“Exactly why,” she said, “did you come on this trip?”
“I had seven hundred and fifty bucks, plus tax, and some time to waste. Why does anybody come on it?”
“Most people want to see the country. Do you?”
“Well, not right here, maybe. But I’m looking forward to some of the sights later on.”
“What sights, Mr. Wayne?”
He wasn’t prepared for a cross-examination like this. He had assumed that people would let him alone and not ask pointed questions. He had maps and a lot of information about Cheyenne and Salt Lake City and Reno and San Francisco and L. A., but he didn’t want to show any special interest in those places. “I’m looking forward,” he said, “to seeing Yosemite National Park.”
“Wonderful! And what especially are you looking forward to seeing in Yosemite?”
Yosemite . . . Yosemite . . . what the devil was at Yosemite? He took a stab at it, and said, “I expect Old Faithful will be interesting.”
She smiled sweetly at him. “It certainly will be, if it has managed to move there from Yellowstone National Park.”
Nice work, Wayne. You just flunked first-year geography. “This is bad,” he said. “You’d better keep me after school.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m rude, asking all these questions,” she said earnestly, “but I have a job to do. My job is to run the trip smoothly and make sure everybody enjoys it. One person who doesn’t like the trip can throw everything out of gear. So I worry when you sit alone with that grim look on your face. And you’re so different from everybody else in the party that I don’t quite know how to handle the problem.”
“What makes me so different?”
“For one thing, you don’t happen to be middle-aged.”
He looked around the bus. He had never realized before that it was a middle-aged crowd. There was just one young person in the bunch: a thin-faced girl of about twenty who wore glasses and a resigned look and was traveling with her mother. “Don’t let appearances fool you,” he said. “Some days I feel eighty.”
“What a ridiculous statement!” she cried. “You were just thirty years old last November and—”
His right hand moved before he could think. It grabbed her wrist, fingers biting into her flesh. He glared into her shocked eyes and said, “How did you find that out? What’s your angle?”
“Let my wrist go, please.”
His fingers unclenched slowly. He had been out of the country for almost ten years. He had come back to a land where nearly everybody was a stranger except five guys who wanted to kill him. So it was quite a jolt to find somebody had collected a fact or two about his background. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I’d still like to know what your game is.”
“All right,” she said. “My game is football. It used to be yours, too. And your coach was Rocky Clark.”
“Clark . . . that’s your name, isn’t it? Where do you fit in?”
“Don’t you remember?”
He tried to look back into his memory. There were a few old snapshots tucked away in it. Gothic spires in the haze of Indian summer . . . the River Field on weekdays with footballs tumbling in the sky . . . the roaring stands on Saturdays . . . Rocky Clark’s red face in the locker room at the half, when they had been taking a pounding. No snapshot of Holly Clark, though. “I can’t get it,” he said.
She sighed. “I shouldn’t have made that slip about your birthday. I was hoping you’d remember me all by yourself. I had it planned. You were going to look at me and say in the most delighted tone, ‘Why, you were that pretty little kid of Rocky Clark’s who used to tag around after me all the time.’ ”
He studied her face. If you gave her bangs and a Dutch bob, and plumped out her face and body, and put bands on her teeth and—“Oh, sure,” he said. “You were only what, twelve or thirteen? And what do you mean, pretty little kid? You were a fat lump.”
“That’s a fine reward. You were my hero and I was just a fat lump to you. I used to cheer everything you did on the field.”
“Your father didn’t teach you much football, then. You should have booed.”
“You were very good,” she said indignantly. “After all, you were only a sophomore that last fall. You enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, didn’t you? I don’t suppose you ever knew that I put up a service flag in your honor in my room. You were going to come back covered with medals and I was going to marry you.”
He wished he knew how to turn this off. He didn’t want to play Old Home Week with her or anyone. The less people knew about him, the better. “Kids get funny ideas,” he said.
“Well, anyway, you see why I’ve been acting so interested in you. Bill, why did it upset you so much when I mentioned your birthday?”
When he was packing for the trip he should have included a spare head; the one he was using now didn’t seem to be much good. Quick, Wayne, what’s a good reason to explain why you’re acting like a hunted man? Ah! Nervous breakdown. That would explain why he was taking this trip, too.
He said, “I had sort of a nervous breakdown. That’s why I’m jumpy. The doctor told me to take a quiet trip somewhere. I don’t like boats so I picked a bus trip.”
“Oh, I’m sorry! I suppose you’d been working too hard.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“You’re not married, of course, or you wouldn’t be taking a trip like this alone. Where do you live now, Bill? And what do you do?”
He had to cut this off, but fast. He wasn’t ready with the answers to her quiz program. “What I mainly do,” he said, “is mind my own business. It’s a nice field to be in. Not many people know how to do it.”
It was like kicking her in the teeth. She swallowed a couple of times, and then said brightly, “I asked for that, didn’t I? I’m a big girl now and ought to stop tagging around after you.” She got up and left.
Two
A HIGHWAY sign flicked some words at him: Cheyenne 176 miles. The miles were peeling off the signs fast. It gave him the same tight hot feeling in his stomach that you got trying to keep a crippled plane in the air and watching your last thousand feet melt off the altimeter. Except that in this case he wasn’t coming closer and closer to a crash. He was coming closer and closer to Russ Nordhoff in Cheyenne.
He hoped Russ would talk. He hoped the guy would open up and give him the whole story and be able to prove that somebody else had done the shooting. Otherwise he had better put a slug in Russ. He thought about that and felt sweat begin crawling over his body. He had never killed anyone. It was one thing to practice quick draws in front of a mirror but it might be very different to look at big dumb Russ along the barrel of a loaded .45 and squeeze the trigger. He wished he knew whether he could do it.
Thinking about Russ was getting him wound up too tight and he stared out of the bus window and tried to make his mind go blank. The flat Nebraska land was shimmering in the heat. Houses and barns lost their outlines and changed shape. The blades of a gaunt windmill blurred and began looking like the prop of an airplane. Of an old beat-up C-47 that he had flown in China before the Reds came. It was a good plane, though. He had flown it a lot of missions over the Himalayas—the Hump—during the war. Then after the war he and five other guys from his outfit bought it as surplus and had started a little airline in China. They were going to make a million bucks . . .
This was certainly a swell way to blank out his mind.