road, his hand collided with hers.
Soon after the chips and sodas were gone, the road narrowed. It curved along the side of a mountain. Beyond the other lane was a sheer drop to a wooded valley. Rick’s hands tightened on the steering wheel and he slowed down and edged to the right each time he met a descending vehicle. There were pickup trucks, Jeeps and vans, a few R.V.s. The big campers barely had room to squeeze by. Rick began pulling onto the gravel shoulder and stopping each time one of them appeared around a bend.
After the fourth time he did that, he slid a thin cigar out of the pack in his shirt pocket.
“Uh-oh,” Bert said. “The man’s getting serious.”
“They help calm me down.” He held the cigar out to Bert. “Want one?” he asked.
“Why not?”
Though she had never complained of his cigars, she had never smoked one, either. “You are in a festive mood,” Rick said. He took one out for himself. His hands shook badly as he unwrapped it.
Cigar jutting from her pursed lips, Bert leaned toward Rick for a light and wiggled her eyebrows like Groucho.
Rick lit it for her. “You’re a regular guy,” he said.
“If I’m a guy, I’m irregular.”
He grinned and fired up his own cigar. He checked the road. Then he eased off the rough shoulder and picked up speed.
Smoking the cigar helped his nerves. So did watching Bert with hers. She didn’t smoke it so much as fool with it: she held it out daintily between two fingers; she stretched out her lips and sucked it like a monkey; she talked with the cigar clamped in her side teeth; she tapped off ashes with her pinky; looking at Rick with half-shut eyes, she licked its blunt wet end and slid the shaft deep into her mouth and out and in again.
“You’re going to make me crash,” he said.
“You’re doing fine.”
Long after the cigars were snuffed out in the ashtray, Bert unbuttoned the flap of her breast pocket and took out a folded yellow sheet from a legal pad.
“Does this mean we’re almost there?”
“Time to start thinking about it,” she said.
She spread the paper open across her thighs. There was no map, just handwritten directions. She looked at it briefly, then put it away and patted it. “There’ll be a road on the right with a sign for Jacktooth Mountain.”
“And we take it?”
“Nope. We check the odometer and go about twelve miles more. There’ll be a big rock on the left.”
“A rock? That’s a great landmark.”
“Some lovebirds painted ‘Bill & Marie, 69’ on it surrounded by a heart.”
“Romantic. Do you think that’s a year or their favorite pastime?”
“If it’s a year, it’s been around a long time.”
“Maybe they make annual pilgrimages to touch it up.”
“At any rate, after the rock we go about two hundred yards and there’ll be an unmarked road on the right. We take that and follow it to the end. Then we’ll be there.”
Rick looked at his wristwatch. “Almost three,” he said.
“Jean said it’s about two hours from the Jacktooth Mountain sign.”
“Lordy. I hope we spot it soon.”
They passed it forty-five minutes later. Rick checked the odometer, added twelve to the mileage, and kept an eye on the slowly turning numbers.
Eighteen miles later, they spotted the rock. Bill and Marie had not been the only artists to leave their mark on it, but they’d been the most ambitious. Their heart, names and number were faded but twice the size of the surrounding graffiti.
“Two hundred yards,” Bert said.
“Want to get out and pace it off?”
“Thanks anyway. It might be a mile the way Jean gives directions.”
Rick slowed the car. The area to the right was thickly wooded, the spruce and pines brilliant green in the sunlight but dark in the shadows beyond the edge of the road. It looked foreboding.
Rick flinched at the blare of a honking horn. He checked the rearview. A van bore down on them. Without slowing, it veered into the other lane and rushed by. It had a mountain landscape, red in the sunset, painted on its side panel. Rick watched it speed around a bend.
“There!” Bert stuck an arm out of the window and pointed.
Rick eased off the road and stopped. He peered through Bert’s window. “You think that’s it?” he asked.
“Must be.”
All he saw were tire tracks like parallel walking paths leading into the woods. Between the tracks was a hump with foliage growing on it.
“Fondly referred to as ‘the fun part,’ ” Rick said, and steered onto the twin paths.
Only a few dusty shafts of sunlight slanted down and mottled the forest floor, not enough to dispel the gloom of the heavy shadows. The car rocked and bounced along. Sometimes, the springy limbs of nearby saplings brushed the sides of the car or scraped along with squealing sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Rick wondered vaguely if they were scraping the paint.
The least of my worries, he thought.
“What happens if we meet another car?” he asked.
“It’ll get interesting,” Bert said.
“Or have a breakdown?”
“We’ll call the Auto Club.”
“Yuk, yuk.”
“You worry too much.”
A rock on the center hump scraped and clattered against the undercarriage.
Rick took one hand at a time off the steering wheel and wiped each dry on his trousers.
The tracks rose up a gende grade and dipped on its other side. At the bottom, the tire ruts were puddles. The water whooshed as Rick drove through.
“Thirty miles of this?” he asked.
“Maybe it gets better,” Bert said.
Around the next curve, the way was blocked by a fallen branch. Bert shrugged.
“You don’t suppose,” Rick said, “someone put that there to discourage us?”
“Could be an ambush.”
Rick smiled, but he scanned the nearby trees before climbing out. Quickly, he walked in front of the car and stopped at the broken end of the limb. He crouched over it. The branch had neither been sawed off nor hacked with an axe.
Of course not. Rick felt a little silly for even suspecting such a thing. There was a long split up one side. The limb had simply been torn from a tree by its own weight or a strong wind or a burden of winter snow.
He lifted it with both hands and stepped across the tracks, swinging it out of the way. He gave it a shove and let go. The limb dropped with a soft thud onto the brown mat of pine needles. There was sap on the index finger of his left hand. He bent the finger and felt the skin stick. He sniffed the brown stain. It smelled like a Christmas tree.
Turning back toward the car, he saw Bert behind the steering wheel. He went to the passenger door and climbed in.
“Mind if I drive?” she asked.
Bert seemed to enjoy it. Rick enjoyed watching her. She sat forward, away from the seat back, and peered intently out of the windshield. She held the steering wheel with both hands. Sometimes the tip of her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth.
As time passed, however, Rick found himself watching the woods more often than he watched Bert. He gazed out the windows, half expecting to spot someone in the deep shadows sneaking around among the trees. He saw no one. But the farther they traveled along the dirt tracks, the more certain he became that they were not
