Panic!

The driver pulled open the screen door, and his passengers trooped in after him like a line of weary foot soldiers, Lennox entering last. It was not much cooler inside. There was an overt stuffiness in the barnlike interior that had not been dispelled by the large ceiling fan whirring overhead, or by the ice-cooler placed on a low table to one side. On the left was a long, deserted lunch counter with yellow leatherette-topped stools arranged before it; the remainder of the room was taken up with wooden tables covered in yellow-checked oilcloth, all of them empty now, and straight-backed chairs. The rough-wood walls were furbished with prospecting tools—picks, shovels, nugget pans, and the like—and faded facsimiles of venerable Western newspapers announcing the discovery of gold in California, silver in Nevada and Arizona. At the foot of the far wall, next to an open door leading to a storeroom, were a rocking cradle and portions of a wooden sluice box that a placard propped between them claimed to have been used at Sutter’s Mill, California, circa 1850.

Behind the lunch counter, dressed in clean white, a middle-aged, balding man with thick jowls stood slicing potatoes on a scarred sandwich board. To one side of him, tacked to the wall, was a square of cardboard: We Accept All Major Credit Cards. Lennox thought bitterly of the wallet full of credit cards he had destroyed months ago, because they had his name on them and were links with the dead past, because using them would be like leaving a clear, fresh trail to his current whereabouts, because he might never be able to pay the accumulated sums, and that was considered fraud and he did not want any more threats to his tenuous freedom. But Jesus, he should have kept just one card—Diner’s or Carte Blanche—for emergencies like this, for the moments of burning hunger ...

The balding man put down the heavy knife he was using as the string of customers—not Lennox—moved to the lunch counter and took stools in an even row; he wiped his hands on a freshly laundered towel, smiling professionally with thick lips that were a winelike red in the sallow cast of his face. “What’ll it be today, folks?”

Lennox could smell the pungency of grilled meat hanging heavily in the hot, still air, and the muscles of his stomach convulsed. He backed to the door, turning, and stumbled outside, moving directly across to the bus, leaning unsteadily against the hot metal of its side. After a moment he re-entered the coach and took his small, cracked blue overnight bag from the rack above the seat. Then he crossed under the bright glare of the sun to the rest rooms.

Inside the door marked Men, he ran cold water into the lavatory basin and washed his face and neck, cupped his hands under the tap and rinsed his mouth several times; he resisted the urge to drink, knowing that if he swallowed any of the tepid, chemical-tasting liquid his contracted stomach would throw it up again immediately. From the overnight bag he took his razor and a thin sliver of soap; but the idea of shaving, which had been his intention, evaporated when he looked at himself in the speckled mirror over the basin. A close shave would have been incongruous with his unkempt hair, his sweat-dirty clothes, his hollow eyes—and he would still have looked like a derelict. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with all of it.

He returned the razor and soap to the bag, and then opened the door to one of the two stalls, closing it behind him as he entered, and sat on the lowered lid of the toilet seat, his head in his hands. The pain, which had fluctuated into a muted gnawing as he splashed himself with water at the basin, again disappeared from his stomach; but he kept on sitting there, drinking air through his mouth.

Several minutes passed, and finally Lennox got weakly to his feet. He hoped to God that they would finish eating in the café before long. He wanted to get to some town, any town, a town where there were dishes to be washed or floors to be swept, a town where they had a mission or a Salvation Army kitchen; if he did not get something to eat very soon, he was afraid that he would collapse from lack of nourishment—you could die from malnutrition, couldn’t you? How long could a man live without food? Three days, four? He wasn’t sure, exactly; he was sure only of the pain which attacked his belly more and more frequently, more and more intensely, and that in itself was enough to frighten him.

He picked up his overnight bag and opened the door and went outside, blinking against the glinting sunlight. He moved toward the bus. As he came around on the side of it, he saw the driver lounging against the left front wheel, working on his teeth with a wooden pick. Lennox wet his lips with a dry tongue, pulling his eyes away, and put one foot on the metal entrance step.

The driver said, “Just a minute, guy.”