What of Terry Conniston?

Chapter Fifteen

In the heat Billie Jean sat with her legs wide apart, fanning herself with a folded roadmap. Mitch formed a loose fist, shifting his glance from her to Terry, who stood near the gasoline pumps under the concrete station awning.

Sleeplessness laid a semitransparent glaze over Mitch’s eyes; he had to keep blinking. Wracked by bruises and sore muscles, he contained his irritability badly. They had been stuck in this woebegone gas station seven hours.

The grease monkey came up out of the pit under the car wiping his hands on a filthy rag. He was a diminutive old man with the high-cheeked face of a pureblood Indian, the jet-black hair and old-copper skin. A broad grin showed the gaps in his teeth. “Oll ehfeexed,” he said happily. “Jew gonna pagar een dolors o een pesos?”

“Dollars.” Mitch’s hand plunged into his trouser side-pocket and crumpled a bill. “How much?”

“Eh?”

“Cuanto?”

“Oh. Sí. Cómo, cómo—” The mechanic counted on his grease-black fingers, his lips moving. “Cuarenta... dos... catorce... por ocho.” He frowned and shook his head, and suddenly threw his head back, beaming. “Doce dolares, por favor. Ees twelve dollars.” He added with an apologetic shrug, “Would be maybe not so mahch, bot hod to ehfeex the calceta and the pompa too, jew know? The, ah, the — chingadera, I donno the name een Eenglish, jew know?”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Mitch muttered, and fumbled twelve dollars into the blackened palm. He wheeled past the girls and said crankily, “Come on... come on.”

He rolled the car on west through the rocky desert hills, wondering how long the old grease-monkey’s patchwork job would hold the water pump together before it burst again. He kept it down to forty-five most of the time, except on the downhill slopes, hoping the water temperature wouldn’t rise high enough to blow another hole by steam pressure. In the back seat. Billie Jean said crankily, “Jesus H. Christ. I never been so sticky damn hot in my life.”

“Shut up.”

Terry touched his arm but he gave her a stony look and she withdrew her hand. They limped west in silence after that.

According to the map they had picked up at the gas station, Caborca was a smallish town (población 5,000-7,500) on the Rio Asunción. There was, however, no sign of a river anywhere in sight when they reached the sign which said HEROICA CABORCA. The appelation, Terry explained, commemorated the occasion in the 1850s when a hundred Yankee filibusters had invaded Sonora, planning to capture it and annex it to the United States; they had been besieged here by the local populace, abetted by several companies of militia, and finally forced to surrender, whereupon the Mexicans had lined them up against the wall and slaughtered them with rifle fire, after which the corpses were stripped of gold teeth and rings and left naked to the village pigs and goats. According to legend it had taken more than a year for the stench to dissipate. It had been the high point, if not the only memorable moment, in the town’s four-hundred-year history. The severed head of the filibuster leader had been pickled and placed on display in a jar. It was probably around somewhere, still. The walls of the old Franciscan church were still pocked with bullet holes.

The town clustered against the shoulders of several steep round hills, surrounded by scratch-poor country, all weathered clay and dry brittle clumps of brush. Here and there were painfully irrigated vegetable patches. Flocks of gaunt sheep drifted listlessly across the open desert. Dogs lay in the shade watching through bloodshot eyes when Mitch reached the outskirts of town and slowed to a crawl to make way, horn blasting, through a thickness of chickens clucking in the road.

Ahead on the right stood an apparition: a brand-new motel, complete with plastic, chrome, neon, and swimming pool. Mitch stopped in front of it and eyed the cars parked in the lot. None was Floyd’s Oldsmobile. Anyhow, he thought, Floyd wouldn’t be likely to stop at a conspicuous place like this.

He drove on into town. The streets were narrow, once paved but now holed and dusted. There were occasional cobbled sidewalks. The adobe structures, rammed together like city slum buildings, were painted ludicrous colors — pinks, yellows, greens. Poverty didn’t have to be soot-gray. Slow-moving women with black hair tied back in buns and dusty dresses with flowing long skirts stared at Mitch as if he were a movie director looking for extras to cast in a Pancho Villa film. Men in cowboy hats sat somnolent in shady doorways like characters in cartoons of Old Mexico. It was the siesta hour.

There were a few cars parked with two wheels on the sidewalk — mainly pickups and station wagons, the old ones with real wooden bodies. Mitch didn’t see the Olds anywhere; he hardly expected to. Floyd wouldn’t make it that easy.

He pulled up next to a young man in pachuco-tight Levi’s and stuck his head out the window; he spoke with care, drawing his lips back over his teeth in exaggerated enunciation:

“Por favor, amigo, dónde está la farmacia?”

The youth grinned and rattled off something, adding wild arm-and-hand signals like a ship’s semaphore signalman. Mitch flushed and heard Terry laugh at him: “He says it’s two blocks down and turn right and go across the plaza.”

“Okay,” Mitch said, “Gracias.”

“De nada,” the youth said, and stood grinning until they drove out of his sight.

Mitch said, “What’s so funny about us?”

“Maybe he just likes to smile,” Billie Jean said. “Man, those tight pants, you could sure see how he was hung.”

Mitch didn’t glance at Terry; he felt redness creep up his neck. Terry said, “You’ve got a way with words, Billie Jean.”

“Shit — you making fun of me? Maybe I don’t like your high-and-mighty, either, you ever think of that?”

The plaza enclosed a park with a dead lawn and two or three palm trees. Mitch drove around it and found a parking space in front of the pharmacy. A pulse began to thud in his throat. He got the .38 out of the glove compartment and shoved it in his pocket — it was empty but the whole world didn’t have to know that. I should’ve remembered to buy cartridges in Nogales. Maybe they’ve got some here.

It was just like the photograph, von Roon’s name painted on the sign. The door was closed and when he banged on it he got no response. He tried the knob but it was locked.

Terry said from the car window, “That’s why the kid was grinning. It’s siesta time — everything’s closed.”

Mitch backed down the three steps and came around the car and got in. “Great.”

Billie Jean said, “What now, smart guy?”

“We wait for them to open up.”

“Not here,” Billie Jean said immediately. “Not here. Too hot in this car. Man, what’s wrong with that place back there we passed with the swimming pool? I could use a jump in that pool right now.”

He glanced at Terry. “That place might not be too bad an idea at that. If we can afford it.”

Billie Jean said, “I got some money of my own. I’ll pay my own way. Just you drive me back to that pool.”

Drunk in his legs, Mitch opened the door and went in and looked around. His eyeballs seemed to scrape the sockets. The motel room was new, impersonal, sparsely filled with cheap blond furniture. It smelled stale. The drowsy desk clerk had explained with huge amusement how the motel, with its enormous carpeted lobby, had been built by gringo speculators who had assurances from the Mafia that Sonora was about to legalize gambling. The motel was to have been a gambling casino — only Sonora hadn’t passed the gambling law. That had been eight or nine years ago. The gringo speculators were still scheming and the Mafia were still making promises and the motel was still losing much money. The clerk had laughed uproariously. He had cast his wizened eye at Billie Jean (Terry had remained outside in the car) and at Mitch, and he had winked and handed over the keys to two rooms. They didn’t have enough money to take three rooms. Besides, it would have attracted attention.

He sat down on the bed and began to unlace his shoes. A shadow filled the door and he looked up to see Terry looking at him with an inquiring glance. He said, “You two take the other room.”

“If you think I’m going to stay in a room with that female Genghis Khan you’re mistaken.”

“Stay here, then. God knows I’m too fagged out to be dangerous.” He smiled weakly. “I feel like a two-dollar clock that somebody forgot to wind up. I don’t know about you but I’m going to wash off some of this dirt before I have to start paying real estate taxes on it.”

He shut himself in the bathroom, turned on the shower and let the water run until the rust cleared out of it, and scrubbed himself almost viciously. Blood on my hands, he thought sardonically, remembering the high-school production of Macbeth. “Is this a Floyd I see before me,” he muttered. He washed out his drip-dry shirt and underwear in the sink and hung them, wrung out and wrinkled, across the shower bar; and went back into the main room with a bath towel wrapped around his midriff. “I feel twenty pounds lighter.”

Terry sat in a rickety chair with loosely crossed legs, her hair standing out in wild disorder, looking rumpled and untidy and too tired to care. For the first time he realized she was as worn and ragged as he was; he had begun to think she was indestructible.

“Go on in and take a shower. Make you feel better.”

“As soon as I get the strength,” she mumbled. She glanced at him; her eyes seemed slightly glazed. “What in the hell are we doing here?”

“Sometimes I forget, myself.”

“We’re bananas,” she said vaguely. “Stark, raving bananas.” She got up and took a moment to steady her balance, and went weaving into the bathroom.

He lay back on the bed and listened to the beat of the shower. Ought to keep an eye on Billie Jean, he thought distantly; and then, To hell with her, let her look out for herself. Everything was so muddled it didn’t really matter any more. The pipedream was just that; ashes, now. Maybe Floyd was around here someplace and maybe he wasn’t — what difference did it make? It would be just as easy to rob Fort Knox. In a dark fugue, a dirge, Mitch closed his eyes. He felt instantly as if he were falling down on layers of misty cushions; he heard himself whimper softly in his half-sleep and then a kind of peace settled on him.

A soft touch on his cheek brought him sharply awake. His eyes flashed open.

Terry, leaning over him, kissed him.

He got up on his elbows. She pushed him back with a slim pink arm coated with a fine gauze of soft pale hairs. She was sitting on the edge of the bed; she drew the towel tighter around her; the tip of her tongue quested her mouth corner. She looked pink and scrubbed. Inside, Mitch felt a visceral quiver, the slow coil and press of wanting her — stupid, he said to himself; but out of his urgency of danger, his sense of hopeless failing, came a blood need that sent spasms into him, beyond reason or sensibility.

Her eyes locked on his; her mouth became soft and lost its smile, her eyes became drowsily heavy. With a finger he brushed back a stray damp lock of her hair. He didn’t want to think beyond this bed, this moment, her. He felt tranquil and sure. He pulled her down, drew her tenderly close; her head moved over his and she made a kitteny little sound in her throat and pressed against him and sucked his lower lip. Her mouth made deeper and deeper demands; he twisted, rolling her, grinding against her. She touched him — hot sensation raced through him. He pulled the towel away and laid his face in the softness of her flesh: her body, which looked like hot marble, was after all the softest of down. She pulled his head tight against her and he felt her stir, her breath coming as quick as his own; they made love with a driving hard urgency, hers matching his own.

When he lay back all the certainty drained out of him as if a plug had been pulled. A knotted muscle rippled at his jaw; he didn’t look at her until she made as if to get up. Then he put out a detaining hand. He pulled her against him and spoke into the turned hollow of her neck:

“I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that — you don’t deserve any part of me. I never wanted to — turn you into something cheap, something to be ashamed of.”

She drew away, saying nothing. After a moment he reached for her hand. It was ice-cold. She said abruptly, “Is that how you feel? Cheap?”

“No — I didn’t mean—”

“You’re a puritan, Mitch. Underneath that hip exterior- is a pious prude. Don’t you think I wanted this as much as you did?”

He studied her gravely — the earnest wide beauty of her eyes, the soft curves of her body. Feeling almost burst his throat: he felt an overwhelming warmth course through him, an unreasoning reaching-out of his heart. “I must have been around Billie Jean too long — she’s the one that makes it seem cheap. I’m sorry I said that — I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what I really meant. Well, look, I never said I wasn’t stupid.”

She lay back and smiled at the ceiling. “Don’t you feel fine?”

They waited in shared nesty silence, not needing to talk, until the grinding tensions began to return, setting his nerves on edge again, dispelling the moment’s grateful lassitude. Fear was a malaise never far from the surface, reminding him biliously that this wasn’t an idyll but only a momentary respite.

He said, “I think you’d better get in touch with your old man. You don’t have to tell him where you are but you ought to let him know you’re all right.”

“Not yet.” She sounded hard; she sat bolt upright and tossed her head, resentful, angry with him for having broken the spell.

He said, “Why?”

“It’s a long story.” She was curt.

“Look, I didn’t mean to step on a sore corn. I’m sorry. But he must be climbing the walls by now.”

“Good — let him.”

“You really hate his guts, don’t you?”

“Yes. No — oh hell, Mitch, I don’t know.” She pulled the towel up over her like a bedsheet and lay back. “Do you really want to hear about me, the sad story of my life?”

“Do you want to tell it?”

“Why not?” she said; and she did.

“My mother is still in the home,” she concluded. “He drove her into that. He drove my brother to suicide. He’s never had time for any of us, Mitch, and that’s why. That’s why I want him to endure the silence, wondering. My silence will hurt him the way his hurt us all. I want him to have plenty of time to think about that.”

He said, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but it seems to me it won’t get your mother out of the sanitarium and it won’t bring your brother back to life and it won’t make you any happier. And I imagine your old man’s too old to be changed by anything you do at this late date — you may hurt him but you won’t change him.”

“What am I supposed to do, then — forgive him?”

“I don’t suppose you ever could. But maybe you’re hurting yourself more than you’re hurting him. That kind of hate sort of festers inside you — it can eat you away like some kind of acid, you know? It’s not going to do you any good.”

“You sound like a schoolteacher,” she said sarcastically. “‘This will hurt me worse than it hurts you.’”

“Couldn’t you just make some kind of truce with him and go your own separate way?”

“I mean to. But first I — look, I don’t want to talk about it any more, all right?”

“If you say so. Only — well, a little while ago you and I made love and I kind of got the feeling it meant something to both of us. Didn’t it?”

Her answer was a long time coming. “Yes. It did, Mitch.”

“Then if you’re going to fill yourself full of hate, how much room’s left in you for—?” He left it unfinished, unsaid; he rolled his head to the side and looked straight at her.

Watching him, her eyes slowly filled with tears. She groped for his hand but he pulled away and got off the bed. His face hardened and he said, “I told you I was stupid. This is all ridiculous. I’m the guy that kidnaped you, remember? Shit, we’d make a great couple — a rich beautiful Ivy League debutante and a crummy flat-busted guitar player with a twenty-to-life rap hanging over my head. Sure... sure.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that, Mitch. I wouldn’t press any charges against you, you know that.”

“You wouldn’t have to. Your old man will be glad to take care of that little item.”

She didn’t have any ready answer for that. He turned away, feeling blue and bleak, and went into the bathroom. His drawers and socks were still wet but he put them on. The shirt was damp but he put that on too, and came out of the bathroom ramming his shirttails into his trousers. “Listen, it’s a funny thing but every week or so I do get hungry. Suppose we go get something to eat. I hope you like Mexican food.”

“I love it,” she said. She appeared to have joined in an unspoken agreement not to reopen the previous discussion. When she got to her feet she held the towel against her, picked up her clothes and went into the bathroom, and by shutting the door against him seemed to be shutting him out of her intimate life just as surely as she had opened it to him a short while before. And so when she reappeared in her dress he made his face a blank mask and said, “Okay, we’re just two people who happened to meet one night in the desert. We’ll leave it like that.”

She surprised him: she said, “I won’t leave it like that even if you will. Mitch, I thought I came on this crazy thing because I wanted revenge on my father, and it’s true, I did — I still do. But that wasn’t all. A little while ago I came out of the shower and saw you lying there and I knew I’d really come with you because I just wanted to be with you. If I’d let you leave me along the road somewhere I’d never have seen you again, and I didn’t want to lose you. Maybe it’s just a delirious reaction to this whole weird thing we’ve been through — maybe it’s something I’ll get over when I wake up one morning and the nightmare’s over. But I want to have a chance to find out. If that’s the way it turns out I won’t be scared to say so — let’s keep it clean and honest between us, can we?”

“We can try,” he said, and began to turn toward the door. Suddenly he went rigid. “My God. What time is it?” He looked at his watch and his face fell. “Jesus, you know how long we’ve been here? It’s almost eight o’clock. That damned farmacia’s bound to be closed by now — they pull in the sidewalks at sunset in these towns, don’t they?”

“We’ll find him in the morning, then,” she said, practical and unruffled. She had remarkable resilience — perhaps all women did, but he wasn’t experienced enough to tell. She said, “Anyhow we’re in no condition to face up to Floyd tonight. We need a good solid meal and a long night’s sleep, and time to think out what we’re going to do. My brain’s too fuzzy for that right now and I imagine yours is too.”

“I guess,” he said, and put his head down, thinking. “Matter of fact, I have got one or two ideas, but I don’t want you to get caught in the middle. You’ve been through enough.”

“If you’re leading up to a suggestion that I ought to go home, forget it, Mitch.”

“Look, Floyd’s on the run from big trouble. Now what do you think he’d do to anybody who got in his way?”

“I know. But even a train stops, Mitch — something’s bound to fracture that superman complex of his. We can do it.”

“I’m glad you’re so sure of that.”

“We can do it,” she said again, firmly, and followed him to the door; but then she said in a different voice, “Why’s he like that, anyway?”

“Floyd? He was born a son of a bitch. He doesn’t need reasons.” He held the door for her and then walked over to the adjacent room and knocked. There was no reply; the lights were on and through the window he could see the room was empty, the bed undisturbed, the bathroom door wide open and the bathroom light switched off.

“She’s not here,” he said, suddenly cold. His glance whipped around the swimming pool but it was deserted.

Terry said, “She probably only went somewhere to eat.”

“And not tell us first? What if she went to Floyd?” He was shaking; he grinned loosely. “Look at me. Nerves of steel. Tower of strength. Maybe we both ought to get the hell out of here.”

Terry said, “The car’s still here. She hasn’t gone far. Let’s not jump to conclusions, Mitch — Billie Jean isn’t a threat to us. She’s in just as much trouble as you and Floyd are. She won’t go running to the police.”

“I wasn’t worried about that. But what if she decided to join up with Floyd? If she tells him we’re looking for him, he’ll be waiting for us. He’d just as soon kill us as step on an ant — and down here there wouldn’t even be any questions asked. They kill you around here for your shoes and wristwatch. It happens all the time. A couple of gringo tourists found dead in some alley — who’d bother?”

Terry said, “Let’s go have dinner and sleep on it. We’ll think better in the morning.”

“I don’t know,” he said, but he went with her.