At the nicest motel he could find close to Aunt Goodie’s house he got a room, picked Penny up at seven and promised to have her home by midnight. Her train left at ten the next morning.
For the first hour they just lay in one another’s arms and talked. Then Penny started sobbing quietly.
“Oh, Dunc, what are we going to do? I’ll have to spend Christmas with my mom and my sister’s family in Dubuque.”
“I know.” He was lying on his back with her head in the crook of his neck. “How about semester break? When is it?”
“End of February. But we only get a week.”
“Use both weekends, you can stretch it to nine or ten days.” He kissed the dimple at the side of her mouth. “Smile.” He did it again, she giggled and dodged and caught him in a long kiss on the mouth that ended in frantic loving, then laughing, then Dunc holding her and stroking her head while she cried again.
Aunt Goodie and Uncle Carl, with their usual understanding, asked Dunc if he could drive Penny to Union Station. They clung to each other, hardly noticing the stucco-colored Art Deco station walls, not getting a chance to finish their coffee and tea and Danish before Penny’s train was called.
“I feel like I’m in Casablanca,” she said sadly.
Once inside, she opened her compartment window and leaned out. By stretching up, Dunc could just reach her hand.
“Write to me,” she said.
She was crying again, but he couldn’t hold her and stroke her head this time. Far down the track the conductor called “Board!” and the train gave a sudden lurch, was slowly moving.
“You too.” He was walking along beside her, holding her hand. “You forgot to give me your sorority house number.”
The train was moving faster. Dunc was now trotting to keep up, holding on to her fingers as long as he could.
She called despairingly, “Where can I mail it to you?”
Their hands parted. Almost running now, he was still falling behind. He yelled, “General Delivery, San Francisco!”
The train had rumbled away from him, its metal wheels going ca-chunk ca-chunk on the joins where two sections of rail came together. He stood, watching until it was out of sight; Penny’s sweet small arm never stopped waving out of her window.
Five
South of Market
Chapter Twenty-seven
Dunc drove north on Highway 99. That way he had started through familiar territory, going across the San Fernando Valley past Eagle Rock, out past the mission and half-completed seminary buildings. Then up and over the San Gabriel Mountains on the Grapevine and down into California’s great central valley. This was a three-hundred-mile oval bowl with the Sierra on one side, the Coastal Range on the other.
When he got to Chowchilla, the sun was near the tops of the Coast Range, silhouette after receding silhouette of hills the most intense purple he had ever seen. From here California 152 meandered west some one hundred miles to Highway 101, which would take him up through the Peninsula into San Francisco itself.
At Gilroy he turned north on 101. It was dark and he was tired and hungry, so he ate steak and eggs and cherry pie and drank three glasses of milk at the diner attached to the all-night station where he gassed up. He felt lonely and depressed; where was Penny right now?
The way north became endless: endless lights o£ oncoming cars, endless light-festooned trucks to pass when the opportunity offered, then, after San Jose, endless stoplights where important Peninsula arteries joined 101.
So he almost missed it: stopped by a red light for University Avenue, he was already moving before he saw a city limits sign: PALO ALTO. Palo Alto, where Jack Falkoner lived, the man with his duffel bag and precious notebooks in the boot of a little red MG.
He jerked the wheel over for a right turn, wandered around until he found a narrow raised earthen road that went out across a vast mud flat stretching too far for his high beams to reach. No houses, no traffic. Perfect place to find a wide place in the track and go to sleep.
At morning light he stretched, yawning, and stepped out to take a whiz and look around. He was so startled that he yelled “Hey!” out loud. He was surrounded by water a bare two feet below the road. Last night it had been five mud feet below the track.
He started to laugh. He’d obviously parked on a tidal mud flat and the tide had come in. What did a Minnesota kid know about tides? Good thing nobody had seen his momentary panic. Something to write Penny about. Penny...
Jack Falkoner was in the phone book. Dunc parked the Grey Ghost in front of a brown-shingled bungalow on the corner of Melville and Bryant off a wide through street called Middlefield Road. A sparkling neighborhood with overarching trees.
A curving walk led up between two carefully trimmed pine trees to the front door. The woman who answered the bell came to his shoulder, a vest-pocket Venus with an oval face and full sensuous lips. A tight halter and skimpy shorts barely contained rounded breasts and molded hips. She had it alclass="underline" easy to imagine her handling a couple of lovers and a husband besides.
Except she had a beauty of a shiner, the flesh almost purple around her right eye. She must have reconsidered divorce.
Dunc managed to ask, “Mrs. Falkoner?” in a normal voice.
“Yes, I’m Ginny Falkoner.”
“Does Jack, uh, still live here?”
“Of course he does, why...”
She had a quick, almost strident voice. Dunc explained who he was and why he was there.
“Oh, that guy. Well, Jack’s at the gym, working out.”
Floyd Page’s Gym was over the Western Union office, with ceiling-to-waist windows overlooking High Street. Falkoner was the only person on the floor, doing seated dumbbell incline presses with one hundred pounds in each hand. Dunc waited until the set was finished, then spoke Falkoner’s name.
Falkoner whirled to look at him, feral-fast, stared for a moment, then grinned. “What the fuck’re you doing here?”
“My duffel bag,” said Dunc.
He slammed himself in the head with the heel of his hand.
“Shit! In the boot of the MG! Shit! That night in El Paso, I sort of forgot all about your stuff. It’s probably sprouting mushrooms by this time, the way that fucking car leaks. Gimme another half hour, forty-five minutes. Grab yourself a workout if you’d like. Floyd isn’t here but he won’t care.”
Dunc had never seen a professional layout like this before. He got his workout stuff from the car, went through a full workout using maximum poundage for each exercise, three sets of ten each. He was pouring sweat when he finished. Heel waited three months for his duffel bag, Jack Falkoner could wait an extra thirty minutes for him.
When he came out of the shower, Falkoner had already brought the duffel bag up from his MG, had left it at the desk, and had departed. So much for Auld Lang Syne.
Dunc went off the Bayshore Highway, as 101 was called, on San Francisco’s Third Street. It was a tough-looking industrial area, mostly colored, with Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard and government housing projects covering the low hills.
Downtown was totally confusing, bursting with life and traffic, trolleys running up and down Market Street. One-way streets, honking cars, gesturing cops. He finally found Bush, but it was one-way the wrong way. One block up, Pine was going the right way. At Powell he had to wait while a boxy little open-sided cable car passed, clanging its bell cheerfully.
It was after four o’clock when he finally parked in front of a Chinese grocery store to walk down the steeply slanting street to 1610 Bush, upstairs over a beauty salon on the corner of Franklin. On 1610’s street door was: