I Am the Cheese (20 page)

So I dig in and pedal, past the stores and the
houses, and a long warehouse that I pass as if it’s a big silent ship, and a motorcycle roars past me and almost blasts me from the road. Then, finally, I see the lights of the gas station across from the motel and my heart leaps and I yell, “Hooray.” I have made it to the motel. I have come this far and nothing has stopped me, nothing will stop me now. I will sleep tonight in the cabin where I stayed last year with my mother and father and I will be secure and safe again, thinking of them. And then tomorrow I will wake up and arrive in Rutterburg, Vermont, across the river.

The motel is dark. The light above the sign isn’t lit and the sign swings eerily in the wind. The cabins have an abandoned look. Is the place closed for the season, like the ice-cream stands along the way? I check the cabin that serves as the office and it, too, is deserted. I park my bike and walk up to the office. The door is swinging slightly, unlocked. I push it open and the smell of staleness fills my nostrils, the odor of something old and passed by. The streetlights throw a pale illumination into the office. Two chairs are piled on one another in a kind of obscene embrace. The desk is cluttered with papers and books and other debris as if someone abandoned it hurriedly. I wonder what time it is and where I can find another place to stay tonight. My head throbs and my body longs for rest. I won’t need any medicine to sleep tonight.

I take the two chairs apart and sit in one of them, resting for a moment. I am so weary. It is amazing to me how much the place has changed since last year—the cabin seems or rather
feels
as if it has been neglected for years and years. I think of how fast
decay moves in and it makes me shiver. I think of my pills and wish for the thousandth time I had taken them along. I think of the stories of drug addicts who break into stores and murder other people to get their fixes and I can understand them. Right at this minute, I would give anything to be folded into bed, the pills working their magic, soothing me.

A sound breaks the silence. Somebody is outside, near the bike. I leap to my feet and stalk to the doorway, my legs protesting.

A dog is poking his nose at the front wheel of the bike. A small dog, a cocker spaniel, frisky and energetic. I am not afraid of cocker spaniels and I chase it away. “Go on, go on, get out of here,” I say. The dog studies me for a moment and then lopes away, tail wagging.

The service-station attendant across the street is pumping gas into a car. He’s a teenager with long dark hair flowing to his shoulders. I would like to be like him: to have a job and perform it well and collect my pay at the end of the week and go out with a girl, like Amy. I envy him and I don’t even know him. I think about the friends he must have and his family. I feel alone. “Okay,” I tell myself, “cut the crap, stop the self-pity. This gets you nowhere.”

The wind comes up and I shiver again, turning away from the service station across the street. The wind bangs the door to the office and I see what I must do: get something to eat and then return here and sleep. I can curl up on the floor and prop a chair against the door, against the doorknob for protection, and sleep the night away. And then tomorrow, fresh
and rested, I can make the last few miles to Rutterburg and get there in triumph, flying fast on the bike. Now I’ll get something to eat and call up Amy Hertz and tell her my mission is almost accomplished and then come back and sleep sweetly through the night. And then I have an even better idea: Why sleep in the cabin’s office? Why not investigate the other cabins? Maybe they’ve left beds and mattresses and blankets there. I guide my bike to the first cabin and look in the window. The window is dirty, fly-specked, spotted. I squint and see a bed, the mattress naked and askew. What the hell, as Amy would say, a mattress is better than a floor.

I walk across the street. The attendant is checking the oil in a car, probing around with the dipstick.

“Have you got a pay phone?” I ask.

His long hair swirls as he lifts his head and looks at me. “No booth,” he says. “Just a phone on the wall.” He looks at me and my bike without interest; I don’t represent potential profit for him.

I walk across the grease-spotted pavement and enter the office. The smell of oil fills the air. And old rubber. I see a vending machine with candy bars and figure that I will stock up for the evening. I read somewhere that chocolate gives you quick energy.

The phone clings to the wall near the door that leads to the garage itself. I scoop out my change once more and insert the dime and wait for the operator. A man’s voice says: “Operator …”

I pronounce the numbers carefully, exaggerating them, almost a burlesque, but I don’t care, I don’t want to risk another wrong number. The lights of
passing cars flash by, and I realize that I could never have made it this far tonight alone, on the bike.

The phone is ringing, ringing.

I lose count of the rings.

And then: “Hello, hello.” That same gruff, impatient voice, not Amy’s father, not anybody I know.

“Hello,” I say. “Is Amy there?” I feel ridiculous asking the question because I know it’s futile.

A pause and then as if he’s being very patient: “There’s nobody named Amy here. You the kid called earlier? I’m telling you, there’s no Amy here.”

It’s cold suddenly in the office.

“Look, mister, there must be some kind of mistake. Is this Monument, Massachusetts, 537-3331?” Again I pronounce the numbers carefully, enunciating with precision.

“Yes, this is Monument, Massachusetts, 537-3331,” he says, sarcastically, mimicking my voice.

My hand trembles as it holds the phone. The office is getting colder, as if someone had just opened a door and allowed in the coldest air in the world.

“Then there must be some mistake,” I say. Is it possible for the telephone company to goof that badly—issue the same number to two different places in town?

“Yeah, I guess there is,” the man says. “Look, kid, I been holed up in bed with some kind of flu and I don’t appreciate being dragged to the phone like this—”

“Mister, I’m sorry to bother you. But 537-3331 is a right number. It’s the number of a family by the name
of Hertz. And I’ve been calling it for the past six months. I called it yesterday, for crying out loud.”

The cold has invaded my body now, seeped into my bones, a cold like no other I have ever felt, penetrating, relentless.

“Look, kid, the phone company doesn’t make that kind of mistake. This is Monument, Massachusetts, and my number is 537-3331—I’ve had it for three years—and I don’t know any Hertz family.”

I am trembling all over now. I should have taken the medicine this morning. I shouldn’t have thrown it away.

I manage to say, “Thank you.”

Before he hangs up, he says, “Try Directory Assistance. Just don’t ring this number anymore.”

I see the phone book dangling from a chain.

I open it. I find the number for Directory Assistance.

My hands shake but I find another dime and put it in the slot.

I have never been so cold in all my life but it’s a cold coming from inside. I dial the numbers. One. And the area code: 617. And the rest of it: 555-1212.

“Directory Assistance—what city?” The voice is like a sound from a machine.

“Monument,” I say. I tell her the name—Hertz—and address and I wait and I am surprised that my hand is so steady holding the phone when the rest of my body is trembling.

“Hertz,” she says. “There’s a Hertz Rent-A-Car on
Main Street—but no other Hertz in Monument. Was that the right spelling—H-e-r-t-z?”

“Thank you,” I say, and hang up.

And I watch my hand replacing the receiver and it’s as if I am caught in some kind of slow-motion film. The man had said 537-3331 had been his number for three years. Three years. I turn away from the telephone and begin to move and I find that it’s hard to place one foot in front of the other.

The attendant turns his head as I approach. He is wiping the windshield. There’s a woman in the car. Her face is distorted by the liquid that’s been sprayed on the windshield.

“Yeah?” the attendant asks, but not really interested. He is chewing gum and his jaw moves languidly. Who has slowed up everything? The world is in slow motion.

“How long’s the motel across the street been closed?” I ask, trying to hurry the words, but it’s hard to talk in slow motion.

He looks at me funny. Strange, I mean.

And the woman’s face is still distorted as she squints through the windshield.

I look across the street at the cabins and the attendant also looks.

“Oh, hell, two or three years, I guess. At least.”

He begins to wipe the windshield again.

I touch his shoulder. It’s an effort to raise my hand to his shoulder but I do it, anyway, slowly and carefully.

“The cabins weren’t open last summer?” I ask,
saying the words carefully, not wanting to say the wrong words.

He stops wiping the windshield now and stares at me. I don’t like the stare. There’s something strange in the stare, as if I am alien, a visitor from another planet, another galaxy. The woman pokes her head out the window. Her hair is gray but she has Orphan Annie eyes, wide, no lashes; she looks as if she has never blinked in her life.

“You all right?” the attendant asks. And his eyes are wide, too. His words don’t seem synchronized with his mouth, as if a soundtrack has gone askew.

Why didn’t I take the pills this morning?

Clutching the package with one hand and pushing the bike with the other, I start across the street. I can feel the attendant and the woman staring at me, their stares piercing the back of my head, but I don’t turn back. A terrible sound fills my ears, like a cry of doom. My teeth suddenly hurt; my mouth is open and the cold air bruises my teeth, causing them to ache. I try to close my mouth but can’t do it; it’s as if my jaw is locked, never to be closed again. And then I realize that the sound I hear is me. I am screaming and I can’t stop. The sound is terrible. A car brushes past me, then another: flash of lights, blare of horn.

“Hey, watch where you’re going,” someone calls.

Finally, I am across the street, the bike, the package, and me. The grass is soft beneath my feet and I think I have stopped screaming now because everything is quiet. I check my mouth and it’s still open but I am not screaming any longer. I push toward the cabin where my mother and father and I stayed, all
together, nice that night, the three of us together. I place the bike carefully against the cabin. I look across the street at the gas station and the attendant is standing there looking at me. The Orphan Annie woman is out of the car now and also looking. My mouth is still open and maybe I’m still screaming.

I turn away, and beat at the cabin door asking them to let me in, to please let me in …

The darkness gathers me.

TAPE CHANGE:

END OZK014

START:

Although the day was dark and overcast, one of those muted October days when autumn’s brilliant colors are suddenly subdued, Adam felt exhilaration as his father drove the car north, out of Monument into Fairfield and across the New Hampshire line into Carver.

They all sat in the front seat, a bit cramped, his mother in the middle, and this was the only disturbing note. “I think it might be better if we sit together,” his father had said. And Adam felt a small shiver—were things so bad that it was dangerous for one of them to sit alone in the backseat?

It began to rain at one point but this did not dampen their spirits. The windshield wipers swung on the glass like a metronome and Adam said, “Remember how we used to sing ‘The Farmer in the Dell,’ Dad, when I was just a little kid?”

And his father began to sing, in his old raucous voice, and Adam joined in and after a while his mother did, too, shaking her head in assumed dismay. “There isn’t anyone in this car who’s on key,” she said, between the lines.

Later, when the rain had stopped and they were driving through Fleming, Adam said, “Suppose Mr. Grey is right and those people, whoever they are, have found out who you really are, Dad—does that mean we can’t ever go back to Monument?” He thought of Amy Hertz, how he should have called her before leaving. The possibility of not ever seeing her again made him lonely.

“We’ve had false alarms before, Adam,” his father said. “Chances are this one is, too. Grey always looks on the dark side of things. That’s what makes him so good at his job, I guess.”

“Look,” his mother said, “let’s not talk about all that. This is supposed to be a pleasure trip. A weekend away from Monument. Let’s not talk about anything gloomy …”

So they drove and his father recited some fragments
of Thomas Wolfe, about October and the tumbling leaves of bitter red, or yellow leaves like living light, and Adam was sad again, thinking of his father as a writer and how his life had changed, how it had been necessary for him to give up all that and become another person altogether, how all of them had become other persons, his father, his mother, and himself. Paul Delmonte, poor lost Paul Delmonte.