“Get me a gum, okay?” Miranda said, trailing after him. “Can I have a piece of gum? It’s only one nickel.”
“Hey,” Jamie said, walking over after some hesitation. “You’re just power-tripping me here, and I don’t like it.”
“What do you mean? I said I could help you and you said I couldn’t. But I really can. That must tell you something. Right?”
Holding the baby in her left arm, Jamie put the fingers of her right hand to her eyes and pushed firmly, obliterating the bus station momentarily and filling her head with exploding geometrical shapes. “Okay, listen,” she said. “Tell me about the Bill Houston you know. Sounds kind of like the one I know. I’d appreciate it. Okay?”
“I just told you about him,” the man said, turning the dial on a machine and grabbing the gum that dropped into its metal trough. “I see him uptown all the time. He’s not a good character for you to be hanging around with. He charms the women, but when he drinks, he goes into a whole different personality.” He handed the gum to Miranda and fed the machine another coin. “That the one?”
“That’s him! Shit, I don’t believe this. Hey,” she said to Baby Ellen, who was unconscious, “he knows your Uncle Bill.”
“I couldn’t tell you where he is, though.”
“Well, where would you guess?”
“Might be in Rheba’s. Might be anywhere uptown. Might be over into like the hippy area. He wanders all over. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
“Yeah. Okay, well, how can I find him? Listen, I just came a long ways. I got some things to say to him.”
“Do you have any change? I could call a few places maybe. They know me around here, I’m telling you. If I just ask, they’ll tell me. They know I’m not out to hassle anybody. Hey — wait a minute,” he said suddenly. “What if he doesn’t want you to find him?”
“I’ll find him anyway,” Jamie said.
“Oh.” He looked at Jamie, at Miranda, at the baby. “Well, I just hope this isn’t a whole situation. I don’t want to get anyone pissed off or anything. Right this moment all I have is friends.”
“Well, that’s all I am to Bill Houston, is a friend.”
“You sure? You positive?”
“All I can do is tell you,” Jamie said. “Either you believe it or you don’t.”
“Yeah.” Now the man seemed in agony, biting his lower lip and glancing about as if besieged. “Okay,” he said. “Do you have some change for me? What the hell. I mean, you know him, right?”
“Take a chance,” Jamie said.
“Yeah. Yeah, take a chance — I’m doing a good deed, right?”
Jamie gave him a couple of dollars in coins and sat in a pay-TV chair for half an hour looking at nothing, not even herself, in the emptiness of the dark screen. Miranda fell asleep in the seat beside hers. Baby Ellen snored in Jamie’s arms, and Jamie strapped her into the plastic infant carrier. It was not possible to be less conscious than Baby Ellen was at this moment. She breathed through her toothless mouth, her eyelids like two bruises laid over her vision, the sole drifting inhabitant of an infantile oblivion that Jamie found both enviable and scary.
Jamie failed to know the situation when the man began tugging her sleeve and pushing his face into hers, his wild blond hair blotting out the world; and then she realized she’d been sleeping, was now in Chicago—”I found out where he was,” the man said. “He was in this place uptown a half an hour ago. And the bartender says he’d bet anything he’s staying somewhere in that neighborhood. It’s up north of Wilson.”
“So what’s the deal?” Jamie said, trying to focus on the deal.
“Trouble is, I don’t know the names of the places around there, so I can’t find the phone numbers. We could go up there and look around, maybe leave a few messages. I don’t really know what to do, to tell you the truth. I mean, what do you want to do?”
“Well, I don’t know. My mind is just completely shut down.” She looked around the bus station’s upper level, seeking some indication in its sinister drabness of what her next move should be. “My neck feels like it’s on fire,” was all she could summon in the way of further speech.
The man, whom she was beginning to feel might be all right — he was, at this moment, in fact, her only friend in the world — placed a gentle hand on her arm. “Tell you what. Let’s get some coffee. Then we can lay out all the options, and we can figure this whole thing out.”
To move themselves from immediately inside the door into the coffee shop was like undertaking a safari. They sat in a booth, the man across from the three of them. The suitcase stcod in the aisle, a bulwark against the Greyhound and its hasty embarkations, cold farewells, and dubious moves. Everywhere she looked it seemed to be written: Wouldn’t you like to reconsider? Reconsider what? she wanted to know. Everything I do will be wrong. I got no idea where I get my ideas. Coffee appeared before her, and her friend reached across the small distance between them, laying two white tablets beside her cup. “Just about anywhere you go,” he said, “the bus station is the exact center of town. In case of a nuclear attack, this bus station would be Ground Zero.” He tossed two or three similar tablets into his mouth and washed them down with an evidently painful swallow of hot coffee, screwing up his face. “If we were here when World War Three started, a bomb would drop almost in this restaurant — and do you know what? We’d be atomized and radioactive. It wouldn’t feel like dying. We’d be turned completely into particles of light. This is the center of things.”
“Some center.”
“I don’t say it’s as happy as Walt Disney. But it is Ground Zero.”
“What are these things?” Jamie touched the pills beside her cup.
“White crosses. They’re very mild. They’re equal to about two cups of coffee each. Right on, down the hatch. In three minutes you’ll feel wide awake. Let me know if you want any more. Do you want a donut or something?”
Jamie ate a donut. Miranda slept heavily against her, openmouthed, perfectly motionless, and beside Miranda, Baby Ellen slept in her infant seat. It came over Jamie that she carried her younger daughter everywhere in this seat as if she were an appliance.
They considered the situation. It was beginning to look doubtful that she’d locate Bill Houston by hanging around the neighborhood where he was known to be staying. It made more sense to take a short cab ride — the red-suited hilljack would pay for it, it was no great expense, a very short ride — to his sister’s apartment and just keep calling around until they had Mr. Houston, actual and solid, on the other end of a telephone line. The more she regarded the state of things, the more it seemed that her luck was running. Rather than spend a miserable number of days hunting Bill Houston without a hint of where to start, she would take up the search in the company of one of his friends — a very poor dresser, admittedly, but a person who knew the layout and believed in good deeds. And she was beginning to feel quite sharp. Getting the kids and suitcase out to the street and into a cab was no trouble. The ride was a rocket. As she got out of the cab, holding Baby Ellen in one arm and dragging Miranda onto the pavement with her free hand, she was stunned by the world. The bricks in the building before her were keen-edged and profound. Everything had a definite quality. The fuzziness of Chicago had been burned away. Mr. Redsuit was handling things with the flourish of a Fred Astaire, and had her up two or three flights of stairs, with her kids and her suitcase, in what seemed a matter of seconds.
The hallway they travelled now was carpeted with a wide strip of black rubber down its middle. The doors to the various apartments, behind which the secret interiors seemed to breathe and mutter all around them, were of flat plyboard. One, she noticed as they passed it, was sealed from without with a padlock. Another sported a red and green bordered sign: