| The old man s mood grew increasingly brittle as he began towrestle his Chevy Impala up the twisting grade toward thesummit. The one-hour trip down U.S. 280 from San Francisco tothe outskirts of San Jose had gone well enough, but his drivingwas rusty, and Charley Hallinan remembered now with appre-hension the twelve-mile asphalt corkscrew that wound ahead ofhim over the hill toward Santa Cruz. The curves already seemedsharper now than they had ten years ago, the lanes more narrow.Worse, he began to fear that he might not make it to St. John sbefore the pain came back. A Japanese compact shot past hire in the narrow passing lanewith no more than ten inches to spare, rocketing his heartbeatand producing an unwelcome giddiness. Damn fool, he mutteredafter the driver, and hunched even closer against the steeringwheel, squinting over shiny knuckles like a sea captain on thelookout for icebergs. He turned on the radio, then irritably snapped it off, noticinghow poor the reception was once you got into the mountains. Helistened instead to the sounds of the Detroit clunker he hadborrowed for the trip, straining and groaning around the turns asff its archaic body were strung together with tape and balingwire. Just like me. he thought, glancing up at himself in therearview mirror. Charley quickly returned his attention to the road--partly forsafety, but mainly out of disgust--for looking back at him fromthe mirror was a woru-out face he barely recognized, withyellowing, lifeless eyes and concave cheeks covered with skin ascoarse as fishnet. In the center of the face sprawled a Frenchbore of a nose wrapped in a network of merging capillaries.Loose skin hung from his cheeks, his chin, And the backs of thepale, blue-veined hands that gripped the wheel were mottled with :"Hooker s bumps," so named in honor of the chemical com-pany that had once contaminated Niagara s Love Canal. To a |
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