town seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting Lolitas who dissolved in their haze. A big W made of white stones on a steep talus in the far vista of a cross street seemed the very initial of woe.
The new and beautiful post office I had just emerged from stood between a dormant movie house and a conspiracy of poplars. The time was 9 a.m. mountain time. The street was charming it into beauty, was one of those fragile young summer mornings with flashes of glass here and there and a general air of faltering and almost fainting at the prospect of an intolerably torrid noon. Crossing over, I loafed and leafed, as it were, through one long block: Drugs, Real Estate, Fashions, Auto Parts, Cafe, Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Furniture, Appliances, Western Union, Cleaners, Grocery. Officer, officer, my daughter has run away. In collusion with a detective; in love with a black-mailer. Took advantage of my utter helplessness. I peered into all the stores. I deliberated inly if I should talk to any of the sparse foot-passengers. I did not. I sat for a while in the parked car. I inspected the public garden on the east side. I went back to Fashions and Auto Parts. I told myself with a burst of furious sarcasmun ricanementthat I was crazy to suspect her, that she would turn up any minute.
She did.
I wheeled around and shook off the hand she had placed on my sleeve with a timid and imbecile smile.
“Get into the car,” I said.
She obeyed, and I went on pacing up and down, struggling with nameless thoughts, trying to plan some way of tackling her duplicity.
Presently she left the car and was at my side again. My sense of hearing gradually got tuned in to station Lo again, and I became aware she was telling me that she had met a former girl friend.
“Yes? Whom?”
“A Beardsley girl.”
“Good. I now every name in your group. Alice Adams?”
“The girl was not in my group.”
“Good. I have a complete student list with me. Her name please.”
“She was not in my school She is just a town girl in Beardsley.”
“Good. I have the Beardsley directory with me too. We’ll look up all the Browns.”
“I only know her first name.”
“Mary or Jane?”
“NoDolly, like me.”
“So that’s the dead end” (the mirror you break your nose against). “Good. Let us try another angle. You have been absent twenty-eight minutes. What did the two Dollys do?”
“We went to a drugstore.”
“And you had there?”
“Oh, just a couple of Cokes.”
“Careful, Dolly. We can check that, you know.”
“At least, she had. I had a glass of water.”
“Good. Was it that place there?”
“Sure.”
“Good, come on, we’ll grill the soda jerk.”
“Wait a sec. Come to think it might have been further downjust around the corner.”
“Come on all the same. Go in please. Well, let’s see.” (Opening a chained telephone book.) “Dignified Funeral Service. NO, not yet. Here we are: Druggists-Retail. Hill Drug Store. Larkin’s Pharmacy. And two more. That’s all Wace seems to have in the way of soda fountainsat least in the business section. Well, we will check them all.”
“Go to hell,” she said.
“Lo, rudeness will get you nowhere.”
“Okay,” she said. “But you’re not going to trap me. Okay, so we did not have a pop. We just talked and looked at dresses in show windows.”
“Which? That window there for example?”
“Yes, that one there, for example.”
“Oh Lo! Let’s look closer at it.”
It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning a carpet upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl-child of Lolita’s size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a much taller veiled bride, quite perfect andintacta except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.
“Look, Lo,” I said quietly. “Look well. Is not that a rather good symbol of something or other? However”I went on as we got back into the car”I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove compartment), on this pad I have our boy friend’s car number.”
As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheater of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme edgesa capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond-bearded scholar with rosy lips suckingla pomme de sa canne as he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried shuttle smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand, presented a tangle of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the stateone adjacent to the state Beardsley was in.
I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.
And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I immolated myself… But it was all of no avail. both doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of persecution.
In a street of Wace, on its outskirts… Oh, I am quite sure it was not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had glimpsed the Aztec Red Convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp, it contained four or five loud young people of several sexesbut I said nothing. After Wace a totally new situation arose. For a day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis with which I told myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and then I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and was still with us, in this or that rented car.
A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another. This technique implied the existence of garages specializing in“stage-automobile” operations, but I never could discover the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then he turned toother makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile he had rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Gray, Chevrolet’s Thistle Gray, Dodge’s French Gray…
The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little mustache and open shirtor for his baldish pate and broad shouldersled me to a profound study of all cars on the roadbehind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun: the quiet vacationist’s automobile with the box of Tender-Touch tissues in the back window; the recklessly speeding jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog’s head protruding, and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor’s tudor sedan crowded with suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer weaving in front, immune to the Indian file of fury boiling behind it; the car with the young female passenger politely perched in the middle of the front seat to be closer to the young male driver; the car carrying on its roof a red boat bottom up… The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us.
We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow and Champion, and rolling down an almost imperceptible grade, when I had my next distinct view of Detective Paramour Trapp. The gray mist behind us had deepened and concentrated into the compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden, as if the car I drove responded to my poor heart’s pangs, we were slithering from side to side, with something making a helpless plap-plap-plap under us.
“You got a flat, mister,” said cheerful Lo.
I pulled upnear a precipice. She folded her arms and put her foot on the dashboard. I got out and examined the