J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

As soon as they tried to leave the Dairy Queen, things started going wrong. The Valiant wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. In a huff, Andrew Carlisle stalked around the parking lot looking for someone with jumper cables. Then, as they drove toward the storage unit, Myrna Louise began chattering away in her typically inane manner.

“Do you ever think about them?” she asked.

“Think about whom?”

“About those women, the ones from the reservation.”

There had been times in his life when Andrew Carlisle could have sworn that his mother could read his mind. Part of her ability to do that, he discovered much later, had been related to her secretly devouring daily installments of his diary. He wondered now about the envelope in his pocket. Had she looked at the contents? If so, had she somehow guessed his intentions? He hadn’t really examined the envelope when he took it from her. It had seemed all right at first glance, but he couldn’t very well drag it out now and check it again in the middle of traffic.

“No,” he said eventually. “They’re in the past, and the past is over and done with. I’ve got my future to think about.”

“I wonder what kind of a baby she had, a boy or a girl.”

“For Chrissakes, Mama, does it matter?” he demanded, his voice rising despite his intentions of staying calm and collected, of not letting her provoke him. “Do we have to talk about this?”

“Don’t yell at me, Andrew. I was only wondering. Maybe I wouldn’t be so curious if I’d ever had any grandchildren of my own, you know.”

Well, you didn’t, he thought savagely. And you’re not ever going to, either, by the time I get through with you.

“Give it a rest, Mama,” he said. “I always told you I wasn’t the marrying kind.”

“You should have been. You’re a smart man, Andrew, and smart men should father lots of babies. It’s our only hope, you know. Civilization’s only hope.”

It was an old, old argument, one they’d had countless times before, but this time, under pressure, anxious to get on with the tasks at hand and worrying about whether or not the Valiant would keep on running, it was too much.

“Jesus Christ, Mama! Would you please just shut up about that?”

About that time, they arrived at the U-Stor-It-Here lot. There, Andrew Carlisle encountered the straw that broke the camel’s back. The gate was locked. Closed and locked.

Afraid to turn off the ignition, he put the Valiant in neutral, set the emergency brake, and left it running. He swore a blue streak as he headed for the small converted RV that served as an office. The door was latched with a metal padlock and bore a hand-lettered sign that said, back in fifteen minutes.

Frustrated and fuming, he headed back toward the car. He turned just in time to see the Valiant lurch forward and knock down the gate. For a second, he thought the emergency brake must have slipped, but then, in a cloud of dust, the Valiant roared into reverse. Myrna Louise was definitely at the wheel.

“Mama!” Carlisle yelled. “Stop!”

Instead, the Valiant charged out of the driveway and shot all the way across the street, smashing into a rubber dumpster before coming to a stop. Carlisle took off after the Valiant at a dead run. He almost caught it, too, but as he reached for the door handle, the car blasted forward and careened drunkenly away, leaving him in a cloud of dust. As the car swerved crazily down the flat, two-lane roadway, Myrna Louise clipped a brown El Camino on one side of the street and a second dumpster on the other. Neither one was enough to stop her.

In fact, they barely slowed her down.

It was the last straw for Myrna Louise as well. Not the locked gate-she didn’t care at all about that-but having Andrew yell and curse at her and tell her to shut up, that was just too much. It was supposed to be a fun trip for her, a vacation, he had told her. But this wasn’t fun at all.

As soon as they started having car trouble, he grew more and more surly and upset. She knew from personal experience that Andrew had a vile, mean temper. Myrna Louise didn’t want it turned on her. And if he was already angry with her, what would happen if he ever figured out she had looked at those two precious $150 pieces of paper?

When he got out of the car to go to the storage-unit office, Myrna Louise was still smarting. How dare he talk to her that way? No matter how old they were, children shouldn’t tell their parents to shut up. How could he show her so little respect? She deserved better than that. After all, how many other mothers would have opened their homes and their arms to a son when he came dragging home from doing a stretch in prison? She gave herself high marks for being loyal and broad-minded both, for not holding a grudge, although God knows, she could have.

Myrna Louise saw Andrew turn away from the door, shaking his head in disgust with his mouth twisted into an angry grimace. He was coming back to the car, madder than ever. Seeing him like that scared her, and that’s when she decided not to wait.

The keys were there, the engine already running. So what if she didn’t know how to drive a car? She had been riding in them for sixty years. She had seen other people do it, hadn’t she?

Sliding across the bench seat, she peered nearsightedly down at the gearshift and read the letters: P. R. N. D. L. The car was stopped and the needle pointed to P. That probably meant Park, she theorized. R would mean Reverse, D Drive, and L Low. Maybe she should start out in that, Low.

Cautiously, she moved the gearshift to L , and then put a tentative foot on the gas. The engine raced. The car rocked in place, but it didn’t move forward. Something was wrong. Then she remembered-the emergency brake. Jake had always talked about the importance of using the emergency brake.

Without letting up on the gas, she released the hand brake. At once, the Valiant crashed forward into the gate, breaking the lock, knocking the gate itself loose from its hinges. She glanced in Andrew’s direction. The noise had alerted him, and he was coming after her, running hard. Frightened now, desperate to get away, she shoved the gearshift to R , and found herself backing up at a terrifying speed. She tried turning the steering wheel, but the car went in exactly the opposite direction of what she intended. She heard rather than saw the dumpster crumple under the weight of the Valiant’s rear bumper.

Andrew vaulted forward. Almost at the car, he reached out to grasp the door handle. Myrna Louise had never before seen such looks of unmasked fury distorting her son’s face. What would he do to her if he caught her? Not waiting to find out, she shoved the gearshift needle over to D-D for Drive, D for Disappear-hit the gas pedal, and took off. She never looked back.

Slowing but not stopping at the intersection, she made it into traffic on Alvernon only because three other alert drivers managed to dodge out of her way.

It served Andrew right, Myrna Louise thought, gripping the steering wheel for all she was worth and seesawing it back and forth. Sons should never talk to their mothers that way, no matter what!

Fat Crack arrived at the hospital in Sells and found Rita sitting in a wheelchair on the front sidewalk. “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

She nodded. “I didn’t like it in there. I didn’t want to wait inside.”

Actually, knowing his aunt’s opinion about Mil-gahn doctors, Fat Crack was surprised she had stayed put in the hospital for as long as she had. His mother had told him that ever since returning from California, Rita had adamantly refused to visit an Anglo doctor for any reason. She would have done the same thing after the accident, too, but arriving unconscious by ambulance made refusing admission impossible.