Download an audio version at (www.joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water).

’Tit Jean and Bertrand spent the night in Elliott’s cubicle. They could have slept in the truck as usual, but Elliott offered and there was no reason to turn him down. Bertrand, on the cot, fell asleep quickly; ’Tit Jean, on the floor, was kept awake by worry and the night-desk man’s computer game. After an hour he got up, went to the kitchen at the back of the office, closed the door, and found the switch. The light was harsh and fluorescent, the chipped cabinet-fronts hung with old employee bulletins and safety circulars. He looked in the refrigerator. Not much.

He sat at the Formica table and prayed, electronic explosions and shrieks seeping faintly through the door. He began in his usual way—silently. He asked God to make him shrewd enough to unravel where Guerin had gone, and to give Guerin the good sense not to aggravate his captors. He never asked God for specific interventions in the world. Prayers weren’t magic spells; you couldn’t make God do what you wanted by saying the right words. When he prayed it was for the wisdom to make good choices, or the courage to do what was right.

But for once that didn’t feel like enough. He couldn’t stand waiting and praying for patience felt obscene. Anything could be happening to Guerin right now and he didn’t have the slightest idea how to stop it. What if Guerin simply disappeared forever? His mind went white again, his heart pounded, and an adrenaline itch took hold of his jaw.

He stood and rummaged the drawers, found a box of kitchen matches, and stood over the table, breaking them in half as a nervous use of his hands and arranging the halves to form boxes, triangles, the ordinal numbers.

“God,” he said. It was the first time he’d said a prayer aloud in years. “Abraham bargained with you for the inhabitants of Sodom and you were merciful, and Moses after the Golden Calf…”  It was odd to say the word “merciful” out loud. He didn’t know if he’d ever used it before. It made him feel, of all things, preachy. He flicked the matchsticks off the table and in his head tried to finish begging for mercy for Guerin. His thoughts wouldn’t line up, though. He hoped God could see his heart. He hoped God wouldn’t let—

He had to stop thinking about it.

He took out his phone and stared at it. He should have called his wife right away, but it had taken a while to sink in that something was truly wrong. When Elliott told him Guerin wasn’t in a hospital or a jail, at base he’d still thought that was only natural, because of course Guerin would call soon. When he’d left James Castoreau he’d felt sad for the young man but known that of course nothing like that could happen to my boy. As the day had worn on, though, his fears grew realer and realer, and then he hadn’t called Hélène because he didn’t want to have to say it. He knew how it would go. She would pick up, happy to hear from him or grouchy from her own day—in any case unawares. It would be like hearing the past, his own mind this morning when he hadn’t yet any idea of the helpless terror to come. Then she would catch his tone of voice—or maybe the hesitation before he spoke would be enough—and ask what was wrong—“Qu’est-ce-qui se passe?” And from that moment her world too would lack Guerin. He would have to live through that impossible realization again—doubly, agonizingly impossible because this second time he would be the one inflicting it on Hélène.

He dialed. It was as bad as he’d feared.

When he returned to the cubicle Bertrand had his face to the wall. Looking at him made ’Tit Jean angry, for no fair reason. His heart had bound his worry for Guerin to his love for him, so that seeing Bertrand, whom he also loved, sharpened his worry painfully. Now he had another thing to pray for: he sat on the floor and prayed that tomorrow, when they woke up, he would have the self-control not to mistreat Bertrand just because he was there.

He lay down and tried to sleep.

In the morning Elliott took him to the nearest police station to file a missing-persons report. Many of the officers there plainly knew and liked Elliott; they sped ’Tit Jean past their lines and helped him sidestep their forms’ more uncomfortable questions. For instance, they didn’t ask what an Omaha-based Acadian family might be doing in Denver. Instead the sergeant filling in his boxes looked hard at ’Tit Jean and said, “So, you’re here visiting Abel?” and ’Tit Jean knew he should nod.

Elliott didn’t stay. Once ’Tit Jean was in the hands of a suitably friendly cop, he left to “check his sources again.” Presumably this meant calling the hospitals and morgues again.

When ’Tit Jean returned to the office later, Elliott’s first question was “How much cash can you get right away?”

“Eight thousand. Perhaps ten if I borrow,” he said. In fact he had around five thousand dollars split between the Children’s Museum and, four blocks away, the visiting-end-zone seats of Mile High Stadium, but it was a habit to lie about money, even to friends.

“All three of the kids that came in to Denver yesterday died last night. There’s a girl named Sarah Bennett in a hospital in Vail, but that’s heavy Fed country. You’ll need a lot of money for bribes.”

’Tit Jean took a moment to pity James Castoreau, who hadn’t even gotten to speak to his parents. But a moment was all. He couldn’t allow that to happen to Guerin, and if it meant driving into mountain country, so be it. He didn’t know the roads or the dangers up there but it didn’t matter. He had to go.

Last night he’d promised Hélène to send Bertrand home right away in some other truck. Now he put out word over the radio and soon got an answer from a Houma Indian Acadian. The Houma was traveling to Kansas City but would take Bertrand to Omaha for $300. For $30 more he sold ’Tit Jean a can of white paint and the use of his brushes and turpentine, and sat on the sidewalk eating his lunch while Bertrand and ’Tit Jean painted over the writing on the sides of the truck. They were chapter and verse numbers, and what little he did know about the mountains included the fact that half the Posses up there were Libertarian or Devolutionist, at war as much with East Slope and Plains fundamentalism as with Feds. Quoting Isaiah to them only invited trouble.

The writing had been Guerin’s idea. A band of zealot thugs had taken to raiding I-80 around Gothenburg, men who’d turned their dislike of Catholics into a good excuse to plunder Acadian drivers. Unlike the usual Nebraska robbers, who took only a tithe of any load, these hadn’t heard not to eat the seed corn: they were taking whole trucks, leaving the drivers by the side of the road if they agreed to be rebaptized, threatening to shoot them if they didn’t. Two Acadians, brothers, had been found dead on the highway; it was assumed they’d refused. ’Tit Jean had to stop driving for a while. He couldn’t afford to lose a whole cargo and the truck, and he certainly wouldn’t take his boys out to face death.

They waited in Omaha, hoping to hear that the zealots had gone off to some other highway, or that the Feds had done their job for once and chased them away. His family didn’t have much cash saved and it was winter—nothing in the garden, a load of coal to buy every week, electric light in the house starting at 5:00 pm, and by the way, biodiesel for the generator was twice as expensive from a tanker truck in Omaha as from the pump next to ’Tit Jean’s favorite grain elevator in Dawson County.

’Tit Jean and Hélène talked in front of the boys about what they would do if driving stayed so dangerous. The leading idea was to go live with her family in Mississippi, where ’Tit Jean could take a job in a chicken-processing plant. He loathed the thought. He would be someone else’s employee again, and at hard, dangerous, and badly paid work.

Guerin had taken it even worse than ’Tit Jean himself, inflating a bad job into a total disaster in his mind. He took it as his personal mission to save his dad, made ’Tit Jean give him the names of the Acadians who’d been robbed, and went to talk to them about what the hijackers had said. Then he walked himself to the library, telling no one what he was up to, and searched the internet all of one day and most of another. Late afternoon of that second day he’d come home, thrown his hat and mittens triumphantly on the kitchen counter, and announced that he knew what to do.

“Like the governor,” he said. “We make them think we’re like them, not Catholic.”

The governor of Nebraska was a federal puppet. Everyone knew it, but he managed to keep a good part of the state docile by quoting the right pamphlets the right way and demanding the right kinds of censorship in the ordinary public schools. His “reforms” were one big reason ’Tit Jean hadn’t minded pulling the boys out of formal education.

“It’s whaddyacallit, a shibboleth,” said Guerin. “We need one of those. Only it has to be something they see, not something we say, because if they hear your accent they won’t believe it.”

The next day he and ’Tit Jean had painted the truck. First they painted the sides white, so the writing would show up. Guerin dipped his roller in paint, slathered it on the truck, and moved smoothly from one working spot to another, none of which was remarkable except that just six months earlier the same operation would have seen him bark his shins twice on the bumper and step in the paint pan at least once. He was finally growing into his body. ’Tit Jean had been happy and surprised—the way only his sons could make him feel, when they reminded him of the awesome fact that they were his.

Late that afternoon, when the white was dry, they stenciled up chapter and verse numbers. On the top half of the driver- and passenger-side panels they wrote:

DEUT 28:15–68

ZEPH 1:14–18

DAN 12: 1–3

MATT 24

And on the bottom half:

ISA 2:2–4

ISA 11

ACTS 15:16–17

REV 19:11–20:15

A horizontal line separated the top half from the bottom. From either side, a reader who knew the verses—and Guerin swore that the robbers would know them almost by heart—should see a coherent story: in the first set of verses God destroyed the world in the apocalypse, taking the elect directly to heaven; in the second he sent Jesus back to earth to rule for one thousand years.

The hitch had come afterwards, when ’Tit Jean still hesitated to go back on the road. No matter how proud Guerin might have made him, it was still scary to trust everything, even his own life, to a fifteen-year-old’s idea. Guerin had tried to show how sure he was of it by begging to come along, but of course ’Tit Jean couldn’t let him. Guerin had sulked, complained, even once accused ’Tit Jean of being a coward, and eventually ’Tit Jean had given in. Otherwise he might as well have gone to work in the poultry plant right away.

There was no way to know if it was because of the writing, but he’d made the trip unharmed, and then another and another. Maybe the zealots really did see the verses and think he was one of them. Maybe the other robbers got together and killed them for ruining the brigand business. Anyway other drivers started to copy him, and soon enough all of them were back to normal.

Two months later he’d taken Bertrand on a trip again. He’d been delivering four slabs of bulletproof glass for a check-cashing/liquor store, and needed help to load and unload. Another few months and he’d taken Guerin too.

Traffic out of Denver was surprisingly thin. It thinned even more as the truck groaned up the Continental Divide. Finally there was only one other vehicle on the road with him, a pickup a steady quarter-mile out front. It turned off at Idaho Springs and he was alone.

As he climbed, the pines on the northern slopes grew thicker and those on the southern slopes were gradually replaced by aspens. In some places the road was blasted through rock, and above 9,000 feet the north-facing scarps bore ropes of ice.

He hit the Eisenhower Tunnel and turned on his headlights. The lights on the ceiling had burned out long ago. After twenty seconds he found himself straining to see beyond the cylinder of walls caught in his beams, looking for light to indicate the tunnel’s far end. After forty-five he saw there would be no such light. The tunnel was filled with rubble.

He backed out and used the turnabout road on the slope above the tunnel mouth to reach the eastbound tube. It was blocked too. But here there was a soft, steady noise like air through a pipe organ’s bellows. Air was passing through somewhere. ’Tit Jean turned off his headbeams, thinking that even if there was only an oblique opening, some glimmer must show through. He waited a moment for his vision to adjust, and in the heavy dark the sound was amplified, as if the mountain was moaning. It was like the dream ’Tit Jean sometimes had—the worst kind of nightmare because it wasn’t wholly imaginary—when his mind awoke a half-minute before the rest of his body, so that he was paralyzed and in darkness, knowing that if he could move even a finger he’d be released, but unable to do it. Those dreams were filled with the soft, steady noise of his own blood moving through its veins.

There was no glimmer to be seen. He thought of a verse from first Kings: 

The LORD has set the sun in the heavens, but has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.

If God was near, though, ’Tit Jean didn’t feel Him and couldn’t think of any prayer to offer Him.

He turned on the dome light and unfolded his map of Colorado over the steering wheel. If he backtracked a little, it looked like he could climb over the Wall on Route 40 and then use Route 9 to circle back to the Interstate. It would add hours.