Nothing In Her Way (4 page)

“What time does your bus leave, Mike?”

“In about an hour.”

“Do you have to go tonight?”

There wasn’t anybody else around. I turned away from the lights on the water and they were shining in her eyes until she closed them, and the lashes were very long like shadows on her face when I raised my head after a while and looked at her.

“No,” I said.

When I began to see the sand I knew I was almost there. Beyond the rusty strands of barbed wire it stretched away toward the horizon on both sides of the highway in desolate and wind-ruffled dunes, with only a tumbleweed or gaunt mesquite here and there to break the monotony of it. Then I could see the water tank up ahead.

Wyecross was a bleak little town lost in the desert like a handful of children’s toys dropped and scattered along the highway. It was afternoon now under a sky like a blue glass bowl, and the three blocks of the business district were half asleep in the glare of the sun. I climbed down at the bus station and stood on the high sidewalk while the driver dug the two bags out of the luggage rack. A gust of wind slammed up the street like a balled fist, pushing at me, and I could taste the grit.

I took the bags and went into the restaurant that was also the bus station. The coffee was bitter with alkali. There was a jukebox at the other end of the counter and it was crying the same dirge the other one had, in that bar in New Orleans. I thought of Donnelly. He couldn’t find her in San Antonio. Couldn’t he? He’d found her in New Orleans, hadn’t he? The coffee didn’t warm the cold ball of uneasiness in my stomach.

I turned and looked out the big flyspecked window in front, past the shoddy Christmas decorations that had never been taken down, and the cardboard signs propped against the glass. They were blank on this side, but you knew they advertised Coca-Cola and some brand of cigarettes and maybe what was playing Sun., Mon., Tues. at the only movie in town.

I saw it then. It was diagonally across the street, on the corner. It was like a thousand others between Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, with two marble or imitation marble columns in front and the name and assets written on the window in gold leaf. Stockmen’s Bank, it said. The door was closed now, because it was a little after three, and a small blind was pulled down in back of the glass. They’d still be at work, though, and I thought of him inside there, not knowing that after sixteen years I was right across the street from him.

Lachlan had always been the one, because he was the top boy, the brain, the one who’d engineered it. I hadn’t thought of Goodwin for a long time, and in fact had even forgotten his first name was Howard. But now that I was so near and had actually caught up with him, I began to feel that same old hatred for him that I’d felt so long for Lachlan. He was just as guilty. I wanted to cross the street and see him, just look at him, but I didn’t. That wasn’t the way to do it. I’d meet him when the time came, but it had to be done according to plan.

I picked up the bags and walked back along the sidewalk the way we had come in. It was only two blocks to the edge of town. The sidewalk ended abruptly, as if it had got scared and quit when it saw the desert. There was a gas station on the left, and just beyond it, on the right, was the motel. It was about a dozen frame cabins painted a scabrous brown and grouped in a hollow square with the open end facing the highway. The sign on the arch over the driveway said, “Frankie & Johnnie’s Kottage Kamp—Vacancy.” The first cabin on the left was the office. I walked across the gravel and rang the bell.

Frankie or Johnnie was a fat man somewhere around forty who hadn’t shaved for two or three days. He had on cowboy boots, and his paunch hung out over the top of a pair of skin-tight Levis apparently held up by the friction on his legs and backside. The eyes were muddy brown and questioning. “Yessir?” he said.

“Vacancy?” I asked.

“Sure thing.” The eyes went beyond me, sweeping the driveway, and then looked down at the suitcases. “You got a car?”

“I came on the bus,” I said.

“Oh.” He considered this. Apparently nobody had ever stopped here before without a car. “Sure. We can fix you up. Just for tonight, huh?”

I shook my head. “I’ll probably be here for some time. I’d like to have it by the week, or month, if I could get a rate.”

We arrived at a deal after a few minutes’ haggling, and I paid him a month in advance and signed the register as Julius Reichert of New Orleans. I could see the curiosity working on him. He got a key and we walked up the gravel drive.

It was a small cubbyhole as bleak as a Grosz drawing. The front of it was furnished with an iron bedstead and a shaky night table and an old rocker, while at the rear there was a sink and a two-burner gas stove on a table. He bent down and stuck a match to the open gas heater, which had flakes of asbestos up the back behind the flame. The asbestos turned red in the heat.

“Don’t go to sleep with it burning and all the doors and windows closed,” he said. “It’ll suffocate you.”

“All right,” I said. I put the bags down.

He paused on his way out, with his hand on the door. “Salesman, I guess, huh?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t sell anything.”

“Oh.” He went out.

I sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette. The gas heater burned with a slight hiss, and outside I could hear the wind searching restlessly around the cabins. I tried to think about it. It had gone all right. In less than a week the whole town would be as curious as he was right now. Why would a man—and an obvious Easterner, at that—come to a whistle stop like this in the middle of nowhere, take a cabin by the month, and just stay here, doing nothing at all? And if they thought that was odd, they would have their hands full when they began to get the rest of the act.

Then I wasn’t thinking about it. I was thinking about her. I could see her. I could almost feel her there in the cabin. The hell, I thought; it wasn’t this bad before, when we split up. I’d missed her, but not like this. It was just the bleak loneliness of this God-forsaken outpost at the end of nowhere. That had to be it. Before, there had been the gambling, and big cities, and other girls, and always the horses running. Sure, that was all it was, just the loneliness.

I could see I didn’t want much of this—this sitting around here thinking how it had been in San Antonio and listening to the wind. I wondered how long it would take. A month? But we couldn’t rush it. That would be fatal. He had to come to me. All I could do was set out the bait and wait for him. But she was going to drive up Saturday night, a week from tomorrow. It was only eight days.

I went into the cold bathroom and shaved. I looked strange with the crew haircut and the steel-rimmed glasses. Dr. Julius Reichert, I thought, the dedicated chemist who doesn’t know a compound from a mixture. We were taking long chances. Would Goodwin go for it?

After I changed clothes I walked back to town and sat around the drugstore, reading magazines. Around six I picked out the most likely-looking of the town’s three restaurants and ate dinner—pork chops and applesauce—thinking of the bisque d’ecrevisses at Antoine’s. Since it was Friday night, the movie was a Western. I walked back to Frankie and Johnnie’s in the windy dark and thought of Sunday and shuddered.

The bank was open a half day Saturday, but I didn’t go near it. I’d do that Monday. I read the rest of the magazines and listened to the coveys of jail bait chatter around the drugstore. The waitresses in the restaurant were beginning to recognize me. I didn’t talk to them except to agree to whatever they said about the weather.

I awoke at dawn on Sunday, and could hear the coyotes somewhere out on the prairie. It was funny, I thought, remembering, how only two or three could sound like thirty. After I’d eaten breakfast I put on the boots I’d bought, dressed in khaki trousers and a flannel shirt, and went for a long walk, taking a couple of the little cardboard boxes in my coat pocket. A half mile east of town I left the highway where the dunes began and went out across country, skirting the edge of the sand. It was clear, with a cold wind blowing and making a lonely sound in the telephone lines. I thought of what Charlie had said. He hoped I didn’t go mad.

There was no danger of getting lost, with the highway always to the north and the haze-blue shadows of the mountains far off in Mexico as a landmark to the south. The highway was out of sight, but I could still see the telephone lines after I’d gone a mile. I sat down in the sun on the south side of a dune, out of the wind, and smoked a cigarette. It was lonely and wild and desolate, but it was better than the cabin or the town.

Before I went back I filled the two boxes with sand and stowed them in my coat pocket. They were about the size of the boxes kitchen matches come in, but stronger, and I had three dozen of them and some about twice as large in one of the bags in the cabin. When I got back I wrapped them in brown paper for mailing and wrote on them the address Charlie had given me. It was an actual address, some friend of his who knew about the deal.

Early Monday morning I took them down to the post office and mailed them. Neither the clerk nor the usual post-office loiterers paid much attention to me. As soon as it was ten o’clock I went around to the bank. I had a cashier’s check for six hundred dollars made out to Julius Reichert, which I had bought in New Orleans.

There were two desks in the railed-in area up front, before you got to the tellers’ cages. They were both empty. I cursed myself for coming too early. I’d wanted to get a look at him, at least. Well, it didn’t matter too much. I’d be in and out often enough. As I went past, toward the tellers’ cages, I sneaked a look at the names on the desks. The rear one was his. H. C. Goodwin, it said.

I deposited the check and made out a signature card to open an account. The teller gave me a checkbook. As I started to turn away, he asked, “Are you new here in town, Mr. Reichert?”

“Yes,” I said shortly.

“Going to make Wyecross your home?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

As I moved away from the window I saw a man entering the gate in the railing up front. I slowed, waiting to see which desk he went to. He hung up the Western-style hat on a rack and sat down at Goodwin’s desk, the rear one. I turned, very casually, and looked at him, feeling the hard beat of the pulse in my throat. This was one of them, at least. Not the big one, but one of them. There was nothing about him that I remembered at all, but then I had seen him only two or three times, sixteen years ago. He had a square, tanned face with sun wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. The eyes themselves were brown and alert behind gold-rimmed glasses, and his hair, which was also brown, was thinning out high on his temples. It wasn’t a hard or unpleasant face any way you looked at it. Well, I thought, Charlie looks like a well-fed angel or an archbishop, when he hasn’t got his hand in your pocket.

It was a little hard to connect the bank cashier and big landowner with the bull-o’-the-woods on a construction job in an O. Henry banana republic of sixteen years ago, but as Charlie had said, he came here originally and had more or less inherited the bank job along with the bank stock and land when his father died.

I went on out. The next stop was a hardware store in the next block. It had a small sporting-goods department in the rear. I walked back and stared owlishly at the half-dozen rifles and shotguns standing on a shelf behind the counter. In a minute a clerk came over.

“Yes, sir?” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh,” I said, “I was just wondering. When can you shoot jack rabbits?”

He smiled, a little pityingly. “Any time you see one, and got a gun.”

“Then they don’t have any closed season on them?”

“Nope. On cottontails, yes; but not on jacks.”

You could see him thinking: Dumb dude.

“I see,” I said. “Well, I’d like to buy a gun. A twenty-two.”

“Sure.” He reached back on the shelf and picked up a little slide-action pump. “This is a nice job.” Then he stopped and looked at me with inspiration. “You really want to blow up some jacks? Let me show you something.”

He put the .22 down on the counter and reached back again. This one was a bigger rifle with a long telescope sight.

“Look,” he said. “Here’s a job. It’ll explode a jack at two hundred yards like a bowl of Jello. It’s a two-twenty Swift, a custom deal with a ten-power scope. Man it was ordered for never did come back. I’d buy it myself if I had the money.”

“How much is it?” I asked innocently.

“Let you have it for three hundred. It costs more.”

I winced and shook my head. “I’ll take the little one.”

“Sure thing,” he said, a little disappointed. “I guess you’re right. This other one’s too much gun unless you really got the fever.”

I bought a box of .22 rifle ammunition, and as I started to leave, he said, “You can tell a jack from a cottontail, can’t you? I mean, you got to have a license to hunt cottontails.”

“Oh, certainly,” I said. “I can distinguish them. Jack rabbits have longer ears.”

When I was out on the sidewalk I shot a quick glance through the window. He was talking to another clerk and laughing.

I went out that afternoon with the rifle. Not too far from the highway I set up a rusty can for a target and shot at it for a while. Then I went for a walk, circling toward the dunes. When I came in I had two more boxes of sand in my coat pocket. I wrapped and addressed them in the cabin, exactly as I had before, and took them down to the post office the next morning.

I kept it up all the rest of the week. I spent most of every day wandering around in the dunes, carrying the gun and a little canteen of water, and when I came in I’d have the boxes of sand in the pocket of my coat. The next morning I’d mail them. On Thursday I deliberately skipped going to the post office, and on Friday I mailed five.

The rifle and jack-rabbit idea was a good one. They couldn’t help wondering what kind of screwball it was who didn’t have anything better to do than hunt jack rabbits. And from there it was only one jump to wondering what kind of stupid screwball it was who’d hunt for them in the only place in the county where there weren’t any. There was no life of any kind in the sand dunes.

And there was one other angle to it. Goodwin belonged to a rifle club.

I had already located the rifle range. It was about a mile south of town, on a dirt road going toward the border. I went by it a couple of afternoons during my walks, but there was nobody shooting. I had an idea, though, there would be on Saturday or Sunday.