“I loss my nickel, honky. I loss my muh-fuhn nickel!”
“If you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the house detective, kid. That’s all. I’m done talking to you.”
“But that goddam machine took my nickel!”
“You stop swearing at me, you little scumbag!” The clerk, who looked an old, cold thirty, reached down and shook the jersey. It was too huge for him to be able to shake the boy inside, too. “Now get out of here. I’m through talking.”
Seeing he meant it, the almost comic mask of hate and defiance below the dark sunburst of the kid’s afro broke into a hurt, agonized grimace of disbelief. “Lissen, thass the oney muh-fuhn nickel I got. That gumball machine ate my nickel! That-”
“I’m calling the house dick right now.” The clerk turned toward the switchboard. His jacket, a refugee from some bargain counter, flapped tiredly around his thin butt.
The boy kicked the plaxteel post of the gum machine, then ran. “Muh-fuhn white honky sumbitch!”
The clerk looked after him, the security button, real or mythical unpressed. He smiled at Richards, showing an old keyboard with a few missing keys. “You can’t talk to niggers anymore. I’d keep them in cages if I ran the Network.”
“He really lose a nickel?” Richards asked, signing the register as John Deegan from Michigan.
“If he did, he stole it,” the clerk said. “Oh, I suppose he did. But if I gave him a nickel, I’d have two hundred pickaninnies in here by nightfall claiming the same thing. Where do they learn that language? That’s what I want to know. Don’t their folks care what they do? How long will you be staying, Mr. Deegan?”
“I don’t know. I’m in town on business.” He tried on a greasy smile, and when it felt right, he widened it. The desk clerk recognized it instantly (perhaps from his own reflection looking up at him from the depths of the fake-marble counter, which had been polished by a million elbows) and gave it back to him.
“That’s $15.50, Mr. Deegan.” He pushed a key attached to a worn wooden tongue across the counter to Richards. “Room 512.”
“Thank you.” Richards paid cash. Again, no ID. Thank God for the YMCA.
He crossed to the elevators and looked down the corridor to the Christian Lending Library on the left. It was dimly lit with flyspecked yellow globes, and an old man wearing an overcoat and galoshes was perusing a tract, turning the pages slowly and methodically with a trembling, wetted finger. Richards could hear the clogged whistle of his breathing from where he was by the elevators, and felt a mixture of sorrow and horror.
The elevator chinked to a stop, and the doors opened with wheezy reluctance. As he stepped in, the clerk said loudly: “It’s a sin and a shame. I’d put them all in cages.”
Richards glanced up, thinking the clerk was speaking to him, but the clerk was not looking at anything.
The lobby was very empty and very silent.
MINUS 072 AND COUNTING
The fifth floor hall stank of pee.
The corridor was narrow enough to make Richards feel claustrophobic, and the carpet, which might have been red, had worn away in the middle to random strings. The doors were industrial gray, and several of them showed the marks of fresh kicks, smashes, or attempts to jimmy. Signs at every twenty paces advised that there would be NO SMOKING IN THIS HALL BY ORDER OF FIRE MARSHAL. There was a communal bathroom in the center, and the urine stench became suddenly sharp. It was a smell Richards associated automatically with despair. People moved restlessly behind the gray doors like animals in cages-animals too awful, too frightening, to be seen. Someone was chanting what might have been the Hail Mary over and over in a drunken voice. Strange gobbling noises came from behind another door. A country-western tune from behind another (“I ain’t got a buck for the phone/and I’m so alone…”). Shuffling noises. The solitary squeak of bedsprings that might mean a man in his own hand. Sobbing. Laughter. The hysterical grunts of a drunken argument. And from behind these, silence. And silence. And silence. A man with a hideously sunken chest walked past Richards without looking at him, carrying a bar of soap and a towel in one hand, wearing gray pajama bottoms tied with string. He wore paper slippers on his feet.
Richards unlocked his room and stepped in. There was a police bar on the inside, and he used it. There was a bed with almost-white sheets and an Army surplus blanket. There was a bureau from which the second drawer was missing. There was a picture of Jesus on one wall. There was a steel rod with two coathangers kitty-cornered in the right angle of two walls. There was nothing else but the window, which looked out on blackness. It was 10:15.
Richards hung up his jacket, slipped off his shoes, and lay down on the bed. He realized how miserable and unknown and vulnerable he was in the world. The universe seemed to shriek and clatter and roar around him like a huge and indifferent jalopy rushing down a hill and toward the lip of a bottomless chasm. His lips began to tremble, and then he cried a little.
He didn’t put it on tape. He lay looking at the ceiling, which was cracked into a million crazy scrawls, like a bad potter’s-glaze. They had been after him for over eight hours now. He had earned eight hundred dollars of his stake money. Christ, not even out of the hole yet.
And he’d missed himself on Free-Vee. Christ, yes. The bag-over-the-head spectacular.
Where were they? Still in Harding? New York? Or on their way to Boston? No, they couldn’t be on their way here, could they? The bus had not passed through any roadblocks. He had left the biggest city in the world anonymously, and he was here under an assumed name. They couldn’t be onto him. No way.
The Boston Y might be safe for as long as two days. After that he could move north toward New Hampshire and Vermont, or south toward Hartford or Philadelphia or even Atlanta. Further east was the ocean, and beyond it was Britain and Europe. It was an intriguing idea, but probably out of reach. Passage by plane required ID, what with France under martial law, and while stowing-away might be possible, discovery would mean a quick and final end to the whole thing. And west was out. West was where the heat was the hottest.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Who had said that? Molie would know. He snickered a little and felt better.
The disembodied sound of a radio came to his ears.
It would be good to get the gun now, tonight, but he was too tired. The ride had tired him. Being a fugitive tired him. And he knew in an animal way that went deeper than the rational that very soon he might be sleeping in an October-cold culvert or in a weed- and cinder-choked gully.
The gun tomorrow night.
He turned off the light and went to bed.
MINUS 071 AND COUNTING
It was showtime again.
Richards stood with his buttocks toward the video recorder, humming the theme music to The Running Man. A YMCA pillowslip was over his head, turned inside out so the name stamped on its hem wouldn’t show.
The camera had inspired Richards to a kind of creative humor that he never would have believed he possessed. The self-image he’d always held was that of a rather dour man, with little or no humor in his outlook. The prospect of his approaching death had uncovered a solitary comedian hiding inside.
When the clip popped out, he decided to save the second for afternoon. The solitary room was boring, and perhaps something else would occur to him.
He dressed slowly and then went to the window and looked out.
Thursday morning traffic hustled busily up and down Huntington Avenue. Both sidewalks were crowded with slowly moving pedestrians. Some of them were scanning bright-yellow Help-Wanted Fax. Most of them just walked. There was a cop, it seemed, on every corner. Richards could hear them in his mind: Move along. Ain’t you got someplace to go? Pick it up, maggot.