‘You look fine, Cheryl. You look wonderful.’
We went to the Cossack, on Clement, and had two cocktails in the lounge and then dinner in one of the private booths in the restaurant section: chicken Kiev and sour red cabbage and demitasse cups of bitter Turkish coffee afterward. It was dark and quiet in there. The waiters wore Russian Cossack uniforms replete with scimitars, and hidden speakers gave out with Moussorgsky and Shostakovich and some of the other Russian composers at low volume.
It was fine between us, easy and warm. When I touched her hand with the tips of my fingers once during dinner, she did not stiffen and her eyes reflected in the glow of the candelight a growing trust and a growing need that was exciting and touching and very real.
We talked about many things, impersonal and personal, jumping from this to that as each of us sought to explore the other’s depths, the interests and prejudices and likes and dislikes that each of us had, seeking the common bonds and dwelling on them when we found them. She laughed when I told her about my collection of pulp magazines, and the tenacity with which I had pursued the hobby, but it was not a mocking laugh or a censorious one-as Erika’s had been; it was a pleased, curious laugh, as if she were fascinated by the idea of anyone indulging in that sort of hobby. And then she wanted to know if I thought the idea of a grown woman collecting dolls from foreign lands was silly. No, I didn’t think that was silly at all. Well, she said, she had sixteen dolls in her bedroom, from such countries as Spain and Holland and France and England and Mexico and Germany and Japan, maybe she would show them to me one day if I was interested. Yes, I was interested, and did she want to see some of my pulp magazines?- making a small joke about their being the lure to my apartment instead of etchings. She laughed softly and we went on to something else without any pauses or awkwardness.
We discovered that we both liked hiking in the woods, old movies-Charlie Chan and
We talked and we talked, open and natural, like old friends, like new lovers, and I forgot for a little while about Roy Sands and poor Elaine Kavanaugh and all the ugliness and suspected ugliness that had touched my life in the past week. All at once, then, it was midnight and they were about to close up. We asked each other where the time had gone, the way you do, and I paid the check and then I drove her directly back to 19th Avenue, parking in front of her car a half block from Saxon’s.
We sat there on the darkened street. I said, because it had to be said, ‘Cheryl, will you do me a favor?’
‘Yes, if I can.’
‘Don’t mention that you saw me tonight. To your brother, or to anyone.’
‘Why?’
‘My reasons are complicated and not exactly explainable just now. I’ll tell you about them a little later. Okay?’
‘Well… of course, if it’s what you want.’
‘Thanks, honey.’
She turned her face close to mine at the endearment, and her eyes were pools of deep blackness with the faintest traces of light deep at their centers-and I kissed her. She did not pull away and her lips parted slightly under mine, warm and soft and sweet, and I could feel her shudder with inner emotion as I held her shoulders lightly in my hands. I drew back finally, looking at her, wanting her, needing her, sensing the same feelings inside her own body, but this was not the time, the time was perhaps soon and we both knew that, I think, we both were unable to deny that, but it was not just yet.
‘Thank you,’ she said in a soft, liquid whisper, ‘thank you for a lovely evening.’
‘Are you working Saturday night?’
‘No-the day shift.’
‘Can I see you then? I have to go away again, but I should be back by Saturday.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She touched my hand and we said good night, and then she was out of the car and walking quickly to her own. I sat watching her until she had driven off, until her taillights had vanished around the corner on 19th Avenue, before starting my own car.
The taste and the touch and the scent of her stayed with me all the way back to my apartment.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Roxbury was a small town like a thousand, five thousand other small towns spread across the United States-a little more rustic, perhaps, because of its location, but otherwise predictably conventional. It was situated in the thickly wooden foothills of the Klamath Mountains, east and a little south of Eureka; there was a single street bisecting it into equal halves and extending for three blocks, and that was called Main Street and had everything on it that you would expect to find on Main Street, U.S.A. The village looked quiet and sleepy, and the towering giants of the Redwood Empire, which ringed it majestically, gave it an atmosphere of bucolic tranquillity.
I got in there a few minutes past two on Friday afternoon, and it was cool and cloudy, the countryside lushly green and water-jeweled from a recent rain. I had been on the road for something like six hours, including a brief stop in Ukiah for lunch, and I was tired and cramped as I drove along Main Street. The car had not overheated on the drive, but a rattling sound had developed somewhere, in a location I could not pinpoint. It failed to surprise me much.
At the far edge of town, I found a motel called the Redwood Lodge. It had eight cabins set into a rough horseshoe shape, with number one and number eight at the points of the shoe; they were spaced far apart and partially hidden from one another by redwoods and heavy forest growth. In the near-center of the shoe was a large office-and-residence, of the same design as the cabins and fronted with a jungle of ferns.
I stopped in, and a guy who looked a little like Frank Lovejoy rented me number five for eight dollars a night; I was his first customer all week, he said, things were pretty slow this time of year, big rain and all keeps the people away from the scenic areas. He took me out to the cabin personally; it was two rooms and a shower bath, with beamed ceilings and a false fireplace and mountain-cabin furnishings. I asked the guy how you got to Coachman Road, and he told me and wished me a pleasant stay and left me to my own devices.
I changed into a pair of slacks and a light jacket, and got back into the car and continued east and found Coachman Road without difficulty. It was a narrow, humped lane winding upward through heavy copse of redwood and pine, paralleling a small stream swollen by the winter rains. I went about a mile, and a post mailbox appeared to the left; you could just make out the numerals 2619 on the side of it. Beyond the box, an open gate gave on a sideless wooden platform spanning the creek. On the opposite bank a clearing had been cut in the trees and there was a white frame house on it, and a small barn, and a bare front yard containing a Dodge pickup half as old as I was and the bones of a couple of mid-Depression Fords. The hood on the pickup was raised, and a big guy dressed in blue coveralls had his head inside the engine compartment. He pulled it out when the loose boards of the platform protested the weight of my car, and watched me drive up and park on one side of where he was.
I got out and went over to the Dodge. There was an old, battered toolbox open on the ground by the front fender, and beside it, on a piece of grease-marked canvas, were the components of a two-barrel carburetor. The cool, crisp air smelled of conifers and damp vegetation and oil and machinery corrosion.
The guy was about forty, and he had a face like a rubber mask-or a dead man. The lips were thick and bluish- red, the skin had the look and consistency of dried tallow, the eyes were black pouched pits filled with vacuousness. He had thick, muscle-bunched shoulders and hands like the jaws of a scoop shovel. He was watching me curiously, neither friendly nor unfriendly, those empty, bottomless eyes as immobile as a snake’s.
I put a smile on for him. ‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Howdy,’ ponderously, atonally.
‘Is this the Emery place?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you Mr. Emery? Daniel Emery?’
