I turned and saw his face in alternating reddish light and reddish darkness. It was secret and handsome in the half-light, with liquid-glinting eyes and metal-glinting hair. I recognized Haines from his photograph.
He was crouching in the space between the seats with my car blanket over his shoulders. He lifted his hand from under the robe and showed me a heavy revolver. “I’ll use this if I have to. Bear it in mind.”
There was no real menace in his voice, no feeling of any kind. Its emptiness was the alarming thing. It was the voice of the man from space who owed no human allegiance anywhere. Harry Haines, self-conceived out of nothing, a fatherless man with a gun, trying to steal reality for himself.
I could feel his breath on the side of my neck. It made me angrier than a blow would have. “Get out of my car. Go back to one of your women, Harry-Larry. Snuggle up under a skirt, you won’t feel so anxious.”
“Why, damn you,” he said. “I’ll kill you!”
“Mother wouldn’t like it.”
“You keep my mother out of this. You had no right to force your way into her house. She’s a respectable woman-”
“That’s right, she wouldn’t like it if you shot me. Right here in Mountain Grove, the scene of your early triumphs. Local boy makes good, again.”
“I’m doing better than you are, Gunnarson.”
His voice was painfully high. He didn’t take pressure well. I gave him another notch of it. “Sure, as a two-bit gunman you’re doing fine. I have about seven dollars in my wallet. You’re welcome to it if you’re that hungry.”
“Keep your money. You’ll need it for a down payment on a tombstone.”
He was a poor imitation of a storm trooper. But so were most of the originals. I’d read enough criminology to know that the cat burglars, the night walkers, were the really dangerous ones. They killed for unknown reasons at unexpected times. The reality they stole was ultimately death.
Gaines came over the back of the seat in a swift feline movement. He squatted on his knees beside me, thrusting the gun at my side. “Get going, straight ahead.”
“What did you do to my wife?”
“Nothing. Get going, I said.”
“Where is she?”
“Out on the town, for all I know. I never saw your frigging wife.”
“If she’s harmed in any way, you won’t last long. Do you understand that, Gaines? I’ll attend to you personally.”
I was stealing his lines and it made him nervous. He stammered slightly when he said: “S-shut up. G-get going now or I’ll b-blast you.”
He urged the gun into my side, handling it with more bravado than caution. Perhaps I had a fifty-fifty chance of taking him now. I wanted a better chance, something like ninety to ten. I had more to lose than he had. I hoped. I desperately hoped. And I got going.
The road ran northward out of town, straight as a yardstick through dark fields. I pushed the speedometer needle around past seventy, nearly to eighty. Whatever was going to happen, I wanted it over.
“Don’t drive so fast,” he said.
“Does it make you nervous? I thought you liked going fast.”
“S-sure. I used to d-drag-race, here on this very road. B-but right now I want you to slow down to sixty. I don’t want the HP on my tail.”
“Maybe you’d like to do the driving.”
“Oh, certainly, and let you hold the g-gun.”
“Is it such fun holding the gun?”
“Shut up!” he cried in a sudden yapping rage. “Shut up and slow down like I said.”
He pressed the muzzle of the revolver into the soft place below my ribs. I slowed down to sixty. There were lights ahead, an island of bleak color on the darkness, where the road joined the east-west highway.
“You’re g-going to make a left turn here. I don’t want any funny stuff.”
I slowed still more as we approached the intersection, and stopped for the red light. Two cars were being gassed at a bright, bare all-night station. In the adjacent lunchroom, people sat at the counter with their backs to me.
“You heard me, d-didn’t you? No funny stuff. Let me know you heard me.” He thrust the gun into me with all his force. He was no longer interested in self-protection. The light had turned green. He was interested in imposing his will on me. “Let me know you heard me.”
I remained silent.
“Let me know you heard me,” he said urgently.
I sat with my teeth clenched, my hands turning white on the wheel. The moment stretched out like rotten elastic. A pair of headlights plunged up out of the fields of night behind us. The traffic light turned red again.
One of the cars left the gas station and rolled out onto the highway. It passed in front of us going east, gathering speed. I felt invisible. The hot valley wind blew through my bones like the breath of nothingness.
“What are you trying to do?” Gaines said. “Are you trying to make me k-kill you?”
I was trying to gather the animal courage to open the door of my car and get out and walk over to the gas station. The thought of what I had to lose held me paralyzed. The plunging headlights on the road behind were nearer and brighter. In a few more seconds they’d be on me like a spotlight, making a zone of safety that I could walk through.
They filled the car with sudden shadows. Though the traffic signal was still against us, they swerved to pass. I heard the squeal of tires and caught a glimpse of a pale adolescent face at the wheel. A girl clung like a huge blonde limpet to the driver’s body.
He made a grandstand turn in front of me, double-clutched his hot rod, and fled eastward down the highway trailing noise. No use to me, no use to anybody.
I made a left turn on the green.
A late moon had risen over the mountains, blurred large by thin clouds. The highway climbed through foothills toward it, then rose in sweeping arcs into the pass. I could feel the pressure in my ears.
We passed the sign that marked the summit. I caught a glimpse of the curved aluminum sea far ahead and below. A long beam flashed out from its edge, possibly from the lighthouse on Ferguson’s cliff.
“Are we going back to Buenavista?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? But you’re not going back there, now or any time. You can k-kiss the place good-by.”
“To hell with you and your cheap threats.”
“You think I’m cheap, eh? You called me a two-bit g-gunman. Think again. My g-grandfather had a summer place up here, a real showplace. In addition to the spread he had in the valley. I’m not the b-bum you think.”
“How does your grandfather prevent you from being a bum?”
“I have background, see? You’re stupid for a lawyer. My g-grandfather was loaded. He had two houses, b-big ones.”
“Why tell me?” A plague on both his houses.
“I wouldn’t want you to d-die in ignorance. You better slow down. We’ll be coming to the turnoff in a minute.”
It was marked by a boulder which jutted out of the cut-bank. Some crank or prophet had scrawled on the boulder in whitewash: “We die daily.”
I turned into a gravel road worn bare by the rains of many winters. The bank above it was crenelated by erosion. Below in the canyon, moonlight drenched the treetops. An owl hooted softly and mournfully.
I was keenly aware of these things, their strangeness and their beauty. I thought of turning hard left over the edge, holding on and taking my chances, letting the deep trees catch me if they could. I must have given away the thought somehow. Gaines said: “Don’t do it. You’re a d-dead man if you try it. Just keep on driving until we reach the g-gate.”
I did as I was told. My patience was wearing thin, though, and my time was running out. I wished that I could read Gaines’s mind as he had just read mine. Apparently he had cast me for a role in his fantasy. He wanted to hurt me, and he wanted to impress me. Both halves of the double role were dangerous.
Coming out of a long climbing curve, the headlights flashed on gateposts of squared stone. The gates