Big Driver Read online

  “Your best … since grammar … oh, that’s …”

  Elvid could manage no more. He went into gales and howls and gut-shaking spasms, his chin (strangely sharp for such a chubby face) nodding and dipping at the innocent (but darkening) summer sky. At last he got himself under control. Streeter thought about offering his handkerchief, and decided he didn’t want it on the extension salesman’s skin.

  “This is excellent, Mr. Streeter,” he said. “We can do business.”

  “Gee, that’s great,” Streeter said, taking another step back. “I’m enjoying my extra fifteen years already. But I’m parked in the bike lane, and that’s a traffic violation. I could get a ticket.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Elvid said. “As you may have noticed, not even a single civilian car has come along since we started dickering, let alone a minion of the Derry PD. Traffic never interferes when I get down to serious dealing with a serious man or woman; I see to it.”

  Streeter looked around uneasily. It was true. He could hear traffic over on Witcham Street, headed for Upmile Hill, but here, Derry was utterly deserted. Of course, he reminded himself, traffic’s always light over here when the working day is done.

  But absent? Completely absent? You might expect that at midnight, but not at seven-thirty PM.

  “Tell me why you hate your best friend,” Elvid invited.

  Streeter reminded himself again that this man was crazy. Anything Elvid passed on wouldn’t be believed. It was a liberating idea.

  “Tom was better-looking when we were kids, and he’s far better-looking now. He lettered in three sports; the only one I’m even halfway good at is miniature golf.”

  “I don’t think they have a cheerleading squad for that one,” Elvid said.

  Streeter smiled grimly, warming to his subject. “Tom’s plenty smart, but he lazed his way through Derry High. His college ambitions were nil. But when his grades fell enough to put his athletic eligibility at risk, he’d panic. And then who got the call?”

  “You did!” Elvid cried. “Old Mr. Responsible! Tutored him, did you? Maybe wrote a few papers as well? Making sure to misspell the words Tom’s teachers got used to him misspelling?”

  “Guilty as charged. In fact, when we were seniors—the year Tom got the State of Maine Sportsman award—I was really two students: Dave Streeter and Tom Goodhugh.”

  “Tough.”

  “Do you know what’s tougher? I had a girlfriend. Beautiful girl named Norma Witten. Dark brown hair and eyes, flawless skin, beautiful cheekbones—”

  “Tits that wouldn’t quit—”

  “Yes indeed. But, sex appeal aside—”

  “Not that you ever did put it aside—”

  “—I loved that girl. Do you know what Tom did?”

  “Stole her from you!” Elvid said indignantly.

  “Correct. The two of them came to me, you know. Made a clean breast of it.”

  “Noble!”

  “Claimed they couldn’t help it.”

  “Claimed they were in love, L-U-V.”

  “Yes. Force of nature. This thing is bigger than both of us. And so on.”

  “Let me guess. He knocked her up.”

  “Indeed he did.” Streeter was looking at his shoes again, remembering a certain skirt Norma had worn when she was a sophomore or a junior. It was cut to show just a flirt of the slip beneath. That had been almost thirty years ago, but sometimes he still summoned that image to mind when he and Janet made love. He had never made love with Norma—not the Full Monty sort, anyway; she wouldn’t allow it. Although she had been eager enough to drop her pants for Tom Goodhugh. Probably the first time he asked her.

  “And left her with a bun in the oven.”

  “No.” Streeter sighed. “He married her.”

  “Then divorced her! Possibly after beating her silly?”

  “Worse still. They’re still married. Three kids. When you see them walking in Bassey Park, they’re usually holding hands.”

  “That’s about the crappiest thing I’ve ever heard. Not much could make it worse. Unless …” Elvid looked shrewdly at Streeter from beneath bushy brows. “Unless you’re the one who finds himself frozen in the iceberg of a loveless marriage.”

  “Not at all,” Streeter said, surprised by the idea. “I love Janet very much, and she loves me. The way she’s stood by me during this cancer thing has been just extraordinary. If there’s such a thing as harmony in the universe, then Tom and I ended up with the right partners. Absolutely. But …”

  “But?” Elvid looked at him with delighted eagerness.

  Streeter became aware that his fingernails were sinking into his palms. Instead of easing up, he bore down harder. Bore down until he felt trickles of blood. “But he fucking stole her!” This had been eating him for years, and it felt good to shout the news.

  “Indeed he did, and we never cease wanting what we want, whether it’s good for us or not. Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Streeter?”

  Streeter made no reply. He was breathing hard, like a man who has just dashed fifty yards or engaged in a street scuffle. Hard little balls of color had surfaced in his formerly pale cheeks.

  “And is that all?” Elvid spoke in the tones of a kindly parish priest.

  “No.”

  “Get it all out, then. Drain that blister.”

  “He’s a millionaire. He shouldn’t be, but he is. In the late eighties—not long after the flood that damn near wiped this town out—he started up a garbage company … only he called it Derry Waste Removal and Recycling. Nicer name, you know.”

  “Less germy.”

  “He came to me for the loan, and although the proposition looked shaky to everyone at the bank, I pushed it through. Do you know why I pushed it through, Elvid?”

  “Of course! Because he’s your friend!”

  “Guess again.”

  “Because you thought he’d crash and burn.”

  “Right. He sank all his savings into four garbage trucks, and mortgaged his house to buy a piece of land out by the Newport town line. For a landfill. The kind of thing New Jersey gangsters own to wash their dope-and-whore money and use as body-dumps. I thought it was crazy and I couldn’t wait to write the loan. He still loves me like a brother for it. Never fails to tell people how I stood up to the bank and put my job on the line. ‘Dave carried me, just like in high school,’ he says. Do you know what the kids in town call his landfill now?”

  “Tell me!”

  “Mount Trashmore! It’s huge! I wouldn’t be surprised if it was radioactive! It’s covered with sod, but there are KEEP OUT signs all around it, and there’s probably a Rat Manhattan under that nice green grass! They’re probably radioactive, as well!”

  He stopped, aware that he sounded ridiculous, not caring. Elvid was insane, but—surprise! Streeter had turned out to be insane, too! At least on the subject of his old friend. Plus …

  In cancer veritas, Streeter thought.

  “So let’s recap.” Elvid began ticking off the points on his fingers, which were not long at all but as short, pudgy, and inoffensive as the rest of him. “Tom Goodhugh was better-looking than you, even when you were children. He was gifted with athletic skills you could only dream of. The girl who kept her smooth white thighs closed in the backseat of your car opened them for Tom. He married her. They are still in love. Children okay, I suppose?”

  “Healthy and beautiful!” Streeter spat. “One getting married, one in college, one in high school! That one’s captain of the football team! Chip off the old fucking block!”

  “Right. And—the cherry on the chocolate sundae—he’s rich and you’re knocking on through life at a salary of sixty thousand or so a year.”

  “I got a bonus for writing his loan,” Streeter muttered. “For showing vision.”

  “But what you actually wanted was a promotion.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m a businessman now, but at one time I was a humble salaryman. Got fired before s
triking out on my own. Best thing that ever happened to me. I know how these things go. Anything else? Might as well get it all off your chest.”

  “He drinks Spotted Hen Microbrew!” Streeter shouted. “Nobody in Derry drinks that pretentious shit! Just him! Just Tom Goodhugh, the Garbage King!”

  “Does he have a sports car?” Elvid spoke quietly, the words lined with silk.

  “No. If he did, I could at least joke with Janet about sports car menopause. He drives a goddam Range Rover.”

  “I think there might be one more thing,” Elvid said. “If so, you might as well get that off your chest, too.”

  “He doesn’t have cancer.” Streeter almost whispered it. “He’s fifty-one, just like me, and he’s as healthy … as a fucking … horse.”

  “So are you,” Elvid said.

  “What?”

  “It’s done, Mr. Streeter. Or, since I’ve cured your cancer, at least temporarily, may I call you Dave?”

  “You’re a very crazy man,” Streeter said, not without admiration.

  “No, sir. I’m as sane as a straight line. But notice I said temporarily. We are now in the ‘try it, you’ll buy it’ stage of our relationship. It will last a week at least, maybe ten days. I urge you to visit your doctor. I think he’ll find remarkable improvement in your condition. But it won’t last. Unless …”

  “Unless?”

  Elvid leaned forward, smiling chummily. His teeth again seemed too many (and too big) for his inoffensive mouth. “I come out here from time to time,” he said. “Usually at this time of day.”

  “Just before sunset.”

  “Exactly. Most people don’t notice me—they look through me as if I wasn’t there—but you’ll be looking. Won’t you?”

  “If I’m better, I certainly will,” Streeter said.

  “And you’ll bring me something.”

  Elvid’s smile widened, and Streeter saw a wonderful, terrible thing: the man’s teeth weren’t just too big or too many. They were sharp.

  *

  Janet was folding clothes in the laundry room when he got back. “There you are,” she said. “I was starting to worry. Did you have a nice drive?”

  “Yes,” he said. He surveyed his kitchen. It looked different. It looked like a kitchen in a dream. Then he turned on a light, and that was better. Elvid was the dream. Elvid and his promises. Just a loony on a day pass from Acadia Mental.

  She came to him and kissed his cheek. She was flushed from the heat of the dryer and very pretty. She was fifty herself, but looked years younger. Streeter thought she would probably have a fine life after he died. He guessed May and Justin might have a stepdaddy in their future.

  “You look good,” she said. “You’ve actually got some color.”

  “Do I?”

  “You do.” She gave him an encouraging smile that was troubled just beneath. “Come talk to me while I fold the rest of these things. It’s so boring.”

  He followed her and stood in the door of the laundry room. He knew better than to offer help; she said he even folded dish-wipers the wrong way.

  “Justin called,” she said. “He and Carl are in Venice. At a youth hostel. He said their cabdriver spoke very good English. He’s having a ball.”

  “Great.”

  “You were right to keep the diagnosis to yourself,” she said. “You were right and I was wrong.”

  “A first in our marriage.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “Jus has so looked forward to this trip. But you’ll have to fess up when he gets back. May’s coming up from Searsport for Gracie’s wedding, and that would be the right time.” Gracie was Gracie Goodhugh, Tom and Norma’s oldest child. Carl Goodhugh, Justin’s traveling companion, was the one in the middle.

  “We’ll see,” Streeter said. He had one of his puke-bags in his back pocket, but he had never felt less like upchucking. Something he did feel like was eating. For the first time in days.

  Nothing happened out there—you know that, right? This is just a little psychosomatic elevation. It’ll recede.

  “Like my hairline,” he said.

  “What, honey?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, and speaking of Gracie, Norma called. She reminded me it was their turn to have us to dinner at their place Thursday night. I said I’d ask you, but that you were awfully busy at the bank, working late hours, all this bad-mortgage stuff. I didn’t think you’d want to see them.”

  Her voice was as normal and as calm as ever, but all at once she began crying big storybook tears that welled in her eyes and then went rolling down her cheeks. Love grew humdrum in the later years of a marriage, but now his swelled up as fresh as it had been in the early days, the two of them living in a crappy apartment on Kossuth Street and sometimes making love on the living-room rug. He stepped into the laundry room, took the shirt she was folding out of her hands, and hugged her. She hugged him back, fiercely.

  “This is just so hard and unfair,” she said. “We’ll get through it. I don’t know how, but we will.”

  “That’s right. And we’ll start by having dinner on Thursday night with Tom and Norma, just like we always do.”

  She drew back, looking at him with her wet eyes. “Are you going to tell them?”

  “And spoil dinner? Nope.”

  “Will you even be able to eat? Without …” She put two fingers to her closed lips, puffed her cheeks, and crossed her eyes: a comic puke-pantomime that made Streeter grin.

  “I don’t know about Thursday, but I could eat something now,” he said. “Would you mind if I rustled myself up a hamburger? Or I could go out to McDonald’s … maybe bring you back a chocolate shake …”

  “My God,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “It’s a miracle.”

  *

  “I wouldn’t call it a miracle, exactly,” Dr. Henderson told Streeter on Wednesday afternoon. “But …”

  It was two days since Streeter had discussed matters of life and death under Mr. Elvid’s yellow umbrella, and a day before the Streeters’ weekly dinner with the Goodhughs, this time to take place at the sprawling residence Streeter sometimes thought of as The House That Trash Built. The conversation was taking place not in Dr. Henderson’s office, but in a small consultation room at Derry Home Hospital. Henderson had tried to discourage the MRI, telling Streeter that his insurance wouldn’t cover it and the results were sure to be disappointing. Streeter had insisted.

  “But what, Roddy?”

  “The tumors appear to have shrunk, and your lungs seem clear. I’ve never seen such a result, and neither have the two other docs I brought in to look at the images. More important—this is just between you and me—the MRI tech has never seen anything like it, and those are the guys I really trust. He thinks it’s probably a computer malfunction in the machine itself.”

  “I feel good, though,” Streeter said, “which is why I asked for the test. Is that a malfunction?”

  “Are you vomiting?”

  “I have a couple of times,” Streeter admitted, “but I think that’s the chemo. I’m calling a halt to it, by the way.”

  Roddy Henderson frowned. “That’s very unwise.”

  “The unwise thing was starting it in the first place, my friend. You say, ‘Sorry, Dave, the chances of you dying before you get a chance to say Happy Valentine’s Day are in the ninetieth percentile, so we’re going to fuck up the time you have left by filling you full of poison. You might feel worse if I injected you with sludge from Tom Goodhugh’s landfill, but probably not.’ And like a fool, I said okay.”

  Henderson looked offended. “Chemo is the last best hope for—”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,” Streeter said with a goodnatured grin. He drew a deep breath that went all the way down to the bottom of his lungs. It felt wonderful. “When the cancer’s aggressive, chemo isn’t for the patient. It’s just an agony surcharge the patient pays so that when he’s dead, the doctors and relatives can hug each other over the coffin and say ‘We did every
thing we could.’”

  “That’s harsh,” Henderson said. “You know you’re apt to relapse, don’t you?”

  “Tell that to the tumors,” Streeter said. “The ones that are no longer there.”

  Henderson looked at the images of Deepest Darkest Streeter that were still flicking past at twenty-second intervals on the conference room’s monitor and sighed. They were good pictures, even Streeter knew that, but they seemed to make his doctor unhappy.

  “Relax, Roddy.” Streeter spoke gently, as he might once have spoken to May or Justin when a favorite toy got lost or broken. “Shit happens; sometimes miracles happen, too. I read it in the Reader’s Digest.”

  “In my experience, one has never happened in an MRI tube.” Henderson picked up a pen and tapped it against Streeter’s file, which had fattened considerably over the last three months.

  “There’s a first time for everything,” Streeter said.

  *

  Thursday evening in Derry; dusk of a summer night. The declining sun casting its red and dreamy rays over the three perfectly clipped, watered, and landscaped acres Tom Goodhugh had the temerity to call “the old backyard.” Streeter sat in a lawn chair on the patio, listening to the rattle of plates and the laughter of Janet and Norma as they loaded the dishwasher.

  Yard? It’s not a yard, it’s a Shopping Channel fan’s idea of heaven.

  There was even a fountain with a marble child standing in the middle of it. Somehow it was the bare-ass cherub (pissing, of course) that offended Streeter the most. He was sure it had been Norma’s idea—she had gone back to college to get a liberal arts degree, and had half-assed Classical pretensions—but still, to see such a thing here in the dying glow of a perfect Maine evening and know its presence was a result of Tom’s garbage monopoly …

  And, speak of the devil (or the Elvid, if you like that better, Streeter thought), enter the Garbage King himself, with the necks of two sweating bottles of Spotted Hen Microbrew caught between the fingers of his left hand. Slim and erect in his open-throated Oxford shirt and faded jeans, his lean face perfectly lit by the sunset glow, Tom Goodhugh looked like a model in a magazine beer ad. Streeter could even see the copy: Live the good life, reach for a Spotted Hen.