What say, Al? George Staub asked. Time’s wasting. I can’t decide something like that, I said hoarsely. The moon sailed above the road, swift and brilliant. It’s not fair to ask me.
I know, and believe me, that’s what they all say. Then he lowered his voice. But I gotta tell you something if you don’t decide by the time we get back to the first house lights, I’ll have to take you both. He frowned, then brightened again, as if remembering there was good news as well as bad. You could ride together in the backseat if I took you both, talk over old times, there’s that.
Ride to where?
He didn’t reply. Perhaps he didn’t know. The trees blurred by like black ink. The headlights rushed and the road rolled. I was twenty- one. I wasn’t a virgin but I’d only been with a girl once and I’d been drunk and couldn’t remember much of what it had been like. There were a thousand places I wanted to go Los Angeles, Tahiti, maybe Luchenbach, Texas and a thousand things I wanted to do. My mother was forty- eight and that was old, goddammit. Mrs. McCurdy wouldn’t say so but Mrs. McCurdy was old herself. My mother had done right by me, worked all those long hours and taken care of me, but had I chosen her life for her? Asked to be born and then demanded that she live for me? She was forty- eight. I was twenty- one. I had, as they said, my whole life before me. But was that the way you judged? How did you decide a thing like this? How could you decide a thing like this?
The woods bolting by. The moon looking down like a bright and deadly eye. Better hurry up, man, George Staub said. We’re running out of wilderness.
I opened my mouth and tried to speak. Nothing came out but an arid sigh.
Here, got just the thing, he said, and reached behind him. His shirt pulled up again and I got another look (I could have done without it) at the stitched black line on his belly. Were there still guts
behind that line or just packing soaked in chemicals? When he brought his hand back, he had a can of beer in it one of those he’d bought at the state line store on his last ride, presumably.
I know how it is, he said. Stress gets you dry in the mouth. Here.
He handed me the can. I took it, pulled the ringtab, and drank deeply. The taste of the beer going down was cold and bitter. I’ve never had a beer since. I just can’t drink it. I can barely stand to watch the commercials on TV.
Ahead of us in the blowing dark, a yellow light glimmered. Hurry up, Al got to speed it up. That’s the first house, right up at the top of this hill. If you got something to say to me, you better say it now.
The light disappeared, then came back again, only now it was several lights. They were windows. Behind them were ordinary people doing ordinary things watching TV, feeding the cat, maybe beating off in the bathroom.
I thought of us standing in line at Thrill Village, Jean and Alan Parker, a big woman with dark patches of sweat around the armpits of her sundress and her little boy. She hadn’t wanted to stand in that line, Staub was right about that . . . but I had pestered pestered pestered. He had been right about that, too. She had swatted me, but she had stood in line with me, too. She had stood with me in a lot of lines, and I could go over all of it again, all the arguments pro and con, but there was no time. Take her, I said as the lights of the first house swept toward the Mustang. My voice was hoarse and raw and loud. Take her, take my ma, don’t take me.
I threw the can of beer down on the floor of the car and put my hands up to my face. He touched me then, touched the front of my shirt, his fingers fumbling, and I thought with sudden brilliant clarity that it had all been a test. I had failed and now he was going to rip my beating heart right out of my chest, like an evil djinn in one of those cruel Arabian fairy tales. I screamed. Then his fingers let go it was as if he’d changed his mind at the last second and he reached past me. For one moment my nose and lungs were so full of his deathly smell that I felt positive I was dead myself. Then there was the click of the door opening and cold fresh air came streaming in, washing the death smell away.