Besides, why should he spend an hour and a half going back when Toketee Falls was just a spin and a promise away? Look at that road, he thought. You think a road like that is going to just peter out?
He put the Princess back in gear, started down the left fork, and sure enough, the road petered out. Over the first hill, the yellow line disappeared again. Over the second, the paving gave out and they were on a rutted dirt track with the dark woods pressing even closer on either side and the sun — Clark was aware of this for the first time — now sliding down the wrong side of the sky.
The pavement ended too suddenly for Clark to brake and baby the Princess onto the new surface, and there was a hard, spring-jarring thud that woke Mary. She sat up with a jerk and looked around with wide eyes. ‘Where — ‘ she began, and then, to make the afternoon utterly perfect and complete, the smoky voice of Lou Reed sped up until he was gabbling out the lyrics to ‘Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim’ at the speed of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
‘Oh!’ she said, and punched the eject button. The tape belched out, followed by an ugly brown afterbirth — coils of shiny tape.
The Princess hit a nearly bottomless pothole, lurched hard to the left, and then threw herself up and out like a clipper ship corkscrewing through a stormwave.
‘Clark?’
‘Don’t say anything,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘We’re not lost. This will turn back to tar in just a minute or two — probably over the next hill. We are not lost.’
Still upset by her dream (even though she could not quite remember what it had been), Mary held the ruined tape in her lap, mourning it. She supposed she could buy another one . . . but not
out here. She looked at the brooding trees, which seemed to belly right up to the road like starving guests at a banquet and guessed it was a long way to the nearest Tower Records.
She looked at Clark, noted his flushed cheeks and nearly nonexistent mouth, and decided it would be politic to keep her own mouth shut, at least for the time being. If she was quiet and non-accusatory, he would be more likely to come to his senses before this miserable excuse for a road petered out in a gravel pit or quicksand bog.
‘Besides, I can’t very well turn around,’ he said, as if she had suggested that very thing.
‘I can see that,’ she replied neutrally.
He glanced at her, perhaps wanting to fight, perhaps just feeling embarrassed and hoping to see she wasn’t too pissed at him — at least not yet — and then looked back through the windshield. Now there were weeds and grass growing up the center of this road, too, and the way was so narrow that if they did happen to meet another car, one of them would have to back up.
Nor was that the end of the fun. The ground beyond the wheel-ruts looked increasingly untrustworthy; the scrubby trees seemed to be jostling each other for position in the wet ground.
There were no power-poles on either side of the road. She almost pointed this out to Clark, and then decided it might be smarter to hold her tongue about that, too. He drove on in silence until they came around a down-slanting curve. He was hoping against hope that they would see a change for the better on the far side, but the overgrown track only went on as it had before. It was, if anything, a little fainter and a little narrower, and had begun to remind Clark of roads in the fantasy epics he liked to read — stories by people like Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, and, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien, the spiritual father of them all. In these tales, the characters (who usually had hairy feet and pointed ears) took these neglected roads in spite of their own gloomy intuitions, and usually ended up battling trolls or boggarts or mace-wielding skeletons.
‘Clark — ‘
‘I know,’ he said, and hammered the wheel suddenly with his left hand — a short, frustrated stroke that succeeded only in honking the horn. ‘I know.’ He stopped the Mercedes, which now straddled the entire road (road? hell, lane was now too grand a word for it), slammed the transmission into park, and got out. Mary got out on the other side, more slowly.
The balsam smell of the trees was heavenly, and she thought there was something beautiful about the silence, unbroken as it was by the sound of any motor (even the far-off drone of an airplane) or human voice . . . but there was something spooky about it, as well. Even the sounds she could hear — the tu-whit! of a bird in the shadowy firs, the sough of the wind, the rough rumble of the Princess’s diesel engine — served to emphasize the wall of quiet encircling them.
She looked across the Princess’s gray roof at Clark, and it was not reproach or anger in her gaze but appeal: Get us out of this, all right? Please?
‘Sorry, hon,’ he said, and the worry she saw in his face did nothing to soothe her. ‘Really.’
She tried to speak, but at first no sound came out of her dry throat. She cleared it and tried again. ‘What do you think about backing up, Clark?’
He considered it for several moments — the tu-whit! bird had time to call again and be answered from somewhere deeper in the forest — before shaking his head. ‘Only as a last resort.
It’s at least two miles back to the last fork in the road — ‘
‘You mean there was another one?’
He winced a little, dropped his eyes, and nodded. ‘Backing up . . . well, you see how narrow the road is, and how mucky the ditches are. If we went off . . . ‘ He shook his head and sighed.
‘So we go on.’
‘I think so. If the road goes entirely to hell, of course, I’ll have to try it.’
‘But by then we’ll be in even deeper, won’t we?’ So far she was managing, and quite well, she thought, to keep a tone of accusation from creeping into her voice, but it was getting harder and harder to do. She was pissed at him, quite severely pissed, and pissed at herself, as well — for letting him get them into this in the first place, and then for coddling him the way she was now.
‘Yes, but I like the odds on finding a wide place up ahead better than I like the odds on reversing for a couple of miles along this piece of crap. If it turns out we do have to back out, I’ll take it in stages — back up for five minutes, rest for ten, back up for five more.’ He smiled lamely. ‘It’ll be an adventure.’
‘Oh yes, it’ll be that, all right,’ Mary said, thinking again that her definition for this sort of thing was not adventure but pain in the ass. ‘ Are you sure you aren’t pressing on because you believe in your heart that we’re going to find Toketee Falls right over the next hill?’
For a moment his mouth seemed to disappear entirely and she braced for an explosion of righteous male wrath. Then his shoulders sagged and he only shook his head. In that moment she saw what he was going to look like thirty years from now, and that frightened her a lot more than getting caught on a back road in the middle of nowhere.
‘No,’ he said. ‘1 guess I’ve given up on Toketee Falls. One of the great rules of travel in America is that roads without electrical lines running along at least one side of them don’t go anywhere.’
So he had noticed, too.
‘Come on,’ he said, getting back in. ‘I’m going to try like hell to get us out of this. And next time I’ll listen to you.’
Yeah, yeah, Mary thought with a mixture of amusement and tired resentment. I’ve heard that one before. But before he could pull the transmission stick on the console down from park to drive, she put her hand over his. ‘I know you will,’ she said, turning what he’d said into a promise.
‘Now get us out of this mess.’
‘Count on it,’ Clark said.
‘And be careful.’
‘You can count on that, too.’ He gave her a small smile that made her feel a little better, then engaged the Princess’s transmission. The big gray Mercedes, looking very out of place in these deep woods, began to creep down the shadowy track again.
They drove another mile by the odometer and nothing changed but the width of the cart-track they were on: it grew narrower still. Mary thought the scruffy firs now looked not like hungry guests at a banquet but morbidly curious spectators at the site of a nasty accident. If the track got any narrower, they would begin to hear the squall of branches along the sides of the car. The ground under the trees, meanwhile, had gone from mucky to swampy; Mary could see patches of standing water, dusty with pollen and fallen pine needles, in some of the dips. Her heart was beating much too fast, and twice she had caught herself gnawing at her nails, a habit she thought she had given up for good the year before she married Clark. She had begun to realize that if they got stuck now, they would almost certainly spend the night camped out in the Princess. And there were animals in these woods — she had heard them crashing around out there. Some of them sounded big enough to be bears. The thought of meeting a bear while they stood looking at their hopelessly mired Mercedes made her swallow something that felt and tasted like a large lint ball.