He sent deer jerky to the Graces in California, a hemp doll in a tiny poncho to the one in New Mexico. All daughters, none of them his. He felt as if he were trapped in some variation of the original dream: a house filling with water, a search through empty rooms.
From a motel in Glendale, Arizona, on the first of September, he dialed the number for the last Grace Winkler, the one in Boise, Idaho, and pressed the handset to his ear. It rang unanswered. It was noon before he could summon the will to stand, fold his clothes into his duffel bag, and slog out to the Datsun once more.
Dear Soma—
In over two weeks I have spoken to eight Grace Winklers and have nothing from any of them, no clues, no answers, just a sore on the underside of my tongue and pain in my lower back. It was stupid to think she’d even use my surname. What could it mean to her? She could be Grace Sheeler; she could be Grace Anything. I should probably go straight to Anchorage, finish this. But I’m afraid there will be nothing—no one—there. Not even Herman. It is strange and awful to feel so alone, to feel like your whole tribe is dead, even your enemies.
My little car is starting to fail me. I have spent more than two thousand dollars already.
All day the Datsun coughed and spat oil. He talked it forward. The highway fringed the faint arc of an ancient lakeshore where fossilized shells lay like small bones in the sand, and by evening he was descending onto a plain thronged with legions of cacti. They went first pink and then purple and finally crimson in the dusk, their shadows lengthening, the sun dragging its light over the edge of the firmament. Little desert bats appeared over the road, swooping through the headlight beams, their ancient and jawboned faces flashing once in the glare and then gone. Winkler pushed on, racing the fuel gauge to empty, stopping only to refill the oil reservoir or scrape husks of bugs from the windshield. Soon the cacti were behind him, or invisible in the dark, and all that remained were gray and corrugated mountains at the horizons and the immense darkening cistern of sky, trimmed at the edges with orange.
The Datsun limped into Utah around midnight, only intermittent highway lights left now casting dim pools that the car and its pilot passed beneath, gliding from one to the next, towed, seemingly, by their own pale wedge of light. Beneath the highway a canyon opened, and a river appeared, sleek and implacable, before vanishing again.
He spent the last hours of darkness in a rest stop between two purring car carriers. All night he half woke to the sounds of truckers swinging open the door of the outhouse and relieving themselves. An echoing trickle; a noise like small, individual lives passing away. In a dream he watched a winged ghost disappear through columns of falling snow. Each time he drew close, the ghost faded deeper down the trail. Finally it dissolved for good, just the faint blush of its wings receding, and Winkler stopped running to gaze up at ranks of descending snow, snow all the way to the limits of the earth. He woke sweating.
The next day he passed through the sun-afflicted towns of southern Utah and the flanks of the Datsun went red with dust and great red walls of that same dust hung over the road incandescent as if lit from within. The little car wound over canyons and followed the course of a river far below lined with the greens of river oaks and cottonwoods.
It was late into his sixteenth day when he reached Idaho along the wind-tortured flats near Holbrook. The sky was purple a long time and finally black. Along the shoulders dim shapes of sagebrush were bundled low against the ground, and at both horizons low walls of mountains stood black and featureless. He felt as if he were entering a trap and would soon be hemmed in. Around midnight he could make out the lights of Boise reflected off a space in the sky and soon after saw the lights themselves, twinkling and burning on the range like a small blue galaxy.
“Almost there,” he told Sandy. She merely looked out the window. He braced his hands on the wheel. Already the truth was becoming plain: this place would be no happy ending, no slate wiped clean, no port in the storm. He was arriving at the end of the line, no markers above him, no prospects, no tenth Grace on his list. Sandy was dead and his daughter had likely drowned twenty-five years before, and here he was in Boise, Idaho, after nearly sixty years of living and what did he have to show for it?