Hot Spot Read Free Page B

glasses. He was blind.
    “I don’t think there’s anybody here, Dad,” I said.
    “Mister Julian must be heah. He always heah.”
    “Well, damned if I see him.”
    “You know wheah the fiah is at?” he asked.
    “Yeah. Down the street just this side of the gin. It’s a hamburger shack.”
    “Oh. Thank you, Cap’n.” He turned and tapped his way out with the cane.
    Just then a door in the rear opened and a man came out, apparently from a washroom. He must have been around sixty and looked like a high-school maths teacher with his vague blue eyes and high forehead with thin white hair.
    He smiled apologetically. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting. Everybody’s gone to the fire.”
    “No,” I said absently. “No. Not at all.”
    He came over and went into one of the cages, and said something.
    “What?” I hadn’t been paying attention.
    “I said what can I do for you?”
    “Oh. I want to open an account.”
    I made out the draft and deposited it and went on back to the lot, still thinking about it. Everybody in this town must be fire crazy.
    I sold a car that afternoon and felt a little better for a while. I saw Gloria Harper only once, when she came out of the loan office at five o’clock with another girl. She went up the street without looking towards where I was leaning against a car on the lot. We locked up the office a little later and I got in my own car and drove over to the rooming house. It was sultry and oppressive, and after I took a shower and tried to dry myself the fresh underwear kept sticking to my perspiration-wet body. I sat in the room in my shorts and looked out the window at the back yard as the sun went down. It had a high board fence around it, a little grass turning brown with the heat, and a chinaberry tree with a dirty rabbit hutch leaning against it. This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?
    After a while I put on white slacks and a shirt and went down to the restaurant. When I had eaten it was still only seven o’clock, and there was nothing except the drugstore or the movie. I wandered up that way, but it was a Roy Rogers western, so I got in the car and drove around without any thought in mind except staying out of that room as long as I could. Without knowing why, I found myself following the route we’d taken that morning, going over the sandhill past the abandoned farms and down into the bottom.
    There was a slice of moon low in the west and when I parked off the road at the end of the bridge the river was a silvery gleam between twin walls of blackness under the trees. I stripped off my clothes and walked down to the sandbar and waded in. The water was a little cooler than the air and went around in a big lazy eddy in the darkness under the bridge. I circled back up the other side and waded out after a while to lie on the sandbar and look up at the stars.
    I was still sweltering when I went back to the room. I couldn’t sleep. In the next room an old man was reading aloud to his wife from the Bible, labouring slowly through the Book of Genesis, a begat at a time, and pronouncing it with the accent on the first syllable. I lay there on the hard slab of a bed in the heat and wondered when I’d start walking up the walls. Gloria Harper and Sutton kept going around and around in my mind, and a long time afterwards, just before I dropped off, I came back to that other thing I couldn’t entirely forget. It was that bank with nobody in it.

3
    T HE NEXT MORNING THERE WAS another argument with Harshaw. Just after we opened the office he wanted me to take a cloth and dust off the cars. I was feeling low anyway and told him the hell with it. The other salesman, an older, sallow-faced man named Gulick, got some dust cloths out of a desk drawer and went on out.
    Harshaw leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “What’s the matter with you, Madox? You got a grudge against the world?”
    “No,” I said. “I’m a salesman. When I want