8. A View of the Grand Marquis
Boy, was Mom worried.
She was afraid the bug wouldn't make it up and down all these mountains and that they would get stranded by the side of the road where somebody might come ripping along and hit them. Penny herself was more than sanguine: if Dad thought the bug would make this one trip, then it probably would.
"We're almost there," John said.
Maureen brushed her hair back from her temples. "Thank God.
She was sitting in the right-hand bucket, a Victoria Holt paperback open but face down in her lap. She was wearing a blue dress, the one Penny thought was the prettiest. It had a sailor collar and made her look very young, like a girl just getting ready to graduate from high school. Dad kept putting his hand high up on her leg and she kept laughing and brushing it off, saying "Get away, fly."
Penny was impressed with the moutnains. One day Dad had taken them up in the ones due south of Wheeling, the ones they called the Appalachians, but these were much bigger, and on the tallest of them you could see a fine dusting of snow, which Dad said was often there year-round.
And they were actually in the moutnains, no goofing around. Sheer rock faces rose all around them, so high you could barely see their tops even by craning your neck out the window. When they left Wheeling, the temperature had been in the high seventies. Now, just after noon, the air up here felt crisp and cold like November back in Vermont and Dad had the heater going---not that it worked all that well. They had passed several signs that said FALLING ROCK ZONE, and although Penny had worried that some rock might actually fall on the bug, none had---yet.
Half an hour ago they had passed another sign that Dad said was very important. This one said ENTERING MILL'S CREEK PASS, and Dad explained that sign was as far as the snowplows went in the wintertime. After that th eroad got too steep. In winter, the road was closed from the little town of Mill's Creek, which they had gone through just before they got to that sign, all the way to Ashland, Kentucky.
Now they were passing another sign: SLOWER VEHICLES USE RIGHT LANE.
"That means us," Mom said.
"Cool it, Mom. The bug'll make it," Penny said.
"I hope you're right, dear," Mom said, and crossed her fingers. Penny looked down at her open-toed sandals and saw that she had crossed her toes as well. She giggled. Mom smiled back, but she knew that she was still worried.
The road wound up and up in a series of slow S cursves, and John dropped the bug's stick shift from fourth geart to third, then into second. The bug wheezed and protested, and Maureen's eye fixed on the speedometer needle, which sank from forty to thirty to twenty, where it hovered reluctantly.
"The fuel pump...." she began timidly.
"The fuel pump will go another three miles," John said shortly.
The rock fell away on their right, disclosing a slash valley that seemed to go down forever, lined a dark green with Appalachian pine and spruce. The pines fell away to gray cliffs of rock that dropped for hundreds of feet before smoothing out. She saw a waterfall spilling over one o fthem, the early afternoon sun sparkling in it like golden fish shared in a blue net. They were beautiful mountains bu tthey were hard. Maureen did not think they would forgive many mistakes. An unhappy foreboding rose in her throat. In the Old West, the Donner Party had become snowbound and had resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. The mountains did not forgive many mistakes.
With a punch of the clutch and a jerk, John shifted down to third gear and they labored upward, the bug's engine thumping gamely.
"You know," Maureen said, "I don't think we've seen five cars since we came through Mill's Creek. And one of them was the hotel limousine."
