NOS4A2(88)

The front door slapped shut. Her son came charging back, carrying a helmet and Lou’s jacket.

“COME BACK ALIVE, RIGHT?” he called.

“THAT’S THE PLAN,” she said. And then, as she was putting the jacket on, she said, “I WILL BE RIGHT BACK. DON’T WORRY.”

He nodded.

The world vibrated around her from the force of the engine: the trees, the road, the sky, the house, all of it shuddering furiously, in danger of shattering. She had already turned the bike to face the road.

She punched the helmet down onto her head. She wore the jacket open.

Right before she let the handbrake out, her son bent down in front of the bike and snatched something out of the dirt.

“WHAT?” she asked.

He handed it to her—that wrench that looked like a curved knife, the word TRIUMPH stamped into it. She nodded thanks and pushed it down into the pocket of her shorts.

“COME BACK,” he said.

“BE HERE WHEN I DO,” she said.

Then she put her feet up, dropped it into first, and she was gliding.

The moment she started moving, everything stopped shaking. The split-tie fence slid away on her right. She leaned as she turned onto the road, and it felt like an airplane banking. It didn’t feel as if she were touching the blacktop at all.

She shifted into second. The house dropped away behind her. She cast a last glance over her shoulder. Wayne stood in the driveway, waving. Hooper was out in the street, gazing after her with a curiously hopeless stare.

Vic gave it throttle and shifted into third, and the Triumph lunged, and she had to squeeze the handlebars to keep from falling off. A thought flashed through her mind, the memory of a biker T-shirt she had owned for a while: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THE BITCH FELL OFF.

Her jacket was unzipped, and it scooped up the air and ballooned around her. She rushed on into low fog.

She did not see a pair of close-set headlights come on down the road behind her, glowing dimly in the mist.

Neither did Wayne.





Route 3


TREES AND HOUSES AND YARDS FLASHED BY, DARK, BLURRED SHAPES only dimly apprehended in the mist.

There was no thought in her. The bike rushed her away from thought. She had known that it would, had known the first moment she saw it in the carriage house that it was fast enough and powerful enough to race her away from the worst part of herself, the part that tried to make sense of things.

She triggered the gearshift with her foot again, and then again, and the Triumph jumped forward each time, swallowing the road beneath it.

The fog thickened against her, blowing into her face. It was pearly, evanescent, the sunlight striking through from somewhere up and to the left, causing the whole world to glow around her as if irradiated. Vic felt that a person could not hope for more beauty in this world.

The damp road hissed like static under the tires.

A gentle, almost delicate ache caressed her left eyeball.

She saw a barn in the shifting mist, a long, tall, tilted, narrow structure. A trick of the billowing vapor made it appear to be sitting in the middle of the road, not a hundred yards away, although she knew that the highway would hook off to the left in another moment and swing her past it. She half smiled at how much it looked like her old imaginary bridge.

Vic lowered her head and listened to the susurration of the tires on wet asphalt, that sound that was so like white noise on the radio. What were you listening to when you tuned to static? she wondered. She thought she had read somewhere that it was the background radiation in which the entire universe bathed.

She waited for the road to hook left and bring her around the barn, but it kept on straight. That tall, dark, angular shape rose before her until she was in its shadow. And it wasn’t a barn at all, and she only realized that the road ran straight into it when it was too late to turn aside. The mist darkened and went cold, as cold as a dip in the lake.

Boards slammed under the tires, a rapid-fire knocking sound.

The mist was snatched away as the bike carried her up and out of it and into the bridge. She sucked at the air and smelled the stink of bats.

She drove her heel down on the brake and shut her eyes. This isn’t real, she thought, almost whispered to herself.

The foot pedal for the brake went all the way down, held for a moment—and then came completely off. It fell onto the boards with a deep, hollow thud. A nut and a collection of washers went jingling after it.

The cable that carried the brake fluid flapped against her leg, spurting. The heel of her boot touched the worn boards beneath her, and it was like putting her toe into some nineteenth-century threshing machine. A part of her insisted she was hallucinating. Another part felt her boot striking against the bridge and understood that her hallucination would snap her in two if she dumped the bike.

She had time to look down and back, trying to process what was happening. A gasket spun through the air from somewhere, carving a whimsical arc through the shadows. The front tire wobbled. The world slurved around her, the back tire skidding out and around, slamming madly across loose boards.

She lifted herself up from the seat and slung her weight hard to the left, holding the bike up more by will than by strength. It slid sideways, rattling across the boards. The tires grabbed at last, and the bike came to a shuddering stop and immediately almost fell over. She got a foot down first, held it up, although only barely, gritting her teeth and struggling against the sudden weight.