Clandestine

"Yes," Quinn said, "we did. Let me quote. 'Sarah had high full breasts with cone-shaped dark brown nipples. Coarse hairs surrounded them. She was an experienced lover. We moved well together. She anticipated my motions and accommodated them with fluid grace.' Want some more, Underhill?"

"You filthy bastards," I said.

"Did you know that Sarah Kefalvian is a Communist, Underhill? She's listed in the rolls of five organizations that have been classified as Commie fronts. Did you know that?" Milner leaned over me, his knuckles white from grasping the table. "Do you fuck a lot of Commies, Underhill?" he hissed.

"Are you a Communist, Freddy?" Quinn asked.

"Go fuck yourself," I said.

Milner leaned over further; I could smell his tobacco breath. "I think you are a Communist. And a filthy pervert. Decent men don't write about the women they fuck. Decent men don't fuck Commies."

I stuck my hands under my thighs to control their shaking and to keep myself from hitting someone. My head was pounding and my vision blurred from the blackness throbbing behind my eyes. "You forgot to mention I've got red upholstery on my car. You forgot to mention I also fuck Koreans, Republicans, and Democrats. When I was in high school I had a redheaded girlfriend. I've got a red cashmere sweater, you forgot to mention that."

"There's one thing you didn't forget to mention," Quinn said. "Listen: 'I told Sarah about dodging the draft in '42. She is the only person besides Wacky to know that. Telling her made me feel strangely free.'"

Quinn spat on the floor. "I served in the war, Underhill. I lost a brother at Guadalcanal. All good Americans served. Anyone who dodged the draft is a no-good Commie traitor, and not worthy to carry a badge. You have brought disgrace to the department. The chief himself has been told of what we found in your diary. He ordered this investigation. We only had a little time to search your apartment. God knows what other Commie degeneracy we would have found, if we had had more time. You have two choices: resign, or face departmental trial on charges of moral turpitude. If you don't resign, we will take your diary to the feds. Draft-dodging is a federal offense."

Milner took a typed form out of his suit coat pocket. He placed on the table along with a pen; then he and his partner walked out of the room.

I stared at the resignation form. The print blurred before my eyes. Tears welled in them, and I willed the effort to stanch their flow. It took a minute, but they stopped before they could burst out of me. I walked to the window and looked out. I marked the time and committed the scene to memory, then took off my shoulder holster and laid it on the table. I placed my badge next to it and signed away my access to the wonder.

Camera-wielding reporters were stationed in front of my apartment as I turned onto my block. I couldn't face them, so I drove around the corner and cut through the alley, then parked and hopped fences, entering my apartment through the back door. I filled a suitcase with clean clothes, hitched Night Train to his leash and walked back out to the alley and around the block to my car.

I drove north, with no destination in mind. Night Train chewed golf balls in the backseat. It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one.

Hugging the coast road reminded me of my recent jaunt with Lorna, which suddenly brought the future back to me in a blinding rush of schemes and contingencies.

I looked at the telephone poles lining the Pacific Coast Highway and contemplated sweet, instant oblivion. When the tall wooden spires began to look like the ultimate scheme, I let out a muffled, dry sob and swung my Buick inland through some insignificant dirt canyon trail, moving upward through green scrub country until I came down forty-five minutes later in the San Fernando Valley.

I headed north again, catching the ridge route in Chatsworth and moving up it toward the Grapevine and Bakersfield. I wanted to find someplace barren and bereft of beauty, a good flat place to walk my dog and arrive at decisions without the distractions of picturesque surroundings.

Bakersfield wasn't the place. At three-thirty P.M., the temperature was still close to one hundred degrees. I stopped at a diner and ordered a Coke. The Coke cost a nickel and the ice that accompanied it a quarter. The counterman was giving me the fisheye. He handed me my Coke in a paper cup and opened his mouth to speak. I didn't let him; I slammed some change on the countertop and walked quickly back to my car.

Some hundred and fifty miles north of Bakersfield, I realized I was entering Steinbeck country, and I almost sighed with relief. Here was a place to light, filled with the nuances and epiphanies of my carefree college reading days.