My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) (27 page)

The atlas page showed that in Joliet, Route 6—the Roosevelt Highway—and Routes 30, 66, 52, and 31 all intersected, which explained the gas station open past midnight. I stared at the tangle of roads outlined around Chicago, and felt a pang of curiosity.
Chicago.
That’s where Mama had wanted to go to record her music. Had she ever gone? Ever tried? I thought of the bridal photo of her I’d impulsively stuffed in my suitcase, the strained expression on her face, how different it was from the mischievous, carefree look she had in her old singing photos. Were there photos of her in the years after she’d left us, singing and laughing and carefree?

When I returned from my turn in the bathroom, Will and Trusty were settled down again in the backseat. Jimmy sat behind the wheel, and when I started to tell him to get out of my seat, he said, “It will go faster if we take turns
driving and sleeping. I also bought two extra canisters of gas—they’re in the trunk—for when we get out where there aren’t many gas stations.”

I started to argue with him, but I realized he was right. After all, he’d already driven across the country once, so he knew tricks like staying well supplied and ahead of fatigue. So I settled in the passenger’s seat and helped Jimmy navigate to Route 52, and then stared out at the dark as we continued west on 52 out of Joliet.

For the next four days, we followed Jimmy’s plan, taking turns driving, stopping just to stretch and eat and have bathroom breaks and sleep for just a few hours at a time, following Route 52 across the Mississippi River and into Iowa on the toll bridge near Savanna, Illinois, then staying on the route through Dubuque and Minneapolis and from there taking Route 12 across South Dakota and the southwestern corner of North Dakota and finally into Montana.

So on October 26, it felt like waking up when Jimmy pulled into the parking lot of the two-story Sunrise Motel in Helena, Montana. For just a second, I stared at the sign on top of the motel’s flat roof—the word
SUNRISE
in red capital letters filled a white triangle, above which peeked a neon yellow half circle.
SUNRISE MOTEL
, again in red capital letters, was repeated on the side of the turquoise building, on the second story above the motel office, the letters askew as if a big wind had blown through, picked up the letters, and tossed them back onto the building, right above the entrance overhang.

I looked at Jimmy, who had been driving for the past four hours. “Why are you stopping?” I didn’t want to wake from the travel dream trance. So far, we’d had good
weather—just a few rainstorms—and no car trouble other than one incident of overheating in South Dakota, but we’d had that fixed quickly enough at a gas station.

“I don’t know about you, but I need a shower and to just stop being in a car for a night,” Jimmy said, flashing me a smile.

“All right,” I said, “but we just passed a campground coming into town. We could just spend the night in the camper—”

“Let’s treat ourselves,” Jimmy snapped. “I’m going to check us in.”

“But Trusty—”

“No one will hear him barking through the walls,” Jimmy said.

I frowned, suddenly feeling defensive of Trusty’s impediment. “Sure, but we can’t sneak him in like a toy poodle, either—”

“Hey, Will, can you make sure Trusty keeps his head down until we can check in?” Jimmy asked.

Will looked up from his new
Sergeant Striker and the Alaskan Wild
comic book. I glanced at the comic book, already a little frayed around the edges from Will handling it so much, and tried to pull from my blurry on-road memory a specific recollection of when and where he’d gotten it. Then it came back to me: Jimmy had bought it for him the day before, while the car was being repaired at the service station in Aberdeen, South Dakota. While Will, Trusty, and I walked around the town for a little while, Jimmy went to a hamburger stand and picked up a bag of burgers for our lunch. When we met up with him again at the service station, he looked upset, but wouldn’t say why. He just said he
had a stomachache and wasn’t hungry after all, and fed his burger to Trusty. He stayed quiet after that, but I didn’t think much about it until that moment in Helena, in the parking lot of the Sunrise Motel.

“We’re gonna stay in a motel?” Will asked.

“If your big sister gives us her approval,” Jimmy said.

Will looked at me, wide-eyed. “Can we, Donna? Can we? We’ve never been in a motel before!” I looked at the white doors to the units. There were only a few other cars in the parking lot. This did not, I thought, look like a particularly wonderful first experience. But then, this might well be Will’s only chance to stay in a motel. And getting out of the car for a night did sound heavenly.

Of course, I’d stuck to a strict schedule of giving Will his medicine, just like we were at home. But there was a paleness to Will’s mouth and a pastiness to his skin that I didn’t like. Every time I asked how he felt, he said, with some annoyance to his voice, that he was fine. Maybe, I thought, the constant car motion just worsened the side effects of his medicine. While Jimmy went to the office, I walked to the end of the motel parking lot, beyond which was nothing but wide open field that went on for miles. To the west, I saw other buildings—stores and shops—that led into Helena proper. To the north, far beyond the plain, mountains, part of the Rocky Mountain range, rose into the wide open sky. It was cool—not quite freezing—and dry, and it felt so good to be out of the close, warm confines of the car. I found myself luxuriously stretching my legs, arms, shoulders.

How many miles to those mountains? I wondered. Twenty? Forty? More? It was hard to estimate distance in this wide open land that looked like an odd mix of prairie
and mountain. We’d already come about two thousand miles, and we had about that many more to go before we reached Tok in the Alaska Territory. The chance to say,
Ah, well, we can just turn around and go back
was long behind us.

Maybe, I thought, it would be good to rest for a full night, and let the car rest, too.

“We’re really close to the Continental Divide!”

I startled and saw that Will and Trusty had gotten out of the car and quietly walked up next to me. Will was holding the atlas open. Trusty wandered a little way into the plain behind the motel and squatted.

I looked at Will. He’d been making such pronouncements off and on during the trip—most recently informing us that we weren’t that far from Yellowstone National Park and Custer Battlefield National Monument—but Jimmy and I had just kept driving. I could sense Will’s disappointment, especially about the Custer monument. He’d talked for a good fifteen minutes about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, between General Custer’s 7th Calvary and Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians, and how Custer himself had been buried at the site, but his bones had been dug up and moved to West Point, and how there was a big granite memorial on top of the bones of all kinds of unknown soldiers, and also individual marker stones where soldiers had fallen.

Part of me had been aghast—how could he want to see a cemetery? And part of me had been amused. Will had always been bored in school, and yet so smart about the things that interested him, picking up knowledge from library books.

And atlases.

And the
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
comic strip.

I took the atlas from him and peered at it, studying the little upside down
V
’s that marked the Continental Divide. For the first time, I felt some excitement about the journey itself, and not just an urgency to have it over with so that I could get Will back home where he’d be safe, at least for a while.

“We’ll cross it tomorrow, following your route,” I said.

“’Course, if we wanted to go another way, we could see Glacier Park,” Will said, slyness creeping into his voice as he tapped the top left corner of the page. “We could cross the divide
and
see glaciers!”

I listened to Will go on as I stared at the map. Just east of the area labeled “Glacier National Park” was Shelby, Montana—the town where Miss Bettina said Mama was last known to live. Suddenly, I couldn’t hear anything but buzzing. My vision fuzzed and the atlas fell from my hands.

“Donna!”

I looked up. Jimmy was standing over me, saying my name. I’d sunk to my knees. Will picked up his atlas and then stared at me, worry furrowing his brow. My head was still spinning, but I made myself get up, made myself smile at Jimmy and Will. The last thing I wanted Will to think was that I couldn’t take care of him. I had to put the idea that we were only a few hours’ drive away from Mama out of my head.

“I just got lightheaded, that’s all,” I said. “I’m fine.”

Will ran over and threw his arms tightly around my waist. I returned the hug. “Hey,” I said, “I am fine. I guess I just need dinner more than I realized.”

Jimmy held up a motel room key. “How about we go see our room and get Will and Trusty in there before anyone sees Trusty, and then worry about dinner?”

“All right,” I said. Will unclenched himself from me and began softly calling for Trusty to come back from the field. “I can make sandwiches in the room—”

“Actually, there’s a diner across the street,” Jimmy said. “I was thinking just you and I could go, and bring back something for Will later.”

I frowned at the notion of leaving Will alone.

“Trusty will probably tear the room up if we take Will away from him, and I was kind of hoping to talk to you alone.” Jimmy gave me a pleading look.

I looked across the motel parking lot to the diner across the street. We’d only be a few yards away. Dinner wouldn’t take long. I gave Jimmy a small nod.

“How ’bout it, Will?” Jimmy called to Will, as he and Trusty walked back toward us. “You want to stay in the motel room with Trusty while I take your sister on a little dinner date across the street? There’s a TV in the room and we can bring you back a burger—”

Will wrinkled his nose. “You’re going on a date? Leave me out!” Then he paused and thought a second before adding, “Can I get a malt and fries, too?”

The Golden Gulch—named, according to the blurb on the front of the menu, after the discovery of gold in a gulch in 1864 that led to Helena’s founding—was a lot different than Dot’s Corner Café, with its polished wooden booths and ceiling lamps wired around hanging antlers. Grandma
would have frowned with disgust at the spittoons beside each booth. Finally, something Grandma and I could agree about.

Still, the grilled cheese sandwich and fries were good, even though Jimmy and I ate in awkward silence. I was three spoonfuls into my hot fudge sundae when he suddenly looked up from the apple pie he’d barely touched and said, “Donna, we have to go back.”

I slowly lowered my spoon to the sundae dish. “Go back? What do you mean? We’re halfway to Tok!”

Jimmy looked away from me, down at his pie. “Look, I…I wasn’t completely truthful with you about my driving from California to Ohio.”

“You mean, you never made the drive? You just made that up to impress me?” I gave a little laugh, wanting to believe that Jimmy’s tension was over nothing more than this. “Aw, I forgive you. It’s kind of sweet and you’ve been so great on this trip—”

“No! The part I made up—or at least let you believe—was that my parents were OK with that trip. And they weren’t. They were furious.”

I stared at him. “If you want to go back, that’s fine. I’m sure there’s a Greyhound station here. After all, there’s one in Groverton, and Helena’s five times as big. I’ll buy your ticket to repay you for the gas—”

Suddenly, Jimmy leaned across the booth, grabbed my hands, pulled me roughly toward him. “No, listen, we need to go back together! Plus Will is looking tired and I’m not sure it’s a good idea—”

I pulled my hands from his grasp. “Don’t try to use Will to make me feel guilty enough to go back with you! Yes, he’s
tired. But he’s doing as well on his medicine as he would at home, maybe better, because he’s so excited to be on this trip. Making him turn around now would just be cruel.” I stopped, studied Jimmy for a long moment, and then said, more quietly, “Are you really just worried about what your parents will think? They’re not going to be less mad at you if you go back now, and I don’t see why Will and I need to go back—”

“Just—just—because—” Jimmy dropped his head to his hands in frustration.

“What’s really going on, Jimmy?”

After a long pause, he finally said, “I got worried, OK, about what my parents are thinking, what they’re planning to do when I do get back. So yesterday I made a collect call to Hank’s house, but no one answered. I collect-called Babs and talked to her.” Jimmy took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “It’s bad. Several people were injured in the fire. One died—Joey Winton.”

Winton…MayJune had mentioned just once, at Will’s birthday party, that that was her last name. And that she had a son named Joey. Tears stung my eyes. “MayJune’s son?”

Jimmy nodded. I swallowed hard. MayJune’s son had been dying at the same time she gave us the camper.

He went on, “The fire started because an incinerator door hadn’t been fixed. That fire—it was because of ignoring safety practices, just like your dad said. Which means in the end it’s my dad’s fault for turning a blind eye. The strike is over and management is finally doing a safety review with workers, getting their input, but that doesn’t change where everyone is putting the blame.”

“I’m sorry, especially about MayJune’s son,” I said. “But I don’t see why this means we—any of us—have to go back.”

“Donna, I know that right now my parents—whatever their public face—see me as running away with the enemy’s daughter. Babs overheard my dad rant at hers that if he hadn’t printed all those letters from your father, then people wouldn’t blame my father as much for what happened—the fire could just be seen as an accident.”

I looked at Jimmy, horrified. “People are injured, MayJune’s son is dead, and your dad is worried about his reputation. And you want us to go back to make it look better for him?”

He said softly, “If you go back with me, we can convince them the trip was…done out of an emotional reaction. The stress of Will being sick. Even my parents could understand that. Donna, I love you. We can get back together. I can be free to go to college and figure out what I want to study and then, after a few years, we can get married.”