Alarm flickered across the woman’s face.
With the innocent honesty of a four-year-old, piping up in a concerned and helpful tone, the little girl said, “Mister, you need to buy some soap. You sure smell. The soap’s over that way, I’ll show you.”
The mother quickly took her daughter’s hand, pulled her close. Joe realized that he must, indeed, smell. He had been on the beach in the sun for a couple of hours, and later in the cemetery, and more than once he’d broken into a sweat of fear. He’d had nothing to eat during the day, so his breath must be sour with the beer that he had drunk at the shore.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re right. I smell. I better get some soap.”
Behind him, someone said, “Everything all right?”
Joe turned and saw the Korean proprietor. The man’s previously placid face was now carved by worry.
“I thought they were people I knew,” Joe explained. “People I knew… once.”
He realized that he had left the apartment this morning without shaving. Stubbled, greasy with stale sweat, rumpled, breath sour and beery, eyes wild with blasted hope, he must be a daunting sight. Now he better understood the attitude of the people at the bank.
“Everything all right?” the proprietor asked the woman.
She was uncertain. “I guess so.”
“I’m going,” Joe said. He felt as if his internal organs were slip-sliding into new positions, his stomach rising and his heart dropping down into the pit of him. “It’s okay, okay, just a mistake, I’m going.”
He stepped past the owner and went quickly to the front of the store.
As he headed past the cashier’s counter toward the door, the Korean woman worriedly said, “Everything all right?”
“Nothing, nothing,” Joe said, and he hurried outside into the sedimentary heat of the settling day.
When he got into the Honda, he saw the manila envelope on the passenger’s seat. He had left twenty thousand dollars unattended in an unlocked car. Although there had been no miracle in the convenience store, it was a miracle that the money was still here.
Tortured by severe stomach cramps, with a tightness in his chest that restricted his breathing, Joe wasn’t confident of his ability to drive with adequate attention to traffic. But he didn’t want the woman to think that he was waiting for her, stalking her. He started the Honda and left the shopping centre.
Switching on the air conditioning, tilting the vents toward his face, he struggled for breath, as if his lungs had collapsed and he was striving to re-inflate them with sheer willpower. What air he was able to inhale was heavy inside him, like a scalding liquid.
This was something else that he had learned from Compassionate Friends meetings: For most of those who lost children, not just for him, the pain was at times physical, stunning.
Wounded, he drove half hunched over the steering wheel, wheezing like an asthmatic.
He thought of the angry vow that he had made to destroy those who might be to blame for the fate of Flight 353, and he laughed briefly, sourly, at his foolishness, at the unlikely image of himself as an unstoppable engine of vengeance. He was walking wreckage. Dangerous to no one.
If he learned what had really happened to that 747, if treachery was indeed involved, and if he discovered who was responsible, the perpetrators would kill him before he could lift a hand against them. They were powerful, with apparently vast resources. He had no chance of bringing them to justice.
Nevertheless, he’d keep trying. The choice to turn away from the hunt was not his to make. Compulsion drove him. Searching behaviour.
At a K-Mart, Joe purchased an electric razor and a bottle of aftershave. He bought a toothbrush, toothpaste, and toiletries.
The glare of the fluorescent lights cut at his eyes. One wheel on his shopping cart wobbled noisily, louder in his imagination than in reality, exacerbating his headache.
Shopping quickly, he bought a suitcase, two pair of blue jeans, a grey sports coat—corduroy, because the fall lines were already on display in August—underwear, T-shirts, athletic socks, and a new pair of Nikes. He went strictly by the stated size, trying nothing.