If it had been night, she would have driven; there were five cars in the basement garage she could get the keys for. But she hated sawing through slow day-time traffic, and what was more she was forbidden to ride the hover line, which was why she did it when she was in a bad temper.
This time it didn’t lead to the anticipated result. Naturally, because she was very pretty, several men leered at her, but they were all reeky ancients, at least forty, and the only hand that did try stroking her bare waist belonged to a fat mannish woman who got off at the second halt. It was around then that she realized, as the redwood trees loomed ahead, that this car was heading in the wrong direction. She’d meant to get off at a halt by one of the yacht-pools and pick up a boy with a boat. She hadn’t had a boy for over a week.
Almost, she made to leave the car. But she changed her mind. What the hell. She’d never ridden a Cowville line to the end.
Curious, she watched the squalid city slide beneath, and then around, as the line approached the monstrous mausoleum of Energetics General, and then beneath again: an area of lower buildings, harking vainly back to the foundation of the city, to the pioneering image of the original cow-town. A mobile illuminated figure shamelessly copied from “Vegas Vic” beckoned customers to a block crowded with twenty-four-hour bars and sex clubs. That passed behind too, and the line descended to ground- .` level-or, more likely, the ground rose to meet the line.
By the time a mechanical-sounding voice announced the terminus, the city was petering away to shabby tenements intermingled with warehouses. A distant roaring indicated that she was close to the airport through which EG dispatched its products, but that was out of sight behind a hill. There was a thick industrial stench in the sir.
Uncertainly, she got out, last of the passengers to do so. There had only been three others in the car, a tired eyed black woman and two black kids about twelve. Litter crunched under her sandals as she stepped onto the platform. Before her extended a street of gray buildings. Signs here and there -identified small manufacturing companies making sanitary tampons, plastic cups, door-furniture. At the end of the street was a scrap yard where a tall crane was picking up metal on a magnet. The only person visible was pushing a hand-truck laden with garbage-cans, a sour-faced black.
She hesitated, glancing around. Nearby was a sales kiosk offering candies, cigarettes, and porn. Its display window was of the old-fashioned intermittent-mirror type, and she caught sight of herself in it as it went into the reflecting phase. She stared with annoyance at her image. Her hair was exquisite, honey-gold; her face was oval, though not so perfect as to be dull. But there was an ill-tempered twist to her mouth, which she detested, yet which she could not help. She felt so furious with the world today.
Of course, she had come straight out of the apartment in what she happened to be wearing: play top, shorts, sandals, and literally nothing else. It had been sheer luck that she’d had a pocketful of change. It would have been unbearable to go back for her wrist-purse.
Then the window cleared, and she realized she was being stared at by the owner of the kiosk, a fat middle-aged black. A tooth was missing in the center of his grin. She spun on her heel at random and started down the street. She was just a little afraid. Yet the sensation was somehow stimulating. She felt she needed to do something terrible. Something that would shock the living shit out of her parents. Anything.
The concept took root in her mind, without words. It had the appeal of the suicide’s note: “You’ll be sorry for what you made me dot”
And they had made her do it, hadn’t they? Grandmother
with her wood-rasp voice and her endless condemnation of young people today-well, she’d endured that all her life. But add in the nuisance of this newly arrived Canadian, Holtzer, and the information that her abominable brother Peter was going to be crowded into her bedroom they got on each other’s nerves, and he was a reeky waster, and he’d left it until this morning to admit that he’d overspent his allowance and couldn’t afford a hotel while Holtzer was here . . Not that it was Holtzer’s fault, of course; he seemed rather nice, with his square face, curly brown hair, and ready smile. But-damnation! If there was only one guest-room, and Grandmother was in it, and Dad insisted on accommodating this Canuck, why couldn’t he move in with Mom? Lots of married people had gone back to sharing a room!