Big Driver (19 page)

In cancer veritas,
Streeter thought.

“So let's recap.” Elvid began ticking off the points on his fingers, which were not long at all but as short, pudgy, and inoffensive as the rest of him. “Tom Goodhugh was better-looking than you, even when you were children. He was gifted with athletic skills you could only dream of. The girl who kept her smooth white thighs closed in the backseat of your car opened them for Tom. He married her. They are still in love. Children okay, I suppose?”

“Healthy and beautiful!” Streeter spat. “One getting married, one in college, one in high school!
That
one's captain of the football team! Chip off the old fucking block!”

“Right. And—the cherry on the chocolate sundae—he's rich and you're knocking on through life at a salary of sixty thousand or so a year.”

“I got a bonus for writing his loan,” Streeter muttered. “For showing
vision
.”

“But what you actually wanted was a promotion.”

“How do you know that?”

“I'm a businessman now, but at one time I was a humble salaryman. Got fired before striking out on my own. Best thing that ever happened to me. I know how these things go. Anything else? Might as well get it all off your chest.”

“He drinks Spotted Hen Microbrew!” Streeter shouted. “Nobody in Derry drinks that pretentious shit! Just him! Just Tom Goodhugh, the Garbage King!”

“Does he have a sports car?” Elvid spoke quietly, the words lined with silk.

“No. If he did, I could at least joke with Janet about sports car menopause. He drives a goddam
Range Rover
.”

“I think there might be one more thing,” Elvid said. “If so, you might as well get that off your chest, too.”

“He doesn't have cancer.” Streeter almost whispered it. “He's fifty-one, just like me, and he's as healthy . . . as a fucking . . .
horse
.”

“So are you,” Elvid said.

“What?”

“It's done, Mr. Streeter. Or, since I've cured your cancer, at least temporarily, may I call you Dave?”

“You're a very crazy man,” Streeter said, not without admiration.

“No, sir. I'm as sane as a straight line. But notice I said
temporarily
. We are now in the ‘try it, you'll buy it' stage of our relationship. It will last a week at least, maybe ten days. I urge you to visit your doctor. I think he'll find remarkable improvement in your condition. But it won't last. Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

Elvid leaned forward, smiling chummily. His teeth again seemed too many (and too big) for his inoffensive mouth. “I come out here from time to time,” he said. “Usually at this time of day.”

“Just before sunset.”

“Exactly. Most people don't notice me—they look through me as if I wasn't there—but you'll be looking. Won't you?”

“If I'm better, I certainly will,” Streeter said.

“And you'll bring me something.”

Elvid's smile widened, and Streeter saw a wonderful, terrible thing: the man's teeth weren't just too big or too many. They were
sharp
.

*  *  *

Janet was folding clothes in the laundry room when he got back. “There you are,” she said. “I was starting to worry. Did you have a nice drive?”

“Yes,” he said. He surveyed his kitchen. It looked different. It looked like a kitchen in a dream. Then he turned on a light, and that was better. Elvid was the dream. Elvid and his promises. Just a loony on a day pass from Acadia Mental.

She came to him and kissed his cheek. She was flushed from the heat of the dryer and very pretty. She was fifty herself, but looked years younger. Streeter thought she would probably have a fine life after he died. He guessed May and Justin might have a stepdaddy in their future.

“You look good,” she said. “You've actually got some color.”

“Do I?”

“You do.” She gave him an encouraging smile that was troubled just beneath. “Come talk to me while I fold the rest of these things. It's so boring.”

He followed her and stood in the door of the laundry room. He knew better than to offer help; she said he even folded dish-wipers the wrong way.

“Justin called,” she said. “He and Carl are in Venice. At a youth hostel. He said their cabdriver spoke very good English. He's having a ball.”

“Great.”

“You were right to keep the diagnosis to yourself,” she said. “You were right and I was wrong.”

“A first in our marriage.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Jus has so looked forward to this trip. But you'll have to fess up when he gets back. May's coming up from Searsport for Gracie's wedding, and that would be the right time.” Gracie was Gracie Goodhugh, Tom and Norma's oldest child. Carl Goodhugh, Justin's traveling companion, was the one in the middle.

“We'll see,” Streeter said. He had one of his puke-bags in his back pocket, but he had never felt less like upchucking. Something he
did
feel like was eating. For the first time in days.

Nothing happened out there—you know that, right? This is just a little psychosomatic elevation. It'll recede
.

“Like my hairline,” he said.

“What, honey?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, and speaking of Gracie, Norma called. She reminded me it was their turn to have us to dinner at their place Thursday night. I said I'd ask you, but that you were awfully busy at the bank, working late hours, all this bad-mortgage stuff. I didn't think you'd want to see them.”

Her voice was as normal and as calm as ever, but all at once she began crying big storybook tears that welled in her eyes and then went rolling down her cheeks. Love grew humdrum in the later years of a marriage, but now his swelled up as fresh as
it had been in the early days, the two of them living in a crappy apartment on Kossuth Street and sometimes making love on the living-room rug. He stepped into the laundry room, took the shirt she was folding out of her hands, and hugged her. She hugged him back, fiercely.

“This is just so hard and unfair,” she said. “We'll get through it. I don't know how, but we will.”

“That's right. And we'll start by having dinner on Thursday night with Tom and Norma, just like we always do.”

She drew back, looking at him with her wet eyes. “Are you going to tell them?”

“And spoil dinner? Nope.”

“Will you even be able to eat? Without . . .” She put two fingers to her closed lips, puffed her cheeks, and crossed her eyes: a comic puke-pantomime that made Streeter grin.

“I don't know about Thursday, but I could eat something now,” he said. “Would you mind if I rustled myself up a hamburger? Or I could go out to McDonald's . . . maybe bring you back a chocolate shake . . .”

“My God,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “It's a miracle.”

*  *  *

“I wouldn't call it a miracle, exactly,” Dr. Henderson told Streeter on Wednesday afternoon. “But . . .”

It was two days since Streeter had discussed matters of life and death under Mr. Elvid's yellow umbrella, and a day before the Streeters' weekly
dinner with the Goodhughs, this time to take place at the sprawling residence Streeter sometimes thought of as The House That Trash Built. The conversation was taking place not in Dr. Henderson's office, but in a small consultation room at Derry Home Hospital. Henderson had tried to discourage the MRI, telling Streeter that his insurance wouldn't cover it and the results were sure to be disappointing. Streeter had insisted.

“But what, Roddy?”

“The tumors appear to have shrunk, and your lungs seem clear. I've never seen such a result, and neither have the two other docs I brought in to look at the images. More important—this is just between you and me—the MRI tech has never seen anything like it, and those are the guys I really trust. He thinks it's probably a computer malfunction in the machine itself.”

“I feel good, though,” Streeter said, “which is why I asked for the test. Is that a malfunction?”

“Are you vomiting?”

“I have a couple of times,” Streeter admitted, “but I think that's the chemo. I'm calling a halt to it, by the way.”

Roddy Henderson frowned. “That's very unwise.”

“The unwise thing was starting it in the first place, my friend. You say, ‘Sorry, Dave, the chances of you dying before you get a chance to say Happy Valentine's Day are in the ninetieth percentile, so we're going to fuck up the time you have left by filling you full of poison. You might feel worse if
I injected you with sludge from Tom Goodhugh's landfill, but probably not.' And like a fool, I said okay.”

Henderson looked offended. “Chemo is the last best hope for—”

“Don't bullshit a bullshitter,” Streeter said with a goodnatured grin. He drew a deep breath that went all the way down to the bottom of his lungs. It felt
wonderful
. “When the cancer's aggressive, chemo isn't for the patient. It's just an agony surcharge the patient pays so that when he's dead, the doctors and relatives can hug each other over the coffin and say ‘We did everything we could.'”

“That's harsh,” Henderson said. “You know you're apt to relapse, don't you?”

“Tell that to the tumors,” Streeter said. “The ones that are no longer there.”

Henderson looked at the images of Deepest Darkest Streeter that were still flicking past at twenty-second intervals on the conference room's monitor and sighed. They were good pictures, even Streeter knew that, but they seemed to make his doctor unhappy.

“Relax, Roddy.” Streeter spoke gently, as he might once have spoken to May or Justin when a favorite toy got lost or broken. “Shit happens; sometimes miracles happen, too. I read it in the
Reader's Digest
.”

“In my experience, one has never happened in an MRI tube.” Henderson picked up a pen and tapped it against Streeter's file, which had fattened considerably over the last three months.

“There's a first time for everything,” Streeter said.

*  *  *

Thursday evening in Derry; dusk of a summer night. The declining sun casting its red and dreamy rays over the three perfectly clipped, watered, and landscaped acres Tom Goodhugh had the temerity to call “the old backyard.” Streeter sat in a lawn chair on the patio, listening to the rattle of plates and the laughter of Janet and Norma as they loaded the dishwasher.

Yard? It's not a yard, it's a Shopping Channel fan's idea of heaven
.

There was even a fountain with a marble child standing in the middle of it. Somehow it was the bare-ass cherub (pissing, of course) that offended Streeter the most. He was sure it had been Norma's idea—she had gone back to college to get a liberal arts degree, and had half-assed Classical pretensions—but still, to see such a thing here in the dying glow of a perfect Maine evening and know its presence was a result of Tom's garbage monopoly . . .

And, speak of the devil (
or the Elvid, if you like that better,
Streeter thought), enter the Garbage King himself, with the necks of two sweating bottles of Spotted Hen Microbrew caught between the fingers of his left hand. Slim and erect in his open-throated Oxford shirt and faded jeans, his lean face perfectly lit by the sunset glow, Tom Goodhugh looked like a model in a magazine beer ad. Streeter could even see the copy:
Live the good life, reach for a Spotted Hen
.

“Thought you might like a fresh one, since your beautiful wife says she's driving.”

“Thanks.” Streeter took one of the bottles, tipped it to his lips, and drank. Pretentious or not, it was good.

As Goodhugh sat down, Jacob the football player came out with a plate of cheese and crackers. He was as broad-shouldered and handsome as Tom had been back in the day.
Probably has cheerleaders crawling all over him,
Streeter thought.
Probably has to beat them off with a damn stick.

“Mom thought you might like these,” Jacob said.

“Thanks, Jake. You going out?”

“Just for a little while. Throw the Frisbee with some guys down in the Barrens until it gets dark, then study.”

“Stay on this side. There's poison ivy down there since the crap grew back.”

“Yeah, we know. Denny caught it when we were in junior high, and it was so bad his mother thought he had cancer.”

“Ouch!” Streeter said.

“Drive home carefully, son. No hot-dogging.”

“You bet.” The boy put an arm around his father and kissed his cheek with a lack of self-consciousness that Streeter found depressing. Tom not only had his health, a still-gorgeous wife, and a ridiculous pissing cherub; he had a handsome eighteen-year-old son who still felt all right about kissing his dad goodbye before going out with his best buds.

“He's a good boy,” Goodhugh said fondly, watching Jacob mount the stairs to the house and disappear inside. “Studies hard and makes his grades, unlike his old man. Luckily for me, I had you.”

“Lucky for both of us,” Streeter said, smiling and putting a goo of Brie on a Triscuit. He popped it into his mouth.

“Does me good to see you eating, chum,” Goodhugh said. “Me n Norma were starting to wonder if there was something wrong with you.”

“Never better,” Streeter said, and drank some more of the tasty (and no doubt expensive) beer. “I've been losing my hair in front, though. Jan says it makes me look thinner.”

“That's one thing the ladies don't have to worry about,” Goodhugh said, and stroked a hand back through his own locks, which were as full and rich as they had been at eighteen. Not a touch of gray in them, either. Janet Streeter could still look forty on a good day, but in the red light of the declining sun, the Garbage King looked thirty-five. He didn't smoke, he didn't drink to excess, and he worked out at a health club that did business with Streeter's bank but which Streeter could not afford himself. His middle child, Carl, was currently doing the European thing with Justin Streeter, the two of them traveling on Carl Goodhugh's dime. Which was, of course, actually the Garbage King's dime.