Riding The Bullet

* and stumbled back, terrified and all too aware that I was by myself, visiting a graveyard by moon-light.

FUN IS FUN AND DONE IS DONE

was the inscription.

My mother was dead, had died perhaps at that very minute, and something had sent me a message. Some-thing with a thoroughly unpleasant sense of humor. I began to back slowly toward the road, listening to the wind in the trees, listening to the stream, listen-ing to the frog, suddenly afraid I might hear another sound, the sound of rubbing earth and tearing roots as something not quite dead reached up, groping for one of my sneakers-

My feet tangled together and I fell down, thumping my elbow on a gravestone, barely missing another with the back of my head. I landed with a grassy thud, looking up at the moon which had just barely cleared the trees. It was white instead of orange now, and as bright as a polished bone.

Instead of panicking me further, the fall cleared my head. I didn't know what I'd seen, but it couldn't have been what I thought I'd seen; that kind of stuff might work in John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies, but it wasn't the stuff of real life.

Yes, okay, good, a voice whispered in my head. And if you just walk out of here now, you can go on believing that. You can go on believing it for the rest of your life.

"Fuck that," I said, and got up. The seat of my jeans

was wet, and I plucked it away from my skin. It

wasn't exactly easy to reapproach the stone marking

George Staub's final resting place, but it wasn't as

hard as I'd expected, either. The wind sighed through the trees, still rising, signaling a change in the weather. Shadows danced unsteadily around me. Branches rubbed together, a creaky sound off in the woods. I bent over the tombstone and read:

george staub

january 19,1977-october 12, 1998

Well Begun, Too Soon Done.

I stood there, leaning down with my hands planted just above my knees, not aware of how fast my heart had been beating until it started to slow down. A nasty little coincidence, that was all, and was it any wonder that I'd misread what was beneath the name and dates? Even without being tired and under stress, I might have read it wrong-moonlight was a notori-ous misleader. Case closed.

Except I knew what I'd read: Fun Is Fun and Done Is Done.

My ma was dead.

"Fuck that," I repeated, and turned away. As I did, I realized the mist curling through the grass and around my ankles had begun to brighten. I could hear the mutter of an approaching motor. A car was coming.

I hurried back through the opening in the rock wall,

snagging my pack on the way by. The lights of the

approaching car were halfway up the hill. I stuck out

my thumb just as they struck me, momentarily blind-ing me. I knew the guy was going to stop even before he started slowing down. It's funny how you can just know sometimes, but anyone who's spent a lot of time hitchhiking will tell you that it happens. The car passed me, brake lights flaring, and swerved onto the soft shoulder near the end of the rock wall dividing the graveyard from Ridge Road. I ran to it with my backpack banging against the side of my knee. The car was a Mustang, one of the cool ones from the late sixties or early seventies. The motor rumbled loudly, the fat sound of it coming through a muffler that maybe wouldn't pass inspection the next time the sticker came due . . . but that wasn't my problem.

I swung the door open and slid inside. As I put my backpack between my feet, an odor struck me, some-thing almost familiar and a trifle unpleasant. "Thank you," I said. "Thanks a lot."

The guy behind the wheel was wearing faded jeans and a black tee shirt with the arms cut off. His skin was tanned, the muscles heavy, and his right bicep was ringed with a blue barbwire tattoo. He was wear-ing a green John Deere cap turned around backwards. There was a button pinned near the round collar of his tee shirt, but I couldn't read it from my angle. "Not a problem," he said. "You headed up the city?"

"Yes," I said. In this part of the world "up the city"

meant Lewiston, the only city of

any size north of Portland. As I closed the door, I saw one of those pine-tree air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. That was what I'd smelled. It sure wasn't my night as far as odors went; first pee and now artificial pine. Still, it was a ride. I should have been relieved. And as the guy accelerated back onto Ridge Road, the big engine of his vintage Mustang growling, I tried to tell myself I was relieved.

"What's going on for you in the city?" the driver asked. I put him at about my age, some townie who maybe went to vocational-technical school in Auburn or maybe worked in one of the few remaining textile mills in the area. He'd probably fixed up this Mustang in his spare time, because that was what townie kids did: drank beer, smoked a little rope, fixed up their cars. Or their motorcycles.

"My brother's getting married. I'm going to be his best man." I told this lie with absolutely no premedi-tation. I didn't want him to know about my mother, although I didn't know why. Something was wrong here. I didn't know what it was or why I should think such a thing in the first place, but I knew. I was posi-tive. "The rehearsal's tomorrow. Plus a stag party tomorrow night."