You Know They Got a Hell of a Band(5)

"I've given up thinking -- it keeps getting me into trouble. But I see something that isn't a joke. Look, Mary!"

Twenty or thirty feet beyond the sign -- just before the crest of the hill -- the road widened dramatically and was once more both paved and lined. Mary felt worry roll off her heart like a boulder. Clark was grinning. "Isn't that beautiful?" She nodded happily, grinning herself. They reached the sign and Clark stopped. They read it again:

Welcome to Rock and Roll Heaven, Ore.

WE COOK WITH GAS! SO WILL YOU!

Jaycees Х Chamber of Commerce Х Lions Х Elks

"It's got to be a joke," she repeated.

"Maybe not."

"A town called Rock and Roll Heaven? Puh-leeze, Clark."

"Why not? There's Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, Dry Shark, Nevada, and a town in Pennsylvania called Intercourse. So why not a Rock and Roll Heaven in Oregon?"

She laughed giddily. The sense of relief was really incredible. "You made that up."

"What?"

"Intercourse, Pennsylvania."

"I didn't. Ralph Ginzberg once tried to send a magazine called Eros from there. For the postmark. The Feds wouldn't let him. Swear. And who knows? Maybe the town was founded by a bunch of communal back-to-the-land hippies in the sixties. They went establishment -- Lions, Elks, Jaycees -- but the original name stayed." He was quite taken with the idea; he found it both funny and oddly sweet. "Besides, I don't think it matters. What matters is we found some honest-to-God pavement again, honey. The stuff you drive on."

She nodded. "So drive on it... but be careful."

"You bet." The Princess nosed up onto the pavement, which was not asphalt but a smooth composition surface without a patch or expansion-joint to be seen. "Careful's my middle n -- "

Then they reached the crest of the hill and the last word died in his mouth. He stamped on the brake-pedal so hard that their seatbelts locked, then jammed the transmission lever back into park.

"Holy wow!" Clark said.

They sat in the idling Mercedes, open-mouthed, looking down at the town below.

It was a perfect jewel of a town nestled in a small, shallow valley like a dimple. Its resemblance to the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the small-town illustrations of Currier & Ives was, to Mary, at least, inescapable. She tried to tell herself it was just the geography; the way the road wound down into the valley, the way the town was surrounded by deep green-black forest -- leagues of old, thick firs growing in unbroken profusion beyond the outlying fields -- but it was more than the geography, and she supposed Clark knew it as well as she did. There was something too sweetly balanced about the church steeples, for instance -- one on the north end of the town common and the other on the south end. The barn-red building off to the east had to be the school-house, and the big white one off to the west, the one with the bell-tower on top and the satellite dish to one side, had to be the town hall. The homes all looked impossibly neat and cozy, the sorts of domiciles you saw in the house-beautiful ads of pre-World War II magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and American Mercury.

There should be smoke curling from a chimney or two, Mary thought, and after a little examination, she saw that there was. She suddenly found herself remembering a story from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. "Mars Is Heaven," it had been called, and in it the Martians had cleverly disguised the slaughterhouse so it had looked like everybody's fondest hometown dream.

"Turn around," she said abruptly. "It's wide enough here, if you're careful."

He turned slowly to look at her, and she didn't care much for the expression on his face. He was eyeing her as if he thought she had gone crazy. "Honey, what are you -- "

"I don't like it, that's all." She could feel her face growing warm, but she pushed on in spite of the heat. "It makes me think of a scary story I read when I was a teenager." She paused. "It also makes me think of the candy-house in 'Hansel and Gretel."

He went on giving her that patented I Just Don't Believe It stare of his, and she realized he meant to go down there -- it was just another part of the same wretched testosterone blast that gotten them off the main road in the first place. He wanted to explore, by Christ. And he wanted a souvenir, of course. A tee-shirt bought in the local drugstore would do, one that said something cute like

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."