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
