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want to do. Don’t push on me too hard.”
Her eyes flashed for an instant. “I’m not pushing, Jerry, I’m inquiring. I’m thirty-five and
I’m unattached and it’s getting frightening going to bed alone without a future. Does that seem
rational to you?”
“Rational, but unnecessary. You’ve got a few good weeks left in you.”
“It isn’t funny time for me, Jerry. I have to know. Have you got room in your world for me?”
He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, “There’s barely room
enough in my world for me, baby. And if you knew what my world was like, you wouldn’t want to
come into it. You see before you the last of the cynics, the last of the misogynists, the last of the
bitter men. I look out on a landscape littered with the refuse of a misspent youth. All my gods and
goddesses had feet of shit, and there they lie, like Etruscan statuary, the noses bashed off. Believe
me, Berta, you don’t want into my world.”
Her face was lined in resignation now. “Unraveling the charming syntax, what you’re telling
me is: we had a good time and we made a small mistake, but it’s corrected now, so get lost.”
“No, I’m saying--”
But she was up from the curbside table and stalking across the street. He threw a bill down
on the tablecloth and went after her.
She managed to keep ahead of him. Mostly because he wanted to give her time to cool off.
As they passed a narrow side alley he pulled abreast of her, taking her arm gently, and she allowed
him to draw her into its shadowed coolness. “All it takes is believing, Jerry! Is that so much to ask?”
“Believe,” he snapped, the instant fury that always lay beneath the surface of his charm
boiling up. “Believe. The same stupid mealy-mouth crap they tell the rednecks in the boondocks.
Believe in this, and believe in that, and have faith, and holy holy you’ll get your ass saved. Well, I
don’t believe.”
“Then how can any woman believe in you?”
It was more than anger that forced the words from him. It was a helplessness that translated
itself into cynical ruthlessness. “I’d say that was her problem. “
She pulled her arm free and, turning without really seeing where she was going, she plunged
down the alley. Down a flight of dim steps, and on again, a lower level of the same alley. “Berta!”
he called after her.
Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.
A shop in a dingy back alley in a seedy border town more noted for street-corner whores
than for wrinkled and leathery tellers-of-the-future who sold Huaraches and Serapes in their spare
time. But he had quickly followed her, trying to find a way out of his own inarticulateness, to settle
the senseless quarrel they were having and salvage this one good thing from a past filled with
broken glass. He wanted to tell her his need was not a temporary thing, not a matter of good times
only, of transitory bodies reaching and never quite finding one another. He wanted to tell her that he
had lost all belief in his world, a world that seemed incapable of bringing to him any richness, any
meaning, any vitality. But his words--if they came at all--he knew would come with ill-restrained
fury, with anger and sharpness, insulting her, forcing her to walk away as she now walked away.
He had followed her, down the alley.
And the old, wizened, papyrus-tough Mexican had limped out of his shop, bent almost
double with age, like a blue-belly lizard, all alertness and cunning, and had offered to tell them of
the future.
“No thanks,” Niven had said, catching up to her at that moment.
But she had tossed her head, defiance, and had entered the shop, leaving him standing in the
alley. Niven had followed her, hoping she would turn in an instant, and come out again, and he
would find the words. But she had gone deeper into the musky dimness of the shop, and the old
prognosticator had begun casting the runes, had begun mixing the herbs and bits of offal and
