Riding the Bullet (2 page)

“Make a wish on it, boyo!” the old man cried. In his excitement his voice grew sharp and unpleasant—it was like having shards of glass stuffed into your ear. He gave his crotch a terrific tug. Something in there made a snapping sound. I didn't see how you could
yank on your crotch like that and not rip your balls right off at the stem, truss or no truss. “Wish you make on the ha'vest moon allus comes true, that's what my father said!”

So I wished that my mother would know me when I walked into her room, that her eyes would light up at once and she would say my name. I made that wish and immediately wished I could have it back again; I thought that no wish made in that fevery orange light could come to any good.

“Ah, son!” the old man said. “I wish my wife was here! I'd beg forgiveness for every sha'ap and unkind word I ever said to her!”

Twenty minutes later, with the last light of the day still in the air and the moon still hanging low and bloated in the sky, we arrived in Gates Falls. There's a yellow blinker at the intersection of Route 68 and Pleasant Street. Just before he reached it, the old man swerved to the side of the road, bumping the Dodge's right front wheel up over the curb and then back down again. It rattled my teeth. The old man looked at me with a kind of wild, defiant excitement—everything about him was wild, although I hadn't seen that at first; everything about him had that broken-glass feeling. And everything that came out of his mouth seemed to be an exclamation.

“I'll take you up there! I will, yessir! Never mind Ralph! Hell with him! You just say the word!”

I wanted to get to my mother, but the thought of another twenty miles with the smell of piss in the air and cars flashing their brights at us wasn't very pleasant. Neither was the image of the old fellow wandering and weaving across four lanes of Lisbon Street. Mostly, though, it was him. I couldn't stand another twenty miles of crotch-snatching and that excited broken-glass voice.

“Hey, no,” I said, “that's okay. You go on and take care of your brother.” I opened the door and what I'd feared happened—he reached out and took hold of my arm with his twisted old man's hand. It was the hand with which he kept tearing at his crotch.

“You just say the word!” he told me. His voice was hoarse, confidential. His fingers were pressing deep into the flesh just below my armpit. “I'll take you right to the hospital door! Ayuh! Don't matter if I never saw you before in my life nor you me! Don't matter aye, yes, no, nor maybe! I'll take you right . . . 
there!
”

“It's okay,” I repeated, and all at once I was fighting an urge to bolt out of the car, leaving my shirt behind in his grip if that was what it took to get free. It was as if he were drowning. I thought that when I moved, his grip would tighten, that he might even go for the nape of my neck, but he didn't. His fingers loosened, then slipped away entirely as I put my leg out. And I wondered, as we always do when an irrational moment of
panic passes, what I had been so afraid of in the first place. He was just an elderly carbon-based life-form in an elderly Dodge's pee-smelling ecosystem, looking disappointed that his offer had been refused. Just an old man who couldn't get comfortable in his truss. What in God's name had I been afraid of?

“I thank you for the ride and even more for the offer,” I said. “But I can go out that way—” I pointed at Pleasant Street. “—and I'll have a ride in no time.”

He was quiet for a moment, then sighed and nodded. “Ayuh, that's the best way to go,” he said. “Stay right out of town, nobody wants to give a fella ride in town, no one wants to slow down and get honked at.”

He was right about that; hitchhiking in town, even a small one like Gates Falls, was futile. I guess he
had
spent some time riding his thumb.

“But, son, are you sure? You know what they say about a bird in the hand.”

I hesitated again. He was right about a bird in the hand, too. Pleasant Street became Ridge Road a mile or so west of the blinker, and Ridge Road ran through fifteen miles of woods before arriving at Route 196 on the outskirts of Lewiston. It was almost dark, and it's always harder to get a ride at night—when headlights pick you out on a country road, you look like an escapee from Wyndham Boys' Correctional even with your hair combed and your shirt tucked in. But I didn't want to ride with the old man anymore. Even
now, when I was safely out of his car, I thought there was something creepy about him—maybe it was just the way his voice seemed full of exclamation points. Besides, I've always been lucky getting rides.

“I'm sure,” I said. “And thanks again. Really.”

“Any time, son. Any time. My wife . . .” He stopped, and I saw there were tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. I thanked him again, then slammed the door shut before he could say anything else.

I hurried across the street, my shadow appearing and disappearing in the light of the blinker. On the far side I turned and looked back. The Dodge was still there, parked beside Frank's Fountain & Fruits. By the light of the blinker and the streetlight twenty feet or so beyond the car, I could see him sitting slumped over the wheel. The thought came to me that he was dead, that I had killed him with my refusal to let him help.

Then a car came around the corner and the driver flashed his high beams at the Dodge. This time the old man dipped his own lights, and that was how I knew he was still alive. A moment later he pulled back into the street and piloted the Dodge slowly around the corner. I watched until he was gone, then looked up at the moon. It was starting to lose its orange bloat, but there was still something sinister about it. It occurred to me that I had never heard of
wishing on the moon before—the evening star, yes, but not the moon. I wished again I could take my own wish back; as the dark drew down and I stood there at the crossroads, it was too easy to think of that story about the monkey's paw.

•   •   •

I walked out Pleasant Street, waving my thumb at cars that went by without even slowing. At first there were shops and houses on both sides of the road, then the sidewalk ended and the trees closed in again, silently retaking the land. Each time the road flooded with light, pushing my shadow out ahead of me, I'd turn around, stick out my thumb, and put what I hoped was a reassuring smile on my face. And each time the oncoming car would swoosh by without slowing. Once, someone shouted out, “Get a job, monkeymeat!” and there was laughter.

I'm not afraid of the dark—or wasn't then—but I began to be afraid I'd made a mistake by not taking the old man up on his offer to drive me straight to the hospital. I could have made a sign reading
NEED A RIDE, MOTHER SICK
before starting out, but I doubted if it would have helped. Any psycho can make a sign, after all.

I walked along, sneakers scuffing the gravelly dirt of the soft shoulder, listening to the sounds of the gathering night: a dog, far away; an owl, much closer; the sigh of a rising wind. The sky was bright with the
moonlight, but I couldn't see the moon itself just now—the trees were tall here and had blotted it out for the time being.

As I left Gates farther behind, fewer cars passed me. My decision not to take the old man up on his offer seemed more foolish with each passing minute. I began to imagine my mother in her hospital bed, mouth turned down in a frozen sneer, losing her grip on life but trying to hold on to that increasingly slippery bark for me, not knowing I wasn't going to make it simply because I hadn't liked an old man's shrill voice, or the pissy smell of his car.

I breasted a steep hill and stepped back into moonlight again at the top. The trees were gone on my right, replaced by a small country graveyard. The stones gleamed in the pale light. Something small and black was crouched beside one of them, watching me. I took a step closer, curious. The black thing moved and became a woodchuck. It spared me a single reproachful red-eyed glance and was gone into the high grass. All at once I became aware that I was very tired, in fact close to exhausted. I had been running on pure adrenaline since Mrs. McCurdy called five hours before, but now that was gone. That was the bad part. The good part was that the useless sense of frantic urgency left me, at least for the time being. I had made my choice, decided on Ridge Road instead of Route 68, and there was no sense beating myself up
over it—fun is fun and done is done, my mother sometimes said. She was full of stuff like that, little Zen aphorisms that almost made sense. Sense or nonsense, this one comforted me now. If she was dead when I got to the hospital, that was that. Probably she wouldn't be. Doctor said it wasn't too bad, according to Mrs. McCurdy; Mrs. McCurdy had also said she was still a young woman. A bit on the heavy side, true, and a heavy smoker in the bargain, but still young.

Meantime, I was out here in the williwags and I was suddenly tired out—my feet felt as if they had been dipped in cement.

There was a stone wall running along the road side of the cemetery, with a break in it where two ruts ran through. I sat on the wall with my feet planted in one of these ruts. From this position I could see a good length of Ridge Road in both directions. When I saw headlights coming west, in the direction of Lewiston, I could walk back to the edge of the road and put my thumb out. In the meantime, I'd just sit here with my backpack in my lap and wait for some strength to come back into my legs.

A groundmist, fine and glowing, was rising out of the grass. The trees surrounding the cemetery on three sides rustled in the rising breeze. From beyond the graveyard came the sound of running water and the occasional plunk-plunk of a frog. The
place was beautiful and oddly soothing, like a picture in a book of romantic poems.

I looked both ways along the road. Nothing coming, not so much as a glow on the horizon. Putting my pack down in the wheelrut where I'd been dangling my feet, I got up and walked into the cemetery. A lock of hair had fallen onto my brow; the wind blew it off. The mist roiled lazily around my shoes. The stones at the back were old; more than a few had fallen over. The ones at the front were much newer. I bent, hands planted on knees, to look at one which was surrounded by almost-fresh flowers. By moonlight the name was easy to read:
GEORGE STAUB.
Below it were the dates marking the brief span of George Staub's life:
JANUARY
19, 1977, at one end,
OCTOBER
12, 1998, at the other. That explained the flowers which had only begun to wilt; October 12th was two days ago and 1998 was just two years ago. George's friends and relatives had stopped by to pay their respects. Below the name and dates was something else, a brief inscription. I leaned down farther to read it—

—and stumbled back, terrified and all too aware that I was by myself, visiting a graveyard by moonlight.

FUN IS FUN AND DONE IS DONE

was the inscription.

My mother was dead, had died perhaps at that very minute, and something had sent me a message. Something with a thoroughly unpleasant sense of humor.

I began to back slowly toward the road, listening to the wind in the trees, listening to the stream, listening to the frog, suddenly afraid I might hear another sound, the sound of rubbing earth and tearing roots as something not quite dead reached up, groping for one of my sneakers—

My feet tangled together and I fell down, thumping my elbow on a gravestone, barely missing another with the back of my head. I landed with a grassy thud, looking up at the moon which had just barely cleared the trees. It was white instead of orange now, and as bright as a polished bone.

Instead of panicking me further, the fall cleared my head. I didn't know what I'd seen, but it couldn't have been what I
thought
I'd seen; that kind of stuff might work in John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies, but it wasn't the stuff of real life.

Yes, okay, good,
a voice whispered in my head.
And if you just walk out of here now, you can go on believing that. You can go on believing it for the rest of your life.

“Fuck that,” I said, and got up. The seat of my jeans was wet, and I plucked it away from my skin. It wasn't exactly easy to reapproach the stone marking George Staub's final resting place, but it wasn't as
hard as I'd expected, either. The wind sighed through the trees, still rising, signaling a change in the weather. Shadows danced unsteadily around me. Branches rubbed together, a creaky sound off in the woods. I bent over the tombstone and read:

GEORGE STAUB
JANUARY 19, 1977–OCTOBER 12, 1998
Well Begun, Too Soon Done.

I stood there, leaning down with my hands planted just above my knees, not aware of how fast my heart had been beating until it started to slow down. A nasty little coincidence, that was all, and was it any wonder that I'd misread what was beneath the name and dates? Even without being tired and under stress, I might have read it wrong—moonlight was a notorious misleader. Case closed.

Except I
knew
what I'd read:
Fun Is Fun and Done Is Done.

My ma was dead.

“Fuck that,” I repeated, and turned away. As I did, I realized the mist curling through the grass and around my ankles had begun to brighten. I could hear the mutter of an approaching motor. A car was coming.

I hurried back through the opening in the rock wall, snagging my pack on the way by. The lights of the approaching car were halfway up the hill. I stuck out
my thumb just as they struck me, momentarily blinding me. I knew the guy was going to stop even before he started slowing down. It's funny how you can just know sometimes, but anyone who's spent a lot of time hitchhiking will tell you that it happens.

The car passed me, brake lights flaring, and swerved onto the soft shoulder near the end of the rock wall dividing the graveyard from Ridge Road. I ran to it with my backpack banging against the side of my knee. The car was a Mustang, one of the cool ones from the late sixties or early seventies. The motor rumbled loudly, the fat sound of it coming through a muffler that maybe wouldn't pass inspection the next time the sticker came due . . . but that wasn't my problem.