by T. M. Wright
She pleads, reading my mind in that instant, because I, too, have a little smile on my face, "No, don't do that again." Her smile becomes imploring.
I hop.
She giggles.
I mince over, in time with the elevator music, to a clothing rack that has long-sleeved blouses hanging on it. I do a small, quick two-step. Again her mouth falls open. A young woman walks by and grins at me.
"That woman's looking at you."
I smile. I hop again.
"They'll kick us out."
"No, they won't. We're in love."
And of course they don't kick us out. We dance out, arm in arm, a few minutes later, smiling to ourselves.
THIRTY-TWO
As I headed toward Ashley Falls in the big Plymouth, I realized that I hadn't taken a wrong turnoff, I hadn't zigged left when I should have zagged right, at a fork in the road veered east instead of west. I really was traveling north on U.S. Route 7 toward Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, which would lead me to Burlington and then to Brookfield, Vermont.
It was all simply a matter of perception. My perception was different. Like when the Malibu broke down that first time and I got out and stuck my head under the hood and pretended to understand what I was looking at. Lots of people find themselves in similar situations, and I think lots of people get told things like "It's your torque converter" by people like Anton Kenney—people whose chances for being helpful have all gone by, because life is behind them.
But they still hang in there, they still try to do their job, they still try to be helpful. And so they say, "It's your torque converter," or, "It's your internal rotator," or, "It's your headlight fluid." And 999,999 times out of a million they're ignored. No one hears them. And they shrug and wait for someone else to come along. Why not? The popular mythology says that they've got lots of time and no place to go. And they believe it. Why shouldn't they?
Or maybe they're door-to-door salesmen with vacuum cleaners under their arms or they're teachers or mailmen or waitresses. Whatever they are, they try like hell to carry on. Habits die hard, I guess. People die before their habits do. And who, after all, really wants to leave behind what's .familiar and comfortable so they can dive head first into The Great Unknown? Who really wants—excuse me, I've just got to say it—who really wants to give up the ghost?
But eventually some poor slob like me comes along and actually hears what they've got to say, actually sees them and responds to them. And it's like a shot in the arm, it nurtures them, picks them up, helps renew their sagging self-image.
And for a while they're as real again as the rocks and the grass and the trees.
Real enough to bury the head of an axe in the roof of an old Malibu.
These were the things that I figured out on the road to Ashley Falls. It didn't please me to figure these things out. They were things that I should have figured out long ago.
~ * ~
I didn't plan to go back through Ashley Falls, I planned to take a road that would lead me around it. But when I stopped and checked my interstate map I could find no such road, and a quick check of the Plymouth's glove box turned up an area map that was yellow with age, coffee-stained, doodled on, and illegible. Perhaps, I thought, I could simply turn onto a likely-looking road, and hope my usually reliable sense of direction would keep heading me north. It was an idea I clung to as I approached Ashley Falls. I passed two dirt roads, a dead-end road, and, at last, a two-lane paved road. I turned down that road. A couple of miles later, I realized that I was heading south. I turned around and went back to Route 7. A minute later, I saw a sign that I hadn't seen from the passenger's seat of Anton's Power Wagon: The sign read, "VILLAGE OF ASHLEY FALLS—WELCOME!"
I slowed from sixty to the posted speed limit of thirty. I passed a couple dozen big clapboard houses of indeterminate vintage, and when I got to the business district I slowed to twenty.
It was not the village I had been through a million years before. I knew that. (Abner had told me once, "You'll know in here, Sam"—and he thumped his chest—"what's real and what isn't. " This was one of those times.) It occupied the same space, but it was not the same village.
The buildings in this village's business district were pretty much the same as that other village's, except the hotel was not called the Ashley Falls Hotel, it was called the Haskins Hotel, and the restaurant was not called the Coffee Cup, it was called Mary's Coffee Cup. That other village, the one I'd been through with Anton Kenney, was like a tracing of this village, an approximation of it. A clever imitation.
~ * ~
I'm not sure why I turned onto Haywire Street. A combination of curiosity and stupidity, perhaps.
It wasn't called Haywire Street. It was called Drumlin View Row. And there were no big white clapboard houses on it. All the houses were cedar contemporaries with too many right angles, too few windows, and flat, well-manicured, brightly lit lawns. (If there had been any drumlins to view on Drumlin View Row, they'd all been bulldozed into oblivion.)
I pulled into the driveway of a house under construction, put my foot on the brake, and looked about. They're all dead, I thought. They're dead, their children are dead. Even their houses have been demolished to make way for the new. "It's a pity," I whispered. And in the glare of the headlights I saw Anton rising up out of the blacktop, that long-handled axe poised high above his head.
I stiffened, panic-stricken. Then I slammed the Plymouth into reverse; I felt the tires spinning on the blacktop.
"Damn you!" Anton shrieked. "Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!"
"Good Lord!" I hissed.
"Damn you!" Anton shrieked, and he rose out of the blacktop like someone rising from dark water.
I let off slightly on the accelerator. The Plymouth's tires caught; the car squealed out of the driveway and onto Drumlin View Row. I stopped, slammed it into drive, hesitated. I saw Anton sinking back into the blacktop like a man drowning. I floored the accelerator and moments later had turned right off Drumlin View Row and was heading north out of Ashley Falls.
I hadn't counted on that. I hadn't counted on anger from the dead. And for twenty miles north on U.S. Route 7, I found myself shivering as if from cold.
~ * ~
The Plymouth was fast and comfortable and handled beautifully. I'd shut the two-way radio off because every five minutes or so a woman's voice came over it and said, "Rick? Come in, Rick," until, finally, she said to someone else, "I think something's happened to Rick." I knew that Rick had probably radioed in the license number of the Malibu, but the Malibu was out of commission now. Eventually an alert would be broadcast for the Plymouth. That would happen by morning, I guessed, which gave me the night to use it. And that, I figured, would be more than enough time to get to Brookfield, Vermont. Especially since I planned to make no more stops.
It was about 8:00 P.M. when I was thinking this. My calculations told me I'd be in Brookfield by 2:00 A.M., maybe, with luck, a little earlier.
But, at around 8:30 on a long straight stretch of road a couple miles south of Pontonosuc Gardens, Massachusetts, a pair of headlights appeared in the rearview mirror, advanced on me at a good twenty or thirty miles an hour faster than my own sixty, then paced me five car lengths back.
It was the LTD. I knew it.
And I told myself that, at last, I knew who was driving it. And why.
I told myself that Art DeGraff was driving it. And he was following me because he knew I'd lead him to Abner.
So I pulled over.
The LTD pulled over.
I shut my lights off.
The LTD's lights went off.
Then, taking a very deep breath and wishing to God that I wasn't enjoying this so much, I put the Plymouth in gear and mashed the accelerator. It didn't disappoint me. That huge engine fishtailed the Plymouth away from the shoulder and catapulted it down the road a good quarter mile before the LTD had its lights on again.
I kept my lights off. I negotiated a long, easy curve at eighty or so, braked h
ard and fishtailed onto a gravel side road, then pulled over and stopped, so the curve of the side road hid me. Smiling, proud of myself, I decided then and there that all those hours I'd spent watching TV as a kid hadn't been wasted after all.
I sat tight. Five minutes. Ten minutes. I grew more and more certain that my devilishly clever ploy had worked.
I hadn't, however, taken one very simple fact into account. Dust spits up from gravel roads and hangs in the air for a very long time. The Plymouth had kicked up a lot of dust; it had surely been like a road sign pointing to where I was. And I think that dust was also why, I hadn't seen the LTD sitting just behind me with its lights off, its five acres of hood gleaming dully in the light of the half moon.
I whispered tightly, "Goddamn you!" threw the door open, and stepped out of the Plymouth.
The LTD's lights went on. High.
"Goddamn you!" I bellowed, and threw my arm up in front of my eyes. "Who are you, who the hell are you?!"
Silence.
The LTD's engine was off. If I stood there long enough in the glare of its high beams, its battery would wear down and that would be that.
The LTD's engine fired up. It sounded very powerful, very fast. I bellowed again, "Goddamn you!"
Then I realized that cops carried shotguns in their cars.
I leaned back into the Plymouth's interior and groped frantically around the front seat. Nothing. I turned toward the back seat, hit the top of my head on the wire screen separating the seats, cursed under my breath, backed out of the car, tried the rear door. It was locked.
I heard the LTD change gears. I looked. It was backing slowly away, off the shoulder and onto the road. It did a quick, skillful turn, then sped toward U.S. Route 7.
"Nuts!" I whispered.
Thirty Three
The shotgun was in the Plymouth's trunk, along with a pair of emergency flashers, a spare tire, a black rubber raincoat, a big metal tackle box with lures and bobbers and spools of nylon line inside, and a blue lunch pail. The lunch pail held a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on rye, a pickle, two Oreo cookies, and a pint-size silver thermos filled with apple juice. I was going to eat all that, but I got to thinking that poor Rick had been meant to eat it, and never would, so I closed the lunch pail and put it back where I'd found it.
I was going to keep the shotgun on the front seat with me, too, just in case I had another encounter with the LTD. I had planned on doing something very daring with it, like shooting out the LTD's lights or blowing up its radiator. But the hard truth is that I have never liked guns. Even in Nam, when your weapon was almost literally your best friend, I hated it. It made me feel unclean to hold it.
So I left the shotgun in the trunk. Stupid, you'd say, and you'd be right.
I closed the trunk and got back into the driver's seat. I had come to a decision. I was going to drive to within three or four miles of Brookfield, ditch the Plymouth and then hike cross-country into Brookfield. That way I'd lose Art DeGraff and his friends in, the LTD, because I was sure they'd fall in behind me as soon as I hit Route 7 again.
And once in Brookfield, I'd find Abner. I hoped that wouldn't be the most difficult part of my trek. Because it was not until I crossed into Vermont—at about ten o'clock, with the LTD a precise five car lengths behind me (it had, as I'd expected, picked me up just a few minutes after I'd gotten back on Route 7)—that I realized I didn't know where in Brookfield Abner and Phyllis were staying. "They have a little house in Brookfield, Vermont," Madeline had told me. And I guess at the time I pictured some sleepy, twelve-house hamlet and I assumed that the house where Abner and Phyllis were staying would be easy enough to find. I would, in fact, be able to make a beeline to it. That was, as career Marines, say, "P.P.P.P."—piss-poor prior planning. Actually, it amounted to no prior planning at all. Just wishful thinking.
I don't know when it first struck me that Abner had once mentioned the house in Brookfield. The problem was, try as I might, I couldn't remember what he'd said, whether he'd said the house was green or white or yellow, or whether it had a porch or a rose trellis or whatever. Perhaps he'd mentioned it during our drunken picnic, but there, in the Plymouth, on U.S. Route 7, I couldn't remember his words exactly. I chalked it up to the fact that I'd been concentrating on getting smashed at the time.
~ * ~
I resigned myself to having the LTD on my tail all the way to wherever I ditched the Plymouth. I counted on it. It was how I was going to make my getaway in the night. I was going to stop on some side road, get my map out of the glove compartment, figure out where I was and in which direction I had to walk to get to Brookfield. Then I was going to get out, casually wipe my fingerprints off the door handles and everything else I'd touched, get back in, and unscrew the interior light so it wouldn't go on when the door opened. Then I was going to sneak out the passenger door and into whatever convenient woods lay nearby. It seemed to be a very good plan. And, on a day when most of my plans had turned into cow manure, I decided that fate owed me something, anyway, so it was a plan that would probably work.
~ * ~
I'd been through the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont once before, when I was twelve or thirteen and my parents had driven to Rhode Island to visit friends. U.S. Route 7 doesn't go through the Green Mountain National Forest, though. It skirts it to the east. That was too bad, I thought, because I had liked the high hills there; they were somehow greener than the hills around Bangor. Greener and more luxuriant, as if they were the homes of knights and dragons. I believed in knights and dragons then, when I was twelve or thirteen. I did not believe in them at night on U.S. Route 7. They were the stuff of fairy tales. I believed in other things.
I believed in love and friendship. They were, after all, the forces that had driven Abner from the beach house and me through three states to find him. To save him. I clung to that belief. It seemed necessary that I cling to it, especially with that hellish Ford on my tail and God-only-knew-what ahead of me.
Love and friendship. They make things happen, I told myself.
~ * ~
At just before eleven that night I stopped in the village of Shaftsbury Center, ten miles north of Bennington, Vermont, and about seventy miles south of Brookfield. I stopped to use the men's room at a Chevron station, and I calculated that the LTD would simply wait till I was done.
I parked the Plymouth in darkness to the side of the Chevron station. If someone had, improbably, found poor Rick's body already and an alert had been put out for the Plymouth, then leaving it under the arc lights would be stupid.
I went over to the men's room door, tried it. It was locked. I took a breath, hoped for the best, and went into the station to ask for the keys.
The man inside the station was short, old, and very wrinkled. He wore a red baseball cap and a pair of white overalls that had the name Lou sewn in blue over the breast pocket. He gave me a once-over and stared hard at my mouth while I asked him if the rest rooms were in working order. He grunted an affirmative.
"Good," I said. "Do you have the keys?"
He grunted again, turned and got the keys, which were hooked to a big, highly polished wooden likeness of a grizzly bear. Lou, I thought, was a man of few words.
As I made my way to the rest room with that cumbersome wooden grizzly bear in hand, I told myself that everything at this Chevron station was as it should be. There were no Antons here, and no girls in pink taffeta. There was only an odd old man who liked to keep his rest rooms clean.
I put the key in the rest room door, turned it, then glanced around behind me. The LTD was on the shoulder of the road a hundred feet south of the Chevron station, with its headlights off.
I smiled at it, nodded, waved a little. Then I went into the rest room, found that it was indeed spotlessly clean, which pleased me more, somehow, than the cleanliness of a rest room had ever pleased me before. And after I'd used the toilet I stood in front of the mirror and said, "You cocky son of a bitch." I waved at myself in the mirror;
"Hello, Art, you asshole! Why don't you come over here; we'll talk this out." I quite often talk to myself in mirrors. It's good therapy.
I washed my hands, patted them dry with a continuous roll of immaculate cloth towel near the sink, then turned to go.
I heard a very heavy rap at the rest room door.
I froze.
My knees actually began to knock; my throat grew dry; I got vivid mental pictures of what might be on the other side of the door. Art DeGraff, perhaps, grinning and murderously angry: I imagined him telling me that he wouldn't kill me until later if I showed him where Abner was.
Or maybe Anton, his long-handled axe held high and his hunger mounting with each passing second.
Or the local police, with a warrant for my arrest on charges of car theft and murder.
I muttered a little curse of frustration and disbelief. Then I heard another heavy knock at the door, heavier than the first; it even set up a short-lived, whining, sympathetic vibration in the mirror over the sink.
"God Almighty," I whispered. "God Almighty, God Almighty!"
Another knock. Then another. Then two more in rapid succession.
"Yes?" I croaked.
There was no answer. Only another series of knocks—very frantic now and loud.
I backed away from the door until my rear end hit the wall. I felt the wall—it was cold, made of polishedstone blocks. I hit it with my fist repeatedly.
Another series of loud, suddenly frantic knocks.
"Yes?" I croaked again. "Yes?" I said louder.
Then there was silence.
"Yes?" I said, finding sudden courage in the silence. "Yes, who's there, please?"
Silence.
"This room is occupied," I said, and stepped for-ward to the door. I put my hand on the knob, turned it.
Another knock. Very hard, and very loud. Followed by, "Hey, you okay in there, mister?" It was a young man's voice.
"Huh?" I said.
