Everything's Eventual

   Except I knew what I'd read: Fun Is Fun and Done Is Done.

   My Ma was dead.

   'Fuck that,' I repeated, and turned away. As I did, I realized the mist curling through the grass and around my ankles had begun to brighten. I could hear the mutter of an approaching motor. A car was coming.

   I hurried back through the opening in the rock wall, snagging my pack on the way by. The lights of the approaching car were halfway up the hill. I stuck out my thumb just as they struck me, momentarily blinding me. I knew the guy was going to stop even before he started slowing down. It's funny how you can just know sometimes, but anyone who's spent a lot of time hitchhiking will tell you that it happens.

   The car passed me, brakelights flaring, and swerved onto the soft shoulder near the end of the rock wall dividing the graveyard from Ridge Road. I ran to it with my backpack banging against the side of my knee. The car was a Mustang, one of the cool ones from the late sixties or early seventies. The motor rumbled loudly, the fat sound of it coming through a muffler that maybe wouldn't pass inspection the next time the sticker came due . . . but that wasn't my problem.

   I swung the door open and slid inside. As I put my backpack between my feet an odor struck me, something almost familiar and a trifle unpleasant. 'Thank you,' I said. 'Thanks a lot.'

   The guy behind the wheel was wearing faded jeans and a black teeshirt with the arms cut off. His skin was tanned, the muscles heavy, and his right bicep was ringed with a blue barbwire tattoo. He was wearing a green John Deere cap turned around backward. There was a button pinned near the round collar of his tee-shirt, but I couldn't read it from my angle. 'Not a problem,' he said. 'You headed up the city?'

   'Yes,' I said. In this part of the world 'up the city' meant Lewiston, the only city of any size north of Portland. As I closed the door, I saw one of those pine-tree air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. That was what I'd smelled. It sure wasn't my night as far as odors went; first pee and now artificial pine. Still, it was a ride. I should have been relieved. And as the guy accelerated back onto Ridge Road, the big engine of his vintage Mustang growling, I tried to tell myself I was relieved.

   'What's going on for you in the city?' the driver asked. I put him at about my age, some townie who maybe went to vocational-technical school in Auburn or maybe worked in one of the few remaining textile mills in the area. He'd probably fixed up this Mustang in his spare time, because that was what townie kids did: drank beer, smoked a little rope, fixed up their cars. Or their motorcycles.

   'My brother's getting married. I'm going to be his best man.' I told this lie with absolutely no premeditation. I didn't want him to know about my mother, although I didn't know why. Something was wrong here. I didn't know what it was or why I should think such a thing in the first place, but I knew. I was positive. 'The rehearsal's tomorrow. Plus a stag party tomorrow night.'

   'Yeah? That right?' He turned to look at me, wide-set eyes and handsome face, full lips smiling slightly, the eyes unbelieving.

   'Yeah,' I said.

   I was afraid. Just like that I was afraid again. Something was wrong, had maybe started being wrong when the old geezer in the Dodge had invited me to wish on the infected moon instead of on a star. Or maybe from the moment I'd picked up the telephone and listened to Mrs. McCurdy saying she had some bad news for me, but 'twasn't s'bad as it could've been.

   'Well that's good,' said the young man in the turned-around cap. 'A brother getting married, man, that's good. What's your name?'

   I wasn't just afraid, I was terrified. Everything was wrong, everything, and I didn't know why or how it could possibly have happened so fast. I did know one thing, however: I wanted the driver of the Mustang to know my name no more than I wanted him to know my business in Lewiston. Not that I'd be getting to Lewiston. I was suddenly sure that I would never see Lewiston again. It was like knowing the car was going to stop. And there was the smell, I knew something about that, as well. It wasn't the air freshener; it was something beneath the air freshener.

   'Hector,' I said, giving him my roommate's name. 'Hector Passmore, that's me.' It came out of my dry mouth smooth and calm, and that was good. Something inside me insisted that I must not let the driver of the Mustang know that I sensed something wrong. It was my only chance.

   He turned toward me a little, and I could read his button: I RODE THE BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE, LACONIA. I knew the place; had been there, although not for a long time.

   I could also see a heavy black line which circled his throat just as the barbwire tattoo circled his upper arm, only the line around the driver's throat wasn't a tattoo. Dozens of black marks crossed it vertically. They were the stitches put in by whoever had put his head back on his body.

   'Nice to meet you, Hector,' he said. 'I'm George Staub.'

   My hand seemed to float out like a hand in a dream. I wish that it had been a dream, but it wasn't; it had all the sharp edges of reality. The smell on top was pine. The smell underneath was some chemical, probably formaldehyde. I was riding with a dead man.

The Mustang rushed along Ridge Road at sixty miles an hour, chasing its high beams under the light of a polished button moon. To either side the trees crowding the road danced and writhed in the wind. George Staub smiled at me with his empty eyes, then let go of my hand and returned his attention to the road. In high school I'd read Dracula, and now a line from it recurred, clanging in my head like a cracked bell: The dead drive fast.

   Can't let him know I know. This also clanged in my head. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. Can't let him know, can't let him, can't. I wondered where the old man was now. Safe at his brother's? Or had the old man been in on it all along? Was he maybe right behind us, driving along in his old Dodge, hunched over the wheel and snapping at his truss? Was he dead, too? Probably not. The dead drive fast, according to Bram Stoker, and the old man had never gone a tick over forty-five. I felt demented laughter bubbling in the back of my throat and held it down. If I laughed he'd know. And he mustn't know, because that was my only hope.

   'There's nothing like a wedding,' he said.

   'Yeah,' I said, 'everyone should do it at least twice.'

   My hands had settled on each other and were squeezing. I could feel the nails digging into the backs of them just above the knuckles, but the sensation was distant. I couldn't let him know, that was the thing. The woods were all around us, the only light was the heartless bone-glow of the moon, and I couldn't let him know that I knew he was dead. Because he wasn't a ghost, nothing so harmless. You might see a ghost, but what sort of thing stopped to give you a ride? What kind of creature was that? Zombie? Ghoul? Vampire? None of the above?

   George Staub laughed. 'Do it twice! Yeah, man, that's my whole family!'

   'Mine, too,' I said. My voice sounded calm, just the voice of a hitchhiker passing the time of day—night, in this case—making agreeable conversation as some small payment for his ride. 'There's really nothing like a funeral.'

   'Wedding,' he said mildly. In the light from the dashboard his face was waxy, the face of a corpse before the makeup went on. That turned-around cap was particularly horrible. It made you wonder how much was left beneath it. I had read somewhere that morticians sawed off the top of the skull and took out the brains and put in some sort of chemically treated cotton. To keep the face from falling in, maybe.

   'Wedding,' I said through numb lips, and even laughed a little— a light little chuckle. 'Wedding's what I meant to say.'

   'We always say what we mean to say, that's what I think,' the driver said. He was still smiling.

   Yes, Freud had believed that, too, I'd read it in Psych 101. I doubted if this fellow knew much about Freud, I didn't think many Freudian scholars wore sleeveless tee-shirts and baseball caps turned around backward, but he knew enough. Funeral, I'd said. Dear Christ, I'd said funeral. It came to me then that he was playing me. I didn't