Can't beat the smell, can
you? Nothing smells this good except for pussy… except for pussy… except
for pussy
. I try to scream but I can't scream, because LeBay's hands have
settled in a noxious, tightening ring around my throat.
In the other dream—and this one is somehow worse I've finished with a class
or proctoring a study hall at Norton Junior High, where I teach. I pack my
books into my briefcase, stuff in my papers, and leave the room for my next
class. And there in the hall, packed in between the industrial-grey lockers
lining it, is Christine—brand new and sparkling, sitting on four new
whitewall tires, a chrome Winged Victory hood ornament tilting toward me.
She is empty, but her engine guns and falls off… guns and falls off… guns
and falls off. In some of the dreams the voice from the radio is the voice of
Richie Valens, killed long ago in a plane crash, with Buddy Holly and J. P.
Richardson, The Big Bopper. Richie is screaming "La Bamba" to a Latin
beat, and as Christine suddenly lunges toward me, laying rubber on the hall
floor and tearing open locker doors on either side with her doorhandles, I see
that there is a vanity plate on the front—a grinning white skull on a dead
black field. Imprinted over the skull are the words ROCK AND ROLL WILL
NEVER DIE.
Then I wake up—sometimes screaming, always clutching my leg.
But the dreams are less now. Something else I read in one of my psych
classes—I took a lot of them, maybe hoping to understand things that can't be
understood—is that people dream less as they grow older. I think I am going
to be all right now. Last Christmas season, when I sent Leigh her annual card,
I added a line to my usual note on the back. Below my signature, on impulse,
I scribbled:
How are you dealing with it?
Then I sealed the card up and
mailed it before I could change my mind. I got a postcard back a month later.
It showed the new Taos Center for the Performing Arts on the front. On the
back was my address and a single flat line:
Dealing with what? L
.
One way or another I guess we find out things we have to know.
Around the same time—it seems as though it's around Christmas that my
thoughts turn to it the most often—I dropped Rick Mercer a note, because the
question had been on my mind more and more, gnawing at me. I wrote and
asked him what had become of the block of scrap metal that had once been
Christine.
I got no answer.
But time is teaching me how to deal with that too. I think about it less—I
really do.
So here I am, at the tag end of everything, old memories and old nightmares
all bundled into a neat sheaf of pages. Soon I will put them in a folder and
put the folder in my file cabinet and lock that drawer and that will be the end.
But I told you there was something else, didn't I? Some other reason for
writing it all down.
His single-minded purpose. His unending fury.
I read it in the paper a few weeks ago—just an item that got put on the AP
wire because it was bizarre, I suppose.
Be honest, Guilder
, I can hear Arnie
saying, so I will. It was that item that got me going, more than all the dreams
and old memories.
The news item was about a guy named Sander Galton, whose nickname, one
would logically assume, must have been Sandy.
This Sander Galton was killed out in California, where he was working at a
drive-in movie theatre in LA. He was apparently alone, closing up shop for
the night after the movie had ended. He was in the snack-bar, A car ripped
right through one of the walls, ploughed through the counter, smashed the
popcorn machine, and got him as he was trying to unlock the door to the
projection booth. The cops knew that was what he was doing when the car
ran him down because they found the key in his hand. I read that item, headed
BIZARRE MURDER BY CAR IN LOS ANGELES—and I thought of what
Mercer had told me, that last thing:
He said it bit him
.
Of course it's impossible, but it was all impossible to start with.
I keep thinking of George LeBay in Ohio.
His sister in Colorado.
Leigh in New Mexico.
What if it's started again?
What if it's working its way east, finishing the job?
Saving me for last?
His single-minded purpose.
His unending fury.
