Carver studied the counter waitress while she drew a refill of coffee from a tall stainless-steel urn. She was older than he’d expected, in her mid-thirties. Slender yet somehow sturdy. He suspected she was built with deceptive lushness beneath her ill-fitting white waitress uniform, the sort of peasant-stock voluptuousness that used to play hell with princes. Her hair was thick, pinned up and back, and would probably fall to shoulder length when she let it down. She turned to set the cups on the counter and Carver got the full impact of her broad-featured face. Her eyes were brown and set far apart, beneath unplucked brows that almost met above a broad, perfectly aligned nose. She had vaguely Slavic, prominent cheekbones, and her wide lips were full, slightly inverted to reveal even, very white teeth. She was feminine, not close to beautiful, but there was a coarse sensuality about her. The air around her seemed to hum with vibrations aimed at the male libido.
She turned in the other direction then, and Carver saw the wide, ugly scar that disfigured the right side of her face. Raised and red, it ran from her misshapen ear, down her cheek, and curved beneath her jaw.
Her eyes met Carver’s, didn’t look away. A direct stare, almost daring him to react to the scar. She was probably a woman direct in everything, one who had come to accept her disfigurement and alternate futures not lived.
“Yes, sir?” Emma said. She was standing alongside Carver’s table.
She waited while he glanced over the menu, then she licked a pencil point and jotted in her note pad as he ordered the Gator Special and coffee. He could swear she gave him a crocodile smile.
As Emma walked away, a man came out of the rest room and strode toward the counter, absently checking to make sure his fly was zipped. “Leavin’, Sam?” Emma asked.
“Not yet, sexy,” the man said. He sat down on a stool close to the far end of the counter. Without being asked, Verna poured a cup of coffee with cream and carried it down to him. Sam Cahill. Had to be.
He didn’t look much like Carver had imagined. He was tall and rangy, in his mid-forties but still lean, in good shape. A cigarette-ad cowboy in jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Not the sort who’d sell Sun South units. Did he have an act for each set of customers? Was he the polished smooth-talker for wealthy Sun South buyers, then rough-hewn and one of the boys for the swamptown property he was selling now?
Verna stayed near the end of the counter, leaning on it, and they talked. Carver couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they didn’t seem particularly intimate. There were no lingering looks, no magnetic gestures that prompted and prolonged contact. But Carver noticed that she did keep left and front face toward Cahill, concealing the scar.
After about five minutes, Verna wiped down the counter around Cahill’s coffee cup and walked away, finding things to keep her busy behind the counter. Things she’d just as soon be doing as talking to Cahill. Whatever fire there had been between them, if indeed there had been one, seemed to have burned itself out.
Even before Emma brought Carver’s Gator Special, Cahill got up and strolled out of the restaurant. A still-busy Verna saw him leaving, from the corner of her eye, and waved, managing to keep her scar toward the wall. He nodded an easy good-bye to her, his western boots thunking out a slow rhythm on the floor.
It would have attracted attention to walk out of the restaurant after Cahill without having eaten breakfast. Carver stayed where he was; he knew what Cahill looked like now and could find him easily enough. He wondered about the woman who might have been Cahill’s lover.
Carver ate his eggs, bacon, and toast, drank his orange juice and coffee. It was the kind of salty, greasy breakfast he liked more than was good for him. If he hung around Solarville, he’d return to The Flame for the food if nothing else.
Verna doubled as the cashier. Carver stood up from the table and picked up his check, which somehow had gotten wet at one corner in the way of restaurant checks, and limped over to where the register sat on the counter. The restaurant floor was waxed linoleum, tricky to walk on with the cane.
When she sensed him standing there, Verna turned from the grill she was scraping with an oversized iron spatula and wiped her hands on a towel. She looked at the check. Close to him now on the other side of the counter, she gave off a soapy but vaguely musky scent that cut through the restaurant’s smells of fried grease and perked coffee, like a perspiring athlete not long after her shower.
“Can I still get an airboat ride outside of town?” Carver asked.
“Not anymore,” she said. “Three seventy-six with tax.”
“I rode an airboat here about a year ago,” Carver went on. “I remember you from then.”
She raised her head and gave him a neutral, distant look. “My dad used to take tourists out on those rides. He’s dead now.”
“I’m sorry,” Carver said, and laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. “An accident?”
“Heart attack.” The neutral expression remained.
“Hearts cause a lot of grief. Sometimes I think it would be better if people had been designed without them.”
Verna said nothing as she counted out his change. Then she told him, “Thanks, come again” in the voice of an automaton, and she laboriously resumed scraping the grill. Her efforts made a sound he could feel in the edges of his teeth.
Carver left a tip for Emma and went outside to his car.
He’d driven halfway back to the motel, along the tree-lined narrow road, when the Olds’s front end dipped and it tried to veer to the right, down an embankment and into the swamp.
Carver yanked the steering wheel left and the car crossed the road and almost plunged down the other embankment. It had developed a yen for an accident. It bounced, skidded, fishtailed, a vehicle with a mind of its own, bent on suicide.
He wrestled the slick steering wheel, feeling it slip in his sweaty grasp.
Finally he braked the big car to a stop, half off the right shoulder of the road, and switched off the ignition.
After sitting still for a few minutes, calming down, he got out and stared at the flat right front tire. There was no clue as to what had made it suddenly lose air. He probed the misshapen tire with the tip of his cane, as if checking for signs of life. The faint scent of heated rubber wafted up to him.
Though it was still late morning, the sun and dampness were of the intensity that sapped the energy from a man changing a tire on a dusty road. Or from one thinking about changing a tire. Carver already felt half melted and unenthusiastic. But there was very little traffic on the road, so the odds of being able to flag down a car, so he could ask the driver to send back a mechanic to change the tire, were long.
The clouds of insects that had invaded the motel were there, too. Carver brushed away one of the insistent little bugs as it buzzed around his mouth and tried to flit up a nostril. Then he sighed and walked around to open the trunk and see if the spare still held air; he hadn’t checked it in months.
He was about to insert the key in the trunk lock when a car rounded the bend, slowed, and pulled onto the shoulder a hundred feet beyond the Olds. It was a plain white Ford Escort, the kind used frequently for rental cars in the area. When it stopped, its cloud of dust caught up with it, and the driver waited until the haze settled before opening the door.
A young Latino got out of the Escort. He was wearing a red short-sleeved shirt and dark blue, grease-stained pants. Maybe he was a mechanic. He gave a movie- bandito smile beneath a drooping, ragged mustache as he approached Carver. His teeth were bad. His dusty feet were clad in leather sandals that flopped wildly as he walked, yet he moved very gracefully.