Reamde

AS GOOGLE MAPS made dispiritingly clear, there was no good way to drive from that part of B.C. to Seattle, or anywhere for that matter; all the mountain ranges ran perpendicular to the vectors of travel.

The Schloss’s access road took them across the dam and plugged them in to the beginning of a provincial two-laner that followed the left bank of the river to the southern end of the big lake Kootenay: a deep sliver of water trapped between the Selkirks and the Purcells. It teed into a larger highway in the middle of Elphinstone, a nicely restored town of about ten thousand residents, nine thousand of whom seemed to work in dining establishments. A gas stop there developed into a half-hour break for Thai food. Peter talked hardly at all. Zula was used to long silences from him. In principle she didn’t mind it, since between her phone, her ebook reader, and her laptop she never really felt lonely, even on long drives in the mountains. But usually when Peter was quiet for a long time it was because he was thinking about some geek thing that he was working on, which made him cheerful. His silence on the drive down from Schloss Hundschüttler had been in a different key.

From Elphinstone they would go west over the Kootenay Pass. After that, they would have to choose the lesser of two evils where routing was concerned. They could go south and cross the border at Metaline Falls. This would inject them into the extreme north-eastern corner of Washington, from which they could work their way down to Spokane in a couple of hours and thence bomb right across the state on I-90. That was the route they’d taken when they’d come here on Friday. Or—

“I was thinking,” said Peter, after he’d spent fifteen minutes twirling his pad thai around his fork and attempting to burn a hole through the table with his gaze, “that we should go through Canada.”

He was talking about an alternate route that would take them across the upper Columbia, through the Okanagans, and eventually to Vancouver, whence they could cross the border and plug in to the northern end of I-5.

“Why?” Zula asked.

Peter gazed at her for the first time since they’d sat down. He was almost wounded by the question. It seemed for a moment as if he’d get defensive. Then he shrugged and broke eye contact.

Later, as Peter was driving them west, Zula put away her useless electronics (for phone coverage was expensive in Canada and the ebook reader couldn’t be seen in the dark) and just stared out the windshield and replayed the encounter in her head. It pivoted around that word “should.” If he’d said, It would be fun to go a new way, or I’d like to go through Canada just for the hell of it, she would not have come back with Why? since she’d been thinking along similar lines herself. But he’d said, We should go through Canada, which was an altogether different thing. And the way he’d deflected her question afterward put her in mind of the way he’d behaved around that stranger in the tavern. Uncle Richard’s question about a drug deal had irritated her at the time. Peter’s look, his clothing, the way he acted, caused older people to make wrong assumptions about who he was. But she knew perfectly well that he was a sweet and decent guy and that he never put anything stronger than Mountain Dew into his body.

Should. What possible difference could it make? The Metaline Falls border crossing was rinky-dink to be sure, but by the same token, it was little used, and so you rarely had to wait. The border guards were so lonely they practically ran out and hugged you. The Vancouver crossings were among the largest and busiest on the whole border.

He was avoiding something.

That was the one thing about Peter. If something made him uneasy, he’d dodge around it. And he was good at that. Probably didn’t even know that he was dodging. It was just how he instinctively made his way in the world. He wasn’t an Artful Dodger. More of an Artless Dodger, guileless and unaware. As a young child Zula had seen some of that behavior in Eritrea, where confronting your problems head-on wasn’t always the smartest way; the patriarch of her refugee group had devised a strategy for getting even with the Ethiopians that revolved around walking barefoot across the desert to Sudan, checking into a refugee camp long enough to make his way to America, starting a life there, getting rich (at least by Horn of Africa standards), and sending money back to Eritrea to fund the ongoing war effort.

But the Forthrasts came out of a different tradition where, no matter what the problem, there was a logical and level-headed behavior for dealing with it. Ask your minister. Ask your scoutmaster. Ask your guidance counselor.