“She says again, ‘What do you think of my shortcut, Homer?’
“And I says the first thing to come into my mind, which ain’t something you’d usually say to a lady like ’Phelia Todd. ‘It’s a real piss-cutter, missus,’ I says.
“She laughs, just as pleased as punch, and I seen it then, just as clear as glass: She didn’t remember none of the funny stuff. Not the willow-branches—except they weren’t willows, not at all, not really anything like em, or anything else—that grabbed off m’hat, not that MOTORWAY B sign, or that awful-lookin toad-thing. She didn’t remember none of that funny stuff! Either I had dreamed it was there or she had dreamed it wasn’t. All I knew for sure, Dave, was that we had rolled only a hundred and eleven miles and gotten to Bangor, and that wasn’t no daydream; it was right there on the little go-devil’s odometer, in black and white.
“‘Well, it is,’ she says. ‘It is a piss-cutter. I only wish I could get Worth to give it a go sometime…but he’ll never get out of his rut unless someone blasts him out of it, and it would probably take a Titan II missile to do that, because I believe he has built himself a fallout shelter at the bottom of that rut. Come on in, Homer, and let’s dump some dinner into you.’
“And she bought me one hell of a dinner, Dave, but I couldn’t eat very much of it. I kep thinkin about what the ride back might be like, now that it was drawing down dark. Then, about halfway through the meal, she excused herself and made a telephone call. When she came back she ast me if I would mind drivin the go-devil back to Castle Rock for her. She said she had talked to some woman who was on the same school committee as her, and the woman said they had some kind of problem about somethin or other. She said she’d grab herself a Hertz car if Worth couldn’t see her back down. ‘Do you mind awfully driving back in the dark?’ she ast me.
“She looked at me, kinda smilin, and I knew she remembered some of it all right—Christ knows how much, but she remembered enough to know I wouldn’t want to try her way after dark, if ever at all…although I seen by the light in her eyes that it wouldn’t have bothered her a bit.
“So I said it wouldn’t bother me, and I finished my meal better than when I started it. It was drawin down dark by the time we was done, and she run us over to the house of the woman she’d called. And when she gets out she looks at me with that same light in her eyes and says, ‘Now, you’re sure you don’t want to wait, Homer? I saw a couple of side roads just today, and although I can’t find them on my maps, I think they might chop a few miles.’
“I says, ‘Well, missus, I would, but at my age the best bed to sleep in is my own, I’ve found. I’ll take your car back and never put a ding in her… although I guess I’ll probably put on some more miles than you did.’
“Then she laughed, kind of soft, and she give me a kiss. That was the best kiss I ever had in my whole life, Dave. It was just on the cheek, and it was the chaste kiss of a married woman, but it was as ripe as a peach, or like those flowers that open in the dark, and when her lips touched my skin I felt like… I don’t know exactly what I felt like, because a man can’t easily hold on to those things that happened to him with a girl who was ripe when the world was young or how those things felt—I’m talking around what I mean, but I think you understand. Those things all get a red cast to them in your memory and you cannot see through it at all.
“‘You’re a sweet man, Homer, and I love you for listening to me and riding with me,’ she says. ‘Drive safe.’
“Then in she went, to that woman’s house. Me, I drove home.”
“How did you go?” I asked.
He laughed softly. “By the turnpike, you damned fool,” he said, and I never seen so many wrinkles in his face before as I did then. He sat there, looking into the sky.
“Came the summer she disappeared. I didn’t see much of her…that was the summer we had the fire, you’ll remember, and then the big storm that knocked down all the trees. A busy time for caretakers. Oh, I thought about her from time to time, and about that day, and about that kiss, and it started to seem like a dream to me. Like one time, when I was about sixteen and couldn’t think about nothing but girls. I was out plowing George Bascomb’s west field, the one that looks acrost the lake at the mountains, dreamin about what teenage boys dream of. And I pulled up this rock with the harrow blades, and it split open, and it bled. At least, it looked to me like it bled. Red stuff come runnin out of the cleft in the rock and soaked into the soil. And I never told no one but my mother, and I never told her what it meant to me, or what happened to me, although she washed my drawers and maybe she knew. Anyway, she suggested I ought to pray on it. Which I did, but I never got no enlightenment, and after a while something started to suggest to my mind that it had been a dream. It’s that way, sometimes. There is holes in the middle, Dave. Do you know that?”
“Yes,” I says, thinking of one night when I’d seen something. That was in ’59, a bad year for us, but my kids didn’t know it was a bad year; all they knew was that they wanted to eat just like always. I’d seen a bunch of whitetail in Henry Brugger’s back field, and I was out there after dark with a jacklight in August. You can shoot two when they’re summer-fat; the second’ll come back and sniff at the first as if to say What the hell? Is it fall already? and you can pop him like a bowlin pin. You can hack off enough meat to feed yowwens for six weeks and bury what’s left. Those are two whitetails the hunters who come in November don’t get a shot at, but kids have to eat. Like the man from Massachusetts said, he’d like to be able to afford to live here the year around, and all I can say is sometimes you pay for the privilege after dark. So there I was, and I seen this big orange light in the sky; it come down and down, and I stood and watched it with my mouth hung on down to my breastbone and when it hit the lake the whole of it was lit up for a minute a purple-orange that seemed to go right up to the sky in rays. Wasn’t nobody ever said nothing to me about that light, and I never said nothing to nobody myself, partly because I was afraid they’d laugh, but also because they’d wonder what the hell I’d been doing out there after dark to start with. And after a while it was like Homer said—it seemed like a dream I had once had, and it didn’t signify to me because I couldn’t make nothing of it which would turn under my hand. It was like a moonbeam. It didn’t have no handle and it didn’t have no blade. I couldn’t make it work so I left it alone, like a man does when he knows the day is going to come up nevertheless.
“There are holes in the middle of things,” Homer said, and he sat up straighter, like he was mad. “Right in the damn middle of things, not even to the left or right where your p’riph’ral vision is and you could say ‘Well, but hell—’ They are there and you go around them like you’d go around a pothole in the road that would break an axle. You know? And you forget it. Or like if you are plowin, you can plow a dip. But if there’s somethin like a break in the earth, where you see darkness, like a cave might be there, you say ‘Go around, old hoss. Leave that alone! I got a good shot over here to the left’ards.’ Because it wasn’t a cave you was lookin for, or some kind of college excitement, but good plowin.
“Holes in the middle of things.”