“We’re going to Castle Rock. It’s a small town just south and west of Lewiston-Auburn.”
Castle Rock. That made me feel strange. Once upon a time
I had been on pretty good terms with Castle Rock. But that was before Ace Merrill
messed me up.
The guy brought his car to a stop, took a toll ticket, and then we were on our way again.
“I’m only going as far as Gardiner, myself,” he said, lying smoothly. “One exit up. But that’s a start for you.”
“It sure is,” Nona said, just as sweetly as before. “It was nice of you to stop on such a cold night.” And while she was saying it I was getting her anger on that high emotional wavelength, naked and full of venom. It scared me, the way ticking from a wrapped package might scare me.
“My name’s Blanchette,” he said. “Norman Blanchette.” He waved his hand in our direction to be shaken.
“Cheryl Craig,” Nona said, taking it daintily.
I took her cue and gave him a false name. “Pleasure,” I mumbled.
His hand was soft and flabby. It felt like a hot-water bottle in the shape of a hand. The thought sickened me. It sickened me that we had been forced to beg a ride with this patronizing man who thought he had seen a chance to pick up a pretty girl hitching all by herself, a girl who might or might not agree to an hour spent in a motel room in return for enough cash to buy a bus ticket. It sickened me to know that if I had been alone this man who had just offered me his flabby, hot hand would have zipped by without a second look. It sickened me to know he would drop us at the Gardiner exit, cross over, and then dart right back on the interstate, bypassing us on the southbound ramp without a look, congratulating himself on how smoothly he had solved an annoying situation. Everything about him sickened me. The porky droop of his jowls, the slicked-back wigs of his hair, the smell of his cologne.
And what right did he have? What right?
The sickness curdled, and the flowers of rage began to bloom again. The headlights of his prosperous Impala sedan cut the night with smooth ease, and my rage wanted to reach out and strangle everything that he was set in among — the kind of music I knew he would listen to as he lay back in his La-Z-Boy recliner with the evening paper in his hot-water-bottle hands, the rinse his wife would use in her hair, the Underalls I knew she would wear, the kids always sent off to
the movies or off to school or off to camp — as long as they were off somewhere — his snobbish friends and the drunken parties they would attend with them.
But his cologne — that was the worst. It filled the car with sweet, sickish scent. It smelled like the perfumed disinfectant they use in a slaughterhouse at the end of each shift.
The car ripped through the night with Norman Blanchette holding the wheel with his
bloated hands. His manicured nails gleamed softly in the lights from the instrument panel. I wanted to crack a wing window and get away from that cloying smell. No, more — I wanted to crank the whole window down and stick my liead out into the cold air, wallow in chilled freshness — but I was frozen, frozen in the dumb maw of my wordless, inexpressible hate.
That was when Nona put the nail file into my hand.
When I was three I got a bad case of the flu and had to go to the hospital. While I was there, my dad fell asleep smoking in bed and the house burned down with my folks and my older brother Drake in it. I have their pictures. They look like actors in an old I958 American International horror movie, faces you don’t know like those of the big stars, more like Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mara Corday and some child actor you can’t quite remember — Brandon de Wilde, maybe.