You Know They Got a Hell of a Band(7)
There was a sign hung on a guy-wire above the bandshell, and Mary could read it easily, although they were a hundred yards away. CONCERT TONIGHT, it said.
She suddenly realized that she knew this town -- had seen it many times on late-night TV. Never mind Ray Bradbury's hellish vision of Mars or the candy-house in "Hansel and Gretel"; what this place resembled more than either was The Peculiar Little Town people kept stumbling into in various episodes of The Twilight Zone.
She leaned toward her husband and said in a low, ominous voice: "We're traveling not through a dimension of sight and sound, Clark, but of mind. Look!" She pointed at nothing in particular, but a woman standing outside the town's Western Auto saw the gesture and gave her a narrow, mistrustful glance.
"Look at what?" he asked. He sounded irritated again, and she guessed that this time it was because he knew exactly what she was talking about.
"There's a signpost up ahead! We're entering -- "
"Oh, cut it out, Mare," he said, and abruptly swung into an empty parking slot halfway down Main Street.
"Clark!" she nearly screamed. "What are you doing?"
He pointed through the windshield at an establishment with the somehow not-cute name of The Rock-a-Boogie Restaurant.
"I'm thirsty. I'm going in there and getting a great big Pepsi to go. You don't have to come. You can sit right here. Lock all the doors, if you want." So saying, he opened his own door. Before he could swing his legs out, she grabbed his shoulder.
"Clark, please don't."
He looked back at her, and she saw at once that she should have canned the crack about The Twilight Zone -- not because it was wrong but because it was right. It was that macho thing again. He wasn't stopping because he was thirsty, not really; he was stopping because this freaky little burg had scared him, too. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, she didn't know that, but she did know that he had no intention of going on until he had convinced himself he wasn't afraid, not one little bit.
"I won't be a minute. Do you want a ginger ale, or something?"
She pushed the button that unlocked her seatbelt. "What I want is not to be left alone."
He gave her an indulgent, I-knew-you'd-come look that made her feel like tearing out a couple of swatches of his hair.
"And what I also want is to kick your ass for getting us into this situation in the first place," she finished, and was pleased to see the indulgent expression turn to one of wounded surprise. She opened her own door. "Come on. Piddle on the nearest hydrant, Clark, and then we'll get out of here."
"Piddle... ? Mary, what in the hell are you talking about?"
"Sodas!" she nearly screamed, all the while thinking that it was really amazing how fast a good trip with a good man could turn bad. She glanced across the street and saw a couple of longhaired young guys standing there. They were also drinking Oily and checking out the strangers in town. One was wearing a battered top-hat. The plastic daisy stuck in the band nodded back and forth in the breeze. His companion's arms crawled with faded blue tattoos. To Mary they looked like the sort of fellows who dropped out of high school their third time through the tenth grade in order to spend more time meditating on the joys of drive-train linkages and date rape.
Oddly enough, they also looked somehow familiar to her.
They saw her looking. Top-Hat solemnly raised his hand and twiddled his fingers at her. Mary looked away hurriedly and turned to Clark. "Let's get our cold drinks and get the hell out of here."
"Sure," he said. "And you didn't need to shout at me, Mary. I mean, I was right beside you, and -- "
"Clark, do you see those two guys across the street?"
"What two guys?"
She looked back in time to see Top-Hat and Tattoos slipping through the barber-shop doorway. Tattoos glanced back over his shoulder, and although Mary wasn't sure, she thought he tipped her a wink.
"They're just going into the barber shop. See them?"
Clark looked, but only saw a closing door with the sun reflecting eye-watering shards of light from the glass. "What about them?"
"They looked familiar to me."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. But I find it somehow hard to believe that any of the people I know moved to Rock and Roll Heaven, Oregon, to take up rewarding, high-paying jobs as street-corner hoodlums."
Clark laughed and took her elbow. "Come on," he said, and led her into The Rock-a-Boogie Restaurant.
* * *
The Rock-a-Boogie went a fair distance toward allaying Mary's fears. She had expected a greasy spoon, not much different from the dim (and rather dirty) pit-stop in Oakridge where they'd eaten lunch. They entered a sun-filled, agreeable little diner with a funky fifties feel instead: blue-tiled walls; chrome-chased pie case; tidy yellow-oak floor; wooden paddle fans turning lazily overhead. The face of the wall-clock was circled with thin tubes of red and blue neon. Two waitresses in aqua-colored rayon uniforms that looked to Mary like costumes left over from American Graffiti were standing by the stainless-steel pass-through between the restaurant and the kitchen. One was young -- no more than twenty and probably not that -- and pretty in a washed-out way. The other, a short woman with a lot of frizzy red hair, had a brassy look that struck Mary as both harsh and desperate... and there was something else about her, as well: for the second time in as many minutes, Mary had the strong sensation that she knew someone in this town.