Solo Faces Read Free Page A

to the idea that he would stay. Afraid of what might happen, she was frivolous, oblique, chattering to herself like a bird in a forest so as not to be aware of the approach of danger.
    Early one morning he rose before five. It was barely light. The floor was cool beneath his feet. Louise was sleeping. He picked up his clothes and went down the hall. On top of rumpled sheets Lane was sleeping in his underwear. His arms were like his mother’s, tubular and smooth. Rand shook him lightly. The eyes glinted open.
    “You awake?” Rand asked.
    There was no reply.
    “Come on,” he said.

3
    O N THE CAR WINDOWS , mist had formed. Newspapers lay on the lawns. The streets were empty. Buses were driving with their lights.
    The freeways were already full, a ghostly procession. Over the city lay a layer of clouds. To the east the sky was brighter, almost yellow. The bottom was spilling light. Then suddenly, breaking free from earth, the molten sun.
    The buildings of downtown appeared, tall and featureless. They seemed to turn slowly and reveal an unknown face of greater detail, a planetlike face lit by the sun.
    A river of cars was pouring inward out of a brilliance that obscured the road signs. Some twenty miles farther, among the last apartment buildings and motels, were the first open hills. There was less traffic now, nurses driving homeward, Japanese, bearded blacks, their faces bathed by dawn like true believers. It was seven o’clock.
    Near Pomona the land began to open. There were orchards, farms, vacant fields, the fields that once made up America. A countryside more calm and pure lay all about, covered by soothing clouds. The blue air of rain hung beneath. A group of white objects tilted like gravestones drifted by on the right.
    “What are those?”
    Rand looked out at them.
    “Beehives,” he said.
    The sky was breaking into bright fragments.
    At Banning they turned off. They were far from the city now, a generation away at least. The houses were ordinary. There were trailers, limping dogs. The road had begun to climb into barren hills. At each curve was a view of wide, patterned farmland falling away below. Ahead was emptiness, land that had no owner.
    “It’s nice from here on,” Rand said.
    The mountains were the color of slate, the sun behind them. The valley, wide with a silver highway, was seen for the last time. Beyond it a great range of mountains had appeared, peaks still white with snow. The road was silent, smooth.
    “How high are we?”
    “Two, three thousand feet.”
    The scrub trees vanished. They were speeding through forests of pine. Along the roadside lay banks of snow.
    “Look, a dog.”
    “That’s a coyote.”
    It turned before they reached it and disappeared into the trees.
    They dropped down into a valley and small town. Gas stations, a triangular park. It was all familiar. He knew the way as if it had been yesterday. A wooded road past houses with names like Nirvana and Last Mile, then some green water tanks, and there it was, a great dome of rock, its shoulders gleaming in the sun. A tremor of excitement went through him. The sky was clear. It was nearly nine o’clock.
    They parked, the doors on both sides open, and changed their shoes. Rand got a small rucksack and coil of rope, red as flannel, from the trunk. He led the way, down off the road to a half-hidden path. They followed this for a while and then turned upward and began to climb. The pines were tall and silent. The sun trickled through them to the forest floor. Rand moved steadily, unhurriedly, almost with a pause between his steps. There was no point in wasting strength here. Even so, it burned the legs; sweat began to glisten on their faces. Once or twice they paused to rest.
    “This is the hardest part. It’s not much farther,” Rand said.
    “I’m okay.”
    A large boulder which only an ice age could have borne was up ahead, close to the base of the main rock which seemed to have lost its size. The great slabs that almost