At nine-fifteen Jerrold came hurrying alone across the beach. When he passed in front of us, he had nothing to say, did not even look in our direction. He got into the Caddy and wheeled it around and took it away, not driving as fast or as recklessly as he had yesterday.
Harry let out a long, heavy breath. “Man,” he said.
I had nothing to say.
The hands on my watch crept forward sluggishly. Nine twenty-five. Nine-thirty. Nine thirty-five. Cody came down from his cabin and spread out a towel on the beach and then lay down there in the sun. I liked him better lying out where he could be seen, especially now that Jerrold was gone and Mrs. Jerrold was alone in Cabin Six.
Nine-forty.
And nine forty-five.
I don't want to go, I thought, I don't want to make that goddamn call.
“I'd better get into The Pines,” I said.
“By noon, huh, buddy? Just be back by noon.”
“Sure. Hang in there.”
Just hang in there.
And I left him on the porch and got into my car and drove onto the country road, and the throbbing sound of the engine was like a litany in my ears: malignant, benign, malignant, benign, malignant malignant malignant…
Fifteen
There was a big Concord-type stagecoach and a team of horses drawn up in front of The Pines General Store, and a couple of hundred kids and adults crowding the sidewalks and spilling out into the street around it. All of them were clapping their hands in time to the raucous music created by a pair of fiddlers up on the second-story veranda, and watching another guy and a girl in Western garb perform a high-stepping dance routine on top of the coach. A banner draped over the veranda railing said: Hangtown Stage Depot Historic Tours of the Gold Country • Passengers Board Here.
Traffic was backed up on both sides of the coach, because there was barely enough room for two cars to squeeze past it and each other, and because everybody was rubbernecking. You could not park anywhere in that block; and all the other slots looked to be filled. I turned off onto one of the side streets and hunted around for five minutes before I found a place three blocks away.
I walked back up to the main street, crossed it and made my way toward the hotel. The fiddlers quit playing when I was abreast of the stage, and the dancers bowed to the crowd, and there was a burst of cheering and applause. When it died down the guy on the coach launched into a pitch about visiting a gold mine and a ghost town, seeing the Mother Lode as the forty-niners saw it because this was an authentic replica of the old Hangtown Stagecoach-only three bucks a head. The kids whooped it up and their fathers reached for wallets and billfolds, and while the fiddlers started up again with “Turkey in the Straw,” the guy got down and began collecting money and passing out tickets.
The whole thing had a taint of phoniness about it, of sleaziness wrapped in a veneer of gaiety, like a carnival sideshow. The “authentic replica” had a railed platform tacked onto the back, where the boot should have been, so more people could ride and more three-dollar tickets could be sold; the red and yellow and gold floral designs on the coach panels were pasted-on decals; the wheels were painted a gaudy red, white and blue in honor of the bicentennial; and the springs were made of undisguised steel. They'd take the kids out for an hour and point out a couple of landmarks and bring them back full of half-truths and puffed-up legends. Cheap entertainment and an ersatz history lesson on the one hand, unabashed commercialism on the other-and who the hell cared if a distorted mockery was made of the lives and times of a million dead pioneers? Now was all that mattered; live it up, make a buck, and pretend to care about things like heritage and human endeavor. That was the modern way, all right. You used yesterday and you lived for today and you seldom thought about tomorrow.
Until, maybe, you ran out of tomorrows.
Until you faced the prospect of becoming a forgotten piece of history yourself.
I went into the hotel and shut the door against the noise and the music and the phoniness. The lobby was deserted except for the same clerk behind the desk. He recognized me and gave me a wary nod, as if he thought I might stir up more trouble. The hell with you, I thought, and looked over at the telephone booth, and took a couple of deep breaths, and then walked to the booth and shut myself inside it.
Cloudman first. I found a dime in my pocket, dialed the Sheriffs Department in Sonora. But the deputy who came on said that Cloudman was out and didn't know when he'd be back, did I want to leave a message? It was hot in the booth and sweat had popped out on my face; I could taste it on my upper lip as I gave the deputy my name, asked him to tell Cloudman I had called and would call back again later today.
When I rang off I got the rest of my change out and laid it on the little shelf under the phone; then I opened my address book to the W's and stared at the number of Dr. White's office in San Francisco. And kept on staring at it, just standing there, feeling my heart begin to pump at a faster tempo and my chest tighten up until there was a dull, hollow pain in the center of it. Wetness trickled down my cheeks, my throat was dry and scratchy-and the cough came on thinly, dragging up bitter phlegm. The sound of it seemed to fill the cubicle with small echoes, like whispers half-heard through the walls of a room.