“’Twas a Mercedes she drove,” Homer said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “Two-seater sportster. Todd got it for her in sixty-four or sixty-five, I guess. You remember her taking the kids to the lake all those years they had Frogs and Tadpoles?”
“Ayuh.”
“She’d drive ’em no more than forty, mindful they was in the back. But it chafed her. That woman had lead in her foot and a ball bearing sommers in the back of her ankle.”
It used to be that Homer never talked about his summer people. But then his wife died. Five years ago it was. She was plowing a grade and the tractor tipped over on her and Homer was taken bad off about it. He grieved for two years or so and then seemed to feel better. But he was not the same. He seemed waiting for something to happen, waiting for the next thing. You’d pass his neat little house sometimes at dusk and he would be on the porch smoking a pipe with a glass of mineral water on the porch rail and the sunset would be in his eyes and pipe smoke around his head and you’d think—I did, anyway—Homer is waiting for the next thing. This bothered me over a wider range of my mind than I liked to admit, and at last I decided it was because if it had been me, I wouldn’t have been waiting for the next thing, like a groom who has put on his morning coat and finally has his tie right and is only sitting there on a bed in the upstairs of his house and looking first at himself in the mirror and then at the clock on the mantel and waiting for it to be eleven o’clock so he can get married. If it had been me, I would not have been waiting for the next thing; I would have been waiting for the last thing.
But in that waiting period—which ended when Homer went to Vermont a year later—he sometimes talked about those people. To me, to a few others.
“She never even drove fast with her husband, s’far as I know. But when I drove with her, she made that Mercedes strut.”
A fellow pulled in at the pumps and began to fill up his car. The car had a Massachusetts plate.
“It wasn’t one of these new sports cars that run on onleaded gasoline and hitch every time you step on it; it was one of the old ones, and the speedometer was calibrated all the way up to a hundred and sixty. It was a funny color of brown and I ast her one time what you called that color and she said it was Champagne. Ain’t that good, I says, and she laughs fit to split. I like a woman who will laugh when you don’t have to point her right at the joke, you know.”
The man at the pumps had finished getting his gas.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” he says as he comes up the steps.
“A good day to you,” I says, and he went inside.
“’Phelia was always lookin for a shortcut,” Homer went on as if we had never been interrupted. “That woman was mad for a shortcut. I never saw the beat of it. She said if you can save enough distance, you’ll save time as well. She said her father swore by that scripture. He was a salesman, always on the road, and she went with him when she could, and he was always lookin for the shortest way. So she got in the habit.
“I ast her one time if it wasn’t kinda funny—here she was on the one hand, spendin her time rubbin up that old statue in the Square and takin the little ones to their swimmin lessons instead of playing tennis and swimming and getting boozed up like normal summer people, and on the other hand bein so damn set on savin fifteen minutes between here and Fryeburg that thinkin about it probably kep her up nights. It just seemed to me the two things went against each other’s grain, if you see what I mean. She just looks at me and says, ‘I like being helpful, Homer. I like driving, too—at least sometimes, when it’s a challenge—but I don’t like the time it takes. It’s like mending clothes—sometimes you take tucks and sometimes you let things out. Do you see what I mean?’
“‘I guess so, missus,’ I says, kinda dubious.
“‘If sitting behind the wheel of a car was my idea of a really good time all the time, I would look for long-cuts,’ she says, and that tickled me s’much I had to laugh.”
The Massachusetts fellow came out of the store with a six-pack in one hand and some lottery tickets in the other.
“You enjoy your weekend,” Homer says.
“I always do,” the Massachusetts fellow says. “I only wish I could afford to live here all year round.”
“Well, we’ll keep it all in good order for when you can come,” Homer says, and the fellow laughs.
We watched him drive off toward someplace, that Massachusetts plate showing. It was a green one. My Marcy says those are the ones the Massachusetts Motor Registry gives to drivers who ain’t had a accident in that strange, angry, fuming state for two years. If you have, she says, you got to have a red one so people know to watch out for you when they see you on the roll.
“They was in-state people, you know, the both of them,” Homer said, as if the Massachusetts fellow had reminded him of the fact.
“I guess I did know that,” I said.
“The Todds are just about the only birds we got that fly north in the winter. The new one, I don’t think she likes flying north too much.”
He sipped his mineral water and fell silent a moment, thinking.
“She didn’t mind it, though,” Homer said. “At least, I judge she didn’t although she used to complain about it something fierce. The complaining was just a way to explain why she was always lookin for a shortcut.”
“And you mean her husband didn’t mind her traipsing down every wood-road in tarnation between here and Bangor just so she could see if it was nine-tenths of a mile shorter?”
“He didn’t care piss-all,” Homer said shortly, and got up, and went in the store. There now, Owens, I told myself, you know it ain’t safe to ast him questions when he’s yarning, and you went right ahead and ast one, and you have buggered a story that was starting to shape up promising.
I sat there and turned my face up into the sun and after about ten minutes he come out with a boiled egg and sat down. He ate her and I took care not to say nothing and the water on Castle Lake sparkled as blue as something as might be told of in a story about treasure. When Homer had finished his egg and had a sip of mineral water, he went on. I was surprised, but still said nothing. It wouldn’t have been wise.
“They had two or three different chunks of rolling iron,” he said.
“There was the Cadillac, and his truck, and her little Mercedes go-devil. A couple of winters he left the truck, ’case they wanted to come down and do some skiin. Mostly when the summer was over he’d drive the Caddy back up and she’d take her go-devil.”
I nodded but didn’t speak. In truth, I was afraid to risk another comment. Later I thought it would have taken a lot of comments to shut Homer Buckland up that day. He had been wanting to tell the story of Mrs. Todd’s shortcut for a long time.
“Her little go-devil had a special odometer in it that told you how many miles was in a trip, and every time she set off from Castle Lake to Bangor she’d set it to 000-point-0 and let her clock up to whatever. She had made a game of it, and she used to chafe me with it.” He paused, thinking that back over.
“No, that ain’t right.”
He paused more and faint lines showed up on his forehead like steps on a library ladder.
“She made like she made a game of it, but it was a serious business to her. Serious as anything else, anyway.” He flapped a hand and I think he meant the husband. “The glovebox of the little go-devil was filled with maps, and there was a few more in the back where there would be a seat in a regular car. Some was gas station maps, and some was pages that had been pulled from the Rand-McNally Road Atlas; she had some maps from Appalachian Trail guidebooks and a whole mess of topographical survey-squares, too. It wasn’t her having those maps that made me think it wa’n’t a game; it was how she’d drawed lines on all of them, showing routes she’d taken or at least tried to take.
“She’d been stuck a few times, too, and had to get a pull from some farmer with a tractor and chain.
“I was there one day laying tile in the bathroom, sitting there with g
rout squittering out of every damn crack you could see—I dreamed of nothing but squares and cracks that was bleeding grout that night—and she come stood in the doorway and talked to me about it for quite a while. I used to chafe her about it, but I was also sort of interested, and not just because my brother Franklin used to live down-Bangor and I’d traveled most of the roads she was telling me of. I was interested just because a man like me is always oncommon interested in knowing the shortest way, even if he don’t always want to take it. You that way too?”
“Ayuh,” I said. There’s something powerful about knowing the shortest way, even if you take the longer way because you know your mother-in-law is sitting home. Getting there quick is often for the birds, although no one holding a Massachusetts driver’s license seems to know it. But knowing how to get there quick—or even knowing how to get there a way that the person sitting beside you don’t know... that has power.
“Well, she had them roads like a Boy Scout has his knots,” Homer said, and smiled his large, sunny grin. “She says, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ like a little girl, and I hear her through the wall rummaging through her desk, and then she comes back with a little notebook that looked like she’d had it a good long time. Cover was all rumpled, don’t you know, and some of the pages had pulled loose from those little wire rings on one side.
“‘The way Worth goes—the way most people go—is Route 97 to Mechanic Falls, then Route 11 to Lewiston, and then the Interstate to Bangor. 156.4 miles.’”
I nodded.
“‘If you want to skip the turnpike—and save some distance—you’d go to Mechanic Falls, Route 11 to Lewiston, Route 202 to Augusta, then up Route 9 through China Lake and Unity and Haven to Bangor. That’s 144.9 miles.’
“‘You won’t save no time that way, missus,’ I says, ‘not going through Lewiston and Augusta. Although I will admit that drive up the Old Derry Road to Bangor is real pretty.’
“‘Save enough miles and soon enough you’ll save time,’ she says. ‘And I didn’t say that’s the way I’d go, although I have a good many times; I’m just running down the routes most people use. Do you want me to go on?’
“‘No,’ I says, ‘just leave me in this cussed bathroom all by myself starin at all these cussed cracks until I start to rave.’
“‘There are four major routes in all,’ she says. ‘The one by Route 2 is 163.4 miles. I only tried it once. Too long.’
“‘That’s the one I’d hosey if my wife called and told me it was leftovers,’ I says, kinda low.
“‘What was that?’ she says.
“‘Nothin,’ I says. ‘Talkin to the grout.’
“‘Oh. Well, the fourth—and there aren’t too many who know about it, although they are all good roads—paved, anyway—is across Speckled Bird Mountain on 219 to 202 beyond Lewiston. Then, if you take Route 19, you can get around Augusta. Then you take the Old Derry Road. That way is just 129.2.’
“I didn’t say nothing for a little while and p’raps she thought I was doubting her because she says, a little pert, ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s so.’
“I said I guessed that was about right, and I thought—looking back—it probably was. Because that’s the way I’d usually go when I went down to Bangor to see Franklin when he was still alive. I hadn’t been that way in years, though. Do you think a man could just—well—forget a road, Dave?”
I allowed it was. The turnpike is easy to think of. After a while it almost fills a man’s mind, and you think not how could I get from here to there but how can I get from here to the turnpike ramp that’s closest to there. And that made me think that maybe there are lots of roads all over that are just going begging; roads with rock walls beside them, real roads with blackberry bushes growing alongside them but nobody to eat the berries but the birds and gravel pits with old rusted chains hanging down in low curves in front of their entryways, the pits themselves as forgotten as a child’s old toys with scrum-grass growing up their deserted unremembered sides. Roads that have just been forgot except by the people who live on them and think of the quickest way to get off them and onto the turnpike where you can pass on a hill and not fret over it. We like to joke in Maine that you can’t get there from here, but maybe the joke is on us. The truth is there’s about a damn thousand ways to do it and man doesn’t bother.
Homer continued: “I grouted tile all afternoon in that hot little bathroom and she stood there in the doorway all that time, one foot crossed behind the other, bare-legged, wearin loafers and a khaki-colored skirt and a sweater that was some darker. Hair was drawed back in a hosstail. She must have been thirty-four or -five then, but her face was lit up with what she was tellin me and I swan she looked like a sorority girl home from school on vacation.
“After a while she musta got an idea of how long she’d been there cuttin the air around her mouth because she says, ‘I must be boring the hell out of you, Homer.’
“‘Yes’m,’ I says, ‘you are. I druther you went away and left me to talk to this damn grout.’
“‘Don’t be sma’at, Homer,’ she says.
“‘No, missus, you ain’t borin me,’ I says.
“So she smiles and then goes back to it, pagin through her little notebook like a salesman checkin his orders. She had those four main ways—well, really three because she gave up on Route 2 right away—but she must have had forty different other ways that were play-offs on those. Roads with state numbers, roads without, roads with names, roads without. My head fair spun with ’em. And finally she says to me, ‘You ready for the blue-ribbon winner, Homer?’
“‘I guess so,’ I says.
“‘At least it’s the blue-ribbon winner so far,’ she says. ‘Do you know, Homer, that a man wrote an article in Science Today in 1923 proving that no man could run a mile in under four minutes? He proved it, with all sorts of calculations based on the maximum length of the male thigh-muscles, maximum length of stride, maximum lung capacity, maximum heart-rate, and a whole lot more. I was taken with that article! I was so taken that I gave it to Worth and asked him to give it to Professor Murray in the math department at the University of Maine. I wanted those figures checked because I was sure they must have been based on the wrong postulates, or something. Worth probably thought I was being silly—“Ophelia’s got a bee in her bonnet” is what he says—but he took them. Well, Professor Murray checked through the man’s figures quite carefully... and do you know what, Homer?’
“‘No, missus.’
“‘Those figures were right. The man’s criteria were solid. He proved, back in 1923, that a man couldn’t run a mile in under four minutes. He proved that. But people do it all the time, and do you know what that means?’
“‘No, missus,’ I said, although I had a glimmer.
“‘It means that no blue ribbon is forever,’ she says. ‘Someday—if the world doesn’t explode itself in the meantime—someone will run a two-minute mile in the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.’
“And there she stood, her face clean and scrubbed and shinin, that darkish hair of hers pulled back from her brow, as if to say ‘Just you go ahead and disagree if you can.’ But I couldn’t. Because I believe something like that. It is much like what the minister means, I think, when he talks about grace.
“‘You ready for the blue-ribbon winner for now?’ she says.
“‘Ayuh,’ I says, and I even stopped groutin for the time bein. I’d reached the tub anyway and there wasn’t nothing left but a lot of those frikkin squirrelly little corners. She drawed a deep breath and then spieled it out at me as fast as that auctioneer goes over in Gates Falls when he has been putting the whiskey to himself, and I can’t remember it all, but it went something like this.”
Homer Buckland shut his eyes for a moment, his big hands lying perfectly still on his long thighs, his face turned
up toward the sun. Then he opened his eyes again and for a moment I swan he looked like her, yes he did, a seventy-year-old man looking like a woman of thirty-four who was at that moment in her time looking like a college girl of twenty, and I can’t remember exactly what he said any more than he could remember exactly what she said, not just because it was complex but because I was so fetched by how he looked sayin it, but it went close enough like this:
“‘You set out Route 97 and then cut up Denton Street to the Old Townhouse Road and that way you get around Castle Rock downtown but back to 97. Nine miles up you can go an old logger’s road a mile and a half to Town Road #6, which takes you to Big Anderson Road by Sites’ Cider Mill. There’s a cut-road the old-timers call Bear Road, and that gets you to 219. Once you’re on the far side of Speckled Bird Mountain you grab the Stan-house Road, turn left onto the Bull Pine Road—there’s a swampy patch there but you can spang right through it if you get up enough speed on the gravel—and so you come out on Route 106. 106 cuts through Alton’s Plantation to the Old Derry Road—and there’s two or three woods roads there that you follow and so come out on Route 3 just beyond Derry Hospital. From there it’s only four miles to Route 2 in Etna, and so into Bangor.’
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