Bullet

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 chosen 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 commercials 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 something 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 October 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, kneedeep 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- anAwful- Dream- I- Had. And when I got to Lewiston and found my mother had died? Just a little touch of precognition 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 thoughtfully 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 Then shit, I croaked. The top of the mist was moving slowly, like mist on a clouded mirror. I’m never talking about this. Never, not in my whole life, not even on my deathbed.

But it had all happened just the way I remembered it, of that I was sure. George Staub had come along and picked me up in his Mustang, Ichabod Crane’s old pal with his head stitched on instead of under his arm, demanding that I choose. And I had chosen faced with the oncoming lights of the first house, I had bartered away my mother’s life with hardly a pause. It might be understandable, but that didn’t make the guilt of it any less. No one had to know, however; that was the good part. Her death would look natural hell, would be natural and that’s the way I intended to leave it.

I walked out of the graveyard in the lefthand rut, and when my foot struck my pack, I picked it up and slung it back over my shoulders. Lights appeared at the bottom of the hill as if someone had given them the cue. I stuck out