Necessity

1

It is the sixth day after the theft. She pulls off the Interstate in Tucson, a city she has never seen before. According to the atlas it is a county seat and the second largest city in Arizona-population half a million people.

It seems as good a place as any for a beginning.

The coppery taste on her tongue is a symptom of fear: a familiar companion but unwelcome all the same.

While a fat man with a bandit’s mustache fills the tank she puts a quarter into a newspaper vending machine and leafs through the Arizona Daily Star until she finds the address of its editorial offices.

She pays cash for the gasoline and asks directions and tries to ignore the lechery that leers from the fat man’s eyes when he thinks she’s not watching.

He has been neither articulate nor accurate; she has to stop twice to ask directions. These guide her along wide boulevards debased by plastic and neon, then into scrub desert beaten raw by the sun. Mountains loom all around in a moderate brown smog. The six-lane traffic is incongruously heavy: it seems out of kilter, out of time on this primitive ground.

She has turned the air conditioner all the way up but still the steering wheel is nearly too hot to hold. The car is four years old, 67,000 miles on the clock, not in the best of working order-she bought it for cash in a dying town near Scranton from an unemployed miner who’d taken an ad in one of the supermarket throwaways. In terms of probabilities she doubtless is lucky it’s still running at all.

The miner hated to part with the car but he needed the $1,500-he has mouths to feed-and she doubts he’ll get around to recording the transfer of title until he receives next year’s reregistration bill from the motor vehicle people. Long before then she’ll be rid of the car and in the meantime it is as anonymous a pale blue midsize as can be found and there’s a good chance no one will ever trace it to her.

The wig makes her scalp itch. She feels clammy, uncomfortable with sweat: partly fear, partly the end-of-June heat. Even behind the reflecting lenses of her sunglasses she has to keep her eyes squeezed into a painful squint.

This climate can make one listless-or careless. It won’t do to drop one’s guard; it won’t do to disregard even for a moment the fact that they’re after her.

Pennants hang listlessly above a lot that offers enormous mobile homes for sale. Little stucco houses have weeds, cactus, old cars and broken-down pickup trucks for yard ornaments. And there’s not a pedestrian in sight. Not even a dog.

Arizona Daily Star. The modern structure is as wide and low as a trucking warehouse. She finds a space in the parking lot and walks inside and the cool is as sudden and free as what you feel when you emerge from a sauna.

“I wonder if I could see the obituaries for the first three months of 1953.”

She is steeled to answer questions with inventions but the girl behind the Information counter is incurious. “That’s in the microfilm section.” The girl directs her back into the maze.

She carries the bulky shoulder bag tight against her side as she explores the corridors. Really it’s too big for a handbag but she hasn’t let it out of reach in the three days since she bought it.

Half the money is inside it; the other half, with the diamonds, is in the suitcase locked in the trunk of the car.

An old man with sad bassett eyes brings out his film containers and shows her how to use the viewing machine. “Pretty soon they’ll have all this stuff in the computers and it’ll be real easy to find. But the computer don’t go back that far just yet, thank God, so they still need me.”

She thanks him and sits before the screen of the microfilm reader, turning the crank, searching each day’s issue for the obituary page.

She finds a possibility-January 13,1953: she rereads it several times but decides against it, partly because the date unnerves her (ludicrous superstition!) and partly because she doesn’t like the name of the deceased, Agnes Leonora Dapp. Surely there’ll be something more mellifluous than that …

The town was much smaller thirty-one years ago. A tenth of its present population. An overgrown cowtown, really; she rolls past February headline stories about rodeo parades and an El Conquistador Horse Show. Not many babies were born, let alone died, that season. She prowls on.

March 27, 1953. She leans toward the screen.

DIED: Hartman, Jennifer Corfu, aged 17 days, of cardiac deficiency. Infant daughter of Samuel P. G. Hartman and Jennifer Corfu Williams Hartman, 2675 No. Eastbourne Dr., Tucson. Private services will be conducted March 29th at Gower Funeral Home. Parents request that donations in lieu of flowers be sent to the Tucson chapter of the Nat’l Heart Ass’n.

She writes it all down and, on her way out, consults a current local telephone directory. No Samuel or Jennifer Hartman.

That’s good: they’ve moved away or died.

She stops again at the Information counter. A pulse lurches at the back of her throat; she endeavors to smile. “How do I get to the county courthouse?”