Somewhere there are whole novels and stories about Route Zero and the drivers who take it and the reasons they do it. This is not one of them.

           There was only one tow truck in the north corner of the county, and it belonged to A and A Salvage. Operating out of a building made from two cable cars set on a little lot overshadowed by redwood trees and manzanita, Elisabeth Goodman and Melissa Juneau were famous throughout the county for their promptness, intelligence, and clean work, as much as for their eccentric 1ifestyle. People would call from down in town, and drive half an hour for a part. Otherwise they might have to drive an hour to go "over the hill" to Banner or San Jose, and half the time fail to get the thing they wanted. Melissa would assure them fast delivery and make good on it. They were hooked into the statewide car parts computer network and Melissa never made mistakes in transcription. Elisabeth always knew which substitutions were good and which ones were not, and if there was no exact substitution available she could make one herself with a near-fitting part and her roomful of machine tools.
           They lived in a reclaimed pump house fitted with a multitude of old many-sashed windows all sporting different catches and latches, with lattice-shielded decks to the left and right and the bed in a narrow loft. Elisabeth had come first; by now she was looking at her fifties, and while she kept her graying hair short and always wore hickory striped coveralls or faded tight jeans, it was she who was responsible for the crocheted things and the red geraniums around the place. She built the latticed decks, and planted them with jessamine.
      Melissa installed the modest solar-heated hot tub. She was famous as far away as Fremont and San Luis Obispo for solving the most mysterious electrical problem ever encountered in a car: though naturally, when all was said and done, the guys could discount her success, because the problem ended up being in the alternator, where six people had looked for it before and missed at.
      Melissa had turned up at A and A Salvage quite suddenly while she was still very young, and at first the car men in the county couldn't quite believe what they were seeing. There were still men at the auto parts stores in town who shook their heads in wonder when she sashayed in, lips and nails bright as sunset, to pick up cases of oil and assortments of spark plugs, flirted outrageously, and finally gunned the motor on her cycle and zoomed back up the hill to the quaint place where her butch old lady waited, peering into the crankcase of a Buick or a Mazda.
      Although the end of the county they worked was sparsely settled and off the tourist track, A and A Salvage got plenty of business. There were the referrals from town -- "I don't know what else to do, call A and A. They might be able to figure it out." There were the locals, who might trundle up to A and A for anything from a fuel tank for a ‘69 bug to a clutch for a small tractor. And there were breakdowns and wrecks. The treacherous winding roads would wash out in the winter and crack wide enough to break a rim in the summer. Some were not really wide enough for two lanes, and none of them had enough signs. Some roads were so steep that even the sleek modern cars could boil over on them if there were bad enough conditions, such as a detour from the main highway, a dead deer, or a crafts fair at the church on Popcorn Grade. The residents up there had a neighborly habit of reporting to A and A whatever they saw.
      Melissa had the reputation for being the friendlier of the two because she'd chat with folks, give advice, explain, speculate. Elisabeth, thoughtful and quiet, wasn't really unfriendly, but she didn't encourage prolonged conversation Perhaps she was already losing her hearing. Anyway, Elisabeth never had to fend off misunderstandings as Melissa sometimes did. There was only one time when Elisabeth's intentions were in doubt, and that was due to the mysterious car.
      It was late in the summer that the car appeared. A neighbor who was passing up Dry Creek Cutoff found it abandoned by the road before it had completely cooled down. It had been in good condition up until the head cracked. It had no plates, and no papers in the glove compartment. It was clean and empty, nothing in it to identify or even hint at the driver. It was no make that Elisabeth or Melissa had ever seen.
      It had no name on its slate-gray flank: only a series of letters and numbers, KQ36004. It was of the same general style as the regular run of cars of the day, square and unprepossessing, with bucket seats up front, low headrests, and a bench seat in the back with three sets of lap belts. The engine wasn't exactly like any other, but it was recognizably a six-cylinder internal combustion engine. Melissa and Elisabeth admired it for its subtle spare lines, its unpretentiousness, and its mystery. Melissa reported it through the usual channels, and some unusual ones too.
      Since there was nobody asking for it, Melissa and Elisabeth worked on more urgent things while the KQ as Melissa and Elisabeth called it for lack of a better name -- sat next to Melissa's grape arbor. But when work was done for the day, either Melissa or Elisabeth could be found, gazing at the anonymous but somehow especially graceful automobile.
      It was Elisabeth who first discovered the radio. From the first they had each been aware that the dial was numbered wrong, but it seemed such a minor detail that neither of them really thought about it or spoke of it. But Elisabeth had a Honda up on ramps for a brake job next to the KQ one day and she wanted music, so she tried the KQ's radio to see what its strange numbers meant.
      Unfamiliar music came out of the little door speakers. t didn't even belong to a style Elisabeth could readily identify -not that she was exactly current on all the music -- but she liked it. It rocked a little, and had a sort of folky sound too, but with Latin interpolations. It was exotic ft that it wasn't what she knew, but familiar in its cheerful, humanistic sensibility. After she confirmed that Other radios couldn't tune the station in, she began moving cars around so she could listen to that music while she worked. She had to charge the battery a couple of times, which made Melissa nervous because everything was so nonstandard on the vehicle. But as it turned out there was no problem.
      ‘T can't see why you like that station so much," Melissa said, whose tastes in music ran to snarling and chirping young women who used their instruments hard.
      "It's a challenge to make out the words to the songs," Elisabeth said, not wanting to admit that the optimistic, good-timing fo1k-rock sound stirred up a longing she hadn't named in years.
      The songs expressed a sense of hope and drive that Elisabeth recognized from the decade of her youth. The music put her in mind of massive outbursts, grandiose projects, strong opinions -- some she had since recanted, and some she still held though she no longer found the opportunity or motivation to express them. Some of the songs were so simple she blushed: mere slogans. Others were poignant in their complexity, subtlety, and reach. Their subject matter was at once familiar and mysterious. The mystery was in specific references: for example, there was a song that told the story, complete with names, of sixteen people who rebuilt a bombed-out apartment complex on Story Road in San Jose. Elisabeth thought: if it were a true story, wouldn't she have heard about the bombing? But it wasn't the only song that referred to bombs and even missiles. And it was never Bosnia or Armenia in the songs, but places that sounded like they were in California.
      Then there were the embarrassing slogans. Elisabeth recognized the kind of thing. One song was composed almost entirely of exhortations: "Unite and Rebuild," was the refrain, and one verse was repeated three times: "Rake the rubble, plant the seed, peace and unity is what we need: armed and alert, singing the song Of freedom and justice and moving on."
      Elisabeth remembered chanting stuff like that in her youth, but here the slogans seemed to be referring to something present and rolling, and not something the singers were trying to start. She wondered what she had missed in the world. In what English-speaking country -- must be in the Third World somewhere
      -- was there a new, hopeful revolutionary regime, so new that it had not yet succumbed to factionalism and despotism? Was there some country she had failed to fallow, still producing this kind of propaganda? The music was so snappy that she was sure the musicians must be in the first flush of sincerity, not worn-out, dull Party hacks.
      It was Melissa who first lucked into hearing speech aver the radio. Melissa wasn't comfortable about Elisabeth playing the radio all the time, thinking that the owner of the car would not like it when he or she finally showed up, but she sat in the KQ with the radio on herself from time to time, listening to the same station, in spite of how soft the music seemed to her. She made a note of its location and turned the dial a little, but it was the only station playing such strange stuff. It was hard to get back on to it after she had left it. She discovered that she had to push the button at the end of the dial at the same time as she turned the knob.
      When she succeeded in returning to the mysterious station, a song about migrant workers had just ended with a rousing exhortation to support the radio telephone network of Valley farm workers. A young man s voice began an excited speech rendered almost unintelligible with alien slang: the part that Melissa got was the part that said "that song goes out to Paco from Letty in honor of the second anniversary of the first radiotelephone ballot in the Central Valley. And now for a message from a driver of another kind. This is from Kyle of the Branch Road Crew for Juanita, please to remember him when you're at opposite branches of Route Zero. And can I add as one turtlehead to another that I for one will be glad when we can shut it down! Thanks to our drivers in distant worlds, we will soon be able to. "
      The song that followed was a standard incoherent song of the road, with references to loneliness, rootlessness and landscapes "just like home but alien as the stars." But for Melissa there was hidden in the song a clue to the restlessness she saw in Elisabeth when she'd been listening to the KQ's radio, and she was not sure she was better off far hearing it.
      The speaker came on again right after the song, repeating the dedication, and proceeding to list a series of accomplishments in various neighborhoods. Some of the places were familiar to Melissa. He spoke of apartment complexes refurbished, libraries restocked, schools enhanced, factories starting up in South Winsome, San Lazarro Gardens, Ottoman, Caviota, and Cerro Grande, and he explicitly referred to the thing Melissa and Elisabeth had guessed at: he praised his listeners for "sticking it out through the civil war."
      "A hoax," Melissa thought. Like "War of the Worlds," but ongoing. She didn't tell Elizabeth what she had heard, not that it made any difference. When Elisabeth heard the same kind of speech herself soon after, she became enraptured with the radio. She would come to meals with a distracted look, astonishing announcements running through her head:"Here's a song dedicated to the Coalition of Democratic Parties presenting their proposals at the peace talks in Des Moines" and "If you're going north today, take an inland route. Bandits have closed Highway One south of Half Moon Bay" and "Las Hermanas Lesbianas of San Lazarro Gardens dedicate this next number to Sister Maxie Gutierrez. Get well soon: Everybody admires your work in reorganizing the Seascape wafer tab plant!"
      Melissa thought there was something sinister about such a sustained effort spent on lies and mystification, and she didn't like the snatches of revolutionary tune that would escape as Elisabeth stood under the manzanitas and detached a quarter panel from a Subaru. ~She thought it was a bad direction for Elisabeth to go. She did try to distract her with her own natural charms. But what would have worked for the Bosch and Moen dealers only irritated Elisabeth. Elisabeth could always admire Melissa; the radio she could only listen to until the KQ's owner came back.
      The KQ had been sitting next to the grape arbor for only a week when a strange woman walked into the A and A Salvage office. She appeared so abruptly that Melissa, reconciling the books in the office, was startled and disinclined to trust her with the car. But the woman produced a valid-looking pink slip, listing the KQ as an Aerodynamic Queen KQ36004, model year 1g37, with the name Hermelinda Gonzalez as the owner. And next to it lay the glaring holography of her California driver's license: a good likeness, the name Hermelinda Gonzalez again, an address in Banner.
      "My nephew was driving it," she said, and Melissa knew immediately that she was lying, and why. "Silly boy, he panicked, and walked all the way down into Winsome and didn't call me for days."
      "The car has a cracked head," Melissa said. "Elisabeth can fix it, but it'll cost you. I can't find this car anywhere in our lists. Elisabeth will have to practically make it from scratch. But she can do it."
      "I was afraid of that," Hermelinda said, smiling broadly. "I told my uncle when he gave me the car it was going to cause me trouble some day. Oh well It's been good till now."
      "Where does it come from?" Melissa asked.
      "I'm not really sure. Overseas? Somehow I think Liberia, or maybe Singapore. Fly uncle travels."
      "Well, do you want us to fix the car?" Melissa hoped the woman would say no. There was this light in Elisabeth's eyes when she looked at the car, that made Melissa hope she never fixed it.
      For all her bright colors and outgoing nature, Melissa was a homebody, and she counted on Elisabeth staying home too.
      "Oh, by all means," said Hermelinda, and suddenly she was all business, crisp in her sage green linen suit. "When can you have it done?"
      "Two weeks," said Melissa, not only to be discouraging but because she knew it would take time to machine those parts. "Maybe three, depending on how much we have to fabricate and how much we can substitute."
      And then they set an estimated price and the woman walked away again. Melissa listened for the sound of a car but she didn't hear it.
      She told Elisabeth that she had promised the KQ in two weeks and Elisabeth grinned in the way that usually meant dampness and gasping for Melissa. That it meant Elisabeth would be using her hands on the KQ instead was irksome. And then Elisabeth said the thing Melissa dreaded. "I'd like to see where she's going to drive that thins."
      Another thing Melissa had noticed, and she couldn't think that Elisabeth had tailed to notice it too, was that Hermelinda Gonzalez was very attractive in her way, and closer to Elisabeth's age than Melissa was.
      The frontmost cable car was given over to reception, office space, and a library of shop manuals and parts lists. The rear one was the workshop, with enough machines for the kind of
      fabricating Elisabeth occasionally ended up doing. The walls were lined with ranks of red and black tool chests labeled according to a unique but logical system Melissa had devised for Elisabeth.
      As soon as Melissa agreed to fix the KQ, Elizabeth had the engine pulled and laid out on a steel table in the back room, and a drawing and notes tacked on the wall to remind her of the small surprises she had found under the hood. The good thing, Melissa thought, was that with the car dismantled, Elisabeth wasn't listening to the radio station anymore.
      Another good thing was that the work seemed pretty straightforward, and Elisabeth had it pretty much accomplished when Fred Govern from up Salamander Creek Cutoff came in with a flywheel from his obscure 1g46 pickup. The best thing was that she seemed to have no trouble at all putting the KQ aside for a couple of days to walk the twitchy post-trauma vet through his feckless project of restoring and souping up the truck. It was not a choice model to begin with, but Fred shared a birthday with it and had developed a strong identification with
      it. He almost said in so many words that he believed that if he could rehabilitate the truck, the same could be done for him. "I'm hoping to have it all together before me and the truck turn fifty," Fred said.
      "I hear you," Elisabeth said, tucking a tuft of white hairs behind her ear as she turned the cracked flywheel over in her hand."Well, this here's close enough to something I can my hands on, I think, and then I'll just take some measurements and see what I have to do. If it's a matter of just grinding down here and there, that's easy, but it could be a matter of building things up. You come back in Saturday. I might want to tow the thing down here."
      "I hope you don't," Fred said. "I want to do as much of the work myself as possible."
      "You also don't want your baby to leave home," Elisabeth said, not even smiling.
      Melissa got Elisabeth the part she was thinking of for Fred's truck, and Elisabeth altered it with her artisan's magic and meticulous persistence, and Fred took it away on Saturday, leaving behind a tip consisting of three bags of homegrown herbs, two culinary and one recreational. Saturday night Elisabeth and Melissa fired up the hot tub and the barbecue and sampled the herbs. Sunday they woke late and Elisabeth languidly began to put the KQ back together. Monday she started the car and drove it sedately up and down the dappled back roads, listening to the gears shift, alert to the fault that caused the problem in the first place.
      Of course she played that radio every second of the way. Elisabeth had invited Melissa to come along for the ride, but Melissa said she had to trace a wiring problem in a VW Bug
      belonging to an artist who had laden the poor, formerly inoffensive thing with doll parts and plastic garden decorations.
      It was late in the evening when Elisabeth finally brought the KQ home. Instead of going into the converted pumphouse where Melissa pretended to read a juicy novel in which most of the all-woman cast had men's names, she turned on the high floodlight mounted on a pole behind the cable cars and opened up its hood. She spent another hour and a half fine-tuning the vehicle. And the radio played softly the whole time.
      Tuesday Hermelinda Gonzalez came back. Melissa suspected that the woman knew something, because she had left the linen suit behind this time and came in jeans and a yellow camp shirt with its collar turned up, herself undecorated except for oxblood lipstick: her femininity as finely tuned as the KQ's engine. Melissa filled out the invoice with a sinking feeling and considered how to get the woman her car without letting Elisabeth near her. But in the end she shrugged and led her out to the cement pad where the KQ stood, cleaned and polished, while Elisabeth pottered nearby on a block pulled from another car.
      Elisabeth looked up from her work, her hands resting empty on the trestle table on each side of the block.
      "She's all ready for you," Elisabeth said.
      "Thank you," said Hermelinda. "I'm so glad you were so quick. I have a long trip scheduled and I just don't know what I'd do if I had to postpone it."
      "She's up to anything you could reasonably ask her to do," Elisabeth said. "I even fixed the window cranks."
      "Thank you," repeated Hermelinda.
      The radio, muttering along indistinguishably until now, burst out with a triumphant song of praise. Elisabeth had heard it several times. Even Melissa knew some of the words, "here's to the long road to victory, the lonely drivers to unity."
      "If you have any trouble with the car, don't hesitate to call," Elisabeth said. "Wherever you are. Though I don't expect you to have any problems. I'll be happy to give road service. If it's too far for me to come, I can talk to the mechanic there. Tell him what I know about the car."
      "Thanks, but I've got a mechanic for the car where I'm going."
      "I guess you probably do," Elisabeth said, staring.
      "Uh huh."
      "Well. The keys are in the ignition."
      "Thanks again."
      Melissa watched Elisabeth watching Hermelinda climb into the car, heard the radio wink out and return as she started the motor, saw Elisabeth duck out from behind the trestle table and take three strides to the driver's side window. What passed between them? Whatever it was, Elisabeth slumped back and the KQ revved and edged away, crushing gravel beneath its tires. Melissa noticed for the first time that the tires were subtly off-color, almost more brown than black.
      Only when the KQ was out of sight, beyond the big redwood at the turn in the driveway, did Melissa step next to Elisabeth and offer her arm. Elisabeth kicked at the gravel and turned to
      embrace Melissa. "It's not what you think," she said over
      Melissa's head. "It's nothing like you think. I wish to hell I'd taped that dared radio."
      That's not what you really wish, Melissa thought. "I taped
      it. Ninety minutes of it, anyway," she said.
      Elisabeth stared at Melissa as she had stared at Hermelinda moments before.
      "I got some of the songs you liked the most," Melissa said. "Most of the tape's kind of cruddy, though."
      "It'll be nice to have," Elisabeth said. "But I think I better not listen to it just now."
      "Good. I could get very tired of maracas and acoustic guitars and bullshit unity slogans."
      "I'd love the chance to get tired of those slogans."
      "Yeah, well, if you can't get tired of the slogans you love, I guess you got to love the slogans you're tired of."
      "What?"
      "You explain it. You're the one with wisdom of experience."
      Fred Govern didn't get his truck put together before he turned fifty, but by then you could definitely see it was really going to happen. Minor disasters beset the thing all along, but Elisabeth was able to rescue him again and again. Melissa liked this project better than the KQ, because Fred was a comprehensible factor, one of those damaged mountain guys. When he talked politics it was always the same three subjects:
      conspiracy, marijuana legalization, and the tyranny of building codes. Melissa could only shrug when he talked about this last, because her own home and business didn't meet code and nobody in the county government seemed to care. Anyway, Fred put off celebrating his birthday for two months, until his truck was ready to drive, and then he invited Melissa and Elisabeth to go with him, in his truck, up the coast to a restaurant south of Half Moon Bay. "Fifty years, fifty miles," he said.
      "It's harmless," Elisabeth said. "Let's go with him." It was as much enthusiasm as she'd been able to muster for anything since the KQ had gone.
      "It ought to be harmless," Melissa said. "You checked out all his work on that truck."
      It was a pleasant drive, really: when Fred had enough time to satisfy his need to talk about his pet subjects, he lightened up and cracked jokes about being on the lunatic fringe. The bench seat on the old truck had been completely re-upholstered, and Elisabeth had helped Fred find hydraulic struts to replace the old suspension.
      The restaurant turned out to be a converted Snow White Drive In with some of the best tacos al pastor on the coast. Elisabeth discovered they also fixed three soups: birria, menudo, and pozole, and spent at least ten minutes wavering before she ordered the birria on the grounds that she knew where else to get menudo and pozole.
      They left before dark. Between them they had consumed two Carta Blanca beers and four sodas (Penafiel, in hibiscus, tamarind, and watermelon flavors) , so they had to stop twice on the way back.
      Fred was never a man to take the usual route, so they cut off from Highway One only a few miles down the coast and entered into a strange back roads world of unsuspected hamlets and unbelievable home businesses beyond the llama ranches and the rhododendron farms with which Melissa and Elisabeth were already familiar. They passed a lighted sign at the base of one driveway proclaiming the home of a carnivorous plant nursery and research center, the strange pervasive smell of the mushroom spawn producer, and mysterious places with no sign at all except for the UPS placard swinging from hooks on the mailbox pole.
      Melissa noticed that Elisabeth had zoned out. She knew this was not due to the tiny quantity of beer she had drunk, or Fred's amiable chatter wearing her down. It was the quiet of this road, even with the surprising denseness of its habitation, the gathering dark and the leaning redwoods. The spooky ambience led Elisabeth to speculate again about the KQ and the woman who appeared from nowhere to drive it away. Not that there was anything to do about it. Elisabeth was quietly gathering her scraps again, as she had maybe a couple of hundred times in the months since the KQ had come and gone. Melissa couldn't have avoided noticing Elisabeth's quiet researches carried on while she was ostensibly looking up other things. She knew the results too. It was no surprise that the DMV didn't actually have an Aerodynamic Queen registered to a Hermelinda Gonzalez. No variation that Elisabeth had run through had come up. The Banner phone book had columns and columns of Gonzalez, even an H. Gonzalez, but Hectorina Gonzalez, who answered the phone, had no relatives named Hermelinda, and neither did any of the other people named Gonzalez that Elisabeth called, except for Jorge on Race Street, and he said his daughter was only four. But Melissa didn't know what Elisabeth had decided about the whole incident.
      It was thoroughly dark when Fred turned of f a road neither Elisabeth nor Melissa knew and onto Popcorn Grade only four miles from home. "How did you do that?" Melissa asked, startled. She thought she knew every road up here.
      "1 cheated," he said seriously. "I used a space warp."
      Elisabeth frowned at him across the back of Melissa's head.
      "You're joking," Melissa said.
      "I guess I am," Fred said. "But when I take Bell's Canyon Road it always feels like a space warp. You drive up and up to the head of the canyon, and then you take this hairpin turn, and you come down and down, and you ought to have wasted miles and hours but you're actually ahead of the game. I cut fifteen minutes off the trip using that road, even though it looks like a detour."
      "Really," Elisabeth said, still frowning in the dark.
      "You'll hate to tell me more," Melissa said. "I wasn't paying close attention when you got onto it."
      "I'll draw you a map," Fred said. "The regular road map has it wrong."
      Melissa used the shortcut to go to San Francisco, and she thought it made the coast route shorter than taking the peninsula road. But when she had to go somewhere, it was usually in the other direction, so it didn't make too much of an impact on her. Elisabeth didn't try the shortcut for a long time, because she wanted to so much that she didn't feel she could without a good enough excuse. Anyway, after Fred Govern took his truck to a couple of old-car celebrations, Elisabeth kept getting calls from enthusiasts with impossible cases, and she got very busy manufacturing discontinued parts.
      "We should charge more for this work," Melissa said. "They're taking advantage of you."
      "You figure out what's fair," Elisabeth said, as she usually did.
      Finally, Elisabeth had a day with no work at all to do.
      "I want to drive around on Bell's Canyon Road," she said to Melissa. "Want to come? Where's that map of Fred's?"
      Melissa shrugged. "It's a pretty drive. I'll come." But she gripped that map with tight fingers as she slid into the seat next to Elisabeth. For this they drove the Ranger and brought along the ice chest filled with fruit and mineral water and sliced turkey breast. Any likely place, they would stop and picnic.
      "For a road nobody you know drives at all, it seems pretty populated," Elisabeth remarked after the first half-mile.
      "That's what it's like down here at the bottom. Wait till you get to the top."
      "Sure are a lot of little roads up here you never know about," Elisabeth said. "I'm checking this one out." The green road sign had the name "Baghwan Boulevard" in white letters, but the road itself could barely lay claim to two lanes and looked like it hadn't been resurfaced since the flood of ‘32. It was five or six miles of five-finger ferns and leaning fenceposts till the road dead ended in a fat turnaround with two gravel driveways leading away from a cluster of seven mailboxes and two newspaper tubes. "That was interesting," Elisabeth said. "I did expect a Rajneesh Ranchero or something up there."
      The rest of the day was like that: Elisabeth logged about a hundred and seventy miles ambling the tributaries of Bell's canyon, including some obvious driveways. They had lunch by a creek under redwoods close within ear and nose range of a cow pasture. Melissa added some miner's lettuce to her turkey sandwich, and Elisabeth experimented with redwood sorrel. She spat it out.
      Coming down on the north side of the canyon in the afternoon, Elisabeth was startled to see traffic again. First a black BMW, then a tan Mercedes ("Do they come in other colors?" she asked Melissa, knowing quite well they did. "That's all I ever see them in"), and a run of little boxy economy cars and a pickup dribbling roofing tiles.
      "Nice little drive," Melissa said. "Tell you what, next day we have time, let's do this again on Grizzly Creek, okay?"
      "Sure," Elisabeth said, distracted by the pale blue car in her rear view mirror.
      "I've driven up and down so many roads up here, I forget there are so many more of them," Melissa went on. "I bet if you could really get a good look at them from the air or something, this whole area would look as dense as a suburb. And it looks like real wilderness when you drive through it. Practically first growth." "Uh huh," Elisabeth said, trying to remember the way that Bell's Canyon dumped out onto Lime Kiln Road. Would it be possible to allow the blue car to pass and then follow it?
      "I just love riding around on these roads. So many surprises. Wasn't that little schoolhouse a trip?" There was a troubled edge to Melissa's bright chatter that Elisabeth ignored.
      "Yeah." No need to wait for the intersection. There was a pullout right here, barely scraped into the hill to make it easier for people to make the left turn to the driveway across the road. Elisabeth pulled over into it, slowing just enough to let the blue car pass, wrenching back into the road.
      "Was that guy tailgating?" Melissa asked. "I didn't notice."
      "Not yet," Elisabeth said. "He was inching up on me, though, and I wanted to get rid of him before the we hit that blind turn down on Lime Kiln Road."
      Melissa noticed what the blue car looked like, and knew there was no way that Elisabeth would miss its resemblance to the KQ, but it Elisabeth didn't want to talk about it, neither did she. When two cars slipped between them in the multilane section of Lime Kiln Road that connected to Highway 3g, Melissa watched it pull ahead with disappointment and relief. "Cot to call Fred when we get back," she said. "Thank him for the tip."
      "Yes," Elisabeth said, pulling abruptly into the parking lot of the Denny's by the freeway.
      "Why are we stopping here? Are you okay? You've been real quiet for a while."
      "Just tired," Elisabeth said. "Let's get some awful coffee, and then you can drive us home."
      "All right." Melissa was usually the one who would propose side trips to roadside restaurants: Elisabeth preferred to snack on fruit stand produce and to get her stimulation from gourmet chocolate.
      Melissa didn't notice the blue car in the parking lot until Elisabeth strode up to it and somehow opened the hood. Aghast, she saw Elisabeth slip her hand into her pocket one, two, three times, before closing the hood and rejoining Melissa with a big grin. "Let's get that coffee."
      "What the hell did you take from that car?" Melissa demanded. "What are you going to do?"
      "What I should have done when Hermelinda came back for her car," Elisabeth said. "You don't often get a second chance like this.
      "You'd better tell me," Melissa said.
      "I'm going to fairyland or some goddamned place," Elisabeth whispered as they walked through the windy space between the two sets of doors. "What I want to know is, are you coming with me?"
      "This is monumentally unfair," Melissa said. "You could have discussed it with me." "I'm sorry, but I didn't know this was going to come up. And I can't let this chance go by. Look, there he is."
      Even with the inadequate glances they had gotten through the car windows they had no doubt about the driver of the blue car. There was only one person sitting by himself, a man with thinning blond hair and a deep set of lines around his mouth, an empty cigarette pack in one hand, a newspaper in the other, at arm's length. His coffee hadn't come yet.
      Elisabeth took three long steps to the booth and slid into the orange seat across from him. The foam sighed as Melissa followed. He looked up, regarding them with mild eyes, letting his eyebrows state the question. Melissa noticed his clothes, the baseball-style jacket with the shoulders too broad for him, the slightly faded rugby shirt. Completely invisible clothes.
      "Name's Elisabeth." She offered her hand, streaked in two small places from the man's engine compartment.
      He looked at her hand, hesitated, and took it. He didn't say anything. If Elisabeth was right, maybe he wouldn't speak English? But Hermelinda Gonzalez had.
      "Yours: it's Kyle, right? Or Monty? or Pablo, maybe?" -- all names she had heard mentioned on the strange radio program.
      "Why?" the first word the man spoke, and he barely opened his mouth.
      "You're right, I don't need your name. I know your car, and that's all I really need, isn't it? Because right now, I'm the only person anywhere near here who can get it running. And the only way I'm doing that is if you take me back to wherever you came from. And Melissa, if she wants to go."
      The man smiled slightly. "So what did you take from it?"
      "That would be telling. But I'll tell you that they are three parts that I know for a fact are not replaceable in this country without expert modification and you are looking at the only native expert on your kind of car."
      The tan tilted his head up in a slight gesture of recognition. "I know who you are. You're the one who fixed my friend's car. Too bad you're so curious."
      "Flattering. The only question is, what do we have to do to get ready to go? We won't bother to pack."
      "I'm not in the habit of helping people disappear."
      "I don't care one way or the other about the disappearing part. It's what's on the other side I want to know about."
      "You've made a lot of assumptions. It's not whatever you're thinking. It's mostly tedious"
      "I listened to the radio for hours. I know something. But I'm no romantic. Not any more. I really don't mind tedious."
      Melissa held her tongue. She made up her mind.
      "You know this is a dangerous proposal you're making."
      "It's not a proposal, exactly. It's more of an ultimatum. You take me, or you walk away from a car that won't run."
      "All the same. If you come with me, there are several dangers. Including me, for all you know."
      "This is stupid," Melissa said. "You're stalling to see if you can think of a way not to take us, and you can't, and so what are we waiting for?"
      All of them fell silent as the waitress finally came by.
      "This is what I've been waiting for," the man said. "Just coffee, please," he said to the waitress. "Black." She looked at the women. "Same," both of them said.
      "I wasn't going to drive that way just now," he said when the waitress was gone. "It's not the best time of day. It will be dark by the time we're done. It's hard to do in the dark."
      "Bandits, too," Elisabeth said. "I heard."
      "No way to get you to wait until tomorrow?"
      Elisabeth shook her head. "I couldn't keep you overnight."
      "Drink your coffee fast, then," he said. "I hope you didn't eat too much today. You're going to be sick tonight."
      As they walk@d out the door, Melissa whispered in Elisabeth's ear. "This was too easy," she said. "He's got something up his sleeve."
      "I know," Elisabeth said. "But there's nothing to do but grit our teeth and keep our eyes open."
      "So, " Elisabeth said as she caught up to the man in the parking lot, "Is it okay for me to know your name now?"
      "You can call me Larry." He stood close to the door of the blue KQ, waiting for Elisabeth the get the car functioning again.
      "Melissa, get in the car," she said. "The driver's seat."
      Larry stood staring resentfully at Elisabeth for several beats before he handed the key to Melissa. Melissa smirked as she oozed into the driver's seat, locking the door and smiling at the radio dial with its wrong numbers. Not letting on that she was sure that Elisabeth was leading her into a great mistake.
      Elisabeth finished her work quickly, stepped around to the passenger side, tapping at the window as Melissa reached over and unlocked the door. Only after Elisabeth was in the passenger side front seat did Melissa unlock the driver's side door and climbed into the backseat. She locked her seat belt as Elisabeth locked hers, and smiled as she heard Elisabeth say, "Okay, Larry, take us home."
      Larry said nothing as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto Lime Kiln Road away from the freeway, back towards Bell's Canyon.
      "I knew it," Melissa said. "Fred wasn't kidding about that road."
      "He was," Elisabeth said. "He didn't know."
      "Keep your eyes on the middle distance, " Larry said when they started up the canyon road. "The trees and stuff. Look at the road and you'll get car sick. If you try to focus on the distance you'll get a headache. Double vision.."
     She couldn't see the road from the back seat, and the trees blocked out everything past them, so he needn't have advised them.
      Elisabeth didn't try to engage Larry in conversation. She watched the gauges on the dash, and looked out the window, arching an eyebrow as she grabbed the seat to keep from sliding when Larry raced up a treeless side road graced with crumbling sandstone along the cuts and turned around abruptly at a spot where there was no driveway or turnout to do it in.
      "If you're trying to scare us, you're succeeding," she said, "But you can't talk us out of it this way."
      Larry grunted. Some minutes later, climbing again on Bell's Canyon, he said, "I'm going to be making more of those turns. No point in warning you. You wouldn't believe me. And I'm not going to explain anything either."
      "This is funny," Melissa said after half an hour, "I'm not so surprised that I'm seeing some places I didn't notice this afternoon, but I haven't seen anything I recognized since the first time you did that turnaround thing."
      "You're just disoriented. Most of this stretch is pretty much the same no matter how you go up the road."
      Elisabeth kept swallowing nasty-tasting spit, but she kept alert. She could tell Larry was watching the accelerometer and another gauge -~ there had been one of these on the other KQ too, and she had assumed at the time that it was a strangely-numbered tachometer or some such toy. The gauge hadn't budged when she had test-driven the other car- On this car it rose and fell, but not in concert with the engine. The only thing she was sure of was that Parry was much more likely to execute one of his sudden alarming maneuvers when the gauge was near 100.
      Larry grunted again about an hour later, turning around slowly on the side road he had entered. Elisabeth noticed the gauge read 43 or thereabouts. He drove back down the canyon to the last side road he had entered and roared back up the hill. He passed the same two drives he had passed before and paused at the entrance to the one marked "Dalmatia Cove Cutoff." Elisabeth peeked at the unnamed gauge. It read 50. As she had come to expect, Larry turned around and went back down again.
      They turned again, climbed again. This time Elisabeth watched the gauge as they approached the cutoff. The gauge dropped as low as 20 when they were a few hundred yards away, and started climbing swiftly as they came closer. When they turned on to the road the gauge was in the low sixties and still climbing. A little ways up the road the gauge was at around 35. Larry shook his head and gunned the motor, so that they were going much too fast for a narrow, twisty road like this, with gravel flying out from the wheels.
      Melissa never minded this kind of driving, but Elisabeth was speculating on the power of the skinny second-growth trees to break their fall if Larry lost his grip on the little road. Elisabeth heard herself yelling as Larry abruptly swerved the car toward the inside of the curve, straight at the cliff face where the hill had been cut for the road. Here there was one of those granite outcrops that were scattered through the landscape otherwise composed of limestone from ancient seas or the rich dirt laid down by defunct rivers or more recent forests. Some of the road cuts were so soft they slid every winter, soft enough to cushion a crash if the car wasn't going too fast. That cliff wasn't going to give, not a millimeter.
      "I told you it was too easy," Melissa said, sure that Larry had decided to kill them all rather than divulge his secrets.
      But somehow he made this lunge for the cliff into a narrow turn back and they found themselves plummeting back towards Bell's Canyon. Elisabeth saw that the gauge at the left of the dash was dropping from 100.
      Not long afterwards the country opened out into dry parkland and Melissa looked out over the sudden view that the height of the road gave her. Behind, the road disappeared into the wooded depths of the canyon. Before them, the road turned out of sight again and again as it wound around the rocks and washouts at the top of the canyon. She remembered this from earlier in the day. But she was sure that at that time she'd been able to see familiar things down below, in Winsome: now she could barely pick out the amusement park at Sunday Park Pier, while the rest of it looked unfamiliar. She was sure she would not identify it as Winsome if she saw it in a photograph instead of right below her, not more than five miles away.
      But she said, "Look how close we are to town." "We've done all this driving, but I think we could throw a rock and break a window on San Pablo Avenue."
      "Don't think so," Larry said. "No San Pablo Avenue. Look for Santa Clarita Street instead."
      "We're there?" Elisabeth asked. "Just like that?"
      She didn't know what she had been expecting: something, anyway, more dramatic than just this, reckless driving in the San Lazarro hills.
      "No. Will be by the time we get down the canyon though."
      "It's not dark," Melissa said.
      "Yes. Won't be dark until after we hit Banner, if we're lucky.
      "Banner?"
      But Larry didn't answer. Instead he gunned the motor again, and Elisabeth could see the accelerometer, the speedometer, and the nameless gauge rising together. She was prepared this time when at the very summit of the road, just at the point where the road switched back down the other side of the canyon, and at a hideous blind steep tight turn, Larry hung a U, spinning his tire in the soft shoulder next to the edge of the road for a split second before it bit on asphalt again. She didn't yell this time: but she heard Melissa sing out "Whoopee!" which somehow seemed appropriate enough as they hurtled down towards the redwoods, past a shotholed sign declaring "San Lazarro County! Democratic Coalition! Justice and Freedom."
      "Yeah, " Elisabeth said, turning the radio on just as that lonely road song came on. The road didn't seem lonely at all, on this side. "Take us home, Larry."
  index