Riding the Bullet (5 page)

I pushed up on my elbows and opened my eyes again, more cautiously this time. I think I already knew where I was, and one look around was enough to confirm it: lying on my back in the little graveyard at the top of the hill on Ridge Road. The moon was almost directly overhead now, fiercely bright but much smaller than it had been only a few moments before. The mist was deeper as well, lying over the cemetery like a blanket. A few markers poked up through it like stone islands. I tried getting to my feet and another bolt of pain went through the back of my head. I put my hand there and felt a lump. There was sticky wetness, as well. I looked at my hand. In the moonlight, the blood streaked across my palm looked black.

On my second try I succeeded in getting up, and stood there swaying among the tombstones, knee-deep in mist. I turned around, saw the break in the rock wall and Ridge Road beyond it. I couldn't see my
pack because the mist had overlaid it, but I knew it was there. If I walked out to the road in the lefthand wheelrut of the lane, I'd find it. Hell, would likely stumble over it.

So here was my story, all neatly packaged and tied up with a bow: I had stopped for a rest at the top of this hill, had gone inside the cemetery to have a little look around, and while backing away from the grave of one George Staub had tripped over my own large and stupid feet. Fell down, banged my head on a marker. How long had I been unconscious? I wasn't savvy enough to tell time by the changing position of the moon with to-the-minute accuracy, but it had to have been at least an hour. Long enough to have a dream that I'd gotten a ride with a dead man. What dead man? George Staub, of course, the name I'd read on a grave-marker just before the lights went out. It was the classic ending, wasn't it? Gosh-What-an-Awful-Dream-I-Had. And when I got to Lewiston and found my mother had died? Just a little touch of pre-cognition in the night, put it down to that. It was the sort of story you might tell years later, near the end of a party, and people would nod their heads thoughtfully and look solemn and some dinkleberry with leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket would say there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in our philosophy and then—

“Then shit,” I croaked. The top of the mist was
moving slowly, like mist on a clouded mirror. “I'm never talking about this. Never, not in my whole life, not even on my deathbed.”

But it had all happened just the way I remembered it, of that I was sure. George Staub had come along and picked me up in his Mustang, Ichabod Crane's old pal with his head stitched on instead of under his arm, demanding that I choose. And I
had
chosen—faced with the oncoming lights of the first house, I had bartered away my mother's life with hardly a pause. It might be understandable, but that didn't make the guilt of it any less. No one had to know, however; that was the good part. Her death would look natural—hell, would
be
natural—and that's the way I intended to leave it.

I walked out of the graveyard in the lefthand rut, and when my foot struck my pack, I picked it up and slung it back over my shoulders. Lights appeared at the bottom of the hill as if someone had given them the cue. I stuck out my thumb, oddly sure it was the old man in the Dodge—he'd come back this way looking for me, of course he had, it gave the story that final finishing roundness.

Only it wasn't the old guy. It was a tobacco-chewing farmer in a Ford pick-up truck filled with apple baskets, a perfectly ordinary fellow: not old and not dead.

“Where you goin, son?” he asked, and when I told him he said, “That works for both of us.” Less than
forty minutes later, at twenty minutes after nine, he pulled up in front of the Central Maine Medical Center. “Good luck. Hope your ma's on the mend.”

“Thank you,” I said, and opened the door.

“I see you been pretty nervous about it, but she'll most likely be fine. Ought to get some disinfectant on those, though.” He pointed at my hands.

I looked down at them and saw the deep, purpling crescents on the backs. I remembered clutching them together, digging in with my nails, feeling it but unable to stop. And I remembered Staub's eyes, filled up with moonlight like radiant water.
Did you ride the Bullet?
he'd asked me.
I rode that fucker four times.

“Son?” the man driving the pick-up asked. “You all right?”

“Huh?”

“You come over all shivery.”

“I'm okay,” I said. “Thanks again.” I slammed the door of the pickup and went up the wide walk past the line of parked wheelchairs gleaming in the moonlight.

I walked to the information desk, reminding myself that I had to look surprised when they told me she was dead, had to look surprised, they'd think it was funny if I didn't . . . or maybe they'd just think I was in shock . . . or that we didn't get along . . . or . . .

I was so deep in these thoughts that I didn't at first grasp what the woman behind the desk had told me. I had to ask her to repeat it.

“I said that she's in room 487, but you can't go up just now. Visiting hours end at nine.”

“But . . .” I felt suddenly woozy. I gripped the edge of the desk. The lobby was lit by fluorescents, and in that bright even glare the cuts on the backs of my hands stood out boldly—eight small purple crescents like grins, just above the knuckles. The man in the pick-up was right, I ought to get some disinfectant on those.

The woman behind the desk was looking at me patiently. The plaque in front of her said she was
YVONNE EDERLE.

“But is she all right?”

She looked at her computer. “What I have here is S. Stands for satisfactory. And four is a general population floor. If your mother had taken a turn for the worse, she'd be in ICU. That's on three. I'm sure if you come back tomorrow, you'll find her just fine. Visiting hours begin at—”

“She's my ma,” I said. “I hitchhiked all the way down from the University of Maine to see her. Don't you think I could go up, just for a few minutes?”

“Exceptions are sometimes made for immediate family,” she said, and gave me a smile. “You just hang on a second. Let me see what I can do.” She picked up the phone and punched a couple of buttons, no doubt calling the nurse's station on the fourth floor, and I could see the course of the next two minutes as if I
really
did
have second sight. Yvonne the Information Lady would ask if the son of Jean Parker in 487 could come up for a minute or two—just long enough to give his mother a kiss and an encouraging word—and the nurse would say oh God, Mrs. Parker died not fifteen minutes ago, we just sent her down to the morgue, we haven't had a chance to update the computer, this is so terrible.

The woman at the desk said, “Muriel? It's Yvonne. I have a young man here down here at the desk, his name is—” She looked at me, eyebrows raised, and I gave her my name. “—Alan Parker. His mother is Jean Parker, in 487? He wonders if he could just . . .”

She stopped. Listened. On the other end the nurse on the fourth floor was no doubt telling her that Jean Parker was dead.

“All right,” Yvonne said. “Yes, I understand.” She sat quietly for a moment, looking off into space, then put the mouthpiece of the telephone against her shoulder and said, “She's sending Anne Corrigan down to peek in on her. It will only be a second.”

“It never ends,” I said.

Yvonne frowned. “I beg pardon?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It's been a long night and—”

“—and you're worried about your mom. Of course. I think you're a very good son to drop everything the way you did and come on the run.”

I suspected Yvonne Ederle's opinion of me would
have taken a drastic drop if she'd heard my conversation with the young man behind the wheel of the Mustang, but of course she hadn't. That was a little secret, just between George and me.

It seemed that hours passed as I stood there under the bright fluorescents, waiting for the nurse on the fourth floor to come back on the line. Yvonne had some papers in front of her. She trailed her pen down one of them, putting neat little check marks beside some of the names, and it occurred to me that if there really was an Angel of Death, he or she was probably just like this woman, a slightly overworked functionary with a desk, a computer, and too much paperwork. Yvonne kept the phone pinched between her ear and one raised shoulder. The loudspeaker said that Dr. Farquahr was wanted in radiology, Dr. Farquahr. On the fourth floor a nurse named Anne Corrigan would now be looking at my mother, lying dead in her bed with her eyes open, the stroke-induced sneer of her mouth finally relaxing.

Yvonne straightened as a voice came back on the line. She listened, then said: “All right, yes, I understand. I will. Of course I will. Thank you, Muriel.” She hung up the telephone and looked at me solemnly. “Muriel says you can come up, but you can only visit for five minutes. Your mother's had her evening meds, and she's very soupy.”

I stood there, gaping at her.

Her smile faded a little bit. “Are you sure you're all right, Mr. Parker?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess I just thought—”

Her smile came back. It was sympathetic this time. “Lots of people think that,” she said. “It's understandable. You get a call out of the blue, you rush to get here . . . it's understandable to think the worst. But Muriel wouldn't let you up on her floor if your mother wasn't fine. Trust me on that.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

As I started to turn away, she said: “Mr. Parker? If you came from the University of Maine up north, may I ask why you're wearing that button? Thrill Village is in New Hampshire, isn't it?”

I looked down at the front of my shirt and saw the button pinned to the breast pocket:
I RODE THE BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE, LACONIA.
I remembered thinking he intended to rip my heart out. Now I understood: he had pinned his button on my shirt just before pushing me into the night. It was his way of marking me, of making our encounter impossible not to believe. The cuts on the backs of my hands said so, the button on my shirt said so, too. He had asked me to choose and I had chosen.

So how could my mother still be alive?

“This?” I touched it with the ball of my thumb, even polished it a little. “It's my good luck charm.” The lie was so horrible that it had a kind of splendor.
“I got it when I was there with my mother, a long time ago. She took me on the Bullet.”

Yvonne the Information Lady smiled as if this were the sweetest thing she had ever heard. “Give her a nice hug and kiss,” she said. “Seeing you will send her off to sleep better than any of the pills the doctors have.” She pointed. “The elevators are over there, around the corner.”

With visiting hours over, I was the only one waiting for a car. There was a litter basket off to the left, by the door to the newsstand, which was closed and dark. I tore the button off my shirt and threw it in the basket. Then I rubbed my hand on my pants. I was still rubbing it when one of the elevator doors opened. I got in and pushed for four. The car began to rise. Above the floor buttons was a poster announcing a blood drive for the following week. As I read it, an idea came to me . . . except it wasn't so much an idea as a certainty. My mother was dying now, at this very second, while I rode up to her floor in this slow industrial elevator. I had made the choice; it therefore fell to me to find her. It made perfect sense.

•   •   •

The elevator door opened on another poster. This one showed a cartoon finger pressed to big red cartoon lips. Beneath it was a line reading
OUR PATIENTS APPRECIATE YOUR QUIET!
Beyond the elevator lobby was a corridor going right and left. The odd-numbered
rooms were to the left. I walked down that way, my sneakers seeming to gain weight with every step. I slowed in the four-seventies, then stopped entirely between 481 and 483. I couldn't do this. Sweat as cold and sticky as half-frozen syrup crept out of my hair in little trickles. My stomach was knotted up like a fist inside a slick glove. No, I couldn't do it. Best to turn around and skedaddle like the cowardly chickenshit I was. I'd hitchhike out to Harlow and call Mrs. McCurdy in the morning. Things would be easier to face in the morning.

I started to turn, and then a nurse poked her head out of the room two doors up . . . my mother's room. “Mr. Parker?” she asked in a low voice.

For a wild moment I almost denied it. Then I nodded.

“Come in. Hurry. She's going.”

They were the words I'd expected, but they still sent a cramp of terror through me and buckled my knees.

The nurse saw this and came hurrying toward me, her skirt rustling, her face alarmed. The little gold pin on her breast read
ANNE CORRIGAN.
“No, no, I just meant the
sedative
 . . . She's going to sleep. Oh my God, I'm so stupid. She's fine, Mr. Parker, I gave her her Ambien and she's going, to sleep, that's all I meant. You aren't going to faint, are you?” She took my arm.

“No,” I said, not knowing if I was going to faint or not. The world was swooping and there was a buzzing in my ears. I thought of how the road had leaped toward the car, a black-and-white movie road in all that silver moonlight.
Did you ride the Bullet? Man, I rode that fucker four times.

Anne Corrigan lead me into the room and I saw my mother. She had always been a big woman, and the hospital bed was small and narrow, but she still looked almost lost in it. Her hair, now more gray than black, was spilled across the pillow. Her hands lay on top of the sheet like a child's hands, or even a doll's. There was no frozen stroke-sneer such as the one I'd imagined on her face, but her complexion was yellow. Her eyes were closed, but when the nurse beside me murmured her name, they opened. They were a deep and iridescent blue, the youngest part of her, and perfectly alive. For a moment they looked nowhere, and then they found me. She smiled and tried to hold out her arms. One of them came up. The other trembled, rose a little bit, then fell back. “Al,” she whispered.