‘That’s about what you said back in Oakridge — before we started off on the Magical Mystery Tour segment of our trip.’
He looked at her a moment longer, his mouth tucked in on itself like a cramp, then grabbed the transmission lever. ‘Fuck it,’ he snarled. ‘We’ll go back. But if we meet one car on the way, Mary, just one, we’ll end up backing into Rock and Roll Heaven. So — ‘
She put her hand over his before he could disengage the transmission for the second time that day.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You’re probably right and I’m probably being silly.’ Rolling over like this has got to be bred in the goddam bone, she thought. Either that, or I’m just too tired to fight.
She took her hand away, but he paused a moment longer, looking at her. ‘Only if you’re sure,’
he said.
And that was really the most ludicrous thing of all, wasn’t it? Winning wasn’t enough for a man like Clark; the vote also had to be unanimous. She had voiced that unanimity many times when she didn’t feel very unanimous in her heart, but she discovered that she just wasn’t capable of it this time.
‘But I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘If you’d been listening to me instead of just putting up with me, you’d know that. Probably you’re right and probably I’m just being silly — your take on it makes more sense than mine does, I admit that much, at least, and I’m willing to soldier along — but that doesn’t change the way I feel. So you’ll just have to excuse me if I decline to put on my little cheerleader’s skirt and lead the Go Clark Go cheer this time.’
‘Jesus!’ he said. His face was wearing an uncertain expression that made him look uncharacteristically — and somehow hate fully — boyish. ‘You’re in some mood, aren’t you, honey-bunch?’
‘I guess I am,’ she said, hoping he couldn’t see how much that particular term of endearment grated on her. She was thirty-two, after all, and he was almost forty-one. She felt a little too old to be anyone’s honeybunch and thought Clark was a little too old to need one.
Then the troubled look on his face cleared and the Clark she liked — the one she really believed she could spend the second half of her life with — was back. ‘You’d look cute in a cheerleader’s skirt, though,’ he said, and appeared to measure the length of her thigh. ‘You would.’
‘You’re a fool, Clark,’ she said, and then found herself smiling at him almost in spite of herself.
‘That’s correct, ma’am,’ he said, and put the Princess in gear.
The town had no outskirts, unless the few fields, which surrounded it, counted. At one moment they were driving down a gloomy, tree-shaded lane; at the next there were broad tan fields on either side of the car; at the next they were passing neat little houses.
The town was quiet but far from deserted. A few cars moved lazily back and forth on the four or five intersecting streets that made up downtown, and a handful of pedestrians strolled the sidewalks. Clark lifted a hand in salute to a bare-chested, potbellied man who was simultaneously watering his lawn and drinking a can of Olympia. The potbellied man, whose dirty hair straggled to his shoulders, watched them go by but did not raise his own hand in return.
Main Street had that same Norman Rockwell ambience, and here it was so strong that it was almost a feeling of déjà vu. Robust, mature oaks shaded the walks, and that was somehow just right. You didn’t have to see the town’s only watering hole to know that it would be called The Dew Drop Inn and that there would be a lighted clock displaying the Budweiser Clydesdales over the bar. The parking spaces were the slanting type; there was a red-white-and-blue barber pole turning outside The Cutting Edge; a mortar and pestle hung over the door of the local pharmacy, which was called The Tuneful Druggist. The pet shop (with a sign in the window saying WE HAVE SIAMESE IF YOU PLEASE) was called White Rabbit. Everything was so right you could just shit. Most right of all was the town common at the center of town.
There was a sign hung on a guy-wire above the bandshell, and Mary could read it easily, although they were a hundred yards away. CONCERT TONIGHT, it said.
She suddenly realized that she knew this town — had seen it many times on late-night TV.
Never mind Ray Bradbury’s hellish vision of Mars or the candy-house in ‘Hansel and Gretel’; what this place resembled more than either was The Peculiar Little Town people kept stumbling into in various episodes of The Twilight Zone.
She leaned toward her husband and said in a low, ominous voice: ‘We’re traveling not through a dimension of sight and sound, Clark, but of mind. Look!’ She pointed at nothing in particular, but a woman standing outside the town’s Western Auto saw the gesture and gave her a narrow, mistrustful glance.
‘Look at what?’ he asked. He sounded irritated again, and she guessed that this time it was because he knew exactly what she was talking about.
‘There’s a signpost up ahead! We’re entering — ‘
‘Oh, cut it out, Mare,’ he said, and abruptly swung into an empty parking slot halfway down Main Street.
‘Clark!’ she nearly screamed. ‘What are you doing?’
He pointed through the windshield at an establishment with the somehow not-cute name of The Rock-a-Boogie Restaurant.
‘I’m thirsty. I’m going in there and getting a great big Pepsi to go. You don’t have to come. You can sit right here. Lock all the doors, if you want.’ So saying, he opened his own door. Before he could swing his legs out, she grabbed his shoulder.
‘Clark, please don’t.’
He looked back at her, and she saw at once that she should have canned the crack about The Twilight Zone — not because it was wrong but because it was right. It was that macho thing again. He wasn’t stopping because he was thirsty, not really; he was stopping because this freaky little burg had scared him, too. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, she didn’t know that, but she did know that he had no intention of going on until he had convinced himself he wasn’t afraid, not one little bit.
‘I won’t be a minute. Do you want a ginger ale, or something?’
She pushed the button that unlocked her seatbelt. ‘What I want is not to be left alone.’
He gave her an indulgent, I-knew-you’d-come look that made her feel like tearing out a couple of swatches of his hair.
‘And what I also want is to kick your ass for getting us into this situation in the first place,’ she finished, and was pleased to see the indulgent expression turn to one of wounded surprise. She opened her own door. ‘Come on. Piddle on the nearest hydrant, Clark, and then we’ll get out of here.’
‘Piddle . . . ? Mary, what in the hell are you talking about?’
‘Sodas!’ she nearly screamed, all the while thinking that it was really amazing how fast a good trip with a good man could turn bad. She glanced across the street and saw a couple of longhaired young guys standing there. They were also drinking Oily and checking out the strangers in town. One was wearing a battered top-hat. The plastic daisy stuck in the band nodded back and forth in the breeze. His companion’s arms crawled with faded blue tattoos. To Mary they looked like the sort of fellows who dropped out of high school their third time through the tenth grade in order to spend more time meditating on the joys of drive-train linkages and date rape.
Oddly enough, they also looked somehow familiar to her.
They saw her looking. Top-Hat solemnly raised his hand and twiddled his fingers at her. Mary looked away hurriedly and turned to Clark. ‘Let’s get our cold drinks and get the hell out of here.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘And you didn’t need to shout at me, Mary. I mean, I was right beside you, and
— ‘
‘Clark, do you see those two guys across the street?’
‘What two guys?’
She looked back in time to see Top-Hat and Tattoos slipping through the barber-shop doorway. Tattoos glanced back over his shoulder, and although Mary wasn’t sure, she thought he tipped her a wink.
‘They’re just going into the barber shop. See them?’
Clark looked, but only saw a closing door with the sun reflecting eye-watering shards of light from the glass. ‘What about them?’
‘They looked familiar to me.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. But I find it somehow hard to believe that any of the people I know moved to Rock and Roll Heaven, Oregon, to take up rewarding, high-paying jobs as street-corner hoodlums.’