One Door From Heaven

Geneva's eyes. "Like what?" "So determined."
        "It's not just Leilani's life hanging by a thread, Aunt Gen. It's mine, too." "I know."

Chapter 45
        
        CRACKERLESS, POLLY drives with an open bag of cheese-flavored popcorn in her lap and a cold can of beer in the built-in cupholder on her customized command chair.
        Having an open container of any alcoholic beverage in a moving vehicle is against the law, but Curtis refrains from advising Polly about this infraction. He doesn't want to repeat the errors that he made with Gabby, who had taken extreme offense at being reminded that the law requires seat belts to be worn at all times.
        Cleaving prairie, a lonely two-lane blacktop highway runs north-northwest from Neary Ranch. According to the twins, the southbound lane, not taken, leads eventually to a cruel desert and ultimately to the even crueler games of Las Vegas.
        They have no destination in mind yet, no plan to ensure justice for the Hammond family, no idea of what future Curtis might expect or with whom he might live. Until the situation clarifies and they have time to think, the twins' only concern is keeping him free and alive.
        Curtis approves of this scheme. Flexibility is any fugitive's greatest strength, and a fugitive burdened by a rigid plan makes easy quarry of himself. Mom's wisdom. Anyway, he will leave the sisters soon, so planning beyond the next few hours would be pointless.
        Polly drives fast. The Fleetwood rushes across the prairie, like a nuclear-powered battle wagon on a medium-gravity moon.
        In the lounge, Cass relaxes on a sofa that backs up to the port flank of the motor home, thirdly behind the driver's seat. The dog lies beside her, chin resting on her thigh, blissfully assuming a right of continuous cuddling, and having that assumption rewarded.
        At the sisters' gentle insistence, Curtis occupies the co-pilot's chair, which boasts various power features, including one that turns it away from the road, toward the driver. Having powered the seat to port, he can see both women.
        Although wearing only the beach-towel sarong, he's no longer self-conscious. He feels quite Polynesian, like Bing Crosby in The Road to Bali.
        Instead of chunks of coconut or a bowl of poi, instead of the shredded flesh of a wild pig spiced with eel tongue, he has his own bag of cheese-flavored popcorn and a can of Orange Crush, though he had asked for a beer.
        Better still, he's blessed by the company of the Spelkenfelter sisters, Castoria and Polluxia. He finds the details of their lives to be unlike anything he knows from films or books.
        They were born and raised in a bucolic town in Indiana, which Polly calls "a long yawn of bricks and boards." According to Cass, the most exciting pastimes the area offers are watching cows graze, watching chickens peck, and watching hogs sleep, although Curtis can perceive no entertainment value in two of these three activities.
        Their father, Sidney Spelkenfelter, is a professor of Greek and Roman history at a private college, and his wife, Imogene, teaches art history. Sidney and Imogene are kind and loving parents, but they are also, says Cass, "as naive as goldfish who think the world ends at the bowl." Because their parents were academics, too, Sidney and Imogene have resided ever in tenured security, explaining life to others but living a pale version of it.
        Co-valedictorians of their high-school class, Cass and Polly skipped college in favor of Las Vegas. Within a month, they were the centerpiece feathered-and-sequined nudes in a major hotel's showroom extravaganza with a cast of seventy-four dancers, twelve showgirls, nine specialty acts, two elephants, four chimps, six dogs, and a python.
        Because of a mutual lifelong interest in juggling and trapeze acrobatics, within a year they were elevated to Las -Vegas stardom in a ten-million-dollar stage-musical spectacular featuring a theme of extraterrestrial, contact. They played acrobatic alien queens plotting to turn all human males into love slaves.
        "That was when we first got interested in UFOs," Cass reveals.
        "In the opening dance number," Polly reminisces, "we descended these neon stairs from a giant flying saucer. It was awesome."
        "And this time we didn't have to be naked the whole show," says Cass. "We came out of the saucer nude, of course-"
        "Like any