' The Road Virus Heads North,' she read. 'I never noticed that when my boys were lugging stuff out. Is it the tide, do you think?'
'Must be.' Kinnell couldn't take his eyes off the blond kid's grin. I know something, the grin said. I know something you never will.
'Well, I guess you'd have to believe the fella who did this was high on drugs,' she said, sounding upset - authentically upset, Kinnell thought. 'No wonder he could kill himself and break his mamma's heart.'
'I've got to be heading north myself,' Kinnell said, tucking the picture under his arm. 'Thanks for-'
' Mr. Kinnell?'
'Yes?'
'Can I see your driver's license?' She apparently found nothing ironic or even amusing in this request. 'I ought to write the number on the back of your check.'
Kinnell put the picture down so he could dig for his wallet. 'Sure. You bet.'
The woman who'd bought the Star Wars placemats had paused on her way back to her car to watch some of the soap opera playing on the lawn TV. Now she glanced at the picture, which Kinnell had propped against his shins.
'Ag,' she said. 'Who'd want an ugly old thing like that? I'd think about it every time I turned the lights out.'
'What's wrong with that?' Kinnell asked.
Kinnell's Aunt Trudy lived in Wells, which is about six miles north of the Maine - New Hampshire border. Kinnell pulled off at the exit which circled the bright green Wells water tower, the one with the comic sign on it (KEEP MAINE GREEN, BRING MONEY in letters four feet high), and five minutes later he was turning into the driveway of her neat little saltbox house. No TV sinking into the lawn on paper ashtrays here, only Aunt Trudy's amiable masses of flowers. Kinnell needed to pee and hadn't wanted to take care of that in a roadside rest stop when he could come here, but he also wanted an update on all the family gossip. Aunt Trudy retailed the best; she was to gossip what Zabar's is to deli. Also, of course, he wanted to show her his new acquisition.
She came out to meet him, gave him a hug, and covered his face with her patented little birdy-kisses, the ones that had made him shiver all over as a kid.
'Want to see something?' he asked her. 'It'll blow your pantyhose off.'
'What a charming thought,' Aunt Trudy said, clasping her elbows in her palms and looking at him with amusement.
He opened the trunk and took out his new picture. It affected her, all right, but not in the way he had expected. The color fell out of her face in a sheet-he had never seen anything quite like it in his entire life. 'It's horrible,' she said in a tight, controlled voice. 'I hate it. I suppose I can see what attracted you to it, Richie, but what you play at, it does for, real. Put it back in your trunk, like a good boy. And when you get to the Saco River, why don't you pull over into the breakdown lane and throw it in?'
He gaped at her. Aunt Trudy's lips were pressed tightly together to stop them trembling, and now her long, thin hands were not just clasping her elbows but clutching them, as if to keep her from flying away. At that moment she looked not sixty-one but ninety-one.
' Auntie?' Kinnell spoke tentatively, not sure what was going on here. 'Auntie, what's wrong?'
'That.' she said, unlocking her right hand and pointing at the picture. 'I'm surprised you don't feel it more strongly yourself, an imaginative guy like you.'
Well, he felt something, obviously he had, or he never would have unlimbered his checkbook in the first place. Aunt Trudy was feeling something else, though ... or something more. He turned the picture around so he could see it (he had been holding it out for her, so the side with the Dymotaped title faced him), and looked at it again. What he saw hit him in the chest and belly like a one-two punch.
The picture had changed, that was punch number one. Not much, but it had dearly changed. The young blond man's smile was wider, revealing more of those filed cannibal-teeth. His eyes were squinted down more, too, giving his face a look which was more knowing and nastier than ever.
The degree of a smile ... the vista of sharpened teeth widening slightly ... the tilt and squint of the eyes ... all pretty subjective stuff. A person could be mistaken about things like that, and of course he hadn't really studied the painting before buying it. Also, there had been the distraction of Mrs. Diment, who could probably talk the cock off a brass monkey.
But there was also punch number two, and that wasn't subjective. In the darkness of the Audi's trunk, the blond young man had turned his left arm, the one cocked on the door, so that Kinnell could now see a tattoo which had been hidden before. It was a vine-wrapped dagger with a bloody tip. Below it were words. Kinnell could make Out DEATH BEFORE, and he supposed you didn't have to be a big best-selling novelist to figure out the word that was still hidden. DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR was, after all, just the sort of a thing a hoodoo traveling man like this was apt to have on his arm. And an ace of spades or a pot plant on the other one, Kinnell thought.
'You hate it, don't you, Auntie?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said, and now he saw an even more amazing thing: she had turned away from him, pretending to look out at the street (which was dozing and deserted in the hot afternoon sunlight), so she wouldn't have to look at the picture. 'In fact, Auntie loathes it. Now put it away and come on into the house. I'll bet you need to use the bathroom.'
Aunt Trudy recovered her savoir faire almost as soon as the watercolor was back in the trunk. They talked about Kinnell's mother (Pasadena), his sister (Baton Rouge), and his ex-wife, Sally (Nashua). Sally was a space- case who ran an animal shelter out of a double-wide trailer and published two newsletters each month. Survivors was filled with astral info and supposedly true tales of the spirit world; Visitors contained the reports of people who'd had close encounters with space aliens. Kinnell no longer went to fan conventions which specialized in fantasy and horror. One Sally in a lifetime, he sometimes told people, was enough.
When Aunt Trudy walked him back out to the car, it was fourthirty and he'd turned down the obligatory dinner invitation. 'I can get most of the way back to Derry in daylight, if I leave now.'
'Okay,' she said. 'And I'm sorry I was so mean about your picture. Of course you like it, you've always liked your ... your oddities. It just hit me the wrong way. That awful face. ' She shuddered. 'As if we were looking at him .
