I walked past her and past Joyce Steuben and around the end of the tellers’ counter and out past the guard to the front door. I stopped and looked back at her. She had not moved. Her face was tight and contained and her right hand was still gripping the knob of her door. She stared at me a little longer and then she stepped back into the office and shut the door. Toby was concentrating on the math workbook and did not look up.

I went out to the parking lot and stood by my car beneath a sky that had grown heavy and dense and the color of shale. There was a cold wind coming from the northwest and a formation of large black crows beating their wings a hundred feet overhead. Because of the wind, the crows were pointing in one direction but traveling in another. I wondered if they knew it, and, knowing it, understood it, or if they were simply oblivious, carried along by a force that was felt but not seen. The same thing happens to people, but most of the time they don’t know it, or when they know it, they think it an action of their own devising. They are usually wrong.

Chapter Ten

Ten

Just after four o’clock I drove back to the Howard Johnson’s and took a room for the night. I brought in my things, pulled off my clothes, then went into the shower, letting the hot water cut at my scalp and my neck and my shoulders. I let it cut for a long time. When I got out, I drank a glass of water, got dressed; and went down to the bar.

The bartender was a red-haired woman in her early forties with white lip gloss and heavy silver earrings that looked like little Rorschach patterns. She was cutting limes with a very large knife with a wide, flat blade. She said, “You’re the guy from Los Angeles.” These small towns.

I nodded. “Really packing’m in tonight.” I was the only one in the place.

“Wait’ll you have one of my drinks. You’ll see why.”

“Unh-hunh.” You come to these small towns, the people think they’re a riot. “The beer cold?”

“Yeah, but it’s flat.” You see?

I asked her for a Falstaff, but all they had was Rolling Rock. She put down the knife and went to a refrigerator with a see-through door and took out a long-necked bottle. She said, “I always wanted to go out to Los Angeles. What they say about the smog true?”

“Yep.”

“Bet it’s nice, though.” She opened the bottle and put it and an icy glass on a little napkin in front of me. I had some.