All The Darkness You Need

Chapter 6: The Road To Yuma

The Arizona desert stretched wide and tan. The navy blue Oldsmobile was dusty. Jen was awake and the boys had some discussion about whether they should hold to Interstate Ten and take that up into Phoenix and then more directly into Los Angeles, or if they should take the I-8 road in a more flat trajectory to Yuma, then head north through California into L.A. from that direction.

Jesse studied the map and Dan drove and together they agreed that it was a good idea to stick to the method they had employed thus far and stay on the straightest course for as long as they could. That meant that they would veer off onto I-8 and take that road to the Arizona border town of Yuma. From there, up to L.A.

They stopped for gas at the first gas station they saw and they ate in the restaurant next door. In the parking lot was a nineteen-seventy red Ford Mustang that looked brand new and they wondered if it was a car in the race. It turned out to be the car of an older couple driving through Arizona on a road trip but the whole thing had made Jesse's and Dan's hearts race.

The three travelers ate pancakes and eggs with bacon and they drank coffee. They each used the restroom in turn and Jen took the opportunity to wash up in the ladies room and they were back in the car in forty minutes, gas and all.

They headed out to the roadway and Dan dialed the car up to their normal ninety or so miles per hour and they cruised through the morning. I-10 dipped down through a green valley and rose again to find the flat tan desert. The highway passed right by the tall buildings of Tucson that stood in the shadows of the mountains beyond.

"Those buildings sure are a crazy sight out here, aren't they?" Jesse said.

Jen would liked to have stopped to check out the bigger city but she knew that was impossible so she just watched it pass. With Tucson behind them they drove through the day until eventually they found the exit to take I-8 and they did so. The road headed west and them on it and the day stretched out as far as the horizon and the three racers sat back and Dan guided the car and they all knew they were bound for Yuma on the border. They knew they would not stop if not for gas and that this was the final leg of their journey. There was mostly silence in the car and the wide world flew by outside. Saguaro cacti stood like sentinels on the roadside and out in the flat bajadas.

Jesse said that those kinds of cactus took fifty years to get three feet tall. He said that the first arm would appear around a hundred years and that any that had two arms or more were two hundred years old or older. He said that birds made nests in them and that they grew flowers that were special in some way but he could not remember exactly how. Maybe you could eat them or they made some kind of medicine. Something like that. He did know they were older than most people thought. The car growled on.

The low hill country of southern Arizona looked flat where it stretched in tan grasses toward the shadowed mountains ahead. But there were rolling hills that the road revealed and the only green in that country was the very fringes of the road and it seemed that the road might catch and drain what water did fall and the grass at its edges thrived where all other grass looked brown and dead and it was a wonder to think it grew at all.

Between the rolling low-hill road and the distant mountain shoulders the tan grass was darkened to grey in spots where white clouds made transitory shade that moved over the valley floors like silent hovering shadows rolled across an ocean floor and cast down from ship's hulls that rocked in the bright light high above. The sky was perfect blue and that same hue clung to the bottoms of the clouds as if the clouds had been dipped into the same dye and hung to dry. Under that blue and white patched sky and out beyond the painted mountains that stood on the horizon a black storm gathered and lightening struck among it in white-hot striations that seemed to hold much longer than lightening did in other places. There was a small rise and ahead of that the road dipped so that you could not see where it landed but you could see where it curved out from that deck and bent to the left, which would have been to the west. To the left of that bend beyond the curve was a tan building with a red roof and on the right of the road there were spots of green trees that stood in the brown floor of the roadside. Mesquite. Acacia.