Graham drove back to his hotel. He had to concentrate on his driving, though there was little traffic at four-thirty A.M. His head still ached and he watched for an all-night pharmacy.
He found one on Peachtree. A slovenly rent-a-cop dozed near the door. A pharmacist in a jacket dingy enough to highlight his dandruff sold Graham Bufferin. The glare in the place was painful. Graham disliked young pharmacists. They had a middle-of-the-litter look about them. They were often smug and he suspected that they were unpleasant at home.
“What else?” the pharmacist said, his fingers poised above the cash register keys. “What else?”
The Atlanta FBI office had booked him into an absurd hotel near the city’s new Peachtree Center. It had glass elevators shaped like milkweed pods to let him know he was really in town now.
Graham rode up to his room with two conventioneers wearing name tags with the printed greeting “Hi!” They held to the rail and looked over the lobby as they ascended.
“Looka yonder by the desk—that’s Wilma and them just now coming in,” the larger one said. “God damn, I’d love to tear off a piece of that.”
“Fuck her till her nose bleeds,” the other one said.
Fear and rut, and anger at the fear.
“Say, you know why a woman has legs?”
“Why?”
“So she won’t leave a trail like a snail.”
The elevator doors opened.
“Is this it? This is it,” the larger one said. He lurched against the facing as he got off.
“This is the blind leading the blind,” the other one said.
Graham put his cardboard box on the dresser in his room. Then he put it in a drawer where he could not see it. He had had enough of the wide-eyed dead. He wanted to call Molly, but it was too early.
A meeting was scheduled for eight A.M. at the Atlanta police headquarters. He’d have little enough to tell them.
He would try to sleep. His mind was a busy rooming house with arguments all around him, and they were fighting somewhere down the hall. He was numb and empty and he drank two fingers of whiskey from his bathroom glass before he lay down. The darkness pressed too closely on him. He turned on the bathroom light and went back to bed. He pretended Molly was in the bathroom brushing her hair.
Lines from the autopsy protocols sounded in his own voice, though he had never read them aloud: “. . . the feces was formed . . . a trace of talcum on the lower right leg. Fracture of the medial orbit wall owing to insertion of mirror shard . . .”
Graham tried to think about the beach at Sugarloaf Key, he tried to hear the waves. He pictured his workbench in his mind and thought about the escapement for the water clock he and Willy were building. He sang “Whiskey River” under his breath and tried to run “Black Mountain Rag” through his head from one end to the other. Molly’s music. Doc Watson’s guitar part was all right, but he always lost it in the fiddle break. Molly had tried to teach him clog dancing in the backyard and she was bouncing . . . and finally he dozed.
He woke in an hour, rigid and sweating, seeing the other pillow silhouetted against the bathroom light and it was Mrs. Leeds lying beside him bitten and torn, mirrored eyes and blood like the legs of spectacles over her temples and ears. He could not turn his head to face her. Brain screaming like a smoke alarm, he put his hand over there and touched dry cloth.
Having acted, he felt some immediate relief. He rose, his heart pounding, and put on a dry T-shirt. He threw the wet one into the bathtub. He could not move over to the dry side of the bed. Instead he put a towel on the side where he had sweated and lay down on it, propped against the headboard with a stiff drink in his hand. He swallowed a third of it.
He reached for something to think about, anything. The pharmacy where he bought the Bufferin, then; perhaps because it was his only experience all day that was not related to death.
He could remember old drugstores with soda fountains. As a boy, he thought old drugstores had a slightly furtive air. When you went in, you always thought about buying rubbers whether you needed any or not. There were things on the shelves you shouldn’t look at too long.
In the pharmacy where he bought the Bufferin, the contraceptives with their illustrated wrappings were in a lucite case on the wall behind the cash register, framed like art.
He preferred the drugstore and sundry of his childhood. Graham was nearly forty and just beginning to feel the tug of the way the world was then; it was a sea anchor streamed behind him in heavy weather.
He thought about Smoot. Old Smoot had been the soda jerk and manager for the pharmacist who ow
ned the local drugstore when Graham was a child. Smoot, who drank on the job, forgot to unroll the awning and the sneakers melted in the window. Smoot forgot to unplug the coffeepot, and the fire department was summoned. Smoot sold ice cream cones to children on credit.
His principal outrage was ordering fifty Kewpie dolls from a detail man while the store owner was on vacation. On his return, the owner fired Smoot for a week. Then they held a Kewpie doll sale. Fifty of the Kewpie dolls were arranged in a semicircle in the front window so that they all stared at whoever was looking in.
They had wide eyes of cornflower blue. It was a striking display and Graham had looked at it for some time. He knew they were only Kewpie dolls, but he could feel the focus of their attention. So many of them looking. A number of people stopped to look at them. Plaster dolls, all with the same silly spit curl, yet their concentrated gaze had made his face tingle.
Graham began to relax a little on the bed. Kewpie dolls staring. He started to take a drink, gasped, and choked it onto his chest. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and fetched his box from the dresser drawer. He took out the autopsy protocols of the three Leeds children and his measured field sketches of the master bedroom and spread them on the bed.