"My fault. I can't feel what I'm doing yet."
"I--"
She stopped, seemingly at a loss. I suddenly realized that she was scared. I felt my first reaction to her swim over me again--to protect her and take care of her, make her not afraid. "I need a ride," she finished in a rush. "I didn't dare ask any of them." She made a barely perceptible gesture toward the truckers in the booth.
How can I make you understand that I would have given anything--anything--to be able to tell her, Sure, finish your coffee, I'm parked right outside. It sounds crazy to say I felt that way after half a dozen words out of her mouth, and the same number out of mine, but I did. Looking at her was like looking at the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo come to breathing life. And there was another feeling. It was as if a sudden, powerful light had been turned on in the confused darkness of my mind. It would make it easier if I could say she was a pickup and I was a fast man with the ladies, quick with a funny line and lots of patter, but she wasn't and I wasn't. All I knew was I didn't have what she needed and it tore me up.
"I'm thumbing," I told her. "A cop kicked me off the interstate and I only came here to get out of the cold. I'm sorry."
"Are you from the university?"
"I was. I quit before they could fire me."
"Are you going home?"
"No home to go to. I was a state ward. I got to school on a scholarship. I blew it. Now I don't know where I'm going." My life story in five sentences. I guess it made me feel depressed.
She laughed--the sound made me run hot and cold. "We're cats out of the same bag, I guess."
I thought she said cats. I thought so. Then. But I've had time to think, in here, and more and more it seems to me that she might have said rats. Rats out of the same bag. Yes. And they are not the same, are they?
I was about to make my best conversational shot--something witty like "Is that so?"--when a hand came down on my shoulder.
I turned around. It was one of the truckers from the booth. He had blond stubble on his chin and there was a wooden kitchen match poking out of his mouth. He smelled of engine oil and looked like something out of a Steve Ditko drawing.
"I think you're done with that coffee," he said. His lips parted around the match in a grin. He had a lot of very white teeth.
"What?"
"You stinking the place up, fella. You are a fella, aren't you? Kind of hard to tell."
"You aren't any rose yourself," I said. "What's that after-shave, handsome? Eau de Crankcase?"
He gave me a hard shot across the side of the face with his open hand. I saw little black dots.
"Don't fight in here," the short-order cook said. "If you're going to scramble him, do it outside."
"Come on, you goddammed commie," the trucker said.
This is the spot where the girl is supposed to say something like "Unhand him" or "You brute." She wasn't saying anything. She was watching both of us with feverish intensity. It was scary. I think it was the first time I'd noticed how huge her eyes really were.
"Do I have to sock you again?"
"No. Come on, shitheels."
I don't know how that jumped out of me. I don't like to fight. I'm not a good fighter. I'm an even worse name-caller. But I was angry, just then. It came up on me all at once that I wanted to kill him.
Maybe he got a mental whiff of it. For just a second a shade of uncertainty flicked over his face, an unconscious wondering if maybe he hadn't picked the wrong hippie. Then it was gone. He wasn't going to back off from some long-haired elitist effeminate snob who used the flag to wipe his ass with--at least not in front of his buddies. Not a big ole truck-driving son-of-a-gun like him.
The anger pounded over me again. Faggot? Faggot? I felt out of control, and it was good to feel that way. My tongue was thick in my mouth. My stomach was a slab.
We walked across to the door, and my buddy's buddies almost broke their backs getting up to watch the fun.
Nona? I thought of her, but only in an absent, back-of-my-mind way. I knew Nona would be there. Nona would take care of me. I knew it the same way I knew it would be cold outside. It was strange to know that about a girl I had only met five minutes before. Strange, but I didn't think about that until later. My mind was taken up--no, almost blotted out--by the heavy cloud of rage. I felt homicidal.
The cold was so clear and so clean that it felt as if we were cutting it with our bodies like knives. The frosted gravel of the parking lot gritted harshly under his heavy boots and under my shoes. The moon, full and bloated, looked down on us with a vapid eye. It was faintly ringed, suggesting bad weather on the way. The sky was as black as a night in hell. We left tiny dwarfed shadows behind our feet in the monochrome glare of a single sodium light set high on a pole beyond the parked rigs. Our breath plumed the air in short bursts. The trucker turned to me, his gloved fists balled.
"Okay, you son-of-a-bitch," he said.
I seemed to be swelling--my whole body seemed to be swelling. Somehow, numbly, I knew that my intellect was about to be eclipsed by an invisible something that I had never suspected might be in me. It was terrifying--but at the same time I welcomed it, desired it, lusted for it. In that last instant of coherent thought it seemed that my body had become a stone pyramid or a cyclone that could sweep everything in front of it like colored pick-up sticks. The trucker seemed small, puny, insignificant. I laughed at him. I laughed, and the sound was as black and as bleak as that moonstruck sky overhead.
He came at me swinging his fists. I batted down his right, took his left on the side of my face without feeling it, and then kicked him in the guts. The air barfed out of him in a white cloud. He tried to back away, holding himself and coughing.
I ran around in back of him, still laughing like some farmer's dog barking at the moon, and I had pounded him three times before he could make even a quarter turn--the neck, the shoulder, one red ear.
He made a yowling noise, and one of his flailing hands brushed my nose. The fury that had taken me over mushroomed and I kicked him again, bringing my foot up high and hard, like a punter. He screamed into the night and I heard a rib snap. He folded up and I jumped him.
At the trial one of the other truck drivers testified I was like a wild animal. And I was. I can't remember much of it, but I can remember that, snarling and growling at him like a wild dog.
I straddled him, grabbed double handfuls of his greasy hair, and began to rub his face into the gravel. In the flat glare of the sodium light his blood seemed black, like beetle's blood.
"Jesus, stop it!" somebody yelled.
Hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled me off. I saw whirling faces and I struck at them.
The trucker was trying to creep away. His face was a staring mask of blood from which his dazed eyes peered. I began to kick him, dodging away from the others, grunting with satisfaction each time I connected on him.
He was beyond fighting back. All he knew was to try to get away. Each time I kicked him his eyes would squeeze closed, like the eyes of a tortoise, and he would halt. Then he would start to crawl again. He looked stupid. I decided I was going to kill him. I was going to kick him to death. Then I would kill the rest of them--all but Nona.
I kicked him again and he flopped over on his back and looked up at me dazedly.
"Uncle," he croaked. "I cry Uncle. Please. Please--"
I knelt down beside him, feeling the gravel bite into my knees through my thin jeans.
"Here you are, handsome," I whispered. "Here's your uncle."
I hooked my hands onto his throat.
Three of them jumped me all at once and knocked me off him. I got up, still grinning, and started toward them. They backed away, three big men, all of them scared green.
And it clicked off.
Just like that it clicked off and it was just me, standing in the parking lot of Joe's Good Eats, breathing hard and feeling sick and horrified.
I turned and looked back toward the diner. The girl was there; her beautiful features
were lit with triumph. She raised one fist to shoulder height in salute like the one those black guys gave at the Olympics that time.
I turned back to the man on the ground. He was still trying to crawl away, and when I approached him his eyeballs rolled fearfully.
"Don't you touch him!" one of his friends cried.
I looked at them, confused. "I'm sorry ... I didn't mean to ... to hurt him so bad. Let me help--"
"You get out of here, that's what you do," the short-order cook said. He was standing in front of Nona at the foot of the steps, clutching a greasy spatula in one hand. "I'm calling the cops."
"Hey, man, he was the guy who started it! He--"
"Don't give me any of your lip, you lousy queer," he said, backing up. "All I know is you just about killed that guy. I'm calling the cops!" He dashed back inside.
"Okay," I said to nobody in particular. "Okay, that's good, okay."
I had left my rawhide gloves inside, but it didn't seem like a good idea to go back in and get them. I put my hands in my pockets and started to walk back to the interstate access road. I figured my chances of hitching a ride before the cops picked me up were about one in ten. My ears were freezing and I felt sick to my stomach. Some purty night.
"Wait! Hey, wait!"
I turned around. It was her, running to catch up with me, her hair flying out behind her.
"You were wonderful!" she said. "Wonderful!"
"I hurt him bad," I said dully. "I never did anything like that before."
"I wish you'd killed him!"
I blinked at her in the frosty light.
"You should have heard the things they were saying about me before you came in. Laughing in that big, brave, dirty way--haw, haw, lookit the little girl out so long after dark. Where you going, honey? Need a lift? I'll give you a ride if you'll give me a ride. Damn!"
She glared back over her shoulder as if she could strike them dead with a sudden bolt from her dark eyes. Then she turned them on me, and again it seemed like that searchlight had been turned on in my mind. "My name's Nona. I'm coming with you."
"Where? To jail?" I tugged at my hair with both hands. "With this, the first guy who gives us a ride is apt to be a state cop. That cook meant what he said about calling them."
"I'll hitch. You stand behind me. They'll stop for me. They stop for a girl, if she's pretty."
I couldn't argue with her about that and didn't want to. Love at first sight? Maybe not. But it was something. Can you get that wave?
"Here," she said, "you forgot these." She held out my gloves.
She hadn't gone back inside, and that meant she'd had them all along. She'd known she was coming with me. It gave me an eerie feeling. I put on my gloves and we walked up the access road to the turnpike ramp.
She was right about the ride. We got one with the first car that swung onto the ramp.
We didn't say anything else while we waited, but it seemed as if we did. I won't give you a load of bull about ESP and that stuff; you know what I'm talking about. You've felt it yourself if you've ever been with someone you were really close to, or if you've taken one of those drugs with initials for a name. You don't have to talk. Communication seems to shift over to some high-frequency emotional band. A twist of the hand does it all. We were strangers. I only knew her first name and now that I think back I don't believe I ever told her mine at all. But we were doing it. It wasn't love. I hate to keep repeating that, but I feel I have to. I wouldn't dirty that word with whatever we had--not after what we did, not after Castle Rock, not after the dreams.
A high, wailing shriek filled the cold silence of the night, rising and falling.
"That's an ambulance I think," I said.
"Yes."
Silence again. The moon's light was fading behind a thickening membrane of cloud. I thought the ring around the moon hadn't lied; we would have snow before the night was over.
Lights poked over the hill.
I stood behind her without having to be told. She brushed her hair back and raised that beautiful face. As I watched the car signal for the entrance ramp I was swept with a feeling of unreality--it was unreal that this beautiful girl had elected to come with me, it was unreal that I had beaten a man to the point where an ambulance had to be called for him, it was unreal to think I might be in jail by morning. Unreal. I felt caught in a spiderweb. But who was the spider?
Nona put out her thumb. The car, a Chevrolet sedan, went by us and I thought it was going to keep right on going. Then the taillights flashed and Nona grabbed my hand. "Come on, we got a ride!" She grinned at me with childish delight and I grinned back at her.
The guy was reaching enthusiastically across the seat to open the door for her. When the dome light flashed on I could see him--a fairly big man in an expensive camel's hair coat, graying around the edges of his hat, prosperous features softened by years of good meals. A businessman or a salesman. Alone. When he saw me he did a double take, but it was a second or two too late to put the car back in gear and haul ass. And it was easier for him this way. Later he could fib himself into believing he had seen both of us, that he was a truly good-hearted soul giving a young couple a break.
"Cold night," he said as Nona slid in beside him and I got in beside her.
"It certainly is," Nona said sweetly. "Thank you!"
"Yeah," I said. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it." And we were off, leaving sirens, busted-up truckers, and Joe's Good Eats behind us.
I had gotten kicked off the interstate at seven-thirty. It was only eight-thirty then. It's amazing how much you can do in a short time, or how much can be done to you.
We were approaching the yellow flashing lights that signal the Augusta toll station.
"How far are you going?" the driver asked.
That was a stumper. I had been hoping to make it as far as Kittery and crash with an acquaintance who was teaching school there. It still seemed as good an answer as any and I was opening my mouth to give it when Nona said:
"We're going to Castle Rock. It's a small town just south and west of Lewiston-Auburn."
Castle Rock. That made me feel strange. Once upon a time I had been on pretty good terms with Castle Rock. But that was before Ace Merrill messed me up.
The guy brought his car to a stop, took a toll ticket, and then we were on our way again.
"I'm only going as far as Gardiner, myself," he said, lying smoothly. "One exit up. But that's a start for you."
"It sure is," Nona said, just as sweetly as before. "It was nice of you to stop on such a cold night." And while she was saying it I was getting her anger on that high emotional wavelength, naked and full of venom. It scared me, the way ticking from a wrapped package might scare me.
"My name's Blanchette," he said. "Norman Blanchette." He waved his hand in our direction to be shaken.
"Cheryl Craig," Nona said, taking it daintily.
I took her cue and gave him a false name. "Pleasure," I mumbled.
His hand was soft and flabby. It felt like a hot-water bottle in the shape of a hand. The thought sickened me. It sickened me that we had been forced to beg a ride with this patronizing man who thought he had seen a chance to pick up a pretty girl hitching all by herself, a girl who might or might not agree to an hour spent in a motel room in return for enough cash to buy a bus ticket. It sickened me to know that if I had been alone this man who had just offered me his flabby, hot hand would have zipped by without a second look. It sickened me to know he would drop us at the Gardiner exit, cross over, and then dart right back on the interstate, bypassing us on the southbound ramp without a look, congratulating himself on how smoothly he had solved an annoying situation. Everything about him sickened me. The porky droop of his jowls, the slicked-back wigs of his hair, the smell of his cologne.
And what right did he have? What right?
The sickness curdled, and the flowers of rage began to bloom again. The headlights of his prosperous Impala sedan cut the night with smooth ease, and my rag
e wanted to reach out and strangle everything that he was set in among--the kind of music I knew he would listen to as he lay back in his La-Z-Boy recliner with the evening paper in his hot-water-bottle hands, the rinse his wife would use in her hair, the Underalls I knew she would wear, the kids always sent off to the movies or off to school or off to camp--as long as they were off somewhere--his snobbish friends and the drunken parties they would attend with them.
But his cologne--that was the worst. It filled the car with sweet, sickish scent. It smelled like the perfumed disinfectant they use in a slaughterhouse at the end of each shift.
The car ripped through the night with Norman Blanchette holding the wheel with his bloated hands. His manicured nails gleamed softly in the lights from the instrument panel. I wanted to crack a wing window and get away from that cloying smell. No, more--I wanted to crank the whole window down and stick my head out into the cold air, wallow in chilled freshness--but I was frozen, frozen in the dumb maw of my wordless, inexpressible hate.
That was when Nona put the nail file into my hand.
When I was three I got a bad case of the flu and had to go to the hospital. While I was there, my dad fell asleep smoking in bed and the house burned down with my folks and my older brother Drake in it. I have their pictures. They look like actors in an old 1958 American International horror movie, faces you don't know like those of the big stars, more like Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mara Corday and some child actor you can't quite remember--Brandon de Wilde, maybe.
I had no relatives to go to and so I was sent to a home in Portland for five years. Then I became a state ward. That means a family takes you in and the state pays them thirty dollars a month for your keep. I don't think there was ever a state ward who acquired a taste for lobster. Usually a couple will take two or three wards--not because the milk of human kindness flows in their veins but as a business investment. They feed you. They take the thirty the state gives them and they feed you. If a kid is fed up he can earn his keep doing chores around the place. That thirty turns into forty, fifty, maybe sixty-five bucks. Capitalism as it applies to the unhomed. Greatest country in the world, right? .
My "folks" were named Hollis and they lived in Harlow, across the river from Castle Rock. They had a three-story farmhouse with fourteen rooms. There was coal heat in the kitchen that got upstairs any way it could. In January you went to bed with three quilts over you and still weren't sure if your feet were on when you woke in the morning. You had to put them on the floor where you could look at them to be sure. Mrs. Hollis was fat. Mr. Hollis was skimpy and rarely spoke. He wore a red-and-black hunting cap all year round. The house was a helter-skelter mess of white-elephant furniture, rummage-sale stuff, moldy mattresses, dogs, cats, and automotive parts laid on newspaper. I had three "brothers," all of them wards. We had a nodding acquaintance, like co-travelers on a three-day bus trip.