Step To The Graveyard Easy Part 3

Cape said, "Keep the faith for both of us, Father," and went out of this cool, hushed sanctuary for the last time.

At 4:15 he was on the highway again.

Heading southwest, the radio tuned to a Chicago jazz station, the window rolled down, air rus.h.i.+ng in hot and humid against his face.

First stop? It didn't matter.

He cranked up the volume, bore down harder on the gas.

No longer standing still.

4.

St. Louis.

Nashville.

Memphis.

No set itinerary. Each new day a discovery. Interstates, state and county highways, back roads. Large cities, small cities, rural towns, backwaters. Tourist attractions and scenic vistas; bleak alleys and redneck haunts. High life, low life, day people and night crawlers. The good, the bad, and the ugly. He wanted to taste them all.

Vicksburg.

Natchez.

Deep in the heart of Dixie. Traces of the antebellum South in the oldest civilized settlement on the Mississippi River. Under-the-Hill section along the waterfront; medium-stakes poker game in one of the back rooms of a tavern that had once been a cotton storage warehouse. Five- and seven-card stud and Texas Hold'em. He'd learned poker in his dorm at Ball State, played a fair amount of it since. Knew the game's finer points, but had never had a great deal of luck. Too conservative, not enough focus or concentration. Here he found himself playing in a different style-betting aggressively, card tracking, reading the other players' faces and body language, bluffing, sandbagging, raising to the limit now and then. He walked out eight hours later with over six hundred dollars in winnings. And a lesson learned.

Baton Rouge. Still moving south, loosely paralleling the river on its twisting path to the Gulf of Mexico.

New Orleans.

The French Quarter. Gutbucket jazz, hot and lowdown, at Preservation Hall and the smaller clubs. Street-corner hornmen in Jackson Square. Jambalaya and peppery crayfish and foaming mugs of Cajun beer. Crowds, ancient crumbling buildings, a sense of history as palpable in the sultry air as the mingled smells of beignets and fried andouille sausage, garbage and humanity and Old Man River.

On the afternoon of his third day there, Cape was walking along a relatively quiet section of Dauphine Street. Ahead was a woman in her sixties, alone, big leather bag slung over her right shoulder. As the woman pa.s.sed by one of the overhanging lace-work balconies, somebody jumped out of the shadows and made a lunge for the bag. Kid no more than twenty, long greasy hair, face like a pitted fox's. The woman resisted. He punched her in the face, bringing a spurt of blood, tore the bag loose, and took off running.

Cape chased him. Flash-frozen one instant, rus.h.i.+ng ahead the next. The kid zigzagged across the street, up one block, down another. A couple of other people had seen it happen, were giving pursuit and yelling, but only Cape stayed close. The kid dodged into an alley; Cape went in after him. Halfway along, the kid stopped suddenly and swung around. A thin-bladed knife glinted in his hand.

Cape slowed, but he didn't pull up or veer off. Pure instinct kept him moving in a straight line, even when the kid made a jabbing motion with the knife. He feinted right, avoiding another jab, came back left, and knocked the knife arm out of the way. At the same time he kicked the kid squarely in the crotch.

The kid went down, squealing and writhing. Cape stepped hard on his wrist, grinding down until pain-clenched fingers opened around the knife. He kicked it out of the way. Then he threw his weight down on the skinny body, caught hold of the kid's throat, and held him like that until help arrived.

Later, one of the cops who showed up said to him, "That was a pretty brave thing you did, Mr. Cape."

"I didn't think about it, just did it."

"Still, it took a lot of guts."

Maybe so. Guts he hadn't even known he had.

Another lesson learned.

Shreveport.

Fort Smith and over into Oklahoma.

Tulsa.

Downtown, early evening, he met a man named Luther Babc.o.c.k who sold religious novelties. Mini-Bibles with solid bra.s.s-bound covers, standard Bibles encrusted with rhinestones and bejeweled crosses that glowed in the dark. Crucifixes containing "guaranteed genuine healing water from the world's most blessed shrine" and bearing the words "Lourdes, France" embossed in pure gold leaf; crucifixes with the entire Lord's Prayer written in miniature and a telescopic magnifying crystal in the center so you could read every word. Inspirational books, pamphlets, and videos, a life-size portrait of Jesus on gold-threaded velvet, a devotional music box that played "Amazing Grace" and two other hymns, a translucent Jesus night-light made out of ivory-colored plastic.

"The G.o.d game, my boy. Spreading the Word in small but significant ways to all the lonely sinners. A blessed profession, walking hand in hand with the angels. Enriches the spirit at the same time it enriches the pocketbook. Yessir, you do G.o.d proud, and he'll do you proud in return."

Babc.o.c.k was drunk when he said it.

Five minutes afterward, he put his hand on Cape's thigh and offered to perform oral s.e.x on him.

Back down south through Dallas, Austin, San Antonio.

Corpus Christi.

One-night stand in his Gulf-view motel room with a bonily attractive twenty-something named Kristin. Safe s.e.x; she insisted on it. Later, Cape woke up and caught her fully dressed with his wallet in her hand. She gave him a sob story about losing her job a month ago, couldn't find another, might not be able to pay her rent. Odds-on it was either a half-truth or an outright lie, but she made it sound convincing.

He said, "Why didn't you ask for money before we went to bed? I might've paid you."

"I don't mind giving my body, but I won't sell it. No way."

"You'd rather steal?"

"I'd rather steal."

"Well, you could ask me for a loan. Now, I mean."

"Loan? That's another word for charity."

"And you don't take charity?"

"I don't beg, either."

"Funny set of ethics you have."

"Maybe," she said, "but they're mine."

There was a little better than a hundred dollars in the wallet. Cape took out all but two twenties and a ten, put the wallet back into his pants pocket. "I'm going to the bathroom," he said. "We'll talk some more after I'm done in there."

When he came out five minutes later, the wallet was empty and Kristin was gone.

Brownsville.

Across the Rio Grande to Matamoros.

Jai alai at a local fronton. Team and individual matches, the compet.i.tors all with single names. Fast, fast, fast game. Players leaping up and off walls, catching the little goatskin-covered hard-rubber pelota in handmade wooden baskets and hurling it off granite blocks at speeds up to 188 miles an hour. Betting on the same principle as horse racing: win, place, show; Daily Double, Trifecta, Superfecta. Plus another double called Quiniela, where you selected two players or teams to finish first and second in any order. Cape took a flyer, made a few minimum bets. Lost them all, but came close to winning a Big Q that would have paid him the equivalent of a hundred and fifty dollars.

After the jai alai, a little time in the tenderloin section along the river. Wide open. Roaming hookers, many in their teens; s.h.i.+lls for live-s.e.x clubs and c.o.c.kfights. An old lady in a black shawl, with eyes as dead as an embalmed corpse's, offered him his choice of drugs at cut-rate prices. All this before nightfall. He went back across to U.S. soil, and what came crawling out of the hot, neon-spattered Tex-Mex night in the tenderloin over there wasn't any better.

Not for him. Tasting sin was one thing. Wallowing in it was something else entirely.

North again. Lubbock, Amarillo.

West then into New Mexico, following what was left of the old Route 66. Tuc.u.mcari, Santa Rosa, Albuquerque.

Another backroom poker game. Bad run of cards that aggressive play couldn't overcome. Down and out three hundred in less than four hours. Easy come, easy go.

Santa Fe.

Over into Arizona, through the Painted Desert, down to Flagstaff.

Phoenix.

Air show out on the desert, biplanes and other vintage aircraft, barnstorming wing walkers and a variety of aerobatics. In line at one of the booths selling beer he got into a conversation with a sinewy, leather-brown woman who turned out to be a skydiver. Yvonne. Before the show ended, she invited him to go up and jump with her and some friends the next day.

All his life Cape had been acrophobic. On a plane just twice, commercial flights, both unavoidable business trips and both requiring alcohol anaesthesia. He grinned lopsidedly at Yvonne and said without hesitation, "Sure, why not?"

They went up at noon, five divers and a pilot in a big Beechcraft. Yvonne fed Cape the do's and don'ts, an hour's worth of indoctrination that centered on his parachute. He froze up a little when they opened the door. Other than that, he managed it all right. Kept his eyes open when he jumped, counted slowly to ten before he pulled the rip cord, worked the lines the way he'd been told. The whole thing was a fear-and-adrenaline high, all except the landing. He came down awkwardly and a little too hard, bounced and rolled, and ended up with half a dozen bruises. Even so, the others were full of congratulations. Yvonne had something else for him, all that night and the next morning. Diving made her h.o.r.n.y as h.e.l.l, she said.

Cape spent a week with her. Went diving twice more, longer freefalls and bigger highs. The third time, he stood in the open door with the wind screaming in his ears and looked down through three thousand feet of nothing at a checkerboard landscape. No fear before or after he jumped; and the high was all adrenaline. Just like that, he wasn't afraid of heights any longer.

Prescott.

The Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam.

Las Vegas.

Heat, smog, desert sprawl, the longest downtime traffic lights in the country. The Strip didn't impress him. Glitter and glitz and money-wors.h.i.+ping, sugarcoated, bleary-eyed craziness; people swarming over everything like brightly colored ants over piles of rock candy. Cape spent minutes inside New York, New York, just long enough to see what a Vegas pleasure palace was like. Then he headed for one of the downscale strip joints a few miles away.

He lasted twenty minutes in there, paying forty dollars to find out what a nude lap dance was all about. Another taste of corruption that wasn't for him, neither the joint nor the dance. Demeaning to the women, demeaning to him, if not to the other panting and sweating male customers.

That night, two guys tried to break into the Corvette in the parking lot outside his motel room. They set the alarm off, and by the time Cape got out there, groggy with sleep, they were shadows disappearing into deeper shadows. Their jimmying had damaged the door so that it would no longer shut tightly, but at least he could still lock it. Scratches in the paint, too, not that they amounted to much. The 'Vette hadn't been a virgin when he married her.

He left Vegas at dawn.

Vegas was a gaudily disguised trap, a sugared slice of h.e.l.l, no better underneath than the Tex-Mex tenderloins. Leaving it was like an escape.

Death Valley.

Some people might call it a slice of h.e.l.l, too, but he wasn't one of them. Awe-inspiring. Stark vistas, vast brown and gray and saltwhite emptiness, bare jagged mountains brooding all around. Dazzling sunlight, ink-black shadows. So still the silence hurt your ears. You stood looking out from Zabriskie Point, or one of the high spots in the Grapevines and Panamints, and it put everything into perspective. You understood that you really didn't matter much, alive or dead. That n.o.body did. That this place had been here for millions of years, and would be here for millions more after you were gone. The knowledge was somehow comforting.

Barstow.

Palm Springs.

Los Angeles.

Beach scene for a day. Didn't appeal to him much. Phony, superficial, everybody playing a role-surfer, beach b.u.m, bikini bombsh.e.l.l-like extras in a bad teenage movie.

The rest of L.A. was clogged freeways, towns that weren't towns but teeming highway connectors, smog so thick the sky was yellow-brown and breathing hurt your throat and lungs and screwed up your sinuses.

Two days of California Dreaming, and he was on the road again.

Santa Barbara. Better, but still too much residual L.A.

Big Sur on Highway 1. Much, much better. The air, the coastline, the Pacific Ocean-all clean, beautiful, unspoiled.

Carmel. Monterey.

Argument in a pool parlor with a local who tried to hustle him. Nothing came of it inside, but later, when Cape left, the local and one of his buddies jumped him on the street. Wasn't much of a fight; they were both too drunk to do any real damage. But they kept trying to get his wallet away from him, and that made him furious. He smashed the hustler's nose, stomped the other one's hand, left them both down and moaning, and drove off before anybody else showed up. The last thing he wanted was trouble with the law.

The fight stayed with him that night, into the next day. The depth of his anger, the capacity for violence-he didn't like that hidden side of himself. He would have to be careful to keep it caged. Still, there was cold comfort in knowing that if he needed it, had to depend on it in a tight spot, it was a coiled and powerful part of him.

San Francisco.

And in San Francisco, he met Tanya and Boone Judson.

5.

He b.u.mped into her in the ornate lobby of the Sir Francis Drake. Literally. He came wandering in there; the marbled and muraled expanse was crowded with people wearing badges, somebody yacking and not paying attention stepped into his path, he veered to avoid collision and had one anyway. They caromed off each other, not hard. She smiled ruefully; he did a small double take.

In that first quick glance he thought she was Anna.

Same long, lean body type. Blond hair cut short and side-swept across the forehead. Hollowed cheekbones, wide mouth, green eyes. He blinked-and she wasn't Anna anymore. Younger, her skin browner, the eyes more hazel than green, neck longer, ears set more closely against her skull. The resemblance, once he'd gotten a good look, was no more than superficial.

She looked at him looking at her, head c.o.c.ked quizzically to one side. "You think you know me?" she asked.

Cape said, "No. Sorry," and stepped around and away from her. He made his way through the crowd into the lobby bar. Small and packed solid. He came back out again. A billboard wall sign caught his eye: STARLITE ROOF, and the words "Dining, Dancing, c.o.c.ktails." He'd come into the hotel looking for a drink; he didn't want to go out and look someplace else. He rode one of the elevators up to the Starlite Roof.

Big rambling room in the same Renaissance style as the lobby, ringed with tall windows that provided sweeping views of the city and the Bay. Not nearly as many people here: early yet, a little after four. Cape found an empty table, ordered Jack Daniel's on the rocks. He'd spent most of the day walking around North Beach, Chinatown, the downtown area. Tired now, and his back ached. He needed some downtime as much as he needed the drink.

He'd been there about five minutes when the blond woman walked in. Alone. She stood glancing around the room; her gaze touched him, lingered briefly, moved on. There was one window table left, and she claimed it. Male eyes followed her across the room, Cape's among them. She had that kind of figure, that kind of bearing.