The Third Hill North of Town

by Noah Bly

  Phil and Carol Westman, who bore a disturbing resemblance to the couple in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting, wanted to call the police and have Jon arrested for statutory rape; Jon’s horrified parents attempted to bargain with them by offering to have Jon marry Becky and take responsibility for the baby. The Tates’ first suggestion that an abortion might be in order had been dismissed offhand; the Westmans were Catholic to the core and could not be swayed on this issue.

  Jon had remained mute with shock through the ordeal, sitting on one of the dozen or so milk crates that served as various pieces of furniture throughout his apartment. He kept his gaze squarely on the floor, except for shooting an occasional desperate glance toward his mother, who turned away each time from these silent pleas for understanding and forgiveness.

  Marline Tate was a short, slim woman, with light blue eyes and a delightful, childlike laugh that Jon loved. She wasn’t laughing that night, however, nor had she so much as smiled in Jon’s presence for nearly two years. Marline adored her son, but her disappointment with him had grown so pronounced she couldn’t even bear to look at him. His habitual laziness and burgeoning alcoholism had been hard enough to deal with, but this newly revealed inability to control his penis was the final straw for her, and she was fresh out of sympathy.

  Earl Tate (who looked like an older, grizzled version of Jon) also loved his eldest son, and was more compassionate about his apparent penis problem than Marline. But he, too, was fed up with Jon’s general lack of responsibility, and his unhealthy, bizarre addiction to literature. In truth, part of him was secretly pleased to see the boy finally having to face the consequences of his actions. A baby would put an end to the bohemian existence Jon had been living, and Earl couldn’t help but feel this kind of requital was long overdue. After all, life was not about fun, in Earl’s opinion, or doing whatever you wanted, and it was high time Jon learned this lesson.

  Anyway, after almost five hours of yelling and bickering, Becky’s parents at last agreed that having Jon arrested immediately would serve no purpose. It was then decided, with no input from Jon, that all of them would meet again later than day, to continue their “discussion” about his future. They filed out the door and down the stairs at half past four in the morning, the fathers silent and the mothers weeping.

  And the instant they left him alone, Jon had run away.

  It was getting close to sunrise on Saturday morning when he fled. He had no car, and no suitcase, and the only money he had was locked in a bank that wouldn’t open until Monday. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was going to do, but two things, at least, were certain:

  1. He wasn’t going to jail over Becky “Cowboys and Indians” Westman, and

  2. There was no way in hell he would marry the stupid girl, either, and be saddled with her and her stupid baby for the rest of his life.

  In a blind panic, he’d grabbed a few things from his bathroom and bedroom and stuffed them in a plastic bag. It didn’t occur to him he’d need more than a few toiletries and some clean underwear; the only thing he could think to do was to get out as fast as he could and never look back. It broke his heart to leave his books behind, but he had no alternative. He rescued his three favorite paperbacks (Moby Dick, Walden, and The Fellowship of the Ring) from the floor by his bed, though, and stuffed them in his bag before leaving, then ran down the stairs and out onto the dark street with his breath coming in hitches and his heart clamoring in his chest.

  Acting on blind instinct, he’d made his way over to Toby’s Pizza Shack and used his key to get in. His hands had been shaking as he cleaned out the cash register and the little metal safe under the counter. He crammed the small pile of bills into his plastic bag and scrawled a barely legible note to Toby, apologizing and promising to pay him back as soon as possible. Jon was no thief, but without money he knew he had no chance at all, and this was the only cash available to him. He hoped Toby might someday forgive him, once the circumstances behind this betrayal of trust became public knowledge.

  And then he ran.

  He ran without thought or reservation, like a hunted fox. He ran down empty streets and sidewalks; he ran past the houses of people he had known his entire life; he ran past the high school and the public library and the dark, menacing windows of Rita’s Coffee Shop and Hackey’s Variety Store. He ran all the way out of town, all the way to the ramp leading to the Interstate. He fell to his knees at last by a yield sign, dry-heaving from the exertion.

  He put his forehead in the dirt and sucked air into his overtaxed lungs, and he prayed for help as he had never prayed before. He knew he didn’t deserve such help, nor did he expect it, but he prayed anyway, because he didn’t know what else to do. He wasn’t normally religious, but he’d been reading a lot of C. S. Lewis in the past few days, and was very impressionable. The week before he’d been on a Nietzsche kick and wouldn’t have dreamed of praying, but that was last week, and so mostly forgotten.

  Just as he’d risen to his feet again, salvation had appeared out of nowhere, manifesting itself in the lumbering shape of Clive Upton’s miraculous Canadian truck. Clive had put on the brakes and pulled over the moment Jon stuck out his thumb, and Jon ran to catch up as if he were on his way to meet Jehovah in the flesh. Summoning a ride in such a manner had felt like pure magic, and Jon told himself this was surely an omen that he was doing the right thing.

  He’d climbed into the semi’s cab, introduced himself as Steve Simpson, and lied that he was on his way to visit friends in upstate New York. Clive had just nodded, accepting the story, and only then was Jon able to relax a little, slumping back against the seat. Later, he had even managed to drop off to sleep for a short while, until Clive woke him to say they were stopping for breakfast.

  But that respite from ill fortune now seemed like centuries ago, before the rain began to fall on him in southern New Hampshire. He shielded his eyes with his hand, and gazed down the empty highway in misery. All he wanted to do was go home, but he knew that wasn’t possible. Not for a very long time; maybe not ever. The only thing waiting for him back in Tipton, Maine, was misery.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about his favorite chair in his apartment, and his beloved books stacked up around it, waiting for him to come back. Picturing this familiar, cozy scene made him more unhappy than he’d ever been in his life. If he’d only stayed home two months ago with his books instead of going to a pointless, idiotic party, none of this would have happened.

  “Books don’t get PREGNANT, for Christ’s sake!” he suddenly howled at the empty fields around him. “I am so fucking STUPID!”

  He dropped his arm at last and started to trudge south, clutching his plastic bag to his chest like a life preserver. He couldn’t stay out in this downpour much longer; he had to find shelter. Lightning was sundering the sky, and the ground under his feet was trembling nonstop from continuous blasts of thunder. He felt as if he were being punished for his sins, and would never be safe and dry again. He stared down at his soaking sneakers and tried not to cry as each step took him farther away from everything he loved.

  Please, God, help me, he pleaded silently. Help me find a way to go home.

  “Honest to God, lady, we’re going the wrong way!”

  Elijah was on the verge of panicking. He had been cautioned by his parents, time and again, to always be polite to adults—especially white adults with the power to harm him—but his voice was becoming strident in spite of this warning. The strange woman in the front seat wasn’t listening to him at all. They were now on the blacktop road, and the Edsel’s speedometer said they were rolling along at almost eighty miles per hour.

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Ben.” Julianna’s eyes found his in the rearview mirror. “Stop fooling around.”

  She reached over into one of Edgar Reilly’s grocery bags on the floor and pulled out a Butterfinger candy bar. “Here, have some candy. I know you’d prefer beef jerky, but I don’t think Momma packed any in the picnic basket. She didn’t
know you were coming with me today.”

  Elijah gazed with despair at the candy bar she was holding over the seat for him. He had no idea what she was talking about: For one thing, he truly hated beef jerky; for another, there was no picnic basket in sight. He took the Butterfinger from her at last, though, because he didn’t know what else to do and she just kept holding it there for him.

  It was boiling in the car and he was having trouble breathing. Even with the front windows open and wind pouring in, the Naugahyde upholstery reeked of cigarette smoke. (He didn’t know it, but the closed ashtray on the dash was chock-full of Edgar Reilly’s cigarette butts.) Elijah undid the top button on his shirt and struggled to remain calm. There had to be a way to get her to stop and let him out of the car, but he couldn’t see how. They were going very fast, on a lonely highway, without a stop sign or a town in sight. There weren’t any other vehicles about, either, but even if one showed up all he could do was wave at it in passing, and that wouldn’t help him at all.

  Hoping the woman wouldn’t notice what he was doing, he leaned forward to look at her gas gauge. He squinted at it for a moment, then slumped back against his seat again. There was more than half a tank left, so they could probably travel a long time before needing a refill—maybe as much as a couple hundred miles. He had to get away from this looney-tunes lady long before then, though; for all he knew she could have a gun, and might decide to shoot him long before they reached a station.

  Thinking about her having a gun made him want to pee. A bead of sweat ran down his back and he undid another button on his shirt and squirmed around on the hot seat. The Butterfinger in his hand was turning to mush in its wrapper. Why didn’t she at least turn on the air conditioner?

  He sized her up from behind. She was nearly as big as he was, but he was pretty sure he must be stronger than her. His dad told him all the time how strong he was getting when they worked together on the farm. Still, she was a fairly large woman, and he wasn’t about to try anything while they were moving. They’d wreck for sure and end up dead. If she stopped someplace, though, he might be able to control her long enough to get away from her safely. He supposed scrambling out a window was a possibility, too, but he’d still have to find a way to disable her first, or she’d probably just grab him and pull him back into the car while he was trying to get clear.

  Maybe I can knock her out! he thought, and began looking around the backseat for something he could use to hit her in the head.

  Thus occupied, Elijah didn’t notice that Julianna was watching him in the rearview mirror with concern. She could tell something was upsetting him, but she didn’t have a clue what that could be.

  “Did I do something wrong, Ben?” she asked. “If I did, I really didn’t mean to. Honest!”

  Elijah’s head flew up again in fright. His search for a weapon had proven fruitless. There was nothing at all in the back of the car, except for a woman’s sweater and headscarf on the seat and a flimsy-looking window scraper on the floor. The scraper had a long wooden handle, but it was so thin a child could have snapped it in two with no effort.

  He shook his head after a moment, perplexed by an odd quaver in her voice but also relieved that she seemed to have finally figured out she needed to take him seriously.

  “That’s okay,” he answered after a brief hesitation, laying the Butterfinger on the seat beside him. “But can we please stop? I’ll just walk home from here, so you don’t even have to turn around or anything.”

  The formality of his tone caused Julianna’s eyes to well up. “Don’t be angry with me, Ben,” she implored, her bottom lip trembling. “I didn’t mean to upset you, and I’m truly sorry.”

  This heartfelt apology baffled Elijah more than anything else Julianna could have done. For one thing, he wasn’t used to seeing a woman cry; his mother, Mary, never wept. Even when Elijah’s grandmother, Mary’s own mother, had died a few years ago, Mary had remained dry-eyed throughout the entire funeral. Nor did she cry in the privacy of their home later. She wasn’t unfeeling, he knew; she was just “tough as nails,” as Elijah’s father, Samuel, was fond of remarking. One of Mary’s favorite catchphrases she trotted out whenever Elijah was feeling bad was, “Boo-hooing about a thing you don’t like won’t change it a bit, little man.”

  Another reason Elijah was confounded by Julianna’s remorseful reaction was because she still wasn’t slowing down at all, and showed no sign of intending to let him out.

  “I’m not mad,” he mumbled, feeling oddly guilty for having considered knocking her out as a means of escape. Now that he had seen how emotionally fragile she was, the idea of her having a gun seemed ludicrous to him. “I just . . . feel like walking, that’s all.”

  Julianna shook her head hard enough to make a tear fly from her cheek. “I won’t hear of it. It would take you forever to get home on foot, especially with no shoes.”

  Elijah looked down at the white sneakers on his feet and swallowed hard. The woman might mean no harm, but she was seriously nuts.

  “But I’ve got shoes.” He hitched up his right leg and rested his foot on the seat between them. “See?”

  Julianna turned her head for a moment to gaze with affection at the naked foot next to her shoulder. It was covered in dirt, and had thick calluses on the heel. She snorted and felt immediately better. Ben was teasing her again, so he must have forgiven her.

  “Oh, you,” she said. “You are such a fool.”

  Thinking that she must look quite a sight from her short crying jag, she glanced in the mirror again and cried out in horror.

  “Oh!”

  She let go of the wheel for a moment and the car veered wildly into the other lane before she regained control and brought it back to the right side of the road. Elijah, off-balance from having his foot propped up, tumbled over in the backseat.

  “What the hell?” he yelped.

  Julianna tried to say something reassuring but couldn’t quite manage it. Her heart was hammering with fear.

  That’s ridiculous, she was thinking. You’re imagining things.

  When she had looked in the rearview mirror at what should have been her own reflection, she had seen a middle-aged woman with short brown hair and alarming green eyes staring back at her.

  Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and her neck was stiff with tension. She tried to keep her eyes firmly on the road, but she could almost feel the mirror taunting her, daring her to take another look.

  She squared her shoulders. Pull yourself together, you silly girl. It was just a trick of the light.

  Biting her lip, she gazed boldly at her reflection again. The only thing in the mirror this time was herself: a thin, rather pretty young lady, with long brown hair and smooth, glowing skin. She sighed with relief and her breathing slowly returned to normal.

  “Goodness gracious.” She gave an odd little laugh. “I must be losing my mind.” She glanced over the seat at Elijah, who was upright again, but clutching his door handle in a death grip.

  “Are you all right, Ben?” she asked. “I’m sorry for the rough ride, but the strangest thing just happened.”

  Elijah was too rattled to ask her what she was talking about, but the “rough ride” was no longer his chief concern: He had just seen something that might allow him to put an end to the whole bizarre situation he found himself in. Half a mile in front of them was an intersection with a four-way stop sign. And approaching this intersection from the other direction was a white Ford pickup, which looked as if it might be stopping at almost the exact same time as the Edsel.

  Here’s my chance, Elijah thought.

  Cecil Towpath’s wife of thirty-seven years, Sarah, wouldn’t shut up, and he was sick of it. She’d been at him for the better part of six hours now, ever since they’d left their granddaughter’s home in upstate New York, and it was all he could do not to reach across the seat and slap her silly.

  “For God’s sake, Cecil,” Sarah was saying. “Stop pretending it’s fine she marri
ed that little weasel. I told you Wally would never make a good husband and provider for Tina, but did you listen?” She sniffed and stared out the open passenger window of their pickup.

  Cecil knew what that snooty little sniff of hers meant. It meant she thought Wally wasn’t the only one who didn’t qualify as a “good husband.” Damn her, he thought.

  The Towpaths lived in Bar Harbor, Maine. Their only granddaughter, Tina, had married Walter Abernathy three years ago and moved to New York, where Walter (“Wally”) had since shown himself, in Sarah’s words, to be “a worthless, free-loading skunk.” He couldn’t hold down a job, because he claimed to be an artist of some sort. What kind of art he did had never been clear to Cecil. It had something to do with half a dozen ugly metal-and-wood things in their backyard that Wally called “sculptures,” but if you asked Cecil, they looked a lot like a bunch of monstrous dog turds, lying in the grass.

  Tina worked for a lawyer and supported Wally through thick and thin, and wouldn’t listen to a thing Sarah said about him. Cecil didn’t much care one way or another about Wally, but Tina loved him, so he, unlike Sarah, had decided to just let them be. Tina seemed happy about her life, and that was good enough for him.

  And this irritated Sarah beyond all bearing.

  A stop sign was coming up and Cecil tapped on the brakes to begin slowing. There was another vehicle getting close to the intersection, too, but it was headed the other way. It looked like an Edsel, he thought. The front bumper was separated in the middle by a silver, shield-like ornament on the grille.