Firestarter

“Not far wrong,” Andy said.

The driver fell silent. Andy settled back and tried to cope with his headache. It seemed to have leveled off at a final screaming pitch. Had it ever been this bad before? Impossible to tell. Each time he overdid it, it seemed like the worst ever. It would be a month before he dared use the push again. He knew that two towns up the line was not nearly far enough, but it was all he could manage tonight. He was tipped over. Hastings Glen would have to do.

“Who do you pick, man?” the driver asked him.

“Huh?”

“The Series. The San Diego Padres in the World Series-how do you figure that?”

“Pretty far out,” Andy agreed. His voice came from far away, a tolling undersea bell.

“You okay, man? You look pale.”

“Headache,” Andy said. “Migraine.”

“Too much pressure,” the driver said. “I can dig it. You staying at a hotel? You need some cash? I could let you have five. Wish it was more, but I’m on my way to California, and I got to watch it careful. Just like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath.”

Andy smiled gratefully. “I think we’re okay.”

“Fine.” He glanced at Charlie, who had dozed off: “Pretty little girl, my man. Are you watching out for her?”

“As best I can,” Andy said.

“All right,” the driver said. “That’s the name of that tune.”

20

Hastings Glen was little more than a wide place in the road; at this hour all the traffic lights in town had turned to blinkers. The bearded driver in the hillbilly hat took them up the exit ramp, through the sleeping town, and down Route 40 to the Slumberland Motel, a redwood place with the skeletal remains of a harvested cornfield in back and a pinkish-red neon sign out front that stuttered the nonword VA A CY into the dark. As her sleep deepened, Charlie had tilted farther and farther to the left, until her head was resting on the driver’s blue-jeaned thigh. Andy had offered to shift her, and the driver shook his head.

“She’s fine, man. Let her sleep.” “Would you mind dropping us off a little bit past?” Andy asked. It was hard to think, but this caution came almost intuitively.

“Don’t want the night man to know you don’t have a car?” The driver smiled. “Sure, man. But a place like that, they wouldn’t give a squirt if you pedaled in on a unicycle.” The van’s tires crunched the gravel shoulder. “You positive you couldn’t use five?”

“I guess I could,” Andy said reluctantly. “Would you write down your address for me?

I’ll mail it back to you.”

The driver’s grin reappeared. “My address is ‘in transit,'” he said, getting out his wallet. “But you may see my happy smiling face again, right? Who knows. Grab onto Abe, man.” He handed the five to Andy and suddenly Andy was crying-not a lot, but crying.

“No, man,” the driver said kindly. He touched the back of Andy’s neck lightly. “Life is short and pain is long and we were all put on this earth to help each other. The comic-book philosophy of Jim Paulson in a nutshell. Take good care of the little stranger.”

“Sure,” Andy said, brushing his eyes. He put the five-dollar bill in the pocket of his corduroy coat.

“Charlie? Hon? Wake up. Just a little bit longer now.”

21

Three minutes later Charlie was leaning sleepily against him while he watched Jim Paulson go up the road to a closed restaurant, turn around, and then head back past them toward the Interstate. Andy raised his hand. Paulson raised his in return. Old Ford van with the Arabian Nights on the side, jinns and grand viziers and a mystic, floating carpet. Hope California’s good to you, guy, Andy thought, and then the two of them walked back toward the Slumberland Motel.

“I want you to wait for me outside and out of sight,” Andy said. “Okay?”

“Okay, Daddy.” Very sleepy.

He left her by an evergreen shrub and walked over to the office and rang the night bell. After about two minutes, a middle-aged man in a bathrobe appeared, polishing his glasses. He opened the door and let Andy in without a word.

“I wonder if I could have the unit down on the end of the left wing,” Andy said. “I parked there.”

“This time of year, you could have all of the west wing if you wanted it,” the night man said, and smiled around a mouthful of yellow dentures. He gave Andy a printed index card and a pen advertising business supplies. A car passed by outside, silent headlights that waxed and waned.

Andy signed the card Bruce Rozelle. Bruce was driving a 1978 Vega, New York license LMS 240. He looked at the blank marked ORGANIZATION/ COMPANY for a moment, and then, in a flash of inspiration (as much as his aching head would allow), he wrote United Vending Company of America. And checked CASH under form of payment.

Another car went by out front.

The clerk initialed the card and tucked it away. “That’s seventeen dollars and fifty cents.”

“Do you mind change?” Andy asked. “I never did get a chance to cash up, and I’m dragging around twenty pounds of silver. I hate these country milk runs.”

“Spends just as easy I don’t mind.”

“Thanks.” Andy reached into his coat pocket, pushed aside the five-dollar bill with his fingers, and brought out a fistful of quarters, nickels, and dimes. He counted out fourteen dollars, brought out some more change, and made up the rest. The clerk had been separating the coins into neat piles and now he swept them into the correct compartments of the cash drawer.

“You know,” he said, closing the drawer and looking at Andy hopefully, “I’d knock five bucks off your room bill if you could fix my cigarette machine. It’s been out of order for a week.”

Charlie walked over to the machine, which stood in the corner, pretended to look at it, and then walked back. “Not our brand,” he said. “Oh. Shit. Okay. Goodnight, buddy. You’ll find an extra blanket on the closet shelf if you should want it.”

“Fine.”

He went out. The gravel crunched beneath his feet, hideously amplified in his ears, sounding like stone cereal. He walked over to the evergreen shrub where he had left Charlie and Charlie wasn’t there. “Charlie?” No answer. He switched the room key on its long green plastic tab from one hand to the other. Both hands were suddenly sweaty. “Charlie?”

Still no answer. He thought back and now it seemed to him that the car that had gone past when he had been filling out the registration card had been slowing down. Maybe it had been a green car.

His heartbeat began to pick up, sending jolts of pain up to his skull. He tried to think what he should do if Charlie was gone, but he couldn’t think. His head hurt too badly. He-

There was a low, snorting, snoring sound from deeper back in the bushes. A sound he knew very well. He leaped toward it, gravel spurting out from under his shoes. Stiff” evergreen branches scraped his legs and raked back the tails of his corduroy jacket.

Charlie was lying on her side on the verge of the motel lawn, knees drawn up nearly to her chin, hands between them. Fast asleep. Andy stood with his eyes closed for a moment and then shook her awake for what he hoped would be the last time that night. That long, long night.

Her eyelids fluttered, and then she was looking up at him. “Daddy?” she asked, her voice was blurred, still half in her dreams. “I got out of sight like you said.”

“I know, honey,” he said. “I know you did. Come on. We’re going to bed.”

22

Twenty minutes later they were both in the double bed of Unit 16, Charlie fast asleep and breathing evenly, Andy still awake but drifting toward sleep, only the steady thump in his head still holding him up. And the questions.

They had been on the run for about a year. It was almost impossible to believe, maybe because it hadn’t seemed so much like running, not when they had been in Port City, Pennsylvania, running the Weight-Off program. Charlie had gone to school in Port City, and how could you be on the run if you were holding a job and your daughter was going to first grade? They had almost been caught in Port City, not because they had been particularly good (although they were terribly dogged, and that frightened Andy a lot) but because Andy had made that crucial lapse-he had allowed himself temporarily to forget they were fugitives.

No chance of that now.

How close were they? Still back in New York? If only he could believe that-they hadn’t got the cabby’s number; they were still tracking him down. More likely they were in Albany, crawling over the airport like maggots over a pile of meat scraps. Hastings Glen? Maybe by morning. But maybe not. Hastings Glen was fifteen miles from the airport. No need to let paranoia sweep away good sense.

I deserve it! I deserve to go in front of the cars for setting that man on fire!

His own voice replying: It could have been worse. It could have been his face.

Voices in a haunted room.

Something else came to him. He was supposed to be driving a Vega. When morning came and the night man didn’t see a Vega parked in front of Unit 16, would he just assume his United Vending Company man had pushed on? Or would he investigate? Nothing he could do about it now. He was totally wasted.

I thought there was something funny about him. He looked pale, sick. And he paid with change. He said he worked for a vending-machine company, but he couldn’t fix the cigarette machine in the lobby.