I said, "I told you to stay put."
She made a face at me. "It's not so cold."
Her breath made a misty plume on the still air. Her legs, in those sheer stockings, looked colder than anything on earth. I reached out and pinched one of her toes through the nylon.
"Can you feel that?"
She looked startled. "Why, no, I-"
"You," I said, "are a lovely dope."
I grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her towards me, disregarding her squeals of protest. I gathered her up in my arms, carried her around to the cab and shoved her inside.
"It'll start to get warm as soon as the sun rises, but in the meantime," I said, "you put that coat on and stay in there all covered up if you want to get out of this with a full complement of toes and noses, not to mention fingers and ears. What do they teach you Texas girls, anyway?"
She gave me a grin. "After last night, darling, need you ask?"
I started to close the door and stopped, looking at her. Something had changed in her face. It wasn't just that the hardships of the night had inflicted serious damage on the smooth, hard polish with which she'd embarked on this journey-that her elaborate hairdo was a tousled mess and her careful make-up mostly missing. She didn't even have much lipstick on. Then I realized that it was the mouth itself that had changed. It was softer and prettier than I remembered it.
"What's the matter, darling?" she asked.
"Nothing," he said, "but you'd better comb your hair. You look like a sheep dog."
I went back to melt some snow for coffee on the Coleman stove and told myself that a woman always looks more beautiful after you've made love to her, but I was suddenly a little scared. I didn't want her to turn into a nice girl with a sweet warm mouth. It didn't fit in with my calculations at all.
We had no trouble getting back to the highway, and it didn't take us long after that to reach Carrizozo. For some reason I found myself remembering the time I was working for an Albuquerque newspaper before the war- before Mac got hold of me and taught me a different profession-and had driven through Carrizozo in the spring when the cottonwoods were pale green and the tamarisk hedges were just turning pink. There were no pale new leaves on the cottonwoods today, and no feathery sprays of color on the tamarisks. There were just bare branches and tracked-up snow.
We needed gas, and Gail wanted a nice rest room. When it comes to selecting a place to go to the John, any woman can keep looking much longer than seems natural or safe, and she was no exception. The one she finally picked was no better than the three we'd passed up, as far as I could see, but it sold a brand of gas for which I had a credit card, so I turned in gratefully before she could change her mind.
The man who came up to fill the tank, after setting aside a snow-shovel, was wearing high-laced hunting boots and a red plaid cap with earflaps. He was on the young side of middle age, but not much so, and he had that kind of broad, freckled country face with a long, rubbery, lugubrious mouth and sad light-blue eyes that wouldn't change till he died.
"You folks come far this morning?" he asked. "Have any trouble? No, I reckon you wouldn't in this rig." He patted the fender of the pickup approvingly and glanced up. "Place you want is right around the corner of the building, ma'am, but you'll have to get the key off the cash register inside." He watched Gail walk away, with the veiled expression of a man who has his dreams. Then he glanced quickly at me. "You'll want the regular, I reckon, Mister."
"That's right."
He uncapped the tank and brought the hose over. "We get a big snow just about every year," he said, "but damn if people don't act like it was the end of the world every time it happens… You want me to take those chains off for you? You'll beat them to pieces if you leave them on, now the blade's been over the road. Cost you fifty cents."
"It's a deal," I said.
He got a big hydraulic jack and rolled it over. I stood by, waiting. I saw Gail come around the corner of the building, picking her way where the snow was packed so she wouldn't damage her fragile blue pumps. She'd made the necessary cosmetic repairs, combed her hair smooth and hung her pearls back around her neck. Her expensive sweater and skirt were telling no tales. There are still problems to be solved in the fields of science and medicine and international relations, but the ladies' garment industry has got it licked. Nowadays, a girl can spend the night out under quite strenuous circumstances and still greet the morning without a pleat out of place.
She looked pretty and feminine, tiptoeing through the snow like that, but I wasn't watching her just for aesthetic pleasure. I saw her discover the telephone booth nearby-or pretend to discover it. She glanced my way, and I nodded. She made her way over there and picked up the directory without closing the door. Watching her leaf through the pages, I saw her frown quickly and go back a page. She looked up, with a startled expression on her face. I walked over there.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "It isn't there!"
"No Wigwam?"
"No Wigwam," she said. Then I guess the tone of my voice gave her a belated hint, because she looked up, her gray eyes wide and accusing. "You knew!"
"I knew we wouldn't find it in the phone book" I said.
"How-"
"It was checked two nights ago along with your personal history and various other things."
She frowned as if completely bewildered. "You knew, and still you had us come all this way? You let me-" She stopped, and said naively, "You might at least have told me!"
I said, "It was your wild-goose chase, glamor girl. I just came along to watch the show." She gasped, and I said, "Sure, I let you put on your act. It was very good. Congratulations. The double-take, the surprised expression… Anybody'd have thought you really expected to find a place called the Wigwam!" I grimaced. "Now, why don't you just break down, Gail, and tell me what your sister really said, and why you went to the trouble of making up this crazy story about an Indian lodge…"
"Excuse me, sir."
The voice came from behind me. Well, I should have known better than to pick a public driveway for the scene, but I was just about through, anyway. I'd done my part to establish the unbearable Mr. Helm for another day. He'd slipped a little last night; he'd been almost human early this morning, but now he was right back in form. I turned.
"That'll be three-eighty for the gas and fifty cents for taking off the chains, plus tax," the filling station man said. His stolid, freckled face said that quarrels between his customers were none of his business, much as he'd like to know what the hell it was all about. "Oil and water okay. I put your chains in back."
I gave him my credit card. The sound of running footsteps told me Gail was gone; I heard the truck door open and close, hard. I followed the man into the station to sign the ticket.
"There wouldn't be a place called The Wigwam in town?" I asked casually. "A motel or a restaurant or something?"
"There's nothing called the Wigwam, Mister, but the Turquoise Motel's a nice place to stay, and if you want something to eat or drink, there's the Chloe Bar and Grill…
When I got behind the wheel, she was sitting at the other end of the seat, looking straight ahead. I started up the truck and drove away. At the end of town I stopped at the junction where our north-south highway intersected the big paved road going east over the mountains to Roswell in the Pecos Valley, and west over the mountains to Socorro, on the Rio Grande. I turned left and drove out of town. A little way down the road a sign- similar to ones we'd seen while crossing the missile range farther south-warned that the road was occasionally closed for one-and-one-half hour periods during tests. Ahead, the road dipped down into a wide, desolate, snow-covered basin.