”
“Or to the other one,” Frannie said.
Stu nodded. “Yeah, or to him. Fran, why did you stop taking the Veronal?”
She uttered a trembling sigh and wondered if she should tell him. She wanted to, but she was afraid of what his reaction might be.
“There’s no counting on what a woman will do,” she said at last.
“No,” he agreed. “But there are ways to find out what they’re thinking, maybe.”
“What—” she began, and he stopped her mouth with a kiss.
They lay on the grass in the last of the twilight. Flagrant red had given way to cooler purple as they made love, and now Frannie could see stars shining through the last of the clouds. It would be good riding weather tomorrow. With any luck they would be able to get most of the way across Indiana.
Stu slapped lazily at a mosquito hovering over his chest. His shirt was hung on a nearby bush. Fran’s shirt was on but unbuttoned. Her breasts pushed at the cloth and she thought,
“I’ve wanted you for a pretty long time now,” Stu said without looking directly at her. “I guess you know that.”
“I wanted to avoid trouble with Harold,” she said. “And there’s something else that—”
“Harold’s got a ways to go,” Stu said, “but he’s got the makings of a fine man somewhere inside him if he’ll toughen up. You like him, don’t you?”
“That’s not the right word. There isn’t a word in English for how I feel about Harold.”
“How do you feel about me?” he asked.
She looked at him and found she couldn’t say she loved him, couldn’t say it right out, although she wanted to.
“No,” he said, as if she’d contradicted him, “I just like to get things straight. I guess you’d just as soon not have Harold know anything about this yet. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” she said gratefully.
“It’s just as well. If we lie low, it may take care of itself. I’ve seen him lookin at Patty. She’s about his age.”
“I don’t know…”
“You feel a debt of gratitude to him, don’t you?”
“I suppose so. We were the only two left in Ogunquit, and—”
“That was luck, no more, Frannie. You don’t want to let anyone put you in a headhold over something that was pure luck.”
“I suppose.”
“I guess I love you,” he said. “That’s not so easy for me to say.”
“I guess I love you, too. But there’s something else…”
“I knew that.”
“You asked me why I stopped taking the pills.” She plucked at her shirt, not daring to look at him. Her lips felt unnaturally dry. “I thought they might be bad for the baby,” she whispered.
“For the.” He stopped. Then he grasped her and turned her to face him. “You’re
She nodded.
“And you didn’t tell anyone?”
“No.”
“Harold. Does Harold know?”
“No one but you.”
“God-almighty-damn,” he said. He was peering into her face in a concentrated way that scared her. She had imagined one of two things: he would leave her immediately (as Jess undoubtedly would have done if he had discovered she was pregnant with another man’s child) or he would hug her, tell her not to worry, that he would take care of everything. She had never expected this startled, close scrutiny, and she found herself remembering the night she had told her father in the garden. His look had been very much like this one. She wished she had told Stu what her situation was before they had made love. Maybe then they wouldn’t have made love at all, but at
