I'VE BEEN TO ROCK AND ROLL HEAVEN
AND YOU KNOW THEY GOT A HELL OF A BAND.
"Honey -- " It was the soft, tender voice he used when he intended to jolly her into something or die trying.
"Oh, stop. If you want to do something nice for me, turn us around and drive us back to Highway 58. If you do that, you can have some more sugar tonight. Another double helping, even, if you're up to it."
He fetched a deep sigh, hands on the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead. At last, not looking at her, he said: "Look across the valley, Mary. Do you see the road going up the hill on the far side?"
"Yes, I do."
"Do you see how wide it is? How smooth? How nicely paved?"
"Clark, that is hardly -- "
"Look! I believe I even see an honest-to-God bus on it." He pointed at a yellow bug trundling along the road toward town, its metal hide glittering hotly in the afternoon sunlight. "That's one more vehicle than we've seen on this side of the world."
"I still -- "
He grabbed the map which had been lying on the console, and when he turned to her with it, Mary realized with dismay that the jolly, coaxing voice had temporarily concealed the fact that he was seriously pissed at her. "Listen, Mare, and pay attention, because there may be questions later. Maybe I can turn around here and maybe I can't -- it's wider, but I'm not as sure as you are that it's wide enough. And the ground still looks pretty squelchy to me."
"Clark, please don't yell at me. I'm getting a headache."
He made an effort and moderated his voice. "If we do get turned around, it's twelve miles back to Highway 58, over the same shitty road we just traveled -- "
"Twelve miles isn't so much." She tried to sound firm, if only to herself, but she could feel herself weakening. She hated herself for it, but that didn't change it. She had a horrid suspicion that this was how men almost always got their way: not by being right but by being relentless. They argued like they played football, and if you hung in there, you almost always finished the discussion with cleat-marks all over your psyche.
"No, twelve miles isn't so much," he was saying in his most sweetly reasonable I-am-trying-not-to-strangle-you-Mary voice, "but what about the fifty or so we'll have to tack on going around this patch of woods once we get back on 58?"
"You make it sound as if we had a train to catch, Clark!"
"It just pisses me off, that's all. You take one look down at a nice little town with a cute little name and say it reminds you of Friday the 13th, Part XX or some damn thing and you want to go back. And that road over there" -- he pointed across the valley -- "heads due south. It's probably less than half an hour from here to Toketee Falls by that road."
"That's about what you said back in Oakridge -- before we started off on the Magical Mystery Tour segment of our trip."
He looked at her a moment longer, his mouth tucked in on itself like a cramp, then grabbed the transmission lever. "Fuck it," he snarled. "We'll go back. But if we meet one car on the way, Mary, just one, we'll end up backing into Rock and Roll Heaven. So -- "
She put her hand over his before he could disengage the transmission for the second time that day.
"Go on," she said. "You're probably right and I'm probably being silly." Rolling over like this has got to be bred in the goddam bone, she thought. Either that, or I'm just too tired to fight.
She took her hand away, but he paused a moment longer, looking at her. "Only if you're sure," he said.
And that was really the most ludicrous thing of all, wasn't it? Winning wasn't enough for a man like Clark; the vote also had to be unanimous. She had voiced that unanimity many times when she didn't feel very unanimous in her heart, but she discovered that she just wasn't capable of it this time.
"But I'm not sure," she said. "If you'd been listening to me instead of just putting up with me, you'd know that. Probably you're right and probably I'm just being silly -- your take on it makes more sense than mine does, I admit that much, at least, and I'm willing to soldier along -- but that doesn't change the way I feel. So you'll just have to excuse me if I decline to put on my little cheerleader's skirt and lead the Go Clark Go cheer this time."
"Jesus!" he said. His face was wearing an uncertain expression that made him look uncharacteristically -- and somehow hate fully -- boyish. "You're in some mood, aren't you, honey-bunch?"
"I guess I am," she said, hoping he couldn't see how much that particular term of endearment grated on her. She was thirty-two, after all, and he was almost forty-one. She felt a little too old to be anyone's honeybunch and thought Clark was a little too old to need one.
Then the troubled look on his face cleared and the Clark she liked -- the one she really believed she could spend the second half of her life with -- was back. "You'd look cute in a cheerleader's skirt, though," he said, and appeared to measure the length of her thigh. "You would."
"You're a fool, Clark," she said, and then found herself smiling at him almost in spite of herself.
"That's correct, ma'am," he said, and put the Princess in gear.
The town had no outskirts, unless the few fields, which surrounded it, counted. At one moment they were driving down a gloomy, tree-shaded lane; at the next there were broad tan fields on either side of the car; at the next they were passing neat little houses.
The town was quiet but far from deserted. A few cars moved lazily back and forth on the four or five intersecting streets that made up downtown, and a handful of pedestrians strolled the sidewalks. Clark lifted a hand in salute to a bare-chested, potbellied man who was simultaneously watering his lawn and drinking a can of Olympia. The potbellied man, whose dirty hair straggled to his shoulders, watched them go by but did not raise his own hand in return.
Main Street had that same Norman Rockwell ambience, and here it was so strong that it was almost a feeling of deja vu. Robust, mature oaks shaded the walks, and that was somehow just right. You didn't have to see the town's only watering hole to know that it would be called The Dew Drop Inn and that there would be a lighted clock displaying the Budweiser Clydesdales over the bar. The parking spaces were the slanting type; there was a red-white-and-blue barber pole turning outside The Cutting Edge; a mortar and pestle hung over the door of the local pharmacy, which was called The Tuneful Druggist. The pet shop (with a sign in the window saying WE HAVE SIAMESE IF YOU PLEASE) was called White Rabbit. Everything was so right you could just shit. Most right of all was the town common at the center of town.
There was a sign hung on a guy-wire above the bandshell, and Mary could read it easily, although they were a hundred yards away. CONCERT TONIGHT, it said.
She suddenly realized that she knew this town -- had seen it many times on late-night TV. Never mind Ray Bradbury's hellish vision of Mars or the candy-house in "Hansel and Gretel"; what this place resembled more than either was The Peculiar Little Town people kept stumbling into in various episodes of The Twilight Zone.
She leaned toward her husband and said in a low, ominous voice: "We're traveling not through a dimension of sight and sound, Clark, but of mind. Look!" She pointed at nothing in particular, but a woman standing outside the town's Western Auto saw the gesture and gave her a narrow, mistrustful glance.
"Look at what?" he asked. He sounded irritated again, and she guessed that this time it was because he knew exactly what she was talking about.
"There's a signpost up ahead! We're entering -- "
"Oh, cut it out, Mare," he said, and abruptly swung into an empty parking slot halfway down Main Street.
"Clark!" she nearly screamed. "What are you doing?"
He pointed through the windshield at an establishment with the somehow not-cute name of The Rock-a-Boogie Restaurant.
"I'm thirsty. I'm going in there and getting a great big Pepsi to go. You don't have to come. You can sit right here. Lock all the doors, if you want." So saying, he opened his own door. Before he could swing his legs out, she grabbed his shoulder.
"Clark, please don't."
He looked back at her, and she saw at once that she should have canned the crack about The Twilight Zone -- not because it was wrong but because it was right. It was that macho thing again. He wasn't stopping because he was thirsty, not really; he was stopping because this freaky little burg had scared him, too. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, she didn't know that, but she did know that he had no intention of going on until he had convinced himself he wasn't afraid, not one little bit.