Amarillo, silhouetted by the falling sun, grew on the horizon as they approached, the squat office buildings resting like building blocks on the prairie. Erica thought of the Wild West of her youthful daydreams—cowboys in chaps and ten-gallon hats, the country sere and tan, the long-horn herds lowing on the dusty trail to the stockyards or railroads—but instead, the Texas landscape seemed bereft till they reached an airport dotted with Piper Cubs and an antique biplane. If she jumped from the car, she could roll down the embankment and sprint across the dust, make it to the runway, and some movie-star pilot—maybe Dustin Hoffman or who was the boy that played Billy Pilgrim in that Vonnegut film?—would rescue her and they would fly away, make it home or down to Mexico, where there could be a happier ending. Wiley pulled the Torino into the parking lot of the Wagon Wheel Inn and checked in for the night. When he jumped into bed with her, she showed him her back, complaining that the nausea had returned.
She went into the bathroom at dawn and chopped six inches of her hair, leaving the ragged ends to skirt the base of her skull. Using a peroxide kit Wiley had shoplifted, she bleached the remains, mourning in the shower. Dizzy from the sulfur smell, she sat in the bathtub and let the stream beat the top of her head, and closing her eyes, she waited until her scalp no longer burned from the chemicals. As she dried herself with the thin white towels, Erica could hear him through the closed door. Wiley was practicing again, posing in front of the mirror, first cocking the pistol and then snapping together the shotgun. The bloodied grocer moaned from behind the drawn shower curtain as she trimmed her wet bangs and the sides to frame her face, and he would not keep quiet, so she wrapped her hair in a towel and stepped into the bedroom. Trained on the entrance, the shotgun greeted her. For a brief second, she thought that Wiley intended to shoot her and wished that he would.
“Let's see,” he said, motioning with the gun at her head.
Unwinding the towel like a turban, she murmured softly to herself the lines to a song her mother used to sing about a yellow bird way up in a lemon tree. Brilliantly golden, bordering on white, her hair stuck out in crazy angles like straw from under a scarecrow's hat. She fluffed it further with the scruff of the towel and stood there beneath her burnished halo.
“You did it. Your own mother wouldn't recognize you. You are a whole new you.”
In the lobby of their motel, the morning clerk stood behind the counter staring at the vacant space, the landscape already beginning to bake, deep in conversation with himself. He did not acknowledge Wiley or Erica when they entered other than to flinch at the sound of the door closing. Despite the hum of the air conditioner, he perspired heavily, the sweat visible in twin arcs below his madras-shirt sleeves. Drops dotted his forehead and clung like dew along his receding hairline. As the two neared the counter, the man stiffened and began to speak in the practiced cadence of a radio announcer. “We're open Monday through Friday. Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday. Nine to six. Drop on by and say hello. That's Haverty's Hardware on South Cheyenne.”
“We'd like to check out,” Wiley said.
The radio man ran his fingers through his wispy hair and stared through the window, as if he could see something invisible to the others. “Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Monday. Closed on weekends. Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Monday-Tuesday. Nine to six, so we can be with our families and you can be with yours. Drop on by and say hello. That's Haverty's Hardware on South Cheyenne. Tell ‘em Hank sent you.”
Wiley leaned across the counter. “Are you going to take the key, friend?”
The question caused a synapse to fire the broadcaster back to normalcy. He fiddled with the receipts and poked at the bell as if it were explosive. The nervous man made them nervous. At the axis of jaw and ear, his skin looked beshot with blackheads, as if he, too, had been sprayed by bird pellets long ago, and his lips trembled slightly, struggling to contain a torrent of words. She wondered what station he was receiving now. Out of some innate civility, she and Wiley waited, said nothing, gave him the chance to start.
“Where are you heading?” he blurted out. “The maps, the maps.”
“Las Vegas,” Erica said.
“Viva Las Vegas. That's Spanish. Runaways?”
“Our honeymoon,” Erica lied.
“And that's the way it is,” the man said.
“We'd like to get us some breakfast,” Wiley said. “Anyplace good around here? Maybe some pancakes.”
“I saw Jesus once, the face of Jesus on a pancake.”
“Must have been hard to eat,” Wiley joked.
“You aren't the same one come in last night.” He pointed to Erica. “What happened to her?”
She did not realize that he was referring to her hair until Wiley turned to stare at her head. All she could offer was a shrug of her shoulders.
“I run away,” the radio man said. “Run away from the place they kept me, and you have to run away where they'll never find you. If they come looking. Your mom and dad. And the police. The maps.”
“We're not running away,” Wiley insisted. “We're on our honeymoon. We're married.” He handed over the keys. The man searched the papers and receipts scattered now across the counter, finally handing them a napkin with a greasy bacon stain.
Wiley played along. “If there's no other charges, we'll be on our way.”
“Stay off the main roads. Don't go where they expect you. The straight path is not always the fastest way. Look both ways before you cross the street. Do you have a gun?”