“Harold, I’m not coming back to New York.”
“What?”
“I’m not coming back,” Jana repeated.
Silence hummed over the wire for a moment, and then Klein said half-incredulously, “You’re not serious.”
“I’m very serious.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“I’ve had it with New York, that’s all, I’m sick to my soul of New York. I feel as if I’m... suffocating there.”
“Where do you expect to go? What do you expect to do, a young girl alone?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll travel, I’ll go to Canada, to Mexico, I’ll see some of the great wide world.” She tried to make her tone light, but she had the feeling that her voice was strained and uncertain.
“Jana, I think you’re making a rash and foolish decision. Your place is here, with people you know, with people you can equate with.”
“Don’t try to talk me out of it, Harold, I’ve made up my mind. Now I don’t want to discuss it any more. I’ve got to get to work on Desert Adventure if you want a manuscript in a week.”
“All right, we won’t discuss it any more,” Klein said, and Jana detected an irritating note of patronage in his voice. “What’s the name of the place where you’re staying? The telephone number?”
She told him.
“I’ll call you in a day or so, to see how you’re coming along. Sooner, if anything urgent comes up.”
“Fine.”
“You won’t go running off again, now?”
“No, I’ll stay right here.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
They said parting words, and Jana put the receiver down quickly. The telephone conversation had gone about as she had expected it to, but it had upset her nonetheless. Harold meant well, but he was a prober, a man who tried to burrow his way into your soul, to examine each cell of your being in an effort to determine its relationship with every other cell. And that was exactly the kind of thing which frightened her, which she wanted desperately to avoid.
Harold must never know.
No one must ever know.
Hers was a private hell, and it could be shared by no one — no one at all.
Four
The roadside oasis was situated just outside the crest of a long curve in the main interstate highway, like a detached nipple on some gigantic contour drawing of a woman’s breast.
It was set something over two hundred yards from the highway, umbilically connected to it by a narrow, unpaved access road that blended into a rough-gravel parking area in front. There were, in actuality, three buildings: the main structure, old and sprawling, unpainted, with two weathered gas pumps under a short wooden awning; at the right edge of the parking area, a lattice-fronted, considerably smaller construction that obviously housed rest rooms; and a cabinlike dwelling set directly behind the main building — living quarters for the owner or owners. A large wooden sign, mounted on rusted steel rods on the roof of the main building, read Del’s Oasis in heat-eroded blue letters.
Lennox saw all of this through dulled eyes as the bus turned off the black glass of the highway, onto the access road. It bounced jarringly, raising heavy clouds of dust, and he clutched at the armrests with both hands, his teeth clamped tightly together at the intensification of the pain which still burned deep within his belly. The bus slowed as it swung onto the surface of the parking lot, and the driver maneuvered it to parallel the gas pumps directly in front, switching off the diesel immediately. The doors whispered open, and heat-shrouded silence crept in.
Lennox got sluggishly out of his seat and followed the other passengers and the driver onto the gravel beneath the wooden awning. He saw that a screen door was set into the front of the structure, above which was a warped metal sign: Café. There were two windows, dust-caked, with green shades partially drawn inside, one on either flank of the door. In the left window was a Coca-Cola sign and a card that said Open; in the right was a shield advertising Coors beer.
The driver pulled open the screen door, and his passengers trooped in after him like a line of weary foot soldiers, Lennox entering last. It was not much cooler inside. There was an overt stuffiness in the barnlike interior that had not been dispelled by the large ceiling fan whirring overhead, or by the ice-cooler placed on a low table to one side. On the left was a long, deserted lunch counter with yellow leatherette-topped stools arranged before it; the remainder of the room was taken up with wooden tables covered in yellow-checked oilcloth, all of them empty now, and straight-backed chairs. The rough-wood walls were furbished with prospecting tools — picks, shovels, nugget pans, and the like — and faded facsimiles of venerable Western newspapers announcing the discovery of gold in California, silver in Nevada and Arizona. At the foot of the far wall, next to an open door leading to a storeroom, were a rocking cradle and portions of a wooden sluice box that a placard propped between them claimed to have been used at Sutter’s Mill, California, circa 1850.
Behind the lunch counter, dressed in clean white, a middle-aged, balding man with thick jowls stood slicing potatoes on a scarred sandwich board. To one side of him, tacked to the wall, was a square of cardboard: We Accept All Major Credit Cards. Lennox thought bitterly of the wallet full of credit cards he had destroyed months ago, because they had his name on them and were links with the dead past, because using them would be like leaving a clear, fresh trail to his current whereabouts, because he might never be able to pay the accumulated sums, and that was considered fraud and he did not want any more threats to his tenuous freedom. But Jesus, he should have kept just one card — Diner’s or Carte Blanche — for emergencies like this, for the moments of burning hunger...
The balding man put down the heavy knife he was using as the string of customers — not Lennox — moved to the lunch counter and took stools in an even row; he wiped his hands on a freshly laundered towel, smiling professionally with thick lips that were a winelike red in the sallow cast of his face. “What’ll it be today, folks?”
Lennox could smell the pungency of grilled meat hanging heavily in the hot, still air, and the muscles of his stomach convulsed. He backed to the door, turning, and stumbled outside, moving directly across to the bus, leaning unsteadily against the hot metal of its side. After a moment he re-entered the coach and took his small, cracked blue overnight bag from the rack above the seat. Then he crossed under the bright glare of the sun to the rest rooms.
Inside the door marked Men, he ran cold water into the lavatory basin and washed his face and neck, cupped his hands under the tap and rinsed his mouth several times; he resisted the urge to drink, knowing that if he swallowed any of the tepid, chemical-tasting liquid his contracted stomach would throw it up again immediately. From the overnight bag he took his razor and a thin sliver of soap; but the idea of shaving, which had been his intention, evaporated when he looked at himself in the speckled mirror over the basin. A close shave would have been incongruous with his unkempt hair, his sweat-dirty clothes, his hollow eyes — and he would still have looked like a derelict. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with all of it.
He returned the razor and soap to the bag, and then opened the door to one of the two stalls, closing it behind him as he entered, and sat on the lowered lid of the toilet seat, his head in his hands. The pain, which had fluctuated into a muted gnawing as he splashed himself with water at the basin, again disappeared from his stomach; but he kept on sitting there, drinking air through his mouth.