It was because of what he’d done that he was alive. He thought about that for a long time, replaying it in his head. Despite the pain, something like a smile formed on his lips. He was alive, he realized, because he had done exactly the right thing at the right time, and done it quickly, efficiently, and without hesitation. No playtime stuff. His own quick thinking had shown him the path and his own reflexes had taken him out of harm’s way.
He tried to move again and a fireball the size of North Dakota exploded in his back.
If he’d tried to outrun the wrecker he knew he would have been ground under those big wheels. Mashed into goo. The thought that he’d escaped that fate did nothing to cheer him, because of the very real fact that the driver of that truck had meant to kill him.
The rib was really starting to scream at him. Moreover, time was passing, and Vic would be waiting, belt at the ready, hard hands fondling the remote, waiting for him, pleased with how very late it was. Mike’s feeling of pride vanished instantly. His dread of Vic was overwhelming.
Still, he lay a few moments longer, collecting himself, and thinking about that crucial moment when he’d left the road, remembering what it had felt like. At no time had it ever been panic; no, that particular emotion had not been a part of it at all. Instead, the feeling had been simpler, more profound. He had just done what had to be done, a cool, calculated move, and it had been the right thing. A minor victory, perhaps, on a world scale, but it had been everything to the life of Mike Sweeney.
Slowly and carefully, he made himself sit up. It actually helped the pain, and when he carefully turned to look down he realized that it was the twisted stem of a pumpkin that had been jabbing him in the back. Even though he was sure a rib or two were broken the pain was a lot more bearable sitting up. He took it as a good sign, though he was only partly relived and partly disappointed. Getting stabbed in the back by something would have meant a stay in the hospital, and that would have been at least one night away from Vic.
“Oh well,” he said, and got slowly and carefully to his feet. It took a lot of doing. Both of his ankles were sore though he didn’t think they were sprained, but one rib was definitely cracked. It glowed like a hot ember with every breath.
He limped over to his War Machine. It lay on its side, covered in mud and pumpkin mush. With infinite care, Mike squatted down and raised the bike onto its wheels. Half pulling it, half leaning on it, he walked back up to the road and examined it in the glow from the nearly continual lightning flashes. The frame was undamaged, and when he rolled it back and forth he was delighted to discover that the wheels spun true. How it had come through the crash undamaged was a mystery, but with the way his body was feeling he certainly didn’t want to look any gift horses in the mouth.
With a dreadful expectation of the pain, he mounted the bike and began riding away. The pain was exactly as bad as he expected it to be and for a while he thought that fireflies were swarming around him, but it was only more of the fireworks display of scotoma. It took a long time for his eyes to clear enough for him to ride, but even then there was a fringe of sparks at the edges of his vision and a peculiar tingling in the flesh around both eyes. He plodded on, pedaling slowly and with tremendous care, fearing the exertion of the hills, moving into the night until he had left the site of his calamity far behind, pedaling laboriously up and down the mountains, heading for home to accept his belting.
State Extension Route A-32 lead up from the center of Pine Deep, curved lazily around the twists in the canal, and then darted off at a right angle through the farmlands. It was the main artery along which the tourists flowed into town, and down which the semis loaded with corn, pumpkins, apples, and pears headed southeast toward Philadelphia. Slow-moving tractors, road graders, and harvesters chugged along it at modest speeds during the day, sometimes causing frustrating backups for the day-trippers from Philly, Doylestown, and Willow Grove who flocked to Pine Deep to shop the antique stores and galleries, dine at the four-and five-star restaurants, and sip expensive wines and rare drams of scotch at the sidewalk cafes. About ten miles out of the town proper was a small dirt road that cut away from A-32 at a sharp right angle. There was no official name for it, being actually a disused farm road, but everyone called it Dark Hollow Road because that’s where it lead. At night, carloads of teenagers thumped and bumped along its rutted length heading for the Passion Pit, so named in the forties and never changed, where they did some rutting of their own. Nearly every night the pale glow of taillights looked like fireflies through the trees, and here and there some young lover’s gasp of climactic delight drifted on the breeze blowing through the pines.
Though the whole area was commonly called Dark Hollow, the true hollow was a deep and narrow valley that wormed between the toes of three substantial hills. Halfway up the tallest hill was the flattened natural shelf that had been commandeered as the Passion Pit, and it was surrounded by snarls of undergrowth that were burned to gnarled skeletons three years ago by a thoughtlessly discarded cigarette butt. The trees were badly charred as well, but few had actually died. Pine trees endured forest fires heroically, though these looked desolate without their needles. Slowly, but surely, the land reclaimed its life and color, and here and there a new green sprig of spruce or Frazier pine could be found.
At night, especially an overcast and moody night like this, Dark Hollow was as dark as a tomb and as inviting as an open, beckoning grave; yet there were worse places in Pine Deep, places where the shadows were darker still and the air hummed with a malevolent tension. But these places were never named and they were never thought about by choice. Dark Hollow, a doorway to those other places, remained as the darkest place known consciously to the people of the town, and in its way, it was dark enough.
The last crickets of the season chanted a weak and dispirited chorus from the withered grass of the hollow, and in a half-burnt old oak, an owl demanded identification of all that moved in the night. All day the spot had been empty and then between one second and the next a man stood by the stump. A moment before he had been standing on the road and now he was here, and he looked as startled as the birds around him as if he didn’t understand it either.
His face looked strained and tense, but also sad. He looked around at the shadows that clung like webs around Dark Hollow, then down at the stump, and then slowly sat down. His pale skin glowed faintly in the darkness, and his deep-set eyes looked like the empty sockets in a skull. A guitar stood nearby, canted back to rest against the trunk of a scrub pine. Before him, on the ground, was the remains of an old campfire left behind months ago by hoboes. The wood was only half burned, but cold and damp.
There was a soft flutter in the air and the gray man looked up as the ragged night bird jumped from one branch to a lower one. It stood there on stick legs, head cocked to one side as it regarded him as if it knew him.
“Yeah, brother blackbird, you know me. And I know you.” Though his lips moved to form the words no sound came out. Even so, the bird rustled its wings and edged slightly closer. The man watched it for a long while and thought,
He pulled his guitar around and strummed the strings. The sound was high and sweet, but distant, like something heard through a closed door.
“Are you cold?” the Bone Man asked the bird. “I’m cold as a motherfucker.”
The bird made a faint sound, like the squeak of a rusted hinge.
“I’m always cold.” The Bone Man looked back at the old fire logs. He said nothing else, even when the logs suddenly burst into flame. The bird flapped its wings and almost flew away. But didn’t. It remained there, watching the man, watching the waxing golden light, feeling the blossoming warmth. The logs caught and settled down into a cheerful, chuckling fire, so strange in that desolate place.
The Bone Man fished in his pocket for the sawed-off and polished neck of an old whiskey bottle. It fit on one finger of his left hand and he rested the fingers of his right hand across the strings, but he didn’t play quite yet. Instead he closed his eyes and hung his head as if in prayer and the woods grew still around him. Then slowly,
