o pretend I knew what I was
doing with the directory. Then he hissed at me ("Sorry, no offense," I
figured out later), and said clearly enough so I could understand even
then, "Just trying to help," and walked away.

As soon as he was gone, I walked out myself. Directory or no
directory, I had to get out of that store. I went back to where I'd
left the car, but instead of getting in it, I sat down on a bench in
the park, and waited till the turmoil inside me began to quiet down.

I went back into that drugstore once before I left, purposely, just to
see if I could pin down what it was that had bothered me so much,
because I never reacted that strongly afterwards, and I wondered if
maybe it was just that it was the first time I was inside one of their
buildings. But it was more than that; that place was a regular
snake-pit of a treatment for a stranger, believe me! They had a
tobacco counter, and a lunch counter and a perfume-and-toiletries
section, and a nut-roasting machine, and just to top it off, in the
back of the store, an open-to-look-at (_and_ smell) pharmaceutical
center! Everything, all mixed together, and compounded with stale
human sweat, which was also new to me at the time. And no air
conditioning.

Most of the air conditioning they have is bad enough on its own, with
chemical smells, but those are comparatively easy to get used to ...
and I'll take them _any_ time, over what I got in that first dose of
_Odeur d'Earth_.

* * * * *

Anyhow, I sat on the park bench about fifteen minutes, I guess,
letting the sun and fresh air seep in, and trying to tabulate and
memorize as many of the components of that drugstore smell as I could,
for future reference. I was simply going to have to adjust to them,
and next time I wanted to be prepared.

All the same, I didn't feel prepared to go back into the same place.
Maybe another store wouldn't be quite as bad. I started walking in the
opposite direction, staying on the wide main street, where all the big
stores seemed to be, and two blocks down, I ran into luck, because
there was a big bracket sticking out over the sidewalk from the front
of a store halfway down a side street, and it had the three gold balls
hanging from it that I knew, from television, meant the kind of place
I wanted. When I walked down to it, I saw too that they had a sign
painted over the window: "We buy old gold and diamonds."

Just _how_ lucky that was, I di