Detour to Death

D
ANNY DIDN’T WANT TO HITCH A RIDE
with the old man, but it was hot walking in the sun and no telling how far it might be to the next town. This was a lonely country he’d come to, a flat, arid corridor between twin ranges of low mountains that swelled up like calluses on the hand of God. Danny had come a long way from Chicago, and he still had a long way to go.

Until the universal gave out back at the foot of the last pass, he’d been making pretty good time—in spite of the fuel pump, the radiator, and a few other ailments a seventeen-year-old jalopy can develop on the road; but being on foot wasn’t so bad now that the mountains were leveling out and the border was getting nearer all the time. As for the jalopy, he’d meant to ditch it before crossing into Mexico, anyway. A hundred miles or so, one way or the other, didn’t make much difference now.

Danny Ross was taking no chances. He’d spent a long time planning this migration, and it was going to be done right. That’s why he’d kept to the lonely roads instead of the main highways, and that’s why the car had to roll over the grade into the ditch. Disappeared without trace—that’s what was happening to Danny Ross. He was just going to walk right off the face of the earth so far as the old ties were concerned, and none of the ties were very old because Danny was barely eighteen. Eighteen and skinny in a pair of tight Levi’s and an old leather jacket, with his sun-bleached hair cut a quick two inches from his scalp, and his tanned face marked with anger and pride. Danny wasn’t running away from life; he was running toward it. Nobody was going to cage him! While he walked, he pulled a well-thumbed language dictionary from a canvas zipper bag (Danny believed in traveling light) and took up his studies where he’d left off last. And then an old man drove up in a dusty sedan and held open the door.

“Ride, son?”

Danny closed the book and sized up the source of this offer. The old man looked harmless enough. His face was like a pink and yellow apple just beginning to wither, and his eyes were a blue that time had faded to the shade of old denim. This was the first car to come along in almost an hour, and there was no reason, Danny decided, to walk when he could ride. Having won the decision, he shoved the book into his pocket and climbed into the front seat.

The worst part of a hitch was always the conversation. “Going far?” the old man asked, just as Danny knew he would, and Danny shrugged.

“A ways,” he said.

“Pretty hot walking.”

Sure it was hot walking. It was hot in the sedan, too, with the sun, dipping a little to the west, pouring in through Danny’s window, and with a sickish odor in the car that made him a little dizzy. He looked around to find a place for his zipper bag, and that’s when he saw the little black satchel on the back seat. It had gold lettering on it:
Chas. W. Gaynor, M.D
.

M.D. That was a good racket, a hellova lot better than doctoring motors in some smelly garage, but the old man didn’t look so flush. The collar of the alpaca jacket creeping up about his scrawny neck was frayed at the fold, and his Panama hat had yellowed with age. And the sedan! Danny listened to the motor and shook his head. This baby was due for either a rebore or a nice, deep ditch like the jalopy! People must be pretty healthy in this country if the doc was any indication.

“You’re not a local boy,” the doctor remarked. “I’ve been practicing in this country for fifty years. I’d know you or some of your kinfolk if you were.”

“No,” Danny admitted. “I’m just bumming around, seeing the country.” Nobody was going to get anything out of him.

“That’s a fine idea. I remember planning something of the sort when I was a lad. I was going to see faraway lands and strange people. Somehow my plans just didn’t work out.”

Danny was thinking how the doc had been young a little too soon. Nowadays you could travel to faraway lands without making plans; the plans were all made for you. But he kept his mouth shut and hoped the conversation was over. Queer old duck, the doc. Now he seemed to have forgotten all about his newly acquired passenger. His long hands gripped the steering wheel until the veins etched blue against the ivory skin; but the road was still smooth and empty of traffic, except for a pair of saddle horses ambling single file along the soft, unfenced shoulder. For a moment Danny feared he might be sick, but then the grip on the wheel eased, and the old man returned from his woolgathering.

“Faraway lands and strange people,” he repeated. “And none stranger than ourselves— But what have we here? Spanish-English Dictionary— My, you are a studious young man!”

Danny made a grab for the book, which had slipped out of his jacket pocket. It really didn’t matter if the old man saw what it was, but if anybody started looking for Danny Ross one of these days and traced him this far, some old guy remembering he’d been studying Spanish could give them a good lead. “I found it,” he lied quickly. “I was just looking it over. It doesn’t hurt a guy to know another language.”

“No, it doesn’t,” the doctor agreed. “Sometimes I wish that I knew another language. Some special language that would make it easy to say the things we don’t want to say. Did you ever think how strange it is that with all the tongues of men, all the arts, all the modern inventions, it is still so very difficult for two people sitting in the same room to communicate with one another?”

Danny gave the doctor a sidelong glance and then settled back against the seat cushion. So he was off again. A nut, maybe, but what difference did it make so long as the sedan kept rolling south? And then Danny closed his eyes, because, nutty or not, from here on the doc could communicate with himself.

• • •

It was the vibration of the wheels leaving the pavement that put an end to Danny’s nap. He might have dozed five minutes, or even half an hour, but the sun was still there when he opened his eyes, and the desert, and a stack of ugly yellow buildings piled up at the crossing of an unpaved road. Danny caught a glimpse of the name on the canopy over the gas pumps as the doc drove around back to park in the shade of the buildings:
Mountain View
. In this country that could mean a gas station, a country store, or even a whole town all under one roof.

“Sorry to disturb your sleep,” the old man said, switching off the ignition, “but I always stop in here when I’m on the road. Sometimes I’m needed and folks leave word. I’m a doctor.”

This was no news to Danny. He answered by reaching for his canvas bag.

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” the doctor added quickly. “I’ll be going on to Cooperton in a few minutes. If you want to ride that far, just sit tight. Or better yet, come on in with me, and we’ll have a cold drink.”

Cooperton was a little black dot on the map Danny carried folded up in his hip pocket, and it was still farther south, so that was fine. But the cold drink sounded fine, too, and he didn’t need a second invitation to follow the doctor inside. He’d been right about Mountain View. It was one of those all purpose stops: service station, garage, café—even a grocery counter off to the left side as they came through the sighing screen door. On the opposite wall was a counter with a row of stools, all empty but one, where a plump young woman with greasy hair was opening a beer for her only customer. The customer was a man, small and wiry, who was wearing a soiled canvas hat and a wrinkled trench coat that looked pretty silly in all this sunshine—until you noticed the already over-packed Gladstone at his feet. Yes, Mountain View was also the depot for the local bus line.

“ ‘Evening, Walter—Rice. And how are you today, Viola?”

It was still a long way from evening by Danny’s watch, but this was the doctor’s way of greeting his friends. First the balding young man behind the grocery counter, then his lanky, Stetson-crowned customer, and finally the woman who had now finished opening the beer and was wiping off counter space for the newcomers. With the exception of a couple of Indian boys squatting on their heels outside the door, this comprised the entire current population of Mountain View.

“How am I always?” Viola responded to the question. “Healthy as a horse—you know me.”

They were going to go on trading sharp dialogue like that for a while, and Danny wasn’t interested. He climbed onto one of the stools and gazed longingly at his neighbor’s beer, but there was a sign on the wall prohibiting the sale of intoxicants to minors, and considering the way the old man kept babying him a break didn’t seem likely. “Coke,” he muttered, when the big-breasted woman finally got around to asking what he wanted. In a moment she was back from the ice chest with a pair of frosted bottles.

Two dime drinks and her work was over, but she didn’t move away. She made a halfhearted swipe at one of the blue-tailed flies buzzing about her head without even looking at it; she only had eyes for the old man.

“We heard about Francy,” she began at last. “Somebody said they got a call from Red Rock at the mortuary.”

“Somebody said!”

The subject didn’t sound humorous to Danny, but it seemed to amuse the tall man in the Stetson. He came across the room in a couple of elongated strides to horn in on the conversation. “I’ll bet Viola had her ear glued to the party line all morning,” he chuckled. “How about it, Charley?”

“Do you think that’s all I have to do around here?” Viola wailed. “If you must know it was that shiftless husband of mine who told me! Ask him where he heard it.”

The party was getting real cozy now, with everybody crowded around the doctor’s sagging shoulders like a bevy of matrons hot on the trail of a risqué rumor. Danny couldn’t have helped overhearing what was said.

“I heard she never did regain consciousness,” the balding Walter remarked. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what happened.”

“Like as not Francy never knew, either, the way she was liquored up.”

The tall man—that was Rice, Danny remembered—was sure having a good time. He finished off that observation with a high-pitched laugh that just sort of faded away when the doctor raised his head. It was the first sign that the old man was even listening to all that talk around him.

“Liquored up?” he echoed. “Did you see Francy last night, Rice?”

Rice hesitated. From the word
mortuary
Danny had been following the conversation like a spectator at the tennis matches. He saw Viola’s troubled frown, Walter’s anxious eyes, and the first sign of consternation on the face of the tall man.

“I guess I did,” he admitted. “Sure, it was last night. I was having dinner with a cattle buyer at the Pioneer Hotel, and Francy was hanging around the bar as usual. Hell, Charley, you know as well as I do that girl ain’t been cold sober since she left high school. What happened last night was bound to happen one way or another. Women like Francy Allen don’t die of old age!”

Rice looked about him in search of confirmation; but although he’d made Francy sound very interesting, Viola had other ideas. “Maybe not!” she snapped. “I’m not an expert on women like Francy, but I’d still like to know what happened on the road last night. You can’t just find a woman lying unconscious in her own blood and shrug it off. Maybe Francy was hit by a car, or maybe she smashed her own head that way, but you’ll have to prove it to me!”

“Now, baby,” Walter interrupted, “don’t go making mountains out of molehills—”

“Molehills! This is no molehill! What if it wasn’t an accident? If there’s someone on the loose around here who does things like that to women, something should be done about it!”

Silence drew a heavy frame around Viola’s outburst. Nobody had a thing to say until the doctor pushed aside his untouched drink and came to his feet.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “something should be done about it— Any calls for me, Walter?”

It took a moment for Walter to come out of his trance. “Not a call,” he said. “We’re all too healthy, I guess— But you can drop around in another six months.” A nervous laugh and a quick pat on his wife’s sweaty cheek didn’t do much to ease the tension. Just as Danny had thought in the beginning, Francy wasn’t a humorous subject.

“Then there’s no reason for me to hang around here any longer,” the doctor concluded. “No, finish your drink, son,” he added, as Danny attempted to rise. “I want to check the radiator, anyway. Use a lot of water in weather like this.”

Danny would just as soon have gone along with the old man then, but something in that grave face told him he wasn’t wanted. The old man was troubled; he preferred to be alone. But he wasn’t too troubled to forget something Rice had said. Two steps toward the door, and he turned back again, almost smiling. “By the way,” he remarked, “did you sell that buyer any cattle?”

The way Rice’s ears reddened was a dead giveaway that he’d been caught off base. “Well, yes, I did,” he admitted. “Of course prices aren’t as good as I’d hoped—”

“They never are,” the doctor murmured.

“Oh, I’m going to pay up, Charley. It’s been a long time, but I haven’t forgotten you. As a matter of fact, I was hoping you’d stop by. I might as well give it to you now as put it in the bank. Never stays there long, anyway.”

While he reached for words, Rice was also reaching for a hip pocket that yielded a wallet of astonishing thickness. Danny didn’t mean to stare, but he couldn’t pry his eyes away from all that beautiful currency. This boy was loaded! Now he was peeling off twenties as if they were petals on a daisy.

“One sixty, one eighty, two hundred. There, I guess that squares us. Christ, but it’s expensive to have a sick wife!”

“Funerals are expensive, too,” the doctor murmured. “And remember what I told you. Mrs. Rice needs plenty of rest and peace of mind.”

That was a nice prescription the old man handed out; Danny could have used some of that himself. He also could have used that fistful of money in the old man’s hand. Not that Danny was destitute, but money was something he’d never had enough of. He watched, fascinated, while the doctor extracted a long leather wallet from the inner pocket of his alpaca jacket. When a folded sheet of white paper slipped from the wallet and floated lazily to the floor, Danny was after it instantly. But instantly wasn’t fast enough. The man in the wrinkled raincoat was a spectator to this event, too, and he moved a lot faster than Danny.