“Right,” Sam says, “that’s why I signed that contract that says I won’t booze—”
“It’s bullshit!” Rick explodes.
Sam shrugs. “See you tomorrow. Good game, Rick. You were on top the whole time.”
Outside in the below zero, the Mutant is crabbing along the side of the Main Road. She looks half-dead from the cold. Sam toes down on the gas. Before he passes her, though, he closes his fist and thumps the steering wheel in frustration. He sighs in unison with his brakes as he pulls over.
She throws all the cold she must be feeling into a freezingly scornful glance and keeps on trucking.
Under her coat, she is wearing a couple of layers of those oversized shirts that are supposed to pass for a dress, over tights, with her ragged Levis pulled on after the game. At least she has her head covered with her piece of brocade. It strikes Sam as funny, how he is getting used to her looks. The headrag no longer seems to cover nakedness. During the girls’ game tonight, it suddenly struck him that the other girls all seemed to have an awful lot of hair on their heads.
Creeping along next to her, he calls, “Don’t be stupid. I won’t put you out on the road again.”
She trudges a few more steps before she comes to a sudden halt.
He stops, throws the truck into park and jumps out to help her in—and she needs it. Her whole body is so tensed against the cold, she’s almost incapable of flexing her joints adequately to climb into the truck, or even to let go of her gym bag to let him take it.
“You had a good game,” he says, as soon as she’s on board.
Huddling in the corner, she makes no response. Maybe she can’t—her teeth are chattering. They’ll be in the village before the truck’s heater kicks in.
He shivers himself. “Want some cocoa?”
She nods.
He plugs in an old tape and they listen to the Droogs without conversation until he stops at the Corner.
One of the first books Romney had gotten him to read was A Clockwork Orange. The teacher had noticed a Droogs cassette sticking out of Sam’s unzipped duffel and asked him immediately if he knew the name had been taken from the Burgess novel. Sam hadn’t. As it turned out, for Sam it had been no more difficult to translate the invented slang in the novel than it was to decode standard American English in print. It had been a major revelation that a writer could actually make up words to tell a story more effectively, the way musicians sometimes invented sounds to make a song.
Leaving the truck running, he ducks into the Corner to buy them cocoa and a couple of jelly donuts. Settling behind the wheel again, he pops out the Droogs and inserts a blues dub. He drinks his cocoa and concentrates on Earl King’s “Time for the Sun to Rise.” At the bridge, he is almost swept away with it—almost forgets he is not alone and he is embarrassed to open his eyes and realize he has been crooning along with it.
“Wow.” The Mutant shudders in admiration as the cut ends. “Good shit.” She wipes her fingertips over her lips. “I was hungry.” She seems surprised. She is looking at him curiously, as if she hadn’t particularly noticed him before.
He reaches for the gearshift. “I’d better take you home.”
“Tell you what, take me over the Mill. It’s spooky.” Suddenly cheery, her eyes sparkling as the sugar energizes her, she shivers and hugs herself. “You ever been inside? I’ll give you a tour.”
He hesitates. “Maybe some day it isn’t so frigging cold?”
“Those walls are a couple feet thick. It’s not bad inside at all. It’s really an amazing place. I can’t believe you’ve never been inside.”
He doesn’t have to meet a schedule nor even work on a game night. It’s up to him whether he wants the hours and the wages in his pocket. Friday is the night his father’s only other employee, Jonesy, takes off, but keeping the place open only requires one man. How long could it take to shine a flashlight around the abandoned Mill and make Gauthier feel like he’s impressed with how spooky it is? She’s trying, in her ignorant way, to say thank you. She needs to feel like she’s doing something in return. And he wants to make up for putting her out on the road.
She has him park the truck in the lot at the newly lighted Playground, which strikes him as spooky enough on its own—nevermind the Mill. With the flashlight he keeps under the seat and the one from his toolbox in the flatbed, they each have something to light their way through the tangle of icy underbrush along Mill Brook’s edge to the hulking darkness of the abandoned structure. Sam follows the Mutant, hoping she knows what she is doing. The arc lights from the Playground help them find the path. Against the cold black sky the outline of the building is like a cut-out, a long rectangular mass with a square tower on one end.
He can smell the decay and abandonment of the Mill before its mass looms over them and blocks the cutting wind from the frozen brook. It stinks of birdshit and worse, as if the Mill itself were still spilling human waste from its nineteenth-century sewage system into the water. The Mutant shows him a small wooden door in the narrow end of the building, a service access of some kind, he guesses. It is padlocked but she has a key.
“Broke the old one off and installed this one
