“They want their damned jobs back,” Mitch said.

“They won’t talk to me.” Jack touched his mask with a strong, thick finger. “I persuaded the trustees to let you go. I can’t go with you, but these men will take you up a dirt road to the highway.” Jack held out his hands helplessly. “Sue wanted Kaye to be with her. I wish you could be there. But I gotta go.”

“Thanks,” Mitch said.

Kaye came up behind him, carrying the baby in the car seat. “I’m ready,” she said. “I want to go see Sue.”

“No,” Jack said. “It’s that old Cayuse woman. We should have sent her to the coast.”

“It’s more than her,” Mitch said.

“Sue needs me!” Kaye cried.

“They won’t let you into that part of town,” Jack said miserably. “Too many people. They heard it on the news — dead Mexicans near San Diego. No way. It’s hard, like stone, what they think now. They’ll go after us next, probably.”

Kaye wiped her eyes in anger and frustration. “Tell her we love her,” she said. “Thanks for everything, Jack. Tell her.”

“I will. I gotta go.”

The seven men backed away as Jack walked to his truck and got in. He started the engine and spun out, throwing a plume of dust and gravel.

“The Toyota’s in better shape,” Mitch said. He hefted their two suitcases to the trunk under the watchful eyes of the seven men. They muttered to each other and stayed well clear as Kaye carried Stella out in her arms and fastened her into the car seat in the back. Some of the men avoided her eyes and made small signs with their hands. She slid in beside the baby.

Two of the pickups had gun racks and shotguns and hunting rifles. Her throat closed as she settled into the back of the Toyota beside Stella. She rolled up the window and buckled her seat belt and sat with the meaty sour smell of her own fear.

Mitch carried out her laptop and box of papers and pushed them into the back of the trunk, then slammed the lid. Kaye was pushing buttons on her cell phone.

“Don’t do that,” Mitch said gruffly as he got into the driver’s seat. “They’ll know where we are. We’ll call from a pay phone someplace when we’re on the highway.”

Kaye’s dapples flared red for an instant.

Mitch watched her with a stricken, wondering face. “We’re aliens,” he muttered. He started the engine. The seven men got into the three trucks and led them down the road.

“You have any cash for gas?” Mitch asked.

“In my purse,” Kaye said. “You don’t want to use credit cards?”

Mitch avoided answering that. “We got almost a full tank.”

Stella squalled briefly, then grew quiet as a pink dawn started over the low hills and behind the scattered oak trees. The overcast lay open and ragged on the horizon and they saw curtains of rain ahead. The dawn light was bright and unreal against the low black clouds.

The dirt road north was rough but not impassable. The trucks accompanied them to the very end, where a sign marked the edge of the reservation and also, coincidentally, advertised the Wild Eagle Casino. Scrub and tumbleweeds lay sad and battered against a bent and twisted barbed wire fence.

The thick underbellies of the clouds drizzled light rain on the windshield, turning the dust into wiper-whipped mud as they came off the dirt road, up an embankment, and onto the state highway heading east. A brilliant shaft of morning light, the last they saw that day, caught them like a searchlight as Mitch brought the Toyota up to speed on the two-lane asphalt.

“I liked that place,” Kaye said, her voice rough. “I was happier in that trailer than I can remember ever being, anywhere else in my life.”

“You thrive in adversity,” Mitch said, and reached over his shoulder to grasp her hand.

“I thrive with you,” Kaye said. “With Stella.”

92

Northeastern Oregon

Kaye walked back from the phone booth. They had parked in a strip mall parking lot in Bend to buy food at a market. Kaye had done the shopping and then had called Maria Konig. Mitch had stayed in the car with Stella.

“Arizona still hasn’t set up an Emergency Action Office,” Kaye said.

“What about Idaho?”

“They have one as of two days ago. Canada, too.”

Stella coo-whistled in her safety seat. Mitch had changed her a few minutes before and she usually performed for a short while afterward. He was almost getting used to her musical sounds. She was already adept at making two different notes at once, splitting one note away, raising and lowering it; the effect was uncannily like two theremins arguing. Kaye looked through the window. The baby seemed in another world, lost in discovering what sounds she could make.

“They stared at me in the market,” Kaye said. “I felt like a leper. Worse, like a nigger? She kicked out the word between clenched teeth. She shoved the grocery bag into the passenger seat and dug into it with a tense hand. “I took out money at the ATM and got food and then I got these,” she said, and pulled out bottles of makeup, foundation and powder. “For our dapples. I don’t know what I’ll do about her singing.”

Mitch got behind the wheel.

“Let’s go,” Kaye said, “before somebody calls the police.”

“It isn’t that bad,” Mitch said as he started the car.

“Isn’t it?” Kaye cried. “We’re marked\ If they find us, they’ll put Stella in a camp, for Christ’s sake! God knows what Augustine has planned for us, for all the parents. Get sharp, Mitch!”

Mitch pulled the car out of the parking lot in silence.

“I’m sorry,” Kaye said, her voice breaking. “I’m sorry, Mitch, but I’m so frightened. We have to think, we have to plan.”

Clouds followed them, gray skies and light rain without break. They crossed the border into California at night, pulled off onto a lonely dirt road, and slept in the car with rain drumming on the roof.

Kaye applied makeup to Mitch in the morning. He clumsily painted her face with foundation and she touched up in the rearview mirror.

“We’ll rent a room today in a motel,” Mitch said.

“Why take the risk?”

“We look pretty good, I think,” he said, smiling encouragement. “She needs a bath and so do we. We are not animals and I refuse to act like one.”

Kaye thought about this as she nursed Stella. “All right,” she said.

“We’ll go to Arizona, and then, if necessary, we’ll go to Mexico or even farther south. We’ll find someplace we can live until things get settled down.”

“When will that be?” Kaye asked softly.

Mitch did not know, so he did not answer. He drove back along the deserted farm road onto the highway. The clouds were breaking up now and brilliant morning light fell on the forests and fields of grass to either side of the highway.

“Sun!” said Stella, and waved her fists lustily.

EPILOGUE

Tucson, Arizona

A plump little girl with short brown hair and brown skin and sweated streaks of powder on her face stood in the alley and peered between the dust-colored garages. She whistled softly to herself, interweaving two variations of a Mozart piano trio. Someone who did not look too closely might have mistaken her for one of the many Latino children who played along the streets and ran through the alleys.

Stella had never been allowed to go this far from the small house her parents rented, a few hundred steps away. The world of the alley was fresh. She sniffed the air lightly; she always did that, and she never found what she wanted to find.

But she heard the excited voices of children playing, and that was enticement enough. She walked on red concrete squares along the stucco side wall of a small garage, pushed open a swinging metal gate, and saw three children tossing a half-inflated basketball in a small backyard. The children paused their game and stared at her.