When the thing finally broke up I felt weak and not at all well. I made my way back over to the bleachers and sat down. The music was too loud, the air too greasy. My mind kept pitching and yawing. I could hear my heartbeat in my head, the way you do after you throw the biggest drunk of your life.
I used to think what happened next happened because I was tired and a little nauseated from going around and around, but as I said before, all this writing has brought everything into sharper focus. I can’t believe that anymore.
I looked up at them again, all the beautiful, hurrying people in the semidarkness. It seemed to me that all the men looked terrified, their faces elongated into grotesque, slow-motion masks. It was understandable. The women — coeds in their sweaters, short skirts, their bell-bottoms — were all turning into rats. At first it didn’t frighten me. I even chuckled. I knew what I was seeing was some kind of hallucination, and for a while I could watch it almost clinically.
Then some girl stood on tiptoe to kiss her fellow, and that was too much. Hairy, twisted face with black buckshot eyes reaching up, mouth spreading to reveal teeth…
I left.
I stood in the lobby for a moment, half distracted. There was a bathroom down the hall, but I went past it and up the stairs.
The locker room was on the third floor and I had to run the last flight. I pulled the door open and ran for one of the bathroom stalls. I threw up amid the mixed smells of liniment, sweaty uniforms, oiled leather. The music was far away down there, the silence up here virginal.
I felt comforted.
We had to come to a stop sign at Southwest Bend. The memory of the dance had left me excited for a reason I didn’t understand. I began to shake.
She looked at me, smiling with her dark eyes. “Now?”
I couldn’t answer her. I was shaking too badly for that. She nodded slowly, for me.
I drove onto a spur of Route 7 that must have been a logging road in the summertime. I didn’t drive in too deeply because I was afraid of getting stuck. I popped off the headlights and flecks of snow began to gather silently on the windshield.
“Do you love?” she asked, almost kindly.
Some kind of sound kept escaping me, being dragged out of me. I think it must have been a close oral counterpart to the thoughts of a rabbit caught in a snare.
“Here,” she said. “Right here.”
It was ecstasy.
We almost didn’t get back onto the main road. The snowplow had gone by, orange lights winking and flashing in the night, throwing up a huge wall of snow in our way.
There was a shovel in the trunk of the police car. It took me half an hour to dig out, and by then it was almost midnight. She turned on the police radio while I was doing it, and it told us what we had to know. The bodies of Blanchette and the kid from the pickup truck had been found. They suspected that we had taken the cruiser. The cop’s name had been Essegian, and that’s a funny name. There used to be a major-league ballplayer named Essegian — I think he played for the Dodgers. Maybe I had killed one of his relatives. It didn’t bother me to know the cop’s name. He had been following too close and he had gotten in our way.
We drove back onto the main road.
I could feel her excitement, high and hot and burning. I stopped long enough to clear the windshield with my arm and then we were going again.
We went through west Castle Rock and I knew without having to be told where to turn. A snow-crusted sign said it was Stackpole Road.
The plow had not been here, but one vehicle had been through before us. The tracks of its tires were still freshly cut in the blowing, restless snow.
A mile, then less than a mile. Her fierce eagerness, her need, came to me and I began to feel jumpy again. We came around a curve and there was the power truck, bright orange body and warning flashers pulsing the color of blood. It was blocking the road.