Strangers

miles in every direction. The intensely blue morning sky was immense, and as she got the Ford up to speed, Sandy felt as if she might take flight.
        If she headed north on 21, she would pass through Beowawe and soon come to Interstate 80, which led east toward Elko or west toward Battle Mountain. Instead, she went south, into a beautifully barren landscape. With skill and ease, she guided the four-wheel-drive pickup over the badly weathered county road at seventy miles an hour.
        In fifteen minutes, Route 21 petered out into a gravel roadbed that led south through another eighty-three miles of uninhabited and desolate territory. She did not follow it, choosing instead to turn east on a one-lane dirt track flanked by wild grass and scrub.
        Some snow lay on the ground this Christmas morning, though not much. In the distance, the mountains were white, but down here, the annual precipitation was less than fifteen inches a year, little of it in the form of snow. Here was an inch-deep skin of snow, there a small hillock against which a shallow drift had formed, and here a sparkling bush on which wind-driven snow had hardened into a lacy garment of ice, but by far the largest portion of the land was bare and dry and brown.
        Sandy drove fast on the dirt, too, and behind her a cloud of dust plumed up. In time she left the track, headed overland - north, then west, coming at last to a familiar place, though she had not set out with this destination in mind. For reasons she did not understand, her subconscious often guided her to this spot during her solitary drives, seldom in a direct line but by wandering routes, so her arrival was usually a surprise to her. She stopped, set the brake. With the engine idling, she stared for a while through the dusty windshield.
        She came here because it made her feel better, though she did not know why. The slopes, the spines and teeth of rock, the grass and brush, formed a pleasing picture, though the scene was no prettier and no different from thousands of other places nearby. Yet here she felt a sublime peacefulness that could not be attained anywhere else.
        She switched off the engine and got out of the pickup, and for a while she strolled back and forth, hands jammed into the pockets of her sheepskin-lined jacket, oblivious of the stingingly cold air. Her drive through the wildlands had brought her back toward civilization, and Interstate 80 lay only a couple of hundred yards to the north. The occasional roar of a passing truck-echoed like a distant dragon's growl, but the holiday traffic was light. Beyond the highway, on the uplands to the northwest, lay the Tranquility Motel and Grille, but Sandy glanced just once in that direction. She was more interested in the immediate terrain, which exerted a mysterious and powerful attraction for her, and which seemed to radiate peace the way a rock, in evening, radiated the heat of the sun that it had absorbed during the day.
        She wasn't trying to analyze her affinity for this patch of ground. Evidently, there was some subtle harmony in the contours of the land, an interplay of line, form, and shadow that defied definition. Any attempt to decode its attraction would be as foolish as trying to analyze the beauty of a sunset or the appeal of a favorite flower.
        That Christmas morning, Sandy did not yet know that Ernie Block had been drawn, as if possessed, to the same patch of ground on December 10, when he had been on his way home from the freight office in Elko. She did not know that it aroused in Ernie an electrifying sense of pending epiphany and more than a little fear-emotions quite unlike those that it stirred in her. Weeks would pass before she learned that her special retreat had a strong attraction for others besides herself - both friends and strangers.
        
        Chicago, Illinois.
        For Father Stefan Wycazik - that stocky Polish dynamo, rector of St. Bernadette's, rescuer of troubled priests - it was the busiest Christmas morning he had ever known. And as the day wore on, it swiftly became the most meaningful Christmas of his life.
        He celebrated the second Mass at St. Bernadette's, spent an hour greeting parishioners who stopped by the rectory with fruit baskets and boxes of homemade cookies and other gifts, then drove to University Hospital to pay a visit to Winton Tolk, the policeman who had been shot in an uptown sandwich shop yesterday afternoon.