Up ahead in the far left lane — what would be the fast lane when traffic was actually moving on this stretch of highway — a woman in tennis whites was standing beside a Toyota with a NO NUKES bumper sticker on the left side of the license plate and one reading HOUSECAT: THE OTHER WHITE MEAT on the right. Her skirt was very short, her thighs were very long and brown, and when she pushed her sunglasses up, propping them in her blond-streaked hair, Sully got a look at her eyes. They were wide and blue and somehow alarmed. It was a look that made you want to stroke her cheek (or perhaps give her a one-armed brother-hug) and tell her not to worry, everything was going to be all right. It was a look Sully remembered well. It was the one that had turned him inside out. It was Carol Gerber up there, Carol Gerber in sneakers and a tennis dress. He hadn’t seen her since one night in late 1966
when he’d gone over her house and they’d sat on the sofa (along with Carol’s mother, who had smelled strongly of wine) watching TV. They had ended up arguing about the war and he had left. I’ll go back and see her again when I’m sure I can stay cool, he remembered thinking as he drove away in his old Chevrolet (even back then he’d been a Chevrolet man). But he never had. By late ’66 she was already up to her ass in antiwar shit — that much she’d learned during her semester in Maine, if nothing else — and just thinking about her was enough to make him furious. Fucking little empty-headed idiot was what she was, she’d swallowed all that communist antiwar propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Then, of course, she’d joined that nutty group, that MSP, and had high-sided it completely.
‘Carol!’ he called, starting toward her. He passed the snot-green crotchrocket, cut between the rear bumper of a van and a sedan, temporarily lost sight of her as he hurried along the side of a rumbling sixteen-wheeler, then saw her again. ‘Carol! Hey Carol!’ Yet when she turned toward him he wondered what the hell was wrong with him, what had possessed him. If Carol was still alive she had to be pushing fifty now, just as he was. This woman looked maybe thirty-five.
Sully stopped, still a lane away. Cars and trucks rumbling everywhere. And an odd whickering sound in the air, which he at first thought was the wind, although the afternoon air was hot and perfectly still.
‘Carol? Carol Gerber?’
The whicker was louder, a sound like someone flicking his tongue repeatedly through his pursed lips, a sound like a helicopter five klicks away. Sully looked up and saw a lampshade tumbling out of the hazy blue sky, directly at him. He dodged backward in an instinctive startle reflex, but he had spent his entire school career playing athletic sports of one kind or another, and even as he was pulling back his head he was reaching with his hand. He caught the lampshade quite deftly. On it was a paddleboat churning downriver against a lurid red sunset. WE’RE DOING FINE ON THE MISSISSIPPI was written above the boat in scrolly, old-fashioned letters. Below it, in the same scrolly caps: HOW’S BAYOU?
Where the fuck did this come from? Sully thought, and then the woman who looked like an all-grown-up version of Carol Gerber screamed. Her hands rose as if to adjust the sunglasses propped in her hair and then just hung beside her shoulders, shaking like the hands of a distraught symphony conductor. It was how old mamasan had looked as she came running
out of her shitty fucked-up hooch and into the shitty fucked-up street of that shitty fucked-up little Ville in Dong Ha Province. Blood spilled down over the shoulders of the tennis woman’s white dress, first in spatters, then in a flood. It ran down her tanned upper arms and dripped from her elbows.
‘Carol?’ Sully asked stupidly. He was standing between a Dodge Ram pickup and a Mack semi, dressed in a dark blue suit, the one he wore to funerals, holding a lampshade souvenir of the Mississippi River (how’s bayou) and looking at a woman who now had something sticking out of her head. As she staggered a step forward, blue eyes still wide, hands still shaking in the air, Sully realized it was a cordless phone. He could tell by the stub of aerial, which jiggled with each step she took. A cordless phone had fallen out of the sky, had fallen God knew how many thousands of feet, and now it was in her head.