“Let it stay there,” she said weakly. “I want it there.”
He got up carefully. He had some muscle pains. His left arm was stiff, and it hurt at the elbow as he lowered the bottle.
He clamped the tubing off and placed the bottle on the bed beside her. Her sweat had loosened the adhesive, and the tape came off easily. He took a piece of cotton from the alcohol container on the floor at his foot. When he withdrew the needle he pressed it against the point of exit to keep the blood in, the hematoma from forming. After he had pressed it there for a while, he used a piece of the adhesive to secure it. She was sleeping, her breath regular and shallow again. The semen had begun to dry into crystals on her hand and wrist. He closed his robe and tied it. He adjusted her pillows and her robe, put her right hand over her left on her stomach. He stood back from the bed, the bottle and the tubing with the needle in the end of it in his left hand, the metal alcohol-sponge container in his right. For no good reason he could have articulated, he smiled, and then he bowed to her, deeply and from the waist. As if she knew somewhere in her early sleep that he was doing something odd and possibly extraordinary, she shifted a little and she smiled too. He walked to the glass doors, the materials still in his hands. It was still raining, a little harder than before; the glass doors were sheeted and running with it.
He could not see the car beyond them. He put his face close to the glass, trying to see out. He could see nothing. He put his forehead against the glass. The glass was cool, and it felt good.
After he had put the Laetrile materials away, he took a shower, missing the feel of the golf balls around his feet, and dried and dressed himself. Then he got paper and pencil and wrote a note to her:
Melinda: had to go out. you know. be back by seven. Call Bob White if you need anything. I’ll get dinner. I love you of course. Allen.
He put the note on the pillow beside her head, then changed his mind and propped it up with a glass on the motel room table. He got the gun from between the folds of white towel in his suitcase. He loaded a clip into it carefully. He looked at it, then took the clip out and checked the chamber; it was empty, and he pulled the trigger. It did not click. The safety was on, and he made a note of its position and snapped the clip in again.
He put the gun into the pocket of his raincoat and put his arms into the sleeves and settled the coat on his shoulders and buttoned it. It hung heavily to one side, pulling the collar against his neck. He looked around the room, checking, a thing he always did before leaving a place. He looked down at peaceful Melinda sleeping. Then he turned away, opened the door, and stepped out into the rain.
BY THE TIME HE HAD LEFT THE STONES AND TURNED onto the blacktop, the rain had diminished, and after he had driven for a few minutes it had stopped. The radio told him there were some flooded cars, a few had slid into the washes, a bus with children coming home from a summer trip had skidded and fallen over, but no one had been injured. His wipers were off, and he passed people with hoods up and rags in their hands, working to dry plugs and points. The road leading out of the city to Route 80 was still fairly empty. At one point he had to slow and wait while the cars in front of him crept, wheel deep, under a viaduct. There were some people in yellow slickers walking along the roads. When he hit the highway and started the slight rise out of the city, all evidence of the rain fell away. He could see the edge of the cloud cover ahead of him; he pushed the car up to seventy, and before long he drove from under the clouds, entering the sunlight, the shafts of which made the highway in front of him sparkle. The sky was clear, but there were no heat waves shimmering on the road in front of him. He opened the vent and felt the warm, dry desert air come in.
In twenty minutes he slowed to enter Vail, and after he’d passed through it and come to a place where the shoulder widened, he pulled off the road and got the Tombstone matchbox out of the wheel well in the trunk and put it under the front seat. While the trunk was open, he decided to put the gun in it, and he took it out of his raincoat pocket and slid it between two of the towels on the trunk floor. He had bought the gun in Los Angeles, on impulse, and he had later thought that the reason he’d bought it had to do with a slight sense of romance in the delivering of the cocaine, a kind of vague old-movie, underworld feel. He knew better than that, but once he had gotten the gun, he had kept it; he hadn’t wanted to let it go. And he hadn’t wanted to let Richard go either, once he had gotten back in touch with him. He knew he could have gotten the Laetrile elsewhere; he need not have agreed to the bargain that had him here on his way to deliver the Tombstone matchbox of cocaine. Something about Melinda’s wish to go East, to head back into something, urged a need in him that had to do with Richard and his own past. This need, like his need to keep the gun, was at this point only pictorial for him, vaguely emblematic, not at all clear.
It took him a little over an hour to get the seventy miles to Tombstone. As he got closer to it, things along the road became increasingly familiar. The first thing he noticed were the small white crosses at the roadside, markers for the places where accidents had occurred in which people had been killed. When he saw them he remembered how he had seen them when he was in high school, living in Bisbee, twenty-five miles the other side of Tombstone. He knew the road between Bisbee and Tombstone better than this stretch, but he had traveled here some too. He remembered a place, a looping turn from a long downhill slope, where there were more than twenty crosses clustered like a small graveyard at the roadside. Driving into Tombstone with friends, they had dared that turn in the road often, laughing and joking but not untouched by the danger and its evidence in the crosses. Mostly, he had driven to Tombstone with his father for his quack arthritis treatments, baths and massages, that were supposed to produce wonders. They had moved from Chicago to Bisbee for his father’s health. When he was in his second year of high school, his father had died there.
He remembered the last turn into Tombstone, and he slowed down as he entered it. There had been considerable building on the edge of town since he had last been there close to twenty years ago, but after the turn, Boot Hill still sloped up to the left, a low-brush rise with its wooden and stone markers, now with an out-of-place cyclone fence surrounding it. A little farther down on the right was the O.K. Corral, and by the time he reached it he had slowed to a crawl. The O.K. had changed also; it had been “restored” with new paint and a new sign, and some boards had been replaced, and the grounds had been worked on. Down the streets beyond the O.K., little signs had been hung out in front of the various stores, markers with historic names wood-burned into them. He turned at the corner of the Crystal Palace Bar, drove down a half block, and parked. There were tourists walking the streets, cars with various out-of-state plates, but there were not a lot of tourists, and the town did not look to be thriving. Across the street from the Crystal Palace, he saw the vaguely remembered Bird Cage Theater and the Tombstone Epitaph, the old newspaper, beside it. He turned into the Crystal Palace, pushing one of the swinging half-doors and slipping through it like a hesitant cowboy.
There were six men sitting at the bar, five facing the long glass mirror behind it, the other at a place where the bar turned in an L to the wall, a position where he could see the door. In front of the mirror, obscuring its lower part, were hundreds of bottles of liquor, about half of which were phonies, empty bottles with Old West labels on them. The mirror was high, long, and beautiful, its edge framed in gilded wood or plaster. The bartender had a striped shirt and a handlebar mustache. He nodded to him as he entered. Two of the men at the bar were cowboys, real ones, in boots, Levis, pearl-button shirts and Stetsons. The three men beside them were tourists, all of them heavy and dressed in various combinations of seersucker and brushed cotton. The man at the turn of the L-he thought this was his man the moment he entered-was young, about thirty; he wore a tailored cowboy shirt, dark blue, but he was hatless. A beer bottle stood on the bar in front of him. He smiled as the stranger approached. Allen got there, sat down, and ordered a Lone Star.