Could she speak? Could someone in whatever sort of experience this was utter sentences, audible ordinary human sentences? Could you talk to the people you met in hallucinations, and would they answer back?
He opened his mouth. "I have to"-to get out, he was going to say, but he was already back in the stalled car. A soggy lump that had once been two potato chips lay on his tongue.
What was the worst thing you've ever done?
The maps seemed to show that he was only a few miles from Valdosta. He drove unthinkingly on, not daring to look at the child and therefore not knowing if she were awake or sleeping, but feeling her eyes on him nonetheless. Eventually he passed a sign which informed him that he was ten miles from the Friendliest City in the South.
It looked like any southern town: a little industry on the way in, machine shops and die-stampers, surreal groups of corrugated metal huts under arc lights, yards littered with cannibalized trucks; further in, wooden houses in need of paint, groups of black men standing on corners, their faces alike in the dark; new roads went scarring through the land, then ended abruptly, weeds already encroaching; in the town proper, the teenagers patrolling endlessly, vacantly in their old cars.
He passed a low building, incongruously new, a sign of the New South, with a sign reading PALMETTO MOTOR-IN; he reversed down the street back to the building.
A girl with upswept lacquered hair and candy-pink lipstick gave him a meaningless, dead smile and a room with twin beds "for myself and my daughter." In the register he wrote: Lamar Burgess, 155 Ridge Road, Stonington, Conn. After he handed her a night's payment in cash, she gave him a key.
Their cubicle contained two single beds, an iron-textured brown carpet and lime-green walls, two pictures-a kitten tilting its head, an Indian looking into a leafy gorge from a clifftop-a television set, a door into a blue-tiled bathroom. He sat on the toilet seat while the girl undressed and got into bed.
When he peeked out to check on her, she was lying beneath a sheet with her face to the wall. Her clothes were scattered on the floor, a nearly empty bag of potato chips lay beside her. He ducked back into the bathroom, stripped and got into the shower. Which blessed him. For a moment he felt almost as though he were back in his old life, not "Lamar Burgess" but Don Wanderley, one-time resident of Bolinas, California, and author of two novels (one of which had made some money). Lover for a time of Alma Mobley, brother to defunct David Wanderley. And there it was. It was no good, he could not get away from it. The mind was a trap-it was a cage that slammed down over you. However he had got to where he was, he was there. Stuck there in the Palmetto Motor-In. He turned off the shower, all traces of the blessing departed.
In the little room, only the weak light over his bed to illuminate those ghostly surroundings, he pulled on his jeans and opened his suitcase. The hunting knife was wrapped in a shirt, and he unrolled it so the knife fell out on the bed.
Carrying it by the chunky bone handle, he crossed to the girl's bed. She slept with her mouth open; perspiration gleamed on her forehead.
For a long time he sat beside her, holding the knife in his right hand, ready to use it.
But this night he could not. Giving up, giving in, he shook her arm until her eyelids fluttered.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"I want to sleep."
"Who are you?"
"Go away. Please."
"Who are you? I'm asking, who are you?"
"You know."
"I know?"
"You know. I told you."
"What's your name?"
"Angie."
"Angie what?"
"Angie Maule. I told you before."
He held the knife behind his back so that she could not see it.
"I want to sleep," she said. "You woke me up." She turned her back to him again. Fascinated, he watched sleep settle over her: her fingertips twitched, her eyelids contracted, her breathing changed. It was as if, to exclude him, she had willed herself to sleep. Angie- Angela? Angela Maule. It did not sound like the name she had given him when he had first taken her into the car. Minoso? Minnorsi? Some name like that, an Italian name-not Maule.
He held the knife in both hands, the black bone handle jammed into his naked belly, his elbows out: all he had to do was thrust it forward and jerk it up, using all his strength…
In the end, sometime around three in the morning, he crossed over to his bed.
4
The next morning, before they checked out, she spoke to him while he was looking at the maps. "You shouldn't ask me those questions."
"What questions?" He had been keeping his back turned, at her request, as she got into the pink dress, and he suddenly had the feeling that he had to turn around, right now, to see her. He could see his knife in her hands (though it was back inside the rolled-up shirt), could feel it just beginning to prick his skin. "Can I turn around now?"
"Yeah, sure."
Slowly, still feeling the knife, his uncle's knife, beginning to enter his skin, he turned sideways on the chair. The girl was sitting on her unmade bed, watching him. Her intense unbeautiful face.
"What questions?"
"You know."
"Tell me."
She shook her head and would not say any more.
"Do you want to see where we're going?"
The girl came toward him, not slowly but measuredly, as if not wishing to display suspicion. "Here," he said, pointing to a spot on the map. "Panama City, in Florida."
"Will we be able to see the water?"
"Maybe."
"And we won't sleep in the car?"
"No."
"Is it far away?"
"We can get there tonight. We'll take this road-this one-see?"
"Uh huh." She was not interested: she hung a little to one side, bored and wary.
She said: "Do you think I'm pretty?"
What's the worst thing that ever happened to you? That you took off your clothes at night beside the bed of a nine-year-old girl? That you were holding a knife? That the knife wanted to kill her?
No. Other things were worse.
Not far over the state line and not on the highway he had shown Angie on the map but on a two-lane country road, they drew up before a white board building. Buddy's Supplies.
"You want to come in with me, Angie?"
She opened the door on her side and got out in that childish way, as if she were climbing down a ladder; he held the screen door open for her. A fat man in a white shirt sat like Humpty Dumpty on a counter. "You cheat on your income tax," he said. "And you're the first customer of the day. You believe that? Twelve-thirty and you're the first guy through the door. No," he said, bending forward and scrutinizing them. "Hell no. You don't cheat Uncle Sam, you do worse than that. You're the guy killed four-five people up in Tallahassee the other day."
"What-?" he said. "I just came in here for some food-my daughter-"
"Gotcha," the man said. "I used to be a cop. Allentown, Pennsylvania. Twenty years. Bought this place because the man told me I could turn over a hundred dollars' profit a week. There's a lot of crooks in this world. Anybody comes in, I can tell what kind of crook they are. And now I got you straight. You're not a killer. You're a kidnapper."