“No,” she murmured, and reached out again. This time she tapped three-five-zero-decimal-zero-zero… and then hesitated again. She didn’t know exactly how much of what he called “the ready” there was in the cash-and-checking account this machine tapped into, but three hundred and fifty dollars had to be a pretty sizeable chunk of it. He was going to be so angry… She moved her hand toward the CANCEL/RETRY button, and then asked herself again what difference that made. He was going to be angry in any case. There was no going back now.
“Are you going to be much longer, ma’am?” a voice asked from behind her.
“Because I’m over my coffee-break right now.”
“Oh, sorry!” she said, jumping a little.
“No, I was just… woolgathering.” She hit the TRANSACT button. The words ONE MOMENT PLEASE appeared on the auto-teller’s VDT. The wait wasn’t long, but it was long enough for her to entertain a vivid fantasy of the machine’s suddenly emitting a high, warbling siren and a mechanized voice bellowing
“THIS WOMAN IS A THIEF! STOP HER! THIS WOMEN IS A THIEF!” Instead of calling her a thief, the screen flashed a thank-you, wished her a pleasant day, and produced seventeen twenties and a single ten. Rosie offered the young man standing behind her a nervous, no-eye-contact smile, then hurried back to her cab.
Portside was a low, wide building with plain sandstone-colored walls. Buses of all kinds-not just Greyhounds but Trailways, American Pathfinders, Eastern Highways, and Continental Expresses-ringed the terminal with their snouts pushed deep into the loading docks. To Rosie they looked like fat chrome piglets nursing at an exceedingly ugly mother. She stood outside the main entrance, looking in. The terminal wasn’t as crowded as she had half-hoped (safety in numbers) and half-feared (after fourteen years of seeing almost no one but her husband and the colleagues he sometimes brought home for a meal, she had developed more than a touch of agoraphobia), probably because it was the middle of the week and shouting distance from the nearest holiday. Still she guessed there must be a couple of hundred people in there, walking aimlessly around, sitting on the old-fashioned, high-backed wooden benches, playing the video games, drinking coffee in the snackbar, or queuing for tickets. Small children hung onto their mothers” hands, tilted their heads back, and bawled like lost calves at the faded logging mural on the ceiling. A loudspeaker that echoed like the voice of God in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic announced destinations: Erie, Pennsylvania; Nashville, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Miami, Florida (the disembodied, echoing voice pronounced it Miamuh); Denver, Colorado.
“Lady,” a tired voice said.
“Hey, lady, little help here. Little help, what do you say?” She turned her head and saw a young man with a pale face and a flood of dirty black hair sitting with his back against one side of the terminal entrance. He was holding a cardboard sign in his lap. HOMELESS amp; HAVE AIDS, it read. PLEASE “AID” ME.
“You got some spare change, don’t you? Help me out? You’ll be ridin in your speedboat on Saranac Lake long after I’m dead and gone. Whaja say?” She felt suddenly strange and faint, on the edge of some mental and emotional overload. The terminal appeared to grow before her eyes until it was as large as a cathedral, and there was something horrifying about the tidal movements of the people in its aisles and alcoves. A man with a wrinkled, pulsing bag of flesh hanging from the side of his neck trudged past her with his head down, dragging a duffelbag after him by its string. The bag hissed like a snake as it slid along the dirty tile floor. A Mickey Mouse doll stuck out of the duffel’s top, smiling blandly at her. The godlike announcer was telling the assembled travelers that the Trailways express to Omaha would be departing Gate 17 in twenty minutes. I can’t do this, she thought suddenly. I can’t live in this world. It isn’t just not knowing where the teabags and Scrubbies are; the door he beat me behind was also the door that kept all this confusion and madness out. And I can never go back through it again. For a moment a startlingly vivid image from her childhood Sunday-school class filled her mind-Adam and Eve wearing fig-leaves and identical expressions of shame and misery, walking barefoot down a stony path toward a bitter, sterile future. Behind them was the Garden of Eden, lush and filled with flowers. A winged angel stood before its closed gate, the sword in its hand glowing with terrible light. “don’t you dare think of it that way!” she cried suddenly, and the man sitting in the doorway recoiled so strongly that he almost dropped his sign. “don’t you dare!”
“Jesus, I’m sorry!” the man with the sign said, and rolled his eyes.
“Go on, if that’s the way you feel!”
“No, I… it wasn’t you… I was thinking about my-”
The absurdity of what she was doing-trying to explain herself to a beggar sitting in the doorway of the bus terminal-came home to her then. She was still holding two dollars in her hand, her change from the cabbie. She flung them into the cigar-box beside the young man with the sign and fled into the Portside terminal.
Another young man-this one with a tiny Errol Flynn moustache and a handsome, unreliable face-had set up a game she recognized from TV shows as three-card monte on top of his suitcase near the back of the terminal.
“Find the ace of spades?” he invited.
“Find the ace of spades, lady?” In her mind she saw a fist floating toward her. Saw a ring on the third finger, a ring with the words Service, Loyalty, and Community engraved on it.
“No thank you,” she said.
“I never had a problem with that.” His expression as she passed suggested he thought she had a few bats flying around loose in her belfry, but that was all right. He was not her problem. Neither was the man at the entrance who might or might not have AIDS, or the man with the bag of flesh hanging from his neck and the Mickey Mouse doll poking out of his duffel. Her problem was Rose Daniels-check that, Rosie McClendon-and that was her only problem. She started down the center aisle, then stopped as she saw a trash barrel. A curt imperative-DON’T LITTER!-was stencilled across its round green belly. She opened her handbag, took out the ATM card, gazed down at it for a moment, then pushed it through the flap on top of the barrel. She hated to let it go, but at the same time she was relieved to see the last of it. If she kept it, using it again might become a temptation she couldn’t resist… and Norman wasn’t stupid. Brutal, yes. Stupid, no. If she gave him a way to trace her, he would. She would do well to keep that in mind. She took in a deep breath, held it for a second or two, then let it out and headed for the ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES monitors clustered at the center of the building. She didn’t look back. If she had, she would have seen the young man with the Errol Flynn moustache already rummaging in the barrel, looking for whatever it was the ditzy lady in the sunglasses and bright red kerchief had eighty-sixed. To the young man it had looked like a credit card. Probably not, but you never knew stuff like that for sure unless you checked. And sometimes a person got lucky. Sometimes? Hell, often. They didn’t call it the Land of Opportunity for nothing.
The next large city to the west was only two hundred and fifty miles away, and that felt too close. She decided on an even bigger one, five hundred and fifty miles farther on. It was a lakeshore city, like this one, but in the next timezone. There was a Continental Express headed there in half an hour. She went to the bank of ticket-windows and got into line. Her heart was thumping hard in her chest and her mouth was dry. Just before the person in front of her finished his transaction and moved away from the window, she put the back of her hand to her mouth and stifled a burp that burned coming up and tasted of her morning coffee. You don’t dare use either version of your name here, she cautioned herself. If they want a name, you have to give another one.