Psyche (44 page)

Listening to the even sound of her footsteps, to the crickets in a nearby field, to an owl in a copse ahead of her, she thought, “I should be afraid; afraid of being alone in the night, in the world; afraid because I am not yet really strong again; afraid of what may happen to me when my small amount of money is gone. Instead—I am afraid of nothing. I am free, and that is enough. To hell with Nora, to hell with the doctor—to hell with everybody.”

The big oil truck, when it passed her toward two o'clock in the morning, was doing more than sixty miles an hour. Psyche noticed it, and no more than that, but the harsh grinding of its brakes as it slowed down and came to a halt some hundred yards ahead of her drew her full attention. If she had ever been going to remember another truck, and another night when faulty brakes
had been applied too late, it would have been then. But, remembering nothing, she approached now stationary tail-lights with no more than the wariness natural to an encounter which might, or might not, be of use to her.

When she came up beside the high cab on the off side from the driver, the door was already open, and she leaned against it as she looked up at the man clearly picked out by the lights on the dashboard.

“Want a lift, sister?”

She saw a crew cut, a rocky profile, and a sweat-stained T-shirt disclosing muscular arms and a burly chest. The truckers who had stopped at the derelict mail-box in the slag had not been any more beautiful, but they had always been good to her. It was a breed with which she was thoroughly familiar, and in this instance a quick scrutiny was enough to convince her that it would be perfectly safe to accept the offer.

“Thanks,” she said, and handing her bag up to him, pulled herself up the steep step.

It was not until the truck was under way again, and she had settled herself as comfortably as possible on the hard seat, that she began to realize how close to physical exhaustion she must have been. Her feet and legs ached, and the hand in which she had been carrying her suitcase jerked with small spasmodic cramps. Flexing her fingers, she opened her purse and took out cigarettes and matches.

“Like a smoke?” she asked.

Without taking his eyes from the road, the trucker said, “Don't mind if I do. Going far?”

Drawing smoke deep into her lungs, exhaling it slowly. Psyche said, “I don't know.”

“You out of a job?”

“I suppose you could put it like that.”

“Broke?”

“Not quite.”

The rhythm of the heavy engine was soothing, and the sameness of the small area trapped in the brilliance of the headlights was pleasantly soporific. Quite content to be where she was,
Psyche let her head rest in the angle made by the door and the back of the seat, and stretched her long legs forward until her feet were braced against the floor where it sloped upwards toward the hood. She might not know where she was going, but for the first time in many weeks she knew what she was doing.

The large, blunt-fingered hand, coming to rest on her knee, was not entirely unexpected. Firmly, but without haste, she removed it. “Nothing personal,” she said quietly. “I just don't, that's all.”

“Didn't figure you would, but no harm in trying, was there?”

“No,” Psyche said, “there's never any harm in trying.” No harm in trying anything, ever, as long as one knows when to stop. No harm in dreaming, in straining after the impossible, as long as one knows when to stop.

“You got any folks, sister?”

As long as one knows when to stop. “No.”

“What kind of work you figuring on getting?”

“Just about anything anyone will give me, I guess.” Shifting her gaze, she glanced sideways at him, and was held, fascinated, by the snake, tattooed around his brawny arm, which writhed and twisted as he handled the wheel.

“That there's Irma,” he said conversationally. “T'isn't everyone who falls for Irma, but you can't deny she's a lively little bitch.”

As the dash-lights found her, and then lost her again, Irma was like a living serpent seen by the flicker of a jungle camp fire.

“I'm almost afraid she'll get away from you,” Psyche said, amused in spite of her recoil from an art form that did not appeal to her at all. “How long have you had her?”

“Let me see. I got out of the navy three years ago Christmas, and Irma and me got together maybe a year before that. Close as I can figure it, four years.”

Slowing briefly, they rumbled through a hamlet where a single bulb hanging above a cross street, and one coldly blue neon sign, seemed to emphasize, rather than deny, the apparent absence of any living being. Then, picking up speed, they were again roaring through a countryside empty of buildings other than occasional farm-houses.

“Why did you leave the navy?”

“Too goddam much water. Night driving in these big babies is kind of like being on a ship, only you can get off, if you see what I mean. I like to get off when I want. Another thing, once I pull out, I'm captain of this rig. I sets her on the North Star, and from there on what I says goes.”

Studying two signs above the windshield which read, without equivocation, “NO SMOKING”—“NO RIDERS”, Psyche asked idly, “The North Star. What is that?”

“That's the one star that don't move. You're setting a course for somewheres, you look for the North Star and you can figure where you are and where you want to go.”

What a lot there is that I don't know, Psyche thought soberly. “I don't suppose you could show me where it is?”

Irma stretched and appeared to yawn as her master pointed in front of him. “Sure. You see them pines up ahead on the left?”

Locating a pyramid of darkness denser than the luminous darkness of the summer sky. Psyche said, “Yes.”

“Well, now, you look to the left some more and then up and you see the Big Bear. Got it? Now you follow off the side away from the tail and take a line not just straight up to that bright one there, and that's it, sort of off by itself a ways.”

Looking at heavens blazing with close-packed galaxies. Psyche wondered how anyone could ever distinguish one star from another, let alone describe one as being “sort of off by itself”. Actually, she supposed, they were all very much off by themselves, but they certainly did not appear to be.

Feeling that the greater probably included the less, and recognizing a more specific quest as quite hopeless, she said, “Thanks. I see it.”

“You'll find that star useful,” he told her, pleased with himself. “I'm stopping to refuel here. Me and the wagon both. Want some coffee?”

As the truck turned off the highway between gas pumps and an all-night lunch counter. Psyche shook her head. “I'll wait for you here.”

“What's the matter with you, sister? You running away from something?”

“No, not in the way you mean. But you don't really want me to go in there with you, do you?”

“Why in hell wouldn't I? I'm never ashamed to be seen with a good-looking dame.”

Psyche pointed to the sign that so plainly said “NO RIDERS”. “What about that?”

The trucker's square face broke into a grin that took ten years off his possible forty or more. “The bastards that care about that type thing are all snug in their beds, or maybe some person else's. Anyway, they aren't here, you can bet on that.”

They sat at a marble-topped counter, where Psyche, eating a thick sandwich served to her on a thick white plate, and drinking coffee from a thick white mug, rejoiced not only in the coarseness of the china but also in the clatter around her. Here was contrast that pushed the Scarlettis' elegant dining-room further into the past, and nothing could have pleased her more.

“Do you know how to use a lobster pick?” she asked her companion.

“Dunno that I do.”

“Maybe that's why we get along.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?” asked Psyche, who had begun to work out how long it was since she had seen a sandwich with a crust on it.

“Know how to make out with one of them lobster things?”

“I do now. But don't hold it against me.”

“I don't hold nothing against nobody, sister. Live and let live, that's my motto.”

A smile touched one corner of Psyche's lovely mouth. “And anyone who doesn't agree with it gets a poke in the nose. Is that right?”

“That's right. You ready to go?”

Outside, a lessening of the darkness was a first intimation that before long the night would begin to give way to daylight. Pausing an instant on the steps of the lunch counter, Psyche yawned and shivered slightly.

The next two hours were a blur in which she dozed, and waked, and dozed again. “Can you add figures, sister?”

Blinking, surprised to find that the sun was rising, gilding a green countryside with a promise of heat to come, she said, “I'm quite good at it.”

“Ever worked as a cashier?”

“No.”

Changing to low gear as the big truck lumbered toward the crest of a long gradient, he said, “Well, maybe that won't matter.”

Psyche thought in passing that sunshine did not improve Irma. “Is it a job? Do you know of one I might get?”

“Maybe.”

With difficulty Psyche kept her voice calm, almost uninterested. “Where?”

“Oliver's. An eatery about fifty miles north of here. We'll hit it soon after six-thirty.”

Psyche's first impression of the town in which she was to live for a time was more than favourable, and, even from the outside, Oliver's restaurant attracted her at once. Its imitation-log frontage was in the centre of the single, long block of shops that comprised the commercial life of the little town—a mart bounded on the north by a post office and a hotel, and on the south by a railway crossing. Around this small hub there spread out a lazy pattern of unpaved side-streets lined with white frame houses, and maples that enfolded them in cool, protective shadows.

Situated in the heart of a lake district, summer residents the principal reason for its existence, the town had yet to wake when the truck stopped in front of a restaurant whose plate-glass windows were just beginning to reflect early-morning sunlight.

“This here is a classy dump. We'll go round by the back,” the trucker said, without a trace of embarrassment.

The position of cashier at Oliver's was not one that a transient, without references or previous experience, would normally have stood a chance of obtaining, but when Psyche was presented to him, Ollie, with a week of the summer season still ahead of him. was desperately trying to replace a girl who had let him down
without notice. Any local girls who might have measured up to the standards he required were already preparing to shake the dust of a small town from their shoes for the winter. Psyche, swimming against the tide, appeared at what was, for her, a most propitious moment.

Ollie was in the kitchen in his shirt-sleeves. Normally he wore coat and tie, but at a quarter to seven he had not yet taken up his public duties. A swarthy, thick-set little man in his early fifties, he reminded Psyche in many ways of Bel's Joe.

“This here's a friend of mine who wants to work for you, Ollie,” the trucker said. “She hasn't done the kind of job you want, but she's good with figures, and like you can see for yourself, she's got class.”

During the ensuing colloquy Psyche was aware that she was being sized up by shrewd dark eyes well used to judging people, and she was weak with gratitude and relief when she was told she would be given three days' trial.

With a grin and a wink, the trucker said, “Well, I guess you're all set, sister. Be seeing you.”

When he had gone, Ollie said briskly, “No time to show you the ropes before we open, honey. I'll do your job for you to-day, and you stay with me and keep your eyes open. That's a nice dress you're wearing, not too fancy. You wear that kind of thing and you'll be exactly right. Now, we better get you fixed up with your name.”

Crossing the big kitchen in which a cook and two fresh-faced waitresses were already working, he led her into a small office. Going to a filing cabinet, he opened a drawer, and took out a large box which he placed on one end of a polished oak desk. Looking at it. Psyche's surprise was clearly written on her expressive face.

With a self-satisfied smile, Ollie said, “Look like solid silver, don't they, honey? Nearly a hundred of them, too. All the girls' names you're ever likely to bump into. Now, which one's yours?”

She knew what was coming, but she said it anyway. “Psyche.”

Shocked disbelief wiped the smile from his face. “Say that again?”

Psyche said it again.

“You're kidding!”

“I'm sorry. I'm not.”

Looking down at the desk where he had already laid out an assortment—Mary, Elizabeth, Ann, Antoinette, Catherine—he rubbed the bald spot on the back of his head, and said unhappily, “This has never happened before. I guess you'll have to use your other name, honey. What's your other name?”

On the verge of breaking the news to him that she had no other name. Psyche changed her mind. The last thing she wanted to do was to appear odd or difficult in any way. Maggie—Margaret. It would do.

“Margaret.”

“Oh, my gosh, honey, that won't do. We got a Margaret. One of the girls you saw just now in the kitchen is a Margaret. Look, we got to open in twelve minutes. Isn't there something you always wish you'd been called instead of that outlandish handle you got? Here, take your choice!” Scooping up several fistfuls of nickel-plated brooches, he spread them at random before her.

“Do I have to be called anything?”

“It gives a friendly note. The customers like it.”

“I don——'t” Psyche began, but Ollie would not let her go on.

“Make up your mind, honey. It's time we were out front. Here, this is a nice one. Simple. Dignified.”