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, unlubricated 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 circumstances 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 something 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 me, 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 working 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 clipboard 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 without going insane and beating your fists on the walls. But there was more to it than that, you know. For people 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 overtime 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 wasting. 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 something 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
