Дэймон Найт: Orbit 11

After the storm, night came suddenly. Driving was even more treacherous because all the holes had been filled with water. I searched the map for a turnoff, another road, anyplace to spend the night. Nothing. Sometimes we passed other roads, deeply rutted gravel or dirt roads that intersected ours, vanished among the rocks of the hills. We didn’t turn onto any of them. It would have been stupid to exchange bad for worse. Occasionally we smelled wood smoke. Cooking stoves, Mother said. She was smoking a lot now, more than I’d ever seen before. Our road got worse, the surface was crushed rock, and it was narrower.

I dozed and dreamed of being in bed, warm, and comfortable, listening to the light murmur of Mother’s voice, and the deeper growly tone of Father’s. I woke with a jerk, “Are you all right?” I asked her, as if she had been the one to doze.

“I’m fine.” Her voice was tight.

“Maybe we should just stop and sleep in the car.”

“The mosquitoes would eat us up.” She pushed in the cigarette lighter and groped in her bag for her cigarettes. “We surely will get to Honeyville before long now.”

I found the cigarette pack for her, a new one. It was after eight and I was getting hungrier and hungrier. “I hope there’s a restaurant there.” This was part of it, I thought, glancing at her as the tip of her cigarette brightened. There had to be a better way to get to Salyersville. A better road, even if it meant going out of the way a bit. We should have been there by six, according to our pre-trip estimate. Seven at the latest. I didn’t fall asleep again, but everything got more and more dreamlike. A mist lay low in the valleys and that was right too. It had to be hard and dangerous and seemingly endless. It couldn’t be just another trip. Orange eyes hung above the mist straight ahead.

“Betty, flick your dimmers, tap the horn. It’s paralyzed, hypnotized by the headlights.”

I hit the floor hard and my fingers clenched, ready to whip the car around the animal. The mist swallowed it. I wet my lips and opened my hands and looked at her. She was too rigid, as frightened as I was. If we had a wreck, no one would find us. No one would know. There hadn’t been another car, truck, nothing. I stretched my legs to ease a cramp in my right foot, my braking foot. I tried to imagine how cramped she must be feeling, the soreness of her calf, her shoulders, the stiffness in her neck. She reached up and rubbed the back of her neck.

“Remember that time we were on our way back from Canada?” she said, almost shrilly. “Your father . . . We saw a deer on the road that night too. He said . . .”

“I remember.”

It had been a long time since our road had crossed another road. I strained to see the map under the dashlight, but it didn’t help. I had no idea where we were any longer. “Mother, why Honeyville? I can’t even find it.”

“It’s on a side road. I can’t remember the number. It was just the road to Honeyville.” She pushed herself back in the seat, stretching. “I know some people there. We could spend the night. My cousin and I used to exchange visits. Aunt Tattie lived there.”

Before I could ask who she was, Mother said, “Not really my aunt. Or anyone else’s, far as I know. She could take off warts.”

I couldn’t stop my left hand from jerking, as if trying to hide all by itself. The warts on my little finger and ring finger felt larger than ever. “Will we see her?” I had read about people like that who could do things.

“Oh, honey, she was an old woman when I saw her the last time, twenty-five years ago.” We came to a crossroad then. She hesitated a moment, then shook her head and drove on. It was ten thirty. The fog or mist was denser now. We were creeping along in a white cylinder that grew higher and more solid as I watched. Beyond the walls the world was strange and unknown here, and invisible. It might have been nonexistent, and only the fog cylinder and the car real.

“Was Aunt Tattie a healer?”

“No. Oh, warts, and some said other kinds of skin blemishes, birthmarks, and the like. My father didn’t believe in such things. We weren’t really allowed to talk about her, or to see her. But we all did at one time or another.”

Like Father and my Tarot cards, I thought, and the magazine horoscopes and the palmist who put up a sign at the beach a few years ago. I tried to imagine Mother twenty-five years ago. Long hair? Like mine? Father always said I looked like her, same red-brown hair, same size and shape. “I just hope someone has something to eat,” I said and studied the fog.

We turned at the next intersection. It had to be wrong, I thought. We bounced along on a dirt road that went up and down and back and forth. Mother’s hands were very tight on the steering wheel and she stared straight ahead. She wasn’t smoking at all now. Suddenly I was jolted out of the dreamlike state that I kept slipping into by her voice. I thought she had cried out. She laughed harshly. “I’m sorry, honey. I yawned. You’d better talk to me, I’m getting pretty sleepy.”

The road was worse, but the fog was lifting, and off to the right I could see the dim shape of a barn. Farmland here. Maybe here the radio would pick up a station. There’d been nothing but static since leaving the interstate highway that morning. I gave it up after a minute or two. Still nothing.

“Nothing has changed here at all,” Mother said, adroitly skirting a hole. “Did I mention to you after this year, after the insurance is settled and everything is straightened out, I’m going back to the university for my Ph.D.?”

“What for?” I stared at her, but she was still looking straight ahead, only now I thought her lips were curved in a faint smile.

“You know that I was just two credits short of my master’s degree. Then Eleanor came along, and . . . well, I always thought that some day I’d finish up and go into research psychology. There are so many things . . .”

I clenched my hands, wanting to scream at her, No! That isn’t what we’re coming back for! But I didn’t know why we were coming back, so I didn’t say anything, and then I saw the first lights. Honeyville.

Much of the town was dark. There were three dim street lights, and a few old cars parked along the street, but it seemed that almost everyone was in bed already. Then Mother said, in an excited voice, “For heaven’s sake! There’s Aunt Tattie’s house!” She slowed down, then stopped. “She’ll know if Emma is still here. Come on.” We got out of the car and went up the sidewalk to the frame house with a wide porch. A bare light bulb hung from a chain on the porch. Mother had started up before me, but she stopped and I caught up with her. She turned back toward the car, “You go on and knock. I left my purse in the car.”

I took several more steps toward the door; it was open and I tried to see inside without entering. Then I heard a grumbling voice. “Don’t hold the screen open. Mosquitoes thick as dust in here. “I went inside. An old woman was sitting at a small table. She beckoned to me without looking up. “Don’t be skittish, girl. I don’t eat young’uns.” She was unbelievably old, her skin was brown and thin, transparent on her hands. She reached out and took my left hand, then rubbed her thumb over the warts, mumbling in a barely audible monotone. “Rub a seed potato over them, then bury it where the moon will shine on it and when the potato rots the warts will be gone.” She raised her head and the brilliant blue eyes that studied me were young eyes with dancing lights in them. I don’t know how long I stood with my hand in that ancient hand, staring at those young eyes. Emma’s voice roused me, broke the tableau. I pulled my hand away.

“What did she tell you?” Emma asked, walking home. “I heard the part about a better than average marriage, and three kids. What else?”