Panic!

Lennox stopped, and electricity fled along the nerve synapses in the saddle of his back. There was something—a terse authority—in the driver’s voice that portended trouble. He turned, slowly, and faced the other man. “Yes?”

The driver was darkly powerful in his sweat-stained gray uniform, and there was a grim set to his squared jaw. He studied Lennox with small, sharp eyes, and the distaste at what he saw was clearly defined on his sun-flushed face. “I didn’t see you inside the café,” he said, and the tone of his voice made the words a question that demanded an acceptable answer.

“I ... wasn’t hungry,” Lennox answered thickly. “I went to wash up.”

“You’ve been riding with me since six this morning. You didn’t eat when we took the rest stop in Chandlerville at eight, and you don’t eat now. You don’t have much of an appetite, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” the driver said. “Where are you going?”

“Going?”

“That’s right: what destination?”

Lennox tried to remember the name of the city on the old man’s ticket, but his mind had gone blank. He said, “I ... the next town. The next stop.”

“Let’s have a look at your ticket.”

“What for?”

“Let’s see it,” coldly.

Lennox got the pasteboard from his pocket, and the driver took it out of his nerveless fingers. He scanned it, his eyes narrowing. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “This is only valid to Gila River, and we passed through there two hours ago. You’re riding on an expired pass.”

He could not think of anything to say. What was there to say? He hadn’t considered the possibility of the ticket being good only to one of the small towns along the bus route; he had been irrationally sure that the old man would be going to one of the larger border cities to the south, that that was where the daughter who had sent him the money would be living. The destination on the pasteboard had meant nothing to him originally, and he remembered only vaguely passing through Gila River; the name had sparked no recognition at that time. He stood there sweating, looking at the driver’s shirt front, trying to think of something to do or say but not coming up with anything at all.

“You owe me four-eighty,” the driver said. “That’s the fare one way from Gila River to Troy Springs.”

“I don’t ... have four-eighty,” Lennox said woodenly.

“That’s what I figured, too. You’re nothing but a damned vag, and you’re off my bus as of right now.”

“Listen,” Lennox said, “listen, you can’t leave me here ...”

“The hell I can’t,” the driver told him. “You’re left, guy.”

He turned abruptly and went to the café door, calling out to the passengers inside that they would be leaving now. He came back and got in behind the wheel, ignoring Lennox, and after a moment the other passengers filed out and entered the bus. The homely girl with the heat-chafed thighs looked at Lennox with a curious, mild hunger, but she did not say anything to him.

He stood there like a fool, feeling helpless, holding the overnight bag against his right leg. The homely girl pressed her face to the window glass and looked down at him with sad eyes. The bus began to move away, its diesel engine shattering the hot, dead stillness, and Lennox watched it swing around and start down the access road, raising clouds of dry, acrid dust. Sunlight gleamed feverishly off the silver metal of its body as it slowed and made the turn south, a sluggish armored sowbug disappearing along the curve of the highway. What now? he thought. What am I going to do now?

He heard movement behind him, and when he turned he saw that the balding man who had been behind the café counter had come outside. The balding man walked over beside Lennox and took a cigarette from the pocket of his white shirt and set it between his thick lips without lighting it. After a moment he said, “Put you off the bus, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“I was riding on an expired ticket.”

“These bus drivers can be bastards sometimes,” the balding man said. “This is a hell of a place to strand a guy.”

“A hell of a place,” Lennox agreed dully.

The balding man studied him closely without appearing to do so. The heat was thick around the two of them, and from out of the barren plain to the east, something made a fluttering sound. Finally the balding man said, “You a little strapped for money, are you?”

“You could say that.”

“Down on your luck or on the run?”

Lennox started. “What?”

“Cops looking for you?” the balding man asked matter-of-factly.

“No,” he lied. “No.”

“Were you heading any place special on that bus?”

“Just ... drifting.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I got some work if you could use it.”

Lennox had been looking out over the desert, at the shimmering jagged floor of it, at the gaunt skeletal range rising on the horizon to the south, at the vast brittle emptiness lying motionless under the canopy of heat. He turned his attention to the balding man again and passed a hand across his mouth. “What kind of work?”

“This and that. A little painting, a little stock reshuffling, a little fixing up.”

“Here?”