Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

That brought me back to thinking about Sue. I looked at my watch. We were due in Columbus in twenty minutes. I set my magazine down and went back to the parlor car to look for her. I’d been reading in the diner. She wasn’t there. The place was empty except for the two priests still in murmured conversation, still with the hand of one on the knee of the other.

I headed briskly toward the sleeping car, pushing my way past a couple of porters, already beginning to feel angry at what I was sure I’d find. And find it I did.

When I opened the door to our bedroom I could smell her. I felt like picking up her fallen-off shoe and beating her in the face with the heel of it. She was sprawled out in the easy chair in a rumpled, red-faced mess, passed out drunk. I might have been able to wake her, but I didn’t try.

I left Sue on the train and felt no guilt in doing it. If that was what she wanted her life to be like, it was her business; I wasn’t prepared to dance her loser’s dance and get involved in waking her up and feeding her endolin and dragging her into Columbus with me and then hearing the apologies. She knew what I wanted with her, and I was beginning to see what she wanted. A few years ago I would have become involved, but not now.

In the station I walked directly to a pay phone, got the dollar for a local call and Ruth’s telephone number out of my billfold, and stood there for a long moment holding in my hand my worn old billfold and the paper Ruth had given me aboard the Isabel with her phone number and address. The little brass dollar was in the other hand. What was I doing, leaving one woman behind me and rushing to another? There in that badly lit train station in Columbus, Ohio, about seventy miles from the little town where I was born, I began to remember my nights on Belson. My shoulders and the backs of my legs tingled with the memory of the grass making its interstellar connection with my physical self. My heels felt sensitive; they remembered the tendrils that had penetrated them. A sigh arose from my soul, and I heard an old woman who stood at the viddiphone next to mine gasp softly, and I saw her turn to stare at me for a moment in alarm. Did I look like John the Baptist again? Had I sighed like a drunken beast, as Isabel claimed that I sighed in my sleep?

Here I was about to embark on another dubious sexual adventure, about to diddle with the life of a person who had shown more concern for me than I had ever shown for her—who might secretly love me, for all I knew—and I was going to do this questionable diddling while involved in whatever steps were necessary to find Isabel, make money, and get the uranium off my spaceship and away from L’Ouverture Baynes. All of this while staying out of prison. What was I doing? Where was my Belson calm, my Belson peace? I looked down at my hand. It was trembling. I jammed it, together with the billfold, Ruth’s paper and the dollar, back into my pocket. I turned away from the phone, walked out of the station and into an Ohio drizzle.

It was a five-block walk to the John Glenn Hotel. I was soaked by the time I got there and I dripped water onto the blue carpet at the desk while I registered. The clerk stared at me. I ignored him and signed, thinking of Belson nights.

I came for a moment out of this reverie when he asked if I would prefer a heated room, explaining crisply that the John Glenn had a splendid new coal furnace. There was an implication in his voice that I couldn’t afford it. Not exactly a stupid inference, considering my bedraggled state and lack of luggage; but bastards like that have no business trying to make their customers feel uncomfortable.

When I didn’t reply immediately he said, “Perhaps you would prefer one of our unheated singles, with the heavy blankets?”

I blinked at him. “Come off it,” I said. “I want a suite and I want it heated.” My voice was hoarse.

He just looked at me.

“What’s your best suite?”

“We have the Neil Armstrong Gallery on the third floor…”

“What’s a gallery?”

“Three rooms and a terrace.”

“Is it heated?”

“Every room.”

“I’ll take it.”

It was overpriced, and the gray sofa in the parlor had coffee stains on its arms. But there was space to move around in, and a combination kitchen and dining room of the kind that is dear to my heart. I christened it the Belson Grass Room and decided to use it for meditation.

I had to get out of my wet clothes and I didn’t have any dry ones. The suite was warm, so I undressed, wrung out my clothes, hung them on the shower rod in the bathroom and padded around naked. That turned out to be a good thing; it brought me back to my nights on Belson.

There was an oriental carpet under the table in the dining room. I pushed the table over against the wall and lay down naked on my back on the rug. The floor was warm and the carpet thick, with a slightly musty smell. After I had lain there awhile I began again to feel the tingling down my back, neck to heels, that I’d felt in the train station. The confused voices in my head, and the anger that had begun to gather in me while I was registering in the hotel, began to leave me. Eventually I dozed off.

I woke up late in the afternoon and just lay there and contemplated the state of my affairs for a while. What I needed first was money. More cash to supplement what Myra had given me and then some real money. I pushed myself up from the floor, padded into the bathroom to check my clothes. They were still damp. I went to the viddiphone by the living-room sofa and set its lens for a head shot, so my nakedness wouldn’t show. I seated myself, touched the switch on the phone, and told it to get me a banker I knew. His home phone. In fact he worked for me, since I owned about 40 percent of his savings and loan. And he owed me a favor.

He didn’t recognize me with the dyed hair and the beard. I identified myself, told him to keep quiet about my presence in Ohio and to have his savings and loan lend me a half million, in large bills. To fit my money belt. “I’ll think of something to give you a mortgage on, Gordon,” I told him. “Bring papers.”

He cleared his throat and looked humble. “Mr. Belson,” he said, with some of the soft-mouthed arrogance the hotel clerk had tried on me, “I’m not certain it would be within my authority. As much as I’d like to accommodate you…”

“I’ll accommodate your ass out of the loan business for the rest of your life,” I said. “You dumb son of a bitch. You have those bills here tomorrow morning or you’ll be sweeping streets for a living.” The pompous little fart. He was one of those Warren G. Harding types, with the silver hair at the temples and the grandfatherly ways. Probably younger than I. Ask him to break a law and he turns Sunday school. “Bring that money personally. If you don’t you’re a fiscal ruin.”

There was silence for a moment. I stared at him and let myself float on my rage.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Belson…” His voice was creaky.

“Forget it,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at ten.” I felt righteous, ready to excoriate greedy foolishness and malfeasance in general.

Gordon looked dazed; I felt suddenly a little dazed myself. “See you in the morning,” I said and hung up. Then I walked back through the dining room and out onto the terrace. This turned out to be a six-by-eight-foot permoplastic apron with an Astroturf rug on it. So much for Neil Armstrong. So much for his dumb remark about that first step. No feeling in it. No more life than Astroturf. At least I had announced the first human steps on Belson with a yelp and a broken arm.

But where was my peace—my Belson peace? My hands were trembling with anger.