Riding The Bullet

coffee it was lying in, wiped it on my jeans, put it in

my pocket. Throwing it away had been the wrong idea. It was my button now-good luck charm or bad luck charm, it was mine. I left the hospital, giving Yvonne a little wave on my way by. Outside, the moon rode the roof of the sky, flooding the world with its strange and perfectly dreamy light. I had never felt so tired or so dispirited in my whole life. I wished I had the choice to make again. I would have made a different one. Which was funny-if I'd found her dead, as I'd expected to, I think I could have lived with it. After all, wasn't that the way stories like this one were supposed to end?

Nobody wants to give a fella a ride in town, the old man with the truss had said, and how true that was. I walked all the way across Lewiston-three dozen blocks of Lisbon Street and nine blocks of Canal Street, past all the bottle clubs with the jukeboxes playing old songs by Foreigner and Led Zeppelin and AC/DC in French-without putting my thumb out a single time. It would have done no good. It was well past eleven before I reached the DeMuth Bridge. Once I was on the Harlow side, the first car I raised my thumb to stopped. Forty minutes later I was fishing the key out from under the red wheelbarrow by the door to the back shed, and ten minutes after that I was in bed. It occurred to me as I dropped off that it was the first time in my life I'd slept in that house all by myself.

...

It was the phone that woke me up at quarter past noon. I thought it would be the hospital, someone from the hospital saying my mother had taken a sud-den turn for the worse and had passed away only a few minutes ago, so sorry. But it was only Mrs. McCurdy, wanting to be sure I'd gotten home all right, wanting to know all the details of my visit the night before (she took me through it three times, and by the end of the third recitation I had begun to feel like a criminal being interrogated on a murder charge), also wanting to know if I'd like to ride up to the hospital with her that afternoon. I told her that would be great. When I hung up, I crossed the room to the bedroom door. Here was a full-length mirror. In it was a tall, unshaven young man with a small potbelly, dressed only in baggy undershorts. "You have to get it together, big boy," I told my reflection. "Can't go through the rest of your life thinking that every time the phone rings it's someone calling to tell you your mother's dead."

Not that I would. Time would dull the memory,

time always did . . . but it was amazing how real and

immediate the night before still seemed. Every edge

and corner was sharp and clear. I could still see

Staub's good-looking young face beneath his turned-around

cap, and the cigarette behind his ear, and the

way the smoke had seeped out of the incision on his

neck when he inhaled. I could still hear him telling the story of the Cadillac that was selling cheap. Time would blunt the edges and round the corners, but not for awhile. After all, I had the button, it was on the dresser by the bathroom door. The button was my souvenir. Didn't the hero of every ghost story come away with a souvenir, something that proved it had all really happened?

There was an ancient stereo system in the corner of the room, and I shuffled through my old tapes, hunt-ing for something to listen to while I shaved. I found one marked folk mix and put it in the tape player. I'd made it in high school and could barely remember what was on it. Bob Dylan sang about the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll, Tom Paxton sang about his old ramblin' pal, and then Dave Van Ronk started to sing about the cocaine blues. Halfway through the third verse I paused with my razor by my cheek. Got a headful of whiskey and a bellyful of gin, Dave sang in his rasping voice. Doctor say it kill me but he don't say when. And that was the answer, of course. A guilty conscience had lead me to assume that my mother would die immediately, and Staub had never corrected that assumption-how could he, when I had never even asked?-but it clearly wasn't true. Doctor say it kill me but he don't say when.

What in God's name was I beating myself up about?

Didn't my choice amount to no more than the natu-

ral order of things? Didn't children usually outlive their parents? The son of a bitch had tried to scare me-to guilt-trip me-but I didn't have to buy what he was selling, did I? Didn't we all ride the Bullet in the end?

You're just trying to let yourself off. Trying to find a way to make it okay. Maybe what you're thinking is true . . . but when he asked you to choose, you chose her. There's no way to think your way around that, buddy-you chose her.

I opened my eyes and looked at my face in the mir-ror. "I did what I had to," I said. I didn't quite believe it, but in time I supposed I would.

Mrs. McCurdy and I went up to see my mother and my mother was a little better. I asked her if she remembered her dream about Thrill Village, in Laco-nia. She shook her head. "I barely remember you com-ing in last night, she said. "I was awful sleepy. Does it matter?"

"Nope," I said, and kissed her temple. "Not a bit."

My ma got out of the hospital five days later. She walked with a limp for a little while, but that went away and a month later she was back at work again-only half shifts at first but then full time, just as if nothing had happened. I returned to school and got a job at Pat's Pizza in downtown Orono. The money wasn't great, but it was enough to get my car fixed.

That was good; I'd lost what little taste for hitchhik-ing I'd ever had.

My mother tried to quit smoking and for a little while she did. Then I came back from school for April vacation a day early, and the kitchen was just as smoky as it had ever been. She looked at me with eyes that were both ashamed and defiant. "I can't," she said. "I'm sorry, Al-I know you want me to and I know I should, but there's such a hole in my life with-out it. Nothin fills it. The best I can do is wish I'd never started in the first place."

Two weeks after I graduated from college, my ma had another stroke-just a little one. She tried to quit smoking again when the doctor scolded her, then put on fifty pounds and went back to the tobacco. "As a dog returneth to its vomit," the Bible says; I've always liked that one. I got a pretty good job in Portland on my first try-lucky, I guess, and started the work of convincing her to quit her own job. It was a tough sled at first.

I might have given up in disgust, but I had a certain memory that kept me digging away at her Yankee defenses.

"You ought to be saving for your own life, not tak-ing care of me," she said. "You'll want to get married someday, Al, and what you spend on me you won't have for that. For your real life."

"You're my real life," I said, and kissed her. "You can like it or lump it, but that's just the way it is." And finally she threw in the towel.

We had some pretty good years after that-seven of them in all. I didn't live with her, but I visited her almost every day. We played a lot of gin rummy and watched a lot of movies on the video recorder I bought her. Had a bucketload of laughs, as she liked to say. I don't know if I owe those years to George Staub or not, but they were good years. And my memory of the night I met Staub never faded and grew dreamlike, as I always expected it would; every incident, from the old man telling me to wish on the harvest moon to the fingers fumbling at my shirt as Staub passed his button on to me remained perfectly clear. And there came a day when I could no longer find that button. I knew I'd had it when I moved into my little apart-ment in Falmouth-I kept it in the top drawer of my bedside table, along with a couple of combs, my two sets of cuff links, and an old political button that said bill clinton, the safe sax president-but then it came up missing. And when the telephone rang a day or two later, I knew why Mrs. McCurdy was crying. It was the bad news I'd never quite stopped expecting; fun is fun and done is done.

When the funeral was over, and the wake, and the