Everything's Eventual

   'That's turrible,' he said. 'Your Ma! I'm so sorry!'

   His sympathy was so strong and spontaneous that it made the corners of my eyes prickle. I blinked the tears back. The last thing in the world I wanted was to burst out crying in this old man's old car, which rattled and wallowed and smelled quite strongly of pee.

   'Mrs. McCurdy—the lady who called me—said it isn't that serious. My mother's still young, only forty- eight.'

   'Still! A stroke!' He was genuinely dismayed. He snatched at the baggy crotch of his green pants again, yanking with an old man's oversized, clawlike hand. 'A stroke's allus serious! Son, I'd take you to the CMMC myself—drive you right up to the front door—if I hadn't promised my brother Ralph I'd take him up to the nursin home in Gates. His wife's there, she has that forgettin disease, I can't think what in the world they call it, Anderson's or Alvarez or somethin like that—'

   'Alzheimer's,' I said.

   'Ayuh, prob'ly I'm gettin it myself. Hell, I'm tempted to take you anyway.'

   'You don't need to do that,' I said. 'I can get a ride from Gates easy.'

   'Still,' he said. 'Your mother! A stroke! Only forty-eight!' He grabbed at the baggy crotch of his pants. 'Fuckin truss!' he cried, then laughed—the sound was both desperate and amused. 'Fuckin rupture! If you stick around, son, all your works start fallin apart. God kicks your ass in the end, let me tell you. But you're a good boy to just drop everythin and go to her like you're doin.'

   'She's a good Mom,' I said, and once again I felt the tears bite. I never felt very homesick when I went away to school—a little bit the first week, that was all—but I felt homesick then. There was just me and her, no other close relatives. I couldn't image life without her. Wasn't too bad, Mrs. McCurdy had said; a stroke, but not too bad. Damn old lady better be telling the truth, I thought, she just better be.

   We rode in silence for a little while. It wasn't the fast ride I'd hoped for—the old man maintained a steady forty-five miles an hour and sometimes wandered over the white line to sample the other lane— but it was a long ride, and that was really just as good. Highway 68 unrolled before us, turning its way through miles of woods and splitting the little towns that were there and gone in a slow blink, each one with its bar and its self-service gas station: New Sharon, Ophelia, West Ophelia, Ganistan (which had once been Afghanistan, strange but true), Mechanic Falls, Castle View, Castle Rock. The bright blue of the sky dimmed as the day drained out of it; the old man turned on first his parking lights and then his headlights. They were the high beams but he didn't seem to notice, not even when cars coming the other way flashed their own high beams at him.

  'My sister'n-law don't even remember her own name,' he said. 'She don't know aye, yes, no, nor maybe. That's what that Anderson's Disease does to you, son. There's a look in her eyes . . . like she's sayin 'Let me out of here' . . . or would say it, if she could think of the words. Do you know what I mean?'

   'Yes,' I said. I took a deep breath and wondered if the pee I smelled was the old man's or if he maybe had a dog that rode with him sometimes. I wondered if he'd be offended if I rolled down my window a little. Finally I did. He didn't seem to notice, any more than he noticed the oncoming cars flashing their highs at him.

   Around seven o'clock we breasted a hill in West Gates and my chauffeur cried, 'Lookit, son! The moon! Ain't she a corker?'

   She was indeed a corker—a huge orange ball hoisting itself over the horizon. I thought there was nevertheless something terrible about it. It looked both pregnant and infected. Looking at the rising moon, a sudden and awful thought came to me: what if I got to the hospital and my Ma didn't recognize me? What if her memory was gone, completely shot, and she didn't know aye, yes, no, nor maybe? What if the doctor told me she'd need someone to take care of her for the rest of her life? That someone would have to be me, of course; there was no one else. Goodbye college. What about that, friends and neighbors?

   'Make a wish on it, boyo!' the old man cried. In his excitement his voice grew sharp and unpleasant—it was like having shards of glass stuffed into your ear. He gave his crotch a terrific tug. Something in there made a snapping sound. I didn't see how you could yank on your crotch like that and not rip your balls right off at the stem, truss or no truss. 'Wish you make on the ha'vest moon allus comes true, that's what my father said!'

   So I wished that my mother would know me when I walked into her room, that her eyes would light up at once and she would say my name. I made that wish and immediately wished I could have it back again; I thought that no wish made in that fevery orange light could come to any good.

   'Ah, son!' the old man said. 'I wish my wife was here! I'd beg forgiveness for every sha'ap and unkind word I ever said to her!'

   Twenty minutes later, with the last light of the day still in the air and the moon still hanging low and bloated in the sky, we arrived in Gates Falls. There's a yellow blinker at the intersection of Route 68 and Pleasant Street. Just before he reached it, the old man swerved to the side of the road, bumping the Dodge's right front wheel up over the curb and then back down again. It rattled my teeth. The old man looked at me with a kind of wild, defiant excitement—everything about him was wild, although I hadn't seen that at first; everything about him had that broken-glass feeling. And everything that came out of his mouth seemed to be an exclamation.

   'I'll take you up there! I will, yessir! Never mind Ralph! Hell with him! You just say the word!'

   I wanted to get to my mother, but the thought of another twenty miles with the smell of piss in the air and cars flashing their brights at us wasn't very pleasant. Neither was the image of the old fellow wandering and weaving across four lanes of Lisbon Street. Mostly, though, it was him. I couldn't stand another twenty miles of crotch-snatching and that excited broken-glass voice.

   'Hey, no,' I said, 'that's okay. You go on and take care of your brother.' I opened the door and what I feared happened—he reached out and took hold of my arm with his twisted old man's hand. It was the hand with which he kept tearing at his crotch.

   'You just say the word!' he told me. His voice was hoarse, confidential. His fingers were pressing deep into the flesh just below my armpit. 'I'll take you right to the hospital door! Ayuh! Don't matter if I never saw you before in my life nor you me! Don't matter aye, yes, no, nor maybe! I'll take you right . . . there!'

   'It's okay,' I repeated, and all at once I was fighting an urge to bolt out of the car, leaving my shirt behind in his grip if that was what it took to get free. It was as if he were drowning. I thought that when I moved, his grip would tighten, that he might even go for the nape of my neck, but he didn't. His fingers loosened, then slipped away entirely as I put my leg out. And I wondered, as we always do when an irrational moment of panic passes, what I had been so afraid of in the first place. He was just an elderly carbon-based life-form in an elderly Dodge's pee- smelling ecosystem, looking disappointed that his offer had been refused. Just an old man who couldn't get comfortable in his truss. What in God's name had I been afraid of?

   'I thank you for the ride and even more for the offer,' I said. 'But I can go out that way'—I pointed at Pleasant Street—'and I'll have a ride in no time.'

   He was quiet for a moment, then sighed and nodded. 'Ayuh, that's the best way to go,' he said. 'Stay right out of town, nobody wants to give a fella a ride in town, no one wants to slow down and get honked at.'

   He was right about that; hitchhiking in town, even a small one like Gates Falls, was futile. I guess he had spent some time riding his thumb.

   'But son, are you sure? You know what they say about a bird in the hand.'

   I hesitated again. He was right about a bird in the hand, too. Pleasant Street became Ridge Road a mile or so west of the blinker, and Ridge Road ran through fifteen miles of woods before arriving at Route 196 on the outskirts of Lewiston. It was almost dark, and it's always harder to get a ride at night—when headlights pick you out on a country road, you look like an escapee from Wyndham Boys' Correctional even with your hair combed and your shirt tucked in. But I didn't want to ride with the old man anymore. Even now, when I was safely out of his car, I thought there was something creepy about him—maybe it was just the way his voice seemed full of exclamation points. Besides, I've always been lucky getting rides.