NOS4A2(114)

“I want to call my mother. I want to tell her I’m all right.”

Manx nodded, eyes on the road, hand on the wheel. Had the car been driving itself yesterday? Wayne had a memory of the steering wheel turning on its own, while Manx moaned and the Gasmask Man wiped blood from his face—but this recollection had the shiny, hyperreal quality of the sort of dreams that come to people while they are incapacitated with a particularly bad flu. Now, in the bright, clear sunshine of morning, Wayne was not sure it had really happened. Also, the day was warming; he couldn’t see his own breath anymore.

“It is very right that you should want to call her and tell her you are well. I expect, when we get where we are going, that you will want to call her every day! That is just being considerate! And of course she will want to know how you are doing. We will have to ring her up as soon as possible. I can hardly count that as the favor I owe you! What sort of beast would not let a child call his mother? Unfortunately, there is no easy place to stop and let you call, and neither of us thought to bring a phone with us,” Manx said. He turned his head and looked over the divider at Wayne again. “I don’t suppose you thought to bring one, did you?” And smiled.

He knows, Wayne thought. He felt something shrivel inside him, and for a moment he was dangerously close to tears.

“No,” he said, in a voice that sounded almost normal. He had to fight to keep from looking at the wooden drawer at his feet.

Manx returned his gaze to the road. “Oh, well. It is too early to call her anyway. It is not even six in the morning, and after the day she had yesterday, we had better let her sleep in!” He sighed and added, “Your mother has more tattoos than a sailor.”

“‘There was once a young lady from Yale,’” said the Gasmask Man. “‘Who had verses tattooed on her tail. And on her behind, for the sake of the blind, a duplicate version in braille.’”

“You rhyme too much,” Wayne said.

Manx laughed—a big, unrefined hee-haw of a laugh—and slapped the wheel. “That is for sure! Good old Bing Partridge is a rhyming demon! If you look to your Bible, you will see that those are the lowest sort of demon, but not without their uses.”

Bing rested his forehead against the window, looking out at rolling countryside. Sheep grazed.

“Baa, baa, black sheep,” Bing crooned softly to himself. “Have you any wool?”

Manx said, “All those tattoos on your mother.”

“Yes?” Wayne said, thinking that if he looked in the drawer, the phone would probably not be there. He thought there was an excellent chance they had removed it while he slept.

“Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I view that as an invitation to men of poor character to stare. Do you think she likes that sort of attention?”

“‘There once was a whore from Peru,’” whispered the Gasmask Man, and he giggled softly to himself.

“They’re pretty,” Wayne said.

“Is that why your father divorced her? Because he did not like her to go out that way, with her legs bare and painted, to distract men?”

“He didn’t divorce her. They never got married.”

Manx laughed again. “There is a big surprise.”

They had left the highway and had slipped out of the hills and into a sleepy downtown. It was a sorry, abandoned-looking place. Storefront windows were soaped over, signs in them saying For Rent. Plywood sheeting had been nailed up inside the doors of the movie theater, and the marquee read MER Y XMAS SUGAR EEK PA! Christmas lights hung from it, although it was July.

Wayne couldn’t stand not knowing about his phone. He could just reach the drawer with his foot. He inched his toe under the handle.

“She has a sturdy athletic look to her, I will give you that,” Manx said, although Wayne was hardly listening. “I suppose she has a boyfriend.”

Wayne said, “I’m her boyfriend, she says.”

“Ha, ha. Every mother says that to her son. Your father is older than your mother?”

“I don’t know. I guess. A little.”

Wayne caught the drawer with his toe and slid it back an inch. The phone was still there. He nudged it shut. Later. If he went for it now, they would just take it away.

“Do you think she is inclined to look favorably upon older men?” Manx asked.

It bewildered Wayne that Manx was going on and on about his mother and her tattoos and what she thought about older men. He could not have been more confused if Manx had begun to ask him questions about sea lions or sports cars. He couldn’t even remember how they had gotten on this particular subject, and he struggled to think it out, to run the conversation in reverse.

If you think in reverse, Wayne thought. Reverse. In. Think. You. If. Dead Grandma Lindy had been in his dream, and everything she said came out backward. Most of what she had said to him was gone now—forgotten—but that part of it came back to him with perfect clarity, like a message in invisible ink darkening and appearing on paper held above a flame. If you think in reverse, what? He didn’t know.

The car stopped at an intersection. A middle-aged woman stood on the curb, eight feet away. She was in shorts and a headband, jogging in place. She was waiting for her walk light, even though there was no cross traffic.

Wayne acted without thought. He flung himself at the door and banged his hands on the glass.