“Come where?”
She took his crutches from behind the booth and held them ready for him. “C’mon, c’mon. I’ll show you! I’ll show you! Hurry!”
He did, and she had him on his feet and the awkward crutches stuck under his arms as fast as a mother might when hurrying her hobbled child off to school. They made it to the big glass door before Mari stopped and turned back, leaving Jay half in the day’s ebbing heat and half in the air conditioned cool as she returned to the booth. There she scooped up all but a nickel of the change and scooted back to Jay, leading him outside and to her car at the curb.
She made him stand near the hood, leaning forward on the old crutches that forced a right side list to his posture, and wait as she moved clothes and some blankets and his box of letters around in the back seat until she had what she was searching for.
“Here!” she announced excitedly, showing him the flat and haggard road atlas before splaying it out on the blotched roof of her Honda.
Jay moved close to see just what she was doing.
“I mean, it is so simple,” she said, flipping through the dog-eared pages until she had the place of their presence. She pointed at a spot. “Right here, here we are.”
The tip of her index finger covered the hills south of Plainview. “Okay. So?”
“You haven’t done much driving, have you?” she commented more than asked, her finger moving on the atlas’s page now, along the roving thick lines and thin lines of black and gray and blue and red and green. “Well let me tell you, I’ve done more driving in the past four months than I care to remember. This little atlas, it became like my bible. And one thing I learned out on the road is that everywhere you look there are numbers, and I further learned that every road it seemed had its own.”
“Its own number,” Jay said, connecting it now.
“Look.” She laid the menu to the side of the page, obliterating St. Louis and all of Illinois. “The first number you told me was seventy. Right up here...” Her finger traced back and forth along a thick green line running east/west. “That’s Interstate Seventy. And I’ll bet,” she began, her eyes scanning the page, “that if we follow it out we’ll see a twenty seven.”
“How do you know the numbers are in order?” Jay asked.
“How do you know they’re not?” she countered, her eyes sweeping east on I 70 until the menu blocked her view. “Let’s check this way.” She reached for the menu, but Jay stopped her, putting his hand upon it, keeping it in place. “What?”
He shook his head, and his gaze deepened with a far off look about it. “No. Leave it there. Everything happens for a reason. Go west.”
After a moment she nodded and began tracing the slim length of I 70 as it tracked across the state, then she turned the page and followed it into Kansas, across the Sunflower State until almost its straightedge border with Colorado, and there her finger stopped and she said, looking wondrously up at Jay, “You were right.”
He bent a little closer and looked. Her finger was on the intersection of I 70 and State Route 27 at Goodland, Kansas.
“This is weird,” Mari said.
Jay snorted at her comment. “
Now
it’s weird?”
She smiled, then turned back to the atlas, a new dilemma rising. SR 27 went both north and south. “Now which way?”
He shrugged. “Your turn.”
She followed the route north, but it seemed to die at the town of Haigler just across the border into Nebraska, no connection with a 56 along the way. So south it had to be, her finger retracing its way until it was zooming across miles and miles of Kansas prairie as put to paper. Almost out of the Sunflower State once more, and then she found it, US 56, just past Elkhart, Kansas, where the grassland became Oklahoma. “Got it.”
Jay looked, seeing that US 56 slanted both south and west, or east and north, one way to New Mexico, the other back through Kansas. But just a inch or so distant on the map—maybe forty or fifty miles as a real crow would fly over real earth—there was the number 287, just short of a place in Oklahoma called Boise City. “There,” he said, his own emotions building at this thing that seemed a quest in miniature, the mystical numbers steering their attention somewhere. “See?”
Mari nodded agreement, her finger marking the intersection of US 56 and US 287. She turned the page and repositioned her mark on the junction, and again the direction question arose—Colorado to the north, or Texas to the south. But it was a question that did not go long unanswered, because enough of the bordering states to the south and west were visible that a fat green line not far to the south in the Lone Star State caught her eye. “Interstate Forty,” she said, and her finger sailed over a corner of the wide Texas landscape down to Amarillo, where US 287 met up with the mighty I 40, cutting west and east across the page. “See it.”
“Right,” Jay confirmed, and put his own touch to the spot now, hopping still closer on his right leg and keeping that side’s crutch wedged in the crook of his arm. “And on to eight forty six.”
“Eight forty six,” Mari repeated. “East or west?”
“I don’t know. Try west. We could have just come south to get anywhere east.”
She looked sideways at him. “You sure it works that way?”
“I don’t know how it works. This is as new to me as you.” And he thought, ‘two halves of an equation’, her plus him. He had the numbers, she recognized what they were. And at the end of where they were pointing, was that the equation’s answer?
“Okay,” Mari said, and traced out along I 40, checking each intersecting route, highway, road, river, stream, flipping several pages over until the Interstate terminated in the desert near Barstow, California. “Well, it’s not west. “ So back to Amarillo it was, then out of Texas and across Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and into Tennessee. When her finger reached Nashville she stopped, shaking her head at the map. “This doesn’t seem right.”
“No eight forty six?”
“No, and it’s like all the way back past Missouri.” She tapped her finger on the home of the Grand Ole Opry, thinking, something not sitting right about the number either. “And there’s another thing—have you ever seen a road numbered that high?”
“A few,” Jay said. There was a county road 999 not far from where he’d grown up, and every once in a while some high school kids would go flip its sign upside down just to freak people out. And others, he could vaguely remember. But she was mostly right, it was an awful high number. Almost out of sync with the others. And then, of course, there was still that zero-zero-zero-one, which no way was a road. They still had to deal with
that
.
“I can’t remember seeing
one
that high,” she told him.
“So you think it’s not a road?”
She thought for a moment, then nodded, agreeing with her gut. “I think it’s not a road.”
Jay turned the pages back to their last point of reference, where the 287 and the 40 met in the heart of Amarillo. “Something in Amarillo?”
Mari stared at the map, at the roads and highways and interstates lacing a web of colors across the page. She focused finally on Amarillo, looking for a number on the map near it. Maybe a road that didn’t intersect I 40, or a hill elevation, or something, but there was nothing like that, just those damn little red numbers between each mileage tick......
“Mileage,” she said aloud, her head snapping toward Jay. “It’s the mileage! The mileage of the route on the map! Look!”
He saw the small red numbers, but they accounted for only the mileage between points on the map. “How do you know?”
“It has to be!” Mari said excitedly, then bent and pushed half of her body through the open passenger window of her car and reached into the back to take something from Jay’s box. When she was standing again she had a pencil in hand. “Watch!”
She hunched over the map, working her way backward from the spot where US 287 and I 40 came together, tallying the mileage ticks up every fifty miles or so and noting them on the back of the menu. Back through Oklahoma, and Kansas, and into Missouri she counted, stopping on I 70 just north of Plainview. She combined all the small totals, and frowned at the result. She bit her lip, her gaze shifting off the map and to the hood of her car, and there it came to her. Just like the mileage on her car when Jay first made her tell him, something didn’t add up. There it had been too much, because she had driven since hitting him. Here it was too little, because Plainview was not
on
the interstate. “How far from here to I Forty?”
“From Plainview?” Jay thought on that. He actually knew it, having asked a trucker once how far a walk up Route 87 it would be, because he had thought that collecting cans and bottles along that stretch of highway might be fruitful. As it was the walk was prohibitively long. Fifteen miles the trucker had told him. Fifteen on the dot. And that was what he told Mari.
She smiled, doing the simple math in her head before putting it onto the now completely scribbled-upon menu, which she showed proudly to Jay. “Eight hundred and forty six! I told you!”
So it was eight hundred and forty six miles from Plainview to the junction of US 287 and I 40. What did that mean? What did that mean to them? Was the answer in the last number, the oddest of the lot? 0001?
“Now this last one,” Mari said, as if reading his thoughts. But she could not do that. Only some bum who’d given him this gift-turned-curse-turned-something could read minds. That and more. “Zero-zero-zero-one?” She looked to him. “That’s no road.”
“It’s not mileage, either,” he told her.
“It doesn’t even sound like anything,” she observed. “Why would you have three zeroes in front of a one? What’s that?”
What indeed? Jay wondered, he and the other half of this crazy equation stumped. Zero zero zero one. Four numbers that were one number. But what kind of number? Well, what kind of numbers were there? Start there. Thee were roads-check. There were miles-check. Odometer readings-check. Ages-check. Years-check. Money-check. Time-check. Temperature-check. Radio frequen—
Time.
“It’s time,” Jay said.
“Time for what?” Mari asked, her eyes glued to that one number noted on the menu that still eluded them.
“No,” he said, and motioned so that she looked his way. “The number is
time
. Twenty four hour time. Military time.”
Her brow scrunched down. What was he talking about?
“My father told me about it when I was little. He was in the army. You know, oh-one-hundred is one a.m., but thirteen-hundred is one
p
.m.” He waited, and saw some recognition come to her as her forehead flattened and those blue eyes lit up. “Thirteen-thirteen would be one-thirteen in the afternoon. Get it?”
“I get it,” she said, nodding. She had heard this somewhere, too, in a movie or something. Was it
Top Gun
, or
A Few Good Men
, or what? The military guys talked like that when telling time. Oh-two-fifty this, and sixteen-twenty-something that. Yes, she did remember. Understand, not really (why couldn’t they just say ‘two fifty in the morning’ made no sense to her), but she remembered. “Yeah. Time.”
“Zero-zero-zero-one,” Jay said to her. “That’s one minute past midnight. The first minute of a new day.”
“Right.” They had all the numbers now, what they all meant! “Right!”
She threw her arms around his neck, hugging him without thinking that he was still basically a stranger. But she didn’t care. They had figured it out! The numbers! They knew what each number meant!
But...
...but not what they all meant. Together.
Mari pulled back from Jay, who seemed a bit stunned by her unexpected embrace. She, though, was simply perplexed once again. He could see that plainly in those perfect blue eyes.
“One minute after midnight, an eight hundred and forty six mile route to where two roads meet Amarillo, Texas,” Mari said, as if reciting evidence in the most baffling of cases. She cinched her sleeves down and crossed her arms. “What does it mean?”
Jay looked at her, and that look was all that it took. That look and all that had happened since she had come. The hit, the letters, the bottle, the coins, and now what they had—or what they had been given. Directions. Directions and more, because there was reason for everything. Even the smallest thing, like a moment. A moment which seemed very clearly now to be a time of departure.
“It means we’re going somewhere,” he told her, and the confusion in her eyes melted away until she was nodding slowly to what he had said.
Eighth Interrogation
August 15...3:48 a.m.
A knock at the door to the small white room stopped Jay right there.
“Come,” Mr. Wright said, sounding the part of a drill sergeant telling an underling to, ‘yes, get on in here, but make it fast’.
The door opened inward, the same door through which Jay had been ‘squired’ to this latest part of the extraordinary thing that his life had become, and in came a man in plaid shirt and casual olive chinos, brown loafers on his feet, looking as if he had been called away from his family dinner to complete some task. He gave Jay a glance, then went to Mr. Wright and held a single sheet of paper out to him, directing his attention to a particular spot.
“No, no,” Mr. Wright said, irritated. He pointed to a different part of the paper. “That’s the one. Look there.”
The man nodded and headed back to the door, giving Jay another quick look before closing it behind.
“Who was he?” Jay asked. “Was that paper about me?”
Mr. Wright settled back where he sat and laced his fingers beneath his chin. “So you were going to Amarillo?”
No answer, Jay thought. Though the man’s demeanor toward him had changed, it was still quite plain who was asking and who was answering the questions. “Not really. Amarillo just happened to be where those two roads met and the miles ran out.”
“And you left at midnight, huh?”
“One minute after,” Jay said, making that correction. Because for everything there was a reason, even that one minute.
“And she just went along with all this? After knowing you, what, a day?”