"Yes, but I like the odds on finding a wide place up ahead better than I like the odds on reversing for a couple of miles along this piece of crap. If it turns out we do have to back out, I'll take it in stages -- back up for five minutes, rest for ten, back up for five more." He smiled lamely. "It'll be an adventure."
"Oh yes, it'll be that, all right," Mary said, thinking again that her definition for this sort of thing was not adventure but pain in the ass. "Are you sure you aren't pressing on because you believe in your heart that we're going to find Toketee Falls right over the next hill?"
For a moment his mouth seemed to disappear entirely and she braced for an explosion of righteous male wrath. Then his shoulders sagged and he only shook his head. In that moment she saw what he was going to look like thirty years from now, and that frightened her a lot more than getting caught on a back road in the middle of nowhere.
"No," he said. "1 guess I've given up on Toketee Falls. One of the great rules of travel in America is that roads without electrical lines running along at least one side of them don't go anywhere."
So he had noticed, too.
"Come on," he said, getting back in. "I'm going to try like hell to get us out of this. And next time I'll listen to you."
Yeah, yeah, Mary thought with a mixture of amusement and tired resentment. I've heard that one before. But before he could pull the transmission stick on the console down from park to drive, she put her hand over his. "I know you will," she said, turning what he'd said into a promise. "Now get us out of this mess."
"Count on it," Clark said.
"And be careful."
"You can count on that, too." He gave her a small smile that made her feel a little better, then engaged the Princess's transmission. The big gray Mercedes, looking very out of place in these deep woods, began to creep down the shadowy track again.
They drove another mile by the odometer and nothing changed but the width of the cart-track they were on: it grew narrower still. Mary thought the scruffy firs now looked not like hungry guests at a banquet but morbidly curious spectators at the site of a nasty accident. If the track got any narrower, they would begin to hear the squall of branches along the sides of the car. The ground under the trees, meanwhile, had gone from mucky to swampy; Mary could see patches of standing water, dusty with pollen and fallen pine needles, in some of the dips. Her heart was beating much too fast, and twice she had caught herself gnawing at her nails, a habit she thought she had given up for good the year before she married Clark. She had begun to realize that if they got stuck now, they would almost certainly spend the night camped out in the Princess. And there were animals in these woods -- she had heard them crashing around out there. Some of them sounded big enough to be bears. The thought of meeting a bear while they stood looking at their hopelessly mired Mercedes made her swallow something that felt and tasted like a large lint ball.
"Clark, I think we'd better give it up and try backing. It's already past three o'clock and -- "
"Look," he said, pointing ahead. "Is it a sign?"
She squinted. Ahead, the lane rose toward the crest of a deeply wooded hill. There was a bright blue oblong standing near the top. "Yes," she said. "It's a sign, all right."
"Great! Can you read it?"
"Uh-huh -- it says IF YOU CAME THIS FAR, YOU REALLY FUCKED up."
He shot her a complex look of amusement and irritation. "Very funny, Mare."
"Thank you, Clark. I try."
"We'll go to the top of the hill, read the sign, and see what's over the crest. If we don't see anything hopeful, we'll try backing. Agreed?''
"Agreed."
He patted her leg, then drove cautiously on. The Mercedes was moving so slowly now that they could hear the soft sound of the weeds on the crown of the road whickering against the undercarriage. Mary really could make out the words on the sign now, but at first she rejected them, thinking she had to be mistaken -- it was just too crazy. But they drew closer still, and the words didn't change.
"Does it say what I think it does?" Clark asked her.
Mary gave a short, bewildered laugh. "Sure... but it must be someone's idea of a joke. Don't you think?"
"I've given up thinking -- it keeps getting me into trouble. But I see something that isn't a joke. Look, Mary!"
Twenty or thirty feet beyond the sign -- just before the crest of the hill -- the road widened dramatically and was once more both paved and lined. Mary felt worry roll off her heart like a boulder. Clark was grinning. "Isn't that beautiful?" She nodded happily, grinning herself. They reached the sign and Clark stopped. They read it again:
Welcome to Rock and Roll Heaven, Ore.
WE COOK WITH GAS! SO WILL YOU!
Jaycees ? Chamber of Commerce ? Lions ? Elks
"It's got to be a joke," she repeated.
"Maybe not."
"A town called Rock and Roll Heaven? Puh-leeze, Clark."
"Why not? There's Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, Dry Shark, Nevada, and a town in Pennsylvania called Intercourse. So why not a Rock and Roll Heaven in Oregon?"
She laughed giddily. The sense of relief was really incredible. "You made that up."
"What?"
"Intercourse, Pennsylvania."
"I didn't. Ralph Ginzberg once tried to send a magazine called Eros from there. For the postmark. The Feds wouldn't let him. Swear. And who knows? Maybe the town was founded by a bunch of communal back-to-the-land hippies in the sixties. They went establishment -- Lions, Elks, Jaycees -- but the original name stayed." He was quite taken with the idea; he found it both funny and oddly sweet. "Besides, I don't think it matters. What matters is we found some honest-to-God pavement again, honey. The stuff you drive on."
She nodded. "So drive on it... but be careful."
"You bet." The Princess nosed up onto the pavement, which was not asphalt but a smooth composition surface without a patch or expansion-joint to be seen. "Careful's my middle n -- "
Then they reached the crest of the hill and the last word died in his mouth. He stamped on the brake-pedal so hard that their seatbelts locked, then jammed the transmission lever back into park.
"Holy wow!" Clark said.
They sat in the idling Mercedes, open-mouthed, looking down at the town below.
It was a perfect jewel of a town nestled in a small, shallow valley like a dimple. Its resemblance to the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the small-town illustrations of Currier & Ives was, to Mary, at least, inescapable. She tried to tell herself it was just the geography; the way the road wound down into the valley, the way the town was surrounded by deep green-black forest -- leagues of old, thick firs growing in unbroken profusion beyond the outlying fields -- but it was more than the geography, and she supposed Clark knew it as well as she did. There was something too sweetly balanced about the church steeples, for instance -- one on the north end of the town common and the other on the south end. The barn-red building off to the east had to be the school-house, and the big white one off to the west, the one with the bell-tower on top and the satellite dish to one side, had to be the town hall. The homes all looked impossibly neat and cozy, the sorts of domiciles you saw in the house-beautiful ads of pre-World War II magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and American Mercury.
There should be smoke curling from a chimney or two, Mary thought, and after a little examination, she saw that there was. She suddenly found herself remembering a story from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. "Mars Is Heaven," it had been called, and in it the Martians had cleverly disguised the slaughterhouse so it had looked like everybody's fondest hometown dream.
"Turn around," she said abruptly. "It's wide enough here, if you're careful."
He turned slowly to look at her, and she didn't care much for the expression on his face. He was eyeing her as if he thought she had gone crazy. "Honey, what are you -- "
"I don't like it, that's all." She could feel her face growing warm, but she pushed on in spite of the heat. "It makes me think of a scary story I read when I was a teenager." She paused. "It also makes me think of the candy-house in 'Hansel and Gretel."
He went on giving her that patented I Just Don't Believe It stare of his, and she realized he meant to go down there -- it was just another part of the same wretched testosterone blast that gotten them off the main road in the first place. He wanted to explore, by Christ. And he wanted a souvenir, of course. A tee-shirt bought in the local drugstore would do, one that said something cute like