by Peter Rabe
“And now,” I said, “the difference is that I’m not through with anything. Whatever I do, I’m not through with the past.”
She said that would be asking a lot, any time. She put her cigarette out and said it again, another way.
“I don’t know where you get the hope, Gallivan, but I’ve never seen anything that has happened disappear. It can become less important, but that’s all. Only junkies think they can make things disappear.”
Then she got up. She didn’t care that she was half naked and I didn’t She went to a chair and put on a robe which was lying there. Then she came back to the bed where I was sitting.
“Now you can ask me more but I can’t tell you anything else, Gallivan.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think there is any more.”
“I don’t either.”
She was close enough so I could touch her and I gave her leg a small slap. That was instead of saying thank you. Then I got up.
“You leaving?” she asked.
“Yes. To wait for Rand.”
“What for?”
“I’m no pro, Jessie. I need help to get out of town.”
“Ask him,” she said. “Rand is reasonable.”
I knew he was reasonable. Why else would I be here?
“I’ll talk to him,” I said.
And then she said, “If you want, I’ll ask him too.”
I left the room and went back to my own. These people without any emotions, what simple and helpful lives they led.
CHAPTER 5
We left that same night, which took a great deal of pressure away.
It had started with the break in the yard, where Rand had come by screaming at me to leave Smitty behind; then his play at the gate, dragging me out; then the man with the burp gun, in the flower wagon, and how he had known my name; next, the clothes in the limousine; and the guard in the hall outside my door, and the girl Jessie, who was there and available.
There had been a rational explanation for everything, but taken together it didn’t make sense. It was as if Rand wanted me to come along. This was not reasonable. Which is why I kept thinking about it.
When we left, I got an overcoat of my own and a hat, to be worn low on the forehead. Rand also had a driver’s license for me, for identification, with a new name and address which I should remember just long enough to get out of town.
“You mean I’ll have to show it to somebody?” I asked him.
He was putting on gloves and a hat so his blond hair didn’t show.
“I hope not,” he said. “But nobody’s likely to ask you once we’re fifty miles out.”
“How hard are they looking?”
“Plenty hard. But the roadblocks are off. They got a lead on us down in Nashville, Tennessee.”
“Oh. A good lead?”
“A very good lead.” Then he looked around the room and the look said he was through talking. “We go in two cars, and you and me don’t go together.”
“The man at the desk saw us come in together.”
“Meanwhile, he’s had time to think. You’re a little too tall and I’m a little too short Any other time we’d just be a comedy team, except this time. Wait ten minutes,” he said, and left with the girl.
I stayed with the man who had been out in the hall. We sat for ten minutes.
He chewed gum. He fiddled his tie up and down, he pulled one shoe on and off again, looking for a nail, and he had a miserable habit of humming a tune and breaking it off in the middle. Every time we happened to look at each other he made a quick grin.
“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “I’m the best wheelman.”
I didn’t know what a wheelman was but it sounded professional and therefore well planned.
Planned for me or for Rand?
Then we left. The wheelman stopped grinning and walked as if he didn’t know me. We didn’t meet anyone in the hall, in the elevator, in the mezzanine. Two stairways curved down from the mezzanine into the main lobby and the wheelman took one and I the other. He was taking no chances. I wished I had been a foot shorter and less conspicuous.
Only one person really looked at me, and that was the doorman. He was as tall as I and he asked me which car I was taking. I stalled him off until the wheelman drove up.
We stayed in city traffic for an hour and at every red light the whole town seemed to look into the car.
“What’s your name?” I asked the wheelman.
“Tim. But I’m not Irish.” He grinned and cracked his gum at me. “And I’m called Micky.”
I could have taken that up, for light conversation, but nothing came to me. He didn’t look like a Tim because he didn’t look Irish and he didn’t look like a Micky, either. He looked loose in the face and had a sloppy collar. The only thing I could do with his name was to use it in addressing him and I had nothing to say. I looked around instead and watched traffic.
“Why don’t you swing over,” I told him, “and go faster in the other lane.”
“I’m doing thirty-five. That’s legal.”
“Then go slower than legal.”
“Listen. It won’t make it more legal by going less than legal. Uh — you follow my meaning? What I mean …”
“Just take the other lane for a while, will you please?”
“But that’s the passing lane, Gallivan, and I’m not passing anyone.”
“There’s been a car in that lane for the past fifteen minutes that isn’t passing anyone either. What I want to …”
“You got your wish,” said Tim. “We’re slowing.”
He didn’t get into the left lane but stayed where he was, slowing down. The whole lane was slowing in front of us.
“Always reminds me of a snake,” said Micky. “These lines, when they slow down. You notice that?”
I didn’t notice that. The comparison gave me a start, but I was watching the other lane which had plenty of room.
Nobody had to slow down, but the car further back did.
When Micky drove faster again, so did the other car.
I took my hat off and wiped my face. The wheelman noticed the gesture and stopped cracking gum long enough to tell me not to be nervous.
I asked him if he had a gun.
“Gun? Naw In case we get stopped and …”
“There’s a car following us. Fifteen minutes now.”
“Us? Where?”
“The one in back, in the other lane.”
“Ah!” he said. “Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s Rand and the dish in that car. They been there half an hour.”
I relaxed because I didn’t have the strength left to do anything else. I slid back in the seat and put my head against the cold window and with my foot I kicked open the little door on the heater so that the hot air went up the legs of my pants. I felt deeply tired and didn’t care about anything.
When I woke up we were out of traffic. Except for the light beam in front of the hood it was black outside and the snowflakes shot through the beams like tiny tracer bullets. The wheelman was still going slowly.
“How long did I sleep?”
“Sleep? Did you sleep?”
“Just tell me how far out of town we are.”
“This has been going on maybe half an hour,” he said. “Honestly, Gallivan, I wish we was back in town instead of this. Soon as the houses stop and nothing but landscape comes up, it gets colder. Everything iced. You wouldn’t believe it, looking at this nice looking highway here, what a slick …”
“I believe it Where’s Rand?”
“We lost him, out back. He don’t drive as good as I do. He’s no wheelman.”
I got a cigarette from him and smoked. I noticed that he wasn’t chewing gum any more, that he had moved the heater lever some, and that he was wearing only one glove. My eyes kept pecking at details like that, inside the car, outside the car, and I was getting a headache. When I was done with one cigarette I started another.
Fifty miles out of town, Rand had said, and the wors
t would be over.
Fifty miles out of town we came to a bend in the road and when we straightened out again there were lights on the road further ahead and two of them were red. They swung around and around, blinking.
“Now you just sit tight,” said the wheelman. Suddenly, he wasn’t grinning. “You sit still and let me handle this. It may be nothing at all,” he said. “Most likely somebody skidded off the road, is all.”
“Maybe Rand?”
“He’s behind us, not in front.”
“And if it isn’t an accident up there?”
“Just you sit tight, Gallivan. Rand wouldn’t leave you behind.”
The remark was both a comfort and a threat.
They were state highway patrol and a local sheriff’s car and the only thing they were concerned about was that traffic should pass them by slowly and without stopping. The other two cars in the scene were in a ditch, one to the right, one to the left.
“What did I tell ya?” said the wheelman.
He grinned his grin and started chomping the gum again. When he came close to the cop, who was waving his red torch so that we should pass, my wheelman slowed and started cranking down his window.
“What in hell are you trying …” but I couldn’t say any more because he had the window all the way down and had stopped the car. The patrolman was right next to us now.
“What?” he said into the window. He looked at both of us.
“What happened, is all,” said my wheelman. “Just wondering what happened.”
The patrolman looked cold and miserable out there and I think he didn’t like the sound of somebody cracking gum. He said, “Just keep going and keep it slow, buddy, or the same might happen to you.” He glared at Micky and he glared at me, and then he straightened up and said, “Git.”
His red torch waved past the left window and I had never seen such a good sight.
Micky laughed to himself and said something about coppers and that they all belonged out in the cold. He put the car into gear and rolled.
“Hey!”
The wheelman slowed enough to keep walking speed. He looked out of the back window and said, “Hey what?”
“Hold it,” said the patrolman.
Tim stopped and the cop came to the window. He leaned on the door and looked in at Micky, at me.
“Where you from?”
“Town,” said Tim. “Wanna see my driver’s license?”
“And you?” the cop nodded at me.
“Town.”
“Is that right?” said my wheelman and smiled at me. “Gee. I hadn’t known you and me was from the same town.” Then he turned to the cop and said, “Hitchhiker. I picked him up a ways back.”
“You know whom you picked up there?” asked the cop, but he only looked at me.
“Jimmy, he says was his name.”
“All right, Jimmy — ” and the cop moved back just enough to get his revolver into view, in case he had need of it.
There was a lot of chatter from the wheelman. Curiously enough, I paid more attention to that than to the gun looking in and the cop behind it The wheelman said he never heard such a thing, he’d been picking up hitchhikers right and left for these many years now and nobody ever had told him not to and nobody was going to start now. If he, Timothy Louis, felt like picking up freezing hitchhikers —
“I don’t want you,” said the cop, “I want him there.”
That was that. I felt I was already back in prison and that the time between now and then had been a dream, a very bad dream. I felt as if I had never left the bucket, and the heavy-lidded dullness I had learned for seven years was back on me as always.
“If this is a mistake,” the cop was saying, “I’ll apologize. But in the meantime you look an awful lot like somebody else.”
We stood by the side of the road with the snow blowing and the sweep-light coming across regularly, like a red whip.
“Like who?” asked the wheelman.
“You hear of that break the other day? Jailbreak?”
“Gee — ” said the wheelman.
“Fellow named Gallivan got away. Stupid too. Had less than a month to go.”
We stood around in the night snow near the spots of light from the cars and waited for the cruiser the patrolman had sent for. When the siren came closer it woke me up for a moment and the wheelman must have noticed something because he shook his head very slightly. Perhaps I imagined it and should have tried for a dash or for a clip at the cop who was holding the gun much too low now, but I didn’t.
When the siren came closer it was the ambulance for the accident people.
“Why don’t I go back with the meat wagon,” said Micky, “so I can be checked out that much faster. I gotta get up North, you know Like I told you.”
“I know how it is,” said the cop, and with the gun close at my back he watched the ambulance people move a bloody cripple out of the ditch and then somebody else who could walk.
“You got a policeman going with the ambulance anyways,” said Tim, “and I can be checked out soon as …”
“You got this car here,” said the cop.
“He can ride in the car with me, following the ambulance back to the next town. like I told you, officer, I gotta get …”
“All right. Lemme think already!”
Micky drove off in his car with a local cop from the next town riding guard. Whatever the wheelman had in mind, I hoped it would work, because I myself wasn’t good for anything.
One more thing happened. Rand drove by.
CHAPTER 6
When the car came for me it was an old Chevrolet with an old deputy driving. But his age made no difference to me. By then I was handcuffed. The patrolman apologized again by saying, “Can’t take any chances, and if I’m wrong, buddy, I’ll apologize,” and then he sent us off with a word to the deputy not to take this too lightly and to wait at the station until State sent someone down to check me over.
We drove three miles, mostly on a side road, and I kept thinking how a handcuffed man can knock out his guard with the bracelets just as good as if they were brass knuckles, but it was just thinking. I was locked to the handle of the door. I turned the topic around and around, more awake now, but each time I tried the smallest move, trying to squeeze the chain links through the space of the door and the handle, the old deputy looked at me. He held a gun in his lap.
But I didn’t feel dull any more. Perhaps the depression from before had been like a sleep which I had needed. There’s just so much shock that’ll sink in. The rest is irritation.
When we rolled into the small town I could see the station at the end of the block. There was a big light in front. And if my old deputy was going to unlock me all by himself, that would be that He had only two hands, which meant no gun, and I wasn’t going back to jail.
It was too late to go back. It struck me with a shock that not very long ago there had been the thought: “Go back, apologize, explain how it happened. Ask them to please let you sit out your three weeks in peace.”
But that had been before the patrolman had spotted me. He had spotted me, and by his lights was just doing a job, even though I might have been an innocent citizen.
And that had been before Rand drove by. He hadn’t looked right or left, and what could I do to him now that he was in open country? Tell the cops that the other con had gone North? That wouldn’t be good enough to catch Rand. So I was rid of him.
And Jessie had happened in the meantime. Not that I gave a damn for the girl, but only for what she had said: “You don’t make over what happened. You only do something new — ”
I only knew I wasn’t going back to jail.
• • •
There were two other cars in front of the station and they both were covered with little humps of snow. On the door to the station hung an evergreen wreath and there was snow on that too.
Christmas spirit. We had talked about Christmas spirit back in the laundry.
Smitty was dead
and I was alive, that’s what I felt now.
“You just sit tight for a minute,” said the old man, “and I’ll have you loose in a jiffy.”
How true. He walked around the car and opened my door carefully so as not to drag me off the seat. Then he tucked his gun under one arm, got the keys out, and said, “If you’ll just hold still for a moment, Mister Thorpe — ”
That almost threw me. If he had said Gallivan and no doubts about it —
But it didn’t throw me. I breathed that out with the next exhale I took, a big, white flag of breath which got lost in the snow coming down, the same way my hesitation disappeared.
A fine, quiet country town. Big trees with snow hoods and frilly porches around the old houses. The windows looked yellow in the dark. The only modern touch was the telephone booth. It stood all alone at a corner and made a white, unfriendly light.
He got me unhooked from the door handle and then he stood there with the key.
Then I saw the wheelman.
This was the second time he shook his head. He came out of the station door with a suddenness, as if he had been waiting for this and when he saw me he shook his head.
I didn’t want to stop. I stepped back, because there wasn’t the right kind of swinging room between me and the old man and the old man looked up from his key, not certain yet, but hoping to read my face.
If he stayed this way I’d break his jaw with a swing from below. If he moved farther away, for some reason, his skull was going to get it.
“Heytheremisterthorpe!”
I didn’t get my arms up or down because the old man bumped into me. When the wheelman had yelled from the top of the stairs the old man got disorganized with surprise or suspicion and, on the turn, had knocked into me.
“You almost made a slip there, Mister Thorpe,” Micky called from the stairs. “On that ice.”
He was grinning the way he had done when he had been so nervous, but he didn’t seem nervous now. Dumb, stupid talking, and who knows what else I didn’t like about him, but he looked swift now, all oiled with a purpose, and I held still.
“My,” said the old man. “You gimme a start there a minute ago.”
He looked at the wheelman and he looked at me while he said that, and it was hard to tell whom he meant He also had his gun in his hand again and was jiggling the barrel up and down, as if undecided.