The same night that Homer Petersen was telling his son about Patty Glass's disappearance, Joe Gardner was in Baltimore. He was not at home with his wife and kids sorting through the Halloween loot of Snickers, Necco wafers, and candy corn in their renovated townhouse on Pratt Street. He was down at Fell's Point getting good and plowed on a fine local ale called Oxford Class. It had a golden texture to it, that's what Joe thought, and could be sipped or guzzled, whatever the mood.
The bar was called Franklin's and had a big fat portrait of Ben Franklin holding a foaming mug, as if he'd been in just the other day to hoist a few. The place had an old tin ceiling with all kinds of fancy markings on it and the walls were red brick, built sometime in the last century, crumbling now, cracks between the bricks, cracks on the mahogany bar. Just like me, he thought, a few cracks showing through. Joe had promised his wife a year before that he wouldn't do this kind of thing anymore—go to a dive and get shit-faced, but Ben Franklin's was no ordinary dive, and when you get news like 1 got today, hell, it seems like the right thing to do. Besides, he rationalized, as he often did, I'm joining that fine tradition of writers who can't get through a crisis without a cold one.
But I won't look at women, no sir, not me, that I have forsworn.
He kept his eyes on Ben Franklin, or the chilly mug in his hands, or the bartender, who looked a bit like the Tenniel illustration of the Jabberwocky from Through the Looking-Glass—all gangly and long, with a lamprey-like face and a Fu Manchu mustache.
"More?" the Jabberwock bartender asked.
"I think four has done me in. Hey," Joe added.
"Yeah?"
"You got a mother?"
"Everybody's got a mother."
"Not like my mother."
"How old are you, buddy?"
Joe had to think a minute. "Almost thirty-five."
The bartender shook his head. "Get a life, my friend, get a life."
Joe wanted to protest and say that he had a life, he wrote essays and stories and novels, but when he thought about it again, he realized it wasn't much of a life at all. "My mother's dying," he said. "She's dying. Leave it to her."
The bartender moved away, not interested.
"Damn her for dying," Joe said, and lifted his mug in a toast to old Ben. "She's dying and now I've got to go back there, Ben, for more than a day, Jesus, for maybe a week. A whole week in hell, Ben."
A woman, a blond—he saw her hair peripherally—sat on the stool next to him.
I am not going to look at you. And not just for the obvious reasons that I'm married and I shouldn't even be in here, but because you're going to look like her, I just know it. I will look at you with your blond hair, and instead see a woman with brown hair and deep almond eyes, because, lady, I am haunted, but only in the normal fucked-up way that guys are always haunted by their first loves. Men are all assholes, lady, don't you know that yet?
He could tell that she wanted to speak with him, maybe just for a friendly chat, but he was scared of those friendly chats, because they could turn into something else, and he would just end up punishing himself if he spoke with her. He kept his eyes on Ben Franklin.
When he was finished with his ale, he set the mug down, and swiveled out of the bar stool in the opposite direction from the woman. It was time to go home and sober up, get the kids ready, make sure he was ready, too, ready to face that memory that never seemed to die, no matter how many beers he drank, no matter how many nights he lay awake, listening to the sound of his own heartbeat and remembering the sound of her voice like he was a radio tuned only to her frequency.
Tomorrow we leave, he thought, tomorrow we head for the armpit of the universe and look the devil in the face.
Joe Gardner walked home to sober up in the icy wind that came up from the harbor, not minding the cold, not minding the early dark of autumn, knowing that his doom was somehow sealed.
He bought a pack of cigarettes at Fitzpatrick's corner store and though he wasn't even a smoker, smoked half of it while he walked up seven more blocks to his home. The first thing his wife said when he walked through the door, observing the cigarette hanging from his mouth, was, "Don't you start up another bad habit on me."
He stubbed the cigarette out in a saucer and shrugged. "Lung cancer, emphysema, stroke; nothing compared to dear old Mom."
After Aaron finally wound down from sorting through his candy, after both he and Hillary were quiet in their beds, Joe sat in front of the television and just stared at the screen. The show, Cops, was on, and a policeman was chasing down a man who had been growing marijuana in his backyard. Joe wanted to change the channel, because he usually watched the news, but he didn't even have the energy to pick up the remote. He felt a freeze in his muscles and bones. The thought of going to visit his mother paralyzed him. His wife sat beside him, resting her head on his shoulder.
"Remember the hamster Aaron used to have?" she said.
"Huh? Yeah. King Tut. Not just any hamster, but a long-haired blue hamster."
"Right. Well, remember how Aaron neglected him for a couple of months? Fed him and everything, but didn't get him outside his cage to run around?"
Joe nodded, and laughed. "Hamster paralysis."
"That's right. That's what the vet called it. It didn't move so its body just gave up. Is that what you're going to be like when we go to see your mother?"
Joe nestled his chin above her scalp. She smelled so good. He closed his eyes and inhaled; sweet and fresh. "Yes," he sighed. "I'll get hamster paralysis." He laughed, but he sounded like he'd been hollowed out.
"No, you won't. Because you're not going for Joe."
"I'm not? Well, I'm not going for her, either."
"No, you're not. Guess who you're going for?"
"I have no idea."
"You're going for Aaron and Hillary, so they can finally meet their grandmother, before it's too late."
Joe sighed, wishing he had another drink, but knowing it was better he didn't. "I guess I think too much about myself. All those bad years."
"And it was a long time ago now."
"Not to me. Feels like yesterday."
After a few minutes of breathing her sweet aroma and the feeling of her body against his, he said, "It sure would go a long way to making me forget the past if we made love right about now. What do you think?"
"Oh, I don't know. How about if we sat like this for a while longer? Then, maybe, we can see where it leads," she said.
"Sounds good," he said, slipping both hands around her, feeling the comforting warmth; and until he went to sleep that night, it helped him forget the nagging feeling that if he ever set one foot in the town of Colony, West Virginia, again that it would be his doom. They did not make love that night, but it was all right. They went to bed, and, ignoring each other's snoring, fell asleep.
He awoke in the middle of the night, sleepwalking, standing in the hallway of the townhouse, the last image of a dream in his head—
a girl with berry-stained lips, holding a child in her hands, holding it up for him, as if offering him some of what she had tasted.
From the Journals of Joe Gardner / 1995:
This morning, we go.
Jesus, I do not want to, and not just because of my mother, but because of that other thing, that thing I did, that thing that every last person in the town knows about and probably still remembers. I'd say fuck 'em if they can't take a joke, but you and I know that nobody ever takes a joke in this life. Nobody laughs when you throw something in their face. Last time I went, I hid the whole time. But this time's going to be different. Damn it, I hate being an adult. All right, I'm a coward, I know it, I just don't want to go there, you can't make me. Please let some miracle happen and let us get down there and find that town has been wiped off the face of the earth—as it deserves to be. God—I will believe in you if you will do this for me—please, please.
Don't make me go.
(How can I expect some God to help me if I don't even believe in anything?)
We'll be there by early evening. So close and so far away.
Too damn close.
It's funny how just the idea of going back home sometimes does things to you.
It was November, and he hadn't been back to his hometown in at least seven years, not since Hillary was born—and then, only for a day, without his wife and family, just to pay his respects after his father died. That was the story, anyway.
Truth was, he had skipped his father's funeral, had made it about as far south as Alexandria, Virginia, and had spent the night at a motel off 395 drinking himself into a stupor rather than continue down to that hellhole. He hadn't even felt guilty about missing the funeral; he knew he was a bad son, the worst, but he could not bring himself to go home, as if there were an invisible barrier, a glass wall, keeping him out. He lied to his family, told them what a somber occasion it had been, how he had barely said two words to his mother, how the place was as ugly as he had remembered it.
Joe reasoned that he hadn't been back because time went so fast after thirty; his wife knew it was because he didn't like to remember what had happened back then. Not the Patty Glass thing when he was a kid (he had never even spoken about that with anyone since), but when he was a little older.
And now, he was almost there.
Colony.
In Fredericksburg, he'd stopped at a gas station for coffee and a fill up. While his family waited in the car, he went to use the restroom. It was a garden-variety pit of a restroom, which wasn't so awful, so he did his business, and then caught a glimpse of something in the mirror, something which shook him up in a way he would not be able to explain.
He had seen her, briefly, in his own face.
Mother.
In his eyes, as he was getting older, he saw the flecks of dark brown on cinnamon, the kind of stern, tense glance she had.
It was as if the closer he got to her, the more she emerged from beneath his own flesh.
I'm a grown man. What the hell is wrong with me?
He washed his face off with the ice-cold water, and looked at his reflection in the mirror until she went away. Until it was just Joe, pale skin, a few imminent wrinkles around the eyes and maybe the forehead, his hair thinning in places he didn't like thinking about—but still Joe, and no one else.
He didn't talk much the rest of the way down, and it seemed to take forever (of course, as Aaron pointed out, Joe had taken the longest route possible in his effort to avoid going home). Then, the signs started: Colony, West Virginia, 50 miles; Colony, 22 miles; Colony, 14 miles. It felt like he was counting down to a rocket launch.
Joe took the long cut that went along the quarries, not far off the river. Trees were still bursting with the gold and orange of fall, shining and damp from a recent rain; the grass was dull, but dewy; the air, so clean it was almost unbreathable.
"I forgot it's so pretty," his wife said. "The whole area. We haven't gotten out into the country in forever."
Joe did his usual head-nod-and-rotate as if to say, pretty only goes so far.
Aaron was sitting up in the backseat poking his fingers at his Game Boy, behaving fairly decently since he'd been warned that if he went into any kind of tantrum or mood, the Game Boy got the deep six. Hillary slept, her head propped up against the car window with a pillow. It had taken far too long to come down through the mountain roads after the urban and suburban sprawls of Baltimore, and then Northern Virginia. He was impressed that neither of his kids had put up any fuss.
If anyone's done that, it's me.
"How much farther?" Aaron asked, setting his Game Boy down for the first time since breakfast.
Joe's wife smoothed the map out on her lap. "Seven miles? Maybe?"
Joe looked at the rounded hills, and the blue-gray valley. "You can always smell it before you step in it. That's what old Hop used to say."
"Oh," his wife said, faking a laugh.
"I know, I know," Joe grinned, "I should be more... forgiving or something."
"Mr. Cynical, right, Mom?" Aaron said, leaning forward, resting his chin upon the back of the front seat, between his father and mother.
Joe glanced at his son in the rearview mirror. The kid looked like his mother; neither Hillary nor Aaron got Joe's dark hair, or eyes, or the little ridge to his nose. Thank God for that. He was always afraid that a daughter of his would inherit that nose and feel forever cursed because she didn't get her mother's slightly turned up nose that was so WASP-perfect-to-form that sometimes it was hard to tell she had an ethnic heritage at all.
He looked back at the road; it narrowed and curved, and he had to slow down some, until finally the two lanes melted to one lane, with a sign on its edge.
"What's that mean?" Aaron asked, pointing to the sign. He sometimes got things backward—Joe didn't like to think it might be dyslexia. He preferred to think it was some kind of originality or creativity; but it worried him, his son's inability to read well. He was bright in other respects, everything but reading. "Y-eye-old?"
"It means to let someone else go first. Like being polite," Joe's wife said. "It's pronounced 'yield,' like 'field.' Y-I-E-L-D."
"Keep going, teacher-lady," Joe said, quoting from an old movie. He raised his right arm and rested it along her shoulders. She leaned into him.
After what they'd been through, it amazed him, sometimes, how a simple touch was like healing.
And then, Joe stopped the car.
He didn't realize that he'd already begun shivering.
His wife said, "Honey? We can go—there's no one else on the bridge. Joe?"
But the world's sounds drowned for a moment or more and Joe felt as if he were not at the edge of a bridge, but beneath frozen waters.
Someone whispered in his ear, "Joe? Is that you? Joe?"
It was a girl's voice.
It was as if someone had switched on some juice and sucked Joe back into the vacuum of memory.
To a special time in 1978, when he was eighteen.
What is it you want the most? Money, love, fame, happiness? Make your choice, you only get one. Make it, and blow out the candles, spin the wheel, say the prayer. You only get one of them, so make it last.
What is it you want the most?
My name's Fate, Mister Fate to you, children, and whatever it is you want the most, make sure...
Very sure...
Because I'm gonna make sure it's the one thing you never get.
He was just eighteen and he had a Ford Explorer, bought cheap from a man in Stone Valley for six hundred bucks. The truck was what was called Ford Yellow, and was dented in three places, but Joe was going to hammer the dents out and maybe clean up the transmission some, and replace the left headlight, which was chronically dark.
Seventy-eight was shaping up into a good year for him in most ways, at least in the ways that counted. Back then, he was a smart boy even though he had dropped out of high school in the middle of his junior year to work in his father's garage full-time. Grades were never a problem: he aced the classes he enjoyed and flunked what bored him (including chemistry, geometry, and Phys. Ed.) His father had never finished high school and had never, in his own words, "given a rat's ass goddamn" about education, higher or lower. Joe's mother was furious at both her husband and Joe, but Joe had plans that involved money, and his father was paying him top dollar for Colony, West Virginia, in 1978, a good seven dollars an hour, more than he'd make in the furniture factory, more than he'd make if he went all the way to Charleston with his limited talents and his ambition of being a writer.
Joe figured that he'd get his diploma by hook or by crook somewhere down the road. Writers didn't need educations, anyway. What did Shakespeare need with an education? Or Jack Kerouac? Or John McDonald? Or anyone who wrote a half-decent sentence?—such were his arguments when he turned seventeen. It was hard enough listening to Bruce Springsteen records all the time and feeling like that, like he just wanted to get Melissa and have her wrap herself around his engine and take off—well, sometimes living in Colony was like living in hell, and did Bruce Springsteen have to go get a bachelor's degree to write "Born To Run"? Somehow, Joe doubted it. These arguments had soured in his mouth by the time he was eighteen, and watching his buddies graduate from Colony High, while he went back to being a grease monkey, and Hopfrog Peterson, that son of a gun, was even going all the way to Morgantown for college, while Joe—who knew in his heart he was smarter—was going to be stuck in Bumfuck, Egypt, for the rest of his life, saying, "Regular or unleaded?" and "Check under the hood, miss?"
But he had done it all for Melissa.
Sweet Melissa.
He had been in love with her since sixth grade, and he would love her until the day he died.
And she loved him, too.
Neither could wait until they got married.
Couldn't wait.
Had to get married as soon as they were both on their own.
Melissa's family wanted her to go to college, too, but she wanted to marry Joe, and he loved her more than life itself.
That's really the start of trouble in life: when you can't wait for something, particularly love.
In a town like Colony, patience was not only a virtue, it was a requirement.
It had taken nearly a hundred years for the town to call itself a town.
What would four more years be? That's what Melissa's dad wanted to know.
But to Joe Gardner who had carved JG LOVES MW TO DEATH on an oak tree near the old quarry, and to Melissa Welles, time was the enemy. Everything was NOW NOW NOW.
"What do you know about love? Either one of you?" Gary Welles said. Melissa was upstairs, hiding, embarrassed probably that her father was taking this new tactic in dealing with Joe. Gary ("Mister Welles to you, boy") stood in the doorway of his house, his hands akimbo on either hip, his legs braced as if waiting to get socked in the jaw.
And sometimes Joe wanted to sock him, too, because he was the kind of bully that Joe had hated all his life. Joe wanted to tell him that he knew why Melissa's mother sometimes had bruises, or why her little brother Gordon was practically autistic at thirteen; but he only wanted one thing, to see Melissa, and he knew that getting in a fight with her father wasn't going to help anything.
Besides which, Joe wasn't much for a fight—not that he'd ever been in one to know, but no matter how often his own dad pulled him aside to teach him how to box, he just never got the hang of it.
But Joe had size on his side. At eighteen, he was six foot three, his shoulders were broad, if often slumped, and he projected strength.
Melissa's father, on the other hand, was small and wizened, which made it all the more maddening when Joe thought of the guy beating up on Melissa's mother.
"Love," Gary Welles said, continuing the lecture. "Love isn't this kissy-flower-steam-the-car-window-at-the-drive-in thing like you kids think. It's commitment and security and care and service. It's raising children with the right morals and values."
"Okay, Mr. Welles, I get your drift," Joe said. "But how old were you when you got married?"
Gary Welles narrowed his eyes as if trying to avoid some verbal trick. "Nineteen."
"And Mrs. Welles?"
"Well, sour owl dung, boy, you can't compare Mrs. Welles and me marrying in 1949 with you two. Things were different then. The war helped us grow up fast. I had a steady job, I was able to support a wife."
"I can, too. I make enough, and I'll take another one on weekends, if I have to."
"What about college, boy? Melissa's going to go to college. I ain't gonna have some pregnant girl running back here because she can't do nothing herself. My wife and me, we want something more for her than wife to a grease monkey. We want her to get up in the world."
"You mean you want her to marry up, don't you?"
"I didn't say nothing of the sort."
"You want her to go to college, not so she can learn something, but so she can marry a premed student or someone who's gonna be a lawyer, or something. You think just because of my mother that I'm white trash or something."
"No, boy, you got me all wrong."
"My mother is a good woman, Mr. Welles." Joe felt he was lying.
Gary Welles seemed like he was about to say something, then hesitated. Slowly, he said, "I won't argue with you there."
Joe shut his mouth. He wanted to open it and start up again, because this guy really set him on edge, but he knew it would end in a spitting contest, and all that would happen would be that Gary Welles would be further convinced that Joe Gardner was not suitable for his daughter's hand.
Gary went and stood on the edge of the wraparound porch. The few streetlamps haloed the antebellum houses on Stonewall Avenue; the lights were yellow, and buzzed slightly, to the point that Joe often thought they were going to explode sometimes. You could hear the crickets and locusts, all maracas in the trees, and beyond them, the ocean-wave-crashing sound of the big trucks on the mountain pass, their horns, too, like the cries of whales in mating fever, calling out to each other in darkness.
Gary Welles drew a cigar from his breast pocket. He always wore three-piece suits, even on the sultriest of nights, as this one was; there were clearly blotched islands of sweat beneath each armpit. Mr. Welles was a salesman for Colony Furniture and, although the sales force was known as stupid and deceitful, it was Mr. Welles who headed the northeast region, the biggest sales territory of all, and so, to his face, in town, he was kowtowed to; you couldn't risk offending the man who was so good at getting rich idiots in New York, Boston, and Washington, DC, to fork over hundreds of dollars for what amounted to an eight-dollar rocker, mass-produced, and hit several times with a lug wrench to antique it.
"So, Gardner, Joe, boy, wouldn't you be happier if Melissa got out of this hole and lived a better life?" Gary Welles smoked his cigar. For a moment, Joe felt that he'd let his guard down.
"Yeah. Yes. But I think I can be part of it." The man turned to face him, smiled kindly, reached over and patted Joe on the shoulder, drawing Joe towards him with a slight pressure. Joe stood beside Melissa's father.
He said, "Joe. Let me tell you about myself. Let me tell you about a man who was once a boy like you, fresh from the Good War, come back home to marry his sweetheart. How I bled my knuckles carrying Colony rockers door-to-door, was up by four a.m. to catch the train up to the cities. How I sacrificed everything for my family. And the big question, Joe, always is, my boy, was it worth it? Was all that doing without and sleeplessness and fingers to the bone bullshit, was it really worth it? And you know the answer." Long puff on the cigar, stinking smoke coming at Joe, making his eyes water. "You know the answer?"
"I guess."
"I don't think you do, Joe. I think kids today are too young. The answer, boy, isn't yes. Just the opposite. If I had it to do over again, I'd have waited. I'd have courted Melissa's mama another three, four years, when I had some savings, when I could devote time to a family. She would've waited. When a woman loves you, Joe, she waits. When you love someone enough to let her pursue her dreams, trust me on this one, Joe, you'll wait. What's a few years if love is eternal?" Gary Welles looked Joe in the eyes and blew smoke at him. Joe's eyes teared up as much from the smoke as from the sentiment.
From behind both of them, Melissa's voice: "Damn it, Joe, don't you listen to him." And before Joe could turn, there she was, in her button-down shirt and jeans and penny loafers—she grabbed his arm and tugged him almost halfway down the porch stairs. "Let's get the hell out of here," she whispered, and turned and shouted to her father. "Will you quit it with your poison for once in your life?"
They made love in the bed of his truck, something that was still a mystery to him, an article of faith, a marriage vow, unbreakable, unstoppable (and insatiable, most of the time). Her body was sacred and he took their communion more seriously than most teenagers. He took care that she had as much pleasure as possible, that she felt at least as much as he did, which was all shivers and gasps. There was a lot of fumbling, but it was sacred fumbling. He had never made love to another girl and never wanted to. He would spend the rest of his life with her and he would make sure she was the most fulfilled, happiest woman on the face of the earth. He was a Man now, and she a Woman, and the world was their Eden. People like her father were too old to understand about real love, about how sex bound two souls, how the very act of making love was the one seeking and finding its other half. Older people had lost that, people like his mother and father, they had betrayed their pure spirits long ago, they had perverted their love. But it was different with Melissa, it was like touching an angel. He savored the feeling when he was inside her, albeit with the Lambskin Trojan on, even then the feeling was of connectedness and pleasure and fire—God, he couldn't take it for long, but he had to, he had to for her.
When it was over, he kissed her sweetly, brushing the hair from across her forehead.
She grinned, whispered something, and put her jeans back on. It was nearly midnight. They had to flip coins as to whose music got to play on the tape deck. Melissa usually won. She wasn't a Springsteen fan and so the damned soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever kept playing in the background. He heard those high-pitched Bee Gees every time he felt himself about to really let go and enjoy the moment, so it was just as well they were in the back of his truck and not somewhere more comfortable—disco never was really great make-out music, as far as he was concerned (but most of the time, he just covered his ears and pretended he was listening to the Boss singing about getting out of some pissant burg).
Afterward, he almost laughed. "Hell, kill me," Joe said, smiling. "Your dad's gonna kill me."
"He will if he sees us like this," she said, brazenly jiggling her breasts.
"Melissa Welles, you stop that," he said, but couldn't help laughing.
"After sex, you're shy. You weren't so shy an hour ago."
"And you're a quick learner. I always thought boys were hornier than girls."
She shrugged. Snapped her bra back in place and slipped into her shirt. "The famous Myth of Manhood. Or maybe I'll make that page one hundred two in the book, The Myth of Joe Gardner."
"So," he looked at her sidelong, leaning back on his elbow, "which chapter of my novel do you want to be?" He was in no hurry to dress; he thought he might look desirable to her, there, naked, in the moonlight, in the truck, even with the mosquito bites on his ass.
She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. "Every chapter, Joey. But no more myths, okay? I want us to get married soon. I love you and I don't care what Dad thinks about it."
"Are you sure he wasn't right about getting out of Colony?"
"Well, we can both get out. We'll manage. I've got my savings, and you've got some money. I think we'll do okay."
"And college?"
"I'll go at night or something. All I know is, I love you and I want us to be together." She kissed him harder. He felt the blood start to rush to his lower organs, followed by that awful and wonderful hormonal tide rising up, unbidden.
As they resumed their lovemaking, in which Melissa kept her bra and shirt on but removed her jeans again, Joe wondered if she really loved him or was just a sex fiend.
She whispered, "Day after tomorrow, we can go over the mountain and get married in Stone Valley. Daddy won't have to know 'til it's too late."
Joe said, like a train picking up speed as it comes out of a station, "YES I LOVE YOU OH GOD MELISSA I LOVE YOU YES."
The night was endless, the love was strong and beautiful, but something buzzed around his brain in the early morning.
What is it you want most, kids?
Love? Happiness?
What is it you believe in?
Love? Is that it, Joe? Love?
I'll take it from you. I'll blow out that candle for you, Joe, my boy, and every time you light another one, I'll snuff it, too.
Hopfrog Petersen became best man by default. Melissa and Joe didn't want anyone to know who might tell on them and Hopfrog, for all his winning looks and natural charm, had alienated himself from most of the town well before eighteen.
"Actually, Hop," Melissa said, giving him a hug, "you're a very good man, but I hope I'm marrying the best man."
Hopfrog shrugged. "Remains to be seen, man." Hopfrog had started calling everyone "man" since he'd tried marijuana off in one of the cornfields with the Heads from school. He was going through something of a cool phase and Joe was a little unnerved by his bouts with drugs and booze. Hopfrog had even, it was rumored, tried LSD once, which was way out of the league of even the druggiest high schoolers of Colony, but some kids thought he was lying about the "tab" which sent him "flying" to a place where the world was a "magic carpet ride." Hopfrog's hair was a little too long, his clothes a little too tie-dyed, and his reading matter a little too William Burroughs. Hopfrog had gone to weird, in Joe's opinion, since about eighth grade or so.
It was the morning of graduation and while Melissa's folks were going to the ceremony, expecting her to be there, as she was practically the "fucking valedictorian," as she said in her crude language, she was instead running off with Hop and Joe to Stone Valley to see the justice of the peace.
Hopfrog had a VW bug left over from 1969 with flower power decals and upside-down flags and peace signs painted sloppily on the hood. He'd bought it in Blacksburg, Virginia, for two hundred bucks and a bag of weed. It ran as if it were, itself, stoned, if it ran at all. Joe was ready—he'd dressed up in a navy sport coat and khakis, his shoes were shined, and his hair was cut. He stood with Hopfrog, waiting for Melissa, tapping his foot, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, wondering if he should smoke a cigarette just to calm his nerves.
Hopfrog leaned against the hood of his bug and yawned. "Missy's always been late, man."
Something about the way Hopfrog said that, Missy's always been late, man, seemed too familiar. Sure, Hop had known her since birth, practically, just like Joe, but he'd also known that Hopfrog looked at Melissa differently these days, not like a buddy, but like a woman. Joe didn't really like that. Then, he thought: Shit, am I gonna be one of those hothead rednecks who's always getting jealous 'cause some guy is after his woman? No way. "Yeah, I know, man," Joe said, ever the chameleon. "Hope your wheels don't break down like they did at Christmas."
"Look, dude, this bug is in primo condition."
"I'd have worked on it free down at the shop," Joe said. Sometimes he couldn't believe that Hopfrog had changed so radically since the vanishing of Patty Glass when they were still kids. After that, Hopfrog was never quite the same old Hop. He'd gotten into the drugs and partying too much and did strange things like running cross-country wearing purple granny glasses, or making his own special brand of brownies, to be distributed at lunch to the teachers' table—as it turned out, they weren't hash brownies at all, but had Ex-Lax laced through the dark frosting.
"I got some champagne in the back," Hopfrog said, pointing to the small bag in the back corner of the bug. Beside it was a pizza box from Luigi's. Hopfrog had thought of everything. He had been pretty much a leader before adolescence hit, and now, he was the outsider; but he still had the damned Boy Scout thing down. He was always prepared.
"Hey," Hopfrog said, holding a finger up into the air. "Feel that?"
Joe stood still, as if he were about to miss something.
"No wind," Hopfrog said. "That means a storm. Always a wind from the hills, unless we got a front moving in. You know, the first of one of those summer storms. Lightning, thunder, the nature thing. We'll get rained out over in the Malabars. Probably have to spend the night in Stone Valley. So, do I get to sleep between you, or at the foot of the bed?"
Joe was taken aback. He was not the kind of young man to understand the difference between this kind of joke and a real request. It wasn't because he was dense. It was because he had spent the majority of his formative years reading and writing stories that never seemed to go anywhere, working in his dad's gas station and hoping against hope to get out of Colony before he went crazy. He didn't like the idea of anyone, even a friend, joking about Melissa like that.
Hopfrog must've read his face. "Aw, come on, Joey, sit on it and rotate, it's only a little wedding humor. God, you either hang out with your loony old man sniffing high octane or you're down weeping over Russian lit, as if some dead guy like Tolstoy were sitting right next to you."
"Gee, Hop, you sure know how to sum a guy's life up, don't you?"
"Just seems you've made a lot of stupid mistakes in your life, you know? Like, for instance, dropping out of school when you were practically a fucking honors student and putting up with your old man making you do the dipstick thing and even in third grade accepting that dare to jump the bridge—Jesus, I can't think of a time since your birth when you didn't see the wrong thing to do and head in exactly that direction, Joey."
"Hop," Joe said.
"Yeah?"
"Shut up."
"Oh. Okay."
"If you're trying to tell me what I think you're trying to tell me, butt out. I've known Melissa and I would get married since we were kids. You're not just the best man, you're the only man. All I want from you is a ride over the hills. If there's a storm, I'll pay for your motel room. If there isn't, I'll buy you lunch. Try and remember that you're a friend and not my second conscience, okay?"
Hopfrog nodded and from the look on his face, probably wished he was drinking that champagne in the sack right that very instant.
Joe was tense.
Hopfrog was getting tense, too. So tense, he drew a Camel from his rolled up sleeve, lit it, inhaled deeply and exhaled a gray cloud of smoke.
It was going to be a tense day.
And it didn't get any better when Melissa Welles finally showed up.
"I'm not sure this is the right thing," she said.
Eight little words.
The eight most terrifying words in the language when you're sure that you're doing the right thing and have been depending on her to feel the same.
She looked great. In Hopfrog's words, she was her "kick-assiest," a compliment as far as he was concerned, an obscenity to the more conservative element that pervaded the town.
To Joe, she looked more beautiful than he had ever thought at the very moment she said those disheartening words.
He felt his face go red. It had been too good to be true, all of it, from the time they'd met in fourth grade and he'd had a crush on her but had kept his distance, to the time in sixth grade when he gave her flowers and she kissed him; and when Patty Glass had run away or been kidnapped or had fallen down a well or whatever, she had cried, and he had held her, the first time he'd ever comforted someone else; or when she told him she loved him, in tenth grade; said she'd marry him, in eleventh.
And now, "I'm not sure this is the right thing."
She wore her graduation gown. She'd just come running from the ceremony. Her hands were tucked into the slits of the dark gown; she only put her hands in her pockets when she had something to confess. She didn't even have her overnight bag with her.
She wasn't going to marry him.
He could see that.
She started speaking, but he didn't hear anything. He was beneath some current in the river. He was beyond all sound. All he could think of was that there was nothing left to live for. There was nothing worth having, or wanting.
Then she giggled. "Joe. Joey, come on. It's a joke. I love you, I'm all ready." From beneath her gown she withdrew her small red overnight case.
"Oh, my God," he sighed, and leaned forward, color coming back into his face, feeling the warmth of blood and sunlight and love again. He took her in his arms and kissed her lips and cheek and forehead. "I love you, too, oh, babe, I don't love your jokes, but I love you."
"Never could take a joke," Hopfrog said, slapping him on the back, spitting the butt of his cigarette on the street, "Let's make like shit and hit the trail before the posse comes after us."
They drove to the town limit and beyond, Hopfrog driving, Melissa and Joe together in the backseat. A storm was clearly coming down now from the Malabar Hills and they were almost at the Paramount Bridge, leaving the area, when Hopfrog, who was driving, said, "Looky there, boys and girls, a genuine wreckage of a car." He pointed off to the side of the road.
A Mercury Cougar lay on its side in the gully.
"There's Gump." Hopfrog nodded towards Joe's cousin Dale Chambers. "Wanna say howdy?" The officer barely noticed them as they drove slowly by. The wreck was still smoking. Dale, known by most as Gump because of a cartoon deputy on TV who looked just like him, was scratching his head. Voices came over the policeman's radio in his black-and-white Ford Torino.
"I wonder what happened," Melissa said and leaned against Joe. Her breath was sweet. She was chewing Juicy Fruit gum. She smelled like Charlie!, a vial of which she always kept in her purse. Didn't mix well with his British Sterling, but what the hell. He liked her smell. "You think anyone's hurt?"
Joe leaned forward, sticking his face out Hopfrog's window. "Hey, Dale!"
Dale Chambers turned away from the wreck. He recognized Joe, waved, and then waved them on. But he still had a puzzled look on his Gump face. Joe noticed that there was nobody in the car—as if someone had just wandered off, dazed and disoriented, from the wreck.
"Must be okay," Joe said, relaxing again into the backseat. He entwined his legs with Melissa's and thought it was going to be the happiest day of his life.
Hopfrog put his foot down on the gas and shifted gears. The VW hummed and growled to life again.
They drove onto the Paramount Bridge, but when they got to the middle of the bridge, the bug stalled.
Joe whispered in Melissa's ear, "Now, what else could go wrong?"
Rain was beginning to fall.
It was to be the first storm of summer.
Lightning played blue and white across the far hills.
There was a nice smell of honeysuckle in the air, though. Folks in the hills always said that honeysuckle was like a protection, that it meant good luck. Joe liked smelling it now, mixed with that fresh smell of new rain.
Up ahead, a truck was barreling down the road, directly towards them.
"Damn car!" Hopfrog said, bearing down on the stick shift. The VW kept stalling out.
Something was funny about Hopfrog's face, something Joe couldn't pinpoint.
Joe stayed calm. Nothing bad was going to happen. The truck would stop at the other end of the bridge. He and Melissa would be married by three in Stone Valley. Hopfrog would get drunk on his own champagne and have to sleep in a cot in their room at a motel. He and Melissa would be married and happiness would be starting its slow roll towards them.
Right now, only the truck seemed to be rolling towards them and it was harder to stay calm by the second.
They only had seconds, after all.
Melissa whispered, "Why isn't that truck slowing down?"
Hopfrog seemed to be looking, not at the truck or the clutch, but at something in the sky and his mouth formed a small o as if he had never seen the sky before.
Something else whispered,
What do you want the most?
Think real hard, Joe.
But keep it a secret. Keep it to yourself.
'Cause it's the one thing I'm gonna make sure you never get.
"Joe?"
He opened his eyes.
He was no longer a teenager.
He was in the Buick Skylark with his wife and kids.
His daughter, Hillary, was beginning to sing the "I love you" song from Barney. It reminded him for a second of Old Man Feely, because the tune was "This Old Man He Plays One."
It was no longer 1978.
Damn it. Or Thank the Powers That Be, one of the two.
"Joe? You okay?" his wife asked.
He glanced at her and worked up a smile. He was sweating. "We shouldn't've come back," he told her. "I shouldn't've, anyway."
She reached up and felt his forehead. "A little fever."
"Jenny," he said, "this is where it happened."
She drew her hand back. "We could've taken the new highway down. Why this way?"
"I wanted to see it again. To see if it's changed any. It hasn't. All these years and they haven't put a better road or bridge through this side."
"You want me to drive?" she asked.
"No, I'll be fine." He started the car up again.
This time, he crossed the bridge safely.