“No word from East Germany.”
The Phoenician cracks down the receiver so hard that the drugstore clerk looks up at him. Loose, he thinks, fugitives at large — the phrase, as always, chilling, raising goosebumps. He thinks of swamps, caves, passes in mountains. Loose. At large. He thinks of settlements so inland in terrains so forbidding that the inhabitants have no language. The chatter of apes, perhaps, the signals of birds. As always, the idea of such remoteness abstracts his face, neutralizes his features, a sort of paralysis of the attention. People watching him wish to help.
“Is there something you wanted, sir?” the clerk asks. At large, loose.
“Hmn?”
“Is there anything I can get you?” Loose.
“What have you got that’s binding?” He sees his bus outside and rushes to board it.
They are in Hilgemann’s Restaurant at the girl’s request. At his they have chosen to remain indoors rather than to dine outside in the beer garden. Though it’s warm enough, the long bare vines snaking among the trellis make him nervous. He could never have been a farmer; he is a bailbondsman because he can exercise some control over his crops of criminals, his staggered harvests so nearly continuous that he feels he does not deal in time at all. (His calendars are only a sort of map, like the precinct maps in police stations.) So they are inside, in an Ohio approximation of Bavaria, leashed to reality by the sealed blue hemispheres of Diners Club, American Express’s bland centurion and Master Charge’s interlocking gold and orange circles decaled on the window like bright postage. He sees airy clubs, spades and hearts between the spindles of the heavy, low-backed captain’s chairs, notices the sweet intrusion of a stuffed deer’s head — no teeth there — and the elaborate plaster-of-Paris mugs that hang from their handles above the bar and that gravity arranges in identical angles, a fringe of falling men, with here and there a lidded pewter beer mug like a tiny hookah or an early, complicated steam engine. Once Herr Hilgemann offered to present the Phoenician with his own, and to have his name inscribed on it. “I’m not a joiner,” he told him. He sees without appetite the heavy portions of thick, stringy meats — flank and chuck and pot roasts, and sanded schnitzels, worms of anchovy curled on them like springs. Thick gravies wound the table linen. There are constructs of pastry, geometric lattices of chocolate, baked bridges of caramel, fretworks of crust, flake, cherries in cross section like the intimate slivers of biopsy. Among these moist ruins Main chews the sandwich he cannot taste; he does not want the fearful cutlery in his mouth, those heavy tines.
He is amazed at the girl’s appetite. The lunch, as Miss Krementz might have guessed, is unnecessary; this could have been handled in the office, or on the phone. He might have asked her, as he had asked others, to write a composition for him: “Why I Think——Will Not Jump Bail.”
He doesn’t even feel like explaining it to her. He feels like taking a nap, like dreaming of fugitives, for though they are his nightmares, at least in his dreams he is with them, learning their plans, seeing them in their new settings and fresh disguises.
“All right,” he says, and puts down his sandwich. By the time he is ready to speak he has already decided against her boyfriend. “Arson’s one of the highest bonds there is. It’s a very high bond. You set fire to a building—”
“But he didn’t.”
Alexander shrugs. “You set fire to a building you bring the insurance companies into it. They’re the ones who determine the prices; not me. I admit it isn’t fair. Every sort of minority pressure group exists in this country, but who gives a second thought to the arsonist? Fire Power! I’m just thinking out loud.”
“His lawyer says we’ve got to get him out, that there’s too great a presumption of guilt if he stays in before the trial.”
“That’s true.”
“Well, what do you say? Have you made up your mind?”
“I have to give you a test.”
“A test.”
“It’s routine.”
“What do I have to do? Hey, wait a minute, I’m not looking for a part in your picture. Don’t get any funny ideas.”
“What, the crap you eat? You’d blow me out of bed.”
“Okay, I just wanted that understood. I’ll give you a cashier’s check. We’ll go to the bank and have it drawn up.”
“You have to pass the test.”
“I have to pass the test.”
“It’s a very stupid test.”
“All right. Let’s get it over with.”
“It’s not scientific. It isn’t for an educated person like yourself.”
“Go ahead.”
“Actually it’s an insult to your intelligence.”
“Try me, for God’s sake.”
“How much do you love Mr. Hunsicker?”
“What?”
“How much do you love him? Do you love him a bunch?”
“Certainly. Of course I do.”
“A whole bunch?”
“Yes. What is this?”
“Oodles and oodles?”
“This is crazy.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Show me with your hands.”
“With my hands?”
“Just spread them out real wide and show me.”
She opens her arms. She might be a fisherman demonstrating the length of a large bass.
“That’s all?”
“No. More. Much more.”
“Show me.”
She opens her arms so wide Alexander can hear her shoulder blades crack. Her tits come forward into her food.
“That’s not so much,” he says.
“You’re making a fool of me. There isn’t any test.”
“I can’t do it. He’s a marked man. Your boyfriend’s ruined. You shouldn’t think badly of him. Innocent men are sometimes lousier risks than guilty. How do I know if he sets fires? I like the prosecution’s case, but that doesn’t mean anything; they could still lose. The thing is, in your boyfriend’s state of mind he doesn’t think they will. I saw him. He’s very depressed that this has happened to him. I don’t think he’ll go the course. Too much money is involved; it’s too big a risk.”
“Why did you put me through all this?”
“You got a good lunch, what are you kicking? What did the other bondsmen’s food taste like? You want dessert?”
“I want to get out of here.”
“I’ll get the check in a minute. No, you were thinking a little earlier I was trying to put the make on you. I ask you, what chance would a person like myself have with a girl like you?”
“None. Thanks for the lovely lunch. See you.”
“Yeah. My wife is dead, did you know that?”
“I’m sorry to hear that. That’s like, you know, tough shit.”
“Right. That’s just what I told her when we learned she was dying.”
“You really are one dreadful son of a bitch.”
“No. What are you saying? What do you know about it? You want dessert? How about some of that creamy shit with the nuts?”
“You actually think you can get me to go to bed with you.”
“One lunch? You set some value on yourself. I never remarried.” She makes no move to leave. Perhaps she thinks he will still do a deal with her. “I play the field, go with the whores now and again to get my rocks off. Cincinnati has some lulus. Do anything for money, some of those girls. Now if one of my whores died, I’d put money in the jukebox and sit at the bar with my hat on my head like Walter Winchell.”
“You must have loved her very much, your wife,” Miss Krementz says levelly.
“Yes, well, she was very ordinary, very plain. We married each other in our middle years. You know what I couldn’t stand about being married? The picnics. All those trips to the damn beach. With the blankets and the towels and the sandwiches in wax paper. Warm Coca-Cola. Wearing swim trunks. Being barefoot on the pebbles, or the sand in my shoes if I kept them on. It wasn’t any better in the backyard. Stretched out in Bermudas on the folding lawn furniture. I come from a desert people, a hot culture, sand in my blood like lymph, but it’s as if I was running a temperature the whole time I was married, as if your Mr. Hunsicker did a job on me with the oily rags. Sweat on my belly like the fat on soup. My jockstrap was grimy, it gave me a rash. Sundays. We were together four years but all I remember are the fucking Sundays. Lounging around. Trying to figure out things to do, bored at the barbecue and settled at the fence like a lost ball.