In the new clothes his body felt young and capable, healthier than it had all through that terrible winter. Wanderley moved down the shabby southern street, a tall well-built man in his thirties, no longer quite aware of what he was doing. He rubbed his cheek and felt that blond man's feathery stubble-he could go two or three days without looking as though he needed a shave. A pickup driven by a sailor, five or six sailors in summer whites standing up in the rear of the truck, drove past him, and the sailors yelled something-something cheerful and private and derisory.
"They don't mean no harm," said a man who had appeared beside Wanderley. His head, with an enormous hair-sprouting wart dividing one eyebrow, came no higher than Wanderley's breastbone. "They's all good boys."
He smiled and uttered a meaningless agreement and moved away-he could not go back to the motel, could not deal with the girl; he felt as though he might faint. His feet seemed unreal in the Hush Puppies-too far down, too far from his eyes. He found that he was walking rapidly down a descending street, going toward an area of neon signs and movie theaters. In the grainy sky the sun hung high and motionless. Shadows of parking meters stood out, purely black, on the sidewalk: for a moment he was certain there were more shadows than parking meters. All the shadows hovering over the street were intensely black. He passed the entrance to a hotel and was aware of a vast brown empty space, a brown cool cave, beyond its glass doors.
Almost unwillingly, recognizing a dread familiar set of sensations, he went on in the terrific heat: consciously he kept himself from stepping over the shadows of the parking meters. Two years before the world had gathered itself in this ominous way, had been slick and full of intent-after the episode of Alma Mobley, after his brother had died. In some fashion, literally or not, she had killed David Wanderley: he knew that he had been lucky to escape whatever it was that took David through the Amsterdam hotel window. Only writing had brought him back up into the world; only writing about it, the horrid complicated mess of himself and Alma and David, writing about it as a ghost story, had released him from it. He had thought.
Panama City? Panama City, Florida? What was he doing there? And with that strange passive girl he had taken with him? Whom he had spirited down through the South?
He had always been the "erratic one," the "troubled one," the foil to David's strength, in the economy of family life his poverty the foil to David's success; his ambitions and pretensions ("You actually think you can support yourself as a novelist? Even your uncle wasn't that dumb": his father) the contrast to David's hard-working good sense, to David's steady progress through law school and into a good law firm. And when David had bumped into the daily stuff of his life, it had killed him.
That was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Until last winter: until Milburn.
The shabby street seemed to open like a grave. He felt as if one more step toward the bottom of the hill and the sleazy movie theaters would take him down, down, as if it would never stop but turn into an endless falling. Something which had not been there before appeared before him, and he squinted to see it more clearly.
Breathlessly he turned around in the piercing sunlight. His elbow caught someone's chest, and he heard himself murmuring sorry, sorry to an irritated woman in a white sunhat. He unconsciously began to move quickly back up the street. Back there, looking down to the intersection at the bottom of the hill, he had momentarily seen his brother's tombstone: it had been small, of purple marble, the words David Webster Wanderley, 1939-1975 carved into it, sitting in the middle of the intersection. He fled.
Yes, he had seen David's tombstone, but David had none. He had been cremated in Holland, and his ashes flown back to their mother. David's tombstone, yes, with David's name, but what sent him rushing back up the hill was the feeling that it was for him. And that if he were to kneel in the middle of the intersection and dig up the coffin, within it he would find his own putrefying body.
He turned into the only cool, welcoming place he had seen, the hotel lobby. He had to sit down, to calm himself; beneath the disinterested regard of a desk clerk and a girl behind a magazine counter, he sank down onto a sofa. His face was clammy. The fabric of the sofa's upholstery rubbed uncomfortably into his back; he leaned forward, ran his fingers through his hair, looked at his watch. He had to appear normal, as if he were just waiting for someone; he had to stop trembling. Potted palm trees had been placed here and there about the lobby. A fan whirled overhead. A thin old man in a purple uniform stood by an open elevator and stared at him: caught, he looked away.
When noises came to him he realized that since seeing the tombstone in the middle of the intersection he had heard nothing. His own pulse had drowned all other sound. Now the efficient noises of hotel life floated in the humid air. A vacuum cleaner hummed on an invisible staircase, telephones dimly rang, the elevator doors closed with a soft whoosh. Around the lobby, small groups of people sat in conversation. He began to feel that he could face the street again.
6
"I'm hungry," she said.
"I got you some new clothes."
"I don't want new clothes, I want food."
He crossed the room to sit in the empty chair. "I thought you'd get tired of wearing the same dress all the time."
"I don't care what I wear."
"Okay." He tossed the bag onto her bed. "I just thought you might like them."
She did not respond.
"I'll feed you if you answer some questions."
She turned away from him and began picking at the sheets, wrinkling them and smoothing them out.
"What's your name?"
"I told you. Angie."
"Angie Maule?"
"No. Angie Mitchell."
He let it go. "Why haven't your parents sent the police out to find you? Why haven't we been found yet?"
"I don't have any parents."
"Everybody has parents."
"Everybody except orphans."
"Who takes cares of you?"
"You do."
"Before me."
"Shut up. Shut up." Her face became glossy and self-contained.
"Are you really an orphan?"
"Shut up shut up shut up!"
To stop her screaming he lifted the canned ham out of the box of groceries. "All right," he said. "I'll get you some food. We'll have some of this."
"Okay." It was as if she had never screamed. "I want the peanut butter too."
While he was slicing the ham she said, "Do you have enough money to take care of us?"
She ate in her dedicated way: first she bit off a mouthful of ham, then dipped her fingers in the peanut butter and brought a wad of it home and chewed the two together. "Delicious," she managed to utter around the food.
"If I go to sleep, you won't leave, will you?"
She shook her head. "But I can take a walk, can't I?"
"I guess so."
He was drinking a can of beer from a six-pack he had picked up at the little store on his way back; the beer and the food together made him drowsy, and he knew that if he did not get to bed, he would fall asleep in the chair.
She said, "You don't have to tie me onto you. I'll come back. You believe me, don't you?"