But an hour later when he shambled into the lot where they had parked the MG, it was gone. With his duffel bag, his ID...
Later, somehow, some way, sometime, he was going to have to get to Palo Alto and find Falkoner and get his notebook and ID back. But right now all he wanted was out of El Paso, out of Texas. Hung over. He drank about a gallon of water at a public fountain, almost threw up again.
At a five-and-dime near the railroad marshaling yards on the western edge of El Paso he bought a ballpoint and a spiral notebook and a small tin of aspirin, washed down four of them with a cherry Coke. In a gas station men’s room Dunc washed his shirt and put it on wet, brushed his teeth with his finger and soap from the dispenser; he’d forgotten to buy toothbrush and toothpaste. He got to the highway and stuck out a thumb.
Fifteen minutes later he was on his way to Lus Cruces, New Mexico, on Highway 80, in a rattly pickup full of Mexican migrant workers who shared their tortillas with him and dropped him at the bypass where 180 headed west for Tucson. He had no Spanish, but thought they said they were going north to Albuquerque.
All together it took him seven rides and thirteen hours to cover 275-odd miles of scorching, mostly empty desert to Tucson, a land of multicolored rock and sand and buttes and coulees, sparse mesquite and paloverdes and saguaro.
His final ride was with two Negroes in a dirty bashed-up black 1939 Chevy. He sat in the back, the springs poking at him through knife-slashed seat cushions, the erupted stuffing looking like dried custard.
“You comin’ from where?” asked the rider.
“El Paso.”
“I been there,” he said solemnly. He wore a faded maroon sport shirt, had a little stubble of beard on his chin, rolled his eyes a lot, and was big: big of frame, arms, hands. He kept his arm on the back of the seat. “And Tore that?”
Pick a town, Dunc thought. “Shreveport.”
“Been there, too. Where Tore that?”
“Baton Rouge.” This could go on forever.
“Baton Rouge? Been there, too.”
“How far you guys going?”
“Just outside Tucson. Man tole us ’bout some work at a tire-retreader there. Ain’t worked in six months.” Then quickly, as if that might have sounded like an implied threat, “But we let you off anywhere you want. Right, Jeremiah?”
“That sho be right, Zeke,” said Jeremiah solemnly. He was small, thin, stooped, thick-lipped, and receding of chin, and he talked just like the old radio show Amos ’n’ Andy. “That be right, sho nuff. Yas-sah. Lets him off anywheres he wants.”
The car swayed and drifted as if the tires were half-flat or the steering gone or the tie-rods missing, or all three. A puff of black smoke rolled through the firewall.
“You smell somethin’ burnin’?” demanded a panicked Jeremiah.
“I don’t smell nuthin,” said a placid Zeke.
Dunc fought mightily against slipping over the edge of sleep, afraid of one of his nightmares. He was jerked awake by Jeremiah’s low gravelly voice going up the scale dramatically.
“Ah knowed it, Ah jes knowed it!"
A tractor had pulled into the highway in front of them. The Chevy’s tires shrieked as the car tried to go in four different directions at once because each brake shoe grabbed its drum at a different time.
“Lots of luck,” said Dunc conversationally, but Jeremiah got slowed down in time. Dunc let himself relax back against the gouging seat springs. No worries about falling asleep now.
“Ah knowed he’d pull out theah, fo he did it.” Jeremiah carefully passed the tractor. “Jes knowed it fum the way he cum ’cross that field.” Another puff of black smoke. In instant panic, “You smell somethin’ burnin’?”
Soothingly, “I don’t smell nuthin.”
They dropped Dunc at a roadside truck stop outside Tucson. A dozen truck-trailer rigs sprawled on the concrete apron like basking dinosaurs, their running lights twinkling in the dusk like colored fireflies.
Inside, a junk-crowded gift shop offered rubber sidewinder rattlesnakes, rabbit’s-foot key chains lucky for everyone except the rabbits, and sly desert postcards featuring bubble-butted tourists in shorts doing stupid things. Dunc bought a toothbrush and a can of Pepsodent powder, a safety razor, a packet of Gillette Blue Blades, put them all in a cheap yellow gym bag.
In the gas station rest room, two bits got him a shower. A shave, really brush his teeth... Worth it, even though his money was going fast. Probably have to find a job manning the clipper in some hash house kitchen, before he could get to California.
His hangover was gone, he was ravenous. On the diner’s menu he found something called chicken-fried steak: a huge flat slab of pounded beef, breaded and pan-fried in axle grease, sunk in a pint of gooey pale gravy speckled black with pepper. Served with a mountain of mashed potatoes and watery peas and soggy biscuits heavy as rocks.
Dunc had six glasses of milk while he ate everything except the plate and finished off with cherry pie à la mode.
Outside, the night pressed in on this puny oasis of light and warmth. It was clear and totally black, the full moon long gone or not yet up or already set. He walked a quarter mile out into the desert, regretting the windbreaker in his duffel bag. He could see his breath against the lights of the truck stop.
Then he heard the yip, yip, yip, aroooo of his first coyote. The hair stood up on his arms and the nape of his neck. He’d heard wolves howling at night along the Alaskan Highway, but somehow this was an even lonelier sound. At least wolves hunted in packs. Coyotes worked alone.
What was he doing out here in the desert in the middle of the night, alone, anonymous? Hey, this’d be too damned civilized for old Harry and Señorita, too soft and easy and crowded. Old Harry wouldn’t worry about ID.
He wanted to be a writer, didn’t he? Well, how the hell did you do it except like this? You went, you watched, you learned, until you knew, like Hemingway said, that you had something to write about. You had to earn the mighty reckoning in a little room Shakespeare had written about. He’d meant the murder of Marlowe, but somehow it fit. Writing, you faced your own mighty reckoning in your own little room.
Back at the truck stop, nobody wanted him. The truckers said unauthorized riders voided their insurance. And nobody with the wives and kids in the car, at night, would take a beat-up-looking guy without jacket or suitcase. Instead of eating his chicken-fried steak, maybe he should have put it on his puffy eye.
After almost an hour, a long cream-and-red Olds 98 pulled in at the nearest gas pump. A big hard-looking man got out, impeccably groomed and wearing what looked like a silk suit. He told the attendant to fill the Olds with ethyl.
“I used to work at a gas station,” Dunc said to the big man, “pumping ethyl. Regular, too.”
It earned a chuckle. “Looking for a ride, kid?”
“You bet. Going west.”
“Toward El Centro? Dago?”
Dunc didn’t know where El Centro was. Didn’t know Dago was San Diego. “Sure. Or L.A. Whichever is easier.”
The big man handed over a five, pocketed the change. His neck was thick, as wide as his head, his hairline was climbing, his nose was flattened, his ears cauliflowered. He looked like an ex-pug, but most of them were punch-drunk and none of them would have the money for those clothes or a new Olds 98.
“I’m going up through Phoenix, from there you can hitch straight west to San Berdoo and L.A. Got a suitcase? Anything?”
“Just me and the gym bag.”