The interruption gave Dale the chance to hurry to his SUV and clamber inside. The leader leaned close to the driver’s-side window just as Dale clicked the locks shut. The boy standing closest to Derek dragged a key along the left rear quarter panel of the Land Cruiser.
If I were a real man, thought Dale, I’d get out and beat the shit out of that kid.
Dale drove off, hoping that would be the end of it. No such luck. The five skinheads scrambled to their pickup trucks—Derek and the next-youngest hopping into the white Chevy, the leader and two of his older friends crawling into the scabrous green Ford with the oversized tires. Both trucks roared to follow Dale out of the KWIK’N’EZ lot.
Dale paused at the entrance to the county road. Should he head south a couple of hundred yards to the entrance to I-74? Once on the interstate, he could drive straight to Peoria. If the punks followed him he would flag down a police car or go to the police center he dimly remembered on War Memorial Drive. Or should he turn north toward the Hard Road and Highway 150A, then back west to Oak Hill Road and north to the sheriff’s station in Oak Hill? That wouldn’t make much sense. Not with Sheriff C.J. Congden there. One of these punks was probably C.J.’s kid. They probably all attended skinhead gatherings together and lent each other white robes for their cross burnings.
Dale turned north toward the Hard Road. He’d be damned if he’d flee to Peoria whenever some assholes made threatening noises.
Why not? he thought. Why not just drive straight to Montana?
The two pickups followed him to the Hard Road, the green Ford leading Derek’s white Chevy.
Dale paused again at the Hard Road. The trees and water tower of Elm Haven were visible just a mile or so to the west. Straight ahead stretched the narrow, asphalted lane—too narrow and roughly paved to be called a road—that cut between fields for two miles before connecting to County 6. Dale had come that way on his drive to the KWIK’N’EZ, staring out at the muddy fields and remembering again how the lane used to be two tractor tracks across the field, heavily used by locals but absolutely impassable in the mud season. Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena had told stories of the local farmers waiting with their teams of draft horses to pull out the unlucky Model Ts and fancy new Ford coupes—a lucrative business during a muddy spring.
Dale drove straight ahead down the lane, the truck’s tires hissing on the soft asphalt and melting slush.
If the skinheads had any idea of pulling alongside him and causing trouble, there was no opportunity for them to do so on this skinny stretch of potholes. The road was wide enough for just one vehicle, and there were deep drainage ditches on each side.
Dale glanced in his rearview mirror. The two pickups were following closely. Dale could make out the pale oval face and black eyes of their leader behind the wheel of the Ford.
Dale tried to estimate the age of the pickups and whether they had four-wheel drive. He thought possibly no on the Chevy, but the Ford probably did. At least, the expensive, oversized off-road tires suggested four-wheel capability.
What the fuck do I think I’m doing here?
The lane ended at County 6 just south of the Black Tree Tavern. A mile or so north and he’d be at The Jolly Corner. The Elm Haven water tower was just visible to the west.
Dale turned east onto Jubilee College Road.
You’re nuts. This county road ran east about seven miles to Jubilee College State Park, but there was nothing this way—hills, narrow bridges over creeks, a few farmhouses. But the road’s wide enough for them to pull alongside—force me off the road.
Dale floored it. The big straight-six Toyota engine growled and got the two and a half tons of vehicle moving smartly.
The two pickups behind him were honking—either in exultation at Dale’s stupidity or in anticipation of what came next.
Dale drove seventy-five miles per hour down the poorly maintained county road, the Land Cruiser lifting high on its springs at the tops of hills, hunkering in the steep little valleys. The skinhead leader pulled his green Ford alongside as they roared up the next hill.
A car coming the other way and someone dies, thought Dale.
They crested the hill together. There was no car coming the other way. The white Chevy pickup loomed in Dale’s mirror—actually contacting his rear bumper. The pickups honked their horns; the skinheads waved from the open windows.
The punk in the passenger seat next to the lead skinhead lifted a hunting knife and gestured with it, only two feet away from Dale. The punk’s window was down and he was shouting and cursing above the roar of the wind and engines and tire hiss on wet asphalt.
Dale ignored him and accelerated down the hill. Jubilee College Road was wide enough for two vehicles here, but the bridge over the creek at the bottom of the hill was wide enough for just one.
The green Ford lurched ahead, but Dale had vehicle mass, engine displacement, and desperation on his side. He reached the bottom first and swung in ahead of the Ford. The three vehicles roared across the narrow bridge and accelerated up the next hill.
That was the bridge where Duane’s uncle Art was killed in that same summer of 1960, thought Dale. Someone forced Uncle Art’s old Cadillac off the road and into the bridge railing there.
Then Dale had no more time to think as the green Ford pulled alongside again and the white Chevy surged close behind him.
Dale tapped the brakes. The white truck behind him slammed on its brakes and fell back rather than rear-end the Land Cruiser. The Ford swerved in front of Dale’s vehicle and pulled ahead. Dale braked again, braked harder, the Chevy pickup actually skidding behind him now, and then Dale locked the steering wheel hard left. The Land Cruiser turned, almost tipped, skipped across asphalt, and literally slid into a gravel side road running north toward a line of trees. The shotgun-pelleted yellow sign in the frozen weeds at the side of the road read dead end.
Why did I turn there?Dale thought wildly. The two pickups had already backed up on Jubilee College Road and pulled onto the gravel road a hundred yards behind him. What the hell was I thinking of?
The answer came to him in a mental voice not quite his own: Gypsy Lane.
NINETEEN
I KNEW what Dale had been thinking the instant he turned east on Jubilee College Road. I knew why he had done this seemingly senseless thing even before he did.
Gypsy Lane had been one of the magical places for us boys in the late 1950s and the first year of the decade of the 1960s—my last year of life. Of all our places to play, Gypsy Lane had been the most mysterious. Kid legend had it that the old wagon road had been used more than a century earlier by caravans of Gypsies who plied their trade across the Midwest, keeping to little-used back roads rather than the main thoroughfares. Kid legend also had it that the Gypsies had been driven out of Elm Haven, Oak Hill, and other nearby towns after children had gone missing—kidnapped for their blood, was the opinion of the townspeople—and the Gypsies, still needed by farm folk for their elixir cures and fortunetelling and knife-sharpening tools, had discovered this old lane through the thickest forest, a path broadened to wagon width by the Quakers and other builders of the Underground Railroad running slaves north a day’s walk at a time in the years before the Civil War, and then the Gypsies had taken the lane as their own, moving from Oak Hill to Princeville, Princeville to Peoria, Peoria north toward Chicago on this secret highway in the moonlight, their horse carts and caravans creaking through the darkness and leaf shadow.