There was something ahead. A road? A building? It seemed to me I could faintly hear the struggling roar of a big truck climbing a hill. I kept walking, and saw a clearing ahead, and abruptly stepped out at the top of a cleared grassy hillside; and there was the road. A major road, in fact, Route 70 or some other Interstate, making a broad gray double-scar slice across the haunch of a mountain.
And a Holiday Inn! On the far side of the road, there it was, two stories high and red brick and sprawled out in all directions, the biggest Holiday Inn in the world. By God, we could be there in five minutes!
I stood looking at it, thinking about the air-conditioning and the perfect double bed and the expansive bathroom and the perfectly acceptable restaurant, and also thinking about the tourist cabin’s lumpy bed and awful mohair armchair and tiny tin shower — and the smell of wood and the proprietor’s very pale clear eyes — and I didn’t know what to do. When I finally turned away I was still a mass of confusion, in which only one thing was clear; I could certainly talk to Katharine about this.
I walked quickly back through the woods, this time paying no attention to my surroundings, and when I got back to the cabins I saw that Katharine’s door was standing open. Was that a peace sign? I stood outside and said, “Knock knock.”
Her voice came from within: “Who’s there?”
“Albee.”
“Albee who?”
“Albee down to getcha in a taxi, honey.”
She came to the door and grimaced. “Did you just make that up?” She wasn’t angry anymore.
Neither was I. “I think so,” I said.
“Are there going to be any more like that?”
“Not right away.”
“Then you can come in.”
“Thank you.” And I knew I wasn’t going to tell her about the Holiday Inn. I wanted to stay here, lumpy bed and all. It was better that she not know we had an alternative.
Her cabin was completely different from mine, but exactly the same, if you know what I mean. It had been furnished out of the same attic. “Ah,” I said. “You have the Grover Cleveland suite.”
“Mr. Hilyerd says John Dillinger stayed here one time.”
“He’s probably still in Cabin Six.”
“About food,” Katharine said, and my heart sank: we would drive around looking for a restaurant, we would discover the Holiday Inn. I said, “Yes?”
“If we want supper around seven-thirty, Mrs. Hilyerd will be happy to make it for us. Do we like steak, corn on the cob, baked potato, green beans, and apple pie?”
I said, “Would you repeat the question?”
38
Mrs. Hilyerd, a woman as rangy and bony as her husband, was the sort of cook who believes food should taste like itself. We sat in a small enclosed porch at the rear of their house, which had been furnished with three completely non-matching tables and a whole lot of chairs that had nothing in common except one or two slats missing out of their backs, while Mrs. Hilyerd served us herself, on heavy china dishes featuring handpainted crabapples on a cream ground. The food was so delicious that I just kept eating everything I saw; Mrs. Hilyerd can consider herself lucky I didn’t take a bite out of her hand.
We had neither wine nor liquor, but with such food alcohol would have been an excess. “We’re Temperance,” Mrs. Hilyerd had explained, “but we don’t push our views on others. If you have a bottle and you want empty glasses...” When we assured her we had no bottle, she filled the glasses with crisp icy water from a jug she kept in the refrigerator.
At the end of the meal, to put a metaphor in precisely the wrong place, she spilled the beans. Watching, with pardonable satisfaction, as we engulfed her hot apple pie (with cheese slices), she said to Katharine, “You won’t get a pie like that over to the Holiday Inn.”
“No, I’m sure I won’t,” Katharine said, looking guilty. I stared at her, and she became very absorbed in slicing a bit of cheese with the side of her fork.
Mrs. Hilyerd went back to the kitchen. From deeper in the house came the rattle of canned laughter; Mr. Hilyerd watching television. I sipped my glass of water and said, “You knew about the Holiday Inn.”
“Mr. Hilyerd told me, when we first got here.” She looked at me with a tentative smile. “He said he gives everybody the choice, he doesn’t want to take advantage of people just because they’re lost.”
“But you decided to stay.”
“I thought, if we went to the Holiday Inn, the fight would last longer.”
“Katharine,” I said, “I know I shouldn’t say this, but there are times when I wish I was Barry, and this is one of them.”
“Eat your pie,” she said. “You don’t want to hurt Mrs. Hilyerd’s feelings.”
So I ate my pie, grinning at her while chewing, until all at once she put her fork down, frowned across the table at me, and said, “Wait a minute.”
Oh oh. I drank water and looked as innocent as possible. “Mmm?”
“You knew about the Holiday Inn.”
“I took a walk out behind the cabins,” I admitted. “I saw it.”
“Is it that close?”
“I’m afraid so.”
She looked at me, very sternly, and then she began to grin. “I know what I shouldn’t say,” she told me, “and I’m not going to say it.”
Mrs. Hilyerd appeared in the doorway: “More pie?”
39
After dinner we were invited to watch television with the Hilyerds in their small cramped living room, which had been furnished from an attic twenty years newer than the one that had supplied the cabins. Mr. Hilyerd preferred situation comedies heavy with canned laughter. His wife from time to time would stand in the doorway to watch, then shake her head and make a comment about “foolishness” and go back to the kitchen.
At ten o’clock Mr. Hilyerd yawned, rose, switched off the TV set, and said, “Good night. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
I said, “You already fed them, eh?”
He gave me a sharp look while he caught up, then said, “Heh. Heh.”
We went out through the kitchen. Mrs. Hilyerd said, “Breakfast about seven-thirty?”
“That’d be fine,” Katharine said. “Would you call us at seven?”
“I’ll bang on the door. Doors.” Which was the only indication she ever gave that she found our status unconventional.
There were stars out, millions of them, very high and tiny in the soft black sky, and the moon was one night rounder. By its light we crunched over the gravel drive to our cabins. We stopped together out front. “Katharine,” I said. “Jesus Christ, Katharine.”
But she shook her head, saying, “No. This is a dream and you know it.”
“Let’s stay asleep.”
She smiled, saying she also wanted to. “I’ll see you in the morning, Tom.”
The bed was lumpy and I could neither sleep nor read my saga. At two in the morning I took a long hot shower, and some time after three I fell asleep, with the light on.
40
Noon, and we were at a baking Texaco station somewhere in Utah, talking to Barry on the phone. The receiver was almost too hot to touch, and when I held it to my face sweat droplets formed all around my ear, under my hair.
This was the worst day of the trip. The dream had ended with a vengeance. I’d awakened at seven to the thumping of Mrs. Hilyerd’s bony fist on the door, and I’d known at once some point of no return had been reached last night. Critical mass, flashpoint, whatever the right image would be; Katharine and I could no longer glide effortlessly along together, that’s all. No more sidetrips, no more delays; I had to get her to Los Angeles as fast as humanly possible, and end this thing.