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I
was a junior at the University of Maine when Mrs. McCurdy called
about ma. My father died when I was too young to remember him and
I was an only child, so it was just Alan and Jean Parker against
the world. Mrs. McCurdy, who lived just up the road, called at the
apartment I shared with three other guys. She had gotten the number
off the magnetic minder-board ma kept on her fridge.
"'Twas a stroke," she said in that
long and drawling Yankee accent of hers. "Happened at the restaurant.
But don't you go flyin off all half-cocked. Doctor says it wa'ant
too bad. She's awake and she's talkin."
"Yeah, but is she making sense?" I
asked. I was trying to sound calm, even amused, but my heart was
beating fast and the living room suddenly felt too warm. I had the
apartment all to myself; it was Wednesday, and both my roomies had
classes all day.
"Oh, ayuh. First thing she said was
for me to call you but not to scare you. That's pretty sensible,
wouldn't you say?"
"Yeah." But of course I was scared.
When someone calls and tells you your mother's been taken from work
to the hospital in an ambulance, how else are you supposed to feel?
"She said for you to stay right there
and mind your schoolin until the weekend. She said you could come
then, if you didn't have too much studyin t'do."
Sure, I thought. Fat chance. I'd just
stay here in this ratty, beer-smelling apartment while my mother
lay in a hospital bed a hundred miles south, maybe dying.
"She's still a young woman, your ma,"
Mrs. McCurdy said. "It's just that she's let herself get awful heavy
these last few years, and she's got the hypertension. Plus the cigarettes.
She's goin to have to give up the smokes."
I doubted if she would, though, stroke
or no stroke, and about that I was right--my mother loved her smokes.
I thanked Mrs. McCurdy for calling.
"First thing I did when I got home,"
she said. "So when are you coming, Alan? Sad'dy?" There was a sly
note in her voice that suggested she knew better.
I looked out the window at a perfect
afternoon in October: bright blue New England sky over trees that
were shaking down their yellow leaves onto Mill Street. Then I glanced
at my watch. Twenty past three. I'd just been on my way out to my
four o'clock philosophy seminar when the phone rang.
"You kidding?" I asked. "I'll be there
tonight."
Her laughter was dry and a little
cracked around the edges--Mrs. McCurdy was a great one to talk about
giving up the cigarettes, her and her Winstons. "Good boy! You'll
go straight to the hospital, won't you, then drive out to the house?"
"I guess so, yeah," I said. I saw
no sense in telling Mrs. McCurdy that there was something wrong
with the transmission of my old car, and it wasn't going anywhere
but the driveway for the foreseeable future. I'd hitchhike down
to Lewiston, then out to our little house in Harlow if it wasn't
too late. If it was, I'd snooze in one of the hospital lounges.
It wouldn't be the first time I'd ridden my thumb home from school.
Or slept sitting up with my head leaning against a Coke machine,
for that matter.
"I'll make sure the key's under the
red wheelbarrow," she said. "You know where I mean, don't you?"
"Sure." My mother kept an old red
wheelbarrow by the door to the back shed; in the summer it foamed
with flowers. Thinking of it for some reason brought Mrs. McCurdy's
news home to me as a true fact: my mother was in the hospital, the
little house in Harlow where I'd grown up was going to be dark tonight--there
was no one there to turn on the lights after the sun went down.
Mrs. McCurdy could say she was young, but when you're just twenty-one
yourself, forty-eight seems ancient.
"Be careful, Alan. Don't speed."
My speed, of course, would be up to whoever
I hooked a ride with, and I personally hoped that whoever it was
would go like hell. As far as I was concerned, I couldn't get to
Central Maine Medical Center fast enough. Still, there was no sense
worrying Mrs. McCurdy.
"I won't. Thanks."
"Welcome," she said. "Your ma's going to
be just fine. And won't she be some happy to see you."
I hung up, then scribbled a note saying
what had happened and where I was going. I asked Hector Passmore,
the more responsible of my roommates, to call my adviser and ask
him to tell my instructors what was up so I wouldn't get whacked
for cutting--two or three of my teachers were real bears about that.
Then I stuffed a change of clothes into my backpack, added my dog-eared
copy of Introduction to Philosophy, and headed out. I dropped
the course the following week, although I had been doing quite well
in it. The way I looked at the world changed that night, changed
quite a lot, and nothing in my philosophy textbook seemed to fit
the changes. I came to understand that there are things underneath,
you see-underneath-and no book can explain what they are.
I think that sometimes it's best to just forget those things are
there. If you can, that is.
It's
a hundred and twenty miles from the University of Maine in Orono
to Lewiston in Androscoggin County, and the quickest way to get
there is by I-95. The turnpike isn't such a good road to take if
you're hitchhiking, though; the state police are apt to boot anyone
they see off--even if you're just standing on the ramp they give
you the boot--and if the same cop catches you twice, he's apt to
write you a ticket, as well. So I took Route 68, which winds southwest
from Bangor. It's a pretty well-traveled road, and if you don't
look like an out-and-out psycho, you can usually do pretty well.
The cops leave you alone, too, for the most part.
My first lift was with a morose insurance
man and took me as far as Newport. I stood at the intersection of
Route 68 and Route 2 for about twenty minutes, then got a ride with
an elderly gentleman who was on his way to Bowdoinham. He kept grabbing
at his crotch as he drove. It was as if he was trying to catch something
that was running around in there.
"My wife allus told me I'd wind up in the
ditch with a knife in my back if I kept on picking up hitchhikers,"
he said, "but when I see a young fella standin t'side of the rud,
I allus remember my own younger days. Rode my thumb quite a bit,
so I did. Rode the rods, too. And lookit this, her dead four year
and me still a-goin, drivin this same old Dodge. I miss her somethin
turrible." He snatched at his crotch. "Where you headed, son?"
I told him I was going to Lewiston, and
why.
"That's turrible," he said. "Your ma! I'm
so sorry!"
His sympathy was so strong and spontaneous
that it made the corners of my eyes prickle. I blinked the tears
back. The last thing in the world I wanted was to burst out crying
in this old man's old car, which rattled and wallowed and smelled
quite strongly of pee.
"Mrs. McCurdy--the lady who called
me--said it isn't that serious. My mother's still young, only forty-eight."
"Still! A stroke!" He was genuinely dismayed.
He snatched at the baggy crotch of his green pants again, yanking
with an old man's oversized, clawlike hand. "A stroke's allus serious!
Son, I'd take you to the CMMC myself--drive you right up to the
front door--if I hadn't promised my brother Ralph I'd take him up
to the nursin home in Gates. His wife's there, she has that forgettin
disease, I can't think what in the world they call it, Anderson's
or Alvarez or somethin like that--"
"Alzheimer's," I said.
"Ayuh, prob'ly I'm gettin it myself. Hell,
I'm tempted to take you anyway."
"You don't need to do that," I said. "I
can get a ride from Gates easy."
"Still," he said. "Your mother! A stroke!
Only forty-eight!" He grabbed at the baggy crotch of his pants.
"Fucking truss!" he cried, then laughed--the sound was both desperate
and amused. "Fucking rupture! If you stick around, son, all your
works start fallin apart. God kicks your ass in the end, let me
tell you. But you're a good boy to just drop everythin and go to
her like you're doin."
"She's a good mom," I said, and once again
I felt the tears bite. I never felt very homesick when I went away
to school--a little bit the first week, that was all--but I felt
homesick then. There was just me and her, no other close relatives.
I couldn't imagine life without her. Wasn't too bad, Mrs. McCurdy
had said; a stroke, but not too bad. Damn old lady better be telling
the truth, I thought, she just better be.
We rode in silence for a little while.
It wasn't the fast ride I'd hoped for--the old man maintained a
steady forty-five miles an hour and sometimes wandered over the
white line to sample the other lane--but it was a long ride, and
that was really just as good. Highway 68 unrolled before us, turning
its way through miles of woods and splitting the little towns that
were there and gone in a slow blink, each one with its bar and its
self- service gas station: New Sharon, Ophelia, West Ophelia, Ganistan
(which had once been Afghantistan, strange but true), Mechanic Falls,
Castle View, Castle Rock. The bright blue of the sky dimmed as the
day drained out of it; the old man turned on first his parking lights
and then his headlights. They were the high beams but he didn't
seem to notice, not even when cars coming the other way flashed
their own high beams at him.
"My sister'n-law don't even remember
her own name," he said. "She don't know aye, yes, no, nor maybe.
That's what that Anderson's Disease does to you, son. There's a
look in her eyes . . . like she's sayin 'Let me out of here'
. . . or would say it, if she could think of the words. Do
you know what I mean?"
"Yes," I said. I took a deep breath and
wondered if the pee I smelled was the old man's or if he maybe had
a dog that rode with him sometimes. I wondered if he'd be offended
if I rolled down my window a little. Finally I did. He didn't seem
to notice, any more than he noticed the oncoming cars flashing their
highs at him.
Around seven o'clock we breasted a hill
in West Gates and my chauffeur cried, "Lookit, son! The moon! Ain't
she a corker?"
She was indeed a corker--a huge orange
ball hoisting itself over the horizon. I thought there was nevertheless
something terrible about it. It looked both pregnant and infected.
Looking at the rising moon, a sudden and awful thought came to me:
what if I got to the hospital and my ma didn't recognize me? What
if her memory was gone, completely shot, and she didn't know aye,
yes, no, nor maybe? What if the doctor told me she'd need someone
to take care of her for the rest of her life? That someone would
have to be me, of course; there was no one else. Goodbye college.
What about that, friends and neighbors?
"Make a wish on it, boyo!" the old man
cried. In his excitement his voice grew sharp and unpleasant--it
was like having shards of glass stuffed into your ear. He gave his
crotch a terrific tug. Something in there made a snapping sound.
I didn't see how you could yank on your crotch like that and not
rip your balls right off at the stem, truss or no truss. "Wish you
make on the ha'vest moon allus comes true, that's what my father
said!"
So
I wished that my mother would know me when I walked into her room,
that her eyes would light up at once and she would say my name.
I made that wish and immediately wished I could have it back again;
I thought that no wish made in that fevery orange light could come
to any good.
"Ah, son!" the old man said. "I wish my
wife was here! I'd beg forgiveness for every sha'ap and unkind word
I ever said to her!"
Twenty minutes later, with the last light
of the day still in the air and the moon still hanging low and bloated
in the sky, we arrived in Gates Falls. There's a yellow blinker
at the intersection of Route 68 and Pleasant Street. Just before
he reached it, the old man swerved to the side of the road, bumping
the Dodge's right front wheel up over the curb and then back down
again. It rattled my teeth. The old man looked at me with a kind
of wild, defiant excitement--everything about him was wild, although
I hadn't seen that at first; everything about him had that broken-glass
feeling. And everything that came out of his mouth seemed to be
an exclamation.
"I'll take you up there! I will, yessir!
Never mind Ralph! Hell with him! You just say the word!"
I wanted to get to my mother, but
the thought of another twenty miles with the smell of piss in the
air and cars flashing their brights at us wasn't very pleasant.
Neither was the image of the old fellow wandering and weaving across
four lanes of Lisbon Street. Mostly, though, it was him. I couldn't
stand another twenty miles of crotch- snatching and that excited
broken-glass voice.
"Hey, no," I said, "that's okay. You go
on and take care of your brother." I opened the door and what I'd
feared happened--he reached out and took hold of my arm with his
twisted old man's hand. It was the hand with which he kept tearing
at his crotch.
"You just say the word!" he told me. His
voice was hoarse, confidential. His fingers were pressing deep into
the flesh just below my armpit. "I'll take you right to the hospital
door! Ayuh! Don't matter if I never saw you before in my life nor
you me! Don't matter aye, yes, no, nor maybe! I'll take you right
. . . there!"
"It's okay," I repeated, and all at once
I was fighting an urge to bolt out of the car, leaving my shirt
behind in his grip if that was what it took to get free. It was
as if he were drowning. I thought that when I moved, his grip would
tighten, that he might even go for the nape of my neck, but he didn't.
His fingers loosened, then slipped away entirely as I put my leg
out. And I wondered, as we always do when an irrational moment of
panic passes, what I had been so afraid of in the first place. He
was just an elderly carbon-based life-form in an elderly Dodge's
pee-smelling ecosystem, looking disappointed that his offer had
been refused. Just an old man who couldn't get comfortable in his
truss. What in God's name had I been afraid of?
"I thank you for the ride and even more
for the offer," I said. "But I can go out that way--" I pointed
at Pleasant Street. "--and I'll have a ride in no time."
He was quiet for a moment, then sighed
and nodded. "Ayuh, that's the best way to go," he said. "Stay right
out of town, nobody wants to give a fella ride in town, no one wants
to slow down and get honked at."
He was right about that; hitchhiking in
town, even a small one like Gates Falls, was futile. I guess he
had spent some time riding his thumb.
"But, son, are you sure? You know what
they say about a bird in the hand."
I hesitated again. He was right about a
bird in the hand, too. Pleasant Street became Ridge Road a mile
or so west of the blinker, and Ridge Road ran through fifteen miles
of woods before arriving at Route 196 on the outskirts of Lewiston.
It was almost dark, and it's always harder to get a ride at night--when
headlights pick you out on a country road, you look like an escapee
from Wyndham Boys' Correctional even with your hair combed and your
shirt tucked in. But I didn't want to ride with the old man anymore.
Even now, when I was safely out of his car, I thought there was
something creepy about him--maybe it was just the way his voice
seemed full of exclamation points. Besides, I've always been lucky
getting rides.
"I'm sure," I said. "And thanks again.
Really."
"Any time, son. Any time. My wife . . ."
He stopped, and I saw there were tears leaking from the corners
of his eyes. I thanked him again, then slammed the door shut before
he could say anything else.
I hurried across the street, my shadow
appearing and disappearing in the light of the blinker. On the far
side I turned and looked back. The Dodge was still there, parked
beside Frank's Fountain & Fruits. By the light of the blinker and
the streetlight twenty feet or so beyond the car, I could see him
sitting slumped over the wheel. The thought came to me that he was
dead, that I had killed him with my refusal to let him help.
Then a car came around the corner and the
driver flashed his high beams at the Dodge. This time the old man
dipped his own lights, and that was how I knew he was still alive.
A moment later he pulled back into the street and piloted the Dodge
slowly around the corner. I watched until he was gone, then looked
up at the moon. It was starting to lose its orange bloat, but there
was still something sinister about it. It occurred to me that I
had never heard of wishing on the moon before--the evening star,
yes, but not the moon. I wished again I could take my own wish back;
as the dark drew down and I stood there at the crossroads, it was
too easy to think of that story about the monkey's paw.
I
walked out Pleasant Street, waving my thumb at cars that went by
without even slowing. At first there were shops and houses on both
sides of the road, then the sidewalk ended and the trees closed
in again, silently retaking the land. Each time the road flooded
with light, pushing my shadow out ahead of me, I'd turn around,
stick out my thumb, and put what I hoped was a reassuring smile
on my face. And each time the oncoming car would swoosh by without
slowing. Once, someone shouted out, "Get a job, monkeymeat!" and
there was laughter.
I'm not afraid of the dark--or wasn't then--but
I began to be afraid I'd made a mistake by not taking the old man
up on his offer to drive me straight to the hospital. I could have
made a sign reading NEED A RIDE, MOTHER SICK
before starting out, but I doubted if it would have helped. Any
psycho can make a sign, after all.
I walked along, sneakers scuffing the gravelly
dirt of the soft shoulder, listening to the sounds of the gathering
night: a dog, far away; an owl, much closer; the sigh of a rising
wind. The sky was bright with the moonlight, but I couldn't see
the moon itself just now--the trees were tall here and had blotted
it out for the time being.
As I left Gates farther behind, fewer cars
passed me. My decision not to take the old man up on his offer seemed
more foolish with each passing minute. I began to imagine my mother
in her hospital bed, mouth turned down in a frozen sneer, losing
her grip on life but trying to hold on to that increasingly slippery
bark for me, not knowing I wasn't going to make it simply because
I hadn't liked an old man's shrill voice, or the pissy smell of
his car.
I breasted a steep hill and stepped back
into moonlight again at the top. The trees were gone on my right,
replaced by a small country graveyard. The stones gleamed in the
pale light. Something small and black was crouched beside one of
them, watching me. I took a step closer, curious. The black thing
moved and became a woodchuck. It spared me a single reproachful
red-eyed glance and was gone into the high grass. All at once I
became aware that I was very tired, in fact close to exhausted.
I had been running on pure adrenaline since Mrs. McCurdy called
five hours before, but now that was gone. That was the bad part.
The good part was that the useless sense of frantic urgency left
me, at least for the time being. I had made my choice, decided on
Ridge Road instead of Route 68, and there was no sense beating myself
up over it--fun is fun and done is done, my mother sometimes said.
She was full of stuff like that, little Zen aphorisms that almost
made sense. Sense or nonsense, this one comforted me now. If she
was dead when I got to the hospital, that was that. Probably she
wouldn't be. Doctor said it wasn't too bad, according to Mrs. McCurdy;
Mrs. McCurdy had also said she was still a young woman. A bit on
the heavy side, true, and a heavy smoker in the bargain, but still
young.
Meantime, I was out here in the williwags
and I was suddenly tired out--my feet felt as if they had been dipped
in cement.
There was a stone wall running along the
road side of the cemetery, with a break in it where two ruts ran
through. I sat on the wall with my feet planted in one of these
ruts. From this position I could see a good length of Ridge Road
in both directions. When I saw headlights coming west, in the direction
of Lewiston, I could walk back to the edge of the road and put my
thumb out. In the meantime, I'd just sit here with my backpack in
my lap and wait for some strength to come back into my legs.
A groundmist, fine and glowing, was rising
out of the grass. The trees surrounding the cemetery on three sides
rustled in the rising breeze. From beyond the graveyard came the
sound of running water and the occasional plunk- plunk of a frog.
The place was beautiful and oddly soothing, like a picture in a
book of romantic poems.
I looked both ways along the road. Nothing
coming, not so much as a glow on the horizon. Putting my pack down
in the wheelrut where I'd been dangling my feet, I got up and walked
into the cemetery. A lock of hair had fallen onto my brow; the wind
blew it off. The mist roiled lazily around my shoes. The stones
at the back were old; more than a few had fallen over. The ones
at the front were much newer. I bent, hands planted on knees, to
look at one which was surrounded by almost- fresh flowers. By moonlight
the name was easy to read: GEORGE STAUB.
Below it were the dates marking the brief span of George Staub's
life: JANUARY 19, 1977, at one end, OCTOBER
12, 1998, at the other. That explained the flowers which
had only begun to wilt; October 12th was two days ago and 1998 was
just two years ago. George's friends and relatives had stopped by
to pay their respects. Below the name and dates was something else,
a brief inscription. I leaned down farther to read it--
--and
stumbled back, terrified and all too aware that I was by myself,
visiting a graveyard by moonlight.
FUN
IS FUN AND DONE IS DONE
was
the inscription.
My
mother was dead, had died perhaps at that very minute, and something
had sent me a message. Something with a thoroughly unpleasant sense
of humor.
I began to back slowly toward the road,
listening to the wind in the trees, listening to the stream, listening
to the frog, suddenly afraid I might hear another sound, the sound
of rubbing earth and tearing roots as something not quite dead reached
up, groping for one of my sneakers--
My feet tangled together and I fell down,
thumping my elbow on a gravestone, barely missing another with the
back of my head. I landed with a grassy thud, looking up at the
moon which had just barely cleared the trees. It was white instead
of orange now, and as bright as a polished bone.
Instead of panicking me further, the fall
cleared my head. I didn't know what I'd seen, but it couldn't have
been what I thought I'd seen; that kind of stuff might work
in John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies, but it wasn't the stuff
of real life.
Yes, okay, good, a voice whispered
in my head. And if you just walk out of here now, you can go
on believing that. You can go on believing it for the rest of your
life.
"Fuck that," I said, and got up. The seat
of my jeans was wet, and I plucked it away from my skin. It wasn't
exactly easy to reapproach the stone marking George Staub's final
resting place, but it wasn't as hard as I'd expected, either. The
wind sighed through the trees, still rising, signaling a change
in the weather. Shadows danced unsteadily around me. Branches rubbed
together, a creaky sound off in the woods. I bent over the tombstone
and read:
GEORGE
STAUB
JANUARY 19,1977- OCTOBER 12, 1998
Well Begun, Too Soon Done.
I
stood there, leaning down with my hands planted just above my knees,
not aware of how fast my heart had been beating until it started
to slow down. A nasty little coincidence, that was all, and was
it any wonder that I'd misread what was beneath the name and dates?
Even without being tired and under stress, I might have read it
wrong--moonlight was a notorious misleader. Case closed.
Except I knew what I'd read: Fun
Is Fun and Done Is Done.
My ma was dead.
"Fuck that," I repeated, and turned away.
As I did, I realized the mist curling through the grass and around
my ankles had begun to brighten. I could hear the mutter of an approaching
motor. A car was coming.
I hurried back through the opening in the
rock wall, snagging my pack on the way by. The lights of the approaching
car were halfway up the hill. I stuck out my thumb just as they
struck me, momentarily blinding me. I knew the guy was going to
stop even before he started slowing down. It's funny how you can
just know sometimes, but anyone who's spent a lot of time hitchhiking
will tell you that it happens.
The car passed me, brake lights flaring,
and swerved onto the soft shoulder near the end of the rock wall
dividing the graveyard from Ridge Road. I ran to it with my backpack
banging against the side of my knee. The car was a Mustang, one
of the cool ones from the late sixties or early seventies. The motor
rumbled loudly, the fat sound of it coming through a muffler that
maybe wouldn't pass inspection the next time the sticker came due
. . . but that wasn't my problem.
I swung the door open and slid inside.
As I put my backpack between my feet, an odor struck me, something
almost familiar and a trifle unpleasant. "Thank you," I said. "Thanks
a lot."
The guy behind the wheel was wearing faded
jeans and a black tee shirt with the arms cut off. His skin was
tanned, the muscles heavy, and his right bicep was ringed with a
blue barbwire tattoo. He was wearing a green John Deere cap turned
around backwards. There was a button pinned near the round collar
of his tee shirt, but I couldn't read it from my angle. "Not a problem,"
he said. "You headed up the city?"
"Yes," I said. In this part of the world
"up the city" meant Lewiston, the only city of any size north of
Portland. As I closed the door, I saw one of those pine-tree air
fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. That was what I’d
smelled. It sure wasn’t my night as far as odors went; first
pee and now artificial pine. Still, it was a ride. I should have
been relieved. And as the guy accelerated back onto Ridge Road,
the big engine of his vintage Mustang growling, I tried to tell
myself I was relieved.
“What’s going on for you in the
city?” the driver asked. I put him at about my age, some townie
who maybe went to vocational-technical school in Auburn or maybe
worked in one of the few remaining textile mills in the area. He’d
probably fixed up this Mustang in his spare time, because that was
what townie kids did: drank beer, smoked a little rope, fixed up
their cars. Or their motorcycles.
“My brother’s getting married.
I’m going to be his best man.” I told this lie with absolutely
no premeditation. I didn’t want him to know about my mother,
although I didn’t know why. Something was wrong here. I didn’t
know what it was or why I should think such a thing in the first
place, but I knew. I was positive. “The rehearsal’s tomorrow.
Plus a stag party tomorrow night.”
“Yeah? That right?” He turned
to look at me, wideset eyes and handsome face, full lips smiling
slightly, the eyes unbelieving.
“Yeah,” I said.
I was afraid. Just like that I was afraid
again. Something was wrong, had maybe started being wrong when the
old geezer in the Dodge had invited me to wish on the infected moon
instead of on a star. Or maybe from the moment I’d picked up
the telephone and listened to Mrs. McCurdy saying she had some bad
news for me, but ’twasn’t s’bad as it could’ve
been.
“Well that’s good,” said
the young man in the turned- around cap. “A brother getting
married, man, that’s good. What’s your name?”
I wasn’t just afraid, I was terrified.
Everything was wrong, everything, and I didn’t know
why or how it could possibly have happened so fast. I did know one
thing, however: I wanted the driver of the Mustang to know my name
no more than I wanted him to know my business in Lewiston. Not that
I’d be getting to Lewiston. I was suddenly sure that I would
never see Lewiston again. It was like knowing the car was going
to stop. And there was the smell, I knew something about that, as
well. It wasn’t the air freshener; it was something beneath
the air freshener.
“Hector,” I said, giving him
my roommate’s name. “Hector Passmore, that’s me.”
It came out of my dry mouth smooth and calm, and that was good.
Something inside me insisted that I must not let the driver of the
Mustang know that I sensed something wrong. It was my only chance.
He turned toward me a little, and I could
read his button: I RODE THE BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE,
LACONIA. I knew the place; had been there, although not for
a long time.
I could also see a heavy black line which
circled his throat just as the barbwire tattoo circled his upper
arm, only the line around the driver's throat wasn't a tattoo. Dozens
of black marks crossed it vertically. They were the stitches put
in by whoever had put his head back on his body.
"Nice to meet you, Hector," he said. "I'm
George Staub."
My hand seemed to float out like a hand
in a dream. I wish that it had been a dream, but it wasn't; it had
all the sharp edges of reality. The smell on top was pine. The smell
underneath was some chemical, probably formaldehyde. I was riding
with a dead man.
The
Mustang rushed along Ridge Road at sixty miles an hour, chasing
its high beams under the light of a polished button moon. To either
side, the trees crowding the road danced and writhed in the wind.
George Staub smiled at me with his empty eyes, then let go of my
hand and returned his attention to the road. In high school I'd
read Dracula, and now a line from it recurred, clanging in
my head like a cracked bell: The dead drive fast.
Can't let him know I know. This
also clanged in my head. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. Can't
let him know, can't let him, can't. I wondered where the old
man was now. Safe at his brother's? Or had the old man been in on
it all along? Was he maybe right behind us, driving along in his
old Dodge, hunched over the wheel and snapping at his truss? Was
he dead, too? Probably not. The dead drive fast, according to Bram
Stoker, but the old man had never gone a tick over forty- five.
I felt demented laughter bubbling in the back of my throat and held
it down. If I laughed he'd know. And he mustn't know, because that
was my only hope.
"There's nothing like a wedding," he said.
"Yeah," I said, "everyone should do it
at least twice."
My hands had settled on each other and
were squeezing. I could feel the nails digging the backs of them
just above the knuckles, but the sensation was distant, news from
another country. I couldn't let him know, that was the thing. The
woods were all around us, the only light was the heartless bone-glow
of the moon, and I couldn't let him know that I knew he was dead.
Because he wasn't a ghost, nothing so harmless. You might see a
ghost, but what sort of thing stopped to give you a ride? What kind
of creature was that? Zombie? Ghoul? Vampire? None of the above?
George Staub laughed. "Do it twice! Yeah,
man, that's my whole family!"
"Mine, too," I said. My voice sounded calm,
just the voice of a hitchhiker passing the time of day--night, in
this case--making agreeable conversation as some small payment for
his ride. "There's really nothing like a funeral."
"Wedding," he said mildly. In the light
from the dashboard, his face was waxy, the face of a corpse before
the makeup went on. That turned-around cap was particularly horrible.
It made you wonder how much was left beneath it. I had read somewhere
that morticians sawed off the top of the skull and took out the
brains and put in some sort of chemically treated cotton. To keep
the face from falling in, maybe.
"Wedding," I said through numb lips, and
even laughed a little--a light little chuckle. "Wedding's what I
meant to say."
"We always say what we mean to say, that's
what I think," the driver said. He was still smiling.
Yes, Freud had believed that, too. I'd
read it in Psych 101. I doubted if this fellow knew much about Freud,
I didn't think many Freudian scholars wore sleeveless tee shirts
and baseball caps turned around backwards, but he knew enough. Funeral,
I'd said. Dear Christ, I'd said funeral. It came to me then that
he was playing me. I didn't want to let him know I knew he was dead.
He didn't want to let me know that he knew I knew he was
dead. And so I couldn't let him know that I knew that he knew that
. . .
The world began to swing in front of me.
In a moment it would begin to spin, then to whirl, and I'd lose
it. I closed my eyes for a moment. In the darkness, the afterimage
of the moon hung, turning green.
"You feeling all right, man?" he asked.
The concern in his voice was gruesome.
"Yes," I said, opening my eyes. Things
had steadied again. The pain in the backs of my hands where my nails
were digging into the skin was strong and real. And the smell. Not
just pine air freshener, not just chemicals. There was a smell of
earth, as well.
"You sure?" he asked.
"Just a little tired. Been hitchhiking
a long time. And sometimes I get a little carsick." Inspiration
suddenly struck. "You know what, I think you better let me out.
If I get a little fresh air, my stomach will settle. Someone else
will come along and--"
"I couldn't do that," he said. "Leave you
out here? No way. It could be an hour before someone came along,
and they might not pick you up when they did. I got to take care
of you. What's that song? Get me to the church on time, right? No
way I'm letting you out. Crack your window a little, that'll help.
I know it doesn't smell exactly great in here. I hung up that air
freshener, but those things don't work worth a shit. Of course,
some smells are harder to get rid of than others."
I wanted to reach out for the window crank
and turn it, let in the fresh air, but the muscles in my arm wouldn't
seem to tighten. All I could do was sit there with my hands locked
together, nails biting into the backs of them. One set of muscles
wouldn't work; another wouldn't stop working. What a joke.
"It's like that story," he said. "The one
about the kid who buys the almost new Cadillac for seven hundred
and fifty dollars. You know that story, don't you?"
"Yeah," I said through my numb lips. I
didn't know the story, but I knew perfectly well that I didn't want
to hear it, didn't want to hear any story this man might have to
tell. "That one's famous." Ahead of us the road leaped forward like
a road in an old black-and-white movie.
"Yeah it is, fucking famous. So the kid's
looking for a car and he sees an almost brand- new Cadillac on this
guy's lawn."
"I said I--"
"Yeah, and there's a sign that SAYS
FOR SALE BY OWNER in the window."
There was a cigarette parked behind his
ear. He reached for it, and when he did, his shirt pulled up in
the front. I could see another puckered black line there, more stitches.
Then he leaned forward to punch in the cigarette lighter and his
shirt dropped back into place.
"Kid knows he can't afford no Cadillac-car,
can't get within a shout of a Caddy, but he's curious, you
know? So he goes over to the guy and says, 'How much does something
like that go for? ' And the guy, he turns off the hose he's got--cause
he's washin the car, you know--and he says, 'Kid, this is your lucky
day. Seven hundred and fifty bucks and you drive it away. ' "
The cigarette lighter popped out. Staub
pulled it free and pressed the coil to the end of his cigarette.
He drew in smoke and I saw little tendrils come seeping out between
the stitches holding the incision on his neck closed.
"The kid, he looks in through the driver's
side window and sees there's only seventeen thou on the odometer.
He says to the guy, 'Yeah, sure, that's as funny as a screen door
in a submarine. ' The guy says, 'No joke, kid, pony up the cash
and it's yours. Hell, I'll even take a check, you got a honest face.
' And the kid says . . ."
I looked out the window. I had heard
the story before, years ago, probably while I was still in junior
high. In the version I'd been told the car was a Thunderbird instead
of a Caddy, but otherwise everything was the same. The kid says
I may only be seventeen but I'm not an idiot, no one sells a
car like this, especially one with low mileage, for only seven hundred
and fifty bucks. And the guy tells him he's doing it because
the car smells, you can't get the smell out, he's tried and tried
and nothing will take it out. You see he was on a business trip,
a fairly long one, gone for at least . . .
". . . a coupla weeks," the driver was
saying. He was smiling the way people do when they're telling a
joke that really slays them. "And when he comes back, he finds the
car in the garage and his wife in the car, she's been dead practically
the whole time he's been gone. I don't know if it was suicide or
a heart attack or what, but she's all bloated up and the car, it's
full of that smell and all he wants to do is sell it, you know."
He laughed. "That's quite a story, huh?"
"Why wouldn't he call home?" It was my
mouth, talking all by itself. My brain was frozen. "He's gone for
two weeks on a business trip and he never calls home once to see
how his wife's doing?"
"Well," the driver said, "that's sorta
beside the point, wouldn't you say? I mean hey, what a bargain--that's
the point. Who wouldn't be tempted? After all, you could always
drive the car with the fuckin windows open, right? And it's basically
just a story. Fiction. I thought of it because of the smell in this
car. Which is fact."
Silence. And I thought: He's waiting
for me to say something, waiting for me to end this. And I wanted
to. I did. Except . . . what then? What would he do then?
He rubbed the ball of his thumb over the
button on his shirt, the one reading I RODE THE
BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE, LACONIA. I saw there was dirt under
his fingernails. "That's where I was today," he said. "Thrill Village.
I did some work for a guy and he gave me an all-day pass. My girlfriend
was gonna go with me, but she called and said she was sick, she
gets these periods that really hurt sometimes, they make her sick
as a dog. It's too bad, but I always think, hey, what's the alternative?
No rag at all, right, and then I'm in trouble, we both are." He
yapped, a humorless bark of sound. "So I went by myself. No sense
wasting an all-day pass. You ever been to Thrill Village?"
"Yes," I said. "Once. When I was twelve."
"Who'd you go with?" he asked. "You didn't
go alone, did you? Not if you were only twelve."
I hadn't told him that part, had I? No.
He was playing with me, that was all, swatting me idly back and
forth. I thought about opening the door and just rolling out into
the night, trying to tuck my head into my arms before I hit, only
I knew he'd reach over and pull me back before I could get away.
And I couldn't raise my arms, anyway. The best I could do was clutch
my hands together.
"No," I said. "I went with my dad. My dad
took me."
"Did you ride the Bullet? I rode that fucker
four times. Man! It goes right upside down!" He looked at me and
uttered another empty bark of laughter. The moonlight swam in his
eyes, turning them into white circles, making them into the eyes
of a statue. And I understood he was more than dead; he was crazy.
"Did you ride that, Alan?"
I thought of telling him he had the wrong
name, my name was Hector, but what was the use? We were coming to
the end of it now.
"Yeah," I whispered. Not a single light
out there except for the moon. The trees rushed by, writhing like
spontaneous dancers at a tent-show revival. The road rushed under
us. I looked at the speedometer and saw he was up to eighty miles
an hour. We were riding the bullet right now, he and I; the dead
drive fast. "Yeah, the Bullet. I rode it."
"Nah," he said. He drew on his cigarette,
and once again I watched the little trickles of smoke escape from
the stitched incision on his neck. "You never. Especially not with
your father. You got into the line, all right, but you were with
your ma. The line was long, the line for the Bullet always is, and
she didn't want to stand out there in the hot sun. She was fat even
then, and the heat bothered her. But you pestered her all day, pestered
pestered pestered, and here's the joke of it, man--when you finally
got to the head of the line, you chickened. Didn't you?"
I said nothing. My tongue was stuck to
the roof of my mouth.
His hand stole out, the skin yellow
in the light of the Mustang's dashboard lights, the nails filthy,
and gripped my locked hands. The strength went out of them when
he did and they fell apart like a knot that magically unties itself
at the touch of the magician's wand. His skin was cold and somehow
snaky.
"Didn't you?"
"Yes," I said. I couldn't get my voice
much above a whisper. "When we got close and I saw how high it was
. . . how it turned over at the top and how they screamed inside
when it did . . . I chickened out. She swatted me, and she wouldn't
talk to me all the way home. I never rode the Bullet." Until now,
at least.
"You should have, man. That's the best
one. That's the one to ride. Nothin else is as good, at least not
there. I stopped on the way home and got some beers at that store
by the state line. I was gonna stop over my girlfriend's house,
give her the button as a joke." He tapped the button on his chest,
then unrolled his window and flicked his cigarette out into the
windy night. "Only you probably know what happened."
Of course I knew. It was every ghost story
you'd ever heard, wasn't it? He crashed his Mustang and when the
cops got there he'd been sitting dead in the crumpled remains with
his body behind the wheel and his head in the backseat, his cap
turned around backwards and his dead eyes staring up at the roof,
and ever since you see him on Ridge Road when the moon is full and
the wind is high, wheee-oooo, we will return after this brief
word from our sponsor. I know something now that I didn't before--the
worst stories are the ones you've heard your whole life. Those are
the real nightmares.
"Nothing like a funeral," he said, and
laughed. "Isn't that what you said? You slipped there, Al. No doubt
about it. Slipped, tripped, and fell."
"Let me out," I whispered. "Please."
"Well," he said, turning toward me, "we
have to talk about that, don't we? Do you know who I am, Alan?"
"You're a ghost," I said.
He gave an impatient little snort, and
in the glow of the speedometer the corners of his mouth turned down.
"Come on, man, you can do better than that. Fuckin Casper's
a ghost. Do I float in the air? Can you see through me?" He held
up one of his hands, opened and closed it in front of me. I could
hear the dry, unlubricated sound of his tendons creaking.
I tried to say something. I don't know
what, and it doesn't really matter, because nothing came out.
"I'm a kind of messenger," Staub said.
"Fuckin FedEx from beyond the grave, you like that? Guys like me
actually come out pretty often whenever the circumstances are just
right. You know what I think? I think that whoever runs things--God
or whatever--must like to be entertained. He always wants to see
if you'll keep what you already got or if he can talk you into goin
for what's behind the curtain. Things have to be just right, though.
Tonight they were. You out all by yourself . . . mother sick . .
. needin a ride . . ."
"If I'd stayed with the old man, none of
this would have happened," I said. "Would it?" I could smell Staub
clearly now, the needle-sharp smell of the chemicals and the duller,
blunter stink of decaying meat, and wondered how I ever could have
missed it, or mistaken it for something else.
"Hard to say," Staub replied. "Maybe this
old man you're talking about was dead, too."
I thought of old man's shrill handful-of-glass
voice, the snap of his truss. No, he hadn't been dead, and I had
traded the smell of piss in his old Dodge for some-thing a lot worse.
"Anyway, man, we don't have time to talk
about all that. Five more miles and we'll start seeing houses again.
Seven more and we're at the Lewiston city line. Which means you
have to decide now."
"Decide what?" Only I thought I knew.
"Who rides the Bullet and who stays on
the ground. You or your mother." He turned and looked at me with
his drowning moonlight eyes. He smiled more fully and I saw most
of his teeth were gone, knocked out in the crash. He patted the
steering wheel. "I'm taking one of you with me, man. And since you're
here, you get to choose. What do you say?"
You can't be serious rose to my
lips, but what would be the point of saying that, or anything like
it? Of course he was serious. Dead serious.
I thought of all the years she and I had
spent together, Alan and Jean Parker against the world. A lot of
good times and more than a few really bad ones. Patches on my pants
and casserole suppers. Most of the other kids took a quarter a week
to buy the hot lunch; I always got a peanut-butter sandwich or a
piece of bologna rolled up in day-old bread, like a kid in one of
those dopey rags-to-riches stories. Her working in God knew how
many different restaurants and cocktail lounges to support us. The
time she took the day off work to talk to the ADC man, her dressed
in her best pants suit, him sitting in our kitchen rocker in a suit
of his own, one even a nine-year-old kid like me could tell was
a lot better than hers, with a clipboard in his lap and a fat, shiny
pen in his fingers. Her answering the insulting, embarrassing questions
he asked with a fixed smile on her mouth, even offering him more
coffee, because if he turned in the right report she'd get an extra
fifty dollars a month, a lousy fifty bucks. Lying on her bed after
he'd gone, crying, and when I came in to sit beside her she had
tried to smile and said ADC didn't stand for Aid to Dependent Children
but Awful Damn Crapheads. I had laughed and then she laughed, too,
because you had to laugh, we'd found that out. When it was just
you and your fat chain-smoking ma against the world, laughing was
quite often the only way you could get through without going insane
and beating your fists on the walls. But there was more to it than
that, you know. For people like us, little people who went scurrying
through the world like mice in a cartoon, sometimes laughing at
the assholes was the only revenge you could ever get. Her working
all those jobs and taking the overtime and taping her ankles when
they swelled and putting her tips away in a jar marked ALAN'S
COLLEGE FUND--just like one of those dopey rags- to- riches
stories, yeah, yeah--and telling me again and again that I had to
work hard, other kids could maybe afford to play Freddy Fuckaround
at school but I couldn't because she could put away her tips until
doomsday cracked and there still wouldn't be enough; in the end
it was going to come down to scholarships and loans if I was going
to go to college and I had to go to college because it was
the only way out for me . . . and for her. So I had worked hard,
you want to believe I did, because I wasn't blind--I saw how heavy
she was, I saw how much she smoked (it was her only private pleasure
. . . her only vice, if you're one of those who must take that view),
and I knew that some day our positions would reverse and I'd be
the one taking care of her. With a college education and a good
job, maybe I could do that. I wanted to do that. I loved
her. She had a fierce temper and an ugly mouth on her--that day
we waited for the Bullet and then I chickened out wasn't the only
time she ever yelled at me and then swatted me--but I loved her
in spite of it. Partly even because of it. I loved her when
she hit me as much as when she kissed me. Do you understand that?
Me either. And that's all right. I don't think you can sum up lives
or explain families, and we were a family, she and I, the smallest
family there is, a tight little family of two, a shared secret.
If you had asked, I would have said I'd do anything for her. And
now that was exactly what I was being asked to do. I was being asked
to die for her, to die in her place, even though she had lived half
her life, probably a lot more. I had hardly begun mine.
"What say, Al?" George Staub asked. "Time's
wasting."
"I can't decide something like that," I
said hoarsely. The moon sailed above the road, swift and brilliant.
"It's not fair to ask me."
"I know, and believe me, that's what they
all say." Then he lowered his voice. "But I gotta tell you something--if
you don't decide by the time we get back to the first house lights,
I'll have to take you both." He frowned, then brightened again,
as if remembering there was good news as well as bad. "You could
ride together in the backseat if I took you both, talk over old
times, there's that."
"Ride to where?"
He didn't reply. Perhaps he didn't know.
The trees blurred by like black ink. The
headlights rushed and the road rolled. I was twenty-one. I wasn't
a virgin but I'd only been with a girl once and I'd been drunk and
couldn't remember much of what it had been like. There were a thousand
places I wanted to go--Los Angeles, Tahiti, maybe Luchenbach, Texas--and
a thousand things I wanted to do. My mother was forty- eight and
that was old, goddammit. Mrs. McCurdy wouldn't say so but
Mrs. McCurdy was old herself. My mother had done right by me, worked
all those long hours and taken care of me, but had I chosen her
life for her? Asked to be born and then demanded that she live for
me? She was forty-eight. I was twenty-one. I had, as they said,
my whole life before me. But was that the way you judged? How did
you decide a thing like this? How could you decide a thing
like this?
The woods bolting by. The moon looking
down like a bright and deadly eye.
"Better hurry up, man," George Staub said.
"We're running out of wilderness."
I opened my mouth and tried to speak. Nothing
came out but an arid sigh.
"Here, got just the thing," he said, and
reached behind him. His shirt pulled up again and I got another
look (I could have done without it) at the stitched black line on
his belly. Were there still guts behind that line or just packing
soaked in chemicals? When he brought his hand back, he had a can
of beer in it--one of those he'd bought at the state line store
on his last ride, presumably.
"I know how it is," he said. "Stress gets
you dry in the mouth. Here."
He handed me the can. I took it, pulled
the ringtab, and drank deeply. The taste of the beer going down
was cold and bitter. I've never had a beer since. I just can't drink
it. I can barely stand to watch the commercials on TV.
Ahead of us in the blowing dark, a yellow
light glimmered. "Hurry up, Al--got to speed it up. That's the first
house, right up at the top of this hill. If you got something to
say to me, you better say it now."
The light disappeared, then came back again,
only now it was several lights. They were windows. Behind them were
ordinary people doing ordinary things--watching TV, feeding the
cat, maybe beating off in the bathroom.
I thought of us standing in line at Thrill
Village, Jean and Alan Parker, a big woman with dark patches of
sweat around the armpits of her sundress and her little boy. She
hadn't wanted to stand in that line, Staub was right about that
. . . but I had pestered pestered pestered. He had been right about
that, too. She had swatted me, but she had stood in line with me,
too. She had stood with me in a lot of lines, and I could go over
all of it again, all the arguments pro and con, but there was no
time.
"Take her," I said as the lights of the
first house swept toward the Mustang. My voice was hoarse and raw
and loud. "Take her, take my ma, don't take me."
I threw the can of beer down on the floor
of the car and put my hands up to my face. He touched me then, touched
the front of my shirt, his fingers fumbling, and I thought--with
sudden brilliant clarity--that it had all been a test. I had failed
and now he was going to rip my beating heart right out of my chest,
like an evil djinn in one of those cruel Arabian fairy tales.
I screamed. Then his fingers let go--it was as if he'd changed his
mind at the last second--and he reached past me. For one moment
my nose and lungs were so full of his deathly smell that I felt
positive I was dead myself. Then there was the click of the door
opening and cold fresh air came streaming in, washing the death
smell away.
"Pleasant dreams, Al," he grunted in my
ear and then pushed. I went rolling out into the windy October darkness
with my eyes closed and my hands raised and my body tensed for the
bone-breaking smashdown. I might have been screaming, I don't remember
for sure.
The smashdown didn't come and after an
endless moment I realized I was already down--I could feel the ground
under me. I opened my eyes, then squeezed them shut almost at once.
The glare of the moon was blinding. It sent a bolt of pain through
my head, one that settled not behind my eyes, where you usually
feel pain after staring into an unexpectedly bright light, but in
the back, way down low just above the nape of my neck. I became
aware that my legs and bottom were cold and wet. I didn't care.
I was on the ground, and that was all I cared about.
I pushed up on my elbows and opened my
eyes again, more cautiously this time. I think I already knew where
I was, and one look around was enough to confirm it: lying on my
back in the little graveyard at the top of the hill on Ridge Road.
The moon was almost directly overhead now, fiercely bright but much
smaller than it had been only a few moments before. The mist was
deeper as well, lying over the cemetery like a blanket. A few markers
poked up through it like stone islands. I tried getting to my feet
and another bolt of pain went through the back of my head. I put
my hand there and felt a lump. There was sticky wetness, as well.
I looked at my hand. In the moonlight, the blood streaked across
my palm looked black.
On my second try I succeeded in getting
up, and stood there swaying among the tombstones, knee-deep in mist.
I turned around, saw the break in the rock wall and Ridge Road beyond
it. I couldn't see my pack because the mist had overlaid it, but
I knew it was there. If I walked out to the road in the lefthand
wheelrut of the lane, I'd find it. Hell, would likely stumble over
it.
So here was my story, all neatly packaged
and tied up with a bow: I had stopped for a rest at the top of this
hill, had gone inside the cemetery to have a little look around,
and while backing away from the grave of one George Staub had tripped
over my own large and stupid feet. Fell down, banged my head on
a marker. How long had I been unconscious? I wasn't savvy enough
to tell time by the changing position of the moon with to-the-minute
accuracy, but it had to have been at least an hour. Long enough
to have a dream that I'd gotten a ride with a dead man. What dead
man? George Staub, of course, the name I'd read on a grave-marker
just before the lights went out. It was the classic ending, wasn't
it? Gosh-What-an-Awful-Dream-I-Had. And when I got to Lewiston and
found my mother had died? Just a little touch of precognition in
the night, put it down to that. It was the sort of story you might
tell years later, near the end of a party, and people would nod
their heads thoughtfully and look solemn and some dinkleberry with
leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket would say there
were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in our
philosophy and then-- "Then shit," I croaked.
The top of the mist was moving slowly, like mist on a clouded mirror.
"I'm never talking about this. Never, not in my whole life, not
even on my deathbed."
But it had all happened just the way I
remembered it, of that I was sure. George Staub had come along and
picked me up in his Mustang, Ichabod Crane's old pal with his head
stitched on instead of under his arm, demanding that I choose. And
I had chosen--faced with the oncoming lights of the first
house, I had bartered away my mother's life with hardly a pause.
It might be understandable, but that didn't make the guilt of it
any less. No one had to know, however; that was the good part. Her
death would look natural--hell, would be natural--and that's
the way I intended to leave it.
I walked out of the graveyard in the lefthand
rut, and when my foot struck my pack, I picked it up and slung it
back over my shoulders. Lights appeared at the bottom of the hill
as if someone had given them the cue. I stuck out my thumb, oddly
sure it was the old man in the Dodge--he'd come back this way looking
for me, of course he had, it gave the story that final finishing
roundness.
Only it wasn't the old guy. It was a tobacco-chewing
farmer in a Ford pick-up truck filled with apple baskets, a perfectly
ordinary fellow: not old and not dead.
"Where you goin, son?" he asked, and when
I told him he said, "That works for both of us." Less than forty
minutes later, at twenty minutes after nine, he pulled up in front
of the Central Maine Medical Center. "Good luck. Hope your ma's
on the mend."
"Thank you," I said, and opened the door.
"I see you been pretty nervous about it,
but she'll most likely be fine. Ought to get some disinfectant on
those, though." He pointed at my hands.
I looked down at them and saw the deep,
purpling crescents on the backs. I remembered clutching them together,
digging in with my nails, feeling it but unable to stop. And I remembered
Staub's eyes, filled up with moonlight like radiant water. Did
you ride the Bullet? he'd asked me. I rode that fucker four
times.
"Son?" the man driving the pick-up asked.
"You all right?"
"Huh?"
"You come over all shivery."
"I'm okay," I said. "Thanks again." I slammed
the door of the pickup and went up the wide walk past the line of
parked wheelchairs gleaming in the moonlight.
I walked to the information desk, reminding
myself that I had to look surprised when they told me she was dead,
had to look surprised, they'd think it was funny if I didn't . .
. or maybe they'd just think I was in shock . . . or that we didn't
get along . . . or . . .
I was so deep in these thoughts that I
didn't at first grasp what the woman behind the desk had told me.
I had to ask her to repeat it.
"I said that she's in room 487, but
you can't go up just now. Visiting hours end at nine."
"But . . ." I felt suddenly woozy. I gripped
the edge of the desk. The lobby was lit by fluorescents, and in
that bright even glare the cuts on the backs of my hands stood out
boldly--eight small purple crescents like grins, just above the
knuckles. The man in the pick-up was right, I ought to get some
disinfectant on those.
The woman behind the desk was looking at
me patiently. The plaque in front of her said she was YVONNE
EDERLE.
"But is she all right?"
She looked at her computer. "What I have
here is S. Stands for satisfactory. And four is a general population
floor. If your mother had taken a turn for the worse, she'd be in
ICU. That's on three. I'm sure if you come back tomorrow, you'll
find her just fine. Visiting hours begin at--"
"She's my ma," I said. "I hitchhiked all
the way down from the University of Maine to see her. Don't you
think I could go up, just for a few minutes?"
"Exceptions are sometimes made for immediate
family," she said, and gave me a smile. "You just hang on a second.
Let me see what I can do." She picked up the phone and punched a
couple of buttons, no doubt calling the nurse's station on the fourth
floor, and I could see the course of the next two minutes as if
I really did have second sight. Yvonne the Information Lady
would ask if the son of Jean Parker in 487 could come up for a minute
or two-just long enough to give his mother a kiss and an encouraging
word--and the nurse would say oh God, Mrs. Parker died not fifteen
minutes ago, we just sent her down to the morgue, we haven't had
a chance to update the computer, this is so terrible.
The woman at the desk said, "Muriel? It's
Yvonne. I have a young man here down here at the desk, his name
is--" She looked at me, eyebrows raised, and I gave her my name.
"- Alan Parker. His mother is Jean Parker, in 487? He wonders if
he could just . . ."
She stopped. Listened. On the other end
the nurse on the fourth floor was no doubt telling her that Jean
Parker was dead.
"All right," Yvonne said. "Yes, I understand."
She sat quietly for a moment, looking off into space, then put the
mouthpiece of the telephone against her shoulder and said, "She's
sending Anne Corrigan down to peek in on her. It will only be a
second."
"It never ends," I said.
Yvonne frowned. "I beg pardon?"
"Nothing," I said. "It's been a long night
and--"
"- and you're worried about your mom. Of
course. I think you're a very good son to drop everything the way
you did and come on the run."
I suspected Yvonne Ederle's opinion of
me would have taken a drastic drop if she'd heard my conversation
with the young man behind the wheel of the Mustang, but of course
she hadn't. That was a little secret, just between George and me.
It seemed that hours passed as I stood
there under the bright fluorescents, waiting for the nurse on the
fourth floor to come back on the line. Yvonne had some papers in
front of her. She trailed her pen down one of them, putting neat
little check marks beside some of the names, and it occurred to
me that if there really was an Angel of Death, he or she was probably
just like this woman, a slightly overworked functionary with a desk,
a computer, and too much paperwork. Yvonne kept the phone pinched
between her ear and one raised shoulder. The loudspeaker said that
Dr. Farquahr was wanted in radiology, Dr. Farquahr. On the fourth
floor a nurse named Anne Corrigan would now be looking at my mother,
lying dead in her bed with her eyes open, the stroke- induced sneer
of her mouth finally relaxing.
Yvonne straightened as a voice came back
on the line. She listened, then said: "All right, yes, I understand.
I will. Of course I will. Thank you, Muriel." She hung up the telephone
and looked at me solemnly. "Muriel says you can come up, but you
can only visit for five minutes. Your mother's had her evening meds,
and she's very soupy."
I stood there, gaping at her.
Her smile faded a little bit. "Are
you sure you're all right, Mr. Parker?"
"Yes," I said. "I guess I just thought--"
Her smile came back. It was sympathetic
this time. "Lots of people think that," she said. "It's understandable.
You get a call out of the blue, you rush to get here . . . it's
understandable to think the worst. But Muriel wouldn't let you up
on her floor if your mother wasn't fine. Trust me on that."
"Thanks," I said. "Thank you so much."
As I started to turn away, she said: "Mr.
Parker? If you came from the University of Maine up north, may I
ask why you're wearing that button? Thrill Village is in New Hampshire,
isn't it?"
I looked down at the front of my shirt
and saw the button pinned to the breast pocket: I
RODE THE BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE, LACONIA. I remembered
thinking he intended to rip my heart out. Now I understood: he had
pinned his button on my shirt just before pushing me into the night.
It was his way of marking me, of making our encounter impossible
not to believe. The cuts on the backs of my hands said so, the button
on my shirt said so, too. He had asked me to choose and I had chosen.
So how could my mother still be alive?
"This?" I touched it with the ball of my
thumb, even polished it a little. "It's my good luck charm." The
lie was so horrible that it had a kind of splendor. "I got it when
I was there with my mother, a long time ago. She took me on the
Bullet."
Yvonne the Information Lady smiled as if
this were the sweetest thing she had ever heard. "Give her a nice
hug and kiss," she said. "Seeing you will send her off to sleep
better than any of the pills the doctors have." She pointed. "The
elevators are over there, around the corner."
With visiting hours over, I was the only
one waiting for a car. There was a litter basket off to the left,
by the door to the newsstand, which was closed and dark. I tore
the button off my shirt and threw it in the basket. Then I rubbed
my hand on my pants. I was still rubbing it when one of the elevator
doors opened. I got in and pushed for four. The car began to rise.
Above the floor buttons was a poster announcing a blood drive for
the following week. As I read it, an idea came to me . . . except
it wasn't so much an idea as a certainty. My mother was dying now,
at this very second, while I rode up to her floor in this slow industrial
elevator. I had made the choice; it therefore fell to me to find
her. It made perfect sense.
The
elevator door opened on another poster. This one showed a cartoon
finger pressed to big red cartoon lips. Beneath it was a line reading
OUR PATIENTS APPRECIATE YOUR QUIET! Beyond
the elevator lobby was a corridor going right and left. The odd-numbered
rooms were to the left. I walked down that way, my sneakers seeming
to gain weight with every step. I slowed in the four-seventies,
then stopped entirely between 481 and 483. I couldn't do this. Sweat
as cold and sticky as half-frozen syrup crept out of my hair in
little trickles. My stomach was knotted up like a fist inside a
slick glove. No, I couldn't do it. Best to turn around and skedaddle
like the cowardly chickenshit I was. I'd hitchhike out to Harlow
and call Mrs. McCurdy in the morning. Things would be easier to
face in the morning.
I started to turn, and then a nurse poked
her head out of the room two doors up . . . my mother's room. "Mr.
Parker?" she asked in a low voice.
For a wild moment I almost denied it. Then
I nodded.
"Come in. Hurry. She's going."
They were the words I'd expected, but they
still sent a cramp of terror through me and buckled my knees.
The nurse saw this and came hurrying toward
me, her skirt rustling, her face alarmed. The little gold pin on
her breast read ANNE CORRIGAN. "No, no, I
just meant the sedative . . . She's going to sleep. Oh my
God, I'm so stupid. She's fine, Mr. Parker, I gave her her Ambien
and she's going, to sleep, that's all I meant. You aren't going
to faint, are you?" She took my arm.
"No," I said, not knowing if I was going
to faint or not. The world was swooping and there was a buzzing
in my ears. I thought of how the road had leaped toward the car,
a black-and-white movie road in all that silver moonlight. Did
you ride the Bullet? Man, I rode that fucker four times.
Anne Corrigan lead me into the room
and I saw my mother. She had always been a big woman, and the hospital
bed was small and narrow, but she still looked almost lost in it.
Her hair, now more gray than black, was spilled across the pillow.
Her hands lay on top of the sheet like a child's hands, or even
a doll's. There was no frozen stroke-sneer such as the one I'd imagined
on her face, but her complexion was yellow. Her eyes were closed,
but when the nurse beside me murmured her name, they opened. They
were a deep and iridescent blue, the youngest part of her, and perfectly
alive. For a moment they looked nowhere, and then they found me.
She smiled and tried to hold out her arms. One of them came up.
The other trembled, rose a little bit, then fell back. "Al," she
whispered.
I went to her, starting to cry. There
was a chair by the wall, but I didn't bother with it. I knelt on
the floor and put my arms around her. She smelled warm and clean.
I kissed her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth. She raised
her good hand and patted her fingers under one of my eyes.
"Don't cry," she whispered. "No need of
that."
"I came as soon as I heard," I said. "Betsy
McCurdy called."
"Told her . . . weekend," she said. "Said
the weekend would be fine."
"Yeah, and to hell with that," I said,
and hugged her.
"Car fixed?"
"No," I said. "I hitchhiked."
"Oh gorry," she said. Each word was clearly
an effort for her, but they weren't slurred, and I sensed no bewilderment
or disorientation. She knew who she was, who I was, where we were,
why we were here. The only sign of anything wrong was her weak left
arm. I felt an enormous sense of relief. It had all been a cruel
practical joke on Staub's part . . . or perhaps there had been no
Staub, perhaps it had all been a dream after all, corny as that
might be. Now that I was here, kneeling by her bed with my arms
around her, smelling a faint remnant of her Lanvin perfume, the
dream idea seemed a lot more plausible.
"Al? There's blood on your collar." Her
eyes rolled closed, then came slowly open again. I imagined her
lids must feel as heavy to her as my sneakers had to me, out in
the hall.
"I bumped my head, ma, it's nothing."
"Good. Have to . . . take care of yourself."
The lids came down again; rose even more slowly.
"Mr. Parker, I think we'd better let her
sleep now," the nurse said from behind me. "She's had an extremely
difficult day."
"I know." I kissed her on the corner of
the mouth again. "I'm going, ma, but I'll be back tomorrow."
"Don't . . . hitchhike . . . dangerous."
"I won't. I'll catch a ride in with Mrs.
McCurdy. You get some sleep."
"Sleep . . . all I do," she said. "I was
at work, unloading the dishwasher. I came over all headachey. Fell
down. Woke up . . . here." She looked up at me. "Was a stroke. Doctor
says . . . not too bad."
"You're fine," I said. I got up, then took
her hand. The skin was fine, as smooth as watered silk. An old person's
hand.
"I dreamed we were at that amusement park
in New Hampshire," she said.
I looked down at her, feeling my skin go
cold all over. "Did you?"
"Ayuh. Waiting in line for the one that
goes . . . way up high. Do you remember that one?"
"The Bullet," I said. "I remember it, ma."
"You were afraid and I shouted. Shouted
at you."
"No, ma, you--"
Her hand squeezed down on mine and the
corners of her mouth deepened into near dimples. It was a ghost
of her old impatient expression.
"Yes," she said. "Shouted and swatted you.
Back . . . of the neck, wasn't it?"
"Probably, yeah," I said, giving up. "That's
mostly where you gave it to me."
"Shouldn't have," she said. "It was hot
and I was tired, but still . . . shouldn't have. Wanted to tell
you I was sorry."
My eyes started leaking again. "It's all
right, ma. That was a long time ago."
"You never got your ride," she whispered.
"I did, though," I said. "In the end I
did."
She smiled up at me. She looked small and
weak, miles from the angry, sweaty, muscular woman who had yelled
at me when we finally got to the head of the line, yelled and then
whacked me across the nape of the neck. She must have seen something
on someone's face--one of the other people waiting to ride the Bullet--because
I remember her saying What are you looking at, beautiful?
as she lead me away by the hand, me snivelling under the hot summer
sun, rubbing the back of my neck . . . only it didn't really hurt,
she hadn't swatted me that hard; mostly what I remember was
being grateful to get away from that high, twirling construction
with the capsules at either end, that revolving scream machine.
"Mr. Parker, it really is time to go,"
the nurse said.
I raised my mother's hand and kissed the
knuckles. "I'll see you tomorrow," I said. "I love you, ma."
"Love you, too. Alan . . . sorry for all
the times I swatted you. That was no way to be.
"But it had been; it had been her
way to be. I didn't know how to tell her I knew that, accepted it.
It was part of our family secret, something whispered along the
nerve endings.
"I'll see you tomorrow, ma. Okay?"
She didn't answer. Her eyes had rolled
shut again, and this time the lids didn't come back up. Her chest
rose and fell slowly and regularly. I backed away from the bed,
never taking my eyes off her.
In the hall I said to the nurse, "Is she
going to be all right? Really all right?"
"No one can say that for sure, Mr. Parker.
She's Dr. Nunnally's patient. He's very good. He'll be on the floor
tomorrow afternoon and you can ask him--"
"Tell me what you think."
"I think she's going to be fine," the nurse
said, leading me back down the hall toward the elevator lobby. "Her
vital signs are strong, and all the residual effects suggest a very
light stroke." She frowned a little. "She's going to have to make
some changes, of course. In her diet . . . her lifestyle . . ."
"Her smoking, you mean."
"Oh yes. That has to go." She said it as
if my mother quitting her lifetime habit would be no more difficult
than moving a vase from a table in the living room to one in the
hall. I pushed the button for the elevators, and the door of the
car I'd ridden up in opened at once. Things clearly slowed down
a lot at CMMC once visiting hours were over.
"Thanks for everything," I said.
"Not at all. I'm sorry I scared you. What
I said was incredibly stupid."
"Not at all," I said, although I agreed
with her. "Don't mention it."
I got into the elevator and pushed for
the lobby. The nurse raised her hand and twiddled her fingers. I
twiddled my own in return, and then the door slid between us. The
car started down. I looked at the fingernail marks on the backs
of my hands and thought that I was an awful creature, the lowest
of the low. Even if it had only been a dream, I was the lowest of
the goddam low. Take her, I'd said. She was my mother but
I had said it just the same: Take my ma, don't take me. She
had raised me, worked overtime for me, waited in line with me under
the hot summer sun in a dusty little New Hampshire amusement park,
and in the end I had hardly hesitated. Take her, don't take me.
Chickenshit, chickenshit, you fucking chickenshit.
When the elevator door opened I stepped
out, took the lid off the litter basket, and there it was, lying
in someone's almost-empty paper coffee cup: I RODE
THE BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE, LACONIA. I bent, plucked the
button out of the cold puddle of coffee it was lying in, wiped it
on my jeans, put it in my pocket. Throwing it away had been the
wrong idea. It was my button now--good luck charm or bad luck charm,
it was mine. I left the hospital, giving Yvonne a little wave on
my way by. Outside, the moon rode the roof of the sky, flooding
the world with its strange and perfectly dreamy light. I had never
felt so tired or so dispirited in my whole life. I wished I had
the choice to make again. I would have made a different one. Which
was funny--if I'd found her dead, as I'd expected to, I think I
could have lived with it. After all, wasn't that the way stories
like this one were supposed to end?
Nobody wants to give a fella a ride
in town, the old man with the truss had said, and how true that
was. I walked all the way across Lewiston--three dozen blocks of
Lisbon Street and nine blocks of Canal Street, past all the bottle
clubs with the jukeboxes playing old songs by Foreigner and Led
Zeppelin and AC/ DC in French--without putting my thumb out a single
time. It would have done no good. It was well past eleven before
I reached the DeMuth Bridge. Once I was on the Harlow side, the
first car I raised my thumb to stopped. Forty minutes later I was
fishing the key out from under the red wheelbarrow by the door to
the back shed, and ten minutes after that I was in bed. It occurred
to me as I dropped off that it was the first time in my life I'd
slept in that house all by myself.
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