Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  “Let’s have a look at your ticket.”

  “What for?”

  “Let’s see it,” coldly.

  Lennox got the pasteboard from his pocket, and the driver took it out of his nerveless fingers. He scanned it, his eyes narrowing. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “This is only valid to Gila River, and we passed through there two hours ago. You’re riding on an expired pass.”

  He could not think of anything to say. What was there to say? He hadn’t considered the possibility of the ticket being good only to one of the small towns along the bus route; he had been irrationally sure that the old man would be going to one of the larger border cities to the south, that that was where the daughter who had sent him the money would be living. The destination on the pasteboard had meant nothing to him originally, and he remembered only vaguely passing through Gila River; the name had sparked no recognition at that time. He stood there sweating, looking at the driver’s shirt front, trying to think of something to do or say but not coming up with anything at all.

  “You owe me four-eighty,” the driver said. “That’s the fare one way from Gila River to Troy Springs.”

  “I don’t ... have four-eighty,” Lennox said woodenly.

  “That’s what I figured, too. You’re nothing but a damned vag, and you’re off my bus as of right now.”

  “Listen,” Lennox said, “listen, you can’t leave me here ...”

  “The hell I can’t,” the driver told him. “You’re left, guy.”

  He turned abruptly and went to the café door, calling out to the passengers inside that they would be leaving now. He came back and got in behind the wheel, ignoring Lennox, and after a moment the other passengers filed out and entered the bus. The homely girl with the heat-chafed thighs looked at Lennox with a curious, mild hunger, but she did not say anything to him.

  He stood there like a fool, feeling helpless, holding the overnight bag against his right leg. The homely girl pressed her face to the window glass and looked down at him with sad eyes. The bus began to move away, its diesel engine shattering the hot, dead stillness, and Lennox watched it swing around and start down the access road, raising clouds of dry, acrid dust. Sunlight gleamed feverishly off the silver metal of its body as it slowed and made the turn south, a sluggish armored sowbug disappearing along the curve of the highway. What now? he thought. What am I going to do now?

  He heard movement behind him, and when he turned he saw that the balding man who had been behind the café counter had come outside. The balding man walked over beside Lennox and took a cigarette from the pocket of his white shirt and set it between his thick lips without lighting it. After a moment he said, “Put you off the bus, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come?”

  “I was riding on an expired ticket.”

  “These bus drivers can be bastards sometimes,” the balding man said. “This is a hell of a place to strand a guy.”

  “A hell of a place,” Lennox agreed dully.

  The balding man studied him closely without appearing to do so. The heat was thick around the two of them, and from out of the barren plain to the east, something made a fluttering sound. Finally the balding man said, “You a little strapped for money, are you?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Down on your luck or on the run?”

  Lennox started. “What?”

  “Cops looking for you?” the balding man asked matter-of-factly.

  “No,” he lied. “No.”

  “Were you heading any place special on that bus?”

  “Just ... drifting.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I got some work if you could use it.”

  Lennox had been looking out over the desert, at the shimmering jagged floor of it, at the gaunt skeletal range rising on the horizon to the south, at the vast brittle emptiness lying motionless under the canopy of heat. He turned his attention to the balding man again and passed a hand across his mouth. “What kind of work?”

  “This and that. A little painting, a little stock reshuffling, a little fixing up.”

  “Here?”

  “That’s right. I can’t pay much—a few bucks—but you’ll eat for three-four days and you can sleep on a cot in the storeroom. And you’ll be able to buy another bus ticket out when you’re through.”

  The pain was omnipresent in Lennox’s stomach, gnawing, gnawing. He did not have to consider the offer at all. “All right,” he said.

  The balding man smiled briefly. “My name’s Perrins, Al Perrins.” He kept his hands at his sides.

  “Mine’s Delaney,” Lennox said.

  “Okay, Delaney. How about a couple of burgers? You can start work afterward.”

  Lennox made a dry clearing noise in his throat. His legs felt even weaker now, but it was the weakness of sudden relief. “Sounds good.”

  “The food ain’t,” Perrins said, and laughed. “But it’ll fill your belly. Come on.”

  They turned and walked slowly inside the café. Lennox was thinking about the burgers Perrins had promised, and he felt nauseous with his hunger; he wondered if he would be able to keep any of the food down.

  He was able to—most of it, anyway.

  Five

  When the young bright-face, Forester, finished his morning patrol and returned to the county sheriff’s substation in Cuenca Seco, Andy Brackeen—the resident deputy-in-charge-went down to Sullivan’s Bar to drink his lunch.

  It had been a long morning, and Brackeen was badly hungover and very thirsty. He had gotten into a pointless argument with his wife, Marge, the night before and had driven over to Kehoe City in a huff; there had been a poker game in the back room of Indian Charley’s, and he had lost heavily and drunk too damned much gin in the bargain. He still could not remember driving home, and that was very bad; he was hanging onto his job by a thread now, and the last stroke of the scissors would be a tag by one of the Highway Patrol units or cruising county cars for drunk driving in a county vehicle. He was a goddamned fool for getting into the gin like that; he couldn’t handle gin, he had never been able to handle gin. It did things to his mind, blacked him out so that he could not recall what he had done after a certain point in the evening. But if he stayed with the beer, he was all right. He could drink beer with the best of them, and he was always in full control of his faculties; things were just fine if he stayed with the beer.

  Brackeen had no illusions about himself. He knew what he was and why he was what he was. There had been a time when that knowledge had been heavy and consumptive within him, but that had been sixteen years ago, in another world named San Francisco—that had been before the desert and the beer, before Marge. Now the perception was only a dimly glowing ember resting on the edge of his soul.

  He was a big man, thick-chested, and he had in his youth fought amateur bouts in the heavyweight class, almost but not quite qualifying for the Golden Gloves; but the once-powerful musculature of his body was now overlaid with a soft cushion of fat, and his belly swayed liquidly beneath his dark khaki uniform shirt, partially concealing the buckle of his Sam Browne belt, brushing across the checked grip of the .357 Colt Python Magnum on his right hip. Each of his forty-one years was grooved for all to see on the sun-blackened surface of his face, as the elements had carved the centuries on the desert landscape he had made his home more than fourteen years before. Perpetually damp black hair, speckled with gray and pure white, was thickly visible beneath a deep-crowned white Stetson; gray eyes, red-rimmed and flatly expressionless, seemed as fixed as bright marbles solidified in lucite.

  He was not particularly well-liked in the town of Cuenca Seco, but neither was he hated nor feared; he was, for the most part, simply tolerated and ignored. As he moved now along the heat-waved sidewalk toward Sullivan’s Bar, walking slowly because of the throbbing ache in his temples and because of the hot sun, he passed townspeople whom he knew—but there were no exchanges of greeting, no nods of recognition. He walked alone on the busy street, and it
was the way Brackeen had come to want it; he could live with himself only as long as he was able to lock the secret of his disintegration as a man deep within, and he knew that friendships, liaisons, often brought probings which, if well-meaning, could still be ultimately destructive. He could never talk about it. He had never told anyone about it, not even Marge, even though she might have understood.

  Sullivan’s Bar was crowded with lunch trade, and Brackeen’s eyes narrowed into thin slits at the sudden change in light as he entered. There was an air-conditioning unit behind the simulated kegs-and-plank bar, and the cool air was a salve on his pulsing temples, the feverish skin of his face. He moved across the wooden floor, up to the bar, and the men there made room for him without ceasing conversation, without looking at him, without acknowledging his presence in any way.

  Sullivan came down immediately, no smile on his freckled Irish countenance. Brackeen said, “Mighty hot,” the way he did every day when he came in, and took off his hat and put it on the bar face. He passed one of his big, knotted hands through his damp hair.

  Sullivan said, “Yeah,” ritualistically.

  “Draw a pint, will you, Sully?”

  “Sure.”

  “And put a Poor Boy in, I guess.”

  Sullivan went away and drew the beer and placed one of the foil-wrapped, ready-made sandwiches into the miniature electric oven on the back bar. He was an old-fashioned publican, and he scraped the foaming head off the glass of beer with a wooden spatula before serving it.

  Brackeen wrapped both hands around the cold-beaded stein, lifted it, his eyes closing in anticipation. He drank in long, convulsive swallows, filling his mouth with the chill effervescence before letting it flow tingling through the burning passage of his throat and into the unsettled emptiness of his stomach.

  The glass was empty. He put it down on the bar and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. Jesus, but he had needed that! And the next one, too. He didn’t really want the Poor Boy at all, but he knew that when he had a hangover as bad as this one, he had to have something solid on his stomach; if not, he would conclude his tour at five o’clock by puking up stale beer, that was what had happened the last time he hadn’t eaten with hell going.

  Brackeen looked for Sullivan and caught his eye, lifting the empty stein. When it had been refilled, he drank more slowly, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. What he saw did not disturb him much. If he had been able, as a kid fresh out of the Police Academy, to look twenty years into the future and see himself as he was today, he would have been appalled at the vision; but as a kid, he had had ideals, dreams, he had had a lot of things that he no longer possessed. The fact that he had become a slob offended him not at all.

  He ate the Poor Boy slowly, in mincing bites washed down with a third stein of draught. The beer was bringing him out of it, as it usually did. He called to Sullivan for a fourth draw, and while he waited for it he decided that he was strong enough to have a cigarette; he couldn’t touch them in the mornings after a night like he’d had in Kehoe City.

  He smoked two cigarettes, one each with the fourth and the fifth glasses of beer, and he was feeling straight with himself again, feeling pretty good. The headache had abated, and his gut was not giving him any more trouble. But it was time to get back, because Forester took his lunch at one-thirty and Forester had big eyes and a bigger mouth, being a bright-face. Brackeen didn’t want to antagonize Forester, you had to pamper these young shits with their new-found authority, because if they went sour on you they could make a lot of trouble. And Forester had never made a secret of the fact that he disliked—disapproved of—Brackeen.

  He thought briefly about taking a couple of cans of beer back to the substation with him—Forester was going on patrol again, after his lunch—but he shelved that idea immediately. He had almost gotten caught with a half-quart in his hand that afternoon two months ago, when the county sheriff, Lydell, had come in unannounced. He had learned his lesson from that; there was no point in tempting fate, no percentage in raising already poor odds. He would be able to make it through the day now, with these five beers under his belt—and if he did begin hurting a little later on, maybe he could slip out for a couple of minutes and get back here for a bracer or two, as long as things remained quiet.

  He eased off the stool and put his hat back on, adjusting the Magnum on his hip. “See you later, Sully,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Brackeen smiled loosely and went out into the sweltering afternoon without touching his wallet—the final segment of the bitter ritual he and Sullivan enacted almost every day.

  Six

  Slowly, inexorably, the desert sun traversed its ardent path across the smoky blue heavens. When it reached the lip of the western horizon, it hung there for long minutes as if preparing itself for the descent, radiating, setting red-gold fire to the sky around it. Then, abruptly, it plunged, deepening the red haze into burnished brass, adding salmon and pink threads to the intricate color scheme of a desert sunset. The horizon swallowed it hungrily, and the empyrean modulated to blue-gray, to slate, to expanding black as the shining globe vanished completely.

  The first papery whispers of the night wind stirred the mesquite, the bright gold flowers of the rabbit bush, and nocturnal animals—badgers, foxes, peccaries, coyotes, hooded skunks— ventured tentatively from their lairs in search of food and water. Bats and horned owls filled the rapidly cooling air with the flutter of wings.

  Darkness hooded the land in a black cloak, and the wind grew chill as the sharp and enigmatic reversal of desert temperature manifested itself. A pale gold moon appeared suddenly in the star-pricked velvet of the sky, as if it had been launched from some immense catapult, casting ghostly white shine across the silent landscape.

  Night was full-born.

  Another day had perished into infinity.

  The Second Day...

  One

  I stand on the porch, supporting myself with my left hand on the stucco wall, and with my right I keep slapping the wood paneling of the door. Open up in there, damn you, I know you’re in there, Phyllis. Open this goddamn door!

  And the door opens and she looks out at me with that patronizing, superior expression curling her soft mouth—how could I ever have loved her, how could I ever have thought she was beautiful? Her silver-streaked blond hair is freshly coiffed, even though it is past ten o’clock at night; and the floor-length blue peignoir she wears has fur at the throat and on the sleeves. I know it is expensive, I have never seen it before, she bought it with my money—and she keeps looking at me that way, her eyes reducing me to a pile of soft odorous shit and I feel the rage burning down low in my groin, the flames of it already fanned by the liquor I’ve drunk since the court hearing.

  I want to hit her. I want to slap that look away. I’ve never hit her before—any woman before—but God! I want to hit her now...

  “Oh, it’s you,” she says with clear distaste. “I might have known it. What do you want, Jack?”

  “Want to talk to you.”

  “There’s nothing more to be said.”

  “Goddamn right there is, goddamn right!”

  “You’re drunk,” she says, and starts to close the door.

  I lean away from the wall and wedge my shoulder against the wood. She frowns, nothing more. A sculpture fashioned of glacial ice. I push the door wide, moving her backward, and stagger inside, near falling, catching myself on the table in the hall, turning. She has gone out of focus. I shake my head and rub splayed fingers over my face, the nails digging harshly into the skin, and she shimmers, three of her into two into one.

  “You’re drunk,” she says again.

  “Who has a better right to be drunk, you tell me that.”

  “Jack, I don’t want you in my house. Now say what you came to say and get out.”

  “Your house! You bitch, your house!”

  “That’s right. You heard what the judge said, didn’t you?”

&nbs
p; So sweet, so contemptuous, and I think of all the nights with her lying beneath me, warm, whispering, and inside nothing, despising me, playing out a not particularly demanding role while I burst in every way with love for her.

  “It’s my house!” I shout at her. “I built this goddamn house with my money!”

  “Jack, what’s the point of going over it again and again? It’s settled now. We’re divorced, the judge made a fair evaluation—”

  “Fair! Oh my God, fair! He gave you everything, he gave you my guts, he made me a goddamn indentured servant!”

  “You’re being melodramatic, Jack,” she says with that cold, empty rationality. “You always were childishly ineffective under stress.”

  “You frigging slut!”

  “Jack, Jack, I’ve heard all the words before and they don’t mean anything to me. Now please, won’t you leave? If you don’t, I’ll have to call the police, and I really don’t want to do that. Go home and go to bed. You shouldn’t drink, either, you know.”

  I grow cunning. I take a step forward, with the room tilting slightly, and I point a finger at her as if it is the blade of a dagger, aiming squarely between the heavy white mounds of her breasts. “I’m not going to pay the alimony, Phyllis,” I say softly, and I smile at her with the only side of my mouth which seems to respond.

  “Oh, don’t be absurd.”

  “I’m not going to pay it.”

  “If you don’t, you’ll go to jail.”

  “They have to catch me first.”

  “And just what is that supposed to imply?”

  “What the hell do you think it implies, huh? I’m leaving town, I’m getting out of this state, I’m going as far away from you as I can go.”

  “I don’t believe you. You won’t quit your job, your precious job. Being Humber Realty’s star salesman has always been your one shining ambition.”