Blood Sport

Chapter Seven

I reached the Air Terminal at eight-fifteen, but Lynnie was there first.

‘I couldn’t sleep much,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been to America before.’

I’d been to America a dozen times. I hadn’t slept much either.

Lynnie’s clothes, a deep pink shiny PVC raincoat over the orange tan dress, were having an anti-soporific effect on everyone in sight. Resisting an urge to grope for dark glasses I felt an uncommon lift to the spirits, which lasted to mid Atlantic. There Lynnie went to sleep and a strong wave of non-enthusiasm for finding Chrysalis invaded my mind like one enormous yawn. I wouldn’t mind, I thought idly, I really wouldn’t mind lazing around that swimming pool with Eunice and Lynnie, doing nothing at all but drink in sunshine, peace, Scotch, and an uninterrupted view of two well-shaped females in bikinis. Peace most of all. Lie like a log, and not think, not feel. And sleep. Sleep for sixteen hours a day and mindlessly laze away the other eight: a programme as near to death as dammit. A very small step from there to eternity, to make the peace permanent...

‘What are you thinking about?’ Lynnie said.

She had opened her eyes and was watching my face.

‘Heaven,’ I said.

She shook her head slightly. ‘Hell, more like.’ She sat up briskly. ‘How long before we land?’

About an hour.’

‘Will I like Mrs Teller?’

‘Haven’t you met her before?’ I asked.

‘Once, when I was little. I don’t remember her.’

I smiled. ‘She isn’t easy to forget.’

‘Exactly,’ Lynnie said. ‘There’s something odd about me going to stay with her. Of course I said I’d love to, and who wouldn’t go off on any trip to get away from school, let alone a super one like this, but I distinctly think that Daddy and Mr Teller have an ulterior motive and I want to know what it is.’

‘They want her to have company, to stop her drinking too much alone.’

‘Wow!’ She looked surprised. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘They didn’t say so. I’m only guessing.’

‘But I can’t stop her drinking,’ she protested.

‘Don’t try. She doesn’t get drunk. And you’ll like her all right, as long as your ears don’t fall off.’

She laughed. ‘My mother wouldn’t approve of her?’

‘Quite likely not.’

‘I expect that’s why I’ve only met her once.’ She grinned at me mischievously without a shred of self-consciousness, Joan’s influence waning visibly with every hundred miles.

It was late morning, local time, when we checked in at the Biltmore. From there Lynnie departed on foot for a private tour of New York, and I cabbed down town to Buttress Life. The heatwave was still in position, the air still saturated. Lethargy and haze hung over the city, and buildings shivered like mirages through the blue exhausts of the cars. Once over the Buttress building’s threshold the temperate zone took over: I rode up to the seventh floor with the humidity in my clothes condensing into water, and sagged damply into Walt’s spare chair in four seven.

‘Good trip?’ he said. ‘You look...’ he hesitated.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Pooped.’

He smiled. It was worth waiting for. There’s a load to be read in a smile, and Walt’s was a good one.

‘How’s it with the Snail Express?’ I asked.

He picked a list off his desk. ‘They were very co-operative. Only trouble is, they had about thirty-five trailers out on those dates which just might have been going west on the turnpike.’ He handed me the paper sympathetically. ‘It was a pretty long shot, of course.’

‘Hm.’ I looked at the list of names and addresses, and at my watch. ‘I think we’d better check them.’

‘I had a feeling you’d say that.’ A touch of gloom.

I smiled at him. ‘I’ll start it, if you like. Do you know where we can get good enlargements of a snapshot done quickly?’ He nodded and mentioned a name, and I gave him the negative. ‘The top left hand corner. A couple. Man and girl.’ He nodded again. ‘And there’s this handkerchief.’ I produced it. ‘Would you mind making a tour of all the offices on this floor, and perhaps the fifth as well, and finding out what everyone associates with it?’

Walt took the small white square curiously.

‘Yogi Bear,’ he said. ‘What’s the point?’

‘It belonged to a girl who may know more than she ought about Chrysalis. The girl on the negative.’

‘Find her, find the horse?’ He was half incredulous, a fraction excited.

‘Maybe.’

‘Right then,’ he said at the door. ‘See you.’

I studied the list. Snail Express had done their best. Most names had two addresses, the old and the new. All were followed by a place and a date, the depot where the trailer had been checked in after its trip. There were several telephone numbers for the eastern addresses, a few for the west.

Working stolidly down the list, with long pauses while new inhabitants went to find the new telephone numbers of the old, I said I was calling from Snail Express, wanting to know that the service had been satisfactory, or if the customers had any suggestions or complaints. I listened to more praise than criticism, and eventually checked off twenty-seven genuine hirings.

Walt came back while I was biting the end of one of his pencils and wondering what to do next. It was three o’clock. He’d added lunch to his itinerary but he carried a large white package, which he opened carefully. Six enlargements of the corner of Peter’s negative. Various sizes, from postcard to nine by seven. The faces were clearest on the smallest print, too fuzzy on the largest.

‘He says he’ll run off as many as you want by this evening, if you let him know at once.’

‘Ask him for six, then. Postcard size.’

‘OK.’ He picked up the receiver, pressed the buttons, and asked.

The boy and girl stood side by side, their heads turned slightly to the left, towards where we had sat under the sun umbrella. Their faces were calm, good-looking, and somewhat alike. The boy’s hair was darker. They were of almost the same height. The checks of the boy’s shirt stood out clearly, and one of its buttons was either undone or missing. The girl had a watch with an extra wide strap on her left wrist. She hadn’t been wearing it while she hung on to the post.

‘All-American kids,’ Walt commented. ‘So what?’

‘So how did you get on with the handkerchief?’

Walt produced it. A little limper, a little grubbier than before.

‘Fifteen Yogi Bears, ten don’t-bother-me-nows, six lewd suggestions, and one Yellowstone Park.’

‘One where?’

‘Yellowstone Park?’

‘Why Yellowstone Park?’

‘That’s where Yogi Bear lives. At least, it’s called Jellystone in the cartoons, but it’s Yellowstone really.’

‘Real live bears still in Yellowstone?’

‘Oh sure.’

‘A natural beauty spot... holiday place, isn’t it?’ I remembered vaguely.

Walt nodded.

‘With souvenirs?’ I suggested.

‘Great lot of help that would be to us.’

I agreed. It would only narrow the field down to one of the thousands who’d been to Yellowstone sometime, or one of the other thousands who knew someone who’d been to Yellowstone sometime. But I remembered a Jamaican would-be assistant to the Biological Warfare Defence Laboratory at Porton who’d been turned down because of a Russian-made bust of Castro in his bedroom. Souvenirs sometimes had their uses.

‘The handkerchief probably came from Japan. Do you have a leg-man who can check who imported it, and where it was sold over here?’

‘Leg-man?’ Walt echoed dismally. ‘That’s me.’ He put the handkerchief away in its envelope, chased up a few answers on the telephone, and heaved himself reluctantly to his feet. ‘I may as well go see a man about a Yogi, then. How’re the trailers?’

‘Twenty-seven are OK. Of the other eight, five don’t answer, and three have no telephone.’

I tried two of the non-answerers yet again. Still no reply. Walt looked through the shorter list I’d made of the unchecked.

‘They sure went all over, didn’t they?’ He said, ‘Nebraska, Kentucky, New Mexico, California, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, and Montana. Just don’t ask me to leg it around all those places!’ He drifted out of the door and his solid footsteps diminuendoed down the passage.

I went on trying the numbers now and then. After two hours I had crossed Texas off the list, bitten the end right off Walt’s pencil and started on it an inch farther down, decided I couldn’t work many days in his rabbit hutch of an office, and wondered how Eunice was making out beside her pool.

The telephone buzzed.

Are you staying at the Biltmore again?’ Walt said.

‘Yes.’

‘Meet me in the bar there,’ he suggested. ‘I’m nearer there than to you.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’m on my way.’

Lynnie wasn’t back. I left a message at the desk for her and joined Walt. His pale blue suit looked as if it had just come out of a spin dryer and there was a damp translucent look to his skin. Repentant, I bought him a large Scotch on the rocks and waited until he had it where it would do most good. He sighed, rubbed the back of one wrist across his eyes, fished a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, and spread it open on the bar.

‘To start with,’ he said disgustedly, ‘it’s not Yogi Bear.’

I waited in sympathetic silence and beckoned to the barman for a refill. On the paper a list of about eight souvenir manufacturers and distributors had been crossed out, a single line through each. The top lines were neat and straight, the last three a great wild slash across the paper. Walt had had a very bad day.

‘The handkerchief came from Japan, like you said.’ He took a swallow of his second drink and began to revive. ‘Several of the firms phoned their west coast offices for me. No dice. It seems as if at least half of the souvenirs sold in the west are made in Japan, but all these Yogi Bear concessionists say that this isn’t Yogi Bear at all, it’s the wrong shaped head.’

He pulled out of the by now battered envelope a very bedraggled looking handkerchief and looked at it with loathing.

‘If it was sold at or near Yellowstone Park, it could have come from any two-bit import business. As it’s not Yogi Bear, no one will have had to pay commission to use the picture, and there isn’t any way that I know of finding who brought it into the country and who sold it to where.’

After ten seconds I suggested diffidently, ‘We could start from the other end.’

He glared at me incredulously. ‘Are you plumb nuts? You can’t mean what I think you mean.’

The rocks in my drink had melted to pebbles. I tasted the drowned whisky and put the glass back on the bar.

I said, ‘One of the Snail Express trailers was checked in at Rock Springs, Wyoming. It’s still there: they haven’t had another customer for it yet. I’ve asked them to hold it until I’ve had a look at it.’

‘Why that one? Why that one particularly?’ Walt asked. Irritation only half repressed sharpened his voice.

‘Because it’s one of the three with no phone number. Because it’s in the same state as Yellowstone. And because it gives me an itch.’

‘Yellowstone is clear across Wyoming from Rock Springs,’ he said. ‘Must be four hundred miles.’

‘Three hundred. I looked at the map.’

He drank and rubbed his thumb over his fingers much faster than usual. Tired lines had appeared round his eyes.

I think it’s a futile waste of time,’ he said abruptly.

‘I’ve time to waste.’

‘And I haven’t.’

He put the glass down with a thump, reached into an inner pocket and brought out another white package which he tossed down in front of me.

‘These are your photographs.’

‘Thanks.’

The look he gave me was a long way from the smile of that morning. I wondered whether I would have let him go looking for answers if I’d known he was short on stamina, and decided I probably would. He hadn’t given up half way: only at the end.

Lynnie appeared in the bar doorway in her orange dress and the tired looking men there straightened their spines in a hurry. She wouldn’t come in. I eased Walt with me across the heavy carpet and introduced him to her in the hall outside. He made only a few perfunctory remarks and left in a short time with a glowering face and solid back.

‘Whatever’s bitten him?’ said Lynnie, looking after him.

‘He’s had a tiring day and he’s going home to his wife.’

She looked at me quickly, half laughing. ‘Do you always know what you’re saying?’

‘Frequently.’

She chuckled. ‘Anyway, you look a lot tireder than he does.’ We started to walk over to the desk to collect our keys.

‘That’s most encouraging.’

‘What shall we do this evening? Or do you want to sleep?’ She was unselfish enough to keep anxiety entirely out of her voice, but when I said we’d go wherever she wanted there was an extra bounce in her stride. She decided on a two hour taxi ride to everywhere in the city she’d ever heard of that she hadn’t managed to see that afternoon, followed by dinner in a second-floor glass-walled restaurant, looking down and across the lights of Broadway and Times Square. At eleven-thirty, when we got back to the Biltmore, she was still wide awake.

‘What a fabulous, fantastic day,’ she said in the lift.

‘Good.’

‘I’ll remember it as long as I live.’

I smiled at her enthusiasm. It was a thousand years since I’d been as happy as that, but sometimes I could still imagine how it felt. That evening it had been quite easy.

‘You are far from drizz,’ she said, contentedly grinning.

‘You’d be no great drag to be stuck in a lift with yourself.’

But the lift stopped unimaginatively at the eighth floor as scheduled and we walked along to our rooms. Her door was opposite mine.

I kissed her cheek. ‘Goodnight, little Lynnie.’

Her brown eyes smiled serenely back. ‘Goodnight, Gene. Sleep well.’

‘You too,’ I said. ‘Kentucky first stop in the morning.’

It took four more days to find the girl in the photograph, though maybe I could have done it in two if it hadn’t been for Lynnie. Privately aware that it wasn‘t necessary for me to do the job myself I dredged up a cast iron-sounding reason for having to accompany her to Lexington, and we flew down via Washington, which involved another quick taxi tour instead of a lengthy wait at the airport. Lynnie didn’t intend to miss a thing.

Eunice met us at Lexington airfield and drove us to Midway, and after a prawn and avocado lunch lent me her car to go on my errand. I greased Chrysalis’s ex-groom into going with me with twenty dollars of his employer’s money, and took him off to Sam Hengelman’s. The horse van, Sam said out of the corner of his mouth as he watched an old movie on a cyan-heavy colour set, was still in care of the police department. If I wanted to look at it, go talk to them.

At the police department a state trooper listened to what I had to say, said ‘Yeah,’ several times, consulted higher authority, and sorted out some keys. Higher authority turned out to be a good-looking detective in his twenties, and we all four repaired to the parking lot behind the police building, where the horse van stood in one corner.

Chrysalis’s lad pointed out the stall the stallion had inhabited, and the state trooper came up with a successful conclusion to the expedition: four long shining bay hairs.

‘From his mane,’ said the groom authoritatively.

The detective kept two for the State and sent off the other two special delivery to Walt at Buttress Life, and the groom and I drove back to Midway.

Eunice and Lynnie were both in the pool, and the rest of the day and night came close enough to my daydream on the plane, except that the sixteen hours’ sleep shrank to six, but even that was spectacular by recent standards.

When Lynnie said over large cups of breakfast coffee the next morning that she wished I wasn’t going, I very nearly didn’t. If I’d stayed, Buttress Life would have paid the insurance and a load of grief would never have happened. Yet if I could go back to that cross-roads moment again I know I would inevitably make the same decision. Once a hunter, always a hunter: the inner compulsion hadn’t loosened its grip: the quality they’d hauled me out of the Army for was too basic in my nature, and being what I was, what I am, slopping out of the chase was impossible. Keeble had known, I admitted wryly, that he had only to get me hooked.

‘I must go,’ I said, ‘if I’m to find the horse.’

‘Damn the horse,’ Lynnie said.

I laughed at her. ‘You’ve learnt quickly.’

‘I like Eunice,’ she said defensively. ‘She doesn’t shock me.’

I gathered from that that she certainly did, but that Lynnie would never admit it.

‘But you will come back here? Before you go home, I mean?’

‘I expect so,’ I said.

She fiddled with her coffee cup, looking down. ‘It’s only a week since I picked you up at your flat, last Sunday.’

‘And you’ve aged a year.’

She looked up quickly, startled. ‘Why did you say that?’

‘It was what you were thinking.’

‘I know,’ she said, puzzled, ‘but I don’t know how you do.’

‘Crystal set in the attic. Intermittent though, unfortunately.’

‘Just as well, if you ask me.’ There was a healthy mockery on her laughing face. ‘How would you like to be tuned in permanently to Eunice?’

Eunice herself trailed through the doorway at that moment wearing an electric blue wrapper and a manageable hangover. With both still in place, after two cups of coffee and a cigarette, she trundled Lynnie and me to the airport.

‘Goodbye, you son of a bitch,’ she said to me, as I stood beside her window. ‘I guess you can come back any time you want to.’

Lynnie glanced at her sharply, with sudden speculation: growing up in front of one’s eyes. I smiled goodbye to them both and walked away into the airport. From there I bus-stopped a thousand miles to Denver, and chartered a twin-engined Piper from a local firm for the last two hundred to Rock Springs. The pilot chewed his nails savagely beside me all the way as if he were a dedicated auto-cannibal, and I arrived feeling sick.

On the hot late Sunday afternoon the little desert town looked lifeless. Shimmering air rose endlessly over the dump of abandoned rusting motor cars, a Greyhound bus rolled past with passengers staring like fish through its green glass windows, and sprinklers on the richer front lawns kept the parching heat at bay. At the bus station I learnt that old man Hagstrom’s boy was the agent for Snail Express, but when I found old man Hagstrom, fanning himself in a rocker on the front porch of his small frame house, he said that his boy was out calling.

Hagstrom himself seemed to be glad to have company and told me to go inside and bring two beers out of the icebox. The icebox was in the living room, just through the screen door. It was a shambles of a room with sagging broken-spring chairs, dirty worn out rag rugs, a scattered assortment of cups, glasses, and bottles, all unwashed, and a vast new television. I took the beer out on to the porch, sat on the top step, and drank from the bottle, like my host.

The old man rocked, scratched himself, drank, and said vaguely that his boy would be right along, I could bet on it. I looked up and down the hot empty street. There were other shapes rocking gently in the shade of the porches, half invisible because many had the insect screens round the outside rails. From behind them they watched the world go by: only thing was, the world rolled past in automobiles and didn’t stop to talk.

Two beers later, while old man Hagstrom was telling me how he personally would have dealt with the Saigon situation in ’67, his boy rolled up in a pockmarked Chrysler. His boy was literally a boy, not more than eighteen: old man Hagstrom’s grandson. He rubbed his hands down his grease-marked T-shirt and jeans, and held one out to me with as easy going a welcome as his grandfather’s. I explained what I wanted.

‘Sure you can look at the trailer,’ he said, amiably. ‘Now?’

‘If you don’t mind.’

‘You’re welcome.’

He waved me into his baking car and whirled it casually round a few corners, drawing up with a jerk outside a rickety looking gate set in a head-high wall. Through the gate, in a dusty area, stood four Snail Express trailers, all different sizes.

‘That one,’ I said, pointing to the largest.

‘Came in last Saturday. I think. I’ll look it up.’ He unlocked a small brick-built office on one side, and I followed him in. Hot enough in there to please Satan.

‘That’s right, Saturday,’ he said, consulting the ledger. ‘Came from New York State, renting charge paid in advance for one week. The week wasn’t up until Monday.’

‘Do you remember who brought it here?’

‘Uh, let’s see. Oh yes. An old guy. Can’t remember much about him. He had white hair, I guess.’

‘What sort of car did he have, to pull the trailer?’

‘I helped him unhitch... a station wagon, I think. Grey, mebbe.’

‘It wasn’t these two?’ I showed him the photograph.

‘Nope.’ He was definite. As far as he knew, he’d never seen them. Had I asked his grandfather? I had.

He said he’d swept out the trailer, but I could look inside if I wanted to.

‘Why did you sweep it?’ I asked.

‘Usually do. It was pretty clean already, though.’

I looked anyway. There were no bay hairs. Nothing at all to suggest that Chrysalis had ever been squeezed into it. The only suggestive thing about it was the way it was built: the roof opened outwards right along the centre line, to make the loading of tall objects easier. It had been worrying me that Chrysalis would not have walked into a tiny dark trailer: but one open to the sky was a different matter.

Old man Hagstrom’s boy obligingly dug out the Hertz agent, who rented me an air-conditioned black Chevrolet with only five thousand on the clock. Overnight I added three hundred and thirty-four more, and drove into Gardiner for breakfast.

The road there had led through Yellowstone Park itself where the dawn had crept in mistily between the pine trees, and glimpses of lakes had looked like flat puddles of quick-silver. I had seen an ugly great moose, but no bears. Yogi was asleep.

I spent all morning walking round the town. None of the shops were selling the handkerchief, or had ever stocked any like it. The photograph produced no reactions at all. After a toasted bacon, tomato, and lettuce sandwich at a lunch counter I left Gardiner and went fifty-four miles to West Yellowstone.

The afternoon’s trudge produced exactly the same absence of results. Hot, tired, and frustrated, I sat in the Chevrolet and wondered what to do next. No trace of Chrysalis in the trailer, even though it seemed likely it was the one the drivers had seen. No matching handkerchiefs at Yellowstone Park. Walt had been right. The trip was one pointless waste of time.

I thought of the long forest drive back through the park, the canyon gradients at midway, and the final hundred miles of desert to Rock Springs, and decided to put it off until the next day. Sighing, I found the best-looking motel and booked the best room they had, stood under the shower until the day’s aches had run down the drain with the dust, and stretched out for a couple of hours on the kingsized Slumberland.

The waitress who brought my steak at dinner was large, loosely upholstered, kind natured, and with an obvious conviction that a man alone liked a bit of gossip. I wanted her to go away and let me eat in peace, but custom was slack and I learnt more than I cared about her complicated home life. In the end, simply to stop the flow, I pulled out the crumpled handkerchief and asked if she knew where I could get a new one like it.

She thought ‘the girls’ might know, and went off to ask them. Relieved, I finished my steak. Then she came back and doubtfully put the white square down beside me on the tablecloth.

‘They say you might get one in Jackson. They do have bears on ashtrays and things down there. Down in the Tetons. A hundred, hundred-fifty miles. It’s a holiday town, Jackson.’

I’d driven straight through Jackson the night before on the way up from Rock Springs, and seen only a small western town fast asleep. When I went back on the Tuesday morning it was buzzing with holidaymakers and local inhabitants, dressed all alike in cowboy clothes. Dude ranch country, I learnt. The main street was lined with souvenir shops, and the first one I went into had a whole pile of small white handkerchiefs with bears on.