“Thanks.” Chewing the soft, spicy muffin, he pedaled off into the darkness.
He headed south, away from the lights and activity of town, and as he approached the turn onto Route A-32 he slowed, looking out at the long black ribbon of asphalt as it rose up and down the hills and snaked around out of sight. This used to be part of his regular paper route, but since the near-miss with that wrecker the other night he hadn’t been out there. Then he remembered that he had planned to approach Officer Oswald about it and had been so caught up in Crow’s attempts to make him the next Karate Kid that it had somehow totally slipped his mind.
Now that memory clicked back into place and he slowed to a stop, debating. He could turn around now and find Oswald…or he could finally own up to the realization that the whole tow-truck thing was not what he thought it was. It was a near miss with some drunk asshole who thought it would be fun to play chicken with a kid on a bike. That was all. Anything else, he told himself, was ridiculous. Besides, he had no witnesses, no proof.
He looked down the road. “Crow wouldn’t chicken out,” he said aloud. “He’s not afraid of anything.”
With those words in the front of his brain, Mike set his jaw, kicked down hard on the pedal, and shot the War Machine forward onto the black road.
(3)
The late afternoon gloom churned around Mark as he bulled his way through it. The shadows thrown by the big oaks and the tall barn resisted him, jostling his shoulders as he hunched forward into the stiff wind, stalking purposefully toward the empty nowhere of the farm road that led away from the house and eventually into the fields. His legs pumped like a fortissimo metronome, marking the rhythm of his furious pace. He paused once to angrily light a cigarette, sucking in fiercely enough to ignite a third of the Camel and fairly spitting the blue smoke into the night air; then he snapped his lighter shut with the metallic aggression of lopping shears and shoved it in his pocket as he resumed his march toward the end of his own anger.
The actual physical destination turned out to be the barn, not by any choice but merely because it loomed up in front of him and he stopped, startled, and looked up at it as if he’d never seen it before. His surprise betrayed the intense confusion in his mind: he hadn’t realized he’d walked this far from the house or even in that particular direction. He stood in the road, smoking the cigarette in harsh puffs, whipping the butt out of his mouth between each puff and blowing the smoke out in a thin, forced stream as he regarded the barn. It was the same barn he’d always seen, the barn that had been there when he had been born, the same barn he’d helped his father paint red when he was ten and repaint twice since then. It was the same barn in which he’d smoked his very first cigarette; the same barn in which he and Val had spent many a covert hour leaping from the loft into the massive hay mounds that covered most of the floor. It was the same barn where he and Connie had first kissed almost thirteen years ago, and where he had first made love to her, nestled there in the soft fragrant straw of the highest loft, the two of them losing their virginity together in a few moments of sweet, clumsy fumbling that possessed far more passion than skill. It was the same barn where he had had his last conversation with his father prior to that terrible night. Mark had come home for lunch and had spent twenty minutes talking to Dad about Terry Wolfe’s offer to lease a parcel of their land to build a Christmas Town attraction. Dad had said he’d think about it, and Mark had driven back to his office at the college. The next time he would see his dad would be while they were all hostages to Karl Ruger, and from that moment on everything had gone to shit.
Mark walked slowly up to the tall red sidewall of the barn. He reached out to touch it, drawn for some reason to the wooden planks, needing to feel the slightly pebbled surface of the thick layers of red paint. The paint felt cold, but it felt real, and it was an old and familiar texture. Mark leaned his forehead against the wood, closing his eyes and then screwing them up into tight pits of gristle as a wave of unbearably intense emotion crashed down on the shores of his soul. His lips writhed, trying to speak, trying to articulate what he needed to say. His chest ached with the burning need to scream.
In the end, all he could say was one word. “
