You Know They Got a Hell of a Band(4)

She tried to speak, but at first no sound came out of her dry throat. She cleared it and tried again. "What do you think about backing up, Clark?"

He considered it for several moments -- the tu-whit! bird had time to call again and be answered from somewhere deeper in the forest -- before shaking his head. "Only as a last resort. It's at least two miles back to the last fork in the road -- "

"You mean there was another one?"

He winced a little, dropped his eyes, and nodded. "Backing up... well, you see how narrow the road is, and how mucky the ditches are. If we went off..." He shook his head and sighed.

"So we go on."

"I think so. If the road goes entirely to hell, of course, I'll have to try it."

"But by then we'll be in even deeper, won't we?" So far she was managing, and quite well, she thought, to keep a tone of accusation from creeping into her voice, but it was getting harder and harder to do. She was pissed at him, quite severely pissed, and pissed at herself, as well -- for letting him get them into this in the first place, and then for coddling him the way she was now.

"Yes, but I like the odds on finding a wide place up ahead better than I like the odds on reversing for a couple of miles along this piece of crap. If it turns out we do have to back out, I'll take it in stages -- back up for five minutes, rest for ten, back up for five more." He smiled lamely. "It'll be an adventure."

"Oh yes, it'll be that, all right," Mary said, thinking again that her definition for this sort of thing was not adventure but pain in the ass. "Are you sure you aren't pressing on because you believe in your heart that we're going to find Toketee Falls right over the next hill?"

For a moment his mouth seemed to disappear entirely and she braced for an explosion of righteous male wrath. Then his shoulders sagged and he only shook his head. In that moment she saw what he was going to look like thirty years from now, and that frightened her a lot more than getting caught on a back road in the middle of nowhere.

"No," he said. "1 guess I've given up on Toketee Falls. One of the great rules of travel in America is that roads without electrical lines running along at least one side of them don't go anywhere."

So he had noticed, too.

"Come on," he said, getting back in. "I'm going to try like hell to get us out of this. And next time I'll listen to you."

Yeah, yeah, Mary thought with a mixture of amusement and tired resentment. I've heard that one before. But before he could pull the transmission stick on the console down from park to drive, she put her hand over his. "I know you will," she said, turning what he'd said into a promise. "Now get us out of this mess."

"Count on it," Clark said.

"And be careful."

"You can count on that, too." He gave her a small smile that made her feel a little better, then engaged the Princess's transmission. The big gray Mercedes, looking very out of place in these deep woods, began to creep down the shadowy track again.

They drove another mile by the odometer and nothing changed but the width of the cart-track they were on: it grew narrower still. Mary thought the scruffy firs now looked not like hungry guests at a banquet but morbidly curious spectators at the site of a nasty accident. If the track got any narrower, they would begin to hear the squall of branches along the sides of the car. The ground under the trees, meanwhile, had gone from mucky to swampy; Mary could see patches of standing water, dusty with pollen and fallen pine needles, in some of the dips. Her heart was beating much too fast, and twice she had caught herself gnawing at her nails, a habit she thought she had given up for good the year before she married Clark. She had begun to realize that if they got stuck now, they would almost certainly spend the night camped out in the Princess. And there were animals in these woods -- she had heard them crashing around out there. Some of them sounded big enough to be bears. The thought of meeting a bear while they stood looking at their hopelessly mired Mercedes made her swallow something that felt and tasted like a large lint ball.

"Clark, I think we'd better give it up and try backing. It's already past three o'clock and -- "

"Look," he said, pointing ahead. "Is it a sign?"

She squinted. Ahead, the lane rose toward the crest of a deeply wooded hill. There was a bright blue oblong standing near the top. "Yes," she said. "It's a sign, all right."

"Great! Can you read it?"

"Uh-huh -- it says IF YOU CAME THIS FAR, YOU REALLY FUCKED up."

He shot her a complex look of amusement and irritation. "Very funny, Mare."

"Thank you, Clark. I try."

"We'll go to the top of the hill, read the sign, and see what's over the crest. If we don't see anything hopeful, we'll try backing. Agreed?''

"Agreed."

He patted her leg, then drove cautiously on. The Mercedes was moving so slowly now that they could hear the soft sound of the weeds on the crown of the road whickering against the undercarriage. Mary really could make out the words on the sign now, but at first she rejected them, thinking she had to be mistaken -- it was just too crazy. But they drew closer still, and the words didn't change.

"Does it say what I think it does?" Clark asked her.

Mary gave a short, bewildered laugh. "Sure... but it must be someone's idea of a joke. Don't you think?"