The Waiting Room (25 page)

He shone the flashlight into my eyes. "You're a damn troublemaker's what you are, boy!" he said.

I looked away from the glare of the flashlight. "I give it my best shot," I said.

"And I'll tell ya, boy, we're real tireda troublemakers 'round here. We're real tired of people tearin' about like they's already dead and don't give a damn!"

"I'll bet you are," I said.

"So what I'm gonna have to do with you, boy, is take you back into town—"

"Into Ashley Falls?" I said.

"That's right. Into Ashley Falls. And we're gawna put you up for the night, boy."

"Uh-huh. Sure you are," I said, and I put the Malibu in gear, said, "Bye-bye," pressed the accelerator. And went nowhere. The engine died. "Shit," I whispered, and that old familiar knot of panic started in my stomach.

"Yeah," the cop said, "real nice car you got there, boy." He put his flashlight back in its place on his gun belt. He unholstered that cannon of his, and he pointed it directly at my head, Dirty Harry style.

"Oh, for God's sake," I muttered.

"You get on outta there now, boy, or so help me God—I don't give a good goddamn what the
Su
preme
Court says—I'll blow your brains from here to kingdom come!"

"This can't be happening!" I whispered, as much to myself as to him.

"Now, boy!"

I put my hand on the door handle. I heard the low growl of an engine being revved at a distance. I hesitated.

"Now!" the cop said again, and cocked the .45.

The low growl grew rapidly louder. I glanced in the rearview mirror, saw only the glare of the Fury's lights there.

"I will!" the cop snarled. "Don't you fuckin' test me, boy!"

The low growl became a high whine. I saw another set of lights in the rearview mirror, but just briefly. I glanced at the cop. His face was bathed in the glare of two sets of headlights now—his own and the headlights of the car careening toward him. His snarl drooped. His jaw fell open. His head turned stiffly, resignedly toward the vehicle bearing inexorably down on him.

Then he was gone.

And through the cracked windshield of the Malibu, in the light from the Plymouth Fury, I saw the back end of the LTD lose itself in the gathering night.

~ * ~

I didn't want all that to happen. Not when I realized what that cop was exactly—that he was a real cop with a real gun and a real purpose—to get the maniacs off his roads. And how was he to know that some of those maniacs were precisely what he'd called them—"People tearing about like they's already dead and don't give a damn!"

At that moment, just before the night swallowed him up, I would have willingly gone anywhere with him, because he was a link to reality. He
was
reality.

But then the LTD took him from me.

And left me alone. On U.S. Route 7 a couple of miles south of Ashley Falls.

Alone. With no place to go and no way to get there.

Except Brookfield, Vermont. In that huge Plymouth Fury that still had its gumball machine twirling.

And, because fear really does start crazy fires in us all, I got out of the Malibu, thanked it for being as good a car as it could be, right up to the end, got my suitcase from the back seat, went over to the Fury, climbed in, turned it around on the narrow road, and headed north.

~ * ~

Leslie used to say, in our first couple of weeks together, that I brooded. She's right. I do, and did, though much less so after we met than before. She's entirely the reason I don't brood very much anymore. And I don't think I brooded
because
of anything, because I was unhappy about foreign affairs or the plight of the whales (no one
broods
about things like that; they
think
about things like that).

I brooded so much because I wasn't happy. I wasn't
unhappy.
Someone who's been standing in a cold rain all his life isn't unhappy about it; he doesn't give it a thought—that's the way things are. Life consists of standing in a cold rain and scowling, because a cold rain doesn't make anyone whoop with joy.

She does. Alone in the Chevy Nova, I used to whoop. I've danced, too—alone in my apartment. And I've sung out loud. And hopped straight up into the air—which she told me looked "fruity," though I knew she enjoyed it, because I enjoyed it.

A memory: We're in Ithaca, New York, a college
town. We're there for the day. We're in love, and it's obvious to anyone with eyes or ears. We go into a little clothing shop that specializes in voluminous skirts and white cotton blouses; the place could have been called "The Organic Clothing Store." She wants to look around. Fine, I say, we'll look around.

There's some music playing—elevator music, but that's okay. It gets my feet going. And suddenly I hop straight up into the air. It must be quite a sight, because I'm over six feet tall and weigh 230 pounds. Her mouth falls open. She closes it. A little half-embarrassed, half-gleeful smile appears on it.

She pleads, reading my mind in that instant, because I, too, have a little smile on my face, "No, don't do that again." Her smile becomes imploring.

I hop.

She giggles.

I mince over, in time with the elevator music, to a clothing rack that has long-sleeved blouses hanging on it. I do a small, quick two-step. Again her mouth falls open. A young woman walks by and grins at me.

"That woman's looking at you."

I smile. I hop again.

"They'll kick us out."

"No, they won't. We're in love."

And of course they don't kick us out. We dance out, arm in arm, a few minutes later, smiling to ourselves.

As I headed toward Ashley Falls in the big Plymouth, I realized that I hadn't taken a wrong turnoff, I hadn't zigged left when I should have zagged right, at a fork in the road veered east instead of west. I really was traveling north on U.S. Route 7 toward Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, which would lead me to Burlington and then to Brookfield, Vermont.

It was all simply a matter of
perception.
My perception was different. Like when the Malibu broke down that first time and I got out and stuck my head under the hood and pretended to understand what I was looking at. Lots of people find themselves in similar situations, and I think lots of people get told things like "It's your torque converter" by people like Anton Kenney—people whose chances for being helpful have all gone by, because life is behind them.

But they still hang in there, they still try to do their job, they still try to be helpful. And so they say, "It's your torque converter," or, "It's your internal rotator," or, "It's your headlight fluid." And 999,999 times out of a million they're ignored. No one hears them. And they shrug and wait for someone else to come along. Why not? The popular mythology says that they've got lots of time and no place to go. And they believe it. Why shouldn't they?

Or maybe they're door-to-door salesmen with vacuum cleaners under their arms or they're teachers or mailmen or waitresses. Whatever they are, they try like hell to carry on. Habits die hard, I guess.
People
die before their habits do. And who, after all, really wants to leave behind what's .familiar and comfortable so they can dive head first into
The Great Unknown
? Who really wants—excuse me, I've just got to say it—who really wants to give up the ghost?

But eventually some poor slob like me comes along and actually hears what they've got to say, actually sees them and responds to them. And it's like a shot in the arm, it nurtures them, picks them up, helps renew their sagging self-image.

And for a while they're as real again as the rocks and the grass and the trees.

Real enough to bury the head of an axe in the roof of an old Malibu.

These were the things that I figured out on the road to Ashley Falls. It didn't please me to figure these things out. They were things that I should have figured out long ago.

~ * ~

I didn't plan to go back through Ashley Falls, I planned to take a road that would lead me around it. But when I stopped and checked my interstate map I could find no such road, and a quick check of the Plymouth's glove box turned up an area map that was yellow with age, coffee-stained, doodled on, and illegible. Perhaps, I thought, I could simply turn onto a likely-looking road, and hope my usually reliable sense of direction would keep heading me north. It was an idea I clung to as I approached Ashley Falls. I passed two dirt roads, a dead-end road, and, at last, a two-lane paved road. I turned down that road. A couple of miles later, I realized that I was heading south. I turned around and went back to Route 7. A minute later, I saw a sign that I hadn't seen from the passenger's seat of Anton's Power Wagon: The sign read, "VILLAGE OF ASHLEY FALLS—WELCOME!"

I slowed from sixty to the posted speed limit of thirty. I passed a couple dozen big clapboard houses of indeterminate vintage, and when I got to the business district I slowed to twenty.

It was not the village I had been through a million years before. I knew that. (Abner had told me once, "You'll know in here, Sam"—and he thumped his chest—"what's real and what isn't. " This was one of those times.) It occupied the same space, but it was not the same village.

The buildings in this village's business district were pretty much the same as that other village's, except the hotel was not called the Ashley Falls Hotel, it was called the Haskins Hotel, and the restaurant was not called the Coffee Cup, it was called Mary's Coffee Cup. That other village, the one I'd been through with Anton Kenney, was like a tracing of this village, an approximation of it. A clever imitation.

~ * ~

I'm not sure why I turned onto Haywire Street. A combination of curiosity and stupidity, perhaps.

It wasn't called Haywire Street. It was called Drumlin View Row. And there were no big white clapboard houses on it. All the houses were cedar contemporaries with too many right angles, too few windows, and flat, well-manicured, brightly lit lawns. (If there had been any drumlins to view on Drumlin View Row, they'd all been bulldozed into oblivion.)

I pulled into the driveway of a house under construction, put my foot on the brake, and looked about.
They're all dead
, I thought.
They're dead, their children are dead. Even their houses have been demolished to make way for the new
. "It's a pity," I whispered. And in the glare of the headlights I saw Anton rising up out of the blacktop, that long-handled axe poised high above his head.

I stiffened, panic-stricken. Then I slammed the Plymouth into reverse; I felt the tires spinning on the blacktop.

"Damn you!" Anton shrieked. "Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!"

"Good Lord!" I hissed.

"Damn you!" Anton shrieked, and he rose out of the blacktop like someone rising from dark water.

I let off slightly on the accelerator. The Plymouth's tires caught; the car squealed out of the driveway and onto Drumlin View Row. I stopped, slammed it into drive, hesitated. I saw Anton sinking back into the blacktop like a man drowning. I floored the accelerator and moments later had turned right off Drumlin View Row and was heading north out of Ashley Falls.

I hadn't counted on that. I hadn't counted on anger from the dead. And for twenty miles north on U.S. Route 7, I found myself shivering as if from cold.

~ * ~

The Plymouth was fast and comfortable and handled beautifully. I'd shut the two-way radio off because every five minutes or so a woman's voice came over it and said, "Rick? Come in, Rick," until, finally, she said to someone else, "I think something's happened to Rick." I knew that Rick had probably radioed in the license number of the Malibu, but the Malibu was out of commission now. Eventually an alert would be broadcast for the Plymouth. That would happen by morning, I guessed, which gave me the night to use it. And that, I figured, would be more than enough time to get to Brookfield, Vermont. Especially since I planned to make no more stops.

It was about 8:00
P.M.
when I was thinking this. My calculations told me I'd be in Brookfield by 2:00 A.M., maybe, with luck, a little earlier.

But, at around 8:30 on a long straight stretch of road a couple miles south of Pontonosuc Gardens, Massachusetts, a pair of headlights appeared in the rearview mirror, advanced on me at a good twenty or thirty miles an hour faster than my own sixty, then paced me five car lengths back.

It was the LTD. I knew it.

And I told myself that, at last, I knew who was driving it. And why.

I told myself that Art DeGraff was driving it. And he was following me because he knew I'd lead him to Abner.

So I pulled over.

The LTD pulled over.

I shut my lights off.

The LTD's lights went off.

Then, taking a very deep breath and wishing to God that I wasn't
enjoying
this so much, I put the Plymouth in gear and mashed the accelerator. It didn't disappoint me. That huge engine fishtailed the Plymouth away from the shoulder and catapulted it down the road a good quarter mile before the LTD had its lights on again.