‘Clark, I think we’d better give it up and try backing. It’s already past three o’clock and — ‘
‘Look,’ he said, pointing ahead. ‘Is it a sign?’
She squinted. Ahead, the lane rose toward the crest of a deeply wooded hill. There was a bright blue oblong standing near the top. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a sign, all right.’
‘Great! Can you read it?’
‘Uh-huh — it says IF YOU CAME THIS FAR, YOU REALLY FUCKED up.’
He shot her a complex look of amusement and irritation. ‘Very funny, Mare.’
‘Thank you, Clark. I try.’
‘We’ll go to the top of the hill, read the sign, and see what’s over the crest. If we don’t see anything hopeful, we’ll try backing. Agreed?”
‘Agreed.’
He patted her leg, then drove cautiously on. The Mercedes was moving so slowly now that they could hear the soft sound of the weeds on the crown of the road whickering against the undercarriage. Mary really could make out the words on the sign now, but at first she rejected them, thinking she had to be mistaken — it was just too crazy. But they drew closer still, and the words didn’t change.
‘Does it say what I think it does?’ Clark asked her.
Mary gave a short, bewildered laugh. ‘Sure . . . but it must be someone’s idea of a joke. Don’t you think?’
‘I’ve given up thinking — it keeps getting me into trouble. But I see something that isn’t a joke.
Look, Mary!’
Twenty or thirty feet beyond the sign — just before the crest of the hill — the road widened dramatically and was once more both paved and lined. Mary felt worry roll off her heart like a boulder. Clark was grinning. ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ She nodded happily, grinning herself. They reached the sign and Clark stopped. They read it again:
Welcome to
Rock and Roll Heaven, Ore.
WE COOK WITH GAS! SO WILL YOU!
Jaycees Chamber of Commerce Lions Elks
‘It’s got to be a joke,’ she repeated.
‘Maybe not.’
‘A town called Rock and Roll Heaven? Puh-leeze, Clark.’
‘Why not? There’s Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, Dry Shark, Nevada, and a town in Pennsylvania called Intercourse. So why not a Rock and Roll Heaven in Oregon?’
She laughed giddily. The sense of relief was really incredible. ‘You made that up.’
‘What?’
‘Intercourse, Pennsylvania.’
‘I didn’t. Ralph Ginzberg once tried to send a magazine called Eros from there. For the postmark. The Feds wouldn’t let him. Swear. And who knows? Maybe the town was founded by a bunch of communal back-to-the-land hippies in the sixties. They went establishment — Lions, Elks, Jaycees — but the original name stayed.’ He was quite taken with the idea; he found it both funny and oddly sweet. ‘Besides, I don’t think it matters. What matters is we found some honest-to-God pavement again, honey. The stuff you drive on.’
She nodded. ‘So drive on it . . . but be careful.’
‘You bet.’ The Princess nosed up onto the pavement, which was not asphalt but a smooth composition surface without a patch or expansion-joint to be seen. ‘Careful’s my middle n — ‘
Then they reached the crest of the hill and the last word died in his mouth. He stamped on the brake-pedal so hard that their seatbelts locked, then jammed the transmission lever back into park.
‘Holy wow!’ Clark said.
They sat in the idling Mercedes, open-mouthed, looking down at the town below.
It was a perfect jewel of a town nestled in a small, shallow valley like a dimple. Its resemblance to the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the small-town illustrations of Currier & Ives was, to Mary, at least, inescapable. She tried to tell herself it was just the geography; the way the road wound down into the valley, the way the town was surrounded by deep green-black forest —
leagues of old, thick firs growing in unbroken profusion beyond the outlying fields — but it was more than the geography, and she supposed Clark knew it as well as she did. There was something too sweetly balanced about the church steeples, for instance — one on the north end of the town common and the other on the south end. The barn-red building off to the east had to be the school-house, and the big white one off to the west, the one with the bell-tower on top and the satellite dish to one side, had to be the town hall. The homes all looked impossibly neat and cozy, the sorts of domiciles you saw in the house-beautiful ads of pre-World War II magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and American Mercury.
There should be smoke curling from a chimney or two, Mary thought, and after a little examination, she saw that there was. She suddenly found herself remembering a story from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. ‘Mars Is Heaven,’ it had been called, and in it the Martians had cleverly disguised the slaughterhouse so it had looked like everybody’s fondest hometown dream.
‘Turn around,’ she said abruptly. ‘It’s wide enough here, if you’re careful.’
He turned slowly to look at her, and she didn’t care much for the expression on his face. He was eyeing her as if he thought she had gone crazy. ‘Honey, what are you — ‘
‘I don’t like it, that’s all.’ She could feel her face growing warm, but she pushed on in spite of the heat. ‘It makes me think of a scary story I read when I was a teenager.’ She paused. ‘It also makes me think of the candy-house in “Hansel and Gretel.”
He went on giving her that patented I-just-don’t-believe-it stare of his, and she realized he meant to go down there — it was just another part of the same wretched testosterone blast that gotten them off the main road in the first place. He wanted to explore, by Christ. And he wanted a souvenir, of course. A tee-shirt bought in the local drugstore would do, one that said something cute like I’VE BEEN TOROCK AND ROLL HEAVEN AND YOU KNOW THEY GOT A HELL OF A BAND.
‘Honey — ‘ It was the soft, tender voice he used when he intended to jolly her into something or die trying.
‘Oh, stop. If you want to do something nice for me, turn us around and drive us back to Highway 58. If you do that, you can have some more sugar tonight. Another double helping, even, if you’re up to it.’
He fetched a deep sigh, hands on the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead. At last, not looking at her, he said: ‘Look across the valley, Mary. Do you see the road going up the hill on the far side?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you see how wide it is? How smooth? How nicely paved?’
‘Clark, that is hardly — ‘
‘Look! I believe I even see an honest-to-God bus on it.’ He pointed at a yellow bug trundling along the road toward town, its metal hide glittering hotly in the afternoon sunlight. ‘That’s one more vehicle than we’ve seen on this side of the world.’
‘I still — ‘
He grabbed the map which had been lying on the console, and when he turned to her with it, Mary realized with dismay that the jolly, coaxing voice had temporarily concealed the fact that he was seriously pissed at her. ‘Listen, Mare, and pay attention, because there may be questions later. Maybe I can turn around here and maybe I can’t — it’s wider, but I’m not as sure as you are that it’s wide enough. And the ground still looks pretty squelchy to me.’
‘Clark, please don’t yell at me. I’m getting a headache.’
He made an effort and moderated his voice. ‘If we do get turned around, it’s twelve miles back to Highway 58, over the same shitty road we just traveled — ‘
‘Twelve miles isn’t so much.’ She tried to sound firm, if only to herself, but she could feel herself weakening. She hated herself for it, but that didn’t change it. She had a horrid suspicion that this was how men almost always got their way: not by being right but by being relentless.
They argued like they played football, and if you hung in there, you almost always finished the discussion with cleat-marks all over your psyche.
‘No, twelve miles isn’t so much,’ he was saying in his most sweetly reasonable I-am-trying-not-to-strangle-you-Mary voice, ‘but what about the fifty or so we’ll have to tack on going around this patch of woods once we get back on 58?’
‘You make it sound as if we had a train to catch, Clark!’
‘It just pisses me off, that’s all. You take one look down at a nice little town with a cute little name and say it reminds you of Friday the 13th, Part XX or some damn thing and you want to go back. And that road over there’ — he pointed across the valley — ‘heads due south. It’s probably less than half an hour from here to Toketee Falls by that road.’