by Roy Huggins
Larson moved abruptly and disappeared into the kitchen. He brought out the small brown bottle on a handkerchief and showed it to her. He said nothing at all.
The girl nodded distractedly. “Yes,” she cried, “in that! White, like salt!” Larson turned his head slowly toward Blake, and the muscles along his jaw pulled tight. “Friend, you can go now,” he said thinly. “Sorry I’m not able to give you an oak-towel rubdown. But I’ll be seeing you again. Real soon.”
KATHY’S door was locked. Blake had taken a cab to the Château Michel and had tried to pace the floor of the five-by-five elevator as it ground slowly upward. Now the door was locked and no one was answering to the sound of his knuckles against the wood. He rapped once more, and again more loudly as the silence deepened. The stillness had taken on the quality of an unutterable answer. He went away from the door and found the manager’s apartment, and the manager listened and watched Blake’s tightlipped face and gave him a key without questioning.
The door opened into darkness. There was hope in that. He found a floor lamp and turned on light and the hope faded. The coat she had worn that night lay over the sofa. He walked slowly to the kitchen and put his thumb against the switch. The sterile whiteness of the room leaped at him. It was withdrawn, neutral and empty. He walked to the bedroom, hurrying now, and came out again a moment later with a wide and slightly idiotic grin across his face. He stood in the middle of the room for a moment and looked around, then walked to the door and opened it.
Kathy was there. Cold bright mist clung to her hair. Her eyes were dark and a little swollen, and a key was ready in her hand. She straightened slowly and said nothing. The peach-blow complexion grew suddenly warmer, and the walked inside and closed the door.
“Thanks,” Blake said. “The least I expected was a bloodcurdling scream.
“I thought of it,” she answered, and looked at him steadily out of starry, cold eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“Your sister-in-law seems to have had a supply of cyanide. I knocked first, but I didn’t think that proved anything.”
What he had said meant something to Kathy. Her eyes seemed to darken and she looked beyond him and whispered, “She tried . . . to poison me.”
“How?”
“The milk. When I came home tonight I—I smelled it to see if it was still sweet.”
“And it smelled like bitter almonds.”
“It smelled strange. I never smelled a bitter almond.”
“Come to think of it, neither have I. And now go ahead—tell me you threw it out and rinsed the glass.” The tone was resigned, not bitter.
“Ye-es. I didn’t know! Is it . . . important?”
“I think it was our last hope, angel.
It means Jane got away with it. I suppose it was inevitable that she would. When you’re up against Jane, you’re faced with all the precision efficiency and built-in contempt of a slot machine.” And then he repeated, almost to himself and with a small note of wonder, “She got away with it.”
Kathy walked to the far side of the room. It was dark there and a window was open to the night. Blake knew what was coming. After a while she asked what he had to do with all this, and the tone seemed to say that in his answer she expected to find the last increment of iniquity on which her strength must break.
He went over to the window beside her and looked down into a dark garden below that he hadn’t known was there.
He didn’t want to tell her what had brought him to the Château Michel for a while yet. But there was nothing now that would let him put it off.
He said, “There’s one thing I’d like to settle first. I can’t seem to remember what kind of carpet slippers they were that I saw last night.”
“What kind do you like?” Her voice was flat.
Blake took her hands in his. Her hands were cold, and Blake’s folded over them warmly and tightened, and Kathy looked up at him out of dark and steady and cool eyes and said nothing. He lifted her chin, and she shook her head then and whispered, “No.” Her lips were apart and her eyes questioned him, waiting. He leaned forward and kissed the warm comer of her mouth. She didn’t move and her lips remained open. He kissed the other corner and her mouth trembled ever so slightly and then closed, and her lips were warm and soft against his.
THE road was an endless slate, straight and smooth, with a chalk mark drawn down its middle, and high, wind-patterned dunes rolling away from it on either side with a kind of sterile majesty. The thrusting cold of the desert night had kept her wakeful and alert, but now the sun was reaching out over the hills with soft fingers, and her eyes were straining upward into darkness.
Yuma lay just over there where the sun was. Coffee and something to eat, and she would feel fine again. She could drive on to Nogales, where freedom waited for her. Nogales lay on the border, half in Sonora and half in Arizona. Jane knew only that, but that was enough. There it should be simple to cross over without too thorough an inspection, perhaps with none at all.
The rolling sand gave way to great fiat stretches of mesquite and grease-wood, with here and there a lonely paloverde. She crossed the all-American Canal, brown and motionless, going nowhere; then, in the distance, the tall cottonwoods and clumped greenery that marked the Colorado. A few miles farther the road dipped and turned eastward, and before her stretched a long narrow building with an overhanging roof.
A man in a brown uniform signaled her to come in alongside. She slowed abruptly, trying to make it out. A sign on the building caught her eye and then blurred, but she had seen a word: INSPECTION. Panic and confusion swept over her and she drove her foot against the brake. A horn blasted behind her. A great Diesel truck was roaring down upon her. She threw the gear into second and the car rolled up to the building where the man in the uniform wailed in puzzled irritation.
He had a number, bloodless skin and opaque gray eyes. He leaned down and gave Jane a smile that was just a part of his job, like the drab and dusty uniform. He said, “I was scared that truck was going to stack you right up. Trucks don’t have to stop, you know.”
Jane pulled her lips back in an empty smile, her mind still caught in a quick-freeze of helplessness.
“I didn’t know any cars had to stop,” she said with a labored gaiety. “After all, isn’t this still the U.S.A.?”
His set grimace softened and widened, and he said, “You bet it is. This here’s only a fruit inspection. A quick look through your luggage and you’re on your way.” He turned the door handle. “All the bags right there in back?”
“Wait!” Jane gripped the sill of the door in desperate panic and tried to keep the terror out of her voice. “I—I don’t want my bags looked at. I’m in a dreadful hurry. I’ve got to be in Phoenix. I——”
“Look, lady. You’re wasting good time. How long does it take to open a bag, anyways?” He opened the door and Jane pushed him back and stumbled out of the car. She slammed it behind her and stood stiff and silent, and the man said, “What in—Say, what’s the trouble, lady?”
She smiled brightly and put a hand on his arm gently. She said with soft confidence, “I’ve got a silly—but awfully important—reason for not wanting my bags opened.”
“Sorry, miss.”
Jane looked around. There were no other cars, and from an office at the end of the shed came a sound of typing. She made a playfully conspiratorial gesture and opened her purse. She took out a twenty-dollar bill and folded it so the denomination showed and held it between her fingers. “I swear,” she whispered, “that I don’t have any fruit in the car. May I go through?”
The man glanced down at the bill. “That could cost me my job.”
“I can’t afford any more; I’d have to let you look after all.”
“You on the level? Absolutely no fruit?”
“I swear it!”
He looked casually in the direction of the office and palmed the folded bill. He opened the car door and Jane stepped in and closed it. He drawled, “According to the license, you’re from L.
A. Taking the long way to Phoenix, ain’t you?”
Jane didn’t answer. She started the car and roared away in an agony of grinding gears, up the bill and across the bridge, and down the gutted, dusty road into Yuma.
THE sun was behind her when she drove wearily into Tucson, but its gathered energy lay over the baked land like a thick, dry web. She pulled up onto the shaded island in the white glare of a filling station and put her head against the wheel for a moment and closed her eyes. She raised her head, and the attendant, a jowled man with matted hair, was walking from the shadowed recesses of a repair shed, wiping his hands on an oily rag, Jane told him to fill it up and asked, “How do I get to Nogales?” He told her in a few slow words and stepped to the pump. When he was finished and washing the grime from the windshield she said, “If you drive over into Mexico, do they take very long with the inspection?”
“Nope. They don’t inspect.”
“But I have bags in my car.”
“They don’t care.”
“But . . . what’s to prevent me from just driving right on down to Mexico City?”
“Nothing. Except there aren’t any roads.”
“Oh. You mean you couldn’t get to Mexico City from Nogales?”
“You couldn’t get anywhere from Nogales, ma’am . . . That’ll be two-eighty,” When he brought the change, Jane said, “You can drive to Mexico City, can’t you? From somewhere?”
“From Laredo, Texas. That’s the only way I know of.”
“Laredo, Texas. How . . . far would that be?”
“Somewhere around a thousand miles. Want me to look it up?”
“No. No, thanks very much.”
So Jane bought a vacuum bottle and filled it with coffee and drove on. At twilight she pulled to the side of the road and stepped out. The ground slipped and righted itself, and she fell against the side of the car. She pushed back and breathed slowly, and in a little while she could straighten and stand. She reached into the front and took hold of the seat and pulled. The seat came forward and she wrestled it out of the car. Beneath the sheet-metal seat rest was all the space she would need. Now it contained oily rags, grease-caked bolts and a tire iron. She took them out and carefully wiped her hands. She stepped out to the center of the road and looked down its endless reach in both directions. She could see nothing coming. She hurried now, pulling the brown bag from the car, pulling the straps from it, tearing it open and stuffing the packages of money into the space under the seat rest until there were only a few packages left in the bag. These she threw on the floor in back; she would exchange them for Mexican money at the border.
She stiffened suddenly, bent in a grotesque gesture of hiding. A car was coming, the sound suddenly loud and near. She hurled the empty bag behind her, threw the oily rags over the packages that were visible, scrabbled in the sand and gravel for the bolts, and poured them over the rags. The car was applying its brakes now, pulling up behind her.
She picked up the tire iron and a voice said, “Havin’ trouble?”
Jane turned slowly and looked back. A breeze had risen from the east and it played on her hot wet brow and cooled it, and for a moment she felt secure.
“I—I had to change a tire. All finished now.”
The man was still in his car, just a round pale blur of face and a bare arm. “Sure you’re all right then? This is no place to get stuck.”
“Fine, thanks. Thanks just the same.” She laid the tire iron across the rage. It looked fine. She looked up and the man was getting out of the car. She could see a gleam of white teeth. He was a large man in a brown shirt and tight pants.
He was saying, “Guess the least a Texan can do is help you put that seat back in.”
He was around at the open side of the car now, the seat lying on the ground between them. The smile was eager and friendly, and he looked at her for a moment, then reached down and picked up the seat. He lifted it through the door and dropped it onto the rest. He pushed it back and tried to settle it, but there was something wrong. It wasn’t falling into place. He looked over his shoulder.
“You got too much stuff under there.”
“No! It—it always sits that way. It’s warped or something.” Her voice had broken slightly and she pushed past him and slid over under the wheel. Her weight forced the seat back and it slipped and made a sharp little sound.
The man was grinning with frank amusement now, “Seems to be okay now, huh?”
Jane nodded helplessly. She was too exhausted to have to take this. She felt that she would be sick in a moment or that she would scream. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t fair!
And then the man was whistling, an incredulous whistle, and he was reaching down and picking up one of the packages of fifty-dollar bills Jane had thrown on the floor in back. He looked at it a moment and raised his eyes slowly. Jane’s head was cocked at an absurd and painful angle, and there was nothing she could do. She stared out at him in the thickening dark, realizing with a cool and distant clarity that this was no accident, but an affirmation of meaninglessness, the final idiocy, the ultimate violence.
The man was picking up the rest of the money. He said, “Now I know why you were so nervous. Quite a wad just to be kicking around!”
She didn’t answer. And then she knew that she didn’t have to. A car was coming toward them. She pulled on her lights. The man said casually, “Where do you want this?”
Jane took it and pushed it into her purse. She smiled and said, “It fell out of here when I took the seat out. Thank you for the help.”
The approaching car was slowing now. The man stepped back and Jane started the car and drove off without abutting the door. It slammed shut and she pushed the accelerator to the floor and the car leaped forward with a bitter and complaining roar. The man behind her didn’t try to follow.
It was daylight when she drove slowly into Laredo. It was like any other border town, hot, clinging low to the ground, a long street of money exchanges, tourist traps and shops where fly-harassed meat hung in the sun. Jane found the office of the Mexican consul.
A pale little girl with onyx eyes and blue-black hair sat at a desk and smiled up at her. Jane told her she wanted to drive to Mexico City to meet her husband. The girl wanted to know, in a polite way, how long she expected to stay. Jane said, “A few months,” and the little girl asked more questions and made out a card. She took it into another room, came out in a few moments, handed it to Jane and said, “A pleasant trip.”
In a little clapboard office that looked like a Chinese lottery, Jane changed her money into larger-denomination pesos. She drove down the street and onto the bridge, paid her toll, and rolled across the dry river to where the Mexican customs officials waited for her.
There were two on duty, young, with eyes and hair like the girl in the consul’s office, and with the same soft voices. But they were men, and Jane felt suddenly confident. One of them asked where she was going, and Jane showed him the card. He nodded and asked her to drive over to the right where her bags could be stamped. He didn’t say “inspected,” just “stamped.” But they were inspected. Neatly, with a note of apology, and no further than what was visible. They did not even open the glove compartment. In a few moments it was over and they were saying, “You may pass” and “Happy journey” and Jane was driving on.
She was free. The sound of the car sang it to her; it echoed in the heavy beat of her heart; it danced in the bright miasma that hung before her eyes. She smiled slowly, and the car picked up speed and raced on down the long Pan American Highway.
THE desk clerk at Mexico City’s Hotel Reforma had a smile that warmed, but never intruded, flattered yet remained impeccably impersonal. He gave Jane the smile, and nodded as she strode through the lobby. He watched her step into the elevator and thought about her after the doors had closed. When she had first arrived at the hotel, alone, he had come to a conclusion about her of which he was now frantically ashamed. But he had found no other answer to why one so very lovely sh
ould be so much alone, although he had pondered this enigma with a melancholy appetence for several weeks now.
Jane stepped out of the elevator into the hall. It was shadowed and cool and very much her own. She smiled to herself. She was infinitely happy. She felt her happiness as an energy and a force, as a triumph and a confirmation. She had discovered a terrible, sweet secret that only the courageous and the self-chosen knew: that the touchstone of value was in her own being and nowhere else. It had lifted her above the needs and fears of the faceless ruck; it had shown her a new dimension of freedom.
She was at her door now, and she stopped and brought out her key. She lowered the key and took hold of the knob. The door opened slowly under her hand, and an odor of burning tobacco came from the room. The shades were drawn against the bright sun and she stood irresolutely, seeing nothing, not moving.
A voice said, “Come on in, Mrs. Palmer . . . excuse me . . . Miss Petry, according to the register.”
She stood where she was, trying to think, trying to place the voice. She had heard it before. She knew it well. But her mind had rolled into a tight suspension, and she could not move.
The voice came again, gently, “No one likes to walk into a dark room. Let’s have some light.” There was a sound of movement, and light flooded the room, shining in a soft diffusion from behind the frosted-glass pilasters. He came toward her now and drew her into the room and closed the door. He walked with her to the ice-blue love seat and said, “Sit down, Jane. Nice place you have here. Nice furniture. What kind is it?” He sat down across from her and picked up his cigarette from a tray.
Jane smiled slowly, feeling only a mute irritation now at her own fright and fleeting helplessness. “It’s bleached narra wood,” she said. He blew a thin veil of smoke at the carpet. “It’s a twist-weave carpet,” she added. “Are you thinking of moving in?”
“After a fashion.”
“Oh?”
“I’d like, say, half of the bonanza you brought down here with you.”
“Bonanza, Mr.—What was your name?”
