to the flaunted, broadcast bicycle, she bolted the doors to the house and buckled back through the house to double-check the locks.
Her eyes fixed on the shotgun in its leather case.
With a resigned sigh, she shook her rum-addled head and pulled her arms through the straps of the heavy and carefully packed rucksack. Next, she pulled her right arm through the strap on the leather shotgun holster and tried to center it before pounding the pith helmet down over her thick hair. All that remained was to throw her leg over the high bar on the second-hand Schwinn and push down, right foot first, to begin her newsworthy expedition.
She would return the gun only if Anissa apologized.
Once she left the gravel driveway, the first short section was downhill from the house with its lovely view. If she’d forgotten something, she refused to return back uphill to fetch it. She carried a wad of cash. She had a bank account. She could do whatever she fancied. And for the next 2,500 miles, she chose (chose and elected) to make a noble statement.
Anyway, Florida was not her sort of place. The people were too ghastly rich, too spoiled. She was not like that, never had been. She was still the genuine loving girl that Russell had fallen in love with, and it was time she was simply allowed to be herself—a fierce beauty who incidentally held no prejudices against people for their skin color. The only thing she found offensive in others was stupidity. She had a nose for that. Otherwise, she was as benevolent as the next person.
As she set off, she formulated her inalterable goals. One, to get from A to B; Two to get Anissa’s goat; Three, to demonstrate her stamina and devotion to Russell’s memory, who was of course watching altogether too silently but with amazement from his perch on high; and Four, to be free of the self-righteous women who were trying their best to sour everything she’d been rightfully given. (Mum among them.) Five, possibly to move eventually to Capri. She’d heard it was lovely with a blue grotto and cosmopolitan tastes.
“You won’t make it even to Tallahassee!” Richard Frenzl, the banker, said when she withdrew cash in ten dollar bills.
“You certainly don’t know me.” And each time, she reiterated this: to the bitch next door, to the postman, to the sour-puss clerk in the tackle shop, to the radio repairman and certainly to the conniving and grasping housekeeper Russell was too timid to fire, she had to repeat herself. “No one knows what mettle I am made of.” Pedal, pedal.
So she had mounted the bicycle and left the Lantana house overlooking Lake Worth, quite aware of herself as a glamorous heiress in a Technicolor movie and wishing she could see the glimmering shards of her own dazzling charisma as she passed. “You don’t know me. I do not back down.”
Every car slowed—some hooted. At first, she waved back gaily, holding the bicycle as steady as she could on the gravelly shoulder of the roadbed. They admired her, Hubba Hubba! She ought to have put a sign on the back of her shirt: California or Bust.
Within the first hour, pedaling along roads she habitually drove, she realized that her outfit was ludicrous. She looked like a Great White Hunter off in search of a lost herd of elephants. Whatever had possessed her?
And she had waited too close to noon to start out. The morning temperatures were already in the nineties. The more she struggled under the blazing sun, the less she enjoyed bicycling.
But she had stick-to-it-iveness. Russell had admired that about her: Phyllis did not waffle. Not only did she damn well do what she said she would, she was who she said she was. For the present, she had plenty of time to ruminate about her virtues. She was young, and she believed she had a charming bonny accent, and she felt that her beauty weakened men and aggravated women. She told herself that she was a star, that the world was her oyster.
But perhaps she would be wise to stay off of the major roads and head off for the green cool kudzu that covered and protected the abandoned trucks and barns of the families now torn apart by war. So many vine-tented farms had been abandoned by their men drafted away in the fight for freedom. So she turned to where the scarlet hibiscus grew, to the lantana and away from the oleander medians. She told herself to change directions.
She had started out on the South Dixie, pedaled over to Lake Worth Road then west, heading for the Florida Turnpike. Carefully folded in her shirt pocket was the map gone soggy now, and she was too bushed to swing off the bicycle and fight her slipping pack to trace out a tree-covered cooler route. She did not feel free and liberated; she was not as she had imagined herself, coasting down hills, the wind in her hair and a broad smile on her face.
Bugs hit her teeth if she parted her lips, they speckled her neck.
The late February air was heavy, a steady wind swept off the Atlantic at her back, drivers honked, convoy trucks that ground past at ‘victory speed’ forced her from her steady path to the side of the road. War Bond billboards mildewed in the humidity. Burma Shave. Swamps.
Barely two hours of searing sun and still looking even more and more like a drenched freak, she was on the verge of collapse. She could no longer fight the shifting pack and shotgun on her back, so she gave up and searched for her first overnight stop. Of course, she had planned to rely upon the soothing comforts of the advertised, clean, well-equipped Texaco stations for short breaks in her journey, and at night, to sleep in small, scrupulous Swiss-run tourist inns which must exist.
But now having turned to go along the inland route, she toiled past stinking motels thrown up for truck drivers and the railroad workforce. On her first night at a Y in the road, she bought a roadside meal for a dollar and in a rundown room shared her bed with cockroaches. All through the humid darkness, the trains clacked past whistling into the night, rocking GIs from their poker games by swaying them to sleep while Phyllis swatted flies, sweating naked under musty, line-dried sheets.
The following day was the same: under a shade tree adjacent to a stream and even doused with D.D.T., she was driven away from her midday exhaustion and earned rest by a million hungry mosquitoes. At most she had come forty miles in two days. Her tires melted on the asphalt and it was not yet summer. She went another sodden mile, trying to outrun the ravenous swarms at her back. Bugs by the millions, hatching young and hungry everywhere in the kudzu, under the sugarcane plume grass. What had made her think that a tree-lined road would be pleasant?
Forsaking her green dream of a ride through the countryside, she turned east again toward the Dixie Highway, retracing her way. At least the motels would be adequate winter fare for pale women from Detroit and their pneumonia-riddled sun-starved children. So what if people stared at her and whooped and yelled as though she was a deluded runaway.
She didn’t care anymore. She turned back and was actually surprised to stumble across her first Texaco Station on a connecting road to the coast. Delirious, she pulled into it. The promised Texaco smile floated above great moons of underarm sweat staining the proprietor’s careless uniform. His doughy face changed to a leer when he noticed that she was completely alone. Then he saw the shotgun. Not a .45. So he turned down the radio and stood closer to her.
“’Bout the most I can do is pump your tires, Miss.”
“No, thank you,” she said, out of breath, ready to faint. She tipped the bike sideways and let it fall, too tired to throw her leg over the bar, too exhausted and discouraged to return the smile.
He owed her something, something that had been promised in the slick, half-page Texaco advertisements. A cool place to rest in the shade, some pampering. Hospitality. Maybe even a Coca-Cola.
She was pointed in the direction of the clean bathroom where she was repulsed by the
