‘That you’ll probably get us lost,’ she’d said — a wisecrack she rather regretted later. ‘But I guess we’ll be all right as long as you can find a place wide enough to turn the Princess around in.’
‘Sold American!’ he said, beaming, and pulled his chicken-fried steak back in front of him. He began to eat again, congealed gravy and all.
‘Uck-a- doo,’ she said, holding one hand up in front of her face and wincing. ‘How can you?’
‘It’s good,’ Clark said in tones so muffled only a wife could have understood him. ‘Besides, when one is traveling, one should eat the native dishes.’
‘It looks like someone sneezed a mouthful of snuff onto a very old hamburger,’ she said. ‘I repeat: uck-a-doo.’
They left Oakridge in good spirits, and at first all had gone swimmingly. Trouble hadn’t set in until they turned off SR 42 and onto the unmarked road, the one Clark had been so sure was going to breeze them right into Toketee Falls. It hadn’t seemed like trouble at first; county road or not, the new way had been a lot better than Highway 42, which had been potholed and frost-heaved, even in summer. They had gone along famously, in fact, taking turns plugging tapes into the dashboard player. Clark was into people like Wilson Pickett, Al Green, and Pop Staples.
Mary’s taste lay in entirely different directions.
‘What do you see in all these white boys?’ he asked as she plugged in her current favorite —
Lou Reed’s New York.
‘Married one, didn’t I?’ she asked, and that made him laugh.
The first sign of trouble came fifteen minutes later, when they came to a fork in the road. Both forks looked equally promising.
‘Holy crap,’ Clark said, pulling up and popping the glove compartment open so he could get at the map. He looked at it for a long time. ‘That isn’t on the map.’
‘Oh boy, here we go,’ Mary said. She had been on the edge of a doze when Clark pulled up at the unexpected fork, and she was feeling a little irritated with him. ‘Want my advice?’
‘No,’ he said, sounding a little irritated himself, ‘but I suppose I’ll get it. And I hate it when you roll your eyes at me that way, in case you didn’t know.’
‘What way is that, Clark?’
‘Like I was an old dog that just farted under the dinner table. Go on, tell me what you think.
Lay it on me. It’s your nickel.’
‘Go back while there’s still time. That’s my advice.’
‘Uh-huh. Now if you only had a sign that said REPENT.’
‘Is that supposed to be funny?’
‘I don’t know, Mare,’ he said in a glum tone of voice, and then just sat there, alternating looks through the bug-splattered windshield with a close examination of the map. They had been
married for almost fifteen years, and Mary knew him well enough to believe he would almost certainly insist on pushing on . . . not in spite of the unexpected fork in the road, but because of it.
When Clark Willingham ‘s balls are on the line, he doesn’t back down, she thought, and then put a hand over her mouth to hide the grin that had surfaced there.
She was not quite quick enough. Clark glanced at her, one eyebrow raised, and she had a sudden discomfiting thought: if she could read him as easily as a child’s storybook after all this time, then maybe he could do the same with her. ‘Something?’ he asked, and his voice was just a little too thin. It was at that moment — even before she had fallen asleep, she now realized —
that his mouth had started to get smaller. ‘Want to share, sweetheart?”
She shook her head. ‘Just clearing my throat.’
He nodded, pushed his glasses up on his ever-expanding forehead, and brought the map up until it was almost touching the tip of his nose. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s got to be the left-hand fork, because that’s the one that goes south, toward Toketee Falls. The other one heads east. It’s probably a ranch road, or something.’
‘A ranch road with a yellow line running down the middle of it?’
Clark’s mouth grew a little smaller. ‘You’d be surprised how well-off some of these ranchers are,’ he said.
She thought of pointing out to him that the days of the scouts and pioneers were long gone, that his testicles were not actually on the line, and then decided she wanted a little doze-off in the afternoon sun a lot more than she wanted to squabble with her husband, especially after the lovely double feature last night. And, after all, they were bound to come out somewhere, weren’t they?
With that comforting thought in her mind and Lou Reed in her ears, singing about the last great American whale, Mary Willingham dozed off. By the time the road Clark had picked began to deteriorate, she was sleeping shallowly and dreaming that they were back in the Oakridge cafe where they had eaten lunch. She was trying to put a quarter in the jukebox, but the coin-slot was plugged with something that looked like flesh. One of the kids who had been outside in the parking lot walked past her with his skateboard under his arm and his Trailblazers hat turned around on his head.
What’s the matter with this thing? Mary asked him.
The kid came over, took a quick look, and shrugged. Aw, that ain’t nothing, he said. That’s just some guy’s body, broken for you and for many. This is no rinky-dink operation we got here; we’re talking mass culture, sugar-muffin.
Then he reached up, gave the tip of her right breast a tweak — not a very friendly one, either
— and walked away. When she looked back at the jukebox, she saw it had filled up with blood and shadowy floating things that looked suspiciously like human organs.
Maybe you better give that Lou Reed album a rest, she thought, and within the pool of blood behind the glass, a record floated down onto the turntable — as if at her thought — and Lou began to sing ‘Busload of Faith.’
While Mary was having this steadily more unpleasant dream, the road continued to worsen, the patches spreading until it was really all patch. The Lou Reed album — a long one — came to an end, and began to recycle. Clark didn’t notice. The pleasant look he had started the day with was entirely gone. His mouth had shrunk to the size of a rosebud. If Mary had been awake, she would have coaxed him into turning around miles back. He knew this, just as he knew how she would
look at him if she woke up now and saw this narrow swatch of crumbling hot-top — a road only if one thought in the most charitable of terms — with piney woods pressing in close enough on both sides to keep the patched tar in constant shadow. They had not passed a car headed in the other direction since leaving SR 42.
He knew he should turn around — Mary hated it when he got into shit like this, always forgetting the many times he had found his way unerringly along strange roads to their planned destinations (Clark Willingham was one of those millions of American men who are firmly convinced they have a compass in their heads) — but he continued to push on, at first stubbornly convinced that they must come out in Toketee Falls, then just hoping. Besides, there really was no place to turn around. If he tried to do it, he would mire the Princess to her hubcaps in one of the marshy ditches which bordered this miserable excuse for a road . . . and God knew how long it would take to get a tow-truck in here, or how far he’d have to walk just to call one.
Then, at last, he did come to a place where he could have turned around — another fork in the road — and elected not to do so. The reason was simple: although the right fork was rutted gravel with grass growing up the middle, the leftward-tending branch was once again wide, well-paved, and divided by a bright stroke of yellow. According to the compass in Clark’s head, this fork headed due south. He could all but smell Toketee Falls. Ten miles, maybe fifteen, twenty at the outside.
He did at least consider turning back, however. When he told Mary so later, he saw doubt in her eyes, but it was true. He decided to go on because Mary was beginning to stir, and he was quite sure that the bumpy, potholed stretch of road he’d just driven would wake her up if he turned back . . . and then she would look at him with those wide, beautiful blue eyes of hers. Just look. That would be enough.