by Janice Law
“Mom feel better?” he asked, giving her a sly look, as if they were conspirators, as if she had become complicitous in a way, which Dana supposed she had.
“Yes, thank you.” Very formal, very careful.
He smiled again and opened his mouth to ask this or that, when Dana heard the sound of a truck bouncing into the lot. “Ah, there’s Triple A. Thanks so much for the phone.” She opened her door to deliverance and waved for the mechanic, who pulled up in a red wrecker with another man riding beside him in the cab.
The garage mechanic was slim with punkish blond hair and good looking despite his oily coveralls and grease blackened hands. His much older companion had a racy shock of swept back gray hair, black rimmed glasses over friendly dark eyes, and the last traces of a drawl. The two of them heard whole story, opened the hood, repeated the stranger’s investigations, and agreed the battery was fine.
Rather than taking Dana’s hint to depart, George hung around, answering questions before Dana could respond and amplifying her remarks. He’s trying to make them think he’s a friend of mine, she thought.
“No trouble before?” The mechanic asked.
“No. The car’s old but ultra-reliable.”
“Yeah?” He and his companion exchanged glances. “There has been some trouble lately in these parking lots.”
“Cars tampered with,” his friend agreed. “Not just petty vandalism.”
“Really?” Dana tried to remember if she’d seen the SUV when she arrived at the lot. Of course, George could have arrived at any time, seen the rack, figured she’d be gone for a while. But however disagreable, none of that mattered now. She’d be out of the lot in minutes and on her way home.
“We’ll have to take it in.”
Dana nodded and produced her card. “Have you room in the truck for me? I’ll have to call someone to come down from Worcester and pick me up.”
The mechanic shook his head regretfully. “The garage is closed. We’ll just leave the car until Monday. I was on my way home, giving Joe a lift, when I got the call. Perhaps your friend here . . .
“Sure, Dana, I could run you up,” George offered.
“No, I couldn’t think of that. It’s more than an hour. We just met in the lot,” she told the mechanic, who did not seem to take in either this information or her implication.
“Drop you in Putnam, how’s that? I’m on my way there, anyway.” George was all eagerness, all enthusiasm. “Save these good folks some trouble. I’ll drop you in Putnam and you can call for your ride from there.”
“Would that be all right?” the mechanic asked, and Dana did not feel able to say, I don’t want to ride with this stranger.
“Great,” said the gray haired man. Joe, that was is name. “Ellie’ll sure be happy to see me home early for once.” He and the young mechanic laughed about this.
George smiled and opened the passenger door of his van. “I’ll have you home in no time,” he said.
Dana got into the van. Dark blue fabric seats, a vaguely unpleasant, musty odor, a coffee container. A woman’s sweater lay on the back seat. Dana fastened her seat belt, and George started the engine. He waited until the mechanic had cleared the parking lot, then he backed out and turned, not toward the highway, but up the forest road.
“I like the back roads,” he said.
“I do too, normally, but I need to get home.”
“Won’t take long. I know all the shortcuts. You can go a long way on these back roads. Goodwin Forest to the Natchaug and up though the Bigelow Ponds to the Massachusetts border.”
“Is that where those hikers got lost?”
“That’s right. City people are inclined to get lost. Like you, maybe. Maybe you’re a city person and would get lost, but not me.”
Dana chose not to answer. The heavily tinted windows darkened and flattened the early fall landscape making the familiar look exotic, surreal. Maybe that was why Dana felt uncertain about her emotions: she was nervous and yet alert, almost excited. She was doing something her instincts warned her against, something out of her usual pattern, something that suggested change and escape and an alternative to Monday mornings.
George drove from one narrow secondary road to another until the the asphalt ran out altogether. They were on a bumpy dirt track, when he abruptly pulled over and stopped. Ambiguity vanished, and with a jump of her heart, Dana thought, I’ve made a serious mistake.
“I’ve got some cigarettes in the back,” George said. “Want a cigarette?”
Dana shook her head. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to the truck keys. When he goes to the back of the van, she thought, I could slide over, I could put the truck into gear.
George smiled as he shut off the engine and dropped the keys into his pocket. Dana heard him open the back of the van. I could open the door and run into the woods, Dana thought. She turned around to see where he was and met his eyes.
“I know this place to buy cheap cigarettes on route 6,” he said. He was opening the rear passenger door when Dana heard a car. She saw the state insignia, the close cropped head of the trooper.
“You folks having trouble?’
“Nope, just getting out some cigarettes,” George said.
“I had trouble,” Dana said. “I had to hitch a ride when my car wouldn’t start. There really should be a public phone in the Goodwin parking lot.”
“Fortunately I had my cell phone in the van,” George said. “Best thing in when you have a breakdown.”
“We’re being extra careful here around dusk,” the trooper said, as if he hadn’t heard her, as if he hadn’t picked up on her complaint, her alarm.
I’m invisible, Dana thought, I’m invisible and no one else sees my situation.
“We’re on our way out, but we thought we’d take the scenic route,” George said. “Woods sure are pretty this time of year.” He got in the van and started the motor. The trooper lingered until they pulled away.
“Your tax dollars at work,” George remarked as the cruiser’s tail lights slid into the distance.
“Yes,” said Dana, but she was thinking to herself, I was lucky.
George took a right turn onto a tarred road that wound further into the forest. “So what do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a teacher,” Dana said.
“I’ll bet you teach English.”
“That’s right.”
“You do!” He was delighted. “I knew you did,”
“How did you know?” Dana wasn’t sure she was pleased to have been marked so soon by her profession.
“I’ve just always liked English and books— Stephen King and Poe, I liked Poe a lot.”
“I teach “The Cask of Amontillado.” The students like that as much as they like anything.”
“I liked “The Telltale Heart” and the “The Masque of the Red Death,” too,” he said. “We read them in high school. About the only stuff I really did like.”
“It’s hard to get my kids to read anything.”
“And how is school teaching? Do you like it?”
“Not much,” Dana admitted. “I’m not much good at it. At the kids part, at controlling the kids. The rest I’m okay with.”
“Yeah, well control,” he said. “We all want to be in control, don’t we?”
“I don’t know,” said Dana, “I don’t seem to have much taste for it. With school teaching, I’m becoming a big fan of self-control. That’s what my kids need.”
“Control is important,” he said. “Keeping control, being in control. Now me, I like to feel in control.”
“Maybe you should have gone into teaching,” Dana said. Instead of me, she thought.
“Funny, I thought about being a teacher. I could have done that. I could have done the control bit; I just couldn’t stick the school bit. Sometimes in college, things happen. You know.”
“Yes,” Dana agreed. She’d met Bruce in college and taken education courses and the rest had just happened.
At the edge of the for
est, George turned onto the state road and headed east on route 44. Yes, they were going toward Putnam, that was right, Dana saw the signs. There was nothing wrong with George except her over active imagination; he was just lonely or bored, one of those unfortunates with marginal social skills, who do not have quite the right sense of humor, who say odd, spontaneous things and make people uneasy.
Dana felt relief, and something else, an irrational kind of disappointment: she would have no excuse about Monday. She would have to go back. How much nicer it would be to keep going, how much better if George had been someone different, perhaps a romantic lead right out of a screwball comedy, instead of an unhappy, creepy man. To avoid thinking such things, Dana asked, “And where do you work?”
“I’m independent,” George said. “I install vinyl windows all over eastern Connecticut, southern Massachusetts.
“You must travel around a lot,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m always on the move. I like that, being able to go here and there. With the interstates, you’re here in the morning and five hundred miles away by night. If there’s poor hunting in one place, there’s opportunity elsewhere.”
“I think I might like a job with traveling.” She hadn’t thought of that before, but it was true. She liked seeing new places, meeting new people.
“I hadn’t figured you for a traveler, but you never know about people, do you? See why we need to talk more? I think we need to get to know each other better. We’ll stop and get a drink and talk about jobs and Poe. I know this neat bar . . .”
“I need to get home.” But now Dana spoke without any real conviction. She was out of danger and there was no need to be in a hurry.
“You don’t want to get home that badly,” he said as if he could read her mind. “If you did, you wouldn’t have been out three, four hours on the bike.”
There it was again. That social awkwardness. Not the right thing to say at all, and it made Dana wonder if that was just a guess or had he been in the parking lot all the time she was riding in the forest?
“What about you?” she asked. “You’ve been out all afternoon, too. Is there no one waiting for you at home?”
“Naw. I’m on my own.”
“Sure you are,” she said and glanced toward the back seat.
He turned and looked full at her, surprised or maybe annoyed.
“The sweater,” Dana said. “Pink and purple stripes with some embroidered flowers. It must look real nice on you.”
“Oh, that belongs to a friend. Not even a friend, just a hitchhiker I picked up. She left it behind, forgot it, I guess. I figure I’ll see her again. I think you always see people more than once.”
“Always?”
“Yeah. I can always see her again. If I want to.”
They were up to speed on the main road, whipping along toward Putnam, and Dana began to shiver in the chill from the van’s air system. She had her jeans in her day pack but she’d left her coat in the car.
“Cold?” he asked.
“A bit. I need to change.”
“I’ll stop if you want. There’s a little park just up the road. You can change in the back.”
“No, that’s all right. We don’t want to meet a second helpful trooper.” She gave a little laugh to signal this was a joke and after one of those curious two second pauses, George laughed too.
“I can change into my jeans in Putnam,” Dana added. “There will surely be somewhere. A McDonald’s or something.”
“When we stop for a drink,” George suggested and he reached into the back seat and pulled up the sweater, which was thick and had a distinctive, rather disagreeable smell of perfume and sweat. “Just about your size,” George said.
“Maybe not my color.” Dana noticed the soiling around the cuffs and an odd, rusty stain. But though she disliked the thought of putting the sweater on, she was freezing, and she draped it around her shoulders.
“She had hair like yours,” George said in a reminiscent tone. “Kinda reddish brown and curly. Your hair is not as curly.” He sounded regretful.
“The sweater needs a clean but it must have been expensive. I’m surprised she left it behind.”
“Well, we got kinda wasted at this bar I know. I’m not much of a drinker myself,” he added. “But for conversation, you need a drink. With some people, you need more than one.”
“What do you talk about with hitchhikers?”
“This and that. Like us, what have we talked about? Poe and jobs and control and what we really want. That about it?”
Dana agreed it was.
“Now we’ve never met before, have we? But we have some things in common; I feel we have some issues in common. So, a couple beers, we’ll know a whole lot more about each other, we’ll have a kind of contact we didn’t have before— just like with my friend the hitchhiker.”
He gave her the strange, predatory smile and this time two ideas that had been floating in and out of Dana’s mind came fully to the surface: George was dangerous and she could make use of him. Dana suddenly felt the way she sometimes did riding alone along a new trail, uncertain about who or what she might meet. She felt the potential threat, and with it, a conviction that she could manage danger which made her feel almost unbearably jumpy and excited. “Sure,” she said. “But in Putnam. That way, I can call and we can have a couple drinks before Bruce comes down to pick me up.”
“We’ll have a couple drinks first,” George said. “Then maybe you won’t want to call Bruce.”
Dana knew enough to laugh and George took this endorsement at face value. He grew quite expansive and talkative. He told her more about vinyl windows than she wanted to know and asked her about her students. It could have been a normal conversation except for her sense of fear and excitement and her feeling that his opaque personality had become transparent to her.
It was full dark when they reached Putnam with its winding streets and century old brick factory buildings and cheap, modern facades. Streetlights glowed an anemic orange behind the dark glass, and black water poured over the old mill dam.
“I really want to change,” Dana said, as they drove into the antiques district, full of lighted store fronts and old fashioned shop signs, a little pocket of prosperity in the defunct mill town. “I don’t want to go anywhere in bike shorts.”
“You have the legs for them,” George said.
“Thanks a lot, but it’s nearly 40 degrees.”
“You should put on the sweater. It’s really a warm, nice sweater. It would suit you fine.”
“When I can change,” Dana said. “I don’t want to get it all sweaty.” in She had her belt off before George stopped the van a small municipal lot. She returned the sweater to the back seat and opened her door.
“The bar’s right down the street,” he said. “You can change there.”
“I feel funny going inside a bar in shorts.”
“Not quite proper for a school teacher?”
Thank God for some stereotypes, Dana thought. Looking up and down the street, she spotted an antiques mall in what looked like an old factory building. “What about there? I’ll bet they have a ladies room.”
“Sure.” He locked the van doors. “Change and then you’ll call, and we’ll have a couple beers.”
“Yes,” she said. She hurried across the street and he followed her.
Inside was more crowded than Dana had anticipated. The antiques mall was getting ready to close; customers were lined up at the counter. Another group of shoppers, laden with packages, stood in the middle of the long aisles of booths comparing notes as if fearful of having missed some treasure and reluctant to leave. Dana passed oriental vases and screens, nineteenth century paintings and folk art figures, art deco knickknacks, colonial tables, Victorian bureaus, 1930s mirrors. Postcards, dolls, quilts, a nightmare attic of fusty furniture, tools, ornaments, and clothes. All things for people to buy, but, really, Dana though, things that others had wanted rid of, things they had been glad to escape.
> At the back of the building, she was directed downstairs by one of the dealers, a skinny, dust colored woman surrounded by old toys and rocking horses and metal banks. On the lower level, Dana found more narrow aisles with bedsteads by the dozens, chairs, some with seats missing; bureaus, tables, lamps, mirrors, picture frames, some with hideous pictures; antique sewing machines, carpenter’s tools, and kitchen goods. The lavatories were tucked in the rear behind a couple of lacquered screens and a plaster angel. In the women’s room, Dana struggled out of her bike pants and threw them into the trash basket.
Although her mind had been alive, positively jumping with ideas, she had not known what she would do until she threw away her bike pants— new, expensive, nicely padded. She pulled the jeans out of her day pack and struggled into them and found a dry turtleneck and put it on in place of her damp t-shirt. She opened the lavatory door cautiously, but no, George, all innocence— or all confidence, was upstairs. She had only to get out, and trusting that there must be a back way, a window, a place to hide, even, she started down the aisles, past pool cues and lace and lacquer boxes, dishes and the breakfronts they’d sat in; souvenir mugs and wooden trays and victrolas and old cigar boxes and tobacco cans. Then, just as her heart had begun racing with nerves, a sudden cool draft issued from a narrow, half open door behind piles of headboards and disassembled beds. Dana climbed three steep stone steps to the October night.
A bus was waiting. The antique fanciers, laden with small, precious boxes and bags, were embarking, while the driver stowed larger items in the luggage rack underneath. He did not notice Dana climb on board and head for the lavatory at the back. When she emerged half an hour later, the big charter was rolling south down the interstate away from George and Bruce, her mother and father, and five classes of underachieving eighth graders.
Of course, Dana felt guilty, even about George. When she read he’d been questioned, she almost called, though she told herself it was unnecessary: George was completely innocent and there wouldn’t be a shred of proof, not a shred. Still, it was odd that the only person she felt she should call was George, but Dana didn’t have to agonize for long. When the police searched George’s van, they developed an interest in the stained pink and purple striped sweater, not to mention the handcuffs they found and strands of reddish, curly hair which happened to match some from the corpse of a hiker strangled near the Massachusetts border.
