Runaway (24 page)

He said, “Can you drive?” and when Grace said no, he said, “I think you should learn.”

He meant, right then. He stopped the car, got out and came around to her side, and she had to move behind the wheel.

“No better place than this.”

“What if something comes?”

“Nothing will. We can manage if it does. That’s why I picked a straight stretch. And don’t worry, you do all the work with your right foot.”

They were at the beginning of a long tunnel under the trees, the ground splashed with sunlight. He did not bother explaining anything about how cars ran—he simply showed her where
to put her foot, and made her practice shifting the gears, then said, “Now go, and do what I tell you.”

The first leap of the car terrified her. She ground the gears, and she thought he would put an end to the lesson immediately, but he laughed. He said, “Whoa, easy. Easy. Keep going,” and she did. He did not comment on her steering, or the way the steering made her forget about the accelerator, except to say, “Keep going, keep going, keep on the road, don’t let the engine die.”

“When can I stop?” she said.

“Not till I tell you how.”

He made her keep driving until they came out of the tunnel, and then instructed her about the brake. As soon as she had stopped she opened the door so that they could trade sides, but he said, “No. This is just a breather. Soon you’ll be getting to like it.” And when they started again she began to see that he might be right. Her momentary surge of confidence almost took them into the ditch. Still, he laughed when he had to grab the wheel, and the lesson continued.

He did not let her stop until they had driven for what seemed miles, and even gone—slowly—around several curves. Then he said they had better switch, because he could not get a feeling of direction unless he was driving.

He asked how she felt now, and though she was shaking all over, she said, “Okay.”

He rubbed her arm from shoulder to elbow and said, “What a liar.” But he did not touch her, beyond that, did not let any part of her feel his mouth again.

He must have got the feeling of direction back some miles on when they came to a crossroads, for he turned left, and the trees thinned out and they climbed a rough road up a long hill, and after a few miles they came to a village, or at least a roadside collection
of buildings. A church and a store, neither of them open to serve their original purposes, but probably lived in, to judge by vehicles around them and the sorry-looking curtains in the windows. A couple of houses in the same state and behind one of them a barn that had fallen in on itself, with old dark hay bulging out between its cracked beams like swollen innards.

Neil exclaimed in celebration at the sight of this place, but did not stop there.

“What a relief,” he said. “What—a—relief. Now I know. Thank you.”

“Me?”

“For letting me teach you to drive. It calmed me down.”

“Calmed you down?” said Grace. “Really?”

“True as I live.” Neil was smiling, but did not look at her. He was busy looking from side to side across the fields that lay along the road after it had passed through the village. He was talking as if to himself.

“This is it. Got to be it. Now we know.”

And so on, till he turned onto a lane that didn’t go straight but wound around through a field, avoiding rocks and patches of juniper. At the end of the lane was a house in no better shape than the houses in the village.

“Now, this place,” he said, “this place I am not going to take you in. I won’t be five minutes.”

He was longer than that.

She sat in the car, in the house’s shade. The door to the house was open, just the screen door closed. The screen had mended patches in it, newer wire woven in with the old. Nobody came to look at her, not even a dog. And now that the car had stopped, the day filled up with an unnatural silence. Unnatural because you would expect such a hot afternoon to be full of the buzzing
and humming and chirping of insects in the grass, in the juniper bushes. Even if you couldn’t see them anywhere, their noise would seem to rise out of everything growing on the earth, as far as the horizon. But it was too late in the year, maybe too late even to hear geese honking as they flew south. At any rate, she didn’t hear any.

It seemed they were up on top of the world here, or on one of the tops. The field fell away on all sides, the trees around being only partly visible because they grew on lower ground.

Who did he know here, who lived in this house? A woman? It didn’t seem possible that the sort of woman he would want could live in a place like this, but there was no end to the strangeness Grace could encounter today. No end to it.

Once this had been a brick house, but someone had begun to take the brick walls down. Plain wooden walls had been bared, underneath, and the bricks that had covered them were roughly piled in the yard, maybe waiting to be sold. The bricks left on this wall of the house formed a diagonal line, stairsteps, and Grace, with nothing to do, leaned back, pushed her seat back, in order to count them. She did this both foolishly and seriously, the way you could pull petals off a flower, but not with any words so blatant as
He loves me, he loves me not
.

Lucky. Not. Lucky. Not
. That was all she dared.

She found that it was hard to keep track of bricks arranged in this zigzag fashion, especially since the line flattened out above the door.

She knew. What else could this be? A bootlegger’s place. She thought of the bootlegger at home—a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious. He sat on his front step with a shotgun on Halloween night. And he painted numbers on the sticks of firewood stacked by his door so he’d know if any were stolen. She thought of him—or this one—dozing in the heat in his dirty but tidy room (she knew it would be that way by the
mended patches in the screen). Getting up from his creaky cot or couch, with the stained quilt on it that some woman relative of his, some woman now dead, had made long ago.

Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable, and some that were not. She knew how things were.

How strange that she’d thought of marrying Maury. A kind of treachery it would be. A treachery to herself. But not a treachery to be riding with Neil, because he knew some of the same things she did. And she knew more and more, all the time, about him.

And now in the doorway it seemed that she could see her uncle, stooped and baffled, looking out at her, as if she had been away for years and years. As if she had promised to go home and then she had forgotten about it, and in all this time he should have died but he hadn’t.

She struggled to speak to him, but he was lost. She was waking up, moving. She was in the car with Neil, on the road again. She had been asleep with her mouth open and she was thirsty. He turned to her for a moment, and she noticed, even with the wind that they made blowing round them, a fresh smell of whisky.

It was true.

“You awake? You were fast asleep when I came out of there,” he said. “Sorry—I had to be sociable for a while. How’s your bladder?”

That was a problem she had been thinking about, in fact, when they were stopped at the house. She had seen a toilet back there, beyond the house, but had felt shy about getting out and walking to it.

He said, “This looks like a possible place,” and stopped the car. She got out and walked in amongst some blooming goldenrod
and Queen Anne’s lace and wild aster, to squat down. He stood in such flowers on the other side of the road, with his back to her. When she got back into the car she saw the bottle on the floor beside her feet. More than a third of its contents seemed already to be gone.

He saw her looking.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I just poured some in here.” He held up a flask. “Easier when I’m driving.”

On the floor there was also another Coca-Cola. He told her to look in the glove compartment and find the bottle opener.

“It’s cold,” she said in surprise.

“Icebox. They cut ice off the lakes in the winter and store it in sawdust. He keeps it under the house.”

“I thought I saw my uncle in the doorway of that house,” she said. “But I was dreaming.”

“You could tell me about your uncle. Tell me about where you live. Your job. Anything. I just like to hear you talk.”

There was a new strength in his voice, and a change in his face, but it wasn’t any manic glow of drunkenness. It was just as if he’d been sick—not terribly sick, just down, under the weather—and was now wanting to assure you he was better. He capped the flask and laid it down and reached for her hand. He held it lightly, a comrade’s clasp.

“He’s quite old,” said Grace. “He’s really my great-uncle. He’s a caner—that means he canes chairs. I can’t explain that to you, but I could show you if we had a chair to cane—”

“I don’t see one.”

She laughed, and said, “It’s boring, really.”

“Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”

She said, “You do.”

“Oh. What interests you about me?” His hand slid away.

“What you’re doing now,” said Grace determinedly. “Why.”

“You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”

“Because I know what you’d say.”

“What’s that? What would I say?”

“You’d say, what else is there to do? Or something like that.”

“That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”

“No,” said Grace. “No. I wouldn’t.”

When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought she was serious, but now she saw that she’d been trying to impress him with these answers, trying to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope—genuine, reasonable, and everlasting.

Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”

In a while, he said, “You know—I’m sleepy. Soon as we find a good spot I’m going to pull over and go to sleep. Just for a little while. You don’t mind that?”

“No. I think you should.”

“You’ll watch over me?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The spot he found was in a little town called Fortune. There was a park on the outskirts, beside a river, and a gravelled space for cars. He settled the seat back, and at once fell asleep. Evening had come on as it did now, around suppertime, proving that this wasn’t a summer day after all. A short while ago people had been having a Thanksgiving picnic here—there was still some smoke rising from the outdoor fireplace, and a smell of hamburgers in the air. The smell did not make Grace hungry, exactly—it made her remember being hungry in other circumstances.

He went to sleep immediately, and she got out. Some dust had
settled on her with all the stopping and starting of her driving lesson. She washed her arms and hands and her face as well as she could at an outdoor tap. Then, favoring her cut foot, she walked slowly to the edge of the river, saw how shallow it was, with reeds breaking the surface. A sign there warned that profanity, obscenity, or vulgar language was forbidden in this place and would be punished.

She tried the swings, which faced west. Pumping herself high, she looked into the clear sky—faint green, fading gold, a fierce pink rim at the horizon. Already the air was getting cold.

She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now.

What she had seen was final. As if she was at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing it was all there was.

It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else.

She went back to the car and tried to wake him up. He stirred but wouldn’t waken. So she walked around again to keep warm, and to practice the easiest way with her foot—she understood now that she would be working again, serving breakfast, in the morning.

She tried once more, talking to him urgently. He answered with various promises and mutters, and once more he fell asleep. By the time it was really dark she had given up. Now with the cold of night settled in some other facts became clear to her. That they could not remain here, that they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.

With some difficulty she got him over into the passenger seat. If that did not wake him, it was clear nothing could. She took a while to figure out how the headlights went on, and then she began to move the car, jerkily, slowly, back onto the road.

She had no idea of directions, and there was not a soul on the street to ask. She just kept driving to the other side of the town, and there, most blessedly, there was a sign pointing the way to Bailey’s Falls, among other places. Only nine miles.

She drove along the two-lane highway at never more than thirty miles an hour. There was little traffic. Once or twice a car passed her, honking, and the few she met honked also. In one case it was probably because she was going so slowly, and in the other, because she did not know how to dim the lights. Never mind. She couldn’t stop to get her courage up again in the middle of the road. She could just keep going, as he had said. Keep going.

At first she did not recognize Bailey’s Falls, coming upon it in this unfamiliar way. When she did, she became more frightened than she had been in all the nine miles. It was one thing to drive in unknown territory, another to turn in at the inn gates.

He was awake when she got stopped in the parking lot. He didn’t show any surprise at where they were, or at what she had done. In fact, he told her, the honking had wakened him, miles back, but he had pretended to be still asleep, because the important thing was not to startle her. He hadn’t been worried, though. He knew she would make it.