"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 the 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 something 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 someday 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 shared secret. 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 Luckenbach, 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 ha
d 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 be 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 farmer in a Ford pickup truck filled with apple-baskets, a perfectly ordinary fellow: not old and not dead.
"Where you goin, son?" he asked, and when I told him he said, "That works for both of us." Less than forty minutes later, at twenty minutes after nine, he pulled up in front of the Central Maine Medical Center. "Good luck. Hope your Ma's on the mend."
"Thank you," I said, and opened the door.
"I see you been pretty nervous about it, but she'll most likely be fine. Ought to get some disinfectant on those, though." He pointed at my hands.
I looked down at them and saw the deep, purpling crescents on the backs. I remembered clutching them together, digging in with my nails, feeling it but unable to stop. And I remembered Staub's eyes, filled up with moonlight like radiant water. Did you ride the Bullet? he'd asked me. I rode that fucker four times.
"Son?" the man driving the pickup asked. "You all right?"
"Huh?"
"You come over all shivery."
"I'm okay," I said. "Thanks again." I slammed the door of the pickup and went up the wide walk past the line of parked wheelchairs gleaming in the moonlight.
I walked to the information desk, reminding myself that I had to look surprised when they told me she was dead, had to look surprised, they'd think it was funny if I didn't . . . or maybe they'd just think I was in shock . . . or that we didn't get along . . . or . . .
I was so deep in these thoughts that I didn't at first grasp what the woman behind the desk had told me. I had to ask her to repeat it.
"I said that she's in room 487, but you can't go up just now. Visiting hours end at nine."
"But . . ." I felt suddenly woozy. I gripped the edge of the desk. The lobby was lit by fluorescents, and in that bright even glare the cuts on the backs of my hands stood out boldly--eight small purple crescents like grins, just above the knuckles. The man in the pickup was right. I ought to get some disinfectant on those.
The woman behind the desk was looking at me patiently. The plaque in front of her said she was YVONNE EDERLE.
"But is she all right?"
She looked at her computer. "What I have here is S. Stands for satisfactory. And four is a general-population floor. If your mother had taken a turn for the worse, she'd be in ICU. That's on three. I'm sure if you come back tomorrow, you'll find her just fine. Visiting hours begin at--"
"She's my Ma," I said. "I hitchhiked all the way down from the University of Maine to see her. Don't you think I could go up, just for a few minutes?"
"Exceptions are sometimes made for immediate family," she said, and gave me a smile. "You just hang on a second. Let me see what I can do." She picked up the phone and punched a couple of buttons, no doubt calling the nurses' station on the fourth floor, and I could see the course of the next two minutes as if I really did have second sight. Yvonne the Information Lady would ask if the son of Jean Parker in 487 could come up for a minute or two--just long enough to give his mother a kiss and an encouraging word--and the nurse would say oh God, Mrs. Parker died not fifteen minutes ago, we just sent her down to the morgue, we haven't had a chance to update the computer, this is so terrible.
The woman at the desk said, "Muriel? It's Yvonne. I have a young man down here at the desk, his name is"--she looked at me, eyebrows raised, and I gave her my name--"Alan Parker. His mother is Jean Parker, in 487? He wonders if he could just . . ."
She stopped. Listened. On the other end the nurse on the fourth floor was no doubt telling her that Jean Parker was dead.
"All right," Yvonne said. "Yes, I understand." She sat quietly for a moment, l
ooking off into space, then put the mouthpiece of the telephone against her shoulder and said, "She's sending Anne Corrigan down to peek in on her. It will only be a second."
"It never ends," I said.
Yvonne frowned. "I beg pardon?"
"Nothing," I said. "It's been a long night and--"
"--and you're worried about your mom. Of course. I think you're a very good son to drop everything the way you did and come on the run."
I suspected Yvonne Ederle's opinion of me would have taken a drastic drop if she'd heard my conversation with the young man behind the wheel of the Mustang, but of course she hadn't. That was a little secret, just between George and me.
It seemed that hours passed as I stood there under the bright fluorescents, waiting for the nurse on the fourth floor to come back on the line. Yvonne had some papers in front of her. She trailed her pen down one of them, putting neat little checkmarks beside some of the names, and it occurred to me that if there really was an Angel of Death, he or she was probably just like this woman, a slightly overworked functionary with a desk, a computer, and too much paperwork. Yvonne kept the phone pinched between her ear and one raised shoulder. The loudspeaker said that Dr. Farquhar was wanted in radiology, Dr. Farquhar. On the fourth floor a nurse named Anne Corrigan would now be looking at my mother, lying dead in her bed with her eyes open, the stroke-induced sneer of her mouth finally relaxing.
Yvonne straightened as a voice came back on the line. She listened, then said: "All right, yes, I understand. I will. Of course I will. Thank you, Muriel." She hung up the telephone and looked at me solemnly. "Muriel says you can come up, but you can only visit for five minutes. Your mother's had her evening meds, and she's very soupy."