But forgiveness was for tomorrow. First they had to get to Pampa, and the rain was worsening. Earl had given up his singing once the storm began, and was concentrating all his attention on the road ahead. Sometimes he would sigh to himself and stretch in his seat. Virginia tried not to concern herself with the way he was driving, but as the torrent became
a deluge her anxiety got the better of her. She leaned forward from the backseat and started to peer through the windshield, watching for vehicles coming in the opposite direction. Accidents were common in conditions like these: bad weather and a tired driver eager to be twenty miles further down the road than he was. At her side John sensed her concern.
“The Lord is with us,” he said, riot looking up from the tightly printed pages, though it was by now far too dark for him to read.
“It’s a bad night, John,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn’t try to go all the way to Pampa. Earl must be tired.”
“I’m fine,” Earl put in. “It’s not that far,”
“You’re tired,” Virginia repeated. “We all are.”
“Well, we could find a motel, I guess,” Gyer suggested. “What do you think, Earl?”
Earl shrugged his sizeable shoulders. “Whatever you say, boss,” he replied, not putting up much of a fight.
Gyer turned to his wife and gently patted the back of her hand. “We’ll find a motel,” he said. “Earl can call ahead to Pampa and tell them that we’ll be with them in the morning. How’s that?”
She smiled at him, but he wasn’t looking at her.
“I think White Deer’s next off the highway,” Earl told Virginia. “Maybe they’ll have a motel.”
IN fact, the Cottonwood Motel lay a half mile west of White Deer, in an area of waste ground south of U.S. 60, a small establishment with a dead or dying cottonwood tree in the lot between its two low buildings. There were a number of cars already in the motel parking lot and lights burning in most of the rooms; fellow fugitives from the storm presumably. Earl drove into the lot and parked as close to the manager’s office as possible, then made a dash across the rain-lashed ground to find out if the place had any rooms for the night. With the engine stilled, the sound of the rain on the roof of the Pontiac was more oppressive than ever.
“I hope there’s space for us,” Virginia said, watching the water on the window smear the neon sign. Gyer didn’t reply. The rain thundered on overhead. “Talk to me, John,” she said to him.
“What for?”
She shook her head. “Never mind.” Strands of hair clung to her slightly clammy forehead; though the rain had come, the heat in the air had not lifted. “I hate the rain,” she said.
“It won’t last all night,” Gyer replied, running a hand through his thick gray hair. It was a gesture he used on the platform as punctuation; a pause between one momentous statement and the next. She knew his rhetoric, both physical and verbal, so well. Sometimes she thought she knew everything about him there was to know; that he had nothing left to tell her that she truly wanted to hear. But then the sentiment was probably mutual. They had long ago ceased to have a marriage recognizable as such. Tonight, as every night on this tour, they would lie in separate beds, and he would sleep that deep, easy sleep that came so readily to him, while she surreptitiously swallowed a pill or two to bring some welcome serenity.
“Sleep,” he had often said, “is a time to commune with the Lord.” He believed in the efficacy of dreams, though he didn’t talk of what he saw in them. The time would come when he would unveil the majesty of his visions, she had no doubt of that. But in the meantime he slept alone and kept his counsel, leaving her to whatever secret sorrows she might have. It was easy to be bitter, but she fought the temptation. His destiny was manifest, it was demanded of him by the Lord. If he was fierce with her he was fiercer still with himself, living by a regime that would have destroyed lesser men, and still chastizing himself for his pettiest act of weakness.