Black House (Page 142)

When they have all pulled over, Mouse says, "What’s your problem, Sonny?"

"You are," Sonny says. "Either you missed the turnoff, or your whole story’s all f**ked up."

"I said I wasn’t sure where it is." He notices with nearly immeasurable relief that Little Nancy’s dead hands no longer grip his shoulders.

"Of course not. You were ripped on acid!"

"Good acid."

"Well, there’s no road up ahead, I know that much. It’s just trees all the way to the old f**ks’ home."

Mouse ponders the stretch of road ahead as if the road just might be up there, after all, although he knows it is not.

"Shit, Mouse, we’re practically in town. I can see Queen Street from here."

"Yeah," Mouse says. "Okay." If he can get to Queen Street, he thinks, those hands will never fasten on him again.

Beezer walks his Electra Glide up to them and says, "Okay what, Mouse? You agree it’s farther back, or is the road somewhere else?"

Frowning, Mouse turns his head to look back down the highway. "Goddamn. I think it’s along here somewhere, unless I got totally turned around that day."

"Gee, how could that have happened?" says Sonny. "I looked at every inch of ground we passed, and I sure as hell didn’t see a road. Did you, Beezer? How about a NO TRESPASSING sign, you happen to see one of those?"

"You don’t get it," Mouse says. "This shit doesn’t want to be seen."

"Maybe you shoulda gone to Ward D with Sawyer," Sonny says. "People in there appreciate visionaries."

"Can it, Sonny," Beezer says.

"I was there before, and you weren’t," Mouse says. "Which one of us knows what he’s talking about?"

"I’ve heard enough out of both of you guys," Beezer says. "Do you still think it’s along here somewhere, Mouse?"

"As far as I can recollect, yeah."

"Then we missed it. We’ll go back and check again, and if we don’t find it, we’ll look somewhere else. If it’s not here, it’s between two of the valleys along 93, or in the woods on the hill leading up to the lookout. We have plenty of time."

"What makes you so sure?" Sonny asks. Mild anxiety about what they might come across is making him belligerent. He would just as soon go back to the Sand Bar and down a pitcher of Kingsland while messing with Stinky’s head as waste his time goofing along the highways.

Beezer looks at him, and his eyes crackle. "You know anywhere else there’s enough trees to call it a woods?"

Sonny backs down immediately. Beezer is never going to give up and go back to the Sand Bar. Beezer is in this for keeps. Most of that has to do with Amy, but some of it relates to Jack Sawyer. Sawyer impressed the shit out of Beezer the other night, that’s what happened, and now Beezer thinks everything the guy says is golden. To Sonny, this makes no sense at all, but Beezer’s the one who calls the shots, so for now, Sonny guesses, they will all run around like junior G-men for a while. If this adopt-a-cop program goes on for more than a couple of days, Sonny plans to have a little chat with Mouse and the Kaiser. Doc will always side with Beezer no matter what, but the other two are capable of listening to reason.

"All right, then," Beezer says. "Scratch from here to Queen Street. We know there’s no f**kin’ road along that stretch. We’ll go back the way we came, give it one more shot. Single file the whole way. Mouse, you’re point man again."

Mouse nods and prepares himself to feel those hands on his shoulders again. Gunning his Fat Boy, he rolls forward and takes his place at the head of the line. Beezer moves in behind him, and Sonny follows Beezer, with Doc and the Kaiser in the last two slots.

Five pairs of eyes, Sonny thinks. If we don’t see it this time, we never will. And we won’t, because that damned road is halfway across the state. When Mouse and his old lady got buzzed on the Ultimate, they could go for hundreds of miles and think they’d taken a spin around the block.

Everybody scans the opposite side of the road and the edge of the woods. Five pairs of eyes, as Sonny puts it, register an unbroken line of oaks and pine trees. Mouse has set a pace somewhere between a fast walk and a medium jog, and the trees crawl by. At this speed, they can notice the moss blistering the trunks of the oaks and the bright smears of sunlight on the forest’s floor, which is brownish gray and resembles a layer of rumpled felt. A hidden world of upright trees, shafts of light, and deadfalls extends backward from the first, sentinel row. Within that world, paths that are not paths wind mazelike between the thick trunks and lead to mysterious clearings. Sonny becomes suddenly aware of a tribe of squirrels doing squirrel gymnastics in the map of branches that lace into an intermittent canopy. And with the squirrels, an aviary of birds pops into view.

All of this reminds him of the deep Pennsylvania woods he had explored as a boy, before his parents sold their house and moved to Illinois. Those woods had contained a rapture he had found nowhere else. Sonny’s conviction that Mouse got things wrong and they are looking in the wrong place takes on greater inner density. Earlier, Sonny had spoken about bad places, of which he has seen at least one he was absolutely certain about. In Sonny’s experience, bad places, the ones that let you know you were not welcome, tended to be on or near borders.

During the summer after his high school graduation, he and his two best buddies, all of them motorcycle freaks, had taken their bikes to Rice Lake, Wisconsin, where he had two cousins cute enough to show off to his friends. Sal and Harry were thrilled with the girls, and the girls thought the bikers were sexy and exotic. After a couple of days spent as a literal fifth wheel (or fifth and sixth wheel, depending on what you are counting), Sonny proposed extending their trip by a week and, in the interest of expanding their educations, ballin’ the jack down to Chicago and spending the rest of their money on beer and hookers until they had to go home. Sal and Harry loved the whole idea, and on their third evening in Rice Lake, they packed their rolls on their bikes and roared south, making as much noise as possible. By 10:00 they had managed to get completely lost.