If Thomas Wolfe’s character George Webber was right and “you can’t go home again,” then what happens when you do? In this previously unpublished novelette, protagonist Hallie White discovers the dangers of return visits to one’s hometown after many years. With trademark restraint, Armstrong nicely captures the pace of a small desert town, the characters that inhabit it, the simmering subtexts, and the memories that linger long after they reasonably should.
MAN IN THE ROAD
When it happened she was in a state of self-possession, alert and calm, proceeding at a sensible thirty-miles-per hour.
She was sure of this, afterwards, because she remembered very well how she had just succeeded in pulling herself out of a momentary panic. Oh, come on, Hallie, she’d said to herself. This is your own territory. You were born here, for pity’s sake! You must be punchy. Too many miles today.
But Pan was out there, in the moonless night, in the space, in the wind that scoured the dark and dipping valley and buffeted her little car. And Pan was powerfully in the mountains that stood up, visible where she dared not look, only because they cut away the pattern of the stars.
As a child she had communed with this very space, had kept secret rendezvous with the folds of these mountains in all their changing aspects. But she was not a child now. She was a young woman who lived in a city, and to be alone, on a road where there has been no other car for twenty solid minutes, was unfamiliar, rather eerie . . . In the summer time, even this cut-off would have borne traffic by night, for in the summer the wise motorist drives the desert when the cruel sun is down. But now, in February, at two o’clock in the morning, the desert was cold. The wind owned it. It was . . . deserted.
Oh, nonsense, Hallie told herself. Hordes of people all around—abed and asleep, of course. You are doing fine. You didn’t stay over night in some motel, because you didn’t want to waste the evening being bored. Now you’ve only a few more miles to go. This is the cut-off. You are on the right road. The fact is, you are as good as home.
Staring at the white road, she felt reality turn over so that she and the little vehicle were still, and it was the road that moved swiftly underneath. It was when she fought the illusion by blinking and looking away that she saw the lights scattered on the slope. At once panic left her. She glanced at the speedometer. Thirty miles per hour—hold that. She was fine, and as good as there.
She moved her shoulders to loosen the muscles that had been tense against the feel of the mountains out there, that stood up as they had ever stood, empty boundaries to emptiness. Her old familiars, they may have been, but she thought now that they were nobody’s friends. But the planet was inhabited. She could see the lights of man’s invention shining on streets that men had paved. Her hands were just right on the wheel. She was calm and alert—and in control.
She began to think about arriving. A few childhood playmates will turn up, whose names I’ll have trouble connecting with their faces. There will be my mother’s friends, whose names I ought to remember and never quite can. I am to be shown off like a trophy. Visiting daughter from New York. I go to see how my mother is—whom I haven’t seen for — two years! Can it be? Mother will be surprised. Doesn’t expect me tonight.
Hallie’s father had been the only doctor in a tiny settlement, when Hallie was a child. He had moved to the desert for his wife’s health’s sake. He had never complained. In fact, he had made a good thing of it, his grown-up daughter was thinking shrewdly, what with buying up the odds-and-ends of land when land was cheap. The town had grown.
He had left his widow financially comfortable.
Hallie had been sent away to school when she had reached the end of the tiny town’s educational system, in those days, the end of the ninth grade. Other children took a long bus ride to a High School in another town, but Hallie White, by whose decision she wasn’t sure, had gone away to boarding school. Then college. After that, nothing would do for Hallie, herself, but the biggest and most stimulating, most challenging city she could find.
Why do I say I am coming home? she wondered. It’s only where my mother lives. I got away long, long ago. It’s when I leave here that I’ll be going, at least, to the place where I live and work. Which is, she thought in a moment of sadness, a place loud with human voices but where no voice speaks to me . . . not as the light on the mountains used to speak, or so I fancied, when I was small.
The young woman smiled at the child’s fancies. Then, where the fan of her headlights cut most sharply against the darkness—close, and too close—something came leaping out from the right, directly into her path.
She accepted emergency at once and wrenched the wheel to the left. The car swerved violently. She could feel the rear wheels skidding. It was as if she projected the ability to feel from her own skin to the skin of the car, and she knew that a certain buffet upon that tin hide was not the wind. Her lights were now on the desert’s face and a sprinkle of rocks over which the car could not leap. So crash? No. She would not have it so. She wrenched back to her right. She had been using the brake gingerly. Now, she jammed her foot down. The car slewed again and then it stopped.
Space seemed to swallow her in, soft-lipped, heavy-lipped. It gulped her whole. The little car was panting gently. She did not want to turn off the motor. She opened the door and her dome-light went on. She slipped out of her seat. Her feet hit the rock’s hard surface.
The wind nudged her, twitched at the hem of her long topcoat, made wisps of her hair into tiny whips that stung her cheek. She felt cool and very sharp of sense. She could see marks that her tires had made, slewing. But she was locked within as much light as the car could shed forth. Beyond that, the darkness lay like a wall.
She called out as loudly as she could. “What was that? Is anybody there?” The wind took the sound.
The sky domed over. The stars seemed to wink off and on uncertainly. The mountains stretched up, stern and silent. The cold bit into her bones.
Could an animal have jumped into her way from the edge of the road? Could any four-legged creature have made that jumping-jack, gesticulating impression that she still kept upon her eye? Hallie’s heart shook her.
“Answer me,” she shrieked. “Answer me, if you are alive!”
A cold part of her brain said, Don’t panic. Get your flashlight and see! But the flashlight was locked in her glove compartment. She did not want to take the key out of the ignition and let the little car’s engine die.
She stretched her eyes, looking back the way she had come. No light moved there. She looked the way she had been going, and the town’s lights twinkled on the slope as uncertainly as the stars, as indifferent as the mountains. The wind whooshed softly. Get in! Drive on! Get
to people!
But Hallie clenched her teeth. No. If I were to back the car, or turn it, then I could let my headlights show me. No. If I have hit any person, whoever it is may be lying in the road. The white road began to swim faintly, achieving distinction. Nothing there, as far as the red from her tail-light angled across the road. Maybe there had been nothing. She took one step.
The blackness was going to come up around her ankles, around her shins. Wait. Is it smart—is it wise, to wade into the darkness, not knowing what, if anything, is there? On impulse she crouched and brought her head down under the wind, nearer to the ground. “Is anybody there?” she called.
There came a sound, a moan from an animal throat.
“Where are you?” she shouted. “I can’t see!” Then again, “I can’t see . . . .
Don’t you understand?”
“Help me.”
If sound became words, then the animal was man. Hallie found herself connected with the human race abruptly, and with a shock that sent her creeping forward almost on all fours. “Where are you? Are you hurt?” she called anxiously. One hand groped in her coat pocket for a packet of matches. But she kept going, her other hand scraping finger-tips on the gritty surface of the road. A very soft moaning, a very heavy breathing, was leading her
by the ears to her left . . . over there. Over there? Then a voice said, shocking her by being so near, “Don’t touch me.”
Hallie sat back on her heels. “No, I won’t,” she said quickly. “I know better than that. How are you hurt? What can I do?”
“Get . . . help . . .”
“Of course. Of course, I will.”
There were no matches in her coat pockets. Down under the wind, she could hear the laboring breath and she could tell that the man was a man and was frightened. She herself was feeling anxiety for him, regret, and the responsibility to do something, but no panic. She seemed to be able to tell that he lay with his feet at the edge of the pavement, his body extended away into gravelly soil, that his face was upturned but his arm, or at least some dark bulk, covered a part of it over.
She said, “I have no lights. I have no matches. I don’t know much about First Aid. What must I do?”
“Telephone . . . doctor . . .”
She shuffled closer.
“Don’t touch me,” he said again.
Hallie lifted her head and looked, with better adjusted vision, searchingly along the road. No light of any car. How could she expect there to be? A bad idea to wait here on the chance that one would pass by. Then she sucked in her breath as her eye, from this low angle, caught a crisp corner to the top of a blob of darkness. “Why, there’s a house!” she exclaimed. “I’ll get in there and telephone . . .”
She started to rise, but the voice said in a thick, low-pitched, almost gutteral tone, “No, no. No phone. Go to town. Lights. See lights?”
“Yes, I can see the town,” said Hallie, sinking down. “But I would rather not leave you.”
He said, almost with anger, “You . . . help. Get doctor—quickest . . . Go to town . . .”
“I suppose that is the quickest . . .”
She let herself down upon her knees, straightened her torso, pulled the skirt of her coat out from under her leg, and began to wriggle out of the garment. “All right. I’ll go quickly,” she promised. “But you should be warm. Just let me cover you.”
She had the coat in her two hands and, leaning slightly, she began to lay it down. The back of her right hand brushed fabric. His clothing? Slowly she drew her hand, and the coat after it, up along what she guessed was the length of his body. Leaning as close as this, she was receiving some other sense impressions. The sound of his breathing, its unsteady catching, a certain faint perfume, the thud of his heart, even . . . Then the scent of his breath unmistakeable. Then a warm current of breath on the skin of her hand. When her hand met something warm and moist she snatched it away. The coat must be covering him now.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” she said. “Lie still. I’ll be right back. I promise you. Don’t think at all. It won’t be long.”
He was rigid, she sensed, in terror or in pain. But Hallie, herself, was feeling less anxious. Something takes care of fools and drunkards, she thought to herself, and this man has been drinking, all right, and drinking a lot.
She moved backward, on her knees, a yard or so, before she rose. The moment she stood up the wind came at her to chill her in an instant. Hallie ran toward the lighted car, trusting her feet now to find the pavement bare. She slammed herself inside. The car jerked under her feet. She backed it only as much as was absolutely necessary, and wrenched its nose toward the road. Steady now. Steady. Fast, but not too fast. No time for fearing, hoping, guessing, reviewing or anticipating. None of that. Do what’s to be done. Get help. Get to the lights. Get linked into the mesh of civilized human affairs. Get to a telephone.
The big woman behind the counter looked up from her newspaper as Hallie whirled in and spoke at the same time.
“Phone? Why sure, honey. Right there.”
It hung on the wall. It needed a dime and Hallie found one. Her finger pulled the dial around. “Police,” she said. The quickest thing, the quickest way.
The woman, who had kept her body leaning over the newspaper on the counter, now took a step backward and, on her face, as her body began to straighten, was the expression of slack-jawed stupidity that comes upon a gum-chewer when he stops chewing his gum.
This cafe, or whatever it was, had once been neatly decorated in a consistent scheme, with the modern look of glass and metal. But now it was plastered haphazardly with placards advertising some of its wares, and a homey clutter had prevailed. The big woman was wearing a white uniform, a bit too small, and she had a gaudy flowered apron tied around her middle.
The phone was making clicking noises that were going on too long. Suddenly a man’s voice said into Hallie’s ear, “Police station. Meloney.”
“This is Hallie White.” She spoke crisply, having organized what she would say. “I just hit a man with my car and hurt him. I don’t know how badly. I had to leave him about three miles out of town, east, on the road we used to call the cut-off. Will you get a doctor, or an ambulance . . . some help to him?”
“Where are you?”
“Where am I?” she said sharply to the woman.
“What d’you mean, where are you?” the woman bridled stupidly.
“Where is this place? What’s the name of it?”
“Oh, Ruby’s. Ruby’s Diner . . . That’s me. I’m Ruby.”
“Ruby’s,” said Hallie into the phone, remembering that the town was small and this would be enough. “But I’ve got to go back to the man.”
“Stay where you are, please,” the voice ordered. “We’ll pick you up at Ruby’s.”
“But he’s alone . . .”
“If you guide us to him, it will be quicker.”
“Oh. Then all right. Hurry!”
The phone clicked dead. Hallie hung it up. She was shivering.
“Say,” said the woman with bright eyes, “now I recognize you. Hallie White. Don’t you remember me? Ruby Kearns? Two grades in back of you? Say, listen, Doc White brought me into the world!”
Hallie realized with surprise that this woman must be younger than she was, herself. “Gee, what happened?” Ruby went on, speaking as warmly as if they were sisters. “Say, you look frozen. Lemme get you a cup of coffee. Don’t you remember me, now?”
But Hallie couldn’t remember. She could carve no familiar girlish shape from the ample flesh before her. “I don’t,” she said faintly, “I’m sorry.” Reaction came in the shape of fatigue. She staggered to one of the stools and sat upon it. Her thoughts were not here. She was unhappy about the man. She hadn’t been away from him more than five minutes, so far, but how long that five minutes must have seemed out there! And how much longer would she have to stay away?
“I put on a little weight, I guess,” said Ruby with a tiny edge of resentment. “Here, for heaven’s sakes. You look practically blue.” The cup clattered down on the counter. “That Henry Green on the phone,
was it?” Her eyes turned sly.
Hallie shook her head. “Meloney, he said.”
“Oh, the old man. Well, ’course he’s the boss, but it’ll be Henry Green who shows up. You watch. Henry does all the work. You remember Henry Green? Oh, come on, you gotta. There was this song . . .”
Ruby’s brows arched and her head tilted. She wanted to swap memories, but Hallie could not forget the man in the road. She said numbly, “I don’t care who comes, as long as he hurries.”
“You got time to drink the coffee.” Ruby put her fat elbows on the counter. Now she studied her customer with a certain wary curiosity. “Yeah—somebody down to the church was saying they heard your Ma say you was coming. But seems like it was supposed to be tomorrow.”
Small town, thought Hallie with impatience. She didn’t explain. It seemed so trivial. She shivered with a nightmare thought that she would forget where the man was—out in the desert, in the cold. She reached for the coffee cup.
“Pretty late to be driving alone, isn’t it?” said Ruby. “How come you hit this man? What happened?”
Hallie was trying to pick up the cup, but her hand was stiff. She flexe
d her fingers and Ruby took a sudden step backward. She said, in a flat, accusing voice that had lost its friendliness completely, “There’s blood on you.”
Hallie blinked and saw the dried stain upon her knuckles. She reached for a paper napkin from the holder on the counter. It was bone dry. Hallie looked up. Ruby did not move. Her eyes were round. Her pink face blank. “Get me some water, please,” snapped Hallie. “Look, I didn’t attack the man with my bare hands, you know.” She knew her taut nerves had cracked into sarcasm. Hallie said, “I’m sorry. Some water?”
Ruby’s jaws moved, slowly resuming their motion on the wad of gum which turned between her teeth. She gave out an uncomfortable laugh. “Kinda gave me a jolt.” Ruby filled a glass with water. “Listen, you want an aspirin or anything? He was bleeding, was he?” The turn of her eye asked for horrors. “Was it pretty bad?”
Hallie squeezed her eyes shut briefly. She shook her head. Struggling to control her own quaking innards, she spoke crisply. “However bad it is, it has happened. It won’t do any good to carry on.” Then she dipped the paper napkin into the water and slowly, efficiently, keeping calm, keeping steady, as she knew she must, scrubbed the blood from her unblemished skin. The big woman stood perfectly still, watching her.
When the silence began to stretch too long, Hallie said, a bit sharply, “I have to think about taking them out there. I can’t collapse.”
The woman’s jaws moved slowly on the chewing gum. Her eyes had grown cold. “I guess you’re not going to collapse.” Ruby turned her back.
Hallie made her spine stiff. She waited.
“That’s them,” Ruby spoke with relief.
Hallie’s back sagged for a moment. Then she slipped off the stool and hurried to the door.
“Thanks a lot, Ruby,” she heard the woman say sullenly behind her.
“But we must hurry,” she cried over her shoulder. Outside the cold wind slashed.
Hallie ran a few steps, thinking confusedly that she had done wrong, somehow. Maybe she ought to have paid for the coffee . . . .
A man was getting out of the two-toned car with the gadgets on its roof. Plenty of light streamed from the glass front of the cafe. She knew who he was. She knew that sandy hair, that thin nose, those thick sand-colored lashes.
Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense Page 29