"No, I-" he felt sweat pouring down his sides. "My girl-"
"You can't shit me. Twenty years a cop."
He began to look frantically around the store for the girl. Finally he saw her staring gravely at a shelf stocked with jars of peanut butter. "Angie," he said. "Angie-come on-"
"Aw, hold on," the fat man said. "I was just tryin' to get a rise out of you. Don't flip out or nothin'. You want some of that peanut butter, little girl?"
Angie looked at him and nodded.
"Well, take one off the shelf and bring it up here. Anything else, mister? 'Course if you're Bruno Hauptmann, I'll have to bring you in. I still got my service revolver around somewhere. Knock you flat, I'll tell you that for free."
It was, he saw, all a weary mockery. Yet he could scarcely conceal his trembling. Wasn't that something an ex-cop would notice? He turned away toward the aisles and shelves.
"Hey, listen to this," the man said to his back. "If you're in that much trouble, you can just get the hell out of here right now."
"No, no," he said. "I need some things-"
"You don't look much like that girl."
Blindly, he began taking things off the shelves, anything. A jar of pickles, a box of apple turnovers, a canned ham, two or three other cans he didn't bother to look at. These he took to the counter.
The fat man, Buddy, was staring at him suspiciously. "You just shook me up a little bit," he said to him. "I haven't had much sleep, I've been driving for a couple of days…" Invention blessedly descended. "I have to take my little girl to her grandmother, she's in Tampa-" Angie swiveled around, clutching two jars of crunchy peanut butter, and gaped at him as he said this-"uh, Tampa, on account of her mother and me split up and I have to get a job, get things put together again, right, Angie?" The girl's mouth hung open.
"Your name Angie?" the fat man asked her.
She nodded.
"This man your daddy?"
He thought he would fall down.
"Now he is," she said.
The fat man laughed. " 'Now he is!' Just like a kid. Goddam, you figure out the brain of a kid, you got to be some kind of genius. All right, nervous, I guess I'll take your money." Still sitting on the counter, he rang up the purchases by bending to one side and punching the buttons of the register. "You better get some rest. You remind me of about a million guys I took into my old station."
Outside, Wanderley said to her, "Thanks for saying that."
"Saying what?": pertly, self-assuredly. Then again, almost mechanically, eerily, ticking her head from side to side: "Saying what? Saying what? Saying what?"
5
In Panama City he pulled into the Gulf Glimpse Motor Lodge, a series of shabby brick bungalows around a parking lot. The manager's lodge sat at the entrance, a separate square building like the others, with the exception of a large pane of plate glass behind which, in what must have been ovenlike heat, a stringy old man with gold-rimmed glasses and a mesh T-shirt was visible. He looked like Adolf Eichmann. The severe inflexible cast of the man's face made Wanderley remember what the ex-policeman had said about himself and the girclass="underline" he did not, with his blond hair and fair skin, look anything like the girl's father. He pulled up before the manager's lodge and left the car, his palms sweaty.
But inside, when he said that he wanted a room for himself and his daughter, the old man merely glanced incuriously at the dark-haired child in the car, and said, "Ten-fifty a day. Sign the register. You want food, try the Eat-Mor down the road apiece. There's no cooking in the bungalows. You planning on staying more than one night, Mr.-" He swung the register toward him. "Boswell?"
"Maybe as long as a week."
"Then you'll pay the first two nights in advance."
He counted out twenty-one dollars, and the manager gave him a key. "Number eleven, lucky eleven. Across the parking lot."
The room had whitewashed walls and smelled of lavatory cleaner. He gave it a perfunctory look around: the same iron carpet, two small beds with clean but worn sheets, a television with a twelve-inch screen, two awful pictures of flowers. The room appeared to have more shadows in it than could be accounted for. The girl was inspecting the bed against the side wall. "What's Magic Fingers? I want to try it. Can I? Please?"
"It probably won't work."
"Can I? I want to try it. Please?"
"All right. Lie down on it. I have to go out to do some things. Don't leave until I come back. I have to put a quarter in this slot, see? Like this? When I get back we can eat." The girl was lying on the bed, nodding with impatience, looking not at him but at the coin in his hand. "We'll eat when I get back. I'll try to get you some new clothes, too. You can't wear the same things all the time."
"Put in the quarter!"
He shrugged, pushed the quarter into the slot and immediately heard a humming noise. The child settled down onto the bed, her arms fully extended, her face tense. "Oh. It's nice."
"I'll be back pretty soon," he said, and went back out into the harsh sunlight and for the first time smelled water.
The Gulf was a long way off, but it was visible. On the other side of the road he had taken into town the land abruptly fell off into a wasteland of weeds and rubble at its bottom bisected by a series of railroad tracks. After the tracks another disused weedy patch of land ended at a second road which veered off toward a group of warehouses and loading sheds. Beyond this second road was the Gulf of Mexico-gray lathery water.
He walked down the road in the direction of town.
On the edge of Panama City he went into a Treasure Island discount store and bought jeans and two T-shirts for the girl, fresh underwear, socks, two shirts, a pair of khaki trousers and Hush Puppies for himself.
Carrying two large shopping bags, he emerged from Treasure Island and turned in the direction that was downtown. Diesel fumes drifted toward him, cars with Keep the Southland Great bumper stickers rolled by. Men in short-sleeved shirts and short gray crewcuts moved along the sidewalks. When he saw a uniformed cop trying to eat an icecream cone while writing out a parking ticket, he dodged between a pickup truck and a Trailways van and crossed the street. A rivulet of sweat issued from his left eyebrow and ran into his eye; he was calm. Once again, disaster had not happened.
He discovered the bus station by accident. It took up half a block, a vast new-looking building with black glass slits for windows. He thought: Alma Mobley, her mark. Once through the revolving door, he saw a few aimless people on benches in a large empty space-the people always seen in bus stations, a few young-old men with lined faces and complex hairdos, some children racketing around, a sleeping bum, three or four teenage boys in cowboy boots and shoulder-length hair. Another cop was leaning against the wall by the magazine counter. Looking for him? Panic started in him again, but the cop barely glanced at him. He pretended to check the arrivals-and-departures board before moving, with exaggerated carelessness, to the men's room.
He locked himself into a toilet and stripped. After dressing up to the waist in the new clothes, he left the toilet and washed at one of the sinks. So much grime came off that he washed himself again, splashing water onto the floor and working the green liquid soap deep into his armpits and around the back of his neck. Then he dried himself on the roller and put on one of the new short-sleeved shirts-a light blue shirt with thin red stripes. All of his old clothes went into the Treasure Island bag.
Outside, he noticed the odd grainy grayish blue of the sky. It was the sort of sky he imagined as hanging forever over the keys and swamps much further south in Florida, a sky that would hold the heat, doubling and redoubling it, forcing the weeds and plants into fantastic growth, making them send out grotesque and swollen tendrils… the sort of sky and hot disk of sun which should always, now that he thought of it, have hung over Alma Mobley. He stuffed the bag of old clothes in a trash barrel outside a gun shop.