an endless time spent grinding gears, and wrestled the pulp-truck back onto the road. 'Y'look half-drowned. Got half a thermos of coffee from the Drunken Donuts in Augusta left over from my dinner ... you want it?'
Gardener drank it gratefully. It was strong, hot, and heavily laced with sugar. He also accepted a cigarette from the driver, dragging deeply and with pleasure, although it hurt his throat, which was getting steadily sorer.
Moss dropped him off just over the Haven town line at quarter to seven. The rain had slacked off, and the sky was lightening up in the west. 'Do believe God's gonna let through some sunset,' the driver said. 'I wish like hell I had a pair of shoes I could give you, mister - I usually carry an old pair of sneakers behind the seat, but it was so rainy today I never brought nothin' but m'gumrubbers.'
'Thanks, but I'll be fine. My friend is less than a mile up the road.' Actually Bobbi's place was still three miles away, but if he told Moss that, nothing would do but that he drive Gardener up there. Gardener was tired, increasingly feverish, still damp even after forty-five minutes of the heater's dry, blasting air ... but he couldn't stand any more kindness today. In his present state of mind it could well drive him crazy.
'Okay. Good luck.'
'Thank you.'
He got down and waved as the truck turned off on a side-road and rumbled away toward home.
Even after Moss and his museum piece of a truck had disappeared, Gardener stood where he was for a moment longer, his wet totebag in one hand, his bare feet, white as Easter lilies, planted in the dirt of the soft shoulder, looking at the marker some two hundred feet back the way he had come. Home is the place where, when you have got there, they have to take you in, Frost had said. But he'd do well to remember he wasn't home. Maybe the worst mistake a man could make was to get to the idea that his friend's home was his own, especially when the friend was a woman whose bed you had once shared.
Not home, not at all - but he was in Haven.
He started to walk up the road toward Bobbi's house.
4
About fifteen minutes later, when the clouds in the west finally broke open to let through the westering sun, something strange happened: a burst of music, loud, clear, and brief, went through Gardener's head.
He stopped, looking at the sunlight as it spilled across rolling miles of wet woods and hayfields in the west, the rays beaming down like the dramatic sunrays in a DeMille Bible epic. Route 9 began to rise here, and the western view was long and gorgeous and solemn, the evening's light somehow English and pastoral in its clear beauty. The rain had given the landscape a sleek, washed look, deepening colors, seeming to fulfill the texture of things. Gardener was suddenly very glad he had not committed suicide - not in any corny Art Linkletter way, but because he had been allowed this moment of beauty and perceptual glow. Standing here, now almost at the end of his energy, feverish and sick, he felt a child's simple wonder.
All was still and silent in the final sunshine of evening. He could see no sign of industry or technology. Humanity, yes: a big red barn attached to a white farmhouse, sheds, a trailer or two, but that was all.
The light. It was the light that struck him so strongly.
Its sweet clarity, so old and deep - those rays of sun slanting almost horizontally through the unraveling clouds as this long, confusing, exhausting day neared its end. That ancient light seemed to deny time itself, and Gardener almost expected to hear a huntsman winding his horn, announcing 'All Assemble.' He would hear dogs, and horses' hooves, and and that was when the music, jarring and modern, blasted through his head, scattering all thought. His hands flew to his temples in a startled gesture. The burst lasted at least five seconds, perhaps as long as ten, and what he heard was perfectly identifiable; it was Dr Hook singing 'Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk.'
The lyric was tinny but clear enough - as if he were listening to a small transistor radio, the kind that people used to take to the beach with them before that punk-rock group Walkman and the Ghetto-Blasters had taken over the world. But it wasn't pouring