He walked, in his princely yet faintly simian way, carrying the pitchfork parallel to the ground like a spear, out to the infield where the Sedan de Ville idled behind the ghostly cones of its headlights.
Joe Dale managed to hunch up unsteadily one more time in the jewelweed, trying to get a footing in the deep sand where the track had washed out to a steep slope. Finally he lurched to his feet. You two are through on every racetrack in West Virginia, he shouted.
Tommy ducked into the Sedan de Ville and revved the euphonious engine a few times without shutting the door. The Cadillac roosted a moment on its pearly exhaust, then swished forward through the queen anne's lace, gaining speed.
Hey, get out of my car, Joe Dale shouted, waving his bloody hands over his head. The midnight blue Cadillac left the infield and ploughed into the sand of the ruined track. Its nose bounced down and up and Joe Dale popped heavily into the air, arced backwards over the crumbly heel of the washout and landed in the spindly arms of the broken down hot-walking machine. Incredibly enough, clanking and whirring, dragging one segmented silvery leg and waving another, it started to turn with Joe Dale dangling from the housing of the motor. But then it stopped.
I
She comes to see you, not too often, at this place, zigzagging down the mountains on a Saturday visiting day in that white Grand Prix with its bumper hanging off, the grand prize which is all she got out of it. So in the end you got the magic car for a night, drove it off a bridge and ended up here, she got the decrepit Grand Prix and it's still going. And she's still going. She's back writing recipes for that Winchester rag for a yard a week. A couple times you found an old Thursday Mail lying around the dayroom, perused the recipes, FOR SATURDAY SOCIAL, TRY AUNT MARGARET'S 4-BEAN SALAD and like that, for secret messages, but either her oracles have gone so deep they're beyond even you, or without you she's lost it. Lost her magic. You prefer to think the latter.
She wanted to know how your face got split. Even she couldn't miss the stitches down the edge of your cheek and up one side of your nose-you look like a fucking tooled wallet, like the lifers make in the shop downstairs in this place. She wanted to know what happened so you tried to tell her.
Finally everything came together. The deep blue car with a silver top was a magic car, you were called to go different places and it was there to take you. You had your pitchfork, to symbolize your victory over the forces of darkness. And you had your book-it was the scrapbook of her recipe columns, Menus by Margaret. You could refer to it for anything. Sometimes it seemed to be making fun of you, new pages kept appearing every time you opened it, new lines, but on the whole it was on your side.
But why didn't you ever tell me it was a magic book? That's why I don't exactly trust you, you don't always tell me everything, do you, Maggie? So it's good I've learned to get along without you now.
You had your book and your pitchfork and you drove and drove in your magic car. In a dark woods you came to a road that went over a bridge with a lion on each side of it and you knew, because you looked in the book and saw MARGARET MEETS THE KING OF THE JUNGLE (it was a recipe for barbecue sauce) that you should turn here. You came to a big barn and went in. It was full of animals lying down sleepy and almost dead-calves, bulls, cows, even a couple of goats. You touched them and they rose again. One by one they came back to life. A man opened the door with a bird gun in his hands, wearing a striped robe. Prometheus? he said, and you knew he was right. I am, you said. Then he disappeared and possibly he called the cops because when you came to the lions again in your magic car the police were blocking the road. You knew nothing could hurt you. You drove off the bridge. You woke up here. You think the cops might have put something inside your brain when they sewed up your face.
But it isn't a bad place. Well, there's something queer about the toilets, a funny green light in them like they're trying to draw your guts out. (And the cigarettes she brought you-this you didn't tell her-they were another way of sucking your insides out. You had to throw them away.) But you can live here for now. You have a lot to think about-why you were chosen for various things, like the trip that landed you here. After what you've been through, you need rest.
And you can go now, Maggie, since I see you don't believe me. I'm only telling you a hundredth of what happened. But it doesn't matter what you think. I was there! I heard! I know! The one good thing is, I'm a complete person now, both halves, which I never was before. I'm a finished man, at home in my skin-but tired, so tired I might sleep till the world ends or they let me out-whichever comes first.
II
To no one but herself she said it was a kind of luck after all, what had happened. It was lucky that Joe Dale had ended up dead, and luckier still that she hadn't had to kill him herself. Not that she would have easily found the nerve to kill him, or the equipment, but just as this world came to feel like an unbearably tight squeeze with Joe Dale and her both in it, Tommy stepped in and took care of that for her. And then it was lucky that, if Tommy had to kill Joe Dale, he killed him when he was out of his mind, so that they just put Tommy in the place he was headed for anyway. Granted, now they would keep him rather longer in that place, but that could be all to the good. She did not forget that Tommy too had once flirted with the idea of killing her, had even ruminated on this course with his hands around her neck. Even though he had decided against it, one had not felt entirely safe in the bastion of his caprice. And that had been for merely thinking about deserting him-in the end she had been mentally packing to leave. So in some ways it was lucky, for her, at least, that he was where he was.
It was even a kind of luck to have seen it happen. But should she have seen it coming? Shouldn't she have known by instinct which man of hers could lose his mind, or by the same token which man was as stoutly framed in the confines of his senses as she was in hers? It was the racetrack that had thrown her off. What did she know from horseplayers? Tommy had seemed too rich in venerable and exotic ways to self-destruct to have any need of madness. Gambling, she had judged, as ancient in the culture as grapes and barley, would keep him safe. In Tacitus the Germans gamble themselves into slavery with a laugh. They don't lose their reason, never having had any to begin with. And that was Tommy too. He was a German from up in the woods and coulees of Wisconsin. He had that spinning empty place in him, true, but he was magnetic and handsome and women were drawn to him whatever he did. Even if he never made money, women would do his work for him, keep him afloat. Why should he go crazy when he could just gamble himself, and them, down the drain?
If he had gambled himself into slavery, she would-might-have gone along. But he was not going to Rome in chains, stark naked except for his little fur cape and Swabian topknot. He had gone crazy-all the way mad-he had gone off his head and left her behind. He had made the world over so that it all made shining sense, but only he could see it. As for the racetrack, they had both lost that. And she had lost him. Why didn't she weep?
That he could slip that border alone, and completely-she admired him. She felt she had seen wonders. She had no right to cry. What had become of Tommy was as immense, as terrible and final as a volcano or an earthquake. She almost envied him. She hadn't seen it coming and it had gotten quite away from her. She must never have understood Tommy at all.
She made it a project to get to know the new Tommy in the hospital, though she could only get in to see him every third Saturday, if that. And it was curious how he thought he didn't want to know her now, almost as if she-his twin-had been one of the confusions he needed to put behind him. It was strange, too, that he didn't seem to miss her, when he must be lonely as a planet in that place. But she knew he needed some human tie, whether he knew it or not.