” ‘Twas a Mercedes she drove,” Homer said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “Two-seater sportster. Todd got it for her in sixty-four or sixty-five, I guess. You remember her taking the kids to the lake all those years they had Frogs and Tadpoles?”
“Ayuh.”
“She’d drive ’em no more than forty, mindful they was in the back. But it chafed her. That woman had lead in her foot and a ball bearing sommers in the back of her ankle.” It used to be that Homer never talked about his summer people. But then his wife died. Five years ago it was. She was plowing a grade and the tractor tipped over on her and Homer was taken bad off about it. He grieved for two years or so and then seemed to feel better. But he was not the same. He seemed waiting for something to happen, waiting for the next thing. You’d pass his neat little house sometimes at dusk and he would be on the porch smoking a pipe with a glass of mineral water on the porch rail and the sunset would be in his eyes and pipe smoke around his head and you’d think—I did, anyway—Homer is waiting for the next thing. This bothered me over a wider range of my mind than I liked to admit, and at last I decided it was because if it had been me, I wouldn’t have been waiting for the next thing, like a groom who has put on his morning coat and finally has his tie right and is only sitting there on a bed in the upstairs of his house and looking first at himself in the mirror and then at the clock on the mantel and waiting for it to be eleven o’clock so he can get married. If it had been me, I would not have been waiting for the next thing; I would have been waiting for the last thing.
But in that waiting period—which ended when Homer went to Vermont a year later—he sometimes talked about those people. To me, to a few others.
“She never even drove fast with her husband, s’far as I know. But when I drove with her, she made that Mercedes strut.” A fellow pulled in at the pumps and began to fill up his car. The car had a Massachusetts plate.
“It wasn’t one of these new sports cars that run on onleaded gasoline and hitch every time you step on it; it was one of the old ones, and the speedometer was calibrated all the way up to a hundred and sixty. It was a funny color of brown and I ast her one time what you called that color and she said it was Champagne. Ain’t that good, I says, and she laughs fit to split. I like a woman who will laugh when you don’t have to point her right at the joke, you know.” The man at the pumps had finished getting his gas.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” he says as he comes up the steps.
“A good day to you,” I says, and he went inside.
” ‘Phelia was always lookin for a shortcut,” Homer went on as if we had never been interrupted. “That woman was mad for a shortcut. I never saw the beat of it. She said if you can save enough distance, you’ll save time as well. She said her father swore by that scripture. He was a salesman, always on the road, and she went with him when she could, and he was always lookin for the shortest way. So she got in the habit.
“I ast her one time if it wasn’t kinda funny—here she was on the one hand, spendin her time rubbin up that old statue in the Square and takin the little ones to their swimmin lessons instead of playing tennis and swimming and getting boozed up like normal summer people, and on the other hand bein so damn set on savin fifteen minutes between here and Fryeburg that thinkin about it probably kep her up nights. It just seemed to me the two things went against each other’s grain, if you see what I mean. She just looks at me and says, ‘I like being helpful, Homer. I like driving, too—at least sometimes, when it’s a challenge—but I don’t like the time it takes. It’s like mending clothes—sometimes you take tucks and sometimes you let things out.
Do you see what I mean?’
” ‘I guess so, missus,’ I says, kinda dubious.
” ‘If sitting behind the wheel of a car was my idea of a really good time all the time, I would look for long-cuts,’ she says, and that tickled me s’much I had to laugh.” The Massachusetts fellow came out of the store with a six-pack in one hand and some lottery tickets in the other.
“You enjoy your weekend,” Homer says.
“I always do,” the Massachusetts fellow says. “I only wish I could afford to live here all year round.”
“Well, we’ll keep it all in good order for when you can come,” Homer says, and the fellow laughs.
We watched him drive off toward someplace, that Massachusetts plate showing. It was a green one.
My Marcy says those are the ones the Massachusetts Motor Registry gives to drivers who ain’t had a accident in that strange, angry, fuming state for two years. If you have, she says, you got to have a red one so people know to watch out for you when they see you on the roll.
“They was in-state people, you know, the both of them,” Homer said, as if the Massachusetts fellow had reminded him of the fact.
“I guess I did know that,” I said.
“The Todds are just about the only birds we got that fly north in the winter. The new one, I don’t think she likes flying north too much.” He sipped his mineral water and fell silent a moment, thinking.
“She didn’t mind it, though,” Homer said. “At least, I judge she didn’t although she used to complain about it something fierce. The complaining was just a way to explain why she was always lookin for a shortcut.”
“And you mean her husband didn’t mind her traipsing down every wood-road in tarnation between here and Bangor just so she could see if it was nine-tenths of a mile shorter?”
“He didn’t care piss-all,” Homer said shortly, and got up, and went in the store. There now, Owens, I told myself, you know it ain’t safe to ast him questions when he’s yarning, and you went right ahead and ast one, and you have buggered a story that was starting to shape up promising.
I sat there and turned my face up into the sun and after about ten minutes he come out with a boiled egg and sat down. He ate her and I took care not to say nothing and the water on Castle Lake sparkled as blue as something as might be told of in a story about treasure. When Homer had finished his egg and had a sip of mineral water, he went on. I was surprised, but still said nothing. It wouldn’t have been wise.
“They had two or three different chunks of rolling iron,” he said. “There was the Cadillac, and his truck, and her little Mercedes go-devil. A couple of winters he left the truck, ‘case they wanted to come down and do some skiin. Mostly when the summer was over he’d drive the Caddy back up and she’d take her godevil.” I nodded but didn’t speak. In truth, I was afraid to risk another comment. Later I thought it would have taken a lot of comments to shut Homer Buckland up that day. He had been wanting to tell the story of Todd’s shortcut for a long time.
“Her little go-devil had a special odometer in it that told you how many miles was in a trip, and every time she set off from Castle Lake to Bangor she’d set it to 000-point-O and let her clock up to whatever. She had made a game of it, and she used to chafe me with it.” He paused, thinking that back over.
“No, that ain’t right.” He paused more and faint lines showed up on his forehead like steps on a library ladder.
“She made like she made a game of it, but it was a serious business to her. Serious as anything else, anyway.” He flapped a hand and I think he meant the husband. “The glovebox of the little go-devil was filled with maps, and there was a few more in the back where there would be a seat in a regular car. Some was gas station maps, and some was pages that had been pulled from the Rand-McNally Road Atlas; she had some maps from Appalachian Trail guidebooks and a whole mess of topographical survey-squares, too. It wasn’t her having those maps that made me think it wa’n’t a game; it was how she’d drawed lines on all of them, showing routes she’d taken or at least tried to take.