but I'm not an idiot, no one sells a car like this, espe-cially
one with low mileage, for only seven hundred
and fifty bucks. And the guy tells him he's doing it
because the car smells, you can't get the smell out,
he's tried and tried and nothing will take it out. You see he was on a business trip, a fairly long one, gone for at least . . .
'. . . a coupla weeks,' the driver was saying. He was smiling the way people do when they're telling a joke that really slays them. 'And when he comes back, he finds the car in the garage and his wife in the car, she's been dead practically the whole time he's been gone. I don't know if it was suicide or a heart attack or what, but she's all bloated up and the car, it's full of that smell and all he wants to do is sell it, you know.' He laughed. 'That's quite a story, huh?'
'Why wouldn't he call home?' It was my mouth, talking all by itself. My brain was frozen. 'He's gone for two weeks on a business trip and he never calls home once to see how his wife's doing?'
'Well,' the driver said, 'that's sorta beside the point, wouldn't you say? I mean hey, what a bargain-that's the point. Who wouldn't be tempted? After all, you could always drive the car with the fuckin win-dows open, right? And it's basically just a story. Fic-tion. I thought of it because of the smell in this car.
Which is fact.'
Silence. And I thought: He's waiting for me to say something, waiting for me to end this. And I wanted to. I did. Except . . . what then? What would he do then?
He rubbed the ball of his thumb over the button on his shirt, the one reading i rode the bullet at thrill village, laconia. I saw there was dirt under his fin-gernails. 'That's where I was today,' he said. 'Thrill Village. I did some work for a guy and he gave me an all-day pass. My girlfriend was gonna go with me, but she called and said she was sick, she gets these peri-ods that really hurt sometimes, they make her sick as a dog. It's too bad, but I always think, hey, what's the alternative? No rag at all, right, and then I'm in trou-ble, we both are.' He yapped, a humorless bark of sound. 'So I went by myself. No sense wasting an all-day pass. You ever been to Thrill Village?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Once. When I was twelve.'
'Who'd you go with?' he asked. 'You didn't go alone, did you? Not if you were only twelve.' I hadn't told him that part, had I? No. He was play-ing with me, that was all, swatting me idly back and forth. I thought about opening the door and just rolling out into the night, trying to tuck my head into my arms before I hit, only I knew he'd reach over and pull me back before I could get away. And I couldn't raise my arms, anyway. The best I could do was clutch my hands together.
'No,' I said. 'I went with my dad. My dad took me.'
'Did you ride the Bullet? I rode that fucker four
times. Man! It goes right upside down!' He looked at
me and uttered another empty bark of laughter. The moonlight swam in his eyes, turning them into white circles, making them into the eyes of a statue. And I understood he was more than dead; he was crazy. 'Did you ride that, Alan?'
I thought of telling him he had the wrong name, my name was Hector, but what was the use? We were coming to the end of it now.
'Yeah,' I whispered. Not a single light out there except for the moon. The trees rushed by, writhing like spontaneous dancers at a tent-show revival. The road rushed under us. I looked at the speedometer and saw he was up to eighty miles an hour. We were riding the bullet right now, he and I; the dead drive fast. 'Yeah, the Bullet. I rode it.'
'Nah,' he said. He drew on his cigarette, and once again I watched the little trickles of smoke escape from the stitched incision on his neck. 'You never. Especially not with your father. You got into the line, all right, but you were with your ma. The line was long, the line for the Bullet always is, and she didn't want to stand out there in the hot sun. She was fat even then, and the heat bothered her. But you pestered her all day, pestered pestered pestered, and here's the joke of it, man-when you finally got to the head of the line, you chickened. Didn't you?' 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?'
