Giggling nervously, Greg went back to the Mercury, got in, and backed rapidly out of the driveway. He turned east on the dirt road that ran straight as a string through the corn, and was soon cruising along at sixty-five leaving a dust plume two miles long behind him.
He most assuredly didn’t want to lose the job. Not yet. He was making good money – in addition to the wrinkles the American TruthWay Company knew about, Greg had added a few of his own that they didn’t know about. He was making it now. Besides, traveling around, he got to meet a lot of people… a lot of girls. It was a good life, except -Except he wasn’t content.
He drove on, his head throbbing. No, he just wasn’t content. He felt that he was meant for bigger things than driving around the Midwest and selling Bibles and doctoring the commission forms in order to make an extra two bucks a day. He felt that he was meant for .. . for ….
For greatness.
Yes, that was it, that was surely it. A few weeks ago he had taken some girl up in the hayloft, her folks had been in Davenport selling a truckload of chickens, she had started off by asking if he would like a glass of lemonade and one thing had just led to another and after he’d had her she said it was almost like getting diddled by a preacher and he had slapped her, he didn’t know why. He had slapped her and then left.
Well, no.
Actually, he had slapped her three or four times. Until she had cried and screamed for someone to come and help her and then he had stopped and somehow – he had had to use every ounce of the charm God had given him – he had made it up with her. His head had been aching then, too, the pulsing specks of brightness shooting and caroming across his field of vision, and he tried to tell himself it was the heat, the explosive heat in the hayloft, but it wasn’t just the heat that made his head ache. It was the same thing he had felt in the dooryard when the dog tore his pants, something dark and crazy.
‘I’m not crazy,’ he said aloud in the car. He unrolled the window swiftly, letting in summer heat and the smell of dust and corn and manure. He turned on the radio loud and caught a Patti Page song. His headache went back a little bit.
It was all a matter of keeping yourself under control and – and keeping your record dean.
If you did those things, they couldn’t touch you. And he was getting better at both of those things. He no longer had the dreams about his father so often, the dreams where his father was standing above him with his hard hat cocked back on his head, bellowing:
‘You’re no good, runt! You’re no fucking good!’
He didn’t have the dreams so much because they just weren’t true. He wasn’t a runt anymore. Okay, he had been sick a lot as a kid, not much size, but he had gotten his growth, he was taking care. of his mother -And his father was dead. His father couldn’t see. He couldn’t make his father eat his words because he had died in an oil-derrick blowout and he was dead and once, just once, Greg would like to dig him up and scream into his mouldering face You were wrong, dad, you were wrong about me! and then give him a good kick the way -The way he had kicked the dog.
The headache was back, lowering.
‘I’m not crazy,’ he said again below the sound of the music. His mother had told him often he was meant for something big, something great, and Greg believed it. It was just a matter of getting things – like slapping the girl or kicking the dog – under control and keeping his record dean.
Whatever his greatness was, he would know it when it came to him. Of that he felt quite sure.
He thought of the dog again, and this time the thought brought a bare crescent of a smile, without humor or compassion.