'Pleasant dreams, Al,' he grunted in my ear and then pushed. I went rolling out into the windy Octo-ber 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, knee-deep
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-an-Awful-Dream-I-Had. And when I got to Lewiston and found my mother had died? Just a little touch of pre-cognition 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 thought-fully 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 my thumb, oddly sure it was the old man in the Dodge-he'd come back this way look-ing for me, of course he had, it gave the story that final finishing roundness.
Only it wasn't the old guy. It was a tobacco-chewing farmer in a Ford pick-up truck filled with apple bas-kets, a perfectly ordinary fellow: not old and not dead.
'Where you goin, son?' he asked, and when I told
him he said, 'That works for both of us.' Less than
forty minutes later, at twenty minutes after nine, he pulled up in front of the Central Maine Medical Cen-ter. 'Good luck. Hope your ma's on the mend.'
'Thank you,' I said, and opened the door.
'I see you been pretty nervous about it, but she'll most likely be fine. Ought to get some disinfectant on those, though.' He pointed at my hands.
