6

The woman reads the green sign through the bugsmeared window of her car. Tuba City.

Chooba City. Where the hell is that?

There’s a coffee-shop up the street with a light blinking. I’ll stop there, I gotta stop somewhere. She’s exhausted, she feels the weariness in her bones, deeper than that, deeper than the marrow even – in her heart, what’s left of it. She parks the car behind the coffee-shop so it can’t be seen from the main drag. The night is dark and hot and dry and she feels like a landslide victim, smothered and blind and struggling for something to breathe.

She goes inside, takes a table away from the window and watches the waitress walk towards her with a pad in her hand. The waitress has this slinky sideways manner of walking, like an old beauty queen, maybe Miss Tuba City 1964, something. The light in this place is bad, low-wattage.

‘Coffee.’

‘Coffee. We got some nice Danish, you interested?’

‘Just coffee. No cream. Please.’

Coffee – black and strong. She knows she needs to move again, get back in the car and drive, because no place is safe. She looks at her watch, but what’s the point? Time don’t matter, time don’t have a significant meaning, only distance, distance is everything.

She opens her purse, sees the sealed envelope with the scribbled note inside. She wonders if her handwriting is readable, if she’s spelled things the right way. She doesn’t have a home address, only the office. If it goes to the office, they’ll forward it. What if they don’t?

The coffee comes. She sips it, taps her fingers on the table, watches the window, sees cars passing down the strip, cars heading out into the hot dark night, cars going everywhere and nowhere. She takes a napkin from the dispenser on her table and crumples it in her hand. Gotta go, keep moving, because you don’t know what’s behind you. Only one thing you know, the men are back there in the dark and they’re coming. Only thing you can be sure of.

The men.

The napkin falls into the coffee and she pulls it out. It’s sodden and brown and she makes a wad of it in her fist. There’s no ashtray so she drops the wet thing on the floor, but now her hand is wet and she has to take another napkin from the dispenser to dry her palm. All this fuss, these napkins all joined together coming out the slot. She can hear the sound of herself falling apart.

She covers her eyes with her fingers. She needs sleep, she needs to put her head down and sleep. How long since she lay on that narrow iron bed in the mildewed motel room with the broken-down swamp-cooler? Her hand is shaky. She wonders if anyone notices, but nobody’s looking at her. They don’t care in a roadside place like this, nobody cares, nobody cares anywhere, no matter where you go it’s the same thing.

She finishes the coffee, gets up, walks into the rest room and washes her face, avoiding the mirror. She doesn’t want to see her reflection: a ruin. The rest room smells of heather or lilac, she can’t tell which. It all comes out of an aerosol can anyway, it’s all chemicals. She goes back into the coffee-shop.

‘There a phone?’ she asks.

The waitress points with a yellow pencil to the far side of the room.

‘Thanks,’ she says.

She goes between tables to the pay phone, closes the door and digs coins out of her purse. This is another thing on top of everything else: running low on funds. She picks up the receiver, something happens inside her head, like an echo, like a ghost whispering in her skull. It’s because she needs sleep, she can’t keep going like this. You get hallucinations. You see stuff ain’t there. You dream except you’re not sleeping.

What she sees are flashes of light in the dark. She pushes the memory away, but it comes back immediately. How the night changed and the temperature tumbled to zero.

Coins in the slot. What’s the number, remember the number: 6035 something, something, something. She punches the buttons and shuts her eyes. Let her answer, let her answer.

It rings and rings. She thinks of an empty house, the phone ringing and nobody to hear.

OK, she tries the other number. It’s the same guy as before that answers.

‘Are you the woman who called yesterday?’ he asks.

‘I’m calling from Chooba City,’ she says, and wonders why she gives out this information. Off-guard, going round in a trance, fear makes you crazy.

‘Listen, I’ll give you the number where –’

She hangs up, a clattering sound. The man – she don’t know who he is, could be anybody. Another trapdoor you fall through. She cries, salt liquid fills the back of her throat and sinuses. She weeps with her face pressed against the phone.

The letter. She opens her purse and she walks to the waitress, handing her the crumpled envelope. ‘Please. Can you mail this for me?’

The waitress says, ‘It ain’t stamped, honey.’

She presses a couple of quarters into the waitress’s hand and hurries out of the coffee-shop. She’s still crying as she rushes to the parking-lot and unlocks the car and gets behind the wheel. There’s a stink of fried-food wrappers.

Drive, just drive, don’t think. Make-believe you’re maybe on vacation, a woman just touring here and there, some carefree divorcee. She turns the key in the ignition. How far away are the men? she wonders. How far?