Nona put out her thumb. The car, a Chevrolet sedan, went by us and I thought it was going to keep right on going. Then the taillights flashed and Nona grabbed my hand. “Come on, we got a ride!” She grinned at me with childish delight and I grinned back at her.
The guy was reaching enthusiastically acros? the seat I0 open the door for her. When the dome light flashed on I could see him—a fairly big man in an expensive camel’s hair coat, graying around the edges of his hat, prosperous features softened by years of good meals. A businessman or a salesman. Alone. When he saw me he did a double take, but it was a second or two too late to put the car back in gear and haul ass. And it was easier for him this way. Later he could fib himself into believing he had seen both of us, that he was a truly good-hearted soul giving a young couple a break.
“Cold night,” he said as Nona slid in beside him and I got in beside her.
“It certainly is,” Nona said sweetly. “Thank you!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” And we were off, leaving sirens, busted-up truckers, and Joe’s Good Eats behind us.
I had gotten kicked off the interstate at seven-thirty. It was only eight-thirty then. It’s amazing how much you can do in a short time, or how much can be done to you.
We were approaching the yellow flashing lights that signal the Augusta toll station.
“How far are you going?” the driver asked.
That was a stumper. I had been hoping to make it as far as Kittery and crash with an acquaintance who was teaching school there. It still seemed as good an answer as any and I was opening my mouth to give it when Nona said:
“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.
I had no relatives to go to and so I was sent to a home in Portland for five years. Then I became a state ward. That means a family takes you in and the state pays them thirty dollars a month for your keep. I don’t think there was ever a state ward who acquired a taste for lobster.
Usually a couple will take two or three wards—not because the milk of human kindness flows in their veins but as a business investment. They feed you. They take the thirty the state gives them and they.feed you. If a kid is fed up he can earn his keep doing chores around the place. That thirty turns into forty, fifty, maybe sixty-five bucks. Capitalism as it applies to the unhomed.
Greatest country in the world, right?
My “folks” were named Hollis and they lived in Harlow, across the river from Castle Rock. They had a three-story farmhouse with fourteen rooms. There was coal heat in the kitchen that got upstairs any way it could. In January you went to bed with three quilts over you and still weren’t sure if your feet were on when you woke in the morning. You had to put them on the floor where you could look at them to be sure. Hollis was fat. Hollis was skimpy and rarely spoke. He wore a red-and-black hunting cap all year round. The house was a helter-skelter mess of white-elephant furniture, rummage-sale stuff, moldy mattresses, dogs, cats, and automotive parts laid on newspaper. I had three “brothers,” all of them wards. We had a nodding acquaintance, like co-travelers on a three-day bus trip.
I made good grades in school and went out for spring baseball when I was a high-school ijphomore. Hollis was yapping after me to quit, but I stud with it until the thing with Ace Merrill happened. Then I didn’t want to go anymore, not with my face all puffed oat and cut, not with the stories Betsy Malenfant was telling around. So I quit the team, and Hollis got me a job jerking sodas in the local drugstore.
In February of my junior year I took the College Boards, paying for them with the twelve bucks I had socked away in my mattress. I got accepted at the university with a small scholarship and a good work-study job in the library. The expression on the Hollises’ faces when I showed them the financial-aid papers is the best memory of my life.
One of my “brothers,” Curt, ran away. I couldn’t have done that. I was too passive to take a step like that. I would have been back after two hours on the road. School was the only way out for me, and I took it.
The last thing Mrs. Hollis said when I left was, “You send us something when you can.” I never saw either of them again. I made good grades my freshman year and got a job that summer working full-time in the library. I sent them a Christmas card that first year, but that was the only one.