As I neared the Avenue of the Giants, it started raining again, just as my shirt had almost dried. I was starting to get pissed off at all this rain, which kept coming without warning, and by now I was tired of getting wet, I’d had enough of it. A service station reached out to me from below the highway. I filled her up again, that Mustang was a real gas guzzler. An old man served me. His wife kept the cash register and a little bar that served a few hot dishes. These people looked too old to be working still, but I guess they had no choice. I ordered six fried eggs with bacon and coffee. The old lady crept away to make them. A woman of about thirty came in. She was wearing a gray raincoat over a short skirt that revealed her nice legs. She sat down on one of the two remaining seats, took out a cigarette, and started smoking nervously. I sensed that she wanted to talk to me but couldn’t make up her mind. I didn’t exactly encourage her. I was staring at the black oil in the fryer, on the verge of collapse. At last she took the plunge.
“You going north?”
I didn’t answer straight away. I finally turned to her. “Yes.”
“Could you give me a ride? I’m going to Eugene, Oregon.”
“I’m going to Oregon too, but I’m stopping just over the state line, in Gold Beach.”
“At least that’s something, if you agree to take me.”
“Yes, but there’s a problem. I’m driving a convertible and, because of my size, I can’t close the hood. So when it rains, I can’t guarantee you’ll stay dry.”
“But why did you buy a convertible?”
“I didn’t buy it, I stole it. But it’s like when you steal shoes from the cloakroom of a stadium, you don’t know if they’ll fit your feet.”
I didn’t turn my head to see her reaction. The old lady came back. The fries were still hot. The woman ordered a Pepsi.
“So will you take me?”
“You’d be taking your life in your hands. I haven’t slept for three days. It might be better if you waited for someone else.”
“I don’t have time to wait.”
Her life didn’t interest me. I told her that.
“O.K., I’ll take you, but I don’t want to know anything about you and I don’t feel obliged to hold a conversation with you. I’ll drop you near Reading if we get there alive.”
Suddenly doubt struck her. “You’re serious, right? You haven’t slept for three days?”
I swallowed my mouthful. “I’m serious.”
“Okay, then I’m going to wait for someone else.”
I finished eating then said, “Your problems aren’t so bad that you should risk your life. You just realized it, and that’s a good thing.”
I stood up and went back to my convertible under an almost brazen blue sky. I looked westward. No sign of rain. I got in the car and just as I was about to leave I dozed off. I must have slept at least an hour. When I woke up, the girl was standing in front of the car with her case in her hand and her raincoat tied around her waist. Seeing me open my eyes, she walked up to me.
“Now you’ve slept, maybe you can take me.”
I turned the key in the ignition and slowly pulled up level with her.
“Now I’ve slept, I don’t feel like it.”
I sped away, memories stirring my blood. Sleeping hadn’t refreshed me. Fatigue continued to weigh on me like cow’s milk on a baby’s stomach. The traffic on the 101 made me feel dizzy. I left it and drove along the coast road as far as Gold Beach, at the mouth of the Rogue River. I found myself in Oregon without realizing it. I didn’t really care, I wasn’t particularly trying to get out of California. Gold Beach was the last town I had to drive through before I hit the forest. I had driven the last hundred miles without going back on my decision. I was going to climb up to the mountains and blow my brains out near the tree that had been struck by lightning. Not directly underneath it. I didn’t want to cause offense. Gold Beach was wearing its most conventional face. The darkening gray sky melted into a menacing sea. The big deserted beach seemed to despise the town, which had no reason for being there. There were three motels there, one of them with an Irish theme. I immediately thought of Duigan. Then of Wendy. I hadn’t had the time or the calm to think about them up until now. Wendy had talked to me about her mother one day. When her mother had learned that her cancer was incurable, there had been several days when she couldn’t believe it. She had told Wendy that there was no greater suffering in life than to know that you were going to die within a fixed period of time. Those words stirred so many memories of all the bad stuff I’d done that I walked back to my car, which I had left along the 1. I had to hurry up and be done with it. What the hell was I doing, running around like this? All at once, just when I was least expecting it, an obvious idea came into my mind and wouldn’t go away. I had to do something good. I’d never ducked out of things in my life. But if I was going crazy because of the guilt that was growing in my head like a brain tumor, then I had to tell Duigan everything. I owed him the truth. The poor guy was going to be in enough trouble anyway. No, I wasn’t the kind of son of a bitch who’d let down the people who trusted him. I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. But instead of calming me down, that decision made me twice as nervous. I carried on along the Rogue River for about ten miles. There, at the foot of the mountain, I knew a place. Nobody lived there apart from an old guy who kept the only gas station for miles around. There it stood, a big dirt yard in the middle of all those steep roads. That gas station meant more to desperate drivers than a shrine means to pilgrims. His house was ridiculously small. Almost as small as the phone booth that sat in the middle of that yard. Apart from a few deadbeats, the area was deserted, surrounded by conifers, but with the Rogue River flowing past to the sea. The old man recognized me. He was a nice old guy with no teeth. This was the third time he’d seen me. I had never met anyone as cheerful as he was. He subscribed to a wine club, and was very proud of his bottles. Unfortunately, as he told me himself, he only liked beer. So he was very generous to wine lovers, to make up for the exorbitant prices he charged for gas. “Have you ever seen a guy dying of thirst after crossing the Mojave Desert on foot arguing about the price of water?” He offered me some wine. I drank a bottle to calm down. He offered me another, telling me he had to empty his cellar. They’d just found a nasty tumor in one lung—he’d been systematically filling his lungs with smoke for fifty years.
“I’m not sure I’ll be here next time you come. They want to operate on me. If they don’t operate on me, I’ll die. If they operate on me, I haven’t a cent to pay them. I’m going to be forced to die to escape my debts. That’s how life is, everything’s fine and dandy and then suddenly you’re screwed by fate. But I’m not complaining.”
He opened the second bottle then sniffed the cork.
“It’s a wine that should be kept, but who’s going to keep it? If you like, you can take the bottles that are left. I don’t have any family.”
“That’s a pity but I won’t be able to keep it either.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m not sure I have long to live.”
He looked at me, deeply shocked. “At your age, son, that isn’t natural.”
Before I could satisfy his curiosity, which was quite understandable for an old man living alone without any distractions, I stood up.
“Is the phone working?”
“It was working this morning. I saw a guy in there, making these big gestures like he was trying to convince somebody at the other end.”