After I hung up I remembered I had forgotten lunch, and it was almost three-thirty.
TEN
I HAD a sandwich and coffee at a twenty-four-hour place near enough to the hospital to get the random hours business of nurses and interns, clerks and dietitians, Gray Ladies and residents. There was a gabble of young nurses in a corner. The ceiling fluorescence was as bright as any operating room. My Formica tabletop was white as a surgical dressing. One young nurse had a lovely curve of temple brow, cheek, jaw.
I tried to contrast them with the spidery moonpainted fashion racks I had seen at the Ambassador, thinking that nursing seems to attract young women structured in a curious way-pretty and slender from throat to waist, and there swelling into sedate and massive hips, hefty peasant legs. Debutante riding along in an ox cart. Or, by analogue, some variant of the myth-man who, from the waist down, was horse.
Try as I might, I could not keep my mind twisted away from that great gray howl of beach where the pursuit still went on, the tall sun-bronzed man made clumsy by the scuttling and dartings of the little naked woman. That look of madness is ugly beyond belief when you see it on the face which once had shown you love. And, in my arms and hands, I had the tactile memory of how the total panic of the inner beast felt.
Once, long ago, I went drift fishing with friends for smallmouth black bass in the St. Lawrence River near Alexandria Bay, using live minnows and fly rods, pulling in the lines to run upriver, then drifting down again over the good places. At noon we beached the boat on a small island and cleaned and cooked some of the catch over a driftwood fire. One man cast a minnow from the shore and hooked and brought in a river eel perhaps two feet long, maybe a little more, and in thickest crosssection no greater than the average banana. My friend lived on the river, and he hauled the eel onto a bit of hard ground and told me to stand on it. I thought he was out of his mind. Two hundred and twenty pounds of man on two pounds of eel. I’d crush it flat. He insisted. I pinned it with one foot, then put the other and my full weight on it. As it writhed it kept lifting me an inch or so. I stepped off. It was undamaged.
In her induced terror, Glory had that same incredible muscular tension, so that if I held her too tightly, the muscles would break her bones, unhinge her joints, as sometimes happens under shock treatment. We use only the smallest part of the power of both brain and muscles. Even our senses are dulled in the state we call conscious ness: Under hypnosis the good subject can read a newspaper across a room, hear sounds otherwise inaudible, detect differences in the weight of seemingly identical objects.
Perhaps it is merely sentimentality-that strangely unearned emotion-which makes you want to have the fates and fortunes of life favor the good guys. Glory was a good guy. She had had more than her share already. There is a grotesque and continuous tragedy about some lives which would be too extreme for even a soap-opera audience to stomach.
So I white-eyed a nurse into receptivity across forty feet of plastic restaurant, chomped down a plastic sandwich, gulped down acid coffee and plastic pie, and with accelerating stride got to the men’s room just in time to whonk and brutch the belated lunch into a toilet. Homage to a one-time love. A sick heart makes a sick stomach. They had cleaned and dressed my hand. They do not give you a series of shots for girl-bite. Wasn’t she the lucky one to think of asking you to fly up here and help her, T. McGee? You did great.
I shed coat and jacket and rolled up my shirt sleeves and drew a lavatory bowl of cold water. I wallowed and scrubbed and made seal sounds, and then found out that the management had thoughtfully provided one of those warm air tubes for the drying bit, the special kind that leave you feeling coated with grease rather than water. Small children think they are fun. Every adult in the land hates them. They are part of the international communist conspiracy. A nation forced to dry itself in a machined huff of sickly warm air is going to be too irritable, listless, and disheartened to fight. Americans unitel Carry your own towels. Carry little sticks with which you can wedge those turn-off faucets open so you can get two hands under the water at the same time. Carry your own soap so you need not wash your paws in that sickly green punch-button goo that leaves you smelling like an East Indian bordello. Carry your own toilet paper, men. The psychic trauma created by a supply of the same paper stock used for four-color ads in Life magazine cannot be measured.
The cold-sweat sensation ended. I reassembled the hero, stared into his deadly mirrored eye, nodded reassuringly at the poor suggestible slob, and strode out into a blackening world where the wind had ended, where great slow flakes the size of quarters and half-dollars came falling down to melt into a black sticky slime on the sidewalks and on the fourteen million tons of scrap paper that littered the city.
At a drugstore full of games, toys, and sporting equipment, I downed a fizzing nostrum for uglygut, and from a booth got Heidi first. The fraulein was napping. I told her that Gloria Geis was hospitalized, that she had suffered a little bout of nervous exhaustion.
“Is my heart supposed to go out to her?” asked the ice maiden.
“I don’t think that’s what she had in mind. But tell your brother. Maybe you two can have a good chuckle over it. Mrs. Ottlo will be leaving for Florida when she gets the house closed. I imagine John Andrus will be in touch with you about odds and ends.”
“I hope you and John Andrus understand that the little bitch is probably faking.”
I quoted her word for word to John Andrus when I phoned him at the bank. He was shocked and concerned about Gloria, and I didn’t tell him any more than I had told Heidi. I said Hayes Wyatt was on the case and any reports on her condition would have to come from him. John Andrus said he would swing into action about the house, the furnishings, storing Gloria’s possessions, and finding her a place to live. Then he said, “Are you making any headway?”
“I wish to God I knew, John. I’ll be in touch.”
I got more change and went back to the booth and phoned the bus driver, Daniel D. DuShane in Galesburg. A woman answered and told me to hold on while she went to get him.
When he came on I gave Sergeant Ellis a new job. I put him in Missing Persons investigating a female juvenile runaway.
“Five two, about seventeen, blonde, about a hundred and twenty pounds, blue coat, blue scarf. She could have come into the city on number 83 last night. She might have had facial contusions and abrasions.”
“Sure thing. She was on my load, Sergeant. You know, I been thinking ever since maybe I should have reported her as soon as I got in. No luggage, no purse even.”
“Where did she board you?”
“It’s a crossroads. From Peoria I’m-routed up 29 on the west side of the river to Peru and LaSalle. There’s a kind of village name of Bureau, where 26 comes in from the left. There’s a crossroads gas station and lunchroom there name of Sheen’s. It’s like a hundred miles from Chicago, so I must get there usually about I’d say six o’clock give or take some, depending. Once in maybe ten times I get a pickup there, and what Sheen does, he’s got an amber blinker he can turn on and I can see it way down the road, so when it’s on I hit the air horns and swing in and the fare comes running out, so it isn’t too much time out of my schedule. I had the inside lights out, and she boarded and I turned on the front lights to take the money. She said Chicago and gave me a dollar and the rest of it all in change, and I gave her the ticket and looked up and the first thing I thought was she’d busted up a car and had to take the bus home. The light kind of shone up onto her face and it gave me a real jolt. She went back and took an empty, and later when I had the inside lights on at Ottawa, I saw her back there with her head kind of wrapped up in the scarf so it hid most of the damage. Runaway, huh?”