Death of a Citizen

CHAPTER 24

WHEN I paid my hotel bill, the woman at the cashier's window smiled pleasantly and said, "You come back, Mr. Helm."

I didn't know why she'd want me back, after last night's ruckus, and she probably didn't know herself, but the phrase has become almost obligatory for employes of business institutions throughout the southwest. Whether you drop in five times a day or don't ever expect to see the place again, you're always told to come back.

Driving north from San Antonio, there's the usual freeway routine-at least, they called them freeways out in California when I was there. Maybe the lbxans have another name for them. Driving was a cinch, and I had plenty of time to think. My thinking revolved mainly around Mac's expression when I told him to go to hell. At that point, he'd stopped being his new, sociable, smiling, peacetime self. Well, I hadn't put much stock in that act, anyway.

There wasn't really much he could do about it, short of calling in Denison and having me arrested for something, which apparently didn't appeal to him. Instead, he'd told me how to get in touch with him, if I should change my mind, and stalked out, leaving the mink stole lying on the foot of my bed. It was in the back of the pickup now, as I drove north along the four-lane highway that, as near as I could figure out, more or less followed the route of the old Shawnee Trail to Kansas. So I wasn't rid of her entirely, and if you think that wasn't Mac's idea in leaving it, you don't know Mac. He'd saddled me with something of hers he was reasonably sure I wouldn't sell, burn, or give away. There was only one way for me to get rid of it; and while it was a long chance-after all, I had no idea where she'd gone, and he probably knew it-I was sure that if it should happen, he or some of his people wouldn't be very far away.

Well, that was his worry, or maybe it was Tina's. If she wanted her furs, she could come and get them. If he wanted her, he could come and get her. I wasn't going to play delivery boy or bird dog for either of them. I'd had my little fling at reviving my old, tough, wartime self, and the experiment hadn't been a howling success. I was going back to being a peaceful writer looking for material, a devoted father and a faithful husband-although the last might take some doing, after what had happened.

I got off the concrete and went down the little back roads from which I could see and feel the country, zigzagging northwards. I slept in the truck that night. It rained hard the next day. If anybody was following me in anything but a jeep, he had lots of fun. In places, it was all the truck could do to make it through the gluey gumbo, for all its cleated tires and four-speed transmission. I didn't mind. The nice thing about driving a truck is, you don't have to worry about the wheels falling off just because the road doesn't happen to be perfectly smooth and dry.

I crossed the rivers with the great, ringing names out of Western history: the Trinity, the Colorado, the Brazos, and the Red. The weather cleared, and I shot Kodachrome by the yard. I went on north through Oklahoma and into the southeast corner of Kansas. They found lead and zinc in that corner of the state around the turn of the century, and they dug up the whole country and stacked it in great gray piles behind the mine structures, now mostly abandoned and falling into decay. It makes a weird-looking landscape, and creates difficulties for a writer trying to figure out what the place looked like before the digging.

I began working my way westwards, having completed my main chore. I could have gone straight home, I suppose, but the fact is, I still wasn't quite sure I was going home. And if I did go home, I had no idea what to say to Beth when I got there. I suppose you could say I was stalling while I tried to think up some excuses for my inexcusable behavior. Anyway, it seemed a pity to come so close to the old roaring cattle towns of Abilene, Ellsworth, Hays, and Dodge City without stopping to see what they looked like.

Abilene was a waste of time. They had no sense of their historical past; they were much prouder of President Eisenhower, it seemed, than of Wild Bill Hickok. As a writer of Western stories, I found this hard to understand. Ellsworth was just a sleepy little prairie town on a big railroad. Hays I didn't get to because daylight was running out on me, and it would have taken me too far northwards, anyway. I kept plugging to the south and west and hit Dodge City shortly after dark. It was time for a bath and a night in a real bed, so I pulled into the first tourist court that looked passable, cleaned up, and went into town to eat. Here they'd gone to the other extreme: the whole place was a museum of the old cowboy days. I cruised back and forth along the dark streets for a while, kind of lining up the places I wanted to see when they opened in the morning.

When I got back to my room at the tourist court, the phone was ringing. I knew nobody in this town, and I'd told nobody I was coming here,- but the phone was ringing. I closed the door gently behind me, and walked over and picked it up.

"Mr. Helm?" It was the voice of the motel manager. "I just happened to see you drive in. You have a longdistance call from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Just a minute."

I sat down on the bed and waited. I heard him get the operator, and I heard the phone ring five hundred miles away, and I heard Beth answer. The sound of her voice made me feel guilty and ashamed of myself. I could at least have called her from San Antonio, as I'd promised to do. But I'd sent a couple of cards to the boys. You don't have to say anything on a picture postcard.

"Matt?"

"Yes," I said.

"Matt," she said, speaking in a tight, breathless way, "Matt, Betsy's gone! She disappeared from her playpen on the front porch an hour ago, while I was making dinner… And before I could noti1~' the police, that man who was at the Darrels' party, the big, mean-looking one, Loris, called up and said she would be safe if-" Beth hesitated.

"If what?"

"If you were willing to cooperate. He said to tell you… to tell you somebody was waiting to see you with a proposition. He said you'd know who he meant… Oh, Matt, what is it, what's going on?"