“My sister’n-law don’t even remember her own name,” he said.
“She don’t know aye, yes, no, nor maybe. That’s what that Anderson’s Disease does to you, son. There’s a look in her eyes . . . like she’s sayin
‘Let me out of here’ . . . or would say it, if she could think of the words.
Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. I took a deep breath and wondered if the pee I smelled was the old man’s or if he maybe had a dog that rode with him sometimes. I wondered if he’d be offended if I rolled down my window a little. Finally I did. He didn’t seem to notice, any more than he noticed the oncoming cars flashing their highs at him.
Around seven o’clock we breasted a hill in West Gates and my chauffeur cried, “Lookit, son! The moon! Ain’t she a corker?”
She was indeed a corker—a huge orange ball hoisting itself over the horizon. I thought there was nevertheless something terrible about it. It looked both pregnant and infected. Looking at the rising moon, a sudden and awful thought came to me: what if I got to the hospital and my Ma didn’t recognize me? What if her memory was 410
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gone, completely shot, and she didn’t know aye, yes, no, nor maybe?
What if the doctor told me she’d need someone to take care of her for the rest of her life? That someone would have to be me, of course; there was no one else. Goodbye college. What about that, friends and neighbors?
“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, 411
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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 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 a 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.
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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.”
“Anytime, son. Anytime. 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 413
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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.