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.
