Ozburn drove the minivan south at the speed limit. He'd bought it for two grand cash the day before at a used car lot in Victorville, just after he'd picked up the big, long-haired man standing near the highway entrance with a WILL WORK FOR BEER sign. Ozburn had taken the man's cursory resemblance to himself as an omen, though he wasn't positive that Billy would be able to stay sober long enough to get the Malibu, money and guns to Vernon.
Ozburn now figured three hours max to Buenavista, then another five to Nogales. At a convenience store in Corona he got gas and provisions and two hot dogs each for himself and Daisy. He was famished. He would not let Seliah's pale sleeping form leave him: He saw the road and the cars and the sky before him through her ethereal, dreamlike face.
The next thing he knew he was pulling up to Charlie Hood's home in the foothills outside Buenavista. No cars anywhere, lights on over the garage and the porch and inside the kitchen. He jimmied the side door to the garage and when he and Daisy were inside he laid his shoulder into the door that led to the house and it burst open without much fight. He carried Daisy's kibble and bowls into Hood's house and filled a bowl with food and the other with water.
Ozburn knelt down and opened his arms and Daisy, sensing catastrophe, very slowly walked over, tail low, head down, ears relaxed. He hugged her and told her Hood was a good guy, take care of him and of yourself.
He petted her for a moment, then stood and swung the splintered door shut behind him and made sure the garage door was closed tight. Daisy started howling. He got back into the van and lifted his sunglasses to empty the tears that had built up behind them, then headed down the dirt road toward the interstate. Yuma. Tucson. Nogales. Ozburn crossed the border easily and followed Mexico 15 south from town to a wide dirt road that took him into the hills. He came to Betty and the nice little landing patch. He rousted Miguel from his trailer. The young man was happy to get his money though Ozburn noted that he kept his distance and seemed eager for Ozburn to be on his way. He gave Miguel twice what he'd promised.
– Where is your dog?
– She's with a friend.
– She will not fly again?
– Unless she grows wings.
Ozburn stowed his duffel but stashed a freshly loaded Love 32 up in the cockpit. Miguel had filled the tank. He offered to man the prop but Ozburn waved him away and threw the big propeller himself, thrilled as always at the way his minor strength was magnified by Betty, turned into something that could roar and fly. It took him a few tries. When he walked back around the wing to the cockpit he felt nothing in his feet and little in his legs.
He settled into the rear seat using his hands to arrange his numb legs, nodded at Miguel in the darkness and taxied out to the flat, groomed swatch of desert. Seconds later he was airborne and climbing, the sound of Betty's engine right there in front of him like a steady old friend leading the way. He headed west along the invisible border, just sprinkles of lights separated by chasms of darkness. San Miguel was a flicker, Sonoyta a bigger flicker. Then the black bulk of the Agua Dulce Mountains, and the Cabeza Prietas and the Gilas. Later the sprawl of Yuma far ahead and he saw that the dawn was chasing him now, a frail phantom of light gaining from the eastern sky behind him. The needle on his fuel gauge was just above empty.
He followed the California-Mexico border as the sun rose. The towns became cities and the cities grew and he veered north until he could see San Diego, a panoramic, sun-blasted tangle of buildings and freeways already dense with cars in the clean morning light. He looked down on the graceful blue Coronado Bridge and the flat shimmer of Glorieta Bay, and when Point Loma had scrolled away beneath Betty, there was the vast silver Pacific stretching as far as Ozburn could see and beyond. The engine sputtered and caught.
His legs and feet were without feeling and even his arms were heavy and dull and slow to obey him. To the north a commercial airbus out of Lindbergh Field began its big U-turn over the water. Far to the south Ozburn saw a small Cessna heading for Catalina Island.
He called up the image of Seliah asleep in her hospital bed. And although her beauty had long ago burned into his memory, it still caught him by surprise as it so often did-Seliah, the girl with the green hair walking into the lecture hall, Seliah cutting through the water at the Pan Am Games, Seliah on their wedding day, Seliah on their honeymoon beach on Moorea, Seliah combing out her hair or making coffee or polishing her car or fussing with a bouquet of flowers. Even sleeping she had the power to move him.
Betty coughed and sputtered and started up again but then she fell silent. Ozburn heard the wind whistling past the fuselage and the hiss of air on the wings. The night was immense beyond all his comprehension.
He felt Betty's nose turn toward earth but he couldn't move his arms to correct her course. He looked down at his hands and ordered them into action but they refused. The altimeter reading plummeted and the compass needle circled crazily. He tried to move his feet and raise his knees but they had forsaken him, too. Instead he imagined his first real date with Seliah, breakfast at the Congress Hotel in Tucson, and they ate and sat and drank coffee for two full hours and at the end of it Ozburn knew his life had changed and she was to be the biggest part of it. That was in February and they'd run through a pouring rain to Ozburn's beat-up Dodge, and halfway back to her place the Dodge stalled at a light and they had to get out and push the thing to the roadside. They were drenched and half-frozen and the gutter was a torrent of brown water that pushed at the car like a big hand. Then their first kiss, both of them trembling with cold with the heater on full blast and the windows fogged and the rain belting the roof of the car. Now Ozburn could feel nothing of his body except the vertigo of that kiss, the warmth and softness of it so startling and right in a cold, hard world. He held his eyes open and steady and watched the spangled Pacific rising up to claim him.