?Who?s with you in your car, Doug??
?My wife. When I get off, we?re going to visit her mother at the hospital.?
?You take your wife on deliveries so you can go to the hospital together??
The delivery man began blinking uncertainly.
?I was just asking,? Tim said. He shut the door and waited. Then he went to the curtain and peeled it from the corner of the window and watched the pizza man turn his car around and drive back onto the highway. He opened the door and squatted down and lifted the two heavily laden cartons of pizza from the concrete. They were warm in his hand and smelled deliciously of sausage and onions and mushrooms and melted cheese. He watched the taillights of the delivery car disappear down the road, then closed the door and replaced the chain. ?What are you guys looking at?? he said to his companions.
?Hey, you?re just being careful. Come on, let?s scarf.?
They ordered beer brought over from the nightclub, and for the next hour, they ate and drank and watched television and rolled joints out of Tim?s stash. Tim even became silently amused at his concern over the pizza man. He yawned and lay back on the bed, a pillow behind his head. Then he noticed again the vinyl handbag one of the women had left behind. It had fallen from the chair and was lodged behind the television stand. ?Which one of the broads was carrying a gray purse?? he said.
?The bony one.?
?Check it out.?
But before the other biker could pick up the handbag, there was another knock on the door. ?We need a turnstile here,? Tim said.
He got up from the bed and went to the window. This time he pulled the curtain all the way back so he could have a clear view of the walkway and door area. He went to the door and opened it on the chain. ?You forgot your purse?? he said.
?I left it here or in the club. It?s not at the club, so it must be here,? the woman said. ?Everything is in it.?
?Hang on.? He shut the door, his hand floating up to release the chain.
?Don?t let her in, man. If women can have a hard-on, this one has got a hard-on. I?ll get her purse,? one of the other bikers said.
Tim slipped the night chain from its slot.
?Tim, wait.?
?What?? Tim said, twisting the doorknob.
?There ain?t a wallet in the purse. Just lipstick and tampons and used Kleenex and hairpins.?
Tim turned around and looked back at his friend, the door seeming to swing open of its own accord. The woman who had knocked was hurrying across the parking lot toward a waiting automobile. In her place stood a man Tim had never seen. The man was wearing a suit and a white shirt without a tie, and his hair was greased and combed straight back, his body trim, his shoes shined. He looked like a man who was trying to hold on to the ways of an earlier generation. His weight was propped up by a walking cane that he held stiffly with his left hand. In his right hand, snugged against his side, was a Thompson machine gun.
?How?d you?? Tim began.
?I get around,? Preacher said.
The spent casings shuddering from the bolt of his weapon clattered off the doorjamb, rained on the concrete, and bounced and rolled into the grass. The staccato explosions from the muzzle were like the zigzags of an electric arc.
Preacher limped toward the waiting car, the downturned silhouette of his weapon leaking smoke. Not one room door opened, nor did one face appear at a window. The motel and the neon-pink tubing wrapped around its eaves and the palm tree etched against the sky by the entrance had taken on the emptiness of a movie set. As Preacher drove away, he stared through the big glass window of the front office. The clerk was gone, and so were any guests who might have been waiting to register. From the highway, he glanced back at the motel again. Its insularity, its seeming abandonment by all its inhabitants, the total absence of any detectable humanity within its confines, made him think of a snowy wind blowing outside a boxcar on a desolate siding, a pot of vegetables starting to burn on an untended fire, although he had no way to account for the association.
18
VIKKI GADDIS GOT off work at the steak house at ten P.M. and walked to the Fiesta motel with a San Antonio newspaper folded under her arm. When she entered the room, Pete was watching television in his skivvies. His T-shirt looked like cheesecloth against the red scar tissue on his back. She popped open the newspaper and dropped it in his lap. ?Those guys were at the restaurant three nights ago,? she said. ?They were bikers. They looked road-fried.?
Pete stared down at the booking-room photographs of three men. They were in their twenties and possessed the rugged good looks of men in their prime. Unlike the subjects of most booking-room photography, none of the men appeared fatigued or under the influence or nonplussed or artificially amused. Two of them had served time in San Quentin, one in Folsom. All three had been arrested for possession with intent to distribute. All three had been suspects in unsolved homicides.
?You talked to them?? Pete asked.
?No, they talked to me. I thought they were just hitting on me. I sang four numbers with the band, and they tried to get me to sit down with them. I told them I had to work, I was a waitress and just sang occasion ally with the band. They thought it was funny that I sang ?Will the Circle Be Unbroken.??
?Why didn?t you tell me??
?Because I thought they were jerks and not worth talking about.?