Chapter eight

I walked down to the garage on Bleecker Street. It was a crummy day. It had rained in the early morning, and now the sky just hung there, undecided. As I walked, the clouds opened and splattered a gout of rain on me, then settled in to drench me slowly with a steady drizzle. My soaked sneaker laces lashed the cuffs of my jeans as I walked, until my cuffs were wet through and my shins were clammy. My hair dripped on my forehead. My forehead throbbed. And what if she didn’t want me? It was a crummy day.

I got out the company car: an ancient, yellow Mustang. The Sunday afternoon traffic was sparse and I made it out of town without a fight. I bounced up the Bruckner through the Bronx with the gray sky all around me and the gray skyline stretching out in all directions. I felt like the ashy center of it. I had a knot in my stomach the size of a fist.

It was about four when I got started, and I figured I had about four hours of driving ahead of me. For a while, the weather held. It drizzled and then the drizzle died, and then it drizzled again. Soon I was in Westchester with the willows weeping by the roadside and the wet naked hills of late winter trees rising and falling away into a low mist. The traffic stayed light. Only the trucks were rolling in my direction. They thundered by me, churning up the fallen rain, spraying it over my windshield. I squinted through the mess and cursed as the wipers swept it away.

I turned on the radio, full blast. Springsteen and Madonna and Prince. There was a downpour as I crossed over the county line, and I traveled through Putnam at about thirty-five, my nose glued to. the glass. As the sun went down, the clouds broke a little on patches of deepening blue. The hills, I saw, were turning muzzy. The mist was spreading over them, snaking into the lowlands.

So the driving was easier for a time. I noticed the knot in my stomach hadn’t gone away. I noticed it was bigger now. Then they played an old Jim Croce tune—“Operator”—on the radio.

“Damn it,” I said. But I didn’t turn it off.

I glanced up into the rearview mirror at my own eyes.

“Goddamnit,” I said.

I don’t remember when the song ended. I was just aware all at once that the beat was harder and the music wild. The highway rose steadily between the hills. The mist was beginning to creep across it. Sheets and tendrils of it wafted over the running white line. It was getting dark. I put my headlights on and the beams lay blandly in the mist.

And it got darker. And the mist became a fog. Yellow and thick, it closed in, until the headlight beams were bouncing off it crazily. Now the trucks came up behind me out of nowhere. There’d be an angry roar, then the blank gray wall of the thing sweeping by me, then the suction of it rocking me as I pushed forward, and finally the great gust of rainwater and the blindness. The windshield wipers ticked and ticked. And then there was just the fog.

An hour went by, maybe more. I was going thirty, twenty sometimes. My throat was dry and tight, my stomach roiling. But that was just the effect of the hard driving. And anyway, maybe she would welcome me with open arms.

The sign for the Marysvale exit shot up out of the mist suddenly. The words on the green background were dazzling white in the beams. I rolled off the highway slowly. It was almost nine o’clock.

Now I was in an even deeper darkness on a winding road. The bare branches of maple trees hung over me, the thick trunks of oaks leaned down. The fog gave way in inches before my headlights, regrouping inches away into a solid mass.

Then, the way fog will, it parted. The road appeared, twisting before me. It was gleaming and black with rain. A brick wall lined the road, the drenched grass at the foot of it matted, the branches above it dark with rain. In the sky, I could see now, the clouds were racing fiercely over a gibbous moon.

I came to a gate in the wall. There was a plaque beside it: Marysvale College. I turned and drove through the gate onto a gravel drive. The fog closed in again. I could see it lying sullenly on a wide lawn. Through it I could make out the silhouettes of buildings arrayed in a half circle all around me. I drew nearer, and I saw the yellow lights of windows shining in the fog.

The gravel crunched and spat under my tires as I went around a sharp curve. And all at once, a figure loomed out of the mist before me.

I hit the brake, hard. The car skidded, swerved, stopped. The figure spun around to me. A face shone suddenly in the headlights.

“Good Christ,” I said.

My heart was hammering. I peered wildly through the windshield. The figure was gone.

But I’d seen him. I’d seen him.

It was the scarred man.