The fifteenth. What was today? His stay at the lodge had stretched interminably in a kind of deadly hiatus, and he had to return to the day of his arrival and repeat in his mind the succession of subsequent days to the present in order to locate himself in time. It was the fourteenth, he discovered. Tomorrow was the day.
He packed his few things, killed a bottle he’d been working on, and went to bed. He slept poorly, disturbed by random imagery, and awoke early. It was exactly seven o’clock when he steered his car off the narrow hill road onto Highway 56.
An hour and a half later he pulled into the wide gravel parking area in front of the junction restaurant. The building was long and low, covered with red shingles, sitting diagonally in its location to face the right angle formed by the meeting of highways. One wing was obviously a dance hall. The Venetian blinds at the windows of this wing were closed, and it had the drab, depleted look that seems to come by day to all places that live by night. The central part of the building and the other wing were the restaurant and the kitchen. In the corner of the window beside the entrance was a large sign with crude black letters that said: Open.
He got out of the car and went inside and climbed onto a stool at a long counter. Behind the counter, a waitress in a starched white uniform filled a thick tumbler with water and set it in front of him. She had hair the color of rust and as dry as hay. The flesh below her eyes was dark and sagging, and her face must have been put on in the dark. She stared wearily over his head, waiting for him to speak.
“Just coffee,” he said.
She filled a cup from a glass pot and set it on the counter, slopping a little of the black brew over into the saucer. Beside it, she put a miniature milk bottle filled with cream. He pushed the cream aside and lifted the cup, twisting on the stool in order to look out through the plate glass window to the gravel parking area in front.
“What time’s the next bus to Kaw City due?” he said.
“Eight-fifty-five. Five minutes now.”
He looked at his watch and verified it. “Thanks,” he said.
He lit a cigarette and sat alternating swallows of black coffee with inhalations of smoke, and suddenly he remembered that this was Etta’s habit, and he wondered with a trace of bitterness that was far too weak to signify incipient rebellion if his unconscious adoption of it was a measure of his seduction. He had just finished the cigarette and the coffee when the bus pulled up beyond the window and stopped with a series of pneumatic gasps.
At first he thought she hadn’t come. The single passenger to alight, a woman, stood for a moment beside the bus and then picked up a cheap yellow suitcase and crossed to the entrance of the restaurant and inside. Her short hair was the color of platinum, in startling contrast with her dark eyes. Her vivid scarlet mouth was like a soft, wet wound. She was wearing a cheap fur coat that hung open from the shoulders to expose a green knit dress that clung to her body as if it were charged with static electricity. She walked with a practiced swaying of hips on spike-heeled green sandals fastened to her ankles by narrow straps. She was crude and vulgar and beautiful. The impression she made was like a physical impact. With dye and paint and the emphasis of natural assets, she frankly elicited a primitive reaction.
Standing by Peter’s stool in a cloud of heavy scent, she said, “That your car outside, Mister?”
“That’s right.”
“Going to Kaw City?”
“Yes.”
“How about giving a girl a lift?”
“What was the matter with the bus?”
She shrugged. “So times are tough. So my ticket ran out. You want a character reference for a lousy lift?” Her voice was coarse, a voice he had never heard before, a product of gin and a million cigarettes. He laughed and dropped a dime on the counter and stood up.
“When I give a girl a lift, I prefer her not to have any character. You ready to go, or do you want coffee?”
“I’m ready.”
They went outside to the car, and he wheeled it onto the highway and across the junction. She laughed softly, stretching her body in the seat beside him, and he thought he could hear in the laughter a kind of restrained exultation, and it occurred to him suddenly that she was feeling an intense sense of release, of freedom, as if her changed appearance were not so much disguise as the abandonment of one, the assumption at last of the overt expression of herself.
“My God,” she said, “I feel awful. How do you like me, Peter?”
“Just asking?”
She laughed again and pressed against him. “Was it bad, darling? The waiting? Was it very bad?”
“It was bad.”
“It won’t go on forever. Remember that.”
“This time will be longer.”
“It can’t be helped. This is the way it has to be done. You know it is.”
“I know. Is our dentist definitely in?”
“He’s in. For ten grand plus.”
“What does the plus mean?”
“He thinks it means me. I’m supposed to contact him after you’ve been disposed of.”
“What happens when you don’t?”
“Nothing happens. He’ll be an accessory to murder, and there won’t be any thing at all that he can do about it.”
“I almost wish he’d try. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like killing someone just for fun.”
“Don’t think crazy, Peter. He’s an arrogant fool. We’ll use him and drop him off with his stinking
