But they saw no one that day, and on the tenth it was Julie Lawry they ran across.
The day was another scorcher. They had pedaled most of the afternoon with their shirts tied around their waists, and both of them were getting brown as Indians. They hadn't been making very good time, not today, because of the apples. The green apples.
They had found them growing on an old apple tree in a farmyard, green and small and sour, but they had both been deprived of fresh fruit for a long time, and they tasted ambrosial. Nick made himself stop after two, but Tom ate six, greedily, one after the other, right down to the cores. He had ignored Nick's motions that he should stop; when he got an idea in his head, Tom Cullen could be every bit as attractive as a wayward child of four.
So, beginning around eleven in the morning and continuing through the rest of the afternoon, Tom had the squats. Sweat ran off him in small creeks. He groaned. He had to get off his bike and walk it up even shallow hills. Despite his irritation at the poor time they were making, Nick couldn't help a certain rueful amusement.
When they reached the town of Pratt around 4 P.M., Nick decided that was it for the day. Tom collapsed gratefully on a bus-stop bench in the shade and dozed off at once. Nick left him there and went along the deserted business section in search of a drugstore. He would get some Pepto-Bismol and force Tom to drink it when he woke up, whether Tom wanted to or not. If it took a whole bottle to cork Tom up, so be it. Nick wanted to make up some time tomorrow.
He found a Rexall between the Pratt Theater and the local Norge. He slipped in through the open door, and stood for a moment smelling the familiar hot, unaired, stale smell. There were other odors mixed in, strong and cloying. Perfume was the strongest. Perhaps some of the bottles had burst in the heat.
Nick glanced around, looking for the stomach medicines, trying to remember if Pepto-Bismol went over in the heat. Well, the label would say. His eyes slipped past a mannequin and two rows to the right he saw what he wanted. He had taken two steps that way when he realized that he had never before seen a mannequin in a drugstore.
He looked back and what he saw was Julie Lawry.
She was standing perfectly still, a bottle of perfume in one hand, the small glass wand you used to daub the stuff on in the other. Her china-blue eyes were wide in stunned, disbelieving surprise. Her brown hair was drawn back and tied with a brilliant silk scarf that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing a pink middy sweater and bluejeans shorts that were almost abbreviated enough to be mistaken for panties. There was a rash of pimples on her forehead and a hell of a good one right in the middle of her chin.
She and Nick stared at each other across half the length of the deserted drugstore, both frozen now. Then the bottle of perfume dropped from her fingers, shattered like a bomb, and a hothouse reek filled the store, making it smell like a funeral parlor.
"Jesus, are you real?" she asked in a trembling voice.
Nick's heart had begun to race, and he could feel his blood thudding crazily in his temples. Even his eyesight had begun to wham in and out a little, making dots of light race across his field of vision.
He nodded.
"You ain't a ghost?"
He shook his head.
"Then say somethin. If you ain't a ghost, say somethin."
Nick put a hand across his mouth, then on his throat.
"What's that s'posed to mean?" Her voice had taken on a slightly hysterical tone. Nick couldn't hear it... but he could sense it, see it on her face. He was afraid to step toward her, because if he did, she would run. He didn't think she was afraid of seeing another person; what she was afraid of was that she was seeing a hallucination, and she was cracking up. Again, he felt that wave of frustration. If he could only talk -
Instead, he went through his pantomime again. It was, after all, the only thing he could do. This time understanding dawned.
"You can't talk? You're a mute?"
Nick nodded.
She gave a high laugh that was mostly frustration. "You mean somebody finally showed up and it's a mute guy?"
Nick shrugged and gave a slanting smile.
"Well," she said, coming down the aisle to him, "you ain't bad-looking. That's something." She put a hand on his arm, and the swell of her br**sts almost touched his arm. He could smell at least three different kinds of perfume, and under all of them the unlovely aroma of her sweat.
"My name's Julie," she said. "Julie Lawry. What's yours?" She giggled a little. "You can't tell me, can you? Poor you." She leaned a little closer, and her br**sts brushed him. He began to feel very warm. What the hell, he thought uneasily, she's only a kid.