She got back on the ridged bench seat and scooted to the driver’s side, keeping her head low. Coming up from the floor, she realized how much brighter it already was outside. She could see the metallic crossbar bisecting the steering wheel and could even read the cursive word incised into the fake silver plaque in the fake wood panel on the driver’s door: LUXURY.
It made no sense to her why somebody would keep an extra set of car keys inside a car, where they’d be no good to anyone except a person in the situation she was in now. She considered with cold acceptance the great likelihood that the keys were to another car. Her left hand felt out the ignition on the steering column and the other tried clumsily to jam a key into what she hoped was the slot, turning it one way and the other, feeling desperation well up. She brought her face closer to the slot and tried the second key, trembling, holding her breath to steady herself the way hunters did with rifles, but this only made her shake worse. She guided the key slowly toward the center of the chromium circle and wiggled it and suddenly it sank into the curve of the thing like a kitchen knife going into a block.
She nearly screamed, but she understood how meaningless this was; she’d never driven a vehicle in her life other than an ancient tire-less tractor through a Mexican oat field, badly and in fear of being found out. She stared at the rim of the steering wheel looping over the dash, making an arch against the light coming in, a blue that matched the blue tinting at the top of the windshield in such a way that she was unable to tell where the two merged. Any minute now the sun would crest the horizon with no obstacle to prevent it from laying bare all her movements inside the car. The two men would probably be on their way down the hill now anyway, to get a jump on the police. If they weren’t it was only because they were a couple of lazy asses on top of being half-ass thieves. Or maybe they’d already killed each other, the way she had read cowboys sometimes do around campfires in the middle of the night.
She sat up on the driver’s side and slid beneath the steering wheel and stretched her feet down to probe for the gas and the brake, both of which she could touch, though she had to shift herself so far forward she could barely see over the hood. The dash flared up slightly on the driver’s side, mimicking the look of an airplane cockpit. She had heard Johanna make this comparison to women at church, who had seemed envious of such a beautiful new car and suspicious that it was being driven by the pastor’s wife. The windshield curved so far around her that it felt wider than the car itself and the crescent of instruments and capitalized English words below looked like photographs she had seen of a jetliner cockpit—VOLUME, SELECTOR, HOT, HI-LO, COOL, ALT, BRAKES, WIPER, OIL, FUEL, LIGHTER, LIGHTS, FLOOR, RELEASE. The letters inside the glass bubble over the steering wheel said PRNDL and she stopped to think about this strange word—PRNDL, it sounded almost German—before remembering what the letters stood for, at least the important ones. She reached down and pumped the gas pedal the way she had seen Aron do. Breathing in and out several times, she felt herself start to cry and she pressed her forehead down against the steering wheel crossbar and closed her eyes and ground her teeth and spat out the word puta under her breath. She opened her eyes again and almost reflexively started to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the way she always said it in her mind at night, in the language that sounded most convincing to her—“Padre nuestro que estás en el cielo: santificado sea tu nombre, venga tu reino, hágase tu voluntad . . .”—but suddenly the heavy rhythmic phrases seemed unbearably long so she skipped to the end—“el poder, y la gloria, por todos los siglos”—thinking that if God had any plans to help her at this moment, it couldn’t matter that much.
When the motor came to life it drowned out all thought and she felt dank air from the air-conditioning vents waft across her face. The starter shrieked metallically for a second until she realized she should let go of the key. She hauled down on the gearshift with the whole weight of her body and the stick wobbled but stayed in place as if it had snagged on something. She pulled it again and shook it violently and this time it fell, propelling the red needle past the D all the way to the right-hand side of the dial, the number 1, and before she could push the stick up again the car lunged into motion. For a split second it heaved forward and threw her back against the seat but then it seemed to come loose from the ground and slip sideways and she realized the tires were spinning out and she eased up on the gas. When she did she was thrown back again and her foot came off the pedal and the big car bounced and came nearly to a stop in a cloud of grayish dirt that rolled past the windows over the hood. She looked over the dashboard down the length of the hood, trying to make out identifiable forms in front of her, anything through the darkness and dirt, but she picked up only the horizon line and the possibility of a pumpjack far in the distance.
Movement was the only thing that counted now. If she was going fast enough maybe it wouldn’t matter if she drove the car through a fence. She had a vision of multiple strands of barbed wire snagged across the car’s big grille, fence posts being wrenched successively out of the ground, a whole line of fence being dragged and eventually whole fields of it, the station wagon at the apex of a vast inverted V of wire and wood sweeping across the land, scraping everything off its surface. She reached down for the pedal and tried to press it gently but it gave under her and the car lurched violently forward again. This time she tensed her legs and torso and held herself against the steering wheel with both hands to keep from coming off the gas. She felt the car begin to gain momentum and make its way across whatever was in front of it.
Now that she had set things in motion, she felt a sense of calm come over her, as if nothing important could be helped anymore. Her decisions might affect minor details but the overall outcome was no longer within her control. It was a thing that happened sometimes when she was frightened, not so much a religious feeling as a feeling that a mechanism had been triggered whose gears could mesh in only one direction. Instead of being light-headed, as she had heard people say they became when afraid, her head felt fine in these situations, almost too dense. She thought that if she took her hands from the wheel and held them in front of her face, they would have barely shook, though she could still feel her heart thumping wildly behind her eyes, making the visible world pulse in and out.
The station wagon seemed to interpret her actions from a great distance, with a lag, like a lateral nervous system receiving signals from hers through a spinal cord a mile long. She’d never been in a boat before but she thought this was how it must feel to pilot something bulky through deep water.
She hauled herself up on the wheel to get a better bearing of the ground in front of her, but it still looked like nothing, a dark blue slate bisected by a straight black line. On what possible set of facts, she asked herself, had she based the hope that the road lay somewhere ahead and not far to the right or the left? She knew there was a better than even chance that if she didn’t hit fence or irrigation line or plowed field she could drive ten miles into open cow prairie without ever coming across a road, or even near one. Then she thought: Jesus in Heaven, the armageddon of noise I must be letting loose into the quiet of the morning and I still probably haven’t gone further than the men could run to catch me, even the big clumsy one.
She found the gas again with her left foot and stood her weight on it this time, causing the engine to shriek and the steering wheel to yank forward out of her hands as inertia drew her body back. The car bounced hard over tufts of grama and cactus and Martha gave up trying to see what was in front of her but felt herself gain speed and her feet and thighs pressed against the seat registered the freeing sensation of distance starting to spool out between where she was and where she’d been. The car had suddenly decided to switch sides and become her ally.
But just as suddenly it betrayed her again. The dashboard reversed course at great speed and slammed the steering wheel into her chest so hard that she flew back and then bounced forward off the seat and into the wheel again. She felt a vertiginous sensation, as i
f the back end of the car was coming up above her, into the air. And then she knew that it was. The motor screamed as the back wheels lost contact with the earth and then they came down hard, bouncing the car up and down on the shocks. When it hit the ground the impact caused her to bite her tongue and tears leapt to her eyes. The salt taste of blood flooded her mouth, and she took the name of the Lord in vain in Spanish and Low German. Her chest throbbed where it had struck the top of the steering wheel and her ears filled with an animal roar. Through the noise in her own head, she gradually became aware that something in the world was roaring, too, and she realized it was the engine, though the car itself no longer seemed to be moving forward, only bucking on its frame like a wild animal with its hind legs caught in a trap. A few seconds passed before she understood that she was the cause of the sound—her foot had remained atop the gas pedal, holding it to the floorboard. When she let it up the engine made a long dying wail and the car finally stopped moving.
Latching on to the steering wheel again with both hands, she snaked her foot back to the gas and pressed it several times. But the car only bounced and shuddered more violently and through the rearview mirror she watched red dirt spew up into the morning light.
She let go of the wheel and slumped back against the seat, knowing what she had done: She had found the road but had found it crossways. The car had barreled through the deep bar ditch perpendicularly, or nearly enough. The front had managed to jump onto the road but the ass end had caught down in the ditch and the middle of the big heavy car had high-centered on the curve of the grade, beached like a whale on one of the only parts of the land un-flat enough to strand it.
Martha came up from the seat onto her knees and shrieked and beat wildly on the steering wheel, causing the station wagon to emit a series of short irregular honks like Morse code.
For a long time she sat behind the wheel not crying, not moving, breathing almost normally again. She raised herself up to look into the rearview mirror, not to see outside this time but to see herself, out of a sudden need to verify her existence—little more than a shadow, a round shape with thin hair clinging to it, a barely legible line for a nose, two small reflections indicating eyes. Past the mirror she saw that the sun had broken the horizon. She reached over and felt out the master lock button on the door and pushed it, listening to all the doors hammer down. She turned the ignition, killing the engine and filling the car with silence again. Then she crawled down into the darkness of the footwell on the passenger side and pulled the hunting coat over her body and lay waiting for them to come.
Oct. 28, 1972
Some of this—maybe all of it—might not be true:
Bettie told me that her given name was Beatriz, though she rarely went by that name after she left home. She said she went by so many names after the age of sixteen that she couldn’t remember all of them herself. The couple of times she had been picked up, the police seemed to believe she was from Mexico, but she said she had grown up in a small farming town, now a suburb, west of San Antonio and had never set foot on Mexican soil in her life. Her father was born in Chihuahua and came north under the bracero program, staying on after the war, drifting down into Texas to work cotton. He died before she was two years old in a senseless accident. He and a bunch of hands had lit out on the road between picking jobs, to stay ahead of Immigration. One night the men bedded down near Uvalde between a set of rusted freight rails overgrown with sage and bristlegrass, believing, as many did, that rattlesnakes wouldn’t cross a pair of tracks. There were no rattlers that night, but a diesel engine shunting empty feed cars rolled up the spur after midnight because of a broken switch and the engineer, dozing on a double shift, didn’t notice. The engine was on top of the men before they woke. It killed three instantly, including Bettie’s father. The fourth, his leg badly mangled, got a ride back to Chihuahua hidden under a tarp in the back of a pickup but he bled to death before he got home.
Bettie was raised by her mother, whose family had come to San Antonio from the mining town of Matehuala around the turn of the century. They had done well for themselves in ranch work, but only well enough to understand that they would never be able to afford good land themselves or truly feel like citizens, even once they became citizens. Bettie was a cheerleader. In her junior year of high school she won the sheriff’s posse queen by more than a hundred tickets, a stunning achievement in those years for a so-called Spanish girl in a small Texas town. She was just better at speaking to adults—at winning their trust—than the other girls, even those from ranch families with the money to buy the title outright. She showed me a newspaper clipping she kept in the lining of her wallet, from the rodeo where she was crowned. The picture showed her in a tight-fitting denim pantsuit, astride a platinum-maned palomino, small beneath a tall white cowboy hat. She was waving at the camera, flashing a smile whose ferocity people at the time probably didn’t notice.
FIVE
Harlan stood with his forehead pressed against the lower half of the glass on the station wagon’s driver’s-side window. He yelled out again, to no one visible. His voice rolled over the morning, unanswered.
“Nobody in her, Troy! She’s empty. Ain’t a soul down here!”
The sun had crested, but the raking light hid more than it revealed, throwing deep shadows behind the car and up the ridge.
At the first sound that had jolted them from sleep—the unmistakable sound of a car almost on top of them—Troy’s first instinct had been to run and leave everything behind, Harlan included, and in the near-darkness he had tried to pick out a path along the ridge that would conceal him without running him into the silt. But when he had looked to find Harlan he saw that his brother was already in full motion heading the other direction—the wrong direction—clamping his hat to the top of his head as he ran. Before Troy could yell to stop him, he was more than halfway to the bottom of the slope, loping down in a graceless crouch like someone trying to avoid being shot after realizing too late that he was fully exposed.
Based on what had sounded like a lone vehicle, a heavy one, Troy had calculated that it wasn’t the law but a wetback hand, maybe a farmer himself, out before daybreak to check irrigation pivots. But even if that were true, even if he could talk them out of the encounter, it wouldn’t matter because they’d be seen and word would spread faster than they could outrun.
Troy had drifted into a light sleep just before daybreak and he felt heavy and disoriented as he tried to put his body into motion. He patted his coat jacket for his papers and wallet and stumbled into his boots, hopping toward a stand of arrowhead that hemmed the lake for a hundred feet curving south. He didn’t know how to move on foot in the daylight; he’d never been on the run without a car. He thought about Harlan: Harlan running out into the open like that because he had clearly decided in the light of a new day that he was finished with what was happening to him. Whatever lay at the bottom of the hill, sheriff, farmer, hunter, hand—the devil himself—was preferable to present company. And Troy couldn’t blame him. But he knew that Harlan wouldn’t be able to do otherwise than tell everything.
Troy plunged into the grass through a gale of bugs pelting his face and hands. He could still hear the sound of the vehicle below and in the time it had taken him to find cover the engine had grown so loud and pitched he thought it might actually be headed up the ridge toward him. But as suddenly as the sound mounted, it fell off and died out completely after a series of staccato horn bursts that confused him and made him wonder if something more dangerous wasn’t down there after all, parties exchanging signals. To stay in the darkness of the arrowhead he crouched on all fours like an animal and tried to remain absolutely still because he knew his movement could be detected if someone looked to the top of the brush. He listened for a vehicle door opening or closing and for what he thought he might well hear next, a sound he had heard once before, long ago, addressed to him individually—the godlike authority of a voice amplified through a police bullhorn. But he heard only the breeze
and the low idiot drone of ten million lake flies. Then he heard Harlan’s voice booming out, like a lighted sign visible for miles announcing that somebody was with him, hidden up on the ridge.
Troy looked beneath his armpit, searching for a coyote trail, any kind of clearance to allow him to back away unnoticed through the brush. In front of him he saw only a jungle of green, an alien perspective in this part of the country, and through the verticals of green the coral red of the sun cresting the horizon, an event he never saw like this—outside, through naked eyes—but only through a windshield, down a line of asphalt. He heard his brother’s voice again, beckoning him to come down. Though it didn’t seem plausible that Harlan could have been coerced to do so, so convincingly, even with a gun on him, Troy remained motionless nevertheless.
At the risk of being heard, he elbow-walked gingerly forward through the arrowhead. Each rustle of the blades felt like an act of violence. He pushed through at the ridge’s edge far enough to see almost to the road, but he could make out only a portion of the station wagon and Harlan resting against it to one side, facing away, looking east with sunlight sitting square on his big body. There was no other vehicle in sight—the one they had heard must have been closer to him, Troy thought, obscured by the grass and the slope.
He watched Harlan turn slowly and look almost directly to where he thought he had concealed himself so well in the grass. Harlan rose off the car and scanned the horizon, then climbed onto the station wagon bumper with both feet.
“Car’s locked, Troy!” he yelled out. “Somebody must’ve tried to take her. Come down here with the keys. Let’s get the hell out before somebody else shows up.”
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