Free Tony and Susan by Austin Wright Page A

suggestion, lest there be something obscene about it.
    The countryside was green and yellow, rolling and fresh in the morning light. The roads shone black in the sun. They sped suspended high on the sides of hills overlooking broad valleys full of fields and patches of woods, and they descended into woody groves and rode up curves and climbed long straight slopes and slowed for villages and passed clusters of farmhouses and sheds and fields of corn and other fields with cows and yards with pigs and sheep on the opposite slope and dark patches of trees on the tops of the hills. He thought, how beautiful this country if he had Laura to say it to.
    The police station was a new one-story brick building surrounded by a chain link fence at the edge of a town. There were cows beyond the fence and a motel across the street. Tony Hastings followed Officer Talbot through a corridor and past a bulletin board and through an office with a counter into another office with two desks. The man at the desk in the farthest corner got up. ‘I’m Lieutenant Graves. Sergeant Miles went home.’
    Lieutenant Graves was a small man with round cheekbonesand a small chin like a cartoon squirrel and a black mustache that descended below his mouth on each side. His eyes or the shape of his face made him look a little like Ray in the night. I must not look at him, Tony said. He was afraid the lieutenant’s face would obliterate the memory of Ray’s. While Tony sat in the chair by the desk, Lieutenant Graves read the handwritten document on his desk. He was a slow reader and it took a long time. Then he asked Tony to repeat his story. He took it down on a pad of yellow lined paper, though Tony did not understand how he could compress it into so few laborious words. When the story was finished, he repeated the questions Sergeant Miles had asked. He sat a long time with his chin in his hand.
    ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve already put out an alert for the two cars. That ought to turn up something. Don’t know what else we can do except wait.’
    He looked at Tony. ‘Meanwhile, you ain’t got no car. You got a place to stay?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘There’s a motel across the street.’ He wrote something on a card. ‘Here’s the taxi number, you want that. Money?’
    ‘I have credit cards. My checkbook is in my suitcase. That’s in the car. All my clothes.’
    ‘There’s a bank on Hallicot Street. Opens at nine.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘It’s still early yet. Quite likely they went to sleep somewhere.’
    ‘Where?’ Tony said.
    The lieutenant thought. Nodded. ‘Must say it don’t look too good, with nobody calling in. But you know what I’m thinking. Maybe they left them some place like they left you and it take them a while to walk out. Fixing to take your car no doubt.’
    ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking, too,’ Tony said, meaning that’s what he was hoping, not saying what he was thinking. The lieutenant was tapping his forehead with his pencil, as if he were thinking other things as well.
    ‘You want to stay at that motel?’
    ‘I guess so.’
    ‘We’ll call you if we get anything.’
    Tony Hastings walked across the street to the motel. ‘No car?’ the fat woman said.
    ‘It’s stolen.’
    ‘Well, no kidding! So that’s what you were doing at the police. What can you give me for security?’
    ‘Credit card.’
    The motel smelled of plastic and air conditioning, the closed thick brown drapes made an unreal darkness in the room. He lay on the bed in his clothes and instantly the night was back with wind and a swirl of galactic clouds. Ray sitting on the radiator, laughing and saying, Don’t take it so serious, man, we was only kidding. But that was a dream, for now he was awake and crossing the yard to the police station where he saw, newly washed and sparkling in the sun, his car, safely returned. His heart leaped and he went inside. Laura and Helen were on a bench in the hall, there they were, and they jumped up and ran