In the final hour of his program, Parish Lantern and call-ins from his nationwide radio audience discussed the likelihood of a pole-shift striking within the next fifty years. Because Dylan and Jilly were for the moment still too busy digesting their recent experiences to talk anymore about them, they listened to Lantern as they drove north on this lonely desert highway, where it was possible to believe simultaneously that civilization had already vanished in a planetary cataclysm and that the earth was timeless, unchanging.
‘You listen to this guy all the time?’ he asked Jilly.
‘Not every night, but a lot.’
‘It’s a miracle you’re not suicidal.’
‘His show isn’t usually about doom. Mostly it’s time travel, alternate realities, whether we have souls, life after death….’
In the backseat, Shep continued reading Dickens, granting the novelist a form of life after death. On the radio, the planet crushed and burned and drowned and blew away human civilization and most of the animal kingdom, as though all life were pestilence.
When they reached the town of Safford, about forty minutes after they exited the interstate, Shepherd said, ‘Fries not flies, fries not flies, fries not flies….’
Maybe it was time to stop and devise a plan of action, or maybe they had not yet analyzed their situation to a degree that allowed for planning, but in either case, Dylan and Shep were in want of the dinner they had missed. And Jilly expressed the need for a drink.
‘First we need new license plates,’ Dylan said. ‘When they trace that Cadillac to you, they’ll go unit to unit in the motel, looking for you. When they find you’ve lit out and that Shep and I didn’t stay the night we’d paid for, they might link us.’
‘No might about it. They will,’ she said.
‘The motel records have the make, model, license-plate number. At least we can change the plate number and not be so easily made.’
On a quiet residential street, Dylan parked, took screwdrivers and pliers from the Expedition tool kit, and went looking for Arizona plates. He found an easily detached pair on a pickup in the driveway of a weather-silvered cedar ranch house with a dead front lawn.
Throughout the theft, his heart pounded. The guilt he felt was out of proportion to such a minor crime, but his face burned with shame at the prospect of being caught in the act.
After he had purloined the plates, he drove around town until he found a school. The parking lot was deserted at this hour. In those shadows, he replaced his California plates with the Arizona pair.
‘With luck,’ he said as he got behind the wheel once more, ‘the owner of that pickup won’t notice the plates missing until tomorrow.’
‘I hate trusting in luck,’ Jilly said. ‘I’ve never had much.’
‘Fries not flies,’ Shepherd reminded them.
A few minutes later, when Dylan parked in front of a restaurant adjacent to a motel, he said, ‘Let me see the pin. Your toad button.’
She unpinned the smiling amphibian from her blouse but withheld it. ‘What do you want it for?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s not going to set me off like the other one did. That’s over. That business is finished.’
‘Yeah, but what if?’ she worried.
He handed the car keys to her.
Reluctantly, she exchanged the pin for the keys.
Thumb on the toad face, forefinger against the back of the pin, Dylan felt a quiver of psychic spoor, the impression of more than one individual, perhaps Grandma Marjorie overlaid by Jillian Jackson, but neither invoked in him the compulsion to hurry-move-find-do that had harried him to the house on Eucalyptus Avenue.
Dropping the button in the little trash basket in the console, he said, ‘Nothing. Or next to nothing. It wasn’t the pin itself that set me off. It was… Marjorie’s impending death that somehow I sensed on the first pin. Does that make sense?’
‘Only here in Nutburg, USA, where we seem to live now.’
‘Let’s get you that drink,’ he said.
‘Two.’
Crossing the parking lot to the front door of the restaurant, Shep walked between them. He carried Great Expectations with the little battery-powered light attached, reading intently as he walked.