Panic!

by Bill Pronzini

  Lennox touched her hair, gently, almost delicately, the way you touch a sleeping child. Jana did not take notice. She no longer knew he was there; the words she was speaking were for herself, a volume-open replaying of a memory tape that had already been played a hundred, a thousand times before.

  “The morning after that first night with Kelly, I was sick at what I had done and I thought for a while about taking sleeping pills or cutting my wrists, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought about a psychiatrist but I couldn’t call one, I couldn’t tell anyone what I’d done, and then Kelly came and I didn’t want to let her in but something made me let her in and she was contrite, she said she was sorry, she said she had been a lesbian for a long time and she hadn’t been able to control herself and then she told me that she loved me, she said it just like that, ‘I love you, Jana,’ she said, and suddenly I couldn’t hate her any more, I didn’t want her to go away, I wanted her to stay with me, and we made love that night and a lot of nights afterward and I woke up one morning and looked at myself in the mirror and I thought: You’re a lesbian now, too, you’re turning into a lesbian just like Kelly. Then I went and vomited in the toilet, because I don’t want to be a lesbian, I want to be normal, but I liked it with Kelly, I liked it every time, I liked it as much as I liked making love with Don. I knew I had to do something, I knew I had to stop myself before it was too late, divorce myself from Kelly and from New York, from everything that was turning me into what I didn’t want to be turned into. I had to be alone, I had to have time to think, I had to plan for the future—just me, just Jana, keeping her mind occupied with things, and maybe if enough time goes by I’ll be all right again, maybe if I don’t let myself get involved with anyone, not with anyone, because I think I’m a lesbian now and if I am I’ll reject any man, I’ll be frigid with any man who tries to make love to me and if I have anything to do with a woman no matter how casual maybe I’ll try to seduce her or maybe I’ll let her seduce me, and then I’ll know for sure, I’ll know, and I can’t face it yet, maybe not ever. I’ve got to be alone, I’ve got to be alone ...”

  The tape had run out now, and Jana’s eyes lost some of their glassy quality. Lennox shook her again, less sharply this time, and when he was sure his words would penetrate, he said, “Jana, listen to me, you’re all right now, don’t you see that? You’re free now. You broke away, and that proves—”

  “It proves nothing. It’s not Kelly and it’s not New York any more. It’s me I’m afraid of, it’s me I can’t face.” She began to tremble, violently, and the cold wind was only a small part of the cause; her teeth chattered with little hollow clicking sounds. “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me ...”

  Lennox put his arms all the way around her, drawing her close. “Jana,” he said, “Jana.”

  She could feel the warmth of him, the solidity of him, she could feel his breath against her hair, the way his hands moved on her arms and her back, she could hear his soft, gentle voice. The tremoring began to subside, slowly, but there was something else now, a sensation, a curious inner quivering. “No,” she said. “Oh no.”

  “It’s all right,” Lennox whispered. “Jana, it’s all right.”

  “Oh my God, no, no.”

  Caressing, warm, solid, male, touching her, holding her, no, no, the thought there in her mind, growing, spreading, beginning to command, no no no, and the embers stirring and the fires sparking, a tightness in her chest, a catch to her breathing, a flowing warmth in her loins, oh no oh no, and she wants to pull free of his arms, she doesn’t want this to happen, she can’t let it happen, but he is so warm, his touch is so gentle, she is safe but no, no! she can’t let it happen, she can’t know, but it is happening, does that in itself mean something and is that enough, it is happening inside her, she is letting it happen, she wants it, she wants him, she wants him, him, him, him

  and Lennox holds her, rocking, whispering, and he has never known a tenderness like the one which he feels for this girl, this victim, this kin, her body is soft against his and she is still trembling but it is a different kind of trembling now, somehow he senses that and he holds her tighter and she says, “No, oh please,” and her arms go around him and she is holding onto him now, too, she is pressing against him and moving against him and they fall sideways into the dust and fit their bodies tightly to one another, clinging, clinging

  and Jana presses her face to the side of his neck, not wanting to press her face there, his pulse beat is soft and irregular against her ear, and she moves her hands along his back, not wanting to move them, and moves her hips against him, not wanting to move them, I don’t want this, she thinks, I don’t want this, and her loins are hungry and eager for the first sign of his arousal

  and Lennox becomes aware of her body now, moving, the rippling of her muscles under his fingers, and he understands, he understands what must be happening inside her, the confusion, he doesn’t want to hurt her but he doesn’t know what will hurt her the most—capitulation or rejection, he wants to help, he wants to reassure her, he knows she is normal, he feels it, he has to communicate it to her and there is really only one way now, but he is so tired, the toll of the past two days has been too great, he can’t, and he focuses on her movements, on her body, and his hand slips down and touches her buttocks and then he is lengthening, growing, impossibly and wondrously coming alive

  and Jana feels him erect against her, oh no, no, and her hips move faster under his hand now, under his hand, I don’t want this, “No, please no,” and she is burning, she is burning, Love me, no, love me love me love me

  and Lennox says her name, “Jana,” and hears her moaning and wants her desperately and his fingers on her clothing are deft, quick, gentle

  and Jana helps him, helps them both, the wind blowing cold over naked flesh, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, her lips saying “No” and her mind saying Yes, yes! and she is afraid, she is terrified, but he is whispering to her now, calming her, stroking her, and the fire, the need, the need

  and they are one, murmuring, clinging, moving, and it is savage, it is tender—together, reaching upward, reaching the zenith, together, together, it happens together, incredibly, perfectly, the way it had to be ...

  They lie silent, holding tightly to one another, and there is no need for words. Jana knows, and inside she weeps—but the tears are clean and good, purging. Lennox knows, and inside there is a peace, unstable but rich and promising. They are one now, in many ways.

  In many ways.

  The Final Day..

  One

  Vollyer came awake just before dawn—and he was blind.

  A soft, strangled cry bubbled in his throat; he sat up, pawing at his eyes. Darkness, darkness, with light shimmering faintly at the edges, with light flickering a long way off like candles at the end of a long, dark tunnel; but there were no images, no colors, there was only the light and pain, pain hammering behind the swollen lids, pain pulsating at the core of each eyeball. He shook his head and kept on shaking it, scratching wildly at the mucus-crusted sockets with the tips of his fingers.

  Di Parma had been sitting on a rock nearby, watching the eastern horizon turn a dusty gray with the approach of dawn, eating the last of the tinned meat with chilled fingers. He came running over to Vollyer and knelt beside him. “Harry, what’s the matter? Jesus, Harry, what is it?”

  “Get away from me!” Vollyer snapped at him. Control, control, get control of yourself, don’t panic, only the losers panic. Hands away from your eyes, only makes it worse rubbing at them, that’s it, blink now, blink, blink, light growing brighter, yes, taking away the darkness, force those lids up all the way, blink, blink, the sky, you can see the sky now and Di Parma, fuzzy but it’s Di Parma, concentrate, blink, his features, eyes, nose, mouth, blink, concentrate, blink, fuzziness fading, focus coming back, you’re all right, you’re not really blind, only temporary, bad strain that’s all, you can see now, you can see as well as before ...

  Vollyer dragged cool air into his lung
s and sat up again, looking around him. The solid objects had faint, dancing perimeter shadows until he stared at one in particular and then the shadow went away. His head ached massively, malignantly, and there were searing needles probing at the retinas of his eyes. He got shakily to his feet and held his hands out in front of him and stared at their backs; the hands were trembling, but there were only two of them and they had no dancing shadows.

  Di Parma said, “Was it your eyes, Harry? Mine have been giving me hell, too. It’s the glare of that sun ...”

  Vollyer said nothing. He walked slowly to the rock on which Di Parma had been sitting and took the binoculars from it and then went to where he could look out over the desert to the north. He lifted the glasses, squinting through the lens. The moon was gone now, the stars fading, and the landscape lay cold and starkly quiet under the retreating gray-black of the sky. He could see a long way, he could see cactus, rocks, bushy shrubs, distinct and identifiable forms. He released a long, soft breath, turning, calm again.

  “Come on,” he said to Di Parma. “It’s time to be moving. We’re close to them, I can feel it. Even with you shooting at that snake last night, we’re close to them. It won’t be long now ...”

  Two

  Brackeen said, “I can’t take any more of this sitting around. I’m going out and check with the deputy I posted at the junction.”

  “If he had anything to report, he would have radioed in,” Gottlieb said. He sat across from his partner, Dick Sanchez, at one of the desks in the substation, drinking his tenth or eleventh cup of coffee and chain-smoking cork-tipped cigarettes. Both men owned tired eyes and disheveled suits, and they were playing two-handed pinochle with no enthusiasm at all.

  Brackeen stood at the front counter, looking out through the window. The first pale, cold light of dawn touched the empty street beyond, an inchoate dissolution of the shadows resting in doorways and alleyways and at the corners of the false-fronted buildings. “I know that,” he said without turning. “But I’m ready to climb the goddamn walls.”

  “Lydell will have those men I asked for here any minute now,” Gottlieb told him. “Why don’t you wait for him and we’ll all go out together?”

  “I’d feel better moving around, that’s all.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “Radio when you’re coming?”

  “As soon as we leave.”

  “What time are the choppers going up?”

  “They should be in the air any minute now.”

  “Then we’ll have a report in another hour or less.”

  “About that.”

  Brackeen passed a hand across his face. There were deep circles etched into the puffy flesh beneath his eyes, and the lack of sleep had made the lids heavy and put a cottony taste in his mouth that was enhanced by the amount of coffee he had drunk and cigarettes he had smoked since last night. His nerves were raw-edged from inactivity, fatigue, caffein, nicotine. But his mind was clear and alert, kept that way by the prospect of movement and accomplishment, and by the presence of Gottlieb and Sanchez; the three of them had passed the hours since the arrival of the state investigators shortly after midnight in talking Brackeen’s theory through, examining every possibility, planning the moves to be made on this day.

  As Brackeen picked up his Stetson and crossed to the front door, Gottlieb said mildly, “Stay loose, huh?”

  “As loose as the two of you,” Brackeen said, and went out.

  He drove to the junction and talked to the deputy again, and there was nothing to report. The sky was much lighter now, splashed with gold and deep red on the eastern horizon, and it would not be long before the rounded rim of the sun edged up there like a huge golden shield. A narrow wash paralleled the county road for a short distance here, beginning just beyond the rutted surface of the abandoned rail company road; a red-topped, black-and-white striped Gila woodpecker swooped low over it, shrieking maniacally all the while. There was no other sound; the county road was deserted at this hour of the morning.

  Brackeen stood by his cruiser, looking up into the lightening heavens. The hell with this, he thought. He slid under the cruiser’s wheel and entered the abandoned road, driving slowly, his head moving in careful quadrants from the road surface to the terrain stretching away to the east. He did not expect to see anything, but this was better than just sitting, waiting for Lydell to show up, waiting for the choppers to report.

  A half-mile, by the odometer, beyond the place where he had found the rental Buick the day before, Brackeen U-turned and started back again. He passed the sandstone formation which had concealed the Buick, passed the dry wash where the wrecked yellow Triumph had lain, and followed the gentle curve in the road from due north to northeasterly. Less than a mile from the junction, he slowed, remembering the all but obliterated shortcut from the rail company road to the county highway several miles to the east of the junction; trucks carrying road-grading equipment and the men who operated it had made the cut across the flatland here in order to save some eight miles in the haul out of Kehoe City. Brackeen had been over the rutted surface several times. It skirted a long, deep arroyo, over which the railroad, in the early days of the century, had built a trestle for a proposed spur to Cuenca Seco; the trestle had long since collapsed into the arroyo, and there was little else remaining of the abortive line of tracks branching off the later-abandoned line to Kehoe City. The railroad had not had much luck in this area of the desert over the years.

  Brackeen did not want to return to the junction just yet; it only meant more passive waiting. He swung the cruiser off the road, onto the creosote-choked flatland. It wouldn’t do any harm to check the area out here, he thought; there was always the chance that he might spot something, and even if he didn’t it would consume some time until the air reconnaissance could be made and Lydell could get off his fat ass and into Cuenca Seco with the team of men.

  Slowly, dust blossoming in lazy plumes behind him, Brackeen drove toward the flaming brass light in the eastern sky.

  Three

  Lennox and Jana left the tank at the first fading of darkness, rested and with regathered strength, and began moving toward a long sloping rise to the north. The air was no longer cold, though still cool, and they went as swiftly as their stiffened, aching bodies would allow; they had drunk deeply of the pulp of another barrel cactus outside the tank, and the moisture would stay with them for a while, until the sun climbed into the sky and set fire to the desert again.

  They had passed the long night wrapped in each other’s arms, insulated against the biting wind, against the terror which lay without. The need for words had not come to either of them, and they had slept, and when they had awakened there was still no need to put voice to what they had shared. Jana had met Lennox’s gaze when he looked at her, and smiled faintly and nodded, thanking him with her eyes, telling him that she was all right now, that she knew and accepted the truth about herself.

  As they ran, Lennox found himself wondering how deeply his feelings for Jana were rooted—if he could possibly be in love with her. There was none of the wild, joyous exhilaration he had felt with Phyllis in the beginning, none of the electricity, the chemical magnetism that draws and fuses two individuals; there was only the peace she generated within him, the bond that was theirs, the tenderness that overwhelmed him each time he looked at her and touched her. Was that love? Or the beginnings of love? He didn’t know, but he wanted to know. He wanted to know her better, he wanted her to know him, he wanted them to get out of this place, this trap, so that the understanding and the perception each seemed to have of the other’s inner self could be nurtured and developed.

  He gripped Jana’s hand tightly, looking over his shoulder at her, trying to smile with his cracked mouth. She returned the pressure of his fingers, touching him with her eyes, and he knew that she felt some of the same things about him—and the knowledge filled him with hope and with pleasure and with urgency.

  They approached the crest of the rise, threading th
eir way between scattered boulders and thick clumps of mesquite; the sky was bright with the building haze of heat now, and Gam-bel’s quail and an occasional jackrabbit scurried away before them, startled by their presence in a world that belonged to creatures instead of men. Finally, minutes later, they topped the rise, and Lennox stopped abruptly, staring at what lay beyond. “Oh God,” he said softly.

  Flat, semi-barren land stretched away from them, void of all but transitory cover; there was a line of rocky outcroppings to the west, but they were some distance away and he and Jana would have to cross a great expanse of open ground to get to them. Naked, they would be naked ...

  Jana said sharply, “Jack, look!”

  “What is it?”

  “Down there! Is that a road?”

  Lennox followed her pointing arm with his eyes. Near the foot of the long slope falling away into the flatland was a pair of faintly discernible wheel ruts, obliterated in spots, grown over with brush in others, but ruts nonetheless, coming from around the rocks to the west, hooking eastward to parallel a wide arroyo cut deeply, like a jagged scar, into the dry, desolate plain. They would lead somewhere, they would lead to Cuenca Seco or to another road, they would lead out.