Follow Me (15 page)

“How could anything be wrong when you’re around?” he said, a question that he delivered flatly, as if he’d been rehearsing
it all morning. But when he smiled, it felt good and honest, with his inward smile matching the outward one, as far as Sally
could tell. She already was convinced that this boy, this Mole, was the sweetest fellow she’d ever met.

She bumped her hip against his, knocking him slightly to the side. He bumped back. She bumped, he bumped, and they staggered
along the road, laughing together, bumping together, and suddenly rearing backward to get out of the way when a car came speeding
around the turn.

Sally and Mole clung to each other, still chuckling, as they watched the car, a stub-finned green Cadillac, go by.

“There goes the cream-cheese prince,” said Mole when the car was out of sight.

“Who?”

“Heir to the throne.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know Benny Patterson?”

“I haven’t been here long.”

“The Pattersons own a dairy farm east of Fenton. They got rich selling cream cheese. Benny, what a gorilla. He bought that
car with cash. Aw, will you listen to that.” There was a bird shrieking in the darkness, a jay calling and then answering
itself. “Crazy bird,” murmured Mole. But Sally was still thinking about the prince of cream cheese speeding by in his Cadillac.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to drive around? I mean, if we could just get in a car and follow the road,” she said dreamily.
Mole didn’t say anything, and Sally interpreted his silence as agreement. “If only I knew how to drive,” she continued. “Gee,
I wish… if I had a car…”

“You say you want to learn to drive?” There was an unfamiliar sharpness in Mole’s voice, and Sally guessed that he was envious
of Benny Patterson’s fancy car and all the privileges that money bought. She decided to talk about something else, and the
best she could come up with was to comment on the good smell of honeysuckle. She added, in an attempt to reassure him, “It’s
nice to walk along.” But he didn’t let go either of her arm or the subject.

“So you want to learn to drive?” he repeated.

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Some girls are flat-out scared.”

“Bah, that’s just what boys think. They’re afraid their girls will learn to drive and then drive away and leave them in the
dust.”

“Where would you go, if you could drive?”

“To Amity. To shop.”

“And what would you buy?”

She sensed that he was teasing her now, so she teased him back: “I’d buy you your own deck of cards.”

“What do I need with cards?”

“You’d get to call the game.”

She laughed to show that she was joking, and he laughed along with her and then pulled her toward him, tipping his head down
as she tipped hers up, their lips meeting in a brief, tender kiss that thrilled Sally not just because it was happening but
because she sensed in it a bid to make something serious, respectful, and lasting out of their mutual affection. Sweet Mole
with his menthol breath and tousled hair. He cared about her too much to take advantage of her. And she felt for him a different
kind of attraction than she’d ever felt before, something that right here in its early stages was enriched with the possibility
of permanence. She wasn’t certain yet — she hardly knew him, after all — but it could be that this kiss signified a release
from all her troubles.

“Mole.”

“Sally Angel.”

How could she let him think of her under that guise, a false name, a veil for her sins?
My real name is…,
she tried to say.
I’m not…,
she tried to say. “I…,” she began. But before she could utter another word he’d leaned forward and they were kissing again,
their mouths open this time, their tongues moving greedily, their eyes squeezed shut. Oh, he was a nice boy, an innocent who
assumed there was an empty place in Sally’s life that only he could fill. And he wasn’t far from the truth, was he? Maybe
she hadn’t been looking for a boy like Mole, but now she was glad she’d found him.

They finally came up for air, blinking, each waiting for the other to speak, the silence stretching into an awkward pause
that Sally could think to break only by telling Mole that she needed to go home. Wasn’t that what a good girl was supposed
to say? But she didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to go home. She had no home of her own and was fighting a swell of
desperation when Mole asked in a whisper, “You want to learn to drive?”

“Yes,” she said softly. She would have said yes to any question he’d asked.

“Well then, I’ll teach you,” he announced, taking her hand and leading her around the curve of the road that had returned
them — magically, it seemed to Sally, as though they’d crossed a fold of time and space in a single stride — to the street
corner from where they’d set out on their walk. And at the corner was the car that had been parked there earlier, a tired
old Pontiac with a webbed crack in the corner of the windshield and dents along one side, front to back, that were outlined
in rusty scratches.

The scratches were black in the dusk. The corner of the rear bumper was anchored with twine. Mole patted the hood as though
to calm a nervous horse, and then he opened the passenger door for Sally.

“Meet Phoebe.”

“This is your car? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“You said you wanted to walk.”

“But… this is your car? Really, Mole? You have your own car?”

He didn’t answer. He’d already closed her door and was walking around the front of the car. She watched him settle in beside
her and fit the key into the ignition, and she was reminded of the ride she’d taken four years earlier on the back of her
cousin’s motorcycle. But this ride would be nothing like that one. She already was sure that this ride would be like the kisses
she’d just enjoyed, marking the beginning of a story that would go on and on.

She didn’t mind that the seam of her vinyl seat had split and she could feel the coil of the metal spring. She didn’t mind
the dents and cracks. She felt the pleasure of Mole’s pride as he described the car to her, a ’46 Pontiac sedan complete with
a radio and a heater that actually worked! To prove it, Mole turned the heater on, turned it off, turned it on and off again
as he drove down the street.

He had an odd way of driving, with his hands gripping the steering wheel as though to hold it on the stem and his foot pressing
and then releasing the accelerator, creating a jerking motion that kept throwing Sally back against her seat. She wondered
if he’d only recently learned to drive or even if he was old enough to drive. What did he know about the world? What did he
assume about her? Surely it wouldn’t occur to him that she’d
been through it.
Or maybe he was wise enough to guess that Sally had secrets he didn’t want to hear.

She had an impulse to divert him from this thought, even though he’d given no sign that he was thinking it. “Say,” she said,
sliding her hand behind his neck, “where are you taking me?”

“To the moon!” he cried. “Hold on, baby!” With that he pressed the accelerator, turning the car with a screech down a dark
lane that led to a school and speeding around the front loop and into an empty parking lot, where he stopped so abruptly that
Sally had to throw her hands forward to keep from colliding with the dashboard.

“Your turn,” he said in a tone that reminded her of the way her brothers would dare her, when she was just a little girl,
to jump off a high rock shelf into the pool at the bottom of the gravel pit.

But what Sally experienced that evening in Mole’s beat-up ’46 Pontiac sedan was not the sensation of falling. Nor was it much
like the dangerous thrill she’d felt on the back of her cousin’s motorcycle. Rather, after she’d taken her place in the driver’s
seat and Mole had showed her how to put the car in drive, she felt as though she were riding on a raft, carried by a steady
current. Why, it turned out to be surprisingly easy to drive, almost effortless! She had only to rest the ball of her foot
against the pedal and hold the steering wheel at an angle that kept the car moving in a circle, around and around in the parking
lot, following the beams of the headlights.

“I’m driving!”

“Go ahead,” he urged. “Go a little faster.”

She obliged, following the road that girdled the earth, speeding along from hemisphere to hemisphere. Mole turned on the radio
and turned up the volume of the sportscaster who was reporting on last night’s headliner at the Elks Club, in which Abe Walden
had been —

“Dumped by Bruce Brewster!” Mole cried.

“Who?”

“Welterweight from Hornell, the best, good God, dumped on the seat of his drawers!” He hung on to the vinyl handle above the
passenger door and swayed with the motion of the car. “Go for it!” he shouted as Sally changed direction and steered the car
in a tight figure eight.

Fast, faster, fastest. The darkening twilight gave the playground a strange depth, as if the flat field went on and on. The
Pontiac sped round the parking lot in dizzying loops.

So this is happiness, Sally thought. This was the power that would save her from her own mistakes. The ability to go anywhere,
to just get in a car and go with the current, leaving everything behind.

But now Mole was yelling that she had to do something, find something, figure it out for herself because
whoops,
he’d forgotten to show her the brake.

“The what?”

“The pedal there, to stop.” He tried to kick his foot into the space, but Sally beat him to it.

“I know what a brake is.” Sally pressed lightly, expertly slowing the car, bringing it to a halt with its nose pointing toward
the fence. “How was that?”

“I told you,” he said. “You’re a natural.” He reached for the gear handle, shoving it into park.

They sat in silence for a moment, staring at the metal links glinting in the headlights. “I guess…,” Mole said vaguely, giving
a timid smile. She braced her shoulders as she turned toward him, offering him her lips. He hesitated, so she wrapped her
arms around his neck to pull him closer, and they kissed another gulping kiss.

A newscaster was droning on about yesterday’s swirling dogfight over Korea, though Sally and Mole weren’t listening. Nor did
they notice the dark form of a moth fluttering in the headlight beams or the white-tailed doe that bounded across the edge
of the playground behind the fence. They kept kissing for so long, with such absorbing passion, that by the end of it, Sally
was certain that she knew Mole thoroughly and knew that she could count on him to be a good and honest sport no matter what.
So desperate was she to put the tumult of the last three years behind her forever that by the time they’d stopped kissing,
she’d concluded that they should marry and spend the rest of their lives together.

“It’s a good thing that pistol didn’t fire when you pulled the trigger,” she whispered, fingering his collarbone, pressing
tenderly to explore the line of his neck.

She expected him to say something charming in return. But he surprised her by admitting in a murmur that he had something
to tell her — a
something
in a tone that promised to be an unwelcome confession. Her fingers curled in tense anticipation. He was going to tell her
that he didn’t want to be involved with her or couldn’t be involved because of what she’d done, he’d heard about her, he knew
about what she’d left behind in Tauntonville and what she’d taken from Fishkill Notch. He was going to call her a slut. He
was going to say he wouldn’t have anything more to do with her. He was going to say —

“It’s about Phoebe. Well…”

“What?” Her confusion was smothering. All she would let herself understand was that he was telling her something he thought
she didn’t want to hear.

“The car, it’s Phil’s. Phil’s my brother, see —”

“What?”

“I should have come right out and told you earlier. You see, Phil lets me use his car when he doesn’t need it, except he needs
it to drive to Fenton. He’s a manager on the graveyard shift at the diner there, and he needs the car to get to work. If I’m
not back by ten —”

“That’s all you’re telling me, about the car?”

“I mean, I hope you’re not mad.”

“You darling,” Sally said with relief. His ignorance of her guilt was almost as good as forgiveness. “Of course I’m not mad.”

They met the next time Phil lent Mole the Pontiac, three nights later. They met again on the following Sunday and stayed out
well past midnight, since it was Phil’s night off. They met again on Tuesday night, and then the next Thursday, dividing their
time between driving instruction and kissing, incrementally driving less, since Sally was quick to master the necessary skills,
and kissing more, expanding their kissing to caresses, their caresses to more excited groping. They took to parking along
the gravel drive leading to the mill. They’d move to the ample rear seat, and Mole would open Sally’s blouse button by button
with a slow, intoxicating persistence. Sometimes he’d have to struggle with the hooks of her bra, bunching the clasp, pulling
with two hands before he discovered that a simple pinch with a slight rubbing would do it. His fingers were always cold, even
on a steamy summer’s night, but they’d warm up from the heat of Sally’s skin. And she’d make sure to move her body into positions
that gave him room to explore, shifting her hips to stretch her torso into a long curve, lifting her chin, raising a knee,
until finally, after several weeks of caresses gentler than anything she could have dreamed of, she separated her thighs for
him.

She’d been afraid that with this new intimacy he’d ask about her history. But though he must have understood that she wasn’t
a virgin, he was too absorbed in his pleasure to care. And she felt her need to confess to him evaporate. He’d fallen for
her in her incarnation as Sally Angel; there wasn’t any need for him to find out about Sally Werner.

She did ask him one night about his own past romances. He insisted that she was his first real love, though he’d had what
he called “a dress rehearsal” with a girl named Annette, the older sister of Belle, the girl who’d fired the gun in the mill.
But Annette had gone away to a junior college, where she’d met someone else, a sergeant in the military, who at the time was
on leave from Korea. When she came back to Helena the next summer, she was already engaged.