Over the hill, the first car to pass in twenty days flung itself down the valley with a shriek, a thud, and a wail.
Mr Terle did not dare to look at Mr Smith.
Mr Smith looked up, thinking of Mr Fremley in his room.
Mr Fremley, at the window, looked down and saw the car expire and die in front of the hotel.
For the sound that the car made was curiously final. It had come a very long way on blazing sulphur roads, across salt flats abandoned ten million years ago by the shingling-off of waters. Now, with wire-ravellings like cannibal hair sprung up from seams, with a great eyelid of canvas top thrown back and melted to spearmint gum over rear seat, the auto, a Kissel car, vintage 1924, gave a final shuddering as if to expel its ghost upon the air.
The old woman in the front seat of the car waited patiently, looking in at the three men and the hotel as if to say, Forgive me, my friend is ill; I’ve known him a long while, and now I must see him through his final hour. So she just sat in the car waiting for the faint convulsions to cease and for the great relaxation of all the bones which signifies that the final process is over. She must have sat a full half-minute longer listening to her car, and there was something so peaceful about her that Mr Terle and Mr Smith leaned slowly towards her. At last she looked at them with a grave smile and raised her hand.
Mr Fremley was surprised to see his hand go out the window above, waving back to her.
On the porch, Mr Smith murmured, ‘Strange. It’s not a storm. And I’m not disappointed. How come?’
But Mr Terle was down the path and to the car.
‘We thought you were … that is …’ He trailed off. ‘Terle’s my name, Joe Terle.’
She took his hand and looked at him with absolutely clear and unclouded light-blue eyes like water that has melted from snow a thousand miles off and come a long way, purified by wind and sun.
‘Miss Blanche Hillgood,’ she said, quietly. ‘Graduate of the Grinnell College, unmarried teacher of music, thirty years high-school glee club and student orchestra conductor, Green City, Iowa, twenty years private teacher of piano, harp, and voice, one month retired and living on a pension and now, taking my roots with me, on my way to California.’
‘Miss Hillgood, you don’t look to be going anywhere from here.’
‘I had a feeling about that.’ She watched the two men circle the car, cautiously. She sat like a child on the lap of a rheumatic grandfather, undecided. ‘Is there nothing we can do?’
‘Make a fence of the wheels, dinner-gong of the brake drums, the rest’ll make a fine rock garden.’
Mr Fremley shouted from the sky. ‘Dead? I say, is the car dead? I can feel it from here! Well – it’s way past time for supper!’
Mr Terle put out his hand. ‘Miss Hillgood, that there is Joe Terle’s Desert Hotel, open twenty-six hours a day. Gila monsters and road runners please register before going upstairs. Get you a night’s sleep, free, we’ll knock our Ford off its blocks and drive you to the city come morning.’
She let herself be helped from the car. The machine groaned as if in protest at her going. She shut the door carefully, with a soft click.
‘One friend gone, but the other still with me. Mr Terle, could you please bring her in out of the weather?’
‘Her, ma’am?’
‘Forgive me, I never think of things but what they’re people. The car was a man, I suppose, because it took me places. But a harp, now, don’t you agree, is female?’
She nodded to the rear seat of the car. There, tilted against the sky like an ancient scrolled leather ship-prow cleaving the wind, stood a case which towered above any driver who might sit up in front and sail the desert calms or the city traffics.
‘Mr Smith,’ said Mr Terle, ‘lend a hand.’
They untied the huge case and hoisted it gingerly out between them.
‘What you got there?’ cried Mr Fremley from above.
Mr Smith stumbled. Miss Hillgood gasped. The case shifted in the two men’s arms.
From within the case came a faint musical humming.
Mr Fremley, above, heard. It was all the answer he needed. Mouth open, he watched the lady and the two men and their boxed friend sway and vanish in the cavernous porch below.
‘Watch out!’ said Mr Smith. ‘Some damn fool left his luggage here –’ He stopped. ‘Some damn fool? Me!’
The two men looked at each other. They were not perspiring any more. A wind had come up from somewhere, a gentle wind that fanned their shirt collars and flapped the strewn calendar gently in the dust.