Panic!

One

The desert surrounded the moving bus like an earthly vision of hell.

Heat shimmered in liquid waves on the polished black ribbon of the highway, in thick tendrils across the arid wastes extending eastward to the horizon, westward to a low stretch of reddish foothills. The noonday sun, in a charred cobalt sky, was a fiery yellow-orange ball suspended on glowing wires. Nothing moved beyond the dust-streaked windows except the heat; the only sign of life was a carrion bird, a black speck lying motionless above something dead or dying in the far distance.

Inside the bus, the air had the same furnacelike quality, smelling of dust, of sweat and cracked leather, of urine from the faulty toilet facility in the rear. It was not crowded. There were only five people riding in addition to the driver: two silent old ladies, with skin that had been dried and cured by twenty thousand appearances of the desert sun outside; a fat man, sleeping, snoring softly; a young, homely girl who sat with her legs splayed wide because the heat had chafed her inner thighs painfully; and, well in the rear on the driver’s side, a lean, hollow-eyed man sitting slouched against the window, breathing through his mouth, thinking about nothing at all.

The hollow-eyed man’s name was Jack Lennox, and he had long, shaggy black hair that hung lifelessly over a high, ascetic forehead, curled around large flat ears, partially draped the collar of a shapeless, sweat-stained blue shirt that had cost twelve dollars new two years before. There were deep, shadowed furrows etched into the once smoothly symmetrical planes of his face, a dissipated sheen to the once affluent healthiness of light olive skin. His eyes, sunken beneath thick, straight brows, were like green Christmas bulbs long burned-out, the whites tinged with a yellow that gave them a sour-buttermilk quality. He was thirty-three years of age, and he was an old, old man.

As he sat staring at the barren wasteland rushing past outside, he reached in an automatic gesture to the pocket of his shirt, fumbled, touched only the thin material and nothing more. He had smoked his last cigarette two hours before. He lowered his thin-fingered hands, untrimmed nails like black half-moons, and rubbed the slickness of them back and forth across the coarse material of his corduroy trousers; then, slowly, without turning his head from the window, he brought the hands up and dry-washed his face, palms grating lightly over the four-day growth of beard stubble there.

I wonder what time it is, he thought then. I wonder what day it is. I wonder where we are. But none of those things really mattered to him, and the questioning thoughts were rhetorical thoughts, requiring no answers. He stopped thinking again.

Outside, in the wavering distance, a second black ribbon had appeared, winding away from the main interstate highway through outcroppings of lava rock, dry washes, rocky and irregular land surface grown heavily with creosote bush and mesquite, porcupine prickly pear and ocotillo, giant saguaro cactus like lonely, entreating soldiers on a mystical battlefield. A moment later he could see the intersection between the county road and the main highway. A large post-supported sign stood there, with a reflectored arrow pointing eastward; below that:

They passed the sign, and the desert lay unbroken again, as ageless as time, as enigmatic as the Sphinx. Lennox turned from the window then and leaned forward slightly, clasping his hands tightly together in an attitude of imploring prayer and pressing the knot they formed up under his wishbone. The pain which had again begun there was alternately dull and acute, and he rocked faintly against the rigid coupling of his fingers, squeezing his eyes shut, waiting for the agony to ebb and subside. He knew it would be that way because he had experienced deep hunger on several occasions in the past nine months, and the pain came and went in approximately the same way each time. It had been almost two days now since he had last eaten anything of substance, fifteen hours since the three chocolate bars he had bought with his last quarter in the bus station, the bus station where he had gone to use the toilet, the bus station in — what town? what difference? — the bus station where he had gotten the ticket...

No.

He did not want to think about getting the ticket.

Jesus God, he did not want to think about that, but the old man — he could see the old man vividly in his mind — the old man standing there by the urinal, poor old man with a cane, zipping up his fly with gnarled and arthritic fingers, and the rectangle of pasteboard falling out of his baggy pocket and onto the floor, the old man not seeing it, moving away — and he himself moving forward, picking up the rectangle, one-way a long way and he wanted to move again, he wanted to get out of that town, get away from the Polack and the things the Polack had made him do, things like grinding stale bread and adding it to the raw hamburger to make it last longer, things like scraping the remains on the plates of recently departed customers back into the serving pots, things that nauseated and disgusted him.

And then the old man coming back, looking chagrined, looking lost, cane tapping on the tile floor, tapping, tapping, and seeing Lennox there with the ticket in his own trousers now, hidden in there.

“I lost my ticket,” the old man said, “I lost it somewhere, it must have fallen out of my pocket. Have you seen it, son? Have you seen my ticket?”

“No,” he answered, “no, I never saw any ticket.”

“I got to go to my daughter, I got to have that ticket,” the old man said. “She sent me the money, I don’t have any money of my own. How can I get to my daughter now?”

“I don’t know, old man, let me by.”

“What about my ticket? What about my daughter?” pleading with him, eyes blinking silver tears, and he had walked away fast, leaving the old man there, standing there alone and leaning on his cane with the tears in his eyes and the lost’ look on his seamed old face, hurried out of there with the ticket burning in his pocket...

The pain went away.

It receded, faded into calm, and Lennox was able to sit up again. He rubbed oily sweat from his face, blanking his mind once more, shutting out the image of the old man, and leaned back in the seat; he sucked breath between yellow-filmed teeth, and the fetid and stagnant air burned like sulphur in his lungs.

There was a static, humming sound inside the bus now, and Lennox became aware that the loudspeaker system had been switched on. He raised his head, and the flat, toneless voice of the bus driver filtered out from a speaker on the roof above him. “There’s a roadside oasis a few miles ahead, folks, and since it’s past noon we’ll be stopping there a half-hour for lunch. They’ve got hamburgers, assorted sandwiches, beer and soft drinks, reasonably priced...”

Lennox doubled forward again, pressing his forehead against the rear of the seat in front of him, his hands burrowing up under his wishbone. Violently and abruptly, the pain had come back.

Two

In a large city sixty miles to the north, in an air-conditioned downtown restaurant, a short, plump man sat in a corner booth and rubbed stubby fingers across his round paunch, cherubic face twisted into a momentary grimace.

The red-haired waitress standing before the booth said, “Is something the matter, sir?”

The plump man, whose name was Harry Vollyer, sighed audibly. “I’ve got a mild ulcer,” he said. “Gives me trouble, every now and then.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, it’s all part of the game.”

“Game?”

“Life,” Vollyer told her. “The greatest game of them all.”

“I guess so,” the waitress said. “Would you like to order now?”

“A grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk — cold milk.”

“Yes, sir. And your friend?”

“He’ll have a steak sandwich, no fries, and black coffee.”

The waitress moved away, and Vollyer belched delicately, if sourly, and sighed again. He wore a tailored powder-blue suit and a handmade silk shirt the color of fresh grapefruit juice; his tie was by Bronzini, dark blue with faint black diamonds, fastened to his shirt by a tiny white-gold tack; his shoes were bench-crafted from imported Spanish leather, polished to a high gloss. On the little fingers of each hand he wore thick white-gold rings, with platinum-and-onyx settings in simple geometric designs. He had wide, bright blue eyes that gave him the appearance of being perpetually incredulous, and silvered hair that was cut and shaped immaculately to the roundness of his skull. The curve of his lips was benign and cheerful, and from the faint wrinkles at each corner you could tell that he laughed often, that he was a complacent and happy man.

There was movement from across the room, and Vollyer saw that Di Parma was finally coming back from the telephone booth. He smiled in a fatherly way. He had felt paternal toward Di Parma from the moment he met him, he didn’t know exactly why; Livio was thirty-six, only fifteen years younger than Vollyer, but he gave the impression of being just a youth, of needing constant guidance and direction. It wasn’t that his actions, his thoughts, were juvenile, it was just that he had this habitual look of being lost, of being about to burst into tears, which got right down and pulled at your heart. Vollyer liked Di Parma. He had only been working with him for eight months now, but he liked him considerably more than any of the others he had worked with over the years; he hoped that they could stay together for a while, that nothing would come up to necessitate a severance of their relationship. There were a lot of things he could teach Di Parma, and Livio was a willing student. It gave you a sense of well-being, of completion, when you had somebody like that to work with, somebody who didn’t claim to know all the answers because he’d been around in some of the other channels for a while, somebody who could follow orders without back-talking or petulance.

Di Parma slipped into the booth across from him, a frown tugging at the edges of his mouth, corrugating the faintly freckled surface of his forehead. He was a very tall man with crew-cut brown hair and medium-length sideburns, dressed in a dove-gray suit that managed to look rumpled most of the time, in spite of the fact that it had cost as much money as Vollyer’s powder-blue one. His shirt and tie were striped, colors harmonious, but he wore no clip or tack, no jewelry of any kind; he had an intense personal aversion to it and he refused to wear it, even refused to wear a wedding ring — a fact which never ceased to amaze Vollyer. He possessed a slender, aquiline nose that gave the illusion of turning up like an inverted fishhook when you faced him, and liquid brown eyes that conveyed the sense of bemusement which Vollyer found so appealing. His hands were oversized, spatulate, and he was self-conscious about them; he put them under the table now, because he had the inveterate feeling that everybody, even Vollyer, would stare at them if they were in plain sight, although Harry had told him on a number of occasions that his hands were not anywhere near as conspicuous as he imagined.

Vollyer smiled paternally and said, “Did you get through to Jean all right?”

“No,” Di Parma answered, frowning, “no, she wasn’t home. I called back twice but she didn’t answer.”

“Maybe she went out shopping.”

“She does her shopping on Tuesdays and Fridays,” Di Parma said. “This is Monday, Harry.”

“A movie then, or a walk.”

“Jean doesn’t like movies, and she’s been having this trouble with her arches. She’s been to a podiatrist three times already this month.” He worried his lower lip. “Damn, I don’t know what to think.”

“Livio, Livio, you just talked to her this morning. She was fine then, wasn’t she?”

“Sure. Sure, she was okay.”

“Then she’s okay now, too,” Vollyer said reasonably. “It’s only been four hours.”

“But she’s not home and she’s always home this time of day.”

“Are you sure she didn’t say something to you this morning about going out? Or maybe last night? Think about it, Livio.”

Di Parma thought about it — and then he blinked and looked surprised and said, “One of the neighbors asked her to come over to some kind of luncheon. Us being new in the neighborhood and all.”

Vollyer nodded tolerantly. “You see? Nothing to get excited about.”

Di Parma was embarrassed. “Hell, Harry, I—”

“Forget it,” Vollyer said. He made a dismissive gesture. “You’re too tense all the time. Relax a little.”

“Well,” Di Parma said, and cleared his throat. “Did you order yet? I’m hungrier than I thought I was.”

“All taken care of.”

“A steak sandwich for me, no fries?”

“Just like always.”

Vollyer settled back comfortably against the cool leather of the booth, folding his hands across his paunch. That Livio. Thirty-six years old, married a full five months now, and he went around like a kid on the third day of his honeymoon, calling Jean two and three times in a twenty-four-hour period whenever they were away from the city, worrying about her, talking about her incessantly. There was nothing wrong with love, Vollyer supposed, even though he had never experienced it and did not feel particularly cheated because he hadn’t — there was nothing wrong with love but there were limits, and he could not understand how a grown man could become that hung up on a woman. Women had their purpose, Vollyer had never been one to put women down, but you had to treat them as simple equals — or inferiors if they deserved it; you just didn’t put them up on pedestals like Roman goddesses or something.

Even though he could not understand Di Parma’s constant preoccupation with his wife, he condoned it, he was indulgent of it. The thing was, Livio had not let this personal hang-up of his interfere in any way with the efficiency of his professional life; when he was working, he was cool and thinking, following orders, making all the right moves. That being the case, how could you put him down for a simple character flaw? Vollyer had decided that Di Parma’s shortcomings were just a part of the game, and as such, had to be accepted, tolerated, because he liked Di Parma, he really did like Di Parma. He hoped that nothing would happen to change things; he hoped Livio would keep right on being cool and efficient when it counted.

The waitress came around with their lunch and set the plates down and went away again. Di Parma said, “What happens after we eat, Harry? Do we stay here or do we make the rest of the drive today?”

“Better if we stay here,” Vollyer answered. “We’ll find a motel, something with a pool and a nice lounge. We’ve only got sixty miles left, over the desert, and we can make that in an hour in the morning.”

“What time do we leave?”

“Seven. We want to get there around eight.”

“There shouldn’t be much doing that early.”

“We don’t want anything doing.”

“How soon do you figure we can get back home?”

“If everything goes okay, the day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll call Jean tomorrow night,” Di Parma said. “She’ll meet us at the airport. Listen, Harry, why don’t you come out to the house then? You haven’t seen the new house.”

Vollyer had no particular desire to see the new house, but he smiled and said, “Sure, Livio, all right.”

There was no getting around it, he really did like Di Parma.

Three

From the window of her room at the Joshua Hotel, Jana Hennessey stood looking down the length of Cuenca Seco’s dusty main street to the spanning arch of the huge wooden banner marking the town’s westward entrance. Even though the black lettering on the front of the sign was not visible from there, she had taken her yellow Triumph TR-6 beneath it late the previous afternoon — after better than fifty miles of desert driving — and she remembered clearly what it said:

As far as Jana was concerned, the wording was misrepre-sentational. The Wonderland it spoke of was little more than a dead sea sustaining grotesque cacti with spines like razor-edged daggers, a haven for vultures and scorpions and fat brown venom-filled snakes, an arid and polychromatic graveyard strewn with the very bones of time. And the Gateway — well, the Gateway was an anachronism in a world of steel-and-glass, of hurtling chrome-toothed machines, of great, rushing, ant-busy throngs of people; it was an elaborate set for an Old West movie, with too many false-fronted buildings and sun-bonneted women and Stetsoned men moving ponderously beneath a demoniacal sun, with dust-caked metal extras miscast in the roles of horses and carriages; it was make-believe that had magically become a reality, and been given an aura of antiquity that was somehow a little frightening.

Jana expelled a long, soft breath. The trouble with me is, she thought, I’m a big-city girl. I can’t appreciate native Americana because I’ve never seen any of it face-to-face; I’ve never really been out of New York City until now. How much of the grass roots can you see in Brooklyn or Long Island or downtown Manhattan? It’s not so easy to adjust to a different way of life, it’s not so easy to surround yourself with nature instead of with people, with life-in-the-raw instead of life-insulated-by-luxury; it’s not so easy to break away, to change, to forget.

To forget...

Abruptly, Jana turned from the window — tall and lithe in her mid-twenties, figure reminiscent of a lingerie model’s, sable hair worn long and straight, with stray wisps falling over her shoulders, almost to the gentle swell of her breasts. A pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses gave her narrow face a quality of introspective intelligence that was enhanced by the prominence of delicately boned cheeks, by the firm set of a small, naturally pink mouth. Her eyes, behind the lens of the glasses, were an intense brown that contained, like an alien presence, a small dull glow of pain.

The room was small and hot, in spite of a portable air-conditioning unit mounted in the frame of the window; but since the Joshua Hotel was the only lodging in town — and since this was considered one of its finer accommodations — she had not had much choice in the matter. It contained a brass-framed double bed, two nightstands, a small private bathroom, and a child-sized writing desk; the walls were of a varnished blond wood, decorated with desert lithographs. The white bedspread depicted a stoic, war-painted Indian astride a pinto horse, a feathered lance in one hand.

Jana crossed the room, stood behind the desk, and studied the typewritten sheets laid out beside the portable Royal, the first two pages of the outline she had begun earlier that morning. Then she looked at the half-filled third page rolled into the platen of the machine, at the x-ed out lines there. She turned again and went to the bed and sat down, staring at the telephone on the nightstand nearest the door.

She had put off calling Harold Klein for a week now, and she knew that that had been a mistake. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him because of the book, the fact that she hadn’t even started it; and, more important, because he represented an integral part of the life in New York from which she had so completely severed herself. Time to think, uninterrupted, had been what she desperately needed during the two thousand five hundred miles she had driven this past week — time to sort things out in her mind so that she would be able to work again. And Harold would not have understood, would still not understand. Oh, he knew about Don Harper, of course — the bare facts of the affair — but that was all he knew. He was a fine agent, a good friend, but she had just never been able to talk to him on a personal level — and the things which had been on her mind of late were such that she would have found it almost impossible to discuss them with a priest, much less a man of Harold’s uncomplicated nature.

But that did not alter the fact that her failure to call him had been a mistake. He was undoubtedly worried, and with good cause; he had done a lot for her, after all, had been responsible for a large percentage of her current success. He had a stake in her future — was a prospectively important part of her future — and to continue to shun him would be, ultimately, to shun whatever prospects for renewed normalcy lay ahead of her.

She had been thinking about rectifying her mistake all morning, and now she knew that she would not be able to get back to her outline until she had done so. She picked up the phone and asked the desk clerk to dial Klein’s personal office number in New York, nervously tapping short, manicured nails on the glass top of the table as she waited. What would she tell him? How would she—?

A soft click. “Harold Klein,” his voice said distantly, metallically.

She drew a quiet, tremulous breath. “Hello, Harold, this is Jana.”

Momentary silence — and then Klein said with deceptive calm, “Well, hello, Jana. How nice of you to call.”

“Harold, I—”

“For God’s sake,” Klein interrupted, anger replacing the subtle sarcasm, “where have you been the past week? You just disappeared, without a word, without a trace. We’ve been so damned worried we were about ready to call in the police.”

“I’ve been... traveling,” she told him vaguely.

“Traveling where?”

“Cross country.”

“Well, where are you now?”

She explained, briefly.

“What are you doing there?”

“Getting ready to write Desert Adventure.”

“You mean you haven’t even started it yet?”

“No,” she said.

“You’re a week past deadline now,” Klein said with exasperation. “I’ve gotten at least one phone call a day from Ross Phalen—”

“Ross Phalen is a pain in the ass,” Jana said bluntly.

“That may be true, but his word is law at Nabob Press. Do you want to lose them, Jana? They’re paying a hell of a lot more money than I can get you from any of the other juvenile publishers.”

“I know that, Harold, and I’m sorry. But I’ve had some... problems the past month. I tried to work and I couldn’t, and so I decided to come out here and see if the location would stimulate me.”

“Problems? What sort of problems?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

Klein exhaled audibly. “Don Harper, I suppose. Well, all right. How long will it take you to finish the book? I’ve got to have something to tell Phalen when he calls again.”

“About a week,” Jana said.

“And the illustrations?”

“Another week.”

“Is that definite?”

“I think so, yes.”

Klein sighed a second time. “When you get back to New York, girl, you and I are going to have a nice long talk about the facts of life. You’ve got to understand that running off unannounced this way—”

“Harold, I’m not coming back to New York.”

“What?”

“I’m not coming back,” Jana repeated.

Silence hummed over the wire for a moment, and then Klein said half-incredulously, “You’re not serious.”

“I’m very serious.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“I’ve had it with New York, that’s all, I’m sick to my soul of New York. I feel as if I’m... suffocating there.”

“Where do you expect to go? What do you expect to do, a young girl alone?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll travel, I’ll go to Canada, to Mexico, I’ll see some of the great wide world.” She tried to make her tone light, but she had the feeling that her voice was strained and uncertain.

“Jana, I think you’re making a rash and foolish decision. Your place is here, with people you know, with people you can equate with.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it, Harold, I’ve made up my mind. Now I don’t want to discuss it any more. I’ve got to get to work on Desert Adventure if you want a manuscript in a week.”

“All right, we won’t discuss it any more,” Klein said, and Jana detected an irritating note of patronage in his voice. “What’s the name of the place where you’re staying? The telephone number?”

She told him.

“I’ll call you in a day or so, to see how you’re coming along. Sooner, if anything urgent comes up.”

“Fine.”

“You won’t go running off again, now?”

“No, I’ll stay right here.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

They said parting words, and Jana put the receiver down quickly. The telephone conversation had gone about as she had expected it to, but it had upset her nonetheless. Harold meant well, but he was a prober, a man who tried to burrow his way into your soul, to examine each cell of your being in an effort to determine its relationship with every other cell. And that was exactly the kind of thing which frightened her, which she wanted desperately to avoid.

Harold must never know.

No one must ever know.

Hers was a private hell, and it could be shared by no one — no one at all.

Four

The roadside oasis was situated just outside the crest of a long curve in the main interstate highway, like a detached nipple on some gigantic contour drawing of a woman’s breast.

It was set something over two hundred yards from the highway, umbilically connected to it by a narrow, unpaved access road that blended into a rough-gravel parking area in front. There were, in actuality, three buildings: the main structure, old and sprawling, unpainted, with two weathered gas pumps under a short wooden awning; at the right edge of the parking area, a lattice-fronted, considerably smaller construction that obviously housed rest rooms; and a cabinlike dwelling set directly behind the main building — living quarters for the owner or owners. A large wooden sign, mounted on rusted steel rods on the roof of the main building, read Del’s Oasis in heat-eroded blue letters.

Lennox saw all of this through dulled eyes as the bus turned off the black glass of the highway, onto the access road. It bounced jarringly, raising heavy clouds of dust, and he clutched at the armrests with both hands, his teeth clamped tightly together at the intensification of the pain which still burned deep within his belly. The bus slowed as it swung onto the surface of the parking lot, and the driver maneuvered it to parallel the gas pumps directly in front, switching off the diesel immediately. The doors whispered open, and heat-shrouded silence crept in.

Lennox got sluggishly out of his seat and followed the other passengers and the driver onto the gravel beneath the wooden awning. He saw that a screen door was set into the front of the structure, above which was a warped metal sign: Café. There were two windows, dust-caked, with green shades partially drawn inside, one on either flank of the door. In the left window was a Coca-Cola sign and a card that said Open; in the right was a shield advertising Coors beer.

The driver pulled open the screen door, and his passengers trooped in after him like a line of weary foot soldiers, Lennox entering last. It was not much cooler inside. There was an overt stuffiness in the barnlike interior that had not been dispelled by the large ceiling fan whirring overhead, or by the ice-cooler placed on a low table to one side. On the left was a long, deserted lunch counter with yellow leatherette-topped stools arranged before it; the remainder of the room was taken up with wooden tables covered in yellow-checked oilcloth, all of them empty now, and straight-backed chairs. The rough-wood walls were furbished with prospecting tools — picks, shovels, nugget pans, and the like — and faded facsimiles of venerable Western newspapers announcing the discovery of gold in California, silver in Nevada and Arizona. At the foot of the far wall, next to an open door leading to a storeroom, were a rocking cradle and portions of a wooden sluice box that a placard propped between them claimed to have been used at Sutter’s Mill, California, circa 1850.

Behind the lunch counter, dressed in clean white, a middle-aged, balding man with thick jowls stood slicing potatoes on a scarred sandwich board. To one side of him, tacked to the wall, was a square of cardboard: We Accept All Major Credit Cards. Lennox thought bitterly of the wallet full of credit cards he had destroyed months ago, because they had his name on them and were links with the dead past, because using them would be like leaving a clear, fresh trail to his current whereabouts, because he might never be able to pay the accumulated sums, and that was considered fraud and he did not want any more threats to his tenuous freedom. But Jesus, he should have kept just one card — Diner’s or Carte Blanche — for emergencies like this, for the moments of burning hunger...

The balding man put down the heavy knife he was using as the string of customers — not Lennox — moved to the lunch counter and took stools in an even row; he wiped his hands on a freshly laundered towel, smiling professionally with thick lips that were a winelike red in the sallow cast of his face. “What’ll it be today, folks?”

Lennox could smell the pungency of grilled meat hanging heavily in the hot, still air, and the muscles of his stomach convulsed. He backed to the door, turning, and stumbled outside, moving directly across to the bus, leaning unsteadily against the hot metal of its side. After a moment he re-entered the coach and took his small, cracked blue overnight bag from the rack above the seat. Then he crossed under the bright glare of the sun to the rest rooms.

Inside the door marked Men, he ran cold water into the lavatory basin and washed his face and neck, cupped his hands under the tap and rinsed his mouth several times; he resisted the urge to drink, knowing that if he swallowed any of the tepid, chemical-tasting liquid his contracted stomach would throw it up again immediately. From the overnight bag he took his razor and a thin sliver of soap; but the idea of shaving, which had been his intention, evaporated when he looked at himself in the speckled mirror over the basin. A close shave would have been incongruous with his unkempt hair, his sweat-dirty clothes, his hollow eyes — and he would still have looked like a derelict. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with all of it.

He returned the razor and soap to the bag, and then opened the door to one of the two stalls, closing it behind him as he entered, and sat on the lowered lid of the toilet seat, his head in his hands. The pain, which had fluctuated into a muted gnawing as he splashed himself with water at the basin, again disappeared from his stomach; but he kept on sitting there, drinking air through his mouth.

Several minutes passed, and finally Lennox got weakly to his feet. He hoped to God that they would finish eating in the café before long. He wanted to get to some town, any town, a town where there were dishes to be washed or floors to be swept, a town where they had a mission or a Salvation Army kitchen; if he did not get something to eat very soon, he was afraid that he would collapse from lack of nourishment — you could die from malnutrition, couldn’t you? How long could a man live without food? Three days, four? He wasn’t sure, exactly; he was sure only of the pain which attacked his belly more and more frequently, more and more intensely, and that in itself was enough to frighten him.

He picked up his overnight bag and opened the door and went outside, blinking against the glinting sunlight. He moved toward the bus. As he came around on the side of it, he saw the driver lounging against the left front wheel, working on his teeth with a wooden pick. Lennox wet his lips with a dry tongue, pulling his eyes away, and put one foot on the metal entrance step.

The driver said, “Just a minute, guy.”

Lennox stopped, and electricity fled along the nerve synapses in the saddle of his back. There was something — a terse authority — in the driver’s voice that portended trouble. He turned, slowly, and faced the other man. “Yes?”

The driver was darkly powerful in his sweat-stained gray uniform, and there was a grim set to his squared jaw. He studied Lennox with small, sharp eyes, and the distaste at what he saw was clearly defined on his sun-flushed face. “I didn’t see you inside the café,” he said, and the tone of his voice made the words a question that demanded an acceptable answer.

“I... wasn’t hungry,” Lennox answered thickly. “I went to wash up.”

“You’ve been riding with me since six this morning. You didn’t eat when we took the rest stop in Chandlerville at eight, and you don’t eat now. You don’t have much of an appetite, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” the driver said. “Where are you going?”

“Going?”

“That’s right: what destination?”

Lennox tried to remember the name of the city on the old man’s ticket, but his mind had gone blank. He said, “I... the next town. The next stop.”

“Let’s have a look at your ticket.”

“What for?”

“Let’s see it,” coldly.

Lennox got the pasteboard from his pocket, and the driver took it out of his nerveless fingers. He scanned it, his eyes narrowing. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “This is only valid to Gila River, and we passed through there two hours ago. You’re riding on an expired pass.”

He could not think of anything to say. What was there to say? He hadn’t considered the possibility of the ticket being good only to one of the small towns along the bus route; he had been irrationally sure that the old man would be going to one of the larger border cities to the south, that that was where the daughter who had sent him the money would be living. The destination on the pasteboard had meant nothing to him originally, and he remembered only vaguely passing through Gila River; the name had sparked no recognition at that time. He stood there sweating, looking at the driver’s shirt front, trying to think of something to do or say but not coming up with anything at all.

“You owe me four-eighty,” the driver said. “That’s the fare one way from Gila River to Troy Springs.”

“I don’t... have four-eighty,” Lennox said woodenly.

“That’s what I figured, too. You’re nothing but a damned vag, and you’re off my bus as of right now.”

“Listen,” Lennox said, “listen, you can’t leave me here...”

“The hell I can’t,” the driver told him. “You’re left, guy.”

He turned abruptly and went to the café door, calling out to the passengers inside that they would be leaving now. He came back and got in behind the wheel, ignoring Lennox, and after a moment the other passengers filed out and entered the bus. The homely girl with the heat-chafed thighs looked at Lennox with a curious, mild hunger, but she did not say anything to him.

He stood there like a fool, feeling helpless, holding the overnight bag against his right leg. The homely girl pressed her face to the window glass and looked down at him with sad eyes. The bus began to move away, its diesel engine shattering the hot, dead stillness, and Lennox watched it swing around and start down the access road, raising clouds of dry, acrid dust. Sunlight gleamed feverishly off the silver metal of its body as it slowed and made the turn south, a sluggish armored sowbug disappearing along the curve of the highway. What now? he thought. What am I going to do now?

He heard movement behind him, and when he turned he saw that the balding man who had been behind the café counter had come outside. The balding man walked over beside Lennox and took a cigarette from the pocket of his white shirt and set it between his thick lips without lighting it. After a moment he said, “Put you off the bus, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“I was riding on an expired ticket.”

“These bus drivers can be bastards sometimes,” the balding man said. “This is a hell of a place to strand a guy.”

“A hell of a place,” Lennox agreed dully.

The balding man studied him closely without appearing to do so. The heat was thick around the two of them, and from out of the barren plain to the east, something made a fluttering sound. Finally the balding man said, “You a little strapped for money, are you?”

“You could say that.”

“Down on your luck or on the run?”

Lennox started. “What?”

“Cops looking for you?” the balding man asked matter-of-factly.

“No,” he lied. “No.”

“Were you heading any place special on that bus?”

“Just... drifting.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I got some work if you could use it.”

Lennox had been looking out over the desert, at the shimmering jagged floor of it, at the gaunt skeletal range rising on the horizon to the south, at the vast brittle emptiness lying motionless under the canopy of heat. He turned his attention to the balding man again and passed a hand across his mouth. “What kind of work?”

“This and that. A little painting, a little stock reshuffling, a little fixing up.”

“Here?”

“That’s right. I can’t pay much — a few bucks — but you’ll eat for three-four days and you can sleep on a cot in the storeroom. And you’ll be able to buy another bus ticket out when you’re through.”

The pain was omnipresent in Lennox’s stomach, gnawing, gnawing. He did not have to consider the offer at all. “All right,” he said.

The balding man smiled briefly. “My name’s Perrins, Al Perrins.” He kept his hands at his sides.

“Mine’s Delaney,” Lennox said.

“Okay, Delaney. How about a couple of burgers? You can start work afterward.”

Lennox made a dry clearing noise in his throat. His legs felt even weaker now, but it was the weakness of sudden relief. “Sounds good.”

“The food ain’t,” Perrins said, and laughed. “But it’ll fill your belly. Come on.”

They turned and walked slowly inside the café. Lennox was thinking about the burgers Perrins had promised, and he felt nauseous with his hunger; he wondered if he would be able to keep any of the food down.

He was able to — most of it, anyway.

Five

When the young bright-face, Forester, finished his morning patrol and returned to the county sheriff’s substation in Cuenca Seco, Andy Brackeen — the resident deputy-in-charge-went down to Sullivan’s Bar to drink his lunch.

It had been a long morning, and Brackeen was badly hungover and very thirsty. He had gotten into a pointless argument with his wife, Marge, the night before and had driven over to Kehoe City in a huff; there had been a poker game in the back room of Indian Charley’s, and he had lost heavily and drunk too damned much gin in the bargain. He still could not remember driving home, and that was very bad; he was hanging onto his job by a thread now, and the last stroke of the scissors would be a tag by one of the Highway Patrol units or cruising county cars for drunk driving in a county vehicle. He was a goddamned fool for getting into the gin like that; he couldn’t handle gin, he had never been able to handle gin. It did things to his mind, blacked him out so that he could not recall what he had done after a certain point in the evening. But if he stayed with the beer, he was all right. He could drink beer with the best of them, and he was always in full control of his faculties; things were just fine if he stayed with the beer.

Brackeen had no illusions about himself. He knew what he was and why he was what he was. There had been a time when that knowledge had been heavy and consumptive within him, but that had been sixteen years ago, in another world named San Francisco — that had been before the desert and the beer, before Marge. Now the perception was only a dimly glowing ember resting on the edge of his soul.

He was a big man, thick-chested, and he had in his youth fought amateur bouts in the heavyweight class, almost but not quite qualifying for the Golden Gloves; but the once-powerful musculature of his body was now overlaid with a soft cushion of fat, and his belly swayed liquidly beneath his dark khaki uniform shirt, partially concealing the buckle of his Sam Browne belt, brushing across the checked grip of the .357 Colt Python Magnum on his right hip. Each of his forty-one years was grooved for all to see on the sun-blackened surface of his face, as the elements had carved the centuries on the desert landscape he had made his home more than fourteen years before. Perpetually damp black hair, speckled with gray and pure white, was thickly visible beneath a deep-crowned white Stetson; gray eyes, red-rimmed and flatly expressionless, seemed as fixed as bright marbles solidified in lucite.

He was not particularly well-liked in the town of Cuenca Seco, but neither was he hated nor feared; he was, for the most part, simply tolerated and ignored. As he moved now along the heat-waved sidewalk toward Sullivan’s Bar, walking slowly because of the throbbing ache in his temples and because of the hot sun, he passed townspeople whom he knew — but there were no exchanges of greeting, no nods of recognition. He walked alone on the busy street, and it was the way Brackeen had come to want it; he could live with himself only as long as he was able to lock the secret of his disintegration as a man deep within, and he knew that friendships, liaisons, often brought probings which, if well-meaning, could still be ultimately destructive. He could never talk about it. He had never told anyone about it, not even Marge, even though she might have understood.

Sullivan’s Bar was crowded with lunch trade, and Brackeen’s eyes narrowed into thin slits at the sudden change in light as he entered. There was an air-conditioning unit behind the simulated kegs-and-plank bar, and the cool air was a salve on his pulsing temples, the feverish skin of his face. He moved across the wooden floor, up to the bar, and the men there made room for him without ceasing conversation, without looking at him, without acknowledging his presence in any way.

Sullivan came down immediately, no smile on his freckled Irish countenance. Brackeen said, “Mighty hot,” the way he did every day when he came in, and took off his hat and put it on the bar face. He passed one of his big, knotted hands through his damp hair.

Sullivan said, “Yeah,” ritualistically.

“Draw a pint, will you, Sully?”

“Sure.”

“And put a Poor Boy in, I guess.”

Sullivan went away and drew the beer and placed one of the foil-wrapped, ready-made sandwiches into the miniature electric oven on the back bar. He was an old-fashioned publican, and he scraped the foaming head off the glass of beer with a wooden spatula before serving it.

Brackeen wrapped both hands around the cold-beaded stein, lifted it, his eyes closing in anticipation. He drank in long, convulsive swallows, filling his mouth with the chill effervescence before letting it flow tingling through the burning passage of his throat and into the unsettled emptiness of his stomach.

The glass was empty. He put it down on the bar and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. Jesus, but he had needed that! And the next one, too. He didn’t really want the Poor Boy at all, but he knew that when he had a hangover as bad as this one, he had to have something solid on his stomach; if not, he would conclude his tour at five o’clock by puking up stale beer, that was what had happened the last time he hadn’t eaten with hell going.

Brackeen looked for Sullivan and caught his eye, lifting the empty stein. When it had been refilled, he drank more slowly, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. What he saw did not disturb him much. If he had been able, as a kid fresh out of the Police Academy, to look twenty years into the future and see himself as he was today, he would have been appalled at the vision; but as a kid, he had had ideals, dreams, he had had a lot of things that he no longer possessed. The fact that he had become a slob offended him not at all.

He ate the Poor Boy slowly, in mincing bites washed down with a third stein of draught. The beer was bringing him out of it, as it usually did. He called to Sullivan for a fourth draw, and while he waited for it he decided that he was strong enough to have a cigarette; he couldn’t touch them in the mornings after a night like he’d had in Kehoe City.

He smoked two cigarettes, one each with the fourth and the fifth glasses of beer, and he was feeling straight with himself again, feeling pretty good. The headache had abated, and his gut was not giving him any more trouble. But it was time to get back, because Forester took his lunch at one-thirty and Forester had big eyes and a bigger mouth, being a bright-face. Brackeen didn’t want to antagonize Forester, you had to pamper these young shits with their new-found authority, because if they went sour on you they could make a lot of trouble. And Forester had never made a secret of the fact that he disliked — disapproved of — Brackeen.

He thought briefly about taking a couple of cans of beer back to the substation with him — Forester was going on patrol again, after his lunch — but he shelved that idea immediately. He had almost gotten caught with a half-quart in his hand that afternoon two months ago, when the county sheriff, Lydell, had come in unannounced. He had learned his lesson from that; there was no point in tempting fate, no percentage in raising already poor odds. He would be able to make it through the day now, with these five beers under his belt — and if he did begin hurting a little later on, maybe he could slip out for a couple of minutes and get back here for a bracer or two, as long as things remained quiet.

He eased off the stool and put his hat back on, adjusting the Magnum on his hip. “See you later, Sully,” he said.

“Yeah, sure.”

Brackeen smiled loosely and went out into the sweltering afternoon without touching his wallet — the final segment of the bitter ritual he and Sullivan enacted almost every day.

Six

Slowly, inexorably, the desert sun traversed its ardent path across the smoky blue heavens. When it reached the lip of the western horizon, it hung there for long minutes as if preparing itself for the descent, radiating, setting red-gold fire to the sky around it. Then, abruptly, it plunged, deepening the red haze into burnished brass, adding salmon and pink threads to the intricate color scheme of a desert sunset. The horizon swallowed it hungrily, and the empyrean modulated to blue-gray, to slate, to expanding black as the shining globe vanished completely.

The first papery whispers of the night wind stirred the mesquite, the bright gold flowers of the rabbit bush, and nocturnal animals — badgers, foxes, peccaries, coyotes, hooded skunks — ventured tentatively from their lairs in search of food and water. Bats and horned owls filled the rapidly cooling air with the flutter of wings.

Darkness hooded the land in a black cloak, and the wind grew chill as the sharp and enigmatic reversal of desert temperature manifested itself. A pale gold moon appeared suddenly in the star-pricked velvet of the sky, as if it had been launched from some immense catapult, casting ghostly white shine across the silent landscape.

Night was full-born.

Another day had perished into infinity.