Direction

She opened the dead boy's map that night by the lamp, with Henry asleep in the loft and the door set back on its hinge and barred, and the shotgun she had taken off the body leaned in the corner where her hand could find it in the dark. She was bone-tired in a way that had nothing to do with the body, a tiredness down under the muscle, but she knew she would not sleep, and there was a thing she needed to know before the morning, which was where in all the wide dark country she was going to take her brother, and so she spread the map in the lamplight and made herself study it.

It was a road map of the ordinary kind, the kind that used to live folded in the door pockets of cars, Wyoming on the one side and Colorado on the other, worn soft and coming apart along the folds so that the country fell into pieces in her hands. Someone had been at it a long while with a pencil. Laramie was ringed hard, gone over and over until the graphite shone like metal in the lamplight, the black heart of the thing. And out from Laramie the pencil ran in lines like the legs of a spider, along the highways, out to the little towns, and against the towns were marks she had to sit and puzzle the meaning of. A check here. A cross there. And here and there a small square blacked solid in, and she understood after a while, cold, that the blacked squares were places that had been gone to and emptied, that the map was not a road map any longer but a ledger, a record of a slow methodical eating-outward from the ringed town, and that she was looking at the reach of Carla's arm laid out in pencil, how far it went and which way it was growing.