I pushed open the door to the coach and looked down the rows of Pullman seats. She was there, looking out the window into the darkness. I started toward her, but thought better of it. There were a couple of dozen pa.s.sengers between her and me. I couldn"t do anything here, now, anyway. I dropped into a scungy seat, and puffs of dust went into the air.

I slid down and took off my right shoe. The twenty was folded neat against the instep. It was all I"d put aside. But I knew the conductor would be along to punch my ticket. And I didn"t want to get caught like Jed Parkman. I wanted my fare to be paid.

We"d see about it in Kansas City.

It was a change. Riding inside.

She went to a phone booth and dialed a place without looking up the number. I waited. She went out to stand in front of the terminal. After a while a car with two women came up, and she got in. I went dark and opened the back door and slid in. They looked around and didn"t see anything in the shadows back there, and the heavyset truck d.y.k.e driving said, "Now what the h.e.l.l was that?" and the pimply one with the plastic hair, the one in the middle, reached over the seat back and thumbed down the lock.

"Wind," she said.

"What wind?" the truck said. But she pulled out.

I always liked K.C. Nice ride. Even in winter. But I didn"t like the women. Not one of them.

They drove out, almost to the Missouri border, toward Weston. I knew a bourbon distillery out there. Best ever made. The truck pulled in at a big house set apart from slummy-looking places on a street with only one comer light. Wh.o.r.e house. Had to be. It was.

I didn"t understand, but I"d by G.o.d certainly find out soon. I"d arrived, but Jed was still traveling.

The truck said, "You pay the girl."

I picked out the tall, slim one in the harem pants and halter top. She couldn"t be smart, I thought.

With a face like that, to wind down in a crib was some kind of special stupid. Or something else.

We went upstairs. The room was like any bedroom. There were stuffed animals on the bed, a giraffe with pink Day-Glo spots, a koala, floppy gopher or muskrat, I can"t tell them apart. She had a photo of a movie star stuck in the frame of the bureau mirror. She took off the harem pants and I said, "We"ll talk." She gave me a look I knew. Another freako. "That"s two bucks extra," she said. I shook my head.

"Five should cover everything."

She shrugged, and sat down on the edge of the bed, her thin legs straight out in front of her.

We stared at each other.

"Why"d you send Jed to h.e.l.l?"

Her head snapped up on her neck and she quivered like a hound on scent. She didn"t even know how to ask me.

"You get the h.e.l.l out of here!"

"I"ve got five bucks worth of something coming."

She bounced up off the bed, and went straight across the room. She was screaming before the door was open: "Bren! Bren! C"mon, Bren! Help up here!"

I heard the foundations of the house shake and the rumble of artillery on the next hill, and then something big and hairy came at me. He had to come through the door sidewise. I put up my hands and that was all. He carried me straight across the room, into the bureau. My back snapped against the edge of the bureau and he bent me till everything started to slip up toward the ceiling. The girl ran out, still shouting.

When she was gone I ended it for him.

There was a trellis outside the window. I went down until the ivy ripped loose and I fell the rest of the way.

That night I slept on the front porch of the house next door, in the glider, watching the ambulance and then the police cars come and go. There were two unmarked police cars that stayed very late. I don"t think they were on duty.

I waited two days, sleeping on the front porch of the house next door. I"d have gone dark more than I did, but there were three empty lots between me and the wh.o.r.e house, and the people with the front porch had gone away for a while. I suppose on a winter vacation, maybe. There was plenty of weed and gra.s.s around, and I let snow melt in an empty milk bottle. At night I"d go dark and steal Hydrox Cookies and milk and beef jerky from a 24-hour market. I don"t eat much, usually. Missed coffee, though.

On the second day I jimmied a window in the empty house. Just to be ready.

Toward evening of the second day, she came out. I went dark, waited on the sidewalk for her, and she walked straight into my fist.

In the empty house, I laid her out on a canopied bed in the master bedroom. When she came to and sat up, I was slouched in a chair across from the bed. She shook her head, looked around, focused, saw me, and started to let go with the screaming again. I sat forward in the chair and said, very softly, "Bren, what happened to him, I can do that again," and she looked sick, and shut her mouth. "Now we go back to where we were," I said, getting up. I walked over and stood there near her. She lay back, terrified, no other word for it.

"How did you know Jed?" My voice was level, but I was hurting.

"I"m his daughter."

"I can make you tell the truth."

"I"m not lying, I"m his...I was his daughter."

"You"re white."

She didn"t say anything.

"Okay, why did you send him to h.e.l.l? You know what it means to take the money."

She snorted a very s.h.i.tty laugh.

"Lady, you better understand something. I don"t know who the h.e.l.l you are, but that old man found me when I was seven years old and kept me alive till I was old enough to go it on my own. Now he meant stuff to me, lady, so I can see myself getting mad enough at you to do just about anything. More green than even Bren. So you feel like telling me why you"d do something like that to a man who was kind to everybody?"

Her face went very hard. Even scared, she hated. " And just what the h.e.l.l do you know? Yeah, he had kind for everybody. Everybody "cept his own." Then, softly, "Everybody "cept me."

I couldn"t tell if she was sick, or deluded, or just putting me on. Lying? Not where she was. No reason for it. And she"d seen that Bren. No, she was telling the truth-if she believed it.

A white girl with old led for a father?

It didn"t make any sense.

Unless...

There are some you can meet-the strange, twisted ones-and you know them by an aura, a scent, a feel about them, that if you had one single word-like "junkie" or "nympho" or "hooker" or "Bircher"-a key word that labeled their secret thing, you would understand all the inexplicable, off -center things about them. The one-word people. One word and you"ve got the handle on them. One word like wino, or diabetic, or puritan, or- "Pa.s.sing."

She didn"t answer. She just stared at me, and hated me. And I looked in her face to see it, now that I knew what it was, but it wasn"t there, of course. She was good at it. And that explained what had been between her and old Jedediah Parkman. Why she"d kissed the dead meat and sent it straight to h.e.l.l. But not the kind of h.e.l.l led had consigned her to. If he"d had all that kind of love for stray cats like me, I could imagine how strong his hate and frustration and shame would have been at one of his own pretending to be what she wasn"t.

"You never know about people," I said to her. "He took in all kinds, and didn"t care where they came from, or what they were. l.u.s.t as long as they didn"t lie about it. He had a lot of love."

She was waiting for me to do something bad to her, what she thought she had coming. I laughed, but not the way Jed used to laugh. "Lady, I ain"t your daddy. He"s punished you all he"s ever going to. And you and me, neither one of us is white, and we"re too much alike for me to punish you."

Pa.s.sing. How about that. She didn"t know what the color line even looked like. Black for white: h.e.l.l, that"s a cinch. led, Jed, you poor old n.i.g.g.e.r b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You knew I couldn"t get home again, back to whatever world it was I"d come from, and you taught me how to pa.s.s so they wouldn"t kill me, but you couldn"t handle it when it happened to you.

I pulled my last five bucks out of my pocket and tossed it on the end of the bed. "Here, baby, get it changed and keep a couple of silver dollars for your own party. Maybe Jed"ll be waiting and you can straighten it out between you."

Then I went dark and started to leave. She was staring at where I"d been, her mouth open, as I paused in the doorway. " And keep the change," I said.

After all, she"d paid the dues for me, hadn"t she?