Fat City Page 15

  Convinced it was hopeless, he crossed the highway to where the ground was higher. For a considerable distance he tramped through sparse brush, until he felt he could not be seen by passing motorists. In that enormous silence he felt unsafe. The only sound was a breeze rustling sporadically over the ground. He lay down, and with his head resting on his bag, the earth yawing under him as he looked at the immense sweep of the stars, he waited for dawn.

  He was wakened by a terrific thundering he knew instantly was a train, and he leaped up in terror, certain he had fallen asleep on a railroad track. The train passed him at twenty yards, hissing and clattering, its great light rolling like an eye, the first cars rushing by before he realized he had never been in their path. With a pounding heart he watched the curtained Pullmans hurtling by. The dining car passed with Negroes in white garments working in the lighted kitchen. No one appeared to notice him. Then the train was gone, a rumble and a single red light fading rapidly away in the nebulous distance. The sky was the color of slate. Far away the beams of a car wavered in the lightening air.

  Ernie walked back through the brush to the road, anxious to get home to Faye and filled again with resentment at being left here. In the increasing light his abandonment took on the unreality of something distant and inexplicable, though it could not have been longer than two or three hours ago that he had been put out of the car. Maybe, he thought, it had been the driver who had been attracted to him all along. But he still despised her, and he remembered Noreen with a pang of disappointment. All he was sure of was that he had been dealt a colossal insult. Lonely by the side of the road, he reviewed his bout, and it too had lost some of its vividness, though its import seemed as great as before: he was on his way.

  Ernie was picked up at sunrise by a soldier in civilian clothes with sport shirts of all colors hanging from a metal rod across the entire width of the back seat, who owned two cars, had made love to innumerable women, drove at high speeds and talked with few pauses across Nevada and all the way to Sacramento. There the two parted. Ernie went the last forty-five miles by Greyhound, riding through the night coolness of low delta fields, past dark vineyards, orchards and walnut groves, isolated lights of farm houses, irrigation ditches full of moonlit water, then on the outskirts a gigantic technicolor face speaking silently on the screen of a drive-in movie. Dazed with fatigue yet alert in the eagerness of coming home, he rode into the city. The bus passed block after block of dark and dimly-lit houses. It stopped; the door opened and shut, then the bus bumped over railroad tracks and entered the downtown business district, the stores dark, box offices closed at the theaters, the marquee lights off, cars cruising down Main Street, and the empty sidewalks brightly lit. Ernie rose, and when the bus roared into the depot he was standing at the head of the aisle. He came lightly down the metal steps into balmy air and diesel fumes, and feeling in himself the potent allegiance of fate, he pushed open the door to the lobby, where unkempt sleepers slumped upright on the benches.