Tilting the Balance

Given the way prices had gone crazy since the Lizards came, that wasn’t out of line for good chicken stew and two mugs of beer. Jens felt a surge of pride that she hadn’t been a pro. He dug in his pocket for a roll that would have astonished him in prewar days, peeled off two twenties, and gave them to her. “I’ll get your change,” she said, and started for the cash register.

“Don’t be silly,” he told her.

She smiled. “I said you were a gentleman.”

“Listen, Mary, when I come back from where I’m going-” he began, with the sentimentality satiation and a bit of beer can bring.

She cut him off. “If I ever see you again, tell me whatever you’re going to tell me. Till then, I’m not gonna worry about it. The war’s made everybody a little bit crazy.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” he said, and thought about Barbara for the first time since he decided to try playing footsie with Mary. Take that, bitch, he said to himself. Aloud, to Mary, he went on, “Thanks for everything-and I mean for everything. I’d better be heading out now.”

She sighed. “I know. Nobody ever stays in Idaho Springs-except me.” She took a couple of quick steps forward, pecked him on the cheek, and moved back again before he could grab her. “Wherever it is you’re going to, you be careful, hear me?”

“I will.” Suddenly he wanted to stay in Idaho Springs, a town he’d never heard of until he started planning the trip for Hanford. Amazing what a roll in the hay can do, he thought. But discipline held, aided by doubts whether Mary wanted anything more from him than that one roll, either.

The doorbell jingled again as he walked out of the First Street Cafe. He climbed onto his bicycle. “Giddyap,” he muttered as he started to pedal. The world wasn’t such a bad old place after all.

He held that view even though he needed a solid day to get to the top of Berthoud Pass, which wasn’t much more than twenty miles beyond Idaho Springs. He spent the night in the mining hamlet of Empire, then tackled the run to the pass the next morning. He didn’t think he’d ever worked so hard in this life. He’d gained a thousand feet between Idaho Springs and Empire, and picked up another three thousand in the thirteen miles between Empire and the top of the pass. Not only was he going up an ever-steeper grade, he was doing it in air that got thinner and thinner. Berthoud Pass topped out at better than eleven thousand feet: 11,315, said a sign that announced the Continental Divide.

“Whew.” Jens paused for a well-earned rest. He was covered with sweat and his heart was beating harder than it had when he’d come atop Mary Cooley, a day before and most of a mile lower. Denver had taken some getting used to. He wondered if anybody this side of an Andean Indian could hope to get used to the thin air of Berthoud Pass.

And yet signs on side roads pointed the way to ski resorts. People actually came up here for fun. He shook his head. “Me, I’m just glad it’s downhill from here on out,” he said, swigging from one of the canteens he’d filled back at Bards Creek in Empire. The kind folk there had also given him chunks of roast chicken to take along. He gnawed on a drumstick as he tried without much luck to catch his breath.

He thought he’d sweated out every drop of water in him, but emptying the canteen proved him wrong. He went off behind a boulder-not that anybody would have seen him if he’d taken a leak right out in the middle of US 40-and unzipped his fly.

The second he started to whiz, he hissed in sudden and unexpected pain; somebody might as well have lighted a match and stuck it up his joint. And along with the urine came thick yellow pus. “What the hell is that?” he burst out, and then, a moment later, as realization struck, “Jesus Christ, I’ve got the fucking clap!”

And where he’d got it was painfully obvious, in the most literal sense of the word. Not from the palm of his own hand, that was for goddamn sure. Somebody who’d lie down with one stranger passing through Idaho Springs… he wondered how many strangers she’d lain down with. One of them had left her a present, and she’d been generous enough to give it to him.

“That’s great,” he said. “That’s just wonderful.” Here he’d been on the point of rejoining the human race, and this had to happen. What he’d hoped would be his ticket out of the black gloom that had seized him ever since Barbara started laying that miserable ballplayer now turned out to be just another kick in the nuts-again, literally.

He thought about turning the bicycle around and heading back toward Idaho Springs. Give that tramp a Springfield thank-you, he thought. It would be an easy ride, too-all downhill. Down that grade, I could do twenty miles in twenty minutes. He knew he was exaggerating, but not by that much.