Skeleton Crew

'The way Worth goes—the way most people go—is Route 97 to Mechanic Falls, then Route 11 to Lewiston, and then the Interstate to Bangor. 156.4 miles.' ' I nodded.

' 'If you want to skip the turnpike—and save some distance—you'd go to Mechanic Falls, Route 11 to Lewiston, Route 202 to Augusta, then up Route 9 through China Lake and Unity and Haven to Bangor. That's 144.9 miles.'

' 'You won't save no time that way, missus,' I says, 'not going through Lewiston and Augusta.

Although I will admit that drive up the Old Derry Road to Bangor is real pretty.'

' 'Save enough miles and soon enough you'll save time,' she says. 'And I didn't say that's the way I'd go, although I have a good many times; I'm just running down the routes most people use. Do you want me to go on?'

' 'No,' I says, 'just leave me in this cussed bathroom all by myself starin at all these cussed cracks until I start to rave.

' 'There are four major routes in all,' she says. The one by Route 2 is 163.4 miles. I only tried it once.

Too long.'

' 'That's the one I'd hosey if my wife called and told me it was leftovers,' I says, kinda low.

' 'What was that?' she says.

' 'Nothin,' I says. Talkin to the grout.'

' 'Oh. Well, the fourth—and there aren't too many who know about it, although they are all good roads—paved, anyway—is across Speckled Bird Mountain on 219 to 202 beyond Lewiston. Then, if you take Route 19, you can get around Augusta. Then you take the Old Derry Road. That way is just 129.2.'

'I didn't say nothing for a little while and p'raps she thought I was doubting her because she says, a little pert, 'I know it's hard to believe, but it's so.'

'I said I guessed that was about right, and I thought— looking back—it probably was. Because that's the way I'd usually go when I went down to Bangor to see Franklin when he was still alive. I hadn't been that way in years, though. Do you think a man could just—well—forget a road, Dave?' I allowed it was. The turnpike is easy to think of. After a while it almost fills a man's mind, and you think not how could 1 get from here to there but how can I get from here to the turnpike ramp that's closest to there. And that made me think that maybe there are lots of roads all over that are just going begging; roads with rock walls beside them, real roads with blackberry bushes growing alongside them but nobody to eat the berries but the birds and gravel pits with old rusted chains hanging down in low curves in front of their entryways, the pits themselves as forgotten as a child's old toys with scrumgrass growing up their deserted unremembered sides. Roads that have just been forgot except by the people who live on them and think of the quickest way to get off them and onto the turnpike where you can pass on a hill and not fret over it. We like to joke in Maine that you can't get there from here, but maybe the joke is on us. The truth is there's about a damn thousand ways to do it and man doesn't bother.

Homer continued: 'I grouted tile all afternoon in that hot little bathroom and she stood there in the doorway all that time, one foot crossed behind the other, bare-legged, wearin loafers and a khaki-colored skirt and a sweater that was some darker. Hair was drawed back in a hosstail. She must have been thirty-four or - five then, but her face was lit up with what she was tellin me and I swan she looked like a sorority girl home from school on vacation.

'After a while she musta got an idea of how long she'd been there cuttin the air around her mouth because she says, 'I must be boring the hell out of you, Homer.'

' 'Yes'm,' I says, 'you are. I druther you went away and left me to talk to this damn grout.'

' 'Don't be sma'at, Homer,' she says.

' 'No, missus, you ain't borin me,' I says.

' 'So she smiles and then goes back to it, pagin through her little notebook like a salesman checkin his orders. She had those four main ways—well, really three because she gave up on Route 2 right away—but she must have had forty different other ways that were play-offs on those. Roads with state numbers, roads without, roads with names, roads without. My head fair spun with 'em. And finally she says to me, 'You ready for the blue-ribbon winner, Homer?'

' 'I guess so,' I says.

' 'At least it's the blue-ribbon winner so far,' she says. 'Do you know, Homer, that a man wrote an article in Science Today in 1923 proving that no man could run a mile in under four minutes? He proved it, with all sorts of calculations based on the maximum length of the male thigh-muscles, maximum length of stride, maximum lung capacity, maximum heart-rate, and a whole lot more. I was taken with that article! I was so taken that I gave it to Worth and asked him to give it to Murray in the math department at the University of Maine. I wanted those figures checked because I was sure they must have been based on the wrong postulates, or something. Worth probably thought I was being silly—'Ophelia's got a bee in her bonnet' is what he says— but he took them. Well, Murray checked through the man's figures quite carefully . . . and do you know what, Homer?'

' 'No, missus.'

' 'Those figures were right. The man's criteria were solid. He proved, back in 1923, that a man couldn't run a mile in under four minutes. He proved that. But people do it all the time, and do you know what that means?'

' 'No, missus,' I said, although I had a glimmer.

' 'It means that no blue ribbon is forever,' she says. 'Someday—if the world doesn't explode itself in the meantime—someone will run a fwo-minute mile in the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.' 'And there she stood, her face clean and scrubbed and shinin, that darkish hair of hers pulled back from her brow, as if to say 'Just you go ahead and disagree if you can.' But I couldn't. Because I believe something like that. It is much like what the minister means, I think, when he talks about grace.