The Dark Tower

The two women have enjoyed their hour’s walk, not because either of them has any great love of raspberries (Justine reckons she won’t even eat hers; the seeds get caught in her teeth) but because it’s given them a chance to catch up on their respective families and to laugh a little together about the years when their friendship was new and probably the most important thing in either girl’s life. They met at Vassar College (a thousand years ago, so it does seem) and carried the Daisy Chain together at graduation the year they were juniors. This is what they are talking about when the blue minivan—it is a 1985 Dodge Caravan, Justine recognizes the make and model because her oldest son had one just like it when his tribe started growing—comes around the curve by Melder’s German Restaurant and Brathaus. It’s all over the road, looping from side to side, first spuming up dust from the southbound shoulder, then plunging giddily across the tar and spuming up more from the northbound one. The second time it does this—rolling toward them now, and coming at a pretty damned good clip—Justine thinks it may actually go into the ditch and turn over (“turn turtle,” they used to say back in the forties, when she and Elvira had been at Vassar), but the driver hauls it back on the road just before that can happen.

“Look out, that person’s drunk or something!” Justine says, alarmed. She pulls Elvira back, but they find their way blocked by the old wall with its dressing of raspberry bushes. The thorns catch at their slacks (thank goodness neither of us was wearing shorts, Justine will think later . . . when she has time to think) and pull out little puffs of cloth.

Justine is thinking she should put an arm around her friend’s shoulder and tumble them both over the thigh-high wall—do a backflip, just like in gym class all those years ago—but before she can make up her mind to do it, the blue van is by them, and at the moment it passes, it’s more or less on the road and not a danger to them.

Justine watches it go by in a muffled blare of rock music, her heart thumping heavily in her chest, the taste of something her body has dumped—adrenaline would be the most likely possibility—flat and metallic on her tongue. And halfway up the hill the little blue van once again lurches across the white line. The driver corrects the drift . . . no, overcorrects. Once more the blue van is on the righthand shoulder, spuming up yellow dust for fifty yards.