The Far Cry

by Fredric Brown

  The way to visit the dead is the approach of one's mind to their memory, not the approach of one’s body to their graves.

  It was hot in Albuquerque when he arrived there in mid-afternoon, enough to make him appreciate the mountain mildness of Taos summer. And Albuquerque had grown greatly in size since he’d last seen it. There'd been only a slight difference in Santa Fe, but Albuquerque seemed almost twice the size it had been when he’d last seen it five years before. It had been a large town then; it was a small city now.

  He found a place to park near the Albuquerque Tribune office. He went in and explained what he wanted to a young man who came to the desk. A few minutes later he was looking through a bound volume of papers eight years old. He started with July 15th, the day the body had been found; the story hadn’t reached Albuquerque in time to make the paper that day. The next issue had a full column—and Callahan had been right; the local angle was played up. A fair portion of the story—and the rest of it included nothing that hadn’t been in the Taos paper—was devoted to the fact that Jenny Ames had spent the night before her death, the night of May 16th, at the Colfax Hotel in Albuquerque, that she had undoubtedly taken the eleven o'clock bus the following morning for Santa Fe. There was an interview with the clerk at the Colfax Hotel, Ward Haver by name, but little was brought out except the fact that he remembered the girl but vaguely; that she had checked in, according to the records, at four o clock in the afternoon and had checked out at ten-thirty the following morning. She’d stayed in Room 36.

  Weaver read the rest of the story and skimmed through the papers following; nothing further that was new to him. He closed the bound volume; the young man who had brought it to him came back to the desk and Weaver asked him, "Your current editor—did he hold the job eight years ago?"

  "Mr. Carson? I'm not sure; I know he’s been with the paper quite a while, but I've been here only two years myself. Shall I ask him?"

  “Well—I’d like to see him in any case. If he wasn't here then, he’ll probably know who to refer me to. My name’s Weaver, George Weaver."

  "Just a moment, Mr. Weaver.”

  Then he was being shown through a door into a private office and a man with thinning gray hair said, “Yes. Mr. Weaver? I’m Carson.”

  "Were you editor here at the time of the Jenny Ames murder near Taos, eight years ago?”

  "I wasn't editor then, but I worked here. Worked on the case, in fact."

  “You were the man who was sent to Taos to cover the inquest?”

  “No, that was Tommy Mainwarren; he isn't here any more. But I covered the local angle, the hotel and the depots and what not.”

  "Good, that's what I’m interested in right now." Weaver explained briefly why he was interested. “Do you have a few minutes to spare?”

  “A few, yes. Just what do you want to know?”

  "Well, this occurred to me while I was reading your story just now, in the outer office. How was it learned so quickly that Jenny Ames had stayed here at the Colfax Hotel? I assumed that the clerk had probably read a news story and had remembered the name—but the hotel angle was in the first story you ran, so it couldn't have been that.”

  "Let's see—we first learned about the story when our regular Taos correspondent, whoever it may have been then—I don’t remember, phoned us a tip on the story. It looked like a big story so Tommy Mainwarren was sent up there right away to cover it. When he phoned in the story I took it down. That happened to be several hours before press time and I got to thinking about the fact that she'd taken the one o'clock bus out of Santa Fe. That bus leaves Albuquerque around eleven and she might have come from here. I asked Henderson—he was the editor then—if I could check that angle and he told me to go ahead.

  "I trotted down to the bus depot and tried to get something—but I couldn't. Nobody remembered after two months—and you can’t blame them for that with only a pretty general description—anything about the girl. Be funny, for that matter, if anybody had. You don't have to give your name to buy a bus ticket and unless you do something unusual—like spitting in the ticket seller’s eye or breaking a window in the bus while you’re riding it—nobody’s going to remember you after two months. None of the ticket sellers who’d been working that day remembered her, nor did the driver who’d had that run—I was lucky enough to catch him at the station.”

  The editor struck a match under his desk and pulled fire into an ancient pipe. “But the local angle was still worth trying for and it hit me that she might have stayed over in a hotel here if she had come through this way, so I phoned hotels and asked them to check their registrations for the name Jenny Ames on whatever night it would have been. Hit pay dirt at the Colfax."

  Weaver nodded. "That was good work. And—well, I just read the story you wrote so I guess I know what you found out. The clerk remembered her, but not very well."

  "He was barely sure that he remembered her at all. If we’d had a picture of her to refresh his memory we might have got more. But the records showed when she checked in and when she checked out—just in time to get that eleven o'clock bus to Santa Fe, so there’s no doubt she was on it even if they don’t remember her. And the clerk thinks he remembers she had two suitcases. I guess the story contained the fact that she put Taos as her address on the registration card?”

  “Yes.”

  "Logical enough," Carson said, "although too bad she figured it that way. She must have thought that was going to be her permanent address and she might as well start using it instead of an obsolete address she didn't intend to return to. Anything else?” He stared at the ceiling a few seconds. "Oh, yes, I tried to see how she came into Albuquerque the day before. She checked in at the hotel some time late in the afternoon—”

  “Four o'clock, according to the story.”

  "That’s right, four o’clock. I checked arrival times of trains and buses; no train came in for several hours before then. But there was a bus arrival at three-thirty. And anyway, since she stayed at the Colfax, it’s more likely she came in by bus. The Colfax was just across the street from the bus terminal and half a block down; you see the sign as you come out of the door and it's a natural thing, if you're a stranger in town, to head for the nearest hotel if there's one in sight.

  "I checked some more at the bus terminal and couldn’t get any proof that she had really come in on that bus, but it seems likely. Especially when I found it had been twenty minutes late that day; got in at ten minutes of four. Allowing ten minutes for her to get her bags if she'd checked them through and to cross the street and walk half a block, that'd make the four o’clock check-in time at the Colfax just right.’

  Weaver nodded. "You used the past tense about the Colfax Hotel," he said. "Isn’t it there any more?”

  "No, it was razed several years ago to make room for a big office building. It was a small hotel—only three stories.”

  “And the clerk, Ward Haver?”

  "Haven't an idea. I didn’t know him, outside of that one talk with him.”

  "The three-thirty bus that she probably came in on. What was its route?”

  “Los Angeles-Phoenix-Globe-Socorro. That run. The police tried to trace her back along it to find her starting point, but they didn't get anywhere. Be a miracle, I suppose, if they had, after that length of time. Well, Mr. Weaver, I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.”

  Weaver thanked him and left.

  He looked in an Albuquerque phone book—on the off-chance—for the name of Ward Haver, and it wasn’t there. It didn’t really matter; the clerk could scarcely have told him anything he hadn't told Carson. And it would be futile for him to try any checking at the bus terminal; that had been tried eight years ago, and by the police as well as by a reporter, and it hadn’t paid off then.

  There was nothing further for him in Albuquerque. He drove back to Santa Fe and got there by dinner time.

  Chapter Seven

  Vi gave him a perfunctory smile and then her pasty face went quickly sullen aga
in. "It was an awful trip, George. I couldn't sleep a wink all night long. I’m so tired. And hungry, too, simply starving. They hadn’t opened the dining car yet.”

  Weaver said, "Come on, we’ll find you somewhere to eat. I could use a cup of coffee myself.”

  "But the baggage, George. There’s all that stuff you told me to bring, typewriter, bedding, dishes—”

  He grinned at her. "They didn’t make you carry it, did they? Let’s have some breakfast first. We can pick up the luggage afterwards.”

  Over breakfast—and Vi packed away a big one—Weaver studied her. She managed to pout, to look sullen, even when she was eating. Her eyes seemed even duller. And she'd gained weight, he was sure, in the few weeks since he'd left Kansas City. He could picture her alone in the apartment there, tippling all afternoon and alternating sips of whisky with chocolate creams while she read confession magazines and listened to interminable radio programs. Probably she hadn’t been outdoors once since he left, unless it was to go to a movie in the evening. Spots of rouge on her cheeks were the only color in her face.

  What had made her that way, he wondered for possibly the ten thousandth time since their marriage. Had it been his fault?

  He didn't see how, basically. In a few little things, yes. He hadn’t been perfect by any means. But back in the early days of their marriage, when they'd loved one another, at least physically, he'd tried his best to help her get interested in—well, in worth-while things. He hadn’t nagged her about it; he’d simply, for example, exposed her to good music by taking her places where she could hear it, by buying good records and playing them once in a while. By seeing that there were good books and magazines around the house as well as the ones she bought for herself. Not highbrow stuff either; he tried to settle for educating her up to Collier's or the Post instead of Dream Romances and Movie Confessions. And, although he liked symphonies and quartets himself, he’d have settled if she'd liked Crosby or Goodman instead of Texas Slim.

  No, her taste had been unchangeable, no matter how hard or how subtly he tried to improve it. All that had changed about her was that, once she’d got herself a man, she'd let herself go, cared little about her appearance and less about her figure. She’d vegetated, sunk into a morass of mushy reading and listening, steady drinking, even steadier eating.

  About the only thing he could say for her was that she hadn’t been unfaithful to him—or did he know even that? She flirted with other men sometimes, was coy with them, but he’d simply assumed she didn’t have the incentive to go farther than that. Maybe he was wrong—but it didn’t matter. He might have cared once, but he didn’t now. Except for the girls' sake of course.

  How on earth was it that the two girls, born of Vi, had good minds? So keen that even now, at their ages, they must know that their mother was a dipsomaniac. They’d know soon enough if she was or became as sloppy morally as she was in every other way. Maybe after all it would be better to make a clean break—

  He shook his head to clear it No, it simply couldn’t be done. Right now, especially, when he wasn’t earning a cent, it was utterly ridiculous even to think of such a thing.

  He said, “There’s egg on your chin, dear.”

  She wiped it off, absently. "Why didn’t you take a place in Santa Fe, George?” She frowned at him. “We don’t know anybody in Taos.”

  He grinned. "That’s why I picked the place, maybe. You know the doctor’s orders, Vi. Peace and seclusion. If it was just a matter of not working, we could have stayed in Kansas City. But wait till you see—“

  She was eating again, not listening. And why go on with what he'd started to say? He knew suddenly—and wondered why he hadn't thought of it before—that she wouldn't appreciate mountains and sunshine and beauty. She hadn't liked even Santa Fe, really; it had been at her urging that he'd gone to a bigger city when he’d decided to go in business for himself—choosing Kansas City because he already had a few connections there.

  No, Vi wasn’t going to like Taos. She was going to like living ten miles outside of Taos, in the last house on a road, even less.

  She finished eating and there was egg on her chin again, but he didn't bother telling her about it. This time, though, she took a compact from her purse and looked into the mirror of it; she wiped the egg off before she dabbed her face with the powder puff and then put lipstick—too much of it, of course—on her over-full, petulant lips. She took a comb from her purse.

  He said, “Please, Vi.”

  “Oh, that’s right; you don’t like it when I use a comb at the table. All right, I’ll wait."

  She got a cigarette out and he held his lighter for her.

  "What time is it, George?”

  "A few minutes after seven.” He stared past her through the coffee-shop Window at the brightening day outside. He wished she'd hurry so they could get going on the drive to Taos. But he’d have to sit here a long time; Vi would want a second cup of coffee and probably a third, and she'd take her time over each of them while a pile of lipstick-smeared cigarette butts grew in the ash tray.

  "Do you guess a bar would be open this early, George? I mean, by the time I’ve had another cup of coffee, I know it seems awful to have a drink this early, but I couldn't sleep on the train and I'm so tired that if I had a drink or two I could maybe nap on the way up.”

  "It’s Sunday, Vi. No bars or liquor stores open.” He saw her face fall and relented. “But I've got a bottle in the car. You can have a nip as soon as we start.”

  At least that got her started sooner; she had only a second cup of coffee instead of her usual three.

  He got the car from the garage where he'd left it overnight and drove to the railroad office; Vi waited in the car, combing her mousy colored hair with the aid of the rear-vision mirror, while he got the luggage and loaded it into the back of the car.

  He waited until they were outside of town and then took the bottle from the glove compartment and. handed it to Vi. He didn’t want a drink himself, this early.

  But he'd long ago given up worrying about Vi’s drinking or trying to get her to cut down on it. Once, five years ago, when she'd first shown a tendency toward dipsomania—before then she’d drunk moderately—he'd gone on the wagon for almost a year himself. But Vi’s drinking had increased anyway.

  She had several nips from the bottle and then, after a while, she dozed, her head falling against his shoulder. Weaver drove carefully to avoid waking her. Thus far she'd asked almost nothing about the place she'd be living in, and he’d told her little in his letters; she wasn’t going to like it, he knew. But let her see it first and get the argument all over with at once instead of having to talk about it now and spoil the drive.

  They reached Taos by ten o’clock and the house ten miles beyond it twenty minutes later.

  Vi didn’t like the place. She hated it.

  “It gives me the creeps, George. Way out here in nowhere. No people at all!"

  “It's only ten miles to Taos, Vi. Fifteen or twenty minutes in the car. You can make all the friends there that you want. And you can use the car all you wish

  He hoped that she would, even though he worried whenever she drove the car. She wasn’t a good driver.

  "But, George, it’s awful after our apartment in Kansas City. It's a dump, that's what it is. A mud hut. And I’m afraid. It gives me the creeps to be way out here. At night—"

  "I won’t leave you alone here at night. Not that there’s anything to be afraid of.”

  "George, I won stay. An outside toilet! And I will be afraid—"

  She was almost crying.

  Weaver listened patiently. He didn’t argue back; he let her get it out of her system. He got her inside and started bringing stuff in from the car. Her radio first—and he plugged it in, turned it on. Let her realize that she'd at least have this—which, anyway, was her main anodyne, more important to her than whisky.

  She was sitting sobbing—but listening to the radio—while he brought in the other things. He went out
into the kitchen and made them drinks—one for himself this time. He gave her one and sat down with his own.

  "Listen, Vi, I’m sorry you dislike it this much. But it's just for three months. For you, anyway; maybe I'll be staying a little longer but you'll have to go back in three months anyway to get the girls out of camp and into school. And the sublet of the apartment will be over then and you'll have it back. Now be a good sport for that long, huh?”

  “But, George—”

  "It won't be too bad, Vi. We won’t get in one another's hair, even if the place is small. I'm going to be writing and painting and I made that little shed—see it out the back window?—into a studio and workshop for myself. You can play the radio all you want, you can read all the damn magazines you want—and that's what you'd he doing if you were back home, so what’s the difference where you do it? And the climate here—well, you’re getting a sample right now, and it’s like this all summer.

  "And besides, I've already got this place paid for, so we can’t afford to live anywhere else now."

  “All right, all right, all right.”

  The worst was over. He made them each another drink.

  She was tired and still sleepy after she drank it and she went into the bedroom to lie down and sleep awhile. After a few minutes George heard her deep breathing and took a deep breath of relief himself.

  He walked to the bedroom doorway and stood watching her closely for a minute or two. Strangely, he felt more tenderness, just then, than any other emotion.