"No," she said. She was somehow positive that she couldn"tlet this man see she had recognized him; if he did, any small chance she and Clark might still have would evaporate. "My husband and I are just . . . you know, pa.s.sing through."
And was Clark pa.s.sing through even now, desperately keeping to the posted speed limit while the sweat trickled down his face and his eyes rolled back and forth from the mirror to the windshield and back to the mirror again? Was he?
The man in the plaid sportcoat grinned, revealing teeth that were too big and much too sharp. "Yep, I know how that is, all right - y"all seen hoot, n now you"re on your way to holler. That about the size of it?""
"I thought this was hoot," Mary said primly, and that made the newcomers first looks at each other, eyebrows raised, and then shout with laughter. The young waitress looked from one to the other with her frightened, bloodshot eyes.
"That ain"t half-bad," Buddy Holly said. "You and y"man ought to think about hangin on a little while, though. Stay for the concert tonight, at least. We put on one heckuva show, if I do say so myself." Mary suddenly realized that the eye behind the cracked lens had filled up with blood. As Holly"s grin widened, pushing the corners of his eyes into a squint, a single scarlet drop spilled over his lower lid and tracked down his cheek like a tear. "Isn"t that right, Roy?"
"Yes, ma"am, it is," the man in the shades said. "You have to see it to believe it."
"I"m sure that"s true," Mary said faintly. Yes, Clark was gone. She was sure of it now. The Testosterone Kid had run like a rabbit, and she supposed that soon enough the frightened young girl with the coldsore would lead her into the back room, where her own rayon uniform and order pad would be waiting.
"It"s somethin to write home about," Holly told her proudly. "I mean to say." The drop of blood fell from his face and pinked onto the seat of the stool Clark had so recently vacated. "Stick around. You"ll be glad y"did." He looked to his friend for support.
The man in the dark gla.s.ses had joined the cook and the waitresses; he dropped his hand onto the hip of the redhead, who put her own hand over it and smiled up at him. Mary saw that the nails on the woman"s short, stubby fingers had been gnawed to the quick. A Maltese cross hung in the open V of Roy Orbison"s shirt. He nodded and flashed a smile of his own. "Love to haveyou, ma"am, and not just for the night, either - draw up and set a spell, we used to say down home."
"I"ll ask my husband," she heard herself saying, and completed the thought in her mind: If I ever see him again, that is.
"You do that, sugar pie!" Holly told her. "You just do that very thing!" Then, incredibly, he was giving her shoulder one final squeeze and walking away, leaving her a clear path to the door. Even more incredibly, she could see the Mercedes"s distinctive grille and peace-sign hood ornament still outside.
Buddy joined his friend Roy, winked at him (producing another b.l.o.o.d.y tear), then reached behind Janis and goosed her. She screamed indignantly, and as she did, a flood of maggots flew from her mouth. Most struck the floor between her feet, but some clung to her lower lip, squirming obscenely.
The young waitress turned away with a sad, sick grimace, raising one blocking hand to her face. And for Mary Willingham, who suddenly understood they had very likely been playing with her all along, running ceased to be something she had planned and became an instinctive reaction. She was up and off the stool like a shot and sprinting for the door.
"Hey!" the redhead screamed. "Hey, you didn"t pay for the pie! Or the sodas, either! This ain"t no Dine and Dash, you crotch! Rick! Buddy! Get her!"
Mary grabbed for the doork.n.o.b and felt it slip through her fingers. Behind her, she heard the thump of approaching feet. She grabbed the k.n.o.b again, succeeded in turning it this time, and yanked the door open so hard she tore off the overhead bell. A narrow hand with hard calluses on the tips of the fingers grabbed her just above the elbow. This time the fingers were not just squeezing but pinching; she felt a nerve suddenly go critical, first sending a thin wire of pain from her elbow all the way up to the left side of her jaw and then numbing her arm.
She swung her right fist back like a short-handled croquet mallet, connecting with what felt like the thin shield of pelvic bone above a man"s groin. There was a pained snort - they could feel pain, apparently, dead or not - and the hand holding her arm loosened. Mary tore free and bolted through the doorway, her hair standing out around her head in a bushy corona of fright.
Her frantic eyes locked on the Mercedes, still parked on the street. She blessed Clark for staying. And he had caught all of her brainwave, it seemed; he was sitting behind the wheel instead of groveling under the pa.s.senger seat for her wallet, and he keyed the Princess"s engine the moment she came flying out of the Rock-a-Boogie.
The man in the flower-decorated top-hat and his tattooed companion were standing outside the barber shop again, watching expressionlessly as Mary yanked open the pa.s.senger door. She thought she now recognized Top-Hat - she had three Lynyrd Skynyrd alb.u.ms, and she was pretty sure he was Ronnie Van Zant. No sooner had she realized that than she knew who his ill.u.s.trated companion was: Duane Allman, killed when his motorcycle skidded beneath a tractor-trailer rig twenty years ago. He took something from the pocket of his denim jacket and bit into it. Mary saw with no surprise at all that it was a peach.
Rick Nelson burst out of the Rock-a-Boogie. Buddy Holly was right behind him, the entire left side of his face now drenched in blood.
"Get in!" Clark screamed at her. "Get in the f.u.c.king car, Mary!""
She threw herself into the pa.s.senger bucket head-first and he was backing out before she could even make a try at slamming the door. The Princess"s rear tires howled and sent up clouds of blue smoke. Mary was thrown forward with neck-snapping force when Clark stamped the brake, and her head connected with the padded dashboard. She groped behind her for the open door as Clark cursed and yanked the transmission down into drive.
Rick Nelson threw himself onto the Princess"s gray hood. His eyes blazed. His lips were parted over impossibly white teeth in a hideous grin. His cook"s hat had fallen off, and his dark-brown hair hung around his temples in oily snags and corkscrews.
"You"re coming to the show!" he yelled.
"f.u.c.k you!" Clark yelled back. He found drive and floored the accelerator. The Princess"s normally sedate diesel engine gave a low scream and shot forward. The apparition continued to cling to the hood, snarling and grinning in at them.
"Buckle your seatbelt!"" Clark bellowed at Mary as she sat up.
She s.n.a.t.c.hed the buckle and jammed it home, watching with horrified fascination as the thing on the hood reached forward with its left hand and grabbed the windshield wiper in front of her. It began to haul itself forward. The wiper snapped off. The thing on the hood glanced at it, tossed it overboard, and reached for the wiper on Clark"s side.
Before he could get it, Clark tramped on the brake again - this time with both feet. Mary"s seatbelt locked, biting painfully into the underside of her left breast. For a moment there was a terrible feeling of pressure inside her, as if her guts were being shoved up into the funnel of her throat by a ruthless hand. The thing on the hood was thrown clear of the car and landed in the street. Mary heard a brittle crunching sound, and blood splattered the pavement in a starburst pattern around its head.
She glanced back and saw the others running toward the car. Janis was leading them, her face twisted into a hag-like grimace of hate and excitement.
In front of them, the short-order cook sat up with the boneless ease of a puppet. The big grin was still on his face.
"Clark, they"re coming!" Mary screamed.
He glanced briefly into the rear-view, then floored the accelerator again. The Princess leaped ahead. Mary had time to see the man sitting in the street raise one arm to shield his face, and wished that was all she"d had time to see, but there was something else, as well, something worse: beneath the shadow of his raised arm, she saw he was still grinning.
Then two tons of German engineering hit him and bore him under. There were crackling sounds that reminded her of a couple of kids rolling in a pile of autumn leaves. She clapped her hands over her ears - too late, too late - and screamed.
"Don"t bother," Clark said. He was looking grimly into the rear-view mirror. "We couldn"t have hurt him too badly - he"s getting up again."
"What?"
"Except for the tire-track across his shirt, he"s - " He broke off abruptly, looking at her. "Who hit you, Mary?"
"What?"
"Your mouth is bleeding. Who hit you?"
She put a finger to the corner of her mouth, looked at the red smear on it, then tasted it. "Not blood - pie," she said, and uttered a desperate, cracked laugh. "Get us out of here, Clark, please get us out."
"You bet," he said, and turned his attention back to Main Street, which was wide and - for the time being, at least - empty. Mary noticed that, guitars and amps on the town common or not, there were no power-lines on Main Street, either. She had no idea where Rock and Roll Heaven was getting its power (well . . . maybe some idea), but it certainly wasn"t from Central Oregon Power and Light.
The Princess was gaining speed as all diesels seem to - not fast, but with a kind of relentless strength - and chumming a dark brown cloud of exhaust behind her. Mary caught a blurred glimpse of a department store, a bookstore, and a maternity shop called Rock and Roll Lullabye. She saw a young man with shoulder-length brown curls standing outside The Rock Em Sock Em Billiards Emporium, his arms folded across his chest and one snakeskin boot propped against the whitewashed brick. His face was handsome in a heavy, pouting way, and Mary recognized him at once.
So did Clark. "That was the Lizard King himself," he said in a dry, emotionless voice.
"I know. I saw."
Yes - she saw, but the images were like dry paper bursting into flame under a relentless, focused light which seemed to fill her mind; it was as if the intensity of her horror had turned her into a human magnifying gla.s.s, and she understood that if they got out of here, no memories of this Peculiar Little Town would remain; the memories would be just ashes blowing in the wind. That was the way these things worked, of course. A person could not retain such h.e.l.lish images, such h.e.l.lish experiences, and remain rational, so the mind turned into a blast-furnace, crisping each one as soon as it was created.
That must be -why most people can still afford the luxury of disbelieving in ghosts and haunted houses, she thought. Because when the mind is turned toward the terrifying and the irrational, like someone who is turned and made to look upon the face of Medusa, it forgets. It has to forget. And G.o.d! Except for getting out of this h.e.l.l, forgetting is the only thing in the world I want.
She saw a little cl.u.s.ter of people standing on the tarmac of a Cities Service station at an intersection near the far end of town. They wore frightened, ordinary faces above faded ordinary clothes. A man in an oil-stained mechanic"s coverall. A woman in a nurse"s uniform - white once, maybe, now a dingy gray. An older couple, she in orthopedic shoes and he with a hearing aid in one ear, clinging to each other like children who fear they are lost in the deep dark woods. Mary understood without needing to be told that these people, along with the younger waitress, were the real residents of Rock and Roll Heaven, Oregon. They had been caught the way a pitcher-plant catches bugs.
"Please get us out of here, Clark," she said. "Please." Something tried to come up her throat and she clapped her hands over her mouth, sure she was going to upchuck. Instead of vomiting, she uttered a loud belch that burned her throat like fire and tasted of the pie she had eaten in the Rock-a-Boogie.
"We"ll be okay. Take it easy, Mary."
The road - she could no longer think of it as Main Street now that she could see the end of town just ahead - ran past the Rock and Roll Heaven Munic.i.p.al Fire Department on the left and the school on the right (even in her heightened state of terror, there seemed something existential about a citadel of learning called the Rock and Roll Grammar School). Three children stood in the playground adjacent to the school, watching with apathetic eyes as the Princess tore past. Up ahead, the road curved around an outcrop with a guitar-shaped sign planted on it: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING ROCK AND ROLL HEAVEN GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART GOODNIGHT.
Clark swung the Princess into the curve without slowing, and on the far side, there was a bus blocking the road.
It was no ordinary yellow school bus like the one they had seen in the distance as they entered town; this one raved and rioted with a hundred colors and a thousand psychedelic swoops, an oversized souvenir of the Summer of Love. The windows flocked with b.u.t.terfly decals and peace signs, and even as Clark screamed and brought his feet down on the brake, she read, with a fatalistic lack of surprise, the words floating up the painted side like overfilled dirigibles: THE MAGIC BUS.
Clark gave it his best, but wasn"t quite able to stop. The Princess slid into The Magic Bus at ten or fifteen miles an hour, her wheels locked and her tires smoking fiercely. There was a hollow bang as the Mercedes. .h.i.t the tie-dyed bus amidships. Mary was thrown forward against her safety harness again. The bus rocked on its springs a little, but that was all.
"Back up and go around!" she screamed at Clark, but she was nearly overwhelmed by a suffocating intuition that it was all over. The Princess"s engine sounded choppy, and Mary could see steam escaping from around the front of her crumpled hood; it looked like the breath of a wounded dragon. When Clark dropped the transmission lever down into reverse, the car backfired twice, shuddered like an old wet dog, and stalled.
Behind them, they could hear an approaching siren. She wondered who the town constable would turn out to be. Not John Lennon, whose life"s motto had been Question Authority, and not the Lizard King, who was clearly one of the town"s pool-shooting bad boys. Who? And did it really matter? Maybe, she thought, it"ll turn out to be Jimi Hendrix. That sounded crazy, but she knew her rock and roll, probably better than Clark, and she remembered reading somewhere that Hendrix had been a jump-jockey in the 101st Airborne. And didn"t they say that ex-service people often made the best law-enforcement officials?
You"re going crazy, she told herself, then nodded. Sure she was. In a way it was a relief. "What now?" she asked Clark dully.
He opened his door, having to put his shoulder into it because it had crimped a little in the frame. "We run," he said.
"What"s the point?"
"You saw them; do you want to be them?"
That rekindled some of her fear. She released the clasp of her seatbelt and opened her own door. Clark came around the Princess and took her hand. As they turned back toward The Magic Bus, his grip tightened painfully as he saw who was stepping off - a tall man in an open-throated white shirt, dark dungarees, and wrap-around sungla.s.ses. His blue-black hair was combed back from his temples in a lush and impeccable duck"s a.s.s "do. There was no mistaking those impossible, almost hallucinatory good looks; not even sungla.s.ses could hide them. The full lips parted in a small, sly smile.
A blue-and-white police cruiser with ROCK AND ROLL HEAVEN PD written on the doors came around the curve and screeched to a stop inches from the Princess"s back b.u.mper. The man behind the wheel was black, but he wasn"t Jimi Hendrix after all. Mary couldn"t be sure, but she thought the local law was Otis Redding.
The man in the shades and black jeans was now standing directly in front of them, his thumbs hooked into his belt-loops, his pale hands dangling like dead spiders. "How y"all t"day?" There was no mistaking that slow, slightly sardonic Memphis drawl, either. "Want to welcome you both to town. Hope you can stay with us for awhile. Town ain"t much to look at, but we"re neighborly, and we take care of our own." He stuck out a hand on which three absurdly large rings glittered. "I"m the mayor round these parts. Name"s Elvis Presley."
Dusk, of a summer night.
As they walked onto the town common, Mary was again reminded of the concerts she had attended in Elmira as a child, and she felt a pang of nostalgia and sorrow penetrate the coc.o.o.n of shock which her mind and emotions had wrapped around her. So similar . . . but so different, too. There were no children waving sparklers; the only kids present were a dozen or so huddled together as far from the bandsh.e.l.l as they could get, their pale faces strained and watchful. The kids she and Clark had seen in the grammar-school play-yard when they made their abortive run for the hills were among them.
And it was no quaint bra.s.s band that was going to play in fifteen minutes or half an hour, either - spread across the band-sh.e.l.l (which looked almost as big as the Hollywood Bowl to Mary"s eyes) were the implements and accessories of what had to be the world"s biggest - and loudest, judging from the amps - rock-and-roll band, an apocalyptic bebop combination that would, at full throttle, probably be loud enough to shatter window-gla.s.s five miles away. She counted a dozen guitars on stands and stopped counting. There were four full drum-sets . . . bongos . . . congas . . . a rhythm section . . . circular stage pop-ups where the backup singers would stand . . . a steel grove of mikes.
The common itself was filled with folding chairs - Mary estimated somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand - but she thought there were no more than fifty spectators actually present, and probably less. She saw the mechanic, now dressed in clean jeans and a Perma-Pressed shirt; the pale, once-pretty woman sitting next to him was probably his wife. The nurse was sitting all by herself in the middle of a long empty row. Her face was turned upward and she was watching the first few glimmering stars come out. Mary looked away from this one; she felt if she looked at that sad, longing face too deeply, her heart would break.
Of the town"s more famous residents there was currently no sign. Of course not; their day-jobs were behind them now and they would all be backstage, duding up and checking their cues. Getting ready for tonight"s rilly big shew.
Clark paused about a quarter of the way down the gra.s.sy central aisle. A puff of evening breeze tousled his hair, and Mary thought it looked as dry as straw. There were lines carved into Clark"s forehead and around his mouth that she had never seen before. He looked as if he had lost thirty pounds since lunch in Oakridge. The Testosterone Kid was nowhere in evidence, and Mary had an idea he might be gone for good. She found she didn"t care much, one way or the other.
And by the way, sugarpie-honeybunch, how do you think you look?
"Where do you want to sit?" Clark asked. His voice was thin and uninterested - the voice of a man who still believes he might be dreaming.
Mary spotted the waitress with the coldsore. She was on the aisle about four rows down, now dressed in a light-gray blouse and cotton skirt. She had thrown a sweater over her shoulders. "There," Mary said, "beside her." Clark led her in that direction without question or objection.
The waitress looked around at Mary and Clark, and Mary saw that her eyes had at least settled down tonight, which was something of a relief. A moment later she realized why: the girl was cataclysmically stoned. Mary looked down, not wanting to meet that dusty stare any longer, and when she did, she saw that the waitress"s left hand was wrapped in a bulky white bandage. Mary realized with horror that at least one finger and perhaps two were gone from the girl"s hand.
"Hi," the girl said. "I"m Sissy Thomas."
"h.e.l.lo, Sissy. I"m Mary Willmgham. This is my husband, Clark."
"Pleased to meet you," the waitress said.
"Your hand . . . " Mary trailed off, not sure how to go on.
"Frankie did it." Sissy spoke with the deep indifference of one who is riding the pink horse down Dream Street. "Frankie Lymon. Everyone says he was the sweetest guy you"d ever want to meet when he was alive and he only turned mean when he came here. He was one of the first ones . . . the pioneers, I guess you"d say. I don"t know about that. If he was sweet before, I mean. I only know he"s meaner than cat-dirt now. I don"t care. I only wish you"d gotten away, and I"d do it again. Besides, Crystal takes care of me."
Sissy nodded toward the nurse, who had stopped looking at the stars and was now looking at them.
"Crystal takes real good care. She"ll fix you up, if you want - you don"t need to lose no fingers to want to get stoned in this town."
"My wife and I don"t use drugs," Clark said, sounding , pompous.
Sissy regarded him without speaking for a few moments. Then "she said, "You will."
"When does the show start?" Mary could feel the coc.o.o.n of shock starting to dissolve, and she didn"t much care for the feeling.
"Soon."
"How long do they go on?"
Sissy didn"t answer for nearly a minute, and Mary was getting ready to restate the question, thinking the girl either hadn"t heard or hadn"t understood, when she said: "A long time. I mean, the show will be over by midnight, they always are, it"s a town ordinance, but still . . . they go on a long time. Because time is different here. It might be . . . oh, I dunno . . . I think when the guys really get cooking, they sometimes go on for a year or more."
A cold gray frost began creeping up Mary"s arms and back. She tried to imagine having to sit through a year-long rock show and couldn"t do it. This is a dream and you"ll wake up, she told herself, but that thought, persuasive enough as they stood listening to Elvis Presley in the sunlight by The Magic Bus, was now losing a lot of its force and believability.
"Drivin out this road here wouldn"t do you no good no how," Elvis had told them. "It don"t go no place but Umpqua Swamp. No roads in there, just a lot of polk salad. And quicksand." He had paused then, the lenses of his shades glittering like dark furnaces in the late-afternoon sun. "And other things."
"Bears," the policeman who might be Otis Redding had volunteered from behind them.
"Bears, yep," Elvis agreed, and then his lips had curled up in the too-knowing smile Mary remembered so well from TV and the movies. "And other things."
Mary had begun: "If we stay for the show . . . "
Elvis nodded emphatically. "The show! Oh yeah, you gotta stay for the show! We really rock. You just see if we don"t."
"Ain"t nothin" but a stone fact," the policeman had added.
"If we stay for the show . . . can we go when it"s over?"
Elvis and the cop had exchanged a glance that had looked serious but felt like a smile. "Well, you know, ma"am," the erstwhile King of Rock and Roll said at last, "we"re real far out in the boonies here, and attractin" an audience is kinda slow work . . . although once they hear us, everybody stays around for more . . . and we was kinda hopin" you"d stick around yourselves for awhile. See a few shows and kind of enjoy our hospitality." He had pushed his sungla.s.ses up on his forehead then, for a moment revealing wrinkled, empty eyesockets. Then they were Elvis"s dark-blue eyes again, regarding them with somber interest.
"I think," he had said, "you might even decide you want to settle down."
There were more stars in the sky now; it was almost full dark. Over the stage, orange spots were coming on, soft as night-blooming flowers, illuminating the mike-stands one by one.
"They gave us jobs," Clark said dully. "He gave us jobs. The mayor. The one who looks like Elvis Presley."
"He is Elvis," Sissy Thomas said, but Clark just went on staring at the stage. He was not prepared to even think this yet, let alone hear it.
"Mary is supposed to go to work in the Be-Bop Beauty Bar tomorrow," he went on. "She has an English degree and a teacher"s certificate, but she"s supposed to spend the next G.o.d-knows-how-long as a shampoo girl. Then he looked at me and he says, "Whuh bou-chew, sir? Whuh-cuore speciality?" " Clark spoke in a vicious imitation of the mayor"s Memphis drawl, and at last a genuine expression began to show in the waitress"s stoned eyes. Mary thought it was fear.
"You hadn"t ought to make fun," she said. "Makin fun can get you in trouble around here . . . and you don"t want to get in trouble." She slowly raised her bandage-wrapped hand. Clark stared at it, wet lips quivering, until she lowered it into her lap again, and when he spoke again, it was in a lower voice.
"I told him I was a computer software expert, and he said there weren"t any computers in town . . . although they "sho would admiah to git a Ticketron outlet or two." Then the other guy laughed and said there was a stockboy"s job open down at the superette, and - "
A bright white spotlight speared the forestage. A short man in a sportcoat so wild it made Buddy Holly"s look tame strode into its beam, his hands raised as if to stifle a huge comber of applause.