Ruffling Einstein’s coat with one hand, Nora said: “I hope you’re right.”
“I am.”
“I hope so.”
“I am.’’
Travis was badly shaken by how close he had come to risking Einstein’s freedom,
and for the next few days he brooded about the infamous Cornell Curse. Maybe it
was happening all over again. His life had been turned around and made livable
because of the love he felt for Nora and for this impossible damn dog. And now
maybe fate, which had always dealt with him in a supremely hostile manner, would
rip both Nora and the dog away from him.
He knew that fate was only a mythological concept. He did not believe there was
actually a pantheon of malevolent gods looking down on him through a celestial
keyhole and plotting tragedies for him to endure—yet he could not help looking
warily at the sky now and then. Each time he said something even slightly
optimistic about the future, he found himself knocking on wood to counter
malicious fates. At dinner, when he toppled the salt shaker, he immediately
picked up a pinch of the stuff to throw it over his shoulder, then felt foolish
and dusted it off his fingers. But his heart began to pound, and he was filled
with a ridiculous superstitious dread, and he didn’t feel right again until he
snatched up more salt and tossed it behind him.
Although Nora was surely aware of Travis’s eccentric behavior, she had the good
grace to say nothing about his jitters. Instead, she countered his mood by
quietly loving him every minute of the day, by speaking with great delight about
their trip to Vegas, by being in unrelieved good humor, and by not knocking on
wood.
She did not know about his nightmares because he did not tell her about them. It
was the same bad dream, in fact, two nights in a row.
In the dream, he was wandering in the wooded canyons of the Santa Ana foothills
of Orange County, the same woods in which he had first met Einstein. He had gone
there with Einstein again, and with Nora, but now he had lost them. Frightened
for them, he plunged down steep slopes, scrambled up hills, struggled through
clinging brush, calling frantically for Nora, for the dog. Sometimes he heard
Nora answering or Einstein barking, and they sounded as if they were in trouble,
so he turned in the direction from which their voices came, but each time he
heard them they were farther off and in a different place, and no matter how
intently he listened or how fast he made his way through the forest, he was
losing them, losing them—
—until he woke, breathless, heart racing, a silent scream caught in his throat.
Friday, August 6, was such a blessedly busy day that Travis had little time to
worry about hostile fate. First thing in the morning, he telephoned a wedding
chapel in Las Vegas and, using his American Express number, made arrangements
for a ceremony on Wednesday, August 11, at eleven o’clock. Overcome by a
romantic fever, he told the chapel manager that he wanted
twenty dozen red roses, twenty dozen white carnations, a good organist (no damn
taped music) who could play traditional music, so many candles that the altar
would be bright without harsh electric light, a bottle of Dom Perignon with
which to conclude events, and a first-rate photographer to record the nuptials.
When those details had been agreed upon, he telephoned the Circus Circus Hotel
in Las Vegas, which was a family-oriented enterprise that boasted a
recreational-vehicle campgrounds behind the hotel itself; he arranged for camp
space beginning the night of Sunday, August 8. With another call to an RV
campgrounds in Barstow, he also secured reservations for Saturday night, when
they would pull off the road halfway to Vegas. Next, he went to a jewelry store,
looked at their entire stock, and finally bought an engagement ring with a big,
flawless three-carat diamond and a wedding band with twelve quarter-carat
stones. With the rings hidden under the seat of the truck, Travis and Einstein
went to Nora’s house, picked her up, and took her to an appointment with her