Milner took a typed form out of his suit coat pocket. He placed on the table along with a pen; then he and his partner walked out of the room.
I stared at the resignation form. The print blurred before my eyes. Tears welled in them, and I willed the effort to stanch their flow. It took a minute, but they stopped before they could burst out of me. I walked to the window and looked out. I marked the time and committed the scene to memory, then took off my shoulder holster and laid it on the table. I placed my badge next to it and signed away my access to the wonder.
Camera-wielding reporters were stationed in front of my apartment as I turned onto my block. I couldn't face them, so I drove around the corner and cut through the alley, then parked and hopped fences, entering my apartment through the back door. I filled a suitcase with clean clothes, hitched Night Train to his leash and walked back out to the alley and around the block to my car.
I drove north, with no destination in mind. Night Train chewed golf balls in the backseat. It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one.
Hugging the coast road reminded me of my recent jaunt with Lorna, which suddenly brought the future back to me in a blinding rush of schemes and contingencies.
I looked at the telephone poles lining the Pacific Coast Highway and contemplated sweet, instant oblivion. When the tall wooden spires began to look like the ultimate scheme, I let out a muffled, dry sob and swung my Buick inland through some insignificant dirt canyon trail, moving upward through green scrub country until I came down forty-five minutes later in the San Fernando Valley.
I headed north again, catching the ridge route in Chatsworth and moving up it toward the Grapevine and Bakersfield. I wanted to find someplace barren and bereft of beauty, a good flat place to walk my dog and arrive at decisions without the distractions of picturesque surroundings.
Bakersfield wasn't the place. At three-thirty P.M., the temperature was still close to one hundred degrees. I stopped at a diner and ordered a Coke. The Coke cost a nickel and the ice that accompanied it a quarter. The counterman was giving me the fisheye. He handed me my Coke in a paper cup and opened his mouth to speak. I didn't let him; I slammed some change on the countertop and walked quickly back to my car.
Some hundred and fifty miles north of Bakersfield, I realized I was entering Steinbeck country, and I almost sighed with relief. Here was a place to light, filled with the nuances and epiphanies of my carefree college reading days.
But it didn't happen. My mind took over and I knew that being surrounded by verdant farmland and picaresque, hard-drinking Mexicans would bring back the wonder full force, along with a barrage of guilt, shame, self-loathing, and fear that spelled only one thing: it is over.
I pulled to the edge of the roadside. I let Night Train out and he ran ahead of me into a seemingly endless sea of furrowed irrigation trenches. I walked behind him, listening to his happy bays. We walked and walked and walked, kicking up dust clouds that soon covered my trouser legs with a rich, dark brown soil. I walked all the way into a spot where the world seemed eclipsed in all directions. All my horizons were a deep dark brownness.
I sat down in the dirt. Night Train barked at me. I scooped up a handful of soil and let it slip through my fingers. I smelled my hands. They smelt of feces and infinity.
Suddenly the irrigation pipes that surrounded me broke into life, spraying me with water. I got up reflexively and started running in the direction of my car. Night Train did too, quickly passing me. Some unseen timing device was at work, and the sprinklers kept popping on in perfect succession, right behind me. I ran and I ran and I ran, barely staying ahead of the ten-foot-high geysers of water. Exhausted, I came to a halt at the edge of the blacktop, trying to catch my breath. Night Train barked happily, his chest heaving also. My shoes, socks, and trouser legs were soaking wet and smelled of manure. I got clean clothes out of the suitcase in the backseat, and changed right there on the roadway.
By the time I had finished dressing and had regained my breath, an eerie stillness had come over me. It held me there and wouldn't let me move or think. After a few moments I started to weep. I wept and I wept and I wept, standing there on the dusty roadside, my hands braced against the hood of my car. Finally my sobbing stopped, as abruptly as the stillness had begun. I took my hands from the car and stood upright as tenuously as a baby taking his first steps.
It took me a solid four hours of lead-footed driving to make it back to Los Angeles. After dropping Night Train with my mystified landlady, I drove to Lorna's apartment.
I could hear her radio blaring from the living room window as I pulled to the curb. Her electrically operated front door was propped open with a stack of telephone books. She had left the light on in the stairway, and I could see the glow of candlelight illuminating her living room at the top of the stairs.
I cleared my throat repeatedly to prepare her for my coming as I took the stairs slowly, one at a time. Lorna was lying on her floral-patterned couch, with one arm dangling over the side holding a wineglass. The light from candles placed strategically throughout the room on lamp tables, bookshelves, and windowsills encased her in an amber glow.
"Hello, Freddy," she said as I entered the room.
"Hello, Lor," I returned. I pulled an ottoman up alongside the sofa.
Lorna sipped her wine. "What will you do now?" she asked.
"I don't know. Who told you?"
"The four-star edition of the L.A. Examiner. 'Underhill Resigns in Wake of False Arrests Suits. Communist Ties Cited.' Do you want me to read you the whole thing?"
I reached for her arm, but she pulled it away. "I'm sorry for yesterday, Lorna, really."
"For my office door?"
"No, for what I said to you."
"Was it the truth?"
"Yes."
"Then don't apologize for it."
Lorna's face was an iron mask in the candlelight. Her expression was expressionless, and I couldn't decipher her feelings. "What are you going to do, Freddy?"
"I don't know. Maybe I'll paint my car red. Maybe I'll dye my hair red, too. Maybe I'll enlist in the North Korean Army. I've never done anything half-assed in my life, so why be a half-assed Commie?"
Lorna lit a cigarette. The smoke she exhaled cast her in a second halo within the amber light. Her mask was starting to drop. She was starting to get angry, and that gave me heart. I threw out a line calculated to compound that anger. "The wonder got me, I guess."
"No!" Lorna spat out. "No, you bastard. The wonder didn't get you; you got you! Don't you know that?"
"Yes, I do. And do you know the only thing I'm sorry for?"
"Eddie Engels and Margaret Cadwallader?"
"The hell with them. They're dead. I'm only sorry I took you with me."
Lorna laughed. "Don't be sorry. I fell for circumstantial evidence and the brightest, brashest, handsomest man I'd ever met. What will you do now, Freddy?"
I took Lorna's hand, holding it tightly so she couldn't withdraw it. "I don't know. What will you do?"
Lorna wrenched her hand free and began twisting her head sideways, banging it back and forth violently on the couch. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, for Christ's fucking sake, I don't know!"
"Will you stay with the D.A.'s office?"
Lorna shook her head again. "No. I can't. I mean, I could if I wanted to, but I can't. I can't go on with justice and cops and criminal law. When you called me and told me Engels confessed, I went straight to the D.A. Maybe I gushed about you, I don't know, but he had my number, and when Canfield brought Winton to see him and we talked afterward, I knew that I was through in the office. With Engels dead, it's final. I don't even want to be there now. Freddy, will you try to get another policeman's job?"