All this happened in the length of time it took for the traffic light on the corner to cycle from red to amber to green and back to red again.
What if she pulls into the driveway right now?
That got him going again. He’d left his calling card; he didn’t need any hassle from her on top of it. There was no way she could do a thing anyway, unless she called the cops, and he didn’t think she’d do that. There were too many things he could tell: The Sex Life of the Great American Happy Housewife in Its Natural Habitat. It had been a crazy scene, though. Best to put miles between himself and Castle Rock. Maybe later he would give her a call. Ask her how she had liked his work. That might be sort of fun.
He walked down the driveway, turned left, and went back to his van. He wasn’t stopped. Nobody took any undue notice of him. A kid on roller skates zipped past him and shouted “Hi!” Steve hi’d him right back.
He got in the van and started it up. He drove up 117 to 302 and followed that road to its intersection with Interstate 95 in Portland. He took an Interstate time-and-toll ticket and rolled south. He had begun having uneasy thoughts about what he had done—the red rage of destruction he had gone into when he saw that no one was home. Had the retribution been too heavy for the offense? So she didn’t want to make it with him any more, so what? He had trashed most of the goddam house: Did that, maybe, say something unpleasant about where his head was at?
He began to work on these questions a little at a time, the way most people do, running an objective set of facts through a bath of various chemicals which, when taken together, make up the complex human perceptual mechanism known as subjectivity. Like a schoolchild who works carefully first with the pencil, then with the eraser, then with the pencil again, he tore down what had happened and then carefully rebuilt it—redrew it in his mind—until both the facts and his perception of the facts jibed in a way he could live with.
When he reached Route 495, he turned west toward New York and the country that sprawled beyond, all the way to the silent reaches of Idaho, the place that Papa Hemingway had gone to when he was old and mortally hurt. He felt the familiar lift in his feelings that came with cutting old ties and moving on—that magical thing that Huck had called “lighting out for the territory.” At such times he felt almost newborn, felt strongly that he was in possession of the greatest freedom of all, the freedom to recreate himself. He would have been unable to understand the significance if someone had pointed out the fact that, whether in Maine or in Idaho, he would still be apt to throw his racket down in angry frustration if he lost a game of tennis; that he would refuse to shake the hand of his opponent over the net, as he always had when he lost. He only shook over the net when he won.
He stopped for the night in a small town called Twickenham. His sleep was easy. He had convinced himself that trashing the Trentons’ house had not been an act of half-mad jealous pique but a piece of revolutionary anarchy—offing a couple of fat middle-class pigs, the sort who made it easy for the fascist overlords to remain in power by blindly paying their taxes and their telephone bills. It had been an act of courage and of clean, justified fury. It was his way of saying “power to the people,” an idea he tried to incorporate in all his poems.
Still, he mused, as he turned toward sleep in the narrow motel bed, he wondered what Donna had thought of it when she and the kid got home. That sent him to sleep with a slight smile on his lips.
By three thirty that Tuesday afternoon, Donna had given up on the mailman.
She sat with one arm lightly around Tad, who was in a dazed half sleep, his lips cruelly puffed from the heat, his face hectic and flushed. There was a tiny bit of the milk left, and soon she would give it to him. During the last three and a half hours—since what would have been lunchtime at home—the sun had