Riding The Bullet Read online

  and fifty bucks. And the guy tells him he's doing it

  because the car smells, you can't get the smell out,

  he's tried and tried and nothing will take it out. You see he was on a business trip, a fairly long one, gone for at least . . .

  ". . . a coupla weeks," the driver was saying. He was smiling the way people do when they're telling a joke that really slays them. "And when he comes back, he finds the car in the garage and his wife in the car, she's been dead practically the whole time he's been gone. I don't know if it was suicide or a heart attack or what, but she's all bloated up and the car, it's full of that smell and all he wants to do is sell it, you know." He laughed. "That's quite a story, huh?"

  "Why wouldn't he call home?" It was my mouth, talking all by itself. My brain was frozen. "He's gone for two weeks on a business trip and he never calls home once to see how his wife's doing?"

  "Well," the driver said, "that's sorta beside the point, wouldn't you say? I mean hey, what a bargain-that's the point. Who wouldn't be tempted? After all, you could always drive the car with the fuckin win-dows open, right? And it's basically just a story. Fic-tion. I thought of it because of the smell in this car.

  Which is fact."

  Silence. And I thought: He's waiting for me to say something, waiting for me to end this. And I wanted to. I did. Except . . . what then? What would he do then?

  He rubbed the ball of his thumb over the button on his shirt, the one reading i rode the bullet at thrill village, laconia. I saw there was dirt under his fin-gernails. "That's where I was today," he said. "Thrill Village. I did some work for a guy and he gave me an all-day pass. My girlfriend was gonna go with me, but she called and said she was sick, she gets these peri-ods that really hurt sometimes, they make her sick as a dog. It's too bad, but I always think, hey, what's the alternative? No rag at all, right, and then I'm in trou-ble, we both are." He yapped, a humorless bark of sound. "So I went by myself. No sense wasting an all-day pass. You ever been to Thrill Village?"

  "Yes," I said. "Once. When I was twelve."

  "Who'd you go with?" he asked. "You didn't go alone, did you? Not if you were only twelve." I hadn't told him that part, had I? No. He was play-ing with me, that was all, swatting me idly back and forth. I thought about opening the door and just rolling out into the night, trying to tuck my head into my arms before I hit, only I knew he'd reach over and pull me back before I could get away. And I couldn't raise my arms, anyway. The best I could do was clutch my hands together.

  "No," I said. "I went with my dad. My dad took me."

  "Did you ride the Bullet? I rode that fucker four

  times. Man! It goes right upside down!" He looked at

  me and uttered another empty bark of laughter. The moonlight swam in his eyes, turning them into white circles, making them into the eyes of a statue. And I understood he was more than dead; he was crazy. "Did you ride that, Alan?"

  I thought of telling him he had the wrong name, my name was Hector, but what was the use? We were coming to the end of it now.

  "Yeah," I whispered. Not a single light out there except for the moon. The trees rushed by, writhing like spontaneous dancers at a tent-show revival. The road rushed under us. I looked at the speedometer and saw he was up to eighty miles an hour. We were riding the bullet right now, he and I; the dead drive fast. "Yeah, the Bullet. I rode it."

  "Nah," he said. He drew on his cigarette, and once again I watched the little trickles of smoke escape from the stitched incision on his neck. "You never. Especially not with your father. You got into the line, all right, but you were with your ma. The line was long, the line for the Bullet always is, and she didn't want to stand out there in the hot sun. She was fat even then, and the heat bothered her. But you pestered her all day, pestered pestered pestered, and here's the joke of it, man-when you finally got to the head of the line, you chickened. Didn't you?" I said nothing. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  His hand stole out, the skin yellow in the light of the Mustang's dashboard lights, the nails filthy, and gripped my locked hands. The strength went out of them when he did and they fell apart like a knot that magically unties itself at the touch of the magician's wand. His skin was cold and somehow snaky.

  "Didn't you?"

  "Yes," I said. I couldn't get my voice much above a whisper. "When we got close and I saw how high it was . . . how it turned over at the top and how they screamed inside when it did . . . I chickened out. She swatted me, and she wouldn't talk to me all the way home. I never rode the Bullet." Until now, at least. "You should have, man. That's the best one. That's the one to ride. Nothin else is as good, at least not there. I stopped on the way home and got some beers at that store by the state line. I was gonna stop over my girlfriend's house, give her the button as a joke." He tapped the button on his chest, then unrolled his window and flicked his cigarette out into the windy night. "Only you probably know what happened."

  Of course I knew. It was every ghost story you'd

  ever heard, wasn't it? He crashed his Mustang and

  when the cops got there he'd been sitting dead in the

  crumpled remains with his body behind the wheel

  and his head in the backseat, his cap turned around

  backwards and his dead eyes staring up at the roof,

  and ever since you see him on Ridge Road when the

  moon is full and the wind is high, wheee-oooo, we will return after this brief word from our sponsor. I know something now that I didn't before-the worst stories are the ones you've heard your whole life. Those are the real nightmares.

  "Nothing like a funeral," he said, and laughed. "Isn't that what you said? You slipped there, Al. No doubt about it. Slipped, tripped, and fell." "Let me out," I whispered. "Please."

  "Well," he said, turning toward me, "we have to talk about that, don't we? Do you know who I am, Alan?"

  "You're a ghost," I said.

  He gave an impatient little snort, and in the glow of the speedometer the corners of his mouth turned down. "Come on, man, you can do better than that. Fuckin Casper's a ghost. Do I float in the air? Can you see through me?" He held up one of his hands, opened and closed it in front of me. I could hear the dry, unlu-bricated sound of his tendons creaking.

  I tried to say something. I don't know what, and it doesn't really matter, because nothing came out.

  "I'm a kind of messenger," Staub said. "Fuckin

  FedEx from beyond the grave, you like that? Guys like

  me actually come out pretty often whenever the cir-cumstances

  are just right. You know what I think? I

  think that whoever runs things-God or whatever-

  must like to be entertained. He always wants to see if

  you'll keep what you already got or if he can talk you into goin for what's behind the curtain. Things have to be just right, though. Tonight they were. You out all by yourself . . . mother sick . . . needin a ride . . ." "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 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 some-thing 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 m
e, 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 work-ing

  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 clip-board

  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 with-out going insane and beating your fists on the walls. But there was more to it than that, you know. For peo-ple 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 over-time 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 some day 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 tight little family of two, 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 wast-ing."

  "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 some-thing-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 Luchenbach, 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 cho-sen 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 com-mercials 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 some-thing 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 had 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 Octo-ber 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 have been 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 pre-cognition 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 thought-fully 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-