The Cartoonist (16 page)

“Name it, Bud.”

“Don’t drive after dark tonight, okay?”

“What? Why not?”

“Please, babe. Just humor your schizoid husband for one night?”

“What about picking you up at the airport?”

“Bring Caroline along. Then I won’t be worried, okay?”

“Okay,” Krista said. She was too tired to argue or to question him further. “See you tonight.” She intentionally filled this last with erotic promise.

“Right,” Scott said, recognizing the signal. “I’ll be the man with the copy of Pravda under his arm and the unripened Chiquita banana taped to his inner thigh.”

Krista laughed. “You’re a nut, Bowman...but I love you anyway. Bye.”

The line went dead.

* * *

Before leaving for the hospital later that morning, Scott folded the drawings and tucked them neatly into his flight bag. He wanted to show them to Krista. He thought they could both have a good laugh over the whole ridiculous affair. Into another compartment he stuffed Jinnie, Kath’s Cabbage Patch doll.

On his way out he remembered the Christmas pictures he’d had developed and put those in the bag, too.

“YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING,” Krista said. She was standing in the blistering heat of midday, staring at a grease-freckled mechanic. The man’s eyes, an amazing bottle green, shone with faint amusement. Behind him, parked on the gravel shoulder, the Volvo hissed steam from beneath its dented hood. The motor of the nearby tow truck grumbled comfortably...almost mockingly, Krista thought.

She’d gotten exactly twenty miles from Nomad’s Notch when the car began to hitch and the heat indicator winked its accusing red eye. Predictably, she’d been here, in the middle of no place, when it happened. And it had taken her more than an hour to flag a ride to the nearest town.

“No, ma’am. No joke. You’ve got a hole in your radiator as big around as that.” He held up one beefy, oil-blackened finger. “You must’ve took a branch through the sucker when you ran her off the road.” Now his green eyes were smiling, flashing dollar signs.

Krista glowered at the crippled car. “Can you fix it?”

Rubbing his chin, the mechanic shuffled back to his truck, where he propped an elbow on the sill and a boot on the muddy side-runner. In this pose his body partially framed the ad painted on the door: Ernie Thurston Texaco.

“I can fix her, all right,” he said after a theatrical pause. “Need a rad, though. Likely have to call down to Boston to get—”

“Boston,” Krista cut in. They were still a good three and a half hours from Boston. “How long will that take?”

“Better part of the day, I expect. Maybe even into tomorrow. Have to send her up on the Greyhound. Might find one in Portland if our luck’s in.” He regarded the Volvo with open disdain. “These foreign jobs might be nice and all, but parts are a bitch.” He spat, as if to emphasize this heart-felt conviction. “’Scuse me, ma’am.”

Krista bit her lip. Unbidden, a favorite expression of her mother’s came to mind in her mother’s nattering voice: “Disasters always come in threes.”
Well, where should I start counting
? Krista asked herself bitterly.
First my busybody sister gets my goat, then Customs, then a speeding ticket, then I get lost in the mountains, kill a cow, sleep on a crab-infested mattress and get arrested for kidnapping. Isn’t that enough?

She looked at the hissing Volvo. A fat drop of sweat stung her eye. “All right,” she said, giving in. “Let’s get started.”

The mechanic nodded and spat again. Then, green eyes gleaming, he climbed into the truck and backed it into position in front of the Volvo.

Meanwhile, Krista hailed Kath, who was down in the ditch hunting grasshoppers, and the two of them piled into the passenger side of Ernie Thurston’s Ford. While they waited, Kath tugged absently at a tuft of stuffing that protruded from a crack in the vinyl upholstery.

THE LAYOVER IN MONTREAL CONSUMED just over an hour, the bulk of which Scott spent in the concourse bar, drinking draft and ignoring the rather clumsy advances of a tipsy prostitute.

After speaking with Krista, he spent the balance of the morning trying to catch up on his shut-eye. But his night of worry had worked on him like an amphetamine, and he found it impossible to wind down. He did manage about an hour, but awoke feeling flakier than before. He arrived at the hospital just after noon and sequestered himself in his office, where he spent a few hours dictating letters and rescheduling the week’s meetings and appointments. Before leaving he peeked in on the Cartoonist. The old man was asleep in his wheelchair. According to the nurse Bateman had assigned to watch over him, he’d been that way since early morning. There were no new drawings.

Now, waiting in line at the boarding ramp, Scott was feeling a tad more than tipsy himself—and unaccountably flattered by the hooker’s persistence. She was still winking and waving from her stool in the nearby open-front bar.

What a pooch
, Scott thought, chuckling and returning her wave. By now he’d all but forgotten his wretched anxiety of the night before. And yet, even through his fatigue and the mild, alcohol-induced euphoria, something rattled at the back of his mind, a detail lurking just out of reach. Something was wrong, didn’t quite fit. It was in the drawings somewhere, an incongruity, ill-defined but there.

As he waited Scott became dimly aware of the old man’s handiwork, folded in the pocket of his TWA flightbag. He fancied he could feel it in there, like a weight just heavy enough to make the straps dig uncomfortably into his shoulder.

“Boarding pass, please. Your boarding pass, sir?”

“Wha...?”

Somehow Scott had graduated to the front of the line. Now he stood facing an irate Puerto Rican woman in a trim blue uniform. Her gloved hand was extended, palm up. The nearest passenger ahead of Scott was just turning the corner at the end of the on ramp, then vanishing. Grumbles of annoyance came from behind him.

He handed over his boarding pass.

“End of the ramp and then left,” the attendant said. “Would you like some assistance, sir?”

“No fff-anks.” Cripes, he wasn’t that bad...was he?

Scott started carefully down the ramp. Through the long, semi-transparent side window, he noticed the conical snout of the aircraft. A large red dot had been painted on its tip. It made him think of a huge breast—the rolling, man-engulfing breast in Woody Allen’s
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
—then he thought of all that icy brew (how many had it been since the airport in Ottawa? Who knew?), and that pathetic, sagging whore in the lounge.

He smiled.

Faithful to instruction, Scott turned left at the end of the boarding ramp. Cool air, reeking of jet fuel, funneled in from over the tarmac. He could feel it riffling his hair, drying the sweat on his brow. He stepped on-board, flashed his boarding pass at the flight attendant, then squeezed his way down the aisle to his seat.

* * *

“Would you like a drink, sir?”

Half-asleep, Scott lay slouched in a window seat near the tail of the aircraft. Lulled by the gentle vibration of the Rolls-Royce turbines, he had promptly and peacefully drifted off. Next to him, reading a thick paperback and smelling like a locker room, sat a woman so chubby she spilled over into the aisle.

“No, thanks,” Scott said. “I believe I’ve had enough.”

The stewardess proceeded along the aisle, smiling and offering beverages from the clinking portable bar.

Angling her girth toward Scott, the fat woman dropped the paperback into her lap and smiled. Swiftly (and, he feared, a little rudely) Scott turned to face the porthole window. Glancing at his watch, it dawned on him that somehow they’d managed to get airborne and halfway to Boston without his noticing.

Beyond the window a clear indigo sky sloped away to the gentle arc of the horizon. A single cloud, black against the star-flecked heavens, raftered reposefully along in the middle distance. Its upper edge, screening the moon, glowed dully. Gazing dreamily at that edge, Scott was reminded of a boyhood fascination with the night sky...he and a chum used to scale the back fence, crawl up onto the garage roof and gaze into the cosmos, pretending to be astronauts, alert for shooting stars.

Gradually, as he watched it now, the moon drifted free of that screening cloud. First a jagged crescent, then the full pocked disk, bright, round and perfect.

Scott’s eyes widened as panic skidded into him. There it was, sailing the dome of night sky—the final piece in the irksome puzzle of the drawings, the source of the harping doubt he’d been juggling around in his mind since early that morning.

The moon.

God’s midnight eye.

Like a junkie remembering where he’d hidden his stash, Scott grabbed his flightbag and dug out the drawings. His gaze scanned rapidly to the third frame, to the tombstone in the foreground and the shambling corpse, to the naked tree traced black against an oversized moon.

A full moon.

WHILE SCOTT WAS SITTING IN the Outbound Lounge at the Montreal airport, ordering his second beer, Krista was finally pulling away from Thurston’s Texaco in Fryeburg. Ernie had been right—the process consumed the entire day. The bill was an equally unpleasant surprise: four hundred and thirty-six dollars and eighty-eight cents—American. As she anteed up, Krista remembered her very first car, a 1965 Vauxhall Victor; she had paid less than half that amount for the whole damned car.

They were still about three hours out of Boston, two and a half if she booted it, then she’d have to find Logan International, a prospect inspiring little joy on the heels of the day she’d already had. Earlier that afternoon she’d called Caroline and warned her not to expect them until after they’d retrieved Scott from the airport, probably around midnight or so. Afterward, she and Kath had caught a matinee at Fryeburg’s single cinema, the Magic Lantern. The feature was a rerun of Spielberg’s
Gremlins
. Skeptical at first, Krista wound up enjoying herself. The theater’s air-conditioning was a blessing after the sticky August heat, and the movie provided just the right blend of humor and gore to abate both the hysterical and urge-to-kill facets of her frustration.

By the time they reached 1-95 southbound, dusk had already begun to settle. While Kath snoozed, Krista stuck like a squatter to the left-hand lane, cruising at a comfortable, if illegal, seventy-five. When dark did fall, and the irksome details of the past two days commenced a slow retreat from her mind, Krista recalled Scott’s peculiar request, the one he’d made over the phone that morning: “Don’t drive after dark...”

But what she remembered more clearly than the words was her husband’s tone while speaking them. He had been pleading with her—not manifestly, but she’d sensed it nonetheless. Behind the slight break in his voice, behind his efforts to conceal it, Scott had been begging her.

But why? she puzzled now, as the center line unreeled ahead of her. She wanted to chalk it off to Scott’s worry-wart nature or to her own imagination, but none of that would cut.

Well, she had no choice now, did she. It was either drive till she got there or wind up in another Nomad’s Notch. And there was no
way
she was going to suffer through that crap again, thank you very kindly.

She placed a hand on Kath’s thigh, burrowed back in her seat, and nudged the needle up to eighty.

* * *

The temperature gauge started to glow again—dull and winking at first, then that same solid red—a mile or two from a service-exit sign reading Byfield. Too exhausted to muster even a vague pique, Krista slowed and exited. It was three miles to Byfield.

The grease monkey at the service station there looked suspiciously like Ernie Thurston, only younger.
Something in the eyes
, Krista thought as she related the tribulations of her day to the distracted mechanic. When she mentioned the radiator, his eyes seemed to shine, like Ernie’s had.

“New rad today,” the mechanic said, one eye glued to the color portable on the desk in front of him. A Red Sox game was blaring. “Pro’ly just a loose clamp.” He peeked out at the steaming Volvo. “Been bootin’ ’er, have ya?”

“Yes,” Krista admitted. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

Following the man’s gaze, she squinted through the bug-spattered front window. She could see Kath out there, her drowsing face angled toward the garage. Looking at her, Krista felt an unexpected, almost dizzying rush of love for her child.

“Yep,” the mechanic said, pleased with himself. The diagnosis was made and he wouldn’t have to miss too much of the inning putting it right. “Drive her up to the first bay there, ma’am, and we’ll have us a look-see."

While the mechanic tinkered under the hood, Krista took a badly needed pee, then strolled out into the starlight. The August moon was full, a strange coppery color, like a shiny new penny. Mingled with the smells of grease and gasoline, Krista noticed the faintly putrescent odor of an unseen swamp. The air was filled with the chirring of its denizens.

Suddenly chilled—and oddly sickened by that faint odor of decay—Krista hurried back inside. Wrapped in her arms, she stood watching the mechanic and reflecting over the trials of the past twenty-four hours. Something about this whole sorry disaster bothered her in an obscure yet disquieting way. And that was the feeling—the absurd, gut-level feeling—that she had been led, and was still being led. It was a crock, of course, just the fatigue working on her mind.

But...

But what had taken her down the wrong road back there in New Hampshire?

Hadn’t it been just an impulse?

Yes—a sudden and thoroughly uncharacteristic impulse.

Or had it been something more than that—

(
turn here
)

An inner voice? An inner command?

(
turn
)

And hadn’t it sounded like someone
else’s
voice?

(
here
)

Jesus, no, Krista reproached herself, shutting off this frankly lunatic train of thought. That’s nuts, kiddo. It was nothing more than your basic snafu: situation normal...all fucked up.