Juanita was dialing.
The purse lay within reach of his hand, a black plastic rectangle with a gold clasp and handle. The plastic was so shiny that Fielding could see in miniature the reflection of his own face. It looked curiously young and unlined and innocent, not the image that stared back at him in the mornings between flyspecks and dabs of toothpaste and other unidentified residues of life. This face in the plastic belonged to his youth, as the picture in Mrs. Rosario’s bedroom belonged to Camilla’s youth. Camilla, he thought, and the knife of pain that stabbed him between the ribs seemed as real as the navaja that had so senselessly killed his friend. We were both young together, Curly and I. It’s too late for him now, but there’s still a chance for me.
He wanted suddenly and desperately to take the purse, not for the money or for the car keys which were in it, but for that reflection of his own face, that innocence intact, that youth preserved in plastic and protected from the sins of time.
He glanced across at the phone booth. Juanita, scowling, was in the act of hanging up. He thought that his opportunity was lost, that she had reached the Velada and been told Mrs. Brewster had gone. Then he saw her pick up the directory chained to the wall, and he knew she must have received a busy signal and decided to recheck the phone number. Luck was giving him another chance.
His eyes returned to the purse, but this time his angle of vision was different and the image that stared back at him was like the images in a fun house. The forehead projected out to the right and the jaw to the left, and in between was a distorted nose and two malevolent slits of eyes. With a little cry of rage he grabbed the purse off the table and dumped its contents on the seat beside him. The car keys were on a small chain separate from Juanita’s other keys. He slid them into his pocket, stood up, and walked toward the front door. He didn’t hurry. The trick was to appear casual. It was the kind of thing he’d done a hundred times before, the friendly, final good-bye-see-you-later to the landlady or grocer or hotel clerk or liquor dealer whom he had no intention of paying or ever seeing again.
He smiled at the bartender as he passed. “Tell Juanita I’ll be back in a few minutes, will you?”
“You didn’t pay for the last round of drinks.”
“Oh, didn’t I? Terribly sorry.” It was a delay he hadn’t anticipated, but he kept the smile on his face as he fished around in his pocket for a dollar. The only sign of his anxiety was a brief, nervous glance in the direction of the phone booth. “Here you are.”
“Thanks,” the bartender said.
“Juanita’s talking to Mrs. Brewster. I thought I’d take a little walk to clear my head.”
“You do that.”
“See you later.”
As soon as Fielding was outside, he dropped the pretense of being casual. He hurried along the sidewalk, the cold brisk air slapping his face with a wintry hand.
At this point he had no clear or extensive plan of action. Impulsively and without thought of the consequences, he had rushed into the middle of something he only half understood. Getting the car and going to Daisy’s house — this was as far ahead as he could see. At Daisy’s house he would almost inevitably run into Ada, and the idea excited him. At this stage he was quite ready to meet her. Sober, he couldn’t have faced her; drunk, he would certainly pick a quarrel, perhaps a very violent one. But right now, somewhere in between, he felt able to deal with her, confront her without malice, expose her without cruelty. Right now he could teach her a few lessons in civilization, in manners: My dear Ada, it grieves me to bring this to your attention but in the interests of justice, I must insist you reveal the truth about your part in this devious little scheme...
It didn’t even seem ironic to him that he should be planning remarks about truth and justice when, in fact, his whole life had been a marathon race, with truth a few jumps ahead of him and justice a few jumps behind. He had never caught up with the one, and the other had never caught up with him.
The car was at the end of the block, parked in front of a long frame building with a dimly lit sign announcing its function: billar. The sign, printed only in Spanish, made it clear that whites were not welcome. Although the place was jammed, the noise coming out of the open door was subdued, punctuated by the click of balls and score racks. A group of young Negroes and Mexicans were hanging around outside, one of them with a cue in his hand. He was using the cue like a drum major, raising it and lowering it in time to some rhythms he heard in his head or felt in his bones.
As Fielding approached, the boy pointed the cue at him and said, “Rat ta ta ta ta. Man, you’re dead.”
Sober, Fielding might have been a little intimidated by the group; drunk, he would certainly have made trouble. But in between, right now — “That’s pretty funny, kid. You ought to be on TV” — and he brushed past the boy with a grin and made his way to the car.
There were two keys on the ring he’d taken from Juanita’s purse — one for the luggage compartment, the other for the doors and ignition. He tried the wrong key on the door first. It was a bad start, made worse by the fact that the boys were watching him with sober interest, as if they knew perfectly well what he intended to do and were waiting to see how he did it and if he would get caught. Later — if there was a later — they would be able to give a good description of both him and the car. Or perhaps Juanita had already called the police, and they had a description on the radio right now. He had counted on her distrust of officials to prevent such a move, but Juanita was unpredictable.
Once inside her car, he had a moment of panic when he looked at the dashboard. He hadn’t driven a car for a long time, and never one like this, with so many buttons and switches that he couldn’t tell which was supposed to turn on the lights. Even without lights, though, he knew where to find the most important object in the car — the half-pint of whiskey he’d bought at one of the bars and later hidden on the floorboard under the seat. The bottle had hardly touched his lips before he began feeling the effects of its contents. First there was a fleeting moment of guilt, followed by the transition of guilt to blame, blame to revenge, revenge to power: By God, I’m going to teach all of them a lesson.
In an ordinary person these changes of emotion would take time to evolve. But Fielding was like a man who’s been hypnotized so often that a snap of the fingers will put him under. A smell of the cork, a tilt of the bottle, and By God, I’ll teach those smug, hypocritical, patronizing bastards.
One of the young Negro men had approached the car and was kicking the right rear tire absently, as if he had no motive other than that the tire was there to kick and he didn’t have anything more important to do.
Fielding shouted through the closed window, “Get your black feet off that tire, coon boy!” He knew these were fighting words, but he knew, too, in that corner of his mind which still had access to the real world, that the insult had been muffled by the window glass and scrambled by the wind.
He pressed the starter button. The car gave a couple of forward lurches, then the engine died, and he saw that he hadn’t released the emergency brake. He released it, started the engine again, and looked in the rearview mirror to make sure the road was clear of traffic behind him. There were no nearby cars, and he was on the point of pulling away from the curb when he saw two Juanitas running down the middle of the road, barefooted, their arms flailing like windmills in a gale, their skirts ballooning around their thighs.