The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “You didn’t go,” I said.

  “Not then.”

  He laughed, and this laugh was gentler.

  “She must have seen something in my face, because it was like she found herself again. She stopped looking like a sorority girl and just looked like ’Phelia Todd again. She looked down at the notebook like she didn’t know what it was she had been holding and put it down by her side, almost behind her skirt.

  “I says, ‘I’d like to do just that thing, missus, but I got to finish up here, and my wife has got a roast on for dinner.’

  “She says, ‘I understand, Homer—I just got a little carried away. I do that a lot. All the time, Worth says.’ Then she kinda straightened up and says, ‘But the offer holds, any time you want to go. You can even throw your shoulder to the back end if we get stuck somewhere. Might save me five dollars.’ And she laughed.

  “ ‘I’ll take you up on it, missus,’ I says, and she seen that I meant what I said and wasn’t just being polite.

  “ ‘And before you just go believing that a hundred and sixteen miles to Bangor is out of the question, get out your own map and see how many miles it would be as the crow flies.’

  “I finished the tiles and went home and ate leftovers—there wa’n’t no roast, and I think ’Phelia Todd knew it—and after Megan was in bed, I got out my yardstick and a pen and my Mobil map of the state, and I did what she had told me…because it had laid hold of my mind a bit, you see. I drew a straight line and did out the calculations accordin to the scale of miles. I was some surprised. Because if you went from Castle Rock up there to Bangor like one of those little Piper Cubs could fly on a clear day—if you didn’t have to mind lakes, or stretches of lumber company woods that was chained off, or bogs, or crossing rivers where there wasn’t no bridges, why, it would just be seventy-nine miles, give or take.”

  I jumped a little.

  “Measure it yourself, if you don’t believe me,” Homer said. “I never knew Maine was so small until I seen that.”

  He had himself a drink and then looked around at me.

  “There come a time the next spring when Megan was away in New Hampshire visiting with her brother, I had to go down to the Todds’ house to take off the storm doors and put on the screens, and her little Mercedes go-devil was there. She was down by herself.

  “She come to the door and says: ‘Homer! Have you come to put on the screen doors?’

  “And right off I says: ‘No, missus, I come to see if you want to give me a ride down to Bangor the short way.’

  “Well, she looked at me with no expression on her face at all, and I thought she had forgotten all about it. I felt my face gettin red, the way it will when you feel you just pulled one hell of a boner. Then, just when I was getting ready to ’pologize, her face busts into that grin again and she says, ‘You just stand right there while I get my keys. And don’t change your mind, Homer!’

  “She come back a minute later with em in her hand. ‘If we get stuck, you’ll see mosquitoes just about the size of dragonflies.’

  “ ‘I’ve seen em as big as English sparrows up in Rangely, missus,’ I said, ‘and I guess we’re both a spot too heavy to be carried off.’

  “She laughs. ‘Well, I warned you, anyway. Come on, Homer.’

  “ ‘And if we ain’t there in two hours and forty-five minutes,’ I says, kinda sly, ‘you was gonna buy me a bottle of Irish Mist?’

  “She looks at me kinda surprised, the driver’s door of the go-devil open and one foot inside. ‘Hell, Homer,’ she says, ‘I told you that was the Blue Ribbon for then, I’ve found a way up there that’s shorter. We’ll be there in two and a half hours. Get in here, Homer. We are going to roll.’ ”

  He paused again, hands lying calm on his thighs, his eyes dulling, perhaps seeing that champagne-colored two-seater heading up the Todds’ steep driveway.

  “She stood the car still at the end of it and says, ‘You sure?’

  “ ‘Let her rip,’ I says. The ball bearing in her ankle rolled and that heavy foot come down. I can’t tell you nothing much about whatall happened after that. Except after a while I couldn’t hardly take my eyes off her. There was somethin wild that crep into her face, Dave—something wild and something free, and it frightened my heart. She was beautiful, and I was took with love for her, anyone would have been, any man, anyway, and maybe any woman too, but I was scairt of her too, because she looked like she could kill you if her eye left the road and fell on you and she decided to love you back. She was wearin blue jeans and a old white shirt with the sleeves rolled up—I had a idea she was maybe fixin to paint somethin on the back deck when I came by—but after we had been goin for a while seemed like she was dressed in nothin but all this white billowy stuff like a pitcher in one of those old gods-and-goddesses books.”

  He thought, looking out across the lake, his face very somber.

  “Like the huntress that was supposed to drive the moon across the sky.”

  “Diana?”

  “Ayuh. Moon was her go-devil. ’Phelia looked like that to me and I just tell you fair out that I was stricken in love for her and never would have made a move, even though I was some younger then than I am now. I would not have made a move even had I been twenty, although I suppose I might of at sixteen, and been killed for it—killed if she looked at me was the way it felt.

  “She was like that woman drivin the moon across the sky, halfway up over the splashboard with her gossamer stoles all flyin out behind her in silver cobwebs and her hair streamin back to show the dark little hollows of her temples, lashin those horses and tellin me to get along faster and never mind how they blowed, just faster, faster, faster.

  “We went down a lot of woods roads—the first two or three I knew, and after that I didn’t know none of them. We must have been a sight to those trees that had never seen nothing with a motor in it before but big old pulp-trucks and snowmobiles; that little go-devil that would most likely have looked more at home on the Sunset Boulevard than shooting through those woods, spitting and bulling its way up one hill and then slamming down the next through those dusty green bars of afternoon sunlight—she had the top down and I could smell everything in those woods, and you know what an old fine smell that is, like something which has been mostly left alone and is not much troubled. We went on across corduroy which had been laid over some of the boggiest parts, and black mud squelched up between some of those cut logs and she laughed like a kid. Some of the logs was old and rotted, because there hadn’t been nobody down a couple of those roads—except for her, that is—in I’m going to say five or ten years. We was alone, except for the birds and whatever animals seen us. The sound of that go-devil’s engine, first buzzin along and then windin up high and fierce when she punched in the clutch and shifted down…that was the only motor-sound I could hear. And although I knew we had to be close to someplace all the time—I mean, these days you always are—I started to feel like we had gone back in time, and there wasn’t nothing. That if we stopped and I climbed a high tree, I wouldn’t see nothing in any direction but woods and woods and more woods. And all the time she’s just hammering that thing along, her hair all out behind her, smilin, her eyes flashin. So we come out on the Speckled Bird Mountain Road and for a while I known where we were again, and then she turned off and for just a little bit I thought I knew, and then I didn’t even bother to kid myself no more. We went cut-slam down another woods road, and then we come out—I swear it—on a nice paved road with a sign that said MOTORWAY B. You ever heard of a road in the state of Maine that was called Motorway B?”

  “No,” I says. “Sounds English.”

  “Ayuh. Looked English. These trees like willows overhung the road. ‘Now watch out here, Homer,’ she says, ‘one of those nearly grabbed me a month ago and gave me an Indian burn.’

  “I didn’t know what she was talkin about and started to sa
y so, and then I seen that even though there was no wind, the branches of those trees was dippin down—they was waverin down. They looked black and wet inside the fuzz of green on them. I couldn’t believe what I was seein. Then one of ’em snatched off my cap and I knew I wasn’t asleep. ‘Hi!’ I shouts. ‘Give that back!’

  “ ‘Too late now, Homer,’ she says, and laughs. ‘There’s daylight, just up ahead…we’re okay.’

  “Then another one of ’em comes down, on her side this time, and snatches at her—I swear it did. She ducked, and it caught in her hair and pulled a lock of it out. ‘Ouch, dammit that hurts!’ she yells, but she was laughin, too. The car swerved a little when she ducked and I got a look into the woods and holy God, Dave! Everythin in there was movin. There was grasses wavin and plants that was all knotted together so it seemed like they made faces, and I seen somethin satin in a squat on top of a stump, and it looked like a tree-toad, only it was as big as a full-growed cat.

  “Then we come out of the shade to the top of a hill and she says, ‘There! That was exciting, wasn’t it?’ as if she was talkin about no more than a walk through the Haunted House at the Fryeburg Fair.

  “About five minutes later we swung onto another of her woods roads. I didn’t want no more woods right then—I can tell you that for sure—but these were just plain old woods. Half an hour after that, we was pulling into the parking lot of the Pilot’s Grille in Bangor. She points to that little odometer for trips and says, ‘Take a gander, Homer.’ I did, and it said 111.6. ‘What do you think now? Do you believe in my shortcut?’

  “That wild look had mostly faded out of her, and she was just ’Phelia Todd again. But that other look wasn’t entirely gone. It was like she was two women, ’Phelia and Diana, and the part of her that was Diana was so much in control when she was driving the back roads that the part that was ’Phelia didn’t have no idea that her shortcut was taking her through places, places that ain’t on any map of Maine, not even on those survey-squares.

  “She says again, ‘What do you think of my shortcut, Homer?’

  “And I says the first thing to come into my mind, which ain’t something you’d usually say to a lady like ’Phelia Todd. ‘It’s a real piss-cutter, missus,’ I says.

  “She laughs, just as pleased as punch, and I seen it then, just as clear as glass: She didn’t remember none of the funny stuff. Not the willow-branches—except they weren’t willows, not at all, not really anything like em, or anything else—that grabbed off m’hat, not that MOTORWAY B sign, or that awful-lookin toad-thing. She didn’t remember none of that funny stuff! Either I had dreamed it was there or she had dreamed it wasn’t. All I knew for sure, Dave, was that we had rolled only a hundred and eleven miles and gotten to Bangor, and that wasn’t no daydream; it was right there on the little go-devil’s odometer, in black and white.

  “ ‘Well, it is,’ she says. It is a piss-cutter. I only wish I could get Worth to give it a go sometime…but he’ll never get out of his rut unless someone blasts him out of it, and it would probably take a Titan II missile to do that, because I believe he has built himself a fallout shelter at the bottom of that rut. Come on in, Homer, and let’s dump some dinner into you.’

  “And she bought me one hell of a dinner, Dave, but I couldn’t eat very much of it I kep thinkin about what the ride back might be like, now that it was drawing down dark. Then, about halfway through the meal, she excused herself and made a telephone call. When she came back she ast me if I would mind drivin the go-devil back to Castle Rock for her. She said she had talked to some woman who was on the same school committee as her, and the woman said they had some kind of problem about somethin or other. She said she’d grab herself a Hertz car if Worth couldn’t see her back down. ‘Do you mind awfully driving back in the dark?’ she ast me.

  “She looked at me, kinda smilin, and I knew she remembered some of it all right—Christ knows how much, but she remembered enough to know I wouldn’t want to try her way after dark, if ever at all…although I seen by the light in her eyes that it wouldn’t have bothered her a bit.

  “So I said it wouldn’t bother me, and I finished my meal better than when I started it. It was drawin down dark by the time we was done, and she run us over to the house of the woman she’d called. And when she gets out she looks at me with that same light in her eyes and says, ‘Now, you’re sure you don’t want to wait, Homer? I saw a couple of side roads just today, and although I can’t find them on my maps, I think they might chop a few miles.’

  “I says, ‘Well, missus, I would, but at my age the best bed to sleep in is my own, I’ve found. I’ll take your car back and never put a ding in her…although I guess I’ll probably put on some more miles than you did.’

  “Then she laughed, kind of soft, and she give me a kiss. That was the best kiss I ever had in my whole life, Dave. It was just on the cheek, and it was the chaste kiss of a married woman, but it was as ripe as a peach, or like those flowers that open in the dark, and when her lips touched my skin I felt like…I don’t know exactly what I felt like, because a man can’t easily hold on to those things that happened to him with a girl who was ripe when the world was young or how those things felt—I’m talking around what I mean, but I think you understand. Those things all get a red cast to them in your memory and you cannot see through it at all.

  “ ‘You’re a sweet man, Homer, and I love you for listening to me and riding with me,’ she says. ‘Drive safe.’

  “Then in she went, to that woman’s house. Me, I drove home.”

  “How did you go?” I asked.

  He laughed softly. “By the turnpike, you damned fool,” he said, and I never seen so many wrinkles in his face before as I did then. He sat there, looking into the sky.

  “Came the summer she disappeared. I didn’t see much of her…that was the summer we had the fire, you’ll remember, and then the big storm that knocked down all the trees. A busy time for caretakers. Oh, I thought about her from time to time, and about that day, and about that kiss, and it started to seem like a dream to me. Like one time, when I was about sixteen and couldn’t think about nothing but girls. I was out plowing George Bascomb’s west field, the one that looks acrost the lake at the mountains, dreamin about what teenage boys dream of. And I pulled up this rock with the harrow blades, and it split open, and it bled. At least, it looked to me like it bled. Red stuff come runnin out of the cleft in the rock and soaked into the soil. And I never told no one but my mother, and I never told her what it meant to me, or what happened to me, although she washed my drawers and maybe she knew. Anyway, she suggested I ought to pray on it. Which I did, but I never got no enlightenment, and after a while something started to suggest to my mind that it had been a dream. It’s that way, sometimes. There is holes in the middle, Dave. Do you know that?”

  “Yes,” I says, thinking of one night when I’d seen something. That was in ’59, a bad year for us, but my kids didn’t know it was a bad year; all they knew was that they wanted to eat just like always. I’d seen a bunch of whitetail in Henry Brugger’s back field, and I was out there after dark with a jacklight in August. You can shoot two when they’re summer-fat; the second’ll come back and sniff at the first as if to say What the hell? Is it fall already? and you can pop him like a bowlin pin. You can hack off enough meat to feed yowwens for six weeks and bury what’s left. Those are two whitetails the hunters who come in November don’t get a shot at, but kids have to eat. Like the man from Massachusetts said, he’d like to be able to afford to live here the year around, and all I can say is sometimes you pay for the privilege after dark. So there I was, and I seen this big orange light in the sky; it come down and down, and I stood and watched it with my mouth hung on down to my breastbone and when it hit the lake the whole of it was lit up for a minute a purple-orange that seemed to go right up to the sky in rays. Wasn’t nobody ever said nothing to me about that light, and I never said nothing to no
body myself, partly because I was afraid they’d laugh, but also because they’d wonder what the hell I’d been doing out there after dark to start with. And after a while it was like Homer said—it seemed like a dream I had once had, and it didn’t signify to me because I couldn’t make nothing of it which would turn under my hand. It was like a moonbeam. It didn’t have no handle and it didn’t have no blade. I couldn’t make it work so I left it alone, like a man does when he knows the day is going to come up nevertheless.

  “There are holes in the middle of things,” Homer said, and he sat up straighter, like he was mad. “Right in the damn middle of things, not even to the left or right where your p’riph’ral vision is and you could say ‘Well, but hell—’ They are there and you go around them like you’d go around a pothole in the road that would break an axle. You know? And you forget it. Or like if you are plowin, you can plow a dip. But if there’s somethin like a break in the earth, where you see darkness, like a cave might be there, you say ‘Go around, old hoss. Leave that alone! I got a good shot over here to the left’ards.’ Because it wasn’t a cave you was lookin for, or some kind of college excitement, but good plowin.

  “Holes in the middle of things.”

  He fell still a long time then and I let him be still. Didn’t have no urge to move him. And at last he says:

  “She disappeared in August. I seen her for the first time in early July, and she looked…” Homer turned to me and spoke each word with careful, spaced emphasis. “Dave Owens, she looked gorgeous! Gorgeous and wild and almost untamed. The little wrinkles I’d started to notice around her eyes all seemed to be gone. Worth Todd, he was at some conference or something in Boston. And she stands there at the edge of the deck—I was out in the middle with my shirt off—and she says, ‘Homer, you’ll never believe it.’

  “ ‘No, missus, but I’ll try,’ I says.

  “ ‘I found two new roads,’ she says, ‘and I got up to Bangor this last time in just sixty-seven miles.’