You Know They Got a Hell of a Band(6)

"I still -- "

He grabbed the map which had been lying on the console, and when he turned to her with it, Mary realized with dismay that the jolly, coaxing voice had temporarily concealed the fact that he was seriously pissed at her. "Listen, Mare, and pay attention, because there may be questions later. Maybe I can turn around here and maybe I can't -- it's wider, but I'm not as sure as you are that it's wide enough. And the ground still looks pretty squelchy to me."

"Clark, please don't yell at me. I'm getting a headache."

He made an effort and moderated his voice. "If we do get turned around, it's twelve miles back to Highway 58, over the same shitty road we just traveled -- "

"Twelve miles isn't so much." She tried to sound firm, if only to herself, but she could feel herself weakening. She hated herself for it, but that didn't change it. She had a horrid suspicion that this was how men almost always got their way: not by being right but by being relentless. They argued like they played football, and if you hung in there, you almost always finished the discussion with cleat-marks all over your psyche.

"No, twelve miles isn't so much," he was saying in his most sweetly reasonable I-am-trying-not-to-strangle-you-Mary voice, "but what about the fifty or so we'll have to tack on going around this patch of woods once we get back on 58?"

"You make it sound as if we had a train to catch, Clark!"

"It just pisses me off, that's all. You take one look down at a nice little town with a cute little name and say it reminds you of Friday the 13th, Part XX or some damn thing and you want to go back. And that road over there" -- he pointed across the valley -- "heads due south. It's probably less than half an hour from here to Toketee Falls by that road."

"That's about what you said back in Oakridge -- before we started off on the Magical Mystery Tour segment of our trip."

He looked at her a moment longer, his mouth tucked in on itself like a cramp, then grabbed the transmission lever. "Fuck it," he snarled. "We'll go back. But if we meet one car on the way, Mary, just one, we'll end up backing into Rock and Roll Heaven. So -- "

She put her hand over his before he could disengage the transmission for the second time that day.

"Go on," she said. "You're probably right and I'm probably being silly." Rolling over like this has got to be bred in the goddam bone, she thought. Either that, or I'm just too tired to fight.

She took her hand away, but he paused a moment longer, looking at her. "Only if you're sure," he said.

And that was really the most ludicrous thing of all, wasn't it? Winning wasn't enough for a man like Clark; the vote also had to be unanimous. She had voiced that unanimity many times when she didn't feel very unanimous in her heart, but she discovered that she just wasn't capable of it this time.

"But I'm not sure," she said. "If you'd been listening to me instead of just putting up with me, you'd know that. Probably you're right and probably I'm just being silly -- your take on it makes more sense than mine does, I admit that much, at least, and I'm willing to soldier along -- but that doesn't change the way I feel. So you'll just have to excuse me if I decline to put on my little cheerleader's skirt and lead the Go Clark Go cheer this time."

"Jesus!" he said. His face was wearing an uncertain expression that made him look uncharacteristically -- and somehow hate fully -- boyish. "You're in some mood, aren't you, honey-bunch?"

"I guess I am," she said, hoping he couldn't see how much that particular term of endearment grated on her. She was thirty-two, after all, and he was almost forty-one. She felt a little too old to be anyone's honeybunch and thought Clark was a little too old to need one.

Then the troubled look on his face cleared and the Clark she liked -- the one she really believed she could spend the second half of her life with -- was back. "You'd look cute in a cheerleader's skirt, though," he said, and appeared to measure the length of her thigh. "You would."

"You're a fool, Clark," she said, and then found herself smiling at him almost in spite of herself.

"That's correct, ma'am," he said, and put the Princess in gear.

The town had no outskirts, unless the few fields, which surrounded it, counted. At one moment they were driving down a gloomy, tree-shaded lane; at the next there were broad tan fields on either side of the car; at the next they were passing neat little houses.

The town was quiet but far from deserted. A few cars moved lazily back and forth on the four or five intersecting streets that made up downtown, and a handful of pedestrians strolled the sidewalks. Clark lifted a hand in salute to a bare-chested, potbellied man who was simultaneously watering his lawn and drinking a can of Olympia. The potbellied man, whose dirty hair straggled to his shoulders, watched them go by but did not raise his own hand in return.

Main Street had that same Norman Rockwell ambience, and here it was so strong that it was almost a feeling of deja vu. Robust, mature oaks shaded the walks, and that was somehow just right. You didn't have to see the town's only watering hole to know that it would be called The Dew Drop Inn and that there would be a lighted clock displaying the Budweiser Clydesdales over the bar. The parking spaces were the slanting type; there was a red-white-and-blue barber pole turning outside The Cutting Edge; a mortar and pestle hung over the door of the local pharmacy, which was called The Tuneful Druggist. The pet shop (with a sign in the window saying WE HAVE SIAMESE IF YOU PLEASE) was called White Rabbit. Everything was so right you could just shit. Most right of all was the town common at the center of town.