"Not very pretty, are they?" Nadine asked. On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf.
Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and-black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups - never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine. And now all those Americans were gone. A thunderstorm had ripped a branch from a tree and it had knocked the gigantic plastic Dairy Treet sign into the ice cream stand's parking lot, where it lay on its side like a pallid duncecap. The grass was starting to get long on the mini-golf course. This stretch of highway between Portland and Portsmouth had once been a seventy-mile amusement park and now it was only a haunted funhouse where all the clockwork had run down.
"Not very pretty, no," he said, "but once it was ours, Nadine. Once it was ours, even though we were never here before. Now it's gone."
"But not forever," she said calmly, and he looked at her, her clean and shining face. Her forehead, from which her amazing white-streaked hair was drawn back, glowed like a lamp. "I am not a religious person, but if I was I would call what has happened a judgment of God. In a hundred years, maybe two hundred, it will be ours again."
"Those trucks won't be gone in two hundred years."
"No, but the road will be. The trucks will be standing in the middle of a field or a forest, and there will be lousewort and ladies' slipper growing where their tires used to be. They won't really be trucks anymore. They will be artifacts."
"I think you're wrong."
"How can I be wrong?"
"Because we're looking for other people," Larry said. "Now why do you think we're doing that?"
She gazed at him, troubled. "Well... because it's the right thing to do," she said. "People need other people. Didn't you feel that? When you were alone?"
"Yes," Larry said. "If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. When we get together we build miles of summer cottages and kill each other in the bars on Saturday night." He laughed. It was a cold and unhappy sound with no humor in it at all. It hung on the deserted air for a long time. "There's no answer. It's like being stuck inside an egg. Come on - Joe'll be way ahead of us."
She stood astride her bike a moment longer, her troubled gaze on Larry's back as it pulled away. Then she rode after him. He couldn't be right. Couldn't be. If such a monstrous thing as this had happened for no good reason at all, what sense did anything make? Why were they even still alive?
Joe wasn't so far ahead after all. They came upon him sitting on the back bumper of a blue Ford parked in a driveway. He was looking at a girlie magazine he had found somewhere, and Larry observed uncomfortably that the boy had an erection. He shot a glance at Nadine, but she was looking elsewhere - perhaps on purpose.
When they reached the driveway Larry asked, "Coming?"
Joe put the magazine aside and instead of standing up made a guttural interrogative sound and pointed up in the air. Larry glanced up wildly, for a moment thinking the boy had seen an airplane. Then Nadine cried: "Not the sky, the barn!" Her voice was close and tight with excitement. "On the barn! Thank God for you, Joe! We never would have seen it!"
She went to Joe, put her arms around him, and hugged him. Larry turned to the barn, where white letters stood out clearly on the faded shingle roof:
HAVE GONE TO STOVINGTON, VT. PLAGUE CENTER
Below that were a series of road directions. And at the bottom:
LEAVING OGUNQUIT JULY 2, 1990
HAROLD EMERY LAUDER
FRANCES GOLDSMITH
"Jesus Christ, his ass must have been out to the wind when he put that last line on," Larry said.
"The plague center!" Nadine said, ignoring him. "Why didn't I think of it? I read an article about it in the Sunday supplement magazine not three months ago! They've gone there!"
"If they're still alive."
"Still alive? Of course they are. The plague was over by July second. And if they could climb up on that barn roof, they surely weren't feeling sick."