Riding The Bullet Read online

  I walked along, sneakers scuffing the gravelly dirt of

  the soft shoulder, listening to the sounds of the gath-ering

  night: a dog, far away; an owl, much closer; the

  sigh of a rising wind. The sky was bright with the

  moonlight, but I couldn't see the moon itself just now-the trees were tall here and had blotted it out for the time being.

  As I left Gates farther behind, fewer cars passed me. My decision not to take the old man up on his offer seemed more foolish with each passing minute. I began to imagine my mother in her hospital bed, mouth turned down in a frozen sneer, losing her grip on life but trying to hold on to that increasingly slip-pery bark for me, not knowing I wasn't going to make it simply because I hadn't liked an old man's shrill voice, or the pissy smell of his car.

  I breasted a steep hill and stepped back into moon-light again at the top. The trees were gone on my right, replaced by a small country graveyard. The stones gleamed in the pale light. Something small and black was crouched beside one of them, watching me. I took a step closer, curious. The black thing moved and became a woodchuck. It spared me a single reproachful red-eyed glance and was gone into the high grass. All at once I became aware that I was very tired, in fact close to exhausted. I had been running on pure adrenaline since Mrs. McCurdy called five hours before, but now that was gone. That was the bad part.

  The good part was that the useless sense of frantic

  urgency left me, at least for the time being. I had

  made my choice, decided on Ridge Road instead of

  Route 68, and there was no sense beating myself up

  over it-fun is fun and done is done, my mother sometimes said. She was full of stuff like that, little Zen aphorisms that almost made sense. Sense or non-sense, this one comforted me now. If she was dead when I got to the hospital, that was that. Probably she wouldn't be. Doctor said it wasn't too bad, according to Mrs. McCurdy; Mrs. McCurdy had also said she was still a young woman. A bit on the heavy side, true, and a heavy smoker in the bargain, but still young.

  Meantime, I was out here in the williwags and I was suddenly tired out-my feet felt as if they had been dipped in cement.

  There was a stone wall running along the road side of the cemetery, with a break in it where two ruts ran through. I sat on the wall with my feet planted in one of these ruts. From this position I could see a good length of Ridge Road in both directions. When I saw headlights coming west, in the direction of Lewiston, I could walk back to the edge of the road and put my thumb out. In the meantime, I'd just sit here with my backpack in my lap and wait for some strength to come back into my legs.

  A groundmist, fine and glowing, was rising out of

  the grass. The trees surrounding the cemetery

  on three sides rustled in the rising breeze. From

  beyond the graveyard came the sound of running

  water and the occasional plunk-plunk of a frog. The

  place was beautiful and oddly soothing, like a picture in a book of romantic poems.

  I looked both ways along the road. Nothing coming, not so much as a glow on the horizon. Putting my pack down in the wheelrut where I'd been dangling my feet, I got up and walked into the cemetery. A lock of hair had fallen onto my brow; the wind blew it off. The mist roiled lazily around my shoes. The stones at the back were old; more than a few had fallen over. The ones at the front were much newer. I bent, hands planted on knees, to look at one which was sur-rounded by almost-fresh flowers. By moonlight the name was easy to read: george staub. Below it were the dates marking the brief span of George Staub's life: january 19, 1977, at one end, october 12, 1998, at the other. That explained the flowers which had only begun to wilt; October 12th was two days ago and 1998 was just two years ago. George's friends and relatives had stopped by to pay their respects. Below the name and dates was something else, a brief inscription. I leaned down farther to read it-

  * and stumbled back, terrified and all too aware that I was by myself, visiting a graveyard by moon-light.

  FUN IS FUN AND DONE IS DONE

  was the inscription.

  My mother was dead, had died perhaps at that very minute, and something had sent me a message. Some-thing with a thoroughly unpleasant sense of humor. I began to back slowly toward the road, listening to the wind in the trees, listening to the stream, listen-ing to the frog, suddenly afraid I might hear another sound, the sound of rubbing earth and tearing roots as something not quite dead reached up, groping for one of my sneakers-

  My feet tangled together and I fell down, thumping my elbow on a gravestone, barely missing another with the back of my head. I landed with a grassy thud, looking up at the moon which had just barely cleared the trees. It was white instead of orange now, and as bright as a polished bone.

  Instead of panicking me further, the fall cleared my head. I didn't know what I'd seen, but it couldn't have been what I thought I'd seen; that kind of stuff might work in John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies, but it wasn't the stuff of real life.

  Yes, okay, good, a voice whispered in my head. And if you just walk out of here now, you can go on believing that. You can go on believing it for the rest of your life.

  "Fuck that," I said, and got up. The seat of my jeans

  was wet, and I plucked it away from my skin. It

  wasn't exactly easy to reapproach the stone marking

  George Staub's final resting place, but it wasn't as

  hard as I'd expected, either. The wind sighed through the trees, still rising, signaling a change in the weather. Shadows danced unsteadily around me. Branches rubbed together, a creaky sound off in the woods. I bent over the tombstone and read:

  george staub

  january 19,1977-october 12, 1998

  Well Begun, Too Soon Done.

  I stood there, leaning down with my hands planted just above my knees, not aware of how fast my heart had been beating until it started to slow down. A nasty little coincidence, that was all, and was it any wonder that I'd misread what was beneath the name and dates? Even without being tired and under stress, I might have read it wrong-moonlight was a notori-ous misleader. Case closed.

  Except I knew what I'd read: Fun Is Fun and Done Is Done.

  My ma was dead.

  "Fuck that," I repeated, and turned away. As I did, I realized the mist curling through the grass and around my ankles had begun to brighten. I could hear the mutter of an approaching motor. A car was coming.

  I hurried back through the opening in the rock wall,

  snagging my pack on the way by. The lights of the

  approaching car were halfway up the hill. I stuck out

  my thumb just as they struck me, momentarily blind-ing me. I knew the guy was going to stop even before he started slowing down. It's funny how you can just know sometimes, but anyone who's spent a lot of time hitchhiking will tell you that it happens. The car passed me, brake lights flaring, and swerved onto the soft shoulder near the end of the rock wall dividing the graveyard from Ridge Road. I ran to it with my backpack banging against the side of my knee. The car was a Mustang, one of the cool ones from the late sixties or early seventies. The motor rumbled loudly, the fat sound of it coming through a muffler that maybe wouldn't pass inspection the next time the sticker came due . . . but that wasn't my problem.

  I swung the door open and slid inside. As I put my backpack between my feet, an odor struck me, some-thing almost familiar and a trifle unpleasant. "Thank you," I said. "Thanks a lot."

  The guy behind the wheel was wearing faded jeans and a black tee shirt with the arms cut off. His skin was tanned, the muscles heavy, and his right bicep was ringed with a blue barbwire tattoo. He was wear-ing a green John Deere cap turned around backwards. There was a button pinned near the round collar of his tee shirt, but I couldn't read it from my angle. "Not a problem," he said. "You headed up the city?"

  "Yes," I said. In this part of the world "up the city"

  meant Lewiston, the only city of
any size north of Portland. As I closed the door, I saw one of those pine-tree air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. That was what I'd smelled. It sure wasn't my night as far as odors went; first pee and now artificial pine. Still, it was a ride. I should have been relieved. And as the guy accelerated back onto Ridge Road, the big engine of his vintage Mustang growling, I tried to tell myself I was relieved.

  "What's going on for you in the city?" the driver asked. I put him at about my age, some townie who maybe went to vocational-technical school in Auburn or maybe worked in one of the few remaining textile mills in the area. He'd probably fixed up this Mustang in his spare time, because that was what townie kids did: drank beer, smoked a little rope, fixed up their cars. Or their motorcycles.

  "My brother's getting married. I'm going to be his best man." I told this lie with absolutely no premedi-tation. I didn't want him to know about my mother, although I didn't know why. Something was wrong here. I didn't know what it was or why I should think such a thing in the first place, but I knew. I was posi-tive. "The rehearsal's tomorrow. Plus a stag party tomorrow night."

  "Yeah? That right?" He turned to look at me, wide-set eyes and handsome face, full lips smiling slightly, the eyes unbelieving.

  "Yeah," I said.

  I was afraid. Just like that I was afraid again. Some-thing was wrong, had maybe started being wrong when the old geezer in the Dodge had invited me to wish on the infected moon instead of on a star. Or maybe from the moment I'd picked up the telephone and lis-tened to Mrs. McCurdy saying she had some bad news for me, but 'twasn't s'bad as it could've been. "Well that's good," said the young man in the turned-around cap. "A brother getting married, man, that's good. What's your name?"

  I wasn't just afraid, I was terrified. Everything was wrong, everything, and I didn't know why or how it could possibly have happened so fast. I did know one thing, however: I wanted the driver of the Mustang to know my name no more than I wanted him to know my business in Lewiston. Not that I'd be getting to Lewiston. I was suddenly sure that I would never see Lewiston again. It was like knowing the car was going to stop. And there was the smell, I knew something about that, as well. It wasn't the air freshener; it was something beneath the air freshener.

  "Hector," I said, giving him my roommate's name. "Hector Passmore, that's me." It came out of my dry mouth smooth and calm, and that was good. Some-thing inside me insisted that I must not let the driver of the Mustang know that I sensed something wrong. It was my only chance.

  He turned toward me a little, and I could read his button: i rode the bullet at thrill village, laco-nia. I knew the place; had been there, although not for a long time.

  I could also see a heavy black line which circled his throat just as the barbwire tattoo circled his upper arm, only the line around the driver's throat wasn't a tattoo. Dozens of black marks crossed it vertically. They were the stitches put in by whoever had put his head back on his body.

  "Nice to meet you, Hector," he said. "I'm George Staub."

  My hand seemed to float out like a hand in a dream. I wish that it had been a dream, but it wasn't; it had all the sharp edges of reality. The smell on top was pine. The smell underneath was some chemical, prob-ably formaldehyde. I was riding with a dead man.

  The Mustang rushed along Ridge Road at sixty miles an hour, chasing its high beams under the light of a polished button moon. To either side, the trees crowd-ing the road danced and writhed in the wind. George Staub smiled at me with his empty eyes, then let go of my hand and returned his attention to the road. In high school I'd read Dracula, and now a line from it recurred, clanging in my head like a cracked bell: The dead drive fast.

  Can't let him know I know. This also clanged in my

  head. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. Can't let him know, can't let him, can't. I wondered where the old man was now. Safe at his brother's? Or had the old man been in on it all along? Was he maybe right behind us, driving along in his old Dodge, hunched over the wheel and snapping at his truss? Was he dead, too? Probably not. The dead drive fast, accord-ing to Bram Stoker, but the old man had never gone a tick over forty-five. I felt demented laughter bubbling in the back of my throat and held it down. If I laughed he'd know. And he mustn't know, because that was my only hope.

  "There's nothing like a wedding," he said.

  "Yeah," I said, "everyone should do it at least twice."

  My hands had settled on each other and were squeezing. I could feel the nails digging the backs of them just above the knuckles, but the sensation was distant, news from another country. I couldn't let him know, that was the thing. The woods were all around us, the only light was the heartless bone-glow of the moon, and I couldn't let him know that I knew he was dead. Because he wasn't a ghost, nothing so harmless. You might see a ghost, but what sort of thing stopped to give you a ride? What kind of creature was that? Zombie? Ghoul? Vampire? None of the above?

  George Staub laughed. "Do it twice! Yeah, man, that's my whole family!"

  "Mine, too," I said. My voice sounded calm, just the voice of a hitchhiker passing the time of day-night, in this case-making agreeable conversation as some small payment for his ride. "There's really nothing like a funeral."

  "Wedding," he said mildly. In the light from the dashboard, his face was waxy, the face of a corpse before the makeup went on. That turned-around cap was particularly horrible. It made you wonder how much was left beneath it. I had read somewhere that morticians sawed off the top of the skull and took out the brains and put in some sort of chemically treated cotton. To keep the face from falling in, maybe. "Wedding," I said through numb lips, and even laughed a little-a light little chuckle. "Wedding's what I meant to say."

  "We always say what we mean to say, that's what I think," the driver said. He was still smiling. Yes, Freud had believed that, too. I'd read it in Psych 101. I doubted if this fellow knew much about Freud, I didn't think many Freudian scholars wore sleeveless tee shirts and baseball caps turned around backwards, but he knew enough. Funeral, I'd said. Dear Christ, I'd said funeral. It came to me then that he was playing me. I didn't want to let him know I knew he was dead. He didn't want to let me know that he knew I knew he was dead. And so I couldn't let him know that I knew that he knew that . . .

  The world began to swing in front of me. In a moment it would begin to spin, then to whirl, and I'd lose it. I closed my eyes for a moment. In the dark-ness, the afterimage of the moon hung, turning green. "You feeling all right, man?" he asked. The concern in his voice was gruesome.

  "Yes," I said, opening my eyes. Things had steadied again. The pain in the backs of my hands where my nails were digging into the skin was strong and real. And the smell. Not just pine air freshener, not just chemicals. There was a smell of earth, as well. "You sure?" he asked.

  "Just a little tired. Been hitchhiking a long time. And sometimes I get a little carsick." Inspiration sud-denly struck. "You know what, I think you better let me out. If I get a little fresh air, my stomach will set-tle.

  Someone else will come along and-"

  "I couldn't do that," he said. "Leave you out here? No way. It could be an hour before someone came along, and they might not pick you up when they did. I got to take care of you. What's that song? Get me to the church on time, right? No way I'm letting you out. Crack your window a little, that'll help. I know it doesn't smell exactly great in here. I hung up that air freshener, but those things don't work worth a shit. Of course, some smells are harder to get rid of than others."

  I wanted to reach out for the window crank and

  turn it, let in the fresh air, but the muscles in my arm wouldn't seem to tighten. All I could do was sit there with my hands locked together, nails biting into the backs of them. One set of muscles wouldn't work; another wouldn't stop working. What a joke. "It's like that story," he said. "The one about the kid who buys the almost new Cadillac for seven hun-dred and fifty dollars. You know that story, don't you?"

  "Yeah," I said through my numb lips. I d
idn't know the story, but I knew perfectly well that I didn't want to hear it, didn't want to hear any story this man might have to tell. "That one's famous." Ahead of us the road leaped forward like a road in an old black-and-white movie.

  "Yeah it is, fucking famous. So the kid's looking for a car and he sees an almost brand-new Cadillac on this guy's lawn."

  "I said I-"

  "Yeah, and there's a sign that says for sale by owner in the window."

  There was a cigarette parked behind his ear. He reached for it, and when he did, his shirt pulled up in the front. I could see another puckered black line there, more stitches. Then he leaned forward to punch in the cigarette lighter and his shirt dropped back into place.

  "Kid knows he can't afford no Cadillac-car, can't get

  within a shout of a Caddy, but he's curious, you know? So he goes over to the guy and says, 'How much does something like that go for?' And the guy, he turns off the hose he's got-cause he's washin the car, you know-and he says, 'Kid, this is your lucky day. Seven hundred and fifty bucks and you drive it away.' " The cigarette lighter popped out. Staub pulled it free and pressed the coil to the end of his cigarette. He drew in smoke and I saw little tendrils come seeping out between the stitches holding the incision on his neck closed.

  "The kid, he looks in through the driver's side win-dow and sees there's only seventeen thou on the odometer. He says to the guy, 'Yeah, sure, that's as funny as a screen door in a submarine.' The guy says, 'No joke, kid, pony up the cash and it's yours. Hell, I'll even take a check, you got a honest face.' And the kid says . . ."

  I looked out the window. I had heard the story

  before, years ago, probably while I was still in junior

  high. In the version I'd been told the car was a Thun-derbird

  instead of a Caddy, but otherwise everything

  was the same. The kid says I may only be seventeen

  but I'm not an idiot, no one sells a car like this, espe-cially

  one with low mileage, for only seven hundred