There were plastic bandages in a small box in the cabinet; I covered the cut along my jaw as well as I could, then combed my hair back. I looked better now—like someone who’d been hurriedly worked over by a bargain mortician, rather than just a corpse carelessly thrown into a ditch.
I dragged the owner into the john, left him on the floor, taped and gagged; I hung the CLOSED sign on the outer door and shut it behind me.
There was a mud-spattered pickup parked beside the station. The fuel gauge read full. I drove my Mercette onto the grease rack, ran it up high. There was a blue Navy weather jacket, not too dirty, hanging by the rack. I put it on, leaving the bad arm out of the sleeve. I waited a moment for the dizziness to pass, then climbed into the pickup and eased out onto the highway, ignoring the nagging feeling that hidden eyes were watching.
* * *
The night was a bad dream without an end; hour after hour of droning tires, the whine of the turbine, the highway unwinding out of darkness while I clung to the wheel, fighting off the cycle of fever blackout, nausea, chills, and fever again.
Just before dawn, ten miles south of the Oklahoma-Kansas border, a police cruiser pulled in alongside me as I swung the wide curve of an intermix. A cop with coldly handsome features and soot-black eyes looked me over expressionlessly. I gave him a foolish grin, waved, then slowed; the cruiser gunned ahead, swung off onto the expressway.
I reduced speed, turned off on the first single-lane track I saw, bumped along past decaying farmhouses and collapsed barns for six miles, then pulled back onto my route at a town called Cherokee Farm. There were lights on in the Transport Café. I parked, went in, and took a corner table with a view of the door, and ordered hot cereal. I ate it slowly, concentrating on keeping it down. My head was getting bad again, and the pain in my swollen arm made my teeth ache. I was traveling on raw nerve-power and drugs now; without the artificial reservoir of strength that my PAPA gear gave me, I would have collapsed hours before.
As it was, I was able to peer through the film of gray that hung before my eyes, swallow the food mechanically, walk to the cashier without excessive wavering, pay up, and go back out into the icy night to my pickup, with no more inconvenience than a sensation of deathly illness and a nagging fear that I was dreaming everything.
* * *
An hour later, I steered the pickup to the curb on a snow-frosted side street of sagging, cavernous houses that had been the culminating achievements of rich farmers a century before. Now they looked as bleak and empty as abandoned funeral homes.
I got out of the car, waited until the pavement settled down, then walked back two blocks to a structure in red-brick Gothic bearing the legend:
RAILROAD MENS YMCA
Coffeyville, Kansas, 1965
Inside, a bored-looking youngish man with thinning hair and a pursed mouth watched me from behind the peeling veneer of a kidney-shaped desk with a faded sign reading: WELCOME BROTHER, and another, hand-lettered, announcing: SHOWER—FIFTY DOLLARS.
I ignored the sea of gray jello in which his face seemed to float, got a hand on the desk, leaned more or less upright, and heard somebody say, “I’d like a room for tonight.”
His mouth was moving. It was hot in the room. I pulled at my collar. The jello had closed over the clerk now, but a voice with an edge like a meat-saw went on:
” . . . drunks in the place. You’ll have to clear out of here. This is a Christian organization.”
“Unfortunately, I’m not drunk.” I heard myself pronouncing the words quite distinctly. “I’m a bit off my feed; touch of an old malaria, possibly . . .”
He was swimming back into focus. My feet seemed to be swinging in a slow arc over my head. I kept both hands on the counter and tried to convince myself that I was standing solidly on the rubber mat that covered the worn place in the rug. I let go long enough to get out my wallet, put money on the counter.
“Well . . .” His hand covered the bill. “You do look a little flushed. Chinese flu, maybe. Maybe you’d better see a doctor. And that’s a nasty cut on your face.”
“Not used to these new-fangled razors,” I said. “I’ll be all right.” The floor was sliding back to where it belonged. The jello had thinned out sufficiently to show me the registration book and a finger with a hangnail indicating where I should sign.
My stomach felt like a flush tank on the verge of starting its cycle. I grabbed the stylus, scrawled something, waded through knee-deep fog to the lift. I rode up, walked past a few miles of wallpaper that was someone’s revenge for life’s disappointments. I found my room, got the door open, took a step toward the bed, and passed out cold.
* * *
A crew of little red men was working at my arm with saws and hatchets, while another played a blowtorch over my face. I tried to yell to scare them away, and managed a weak croak. I got my eyes open, discovered that my face was against a dusty rug with a pattern of faded fruits and flowers.
I crawled as far as the wall-mounted lavatory, pulled myself up, got the cold water on, and splashed it over my head. I could hear myself moaning, like a dog begging to be let in on a cold night; it didn’t seem important.
There was yellow light outside the dirt-scaled window when I tottered across to the bed. The next time I looked, it was deep twilight. Time seemed to be slipping by in large pieces, like an ice-floe breaking up. I got up on the third try, went back, and used some more cold water, then braced my feet and risked a look in the mirror. A gray-white mask with a quarter-inch beard stared at me with red, crusted eyes buried in blue-black hollows. The scars across my nose and beside my mouth from Felix’s plastic surgery were vivid slashes of red. Under the curled plastic tapes, the cut along my jaw showed deep and ragged.
I made it back to the bed and fumbled out my wallet; I still had plenty of money. Now was the time to use some. I punched the screen’s audio circuit, signaled the desk. The clerk came on, sounding irritated.
“Is there an all-night autoshop in town?” I asked, trying to sound sober, sincere, and financially reliable.
“Certainly. Two of them.”
“Good. I’ll pay someone five cees to pick up a few things for me.”
In two minutes he was at my door. I handed through the list I had scribbled, along with a bundle of money.
“Yes, sir!” he said. “Won’t take half an hour. Ah . . . sure you don’t want me to fetch a doctor?”
“Christian Scientist,” I mumbled. He went away, and I sprawled out on the bed to wait.
* * *
An hour later, with half a dozen assorted antipyretics, cortical stimulants, metabolic catalyzers, and happy pills in my stomach, I took a hot shower, shaved, put a clean tape on my jaw, and worked my arm into my new olive-drab one-piece suit. I pocketed my other supplies and went downstairs. I didn’t feel much better, but the clerk nodded happily when I came up to the desk; I gathered that I now looked more like what you’d expect to find in a Christian organization.
“Ah—the nut-hammer,” he said, not quite looking at me. “Was it what you had in mind?”
“Ideal,” I said. “They just don’t taste the same unless you crack ’em yourself, the old-fashioned way.”
He used his worried look on me.
“Maybe you hadn’t ought to go out, sir,” he suggested. “All those medicines you had me buy—they’re just pain-killers—”
“My pains aren’t dead—just wounded,” I assured him. He gave me the blank look my kind of wisecrack usually nets. “By the way,” I ploughed on, “where’s Franklin Street?”
He gave me directions, and I went out into the chill of the late autumn night. I considered calling a cab, but decided against it. My experiences had made me wary of sharing confined spaces with strangers. Using the pickup was out, too; a hot car might attract just the attention I didn’t want at the moment.
I started off at a wobbling gait that steadied as the chemicals in my bloodstream started to work. My breath was freezing into ice-crystals in the bitter air. The route the clerk had given me led me gradually toward brighter-lit streets. I scanned the people on the sidewalks for signs of interest in me; they seemed normal enough.