It was early afternoon when Kyle pulled onto the Hollywood Freeway at Western Avenue and headed southeast across the four-level interchange. The traffic was moderate where in a couple of hours it would be bumper-to-bumper with homeward bound commuters. He turned east on the San Bernardino Freeway. Ironically, the sun chose that moment to break through the overcast and shine down benevolently to mock his mood.
Once they had made it past San Bernardino Kyle floored the accelerator and the Jeep flew over the long straight stretches of Interstate 15 through the California desert, barely slowing down as he bypassed Victorville and Barstow. He had no fear of being stopped by the California Highway Patrol. A speeding ticket would be a minor irritation compared to his larger troubles.
He kept the windows all the way down and his eyes straight ahead. He tuned the radio to whatever heavy rock station was receivable and cranked the volume to the max to blast unwelcome images out of his head.
At Baker he pulled into a Chevron station for gas and to use the rest room. He bought a billed cap with a Marlboro logo to cover the ugly hole in the back of Marianne’s head. She took the cap without comment and put it on.
His stomach growled, reminding him that he had not eaten since breakfast, and that had been a quick cup of instant coffee and a muffin before he left for the beach. It was now after six and he was hungry. He spoke his first words to Marianne since they left the gun shop in Hollywood.
“You hungry?”
She pulled the Marlboro hat down low and looked at him with flat, dead eyes. “I don’t eat.”
His own appetite faded. Still, he went into a convenience store next to the gas station and bought a bag of tortilla chips and a Hershey bar.
At the Nevada border night lay ahead of them in the east while the horizon behind still glowed with the sunset. Kyle polished off the last of the chips and the chocolate and tossed the wrappers out the window to pollute the desert. He wished he had thought to buy a Coke too.
Marianne sat like a wax figure in the seat next to him. A wax figure seriously in need of restoration. From time to time he glanced over at her, only to look quickly away when the headlights of an oncoming car illuminated her face under the bill of the cap.
Las Vegas flowed past on both sides of the highway, an island of glitter in the black desert sea. Kyle remembered the happier trips he had made to the gambling city. Once with his parents, half-a-dozen times with friends. He recalled the lacquered look of the women, the watchful eyes of the pit bosses. It all seemed like another life. This time the city was a meaningless cluster of neon that he put behind him as swiftly as possible.
The desert at night is a cold and lonely place. Seen from a speeding car it is a vast blackness relieved only by the lights of scattered dwellings. Part of Kyle’s mind wondered how people could live like that, isolated beyond any reasonable limit. Another part of his mind reminded him that at this moment he would gladly change places with any of those unseen lonely people.
He stopped outside of Cedar City to refill the tank and use the bathroom. He found an Automatic Teller Machine where his MasterCard would work and withdrew two hundred dollars. He let Marianne wait in the Jeep while he bolted a Cheese Whopper in Burger King and washed it down with two cups of black coffee.
Back on the road and into the desert night. Mile after mile of pavement hummed under the Jeep’s nubby tires. The minutes and hours clicked inexorably away on the digital dashboard clock. The only stations he could get on the radio were a country western yowler and an unctuous Christian couple telling him where to mail his offering. He regretted not grabbing a handful of tapes before he left, but at the time all he wanted to do was get moving.
At some point before dawn he began to hallucinate. Ghostly forms flitted across the highway in front of him. Once he hit the brakes hard enough to send Marianne’s head banging into the dash panel. She looked at him without expression and said nothing.
Finally he had to fight to keep his eyes open. His shoulders and arms ached from driving, his fingers cramped into claws around the steering wheel. The second time the Jeep drifted to the shoulder of the road at 80 mph, he knew he’d had it for this night.
“I’ve got to get some sleep,” he muttered through cracked lips.
“Go ahead,” she told him. “I’ll wake you when it’s time to go.”
He found a dusty two-lane road that led off into the desert. At a wide spot he turned off, killed the lights and the engine, closed his eyes and tried to will himself to sleep. No good. Now his eyes would not stay closed. The morning sun stabbed into the Jeep, and without the rush of air through the windows, the smell of Marianne made him gag. He would have to find a bed. With every muscle aching, every nerve protesting, he fired the engine and drove back onto the highway.
Passing up a TravelLodge and a Holiday Inn, he pulled into a dusty clump of cabins called the Desert Flower Motor Hotel. He asked for a room with two beds, registered as Mr. and Mrs. George Romero, and took Marianne inside. He pulled the blinds, turned the air conditioner up full, stripped to his skivvies, and fell into the bed nearest the blower. Marianne sat in a chair throughout the rest of the morning, staring at something only she could see.
Kyle awoke with a jolt and a moment’s terror of Where the hell am I? Too soon he remembered. Marianne sat where he had last seen her, watching him. The atmosphere was foul despite the air conditioner. He groped his wristwatch from the night stand, read 10:05, and piled out of bed.
He washed quickly, no time for a shower or shave. In a truck stop café he wolfed a plate of scrambled eggs, sausage, and home fries, drinking as much black coffee as he could swallow. Marianne, as always, sat silently waiting in the Jeep.
He filled the tank and dug back onto the highway. They sailed past a town called Spanish Forks. A radio time signal told him they were now in the mountain time zone. With his watch adjusted it was 11 a.m. Tuesday. Chicago was still far away.
By noon they reached Salt Lake City. Kyle did not linger. Throughout the state of Utah he had imagined the clean-living Mormons staring at the California Jeep with the unshaven young man and the decomposing girl and shaking their heads in righteous disapproval.
Under other circumstances he would have enjoyed immensely the spectacular vistas of Wyoming. But on this cheerless journey the majestic mountains, the surging rivers, the unspoiled forests were nothing more than generic scenery to put behind him.
He made it through Cheyenne and across the flat expanse of Nebraska to North Platte before exhaustion forced him into another anonymous motel. He remembered to set his watch for the central time zone. It was 2:50 a.m., Wednesday, when he fell dirty and exhausted into bed.
He had barely closed his eyes when he was awakened by something moving next to him. He jerked erect and back against the headboard in horror when he realized it was the moldering body of Marianne snuggling close to him.
“Jesus, what are you doing?”
She turned her face to him, made more ghastly by the light of a flickering blue neon sign outside the window.
“I can still do it, you know.”
His stomach lurched. “Oh, God, Marianne …”
She grasped his limp member. He pulled violently away.
“But apparently you can’t.”
“Hell no, I can’t.” He rolled out onto the floor and stumbled to the other bed. “What do you expect?”
“You’re not much fun, you know that?”
“Fun? Fun?! Are you crazy?”
“No, lover, I’m dead. Remember?”
“Leave me alone, can’t you? I’ve got to sleep.”
Several times before daylight he awoke shouting and brushing frantically at his body. Marianne sat now in a chair across the room.
At 10 a.m. they were underway again. Kyle tanked up on black coffee and bought a bottle of caffeine pills in a drug store. He vowed not to sleep again until they reached Chicago.
They bypassed Omaha and crossed the Missouri River into Iowa at five in the afternoon. The water towers and not much else of the small towns were visible from the interstate. Kyle stopped only when absolutely necessary for fuel or bathroom purposes, or for a quick sandwich and more black coffee.
They skirted Des Moines to the north and Davenport to the south and rolled on across the Mississippi River. Kyle’s eyelids were crusted, his nerves jangling from coffee and pills, but with his goal just over three hours away, nothing short of a brick wall was going to stop him.
When they entered Illinois at Moline, Kyle felt they were almost there, even though the entire state lay between him and Chicago. He drove with a crazed intensity through Joliet, a name he associated with prison. It was not an image he wanted to hold right now.
He turned north on 57 and angled toward Lake Michigan through the suburbs of Oak Forest, Markham, Harvey, Riverdale, and Blue Island. At the first motel sign visible from the expressway he pulled it off. In the office he rented a room, not bothering to use an alias, and bought a map of Chicago. He took the map to the room, spread it out on the bed, and fell asleep squinting at the small print of the street names.
The cleaning woman awakened him at noon to tell him it was checkout time. He looked wildly around for Marianne, saw the bathroom door closed, and told the woman he would be out in five minutes.
While Marianne stood silently watching, he returned his attention to the map of Chicago. After some hunting, he found Judson Street. It ran in broken sections like a chopped-up snake across the south side of the city. He deposited Marianne in the Jeep and took the map with him when he went into the office to return the key. A fat Arabic looking man with a sooty moustache was working the desk.
Kyle pointed out on the map the section of Judson Street that would include the address Marianne had written down. “Can you tell me how to get there from here?”
The man peered at the map, then up at Kyle. His irises were so dark his eyes seemed to have no pupils. “You sure you want to go there?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
The clerk shrugged, ridding himself of any responsibility for this young man’s actions. He took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and traced a route up the Dan Ryan Expressway past the University of Chicago and off before 35th Street and Comiskey Park. He inked a heavy “X” in a crosshatch of streets where one broken section of Judson lay. Kyle folded up the map and left.
He drove slowly with the map spread out on his lap, following the route marked by the desk clerk. Beside him Marianne sat leaning forward, her sunken eyes scanning the Expressway as though she might spy Lloyd Gerstner walking along the shoulder. When Kyle steered the Jeep down into the neighborhood “X”ed on the map it was like driving into a garbage dump.
There were as many graffiti-scarred, boarded-up store fronts as there were shops open for business. Bottles, rags, scum, and bums littered the street. The Jeep with its California plates and weird occupants drew hard, hostile stares from the dark-skinned people who drifted aimlessly along the sidewalks or stood in clusters at the corners of the mean streets.
The segment of Judson Street that lay here was meaner than most. The fading light of late afternoon did not make it lovelier. Stripped and gutted cars lined the curb. The fronts of the old buildings were blackened with layers of grime, the windows opaque. The address Marianne had for Lloyd Gerstner was a sooty five-story brick that might, in the forgotten past, have been a townhouse. A faded cardboard sign in a downstairs window read: ROOMS FOR RENT.
“There it is,” Kyle said.
“I know,” said Marianne in the terrible rasp that her voice had become.
“Are you going in?”
“That’s what I came for.”
“Do you want me to wait for you?” Please, please say no.
“No. I won’t need you for this.”
Kyle drew a great sigh of blessed relief that he tried to hide. He reached across to open the door on her side, being careful not to come in contact with the pulpy flesh.
Bony fingers clutched his arm and squeezed with inhuman strength.
“But don’t try to run away from me, lover. You know I’ll find you. I’ll always find you.”
The words were a knife in his heart, all the more painful because he knew they were true. He ground the Jeep into gear and drove off without looking back. He turned several corners aimlessly, finally parking across from a black-painted window with a flickering green neon tube in the shape of a lizard. The lettering read: Salamander Lounge.
Kyle got out of the Jeep and exchanged icy stares with two husky black men who leaned against the wall next to the Salamander.
Go ahead, jump me. Nobody can do more to me than I’ve done to myself.
The silent men watched him with hooded eyes, but made no move to impede him.
The interior of the Salamander Lounge smelled like a toilet. So accustomed was Kyle to the odor of rot, that he barely noticed. The lighting was dim to the point of gloom. The patrons were indistinguishable from the derelicts who shuffled along the street outside. Grimy hands, unshaven faces, ragged clothes, and narrow, nervous eyes. None of them paid much attention, and Kyle realized with a jolt that after his marathon drive across the country he looked like one of them.
“Beer,” he told the bartender, a black man with the upper torso of a pro lineman.
“What kind?”
“Whatever you got.”
“Two dollars.” He waited until Kyle had fished out the change and laid it on the bar before heading for the cooler. He brought back a can of Old Milwaukee. “You need a glass?”
Kyle shook his head. He popped the can and tilted it to his lips. The beer was cold and good and went down with a bite. He set the can down and belched.
“Excuse me,” he said, purely by reflex. Nobody paid any attention.
A movement reflected in the streaky mirror behind the bar caught his eye. He turned. In the doorway stood the frail Gypsy boy from the carnival.
“Hey!” he called.
The boy wheeled and disappeared.
Leaving his beer unfinished, Kyle pushed away from the bar and ran to the doorway. He reached the sidewalk in time to see the boy dart into an alley several doors away. With no time to cross the street and get the Jeep turned around, Kyle pounded after him.
The alley was an obstacle course of trash cans, cartons, broken packing crates, makeshift bedrolls. A rat scuttled from a clutter of cans as Kyle crashed through them. The Gypsy boy, fleet as a deer, vanished down the next street. Breathing hard, Kyle reached the far end of the alley. He ran down the sidewalk in the direction the boy had gone, but slowed as he saw the many dark doorways and air shafts, with another alley ahead.
He jogged to a stop. What the hell was he chasing the kid for, anyway? Just a crazy impulse. He fucking sure didn’t need more grief from the Gypsy. With hands jammed in his pockets he plodded back in the direction from which he had come.