He stood up and as he ducked for the low doorway, he said, “Just follow orders and chances are by tomorrow afternoon you can be on your own way with a little dough to boot.”
He was gone. Sanson’s head was aching again. He rubbed the stubble on his chin.
“He is not a nice man, no?” Felicia said.
“He is not a nice man, yes,” answered Lane. “It is a bad thing that you should bring him here.”
“That shows what you know. It was all planned by them for you to be taken by the police for the murder yesterday. Children saw you sleeping here yesterday. In the market a thing is soon made known all over town. But for me you could be in prison for murder.” Her eyes flashed.
“I am truly sorry, chica.”
Her anger left and her smile was warm. “It is nothing.”
He pushed the bill toward her. “Here. This is yours.”
“No, it is much. It is more than four hundred pesos. You see, I know the value of dollares. What could I do with it? If I try to change it, the police will have me. Better you should give me some of your pesos if you wish to make a gift to me.”
The sun was beginning to climb a hot blue sky. She insisted that he hand over his shirt and underwear for cleaning. He kept the blanket over him as he slipped them off. She laughed at him and left with them in her hand. She came back in an hour to cook for them and to tell him that his things were drying in the sun. She heated the tin of water over the charcoal fire and brought him his dry clothes. His suit was badly wrinkled. He called to her and she came in. He handed her his pesos.
She took them without looking up into his face. She seemed suddenly shy.
“Muchas gracias, Felicia.”
“It is nothing, señor.”
He touched her cheek, slipped his hand under her chin and lifted her face until he could look into the deep wild gleam of the black eyes.
“Truly a daughter of many great kings,” he whispered.
She took his hand and kissed it. “Go with God, Señor Lane.”
After lunch he walked back to the garage where he had left the car. A small man with large sores at the corners of his mouth charged him ten pesos for the work on the car. To get to the bridge he had to circle the zocolo with its bandstand in the center, with its paths and rows of iron benches. Curio shops, churches and public buildings faced the square. As he turned the corner to head along the fourth and last side he saw two uniformed policemen armed with rifles standing on the walk. A crowd had gathered but they stayed well back from the policemen, staring avidly at the crumpled form on the walk. Others came running up to join the crowd.
As Sanson drove slowly by he saw the body of the stranger who had come to Felicia’s shack. His cheek rested in a spreading pool of blood and the blue flies buzzed in a cloud around his face. The skull was subtly distorted by the impact of slugs against the brain tissue. Sanson set his jaw, clamped his hands on the wheel and resisted the impulse to tramp hard on the gas.
At the Mexican end of the bridge he surrendered the tourist card which he had renewed three times during the two years in Mexico. He signed it in the presence of the guard and was waved on. In the middle of the bridge he paid the fifty-centavo toll.
At the American end a brisk man in khaki stepped forward and said, “American citizen? Where are you coming from? Please bring your luggage inside for customs inspection.”
Lane made himself grin. “I wish I could. I did too much celebrating the other night. Somebody broke into my car and took everything. All they left was the car itself.”
The man stared at him. “Have an accident?”
“Fell and hit my head.”
“Have you got proof of citizenship?”
Lane dug out his birth certificate. “This do?”
“Fine. Now open up the trunk, please.”
The man shone a flashlight around inside the trunk, then climbed into the car and looked down into the well, where the top folded.
He turned around. “I have the idea I ought to know that name. Lane Sanson.”
“There was a book, six years ago. Battalion Front.”
The customs man grinned. “Hell, yes! I read that thing five times. I was a dough, an old infantry paddlefoot, so it meant something to me.” He backed out of the car. “You haven’t written something since that I missed, have you?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay, that’s all the red tape, Mr. Sanson. Good luck to you.”
“Thanks.”
He drove down into the main street of Baker. Directly ahead and on the right he saw the Sage House, a three-story frame building painted a blinding white. The entrance was dark green. He parked in front and went in. People stared at him. He was conscious of his heavy beard, the badly rumpled suit.
“I’d like a room, please,” he said.
The clerk looked at him with obvious distaste. “I’ll have to see if there are any vacancies.”
Sanson slipped the Bank of America traveler’s checks out of the inside pocket of his wallet. “While you’re looking, tell your cashier I want some of these cashed. If you have a room, I want a barber sent up in thirty minutes. And I’ll want a portable typewriter, and my car put in your parking lot in the rear. I have no baggage. It was stolen over in Piedras Chicas. So I’ll pay you in advance.”
Under the impact of the flow of imperious demands the clerk’s dubious look faded away.
“As a matter of fact, I notice that we do have a pleasant room on the second floor front. It’ll come to—”
“I’ll take it. Send the boy up to open it up and wait for me while I cash my traveler’s checks.”
“Number 202, Mr.—ah—Sanson,” the clerk said, reading his signature as he wrote it. “If you’ll leave your keys here—”
“They’re in the car.”
“I’ll have a typewriter sent up, sir.”
“With a twenty weight bond, black record ribbon and glazed second sheets.”
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said, thoroughly quelled.
Once in the room, Lane threw his jacket on the bed. He stripped off his trousers and emptied the pockets onto the bureau top. He said to the boy, “Go over to the desk and write this down.” The bellhop shrugged and sat down. “Waist 32, inseam 33. That’s for the slacks. For the shirts, 16 collar, 34 sleeve. Buy me two pairs of slacks, gabardine if you can get them. Pale gray or natural. And two sport shirts, plain, white, short sleeves. Take my suit along and leave it to be cleaned. Fastest possible service. I want a doctor as soon as he can get up here and, exactly one hour from now, a good barber to give me a shave and haircut. Oh, yes. Get some underwear shorts and some dark socks, plain colors, three pairs, blue or green, size 12. This ought to cover it.”
The bellhop scribbled some more. “Three pair shorts?”
“That’ll do it. Any questions?”
“You give me a fifty. How high you want to go on the pants and shirts?”
“Fifteen for the slacks, three and a half for the shirts. With what you have left over get some fair rye. Bring up ice and soda.”
“This town is dry, sir.”
“It doesn’t have to be the best rye.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
The doctor arrived when the bathtub was almost empty. He inspected the cut, sighed, rebandaged it. “If you’d called me when it happened I could have put clamps in it and it wouldn’t have made as much of a scar as it’s going to now. Five dollars, please.”
When he came out of the bathroom the barber had spread newspapers and put a straight chair near the windows. Just as he finished the bellhop arrived, laden with packages. Lane checked the purchases and tipped the boy. Ten minutes later, as he was dressing, the typewriter arrived, the ice and soda following soon after. Lane sent the boy back for cigarettes.
When the door was shut and he was alone, Lane Sanson unwrapped the paper and rolled a sheet into the machine. He made a drink and set it near him. He lit a cigarette.
Across the top of the first sheet
he typed: A Daughter of Many Kings.
He sat for a long time, sipping the drink. When the glass was empty he began to work. The words came and they were the right words. After six years, the right words. He forgot time and place and fear.
5
THE DC-3 RUN BY THE FEEDER LINE TO BAKER was a tired old plane. Inside it had the smell and the flavor commonly associated with old smoking cars on marginal railroads. It had sagged and blundered its way through storm and hail, freezing cold and blistering heat. It had fishtailed into a thousand inferior runways. The original motors were five changes back. The airframe was like the uppers of a pair of shoes resoled once too often.
The bored pilot cut the corners off the standard approach pattern and slipped into the Baker strip. The tires leaped and squealed on the cracked concrete and he cursed it for being a weary recalcitrant old lady as he yanked it around and taxied it over to the cinderblock terminal building. The attendants came trotting across the baked cement. The little line prided itself on a ninety second turnaround. The poop sheet said two off and one on at Baker.
The pilot squatted on his haunches under the wing, a cigarette squeezed between his yellowed fingers. The copilot had gone into the building for the initialing of the manifest.
The pilot looked at the two passengers who got off. One of them was easy. Local cattleman, from the cream-colored Stetson right down to the hand-sewn boots. The other one was harder to figure. The pilot decided he wasn’t the sort you’d want to strike up any casual acquaintance with. Brute shoulders on him. Stocky bowed legs. Long arms. Damned if he wasn’t built like one of them apes. But it wasn’t an ape’s face. First you might think it was a face like a college professor’s. Those rimless glasses and that half-bald head. Some crackpot, probably. The zany little blue eyes beamed around at the world and the mouth was wide and wet-lipped, set in the kind of smile that made you think of the time the psychology class went over to the state farm and got a look at the real funny ones.
Only, the pilot decided, you wouldn’t want to laugh at this one. He wasn’t dressed right for the climate in that heavy dark wool suit, but you wouldn’t want to laugh at him.
The two suitcases were off-loaded and the new passenger was put aboard. The pilot flipped away his cigarette and went aboard. The steps were wheeled away. The hot motors caught immediately and he goosed it a few times. He trundled old Bertha down to the end of the runway. He glanced back. The funny-looking stranger was just getting into a cab. He looked like a big dark beetle, or like a hole in the sunlight
Inside the cab Christy leaned back. The trip from New York had been like walking across a dark room toward one of those little tinfoil wrapped chocolate buds on the far side of the room. You wanted it and you knew it was there and you were thinking about it so you didn’t see anything in the room or think of anything except feeling it between your fingers and picking it up and peeling off the tinfoil and putting it in your mouth. And Christy was never without chocolate buds in his side pocket. He took one out but already the climate had gotten to it. It pulped a little between his fingers. The expression on his face made him look like a child about to cry. All the others were soft, too. He dropped them out the window of the cab. His hands were very large, hairless and very white. The network of veins under the skin had a blue-purple tint.
He thought of Diana and he thought of George. He threw his head back and laughed. It was a high gasping, whinnying sound. George was done. You could see that coming for a long time. And so, when it looked right, you gave him a push. And the push just happened to shake Diana loose, right into his hands, after looking at her so long, and taking her lip, and seeing that contempt in her eyes.
Without realizing it, he had grasped the handle on the inside of the cab door. When he remembered how she had looked at him his jaw clamped shut and he gave an almost effortless twist of his big wrist. The screws tore out of the metal and the handle came out in his hand.
The driver gave a quick look back. “Hey, what the hell!”
“It was loose.”
The driver met his glance in the rear vision mirror. “Brother, that thing was on there solid and it’ll cost me at least three bucks to get it fixed.”
Christy hunched forward. He put his hand casually on the driver’s shoulder. He smiled wetly. “I said, friend, it was loose.”
“Watch whacha doin’!” the driver said shrilly.
“It was loose.”
“Okay, okay. It was loose. Leggo! Are you nuts?”
Christy leaned back and laughed again. The gutless human race. Always ready to start something and always fast to back down. The best would be George. He had decided to save that until last. Maybe at the last minute George would find out why everything was going wrong lately. It was good to think of that last minute. He knew how he’d do it. Knock George out and take him down to the boat and wire a couple of cinderblocks to his ankles. Take the boat out and sit and eat chocolates until George came around. Then say, nice and easy, that it was time George joined a lot of his old buddies.
He’d hoist him over the side, hold him there with his face above water and the cinderblocks pulling hard on his legs, and listen to George beg and promise and scream and slobber. Watch his eyes go mad. Hold him there until there wasn’t any man left, just a struggling animal. Hold him and think of him and Diana together and then spit in his face and let go. It would be night and the white face would be yanked down out of sight as though something from underneath had grabbed it. Maybe bubbles would come up like with the others. Then George would be down there, doing a dance in the river current, dancing right along in the chorus with all the guys who’d tried to cut a piece of the big pie and had run into Christy instead.
The cab pulled up in front of the Sage House. Christy paid him the buck and a half rate, tipped him a solemn dime, and carried his bag inside.
“You got a reservation for me,” he said. “A. Christy.”
“Yes, Mr. Christy.”
He had hurried all the way and now he wanted to go slow. Nice and slow.
“There’s a friend of mine here, I think. Miss Saybree. Is she in?”
“I believe she’s in her room. Three eighteen, sir. Shall I phone her?”
“Skip it. I’ll surprise her.”
Nice and slow and easy. The running was over. The girl was smart. She knew what was coming, but she hadn’t tried to run out on it.
He barely noticed the room they gave him. When he was alone he stretched until the great shoulders popped and crackled. This was a hell of a long way from the carny, the garish midway, the thronging marks paying their two bits to see the Mighty Christy drive spikes with his fists, bend crowbars across his shoulders, twist horseshoes until they broke in his hands. George had seen him in the carny and seen his possibilities and had jumped in with smart expensive lawyers when there was that trouble about the girl. Temporary insanity, they had called it, and had cleared him, and from then on he’d done everything George said. Up until a year ago.
He sat on the bed and wished he had some chocolate and thought about Diana. When you want something bad enough and long enough, you get it.
When the thickness in his throat and the flame behind his eyes were too much to bear, he left the room and went up the stairs to the third floor. He passed a second-floor room where a typewriter rattled busily.
He rattled his fingernails on the door panel of Room 318.
“Who is it?”
“An old pal, sweetness.”
She opened the door. He grinned at her. He’d almost forgotten what a very classy dish she was. She was pale and she spoke without moving her lips.
“Come on in, Christy.” She walked away from him. She walked as though she were on eggs and if she stepped too hard they’d break.
He shut the door. She had gone to sit in a straight chair. She sat with her ankles and knees together, her hands folded in her lap, like a new girl at school.
Christy sat on the bed and smiled at her. “George is sore,” he sa
id.
“I didn’t want to do this in the first place,” she snapped.
“George figured nobody would be looking for you. Anyway, he wanted you out of town.”
“Why?” she asked, white-lipped.
“You’ve moved. You aren’t living there any more. He had your stuff packed up and put in storage. You can get the claim check from him.”
“Is—is anyone—”
“You ever meet old Bill Duneen? The horse player? He died of a stroke last year. Now. George and Bill were great pals. George feels a sort of obligation to look out for Bill’s daughter. Cute kid. Nineteen, I’d say. You could call her a kind of protégé. Did I get the right word?”
It surprised him that she smiled… “If that’s the case, then I can get out of here. If you don’t mind, I have to pack now.”
Christy picked his teeth with a blunt thumbnail. “Sweetness, it ain’t quite that easy. George said to me, he said, Christy, you and Diana are two of the best friends I got. I’d be real hurt if you two didn’t team up.”
“He said no such thing!”
“I’ve always had a real yen for you, sweetness. I’d take it bad if you tried to run out. If you ran out, I’d have to go up to that jerk town you come from and see how those kid sisters of yours look. What’s the name of it? Oneonta?”
“You—you dirty—”
“Ah, ah, ah! No bad words, sweetness. George just happened to mention to me where you come from. He wants us to get along.”
He smiled placidly and watched the spirit slowly drain out of her. Her mouth went lax and she lowered her head.
“How come,” he said, “you let some guy take the roll?”
Her head snapped up and her eyes narrowed. “How would you know it was some guy? Why not two or three, or even a woman?”
He knew he’d said the wrong thing. It confused him. When he was so confused he got a dull ache at the crown of his head. It made him angry.
“George told me he thought it was a guy.”
“George never guesses at anything.”
He shrugged. “Maybe he knew.”
She smiled at him and he didn’t like her smile. “Christy, it wouldn’t be possible that you’re crossing George up? I never thought of that before. He trusts you. Maybe he’s wrong.”
Border Town Girl Page 3
