Panic!

“I don’t believe you. You won’t quit your job, your precious job. Being Humber Realty’s star salesman has always been your one shining ambition.”

“I’ve already quit it,” I say slyly. “I quit it at four this afternoon. Call Ed Humber if you want confirmation. Go ahead, call him.”

She frowns again, and there is a faint touch of incredulity to the set of her mouth. Good! I’m getting through to her now, I’m getting to the core of her.

“I’ll put the police on you if you do a silly thing like going away,” she says coldly. “I’ll have you brought back and thrown in jail.”

“You think the police care about nonpayment of alimony? You think they’ll make much of an effort to find me?”

“I won’t let you deprive me of what’s rightfully mine, Jack.”

“No? How you going to stop me?”

“I’ll stop you.”

“No,” I say, “no, you won’t, Phyllis,” and I feel exultant. I’ve won! I’ve finally won! There are fissures in the ice shell now, I’ve penetrated, ’I’ve done what I came to do. I move forward, and a kind of loose, liquid laughter finds its way out of my throat, a strident, ecstatic mirth. Her face contorts, mottles, I’ve put it into you and broken it off, Phyllis, you bitch, and I reach out to put my hand on the doorknob.

She slaps me.

She brings her right hand around, palm open, and cracks it across my face with the stinging force of a whip. The sound reverberates through the house, bouncing off walls, coming back like a boomerang to pierce the soft buzzing in my ears. I jerk up convulsively, staring at her, at the cold fiat mask of her face, the hatred in her eyes.

And she stops me again.

I shake my head, and the momentary confusion within gives way to a rebirth of the burning rage which has sustained me all that day. I feel myself shaking, my hands curling into fists, and I open my mouth to tell her not to do it another time, but the words are stillborn in my throat because she slaps me again, and again and again, her hand whipping back and forth across my face like an arcing metronome. The fires consume all reason that the alcohol has not and I know what I’m going to do but I can’t stop it, I bring my right fist up and I watch myself do so as if I have somehow shed the husk of my body, watch the fist come up as if in slow motion and join her face between the aristocratic tilt of her nose and the soft curve of her mouth, watch the lip split, the nose expand, watch blood spurt out to cover my hand, and then she is falling backward, crumpling against the wall by the door, her hands rushing up to cover her red-white face.

I stand frozen with shock, looking numbly at my right fist, and then the silent world in which all of this has happened no longer exists, the sound track comes on at full volume. I can hear Phyllis screaming between her hands, hear her flinging words at me which are not hysterical but merely a brief flare of the hidden emotions which rule her: “You won’t deprive me of what I’m entitled to, you won’t run out on me. I’ll have a warrant sworn out against you for assault, I’ll say that you came in here and beat me and threatened to kill me, the police care about that, Jack, they’ll bring you back and put you in jail and you’ll work in there to pay my alimony!”

She draws her bloodied hands away.

And she is half-smiling redly with her broken mouth.

I reach for the door, blindly, get it open, stagger onto the porch outside. I look wildly around me. Inside, Phyllis is still screaming. Lights begin to go on, one by one, in the neighboring houses, and the black night is consumed by sound. I don’t know what to do, I’m scared, I’m going to be sick, and somebody shouts, moving across a lawn toward me, and then I know what I have to do, I know what I have to do to survive.

Run, Lennox.

Run.

Run.

RUN!

Running...

Running...

Someone was shaking him, calling the name Delaney.

Lennox came out of the dream as he always did: spasmodically, his eyes snapping open but seeing nothing, his body slick with sweat. He sat up, put his palms flat on the wet, rumpled blanket of the cot, pure terror swiveling his head from side to side. He poised to bolt—and then his brain cleared, reoriented itself, and he blinked up at the lean form of Perrins standing over him in the bright early-morning sunlight.

“Christ,” Perrins said, “that must have been some nightmare.”

Lennox fell back on the cot and threw an arm over his eyes. He couldn’t seem to regulate his breathing. “Was I making much noise?” he asked.

“Hell yes.”

“Did I say anything?”

“Not that I could make out. Why?”

“I talk in my sleep sometimes, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, it’s after seven,” Perrins said. “I open this place at eight. Go wash up, and I’ll get you some breakfast. We’ve got plenty of work today.”

“All right.”

Perrins went out, and Lennox lay there with his arm over his eyes for a time, still trying to breathe normally. Oddly, there was the hangover aftertaste of alcohol in his mouth, even though he had not had a drink in several days, and his arms and the back of his neck ached stingingly with sunburn. Perrins had had him up on the roof late yesterday, repainting the weathered sign, and the desert sun, even fading into twilight, had been merciless.

He sat up again, finally, and dry-washed his face with his hands; he had shaved last night, before stretching out on the cot, but he had not done much of a job of it and he could feel the stubble on his chin already. He could smell himself, too, a sour, unhygienic odor that seemed to fold upward from his crotch; he wished vaguely that he had taken some kind of bath. But it had been more than a week now, and what the hell was another day? Like a lot of other once-important, once-carefully-attended-to small details, it no longer mattered very much.

Lennox got somewhat unsteadily to his feet and pulled on his pants and stepped into his shoes. Then he picked up his overnight bag, went through the dining room—Perrins had his back to him, working over the grill, the smell of frying bacon thick in there—and stepped out into the dusty parking area.

The sun, in spite of the early hour, hung low and bright on the eastern horizon. The air was already hot, and as Lennox walked slowly across to the rest rooms, his head began to throb, gently, steadily. He hoped Perrins did not have any more work to be done outside; there were people who were prone to sunstroke, and he had always been one of them, an indoor type, one of the night people, no aptitudes and no inclinations for nature or the elements.

He washed his face and hands in the john, and used a dampened paper towel to sponge over his groin, dispelling some of the sour odor, knowing it would return again long before the day was out. He put on the only white shirt he had—frayed, slightly soiled, with a urine-colored bleach stain on one of the tails—and ran a comb through his tangled hair carelessly. Then he went back inside.

Perrins had a plate of bacon and eggs, a glass of orange juice on the counter. Lennox ate silently, slowly, head bowed over his plate, not looking up. When he finished eating, Perrins came down from where he had been stocking the ice cooler. “All set, Delaney?”

“I guess I am,” Lennox answered.

“First thing, I want you down in the storage basement. It’s a mess down there, and I just haven’t had the time to straighten it out myself.”

They went into the storeroom, and behind several cartons of snack foods at the far end was an old-fashioned trap door with a ring-pull set through an iron eyebolt; Lennox had not noticed it before. Perrins dragged the door up and descended a set of stairs into a darkly musty vault that was only slightly cooler than the rooms upstairs.