The Lost (14 page)

She’d asked Mrs. Pye if she could take her lunch break at one-thirty instead of noon because she liked to eat in this place and the main crunch at the counter was between eleven and one. By now things were beginning to slow down a little so that with some luck it was possible to get a seat without waiting. She liked the easy mom-and-pop feel of the place. She’d been coming in for a soda or a dish of ice cream with her parents ever since she was a child, then alone or with friends all through high school. Mr. and Mrs. Fahner had always called her by her first name and over the past two years, since she was a junior, had insisted on her calling them Pat and Winnie.

If you ordered a milk shake or a malted you drank off the glass and they poured you what was left in the shaker. If you were a regular you were apt to get a third scoop on your two-scoop sundae.

She wondered if the place would change by the time she got out of college. So much was happening in the world beyond Sparta. Race riots. Flower power. Vietnam. Pot and Timothy Leary. A luncheonette-slash-soda-fountain, even as busy as this one was, was practically an anachronism now. It almost had to be. How could the simple pleasures of a milk shake stand up to a hit of acid? She wondered if the kids who were freshmen now would still want to sit around over a couple of cherry Cokes all night—or at least till the place closed at ten—hanging out together the way she’d done with her own friends, passing the local gossip, falling in and out of love with one another, reading comics and magazines off the rack and spinning around on the revolving stools like they were rides in an amusement park. She suspected she could guess the answer. It was too bad, she thought. They’d be missing out on a lot of fun. And something she felt a lot of affection for would have disappeared.

She’d finished half her sandwich, aware that the din had lessened considerably, when someone slid onto the open stool beside her, and she glanced over and there was Ray Pye.

Great, she thought. Just great.

He was smiling at her, one eyebrow cocked at her as though he were Errol Flynn in that movie
Robin Hood
. The grin was borrowed from somebody too.
I don’t know if he kills people like Ed says
, she thought,
but this guy sure does give me the creeps
. He had a slim hardcover book in his hand roughly the size of a paperback and put it facedown on the counter.

Ray reads? I doubt it
.

“Hi,” he said. “So you like this place too, huh?”

She’d never once seen him in the Sugar Bowl in all these years. It was a small place in a small town and every face here was familiar. Was she supposed to figure this was just a coincidence? He was lying through his teeth.

She nodded and took another bite of her sandwich. The urge to just finish it and get the hell out of there was strong, forget the ice tea. She remembered what Charlie Schilling had told her.
Shoulder, face and left eye from not three feet away. Head and chest, just below her breast
. The thought made her shudder.
Somebody
had done it. Why not him? You didn’t expect the world to thrust a murderer into your face. But unless you were a child or a fool you knew it happened.

“Man, I really love the food here.”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m glad I ran into you, you know? I’m throwing a little party tonight. Whole bunch of people. Food, drinks, music. All the latest sounds. You ought to come. Really. You’ll have a great time.”

“Sorry. I already made plans.”

“Change ’em.”

“Sorry. I can’t.”

“You sure? I’m telling you, it’s gonna be fun. By the way, you look great without the uniform.”

“As I say, I’ve got plans.”

“That’s too bad.”

She was very aware of him looking at her.

“Well, maybe some other time then.”

The red-haired waitress came over and she was grinning.

“Hey, Ray.”

“Hey, Dee Dee. Good to see you.” Turning all the fake charm on Dee Dee now like a spotlight. The girl was actually blushing in its glow.

Wait a minute
. He
knows
her, Sally thought. Not from here certainly because the girl was new and he was no regular anyway.
No. He knows her from somewhere else. Plus the girl’s got an obvious crush on him. Ray’s somewhere in his twenties, right? A grown man. She can’t be more than sixteen. Jailbait
.

What a guy.

“What can I get for you?”

“How about a Coke and a burger, medium.”

“Sure. Fries?”

“Hold the fries, Dee Dee. Got to watch my figure.”

“Nah, Ray. Not you.”

She almost laughed. Now he’s
flirting
with her! Oblivious to any impact it might have on Sally sitting right beside him with whom he had
just been
flirting. It was as though it was some sort of compulsion with him. He couldn’t
not
flirt. Dee Dee smiled and turned to call the order. Sally finished her sandwich and went to work on the ice tea. She wasn’t going to run off because of this guy but she wasn’t going to stick around any longer than necessary either.

“Ever read this?” he said.

The spotlight was back to Sally again. The cocked eybrow. The grin.

He turned over the book.

The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran.

And she came
this
close to snorting a mouthful of tea out of her nose. What she did do was laugh out loud. This time she couldn’t help it.

“You’re kidding.”

“It’s a great book. I’ve read it half a dozen times.” The smile had faltered when she laughed but there it was again, all 2000 watts of it.
Six times?
He was trying to bullshit her again. The book was brand new. If he’d read it half a dozen times then he’d read some other copy. The jacket was immaculate.

So she’d caught him in two lies. The Sugar Bowl and now the book.

Just to be sure she took it from him and cracked it open. Binding intact. She sighed and picked a passage at random and read aloud.

“
‘Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.’
Jesus. What incredible
crap.”

She was angry. She knew she shouldn’t be. Or at least shouldn’t show it given what everybody seemed to think he was. But she couldn’t help that any more than she could help laughing. This unctuous little prick kept insulting her intelligence every which way.

The smile vanished. He kept staring at her like he was waiting for something.

Well, she’d
give
him something, then.

They were in a public place. He wasn’t going to harm her.

“You realize what this guy is saying, Ray? That if you don’t like your job it’s better to be a leech on the rest of society and let somebody else do all the work. Let’s only do the jobs that make us happy. Oh sure. Let’s have a world without garbage collection, or better yet, of
happy garbage men
. Or how about happy executioners? For that matter happy
beggars
. Anybody over twelve who reads knows that Kahlil Gibran is completely full of shit, Ray. Even the prose stinks. What’s next, Rod McKuen?”

She put a five-dollar-bill on the counter, enough for a healthy tip for Dee Dee who at that particular moment was making a point of not watching them and slid off the stool. She realized with a bit of a shock that she was fuming.

Cool it
, she thought.
Take it easy for god’s sake
.

“Bye,” she said.

It was the best she could manage under the circumstances.

She snatched her purse off the floor and walked the length of the counter and out into the parking lot and she was almost to her Volkswagen when he caught her and grabbed her arm and spun her around.

If she’d been mad before she was furious now. He’d actually
touched
her!
How dare he?

And scared. She had to admit that she was scared too.

“Let go of me, Ray!”

She hated the quiver in her voice.

“You go off on me like that? In
public?
What the hell is wrong with you? Who do you think you are? Look at me.”

She refused to. His eyes were scary. She tried to pull away from him but he wouldn’t let go so she stopped trying.
All right
, she thought.
You’re scared. Probably you have a right to be scared. So what? Go for it anyway. Scared or not, give it to him. The little bastard. The little bully
. There were too damn many of him around.

He’d grow up to be her father, only worse.

Give it to him
.

“What the hell’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with
you
, Ray? You come on to me my first day on the job and I make it clear to you I’m not interested. Then you follow me my
second
day on the job and come to me again with some stupid line about some stupid book you probably don’t even know.”

“I don’t like being insulted in public, Sally.”

“Well neither do I. And you following me to a place I’ve known for years pretending that, gee, it’s your favorite place in the world and then throwing these ridiculous moves on me, that’s damn insulting. Grabbing my arm is insulting. What you’re doing right
now
is insulting. Why don’t you go back to your burger and your underage girlfriend and just leave me the hell alone? Tell your mother I won’t be coming back after lunch. Tell her I quit. And I wish I could be around to hear whatever idiot lie you use to explain it.

“You see that car? Right there? You see these people pulling in? Let go of me Ray or I swear to you I will start screaming
right now.”

He glanced at the car and relaxed his grip.

“You little bitch. Fuck you!”

“No, fuck
you
, Ray. Let go!”

He flung her off like her arm had suddenly burst into flame. And that was all she wanted, that was just fine, so she got into the Volkswagen and turned the key in the ignition and saw him stalk back through the door into the luncheonette. She felt light-headed, trembling with rage and fear and thought it was completely possible she might lose her lunch if she didn’t manage to keep on moving.

She put the car into reverse and then into forward.
One step at a time
, she thought.
You’re doing fine
. She drove out of the parking lot headed toward home and thought,
Well, that was easily the shortest job of your entire life but to hell with it
. The guy was crazy. Killer or no killer Ed and Charlie had been absolutely right to warn her.

After a while the trembling stopped but she drove home on total autopilot, registering almost nothing, her mind still back in the parking lot working it over. She thought she’d done all right. She’d handled the little bastard and told him what she thought of him and that was that. Before she knew it she was there.

Her mother’s Chrysler was in the driveway. She pulled in behind it.

As she opened the door her mother was just coming out of the living room, moving toward the kitchen. She had a glass of what appeared to be sherry in her hand and when she heard Sally shut the door behind her she turned and smiled and Sally saw that her eyes were glassy and sparkling.

It was two in the afternoon.

“Sally! What are you doing home so early?”

She didn’t want to deal with her. Not now.

“How was the luncheon?”

A question that was practically guaranteed to divert her.

Her mother wore an elegant tan silk dress belted at the waist. Today it had been a benefit for the American Legion. Tomorrow it might be the NAACP. The next day, who the hell knew? It was all part of being Mrs. William Richmond. What was clear was that she’d already had a few and was not at all opposed to another. It was happening more and more lately. Her mother was well on her way to becoming a full-fledged drunk and her father never even seemed to notice.

The question did its job though.

“Oh, the luncheon was lovely, though the chicken was a little chewy, we thought. Betty Morrison says the chef is new, which doesn’t bode well for the future I suppose. By the way, she’s throwing a pool party for her daughter Linda next Sunday. Would you like to come? I think it would be nice.”

The Morrisons had more money than god, more than even her father and they raised beagles as a hobby. A pool party at their house would be all baying, barking and howling. No thanks.

“I’ll think about it. Listen, mother, I’ve got a splitting headache. I want to lie down for a while, okay?”

Headaches her mother understood.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just a headache.”

“Take some aspirin, dear.”

“I will.”

“Take three. Two never works. That’s just what they say on the bottle. Take three.”

“Okay.”

She walked upstairs thinking that it was not surprising at all that her mother had never come back to her original question about why she was home so early. Whether it was the liquor or the self-absorption Sally had managed to head her off at the pass again with the usual ease and speed. The very normalcy of the exchange—her mother asking, Sally evading—had served to calm her.