by Peter Rabe
She did, backwards, and it was a good time. The others were shuffling pages and talking.
She backed the two steps towards the cell and leaned against the bars without turning. She started to say something low when it choked off.
I had her by the collar and it must have cut into her in the front More important, I had the gun in the small of her back.
“They’ll see — ” she managed.
“They’ll be able to see right through you, through a little hole, Jessie.”
“Please — ”
“Tell them to lay off that phone.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I’m going to kill you, Jessie — ”
“Here it is!” said the deputy. “Right here in the book!”
I let go of her collar some, so she could talk normally. With the gun I spiked her hard. I could feel her tremble.
“What is the number?” she asked.
The deputy read it off and the patrolman said yes, that was it, exactly.
“No,” said Jessie. “That’s not the one I was talking to.”
“You got to do better than that,” I said, close to her.
The others were arguing about what office to call.
“Better, Jessie. Make it much better.”
“How about Information?” said the deputy. “They should know.”
“Kill that whole tack for them, Jessie, or I kill you now.”
“Maybe — maybe he’ll call here!” she said to them. One simple sentence from her could have done it, something like, “Don’t make that call because I remember he said nobody would be in the office once he left to come here.” That’s all. But she was pussyfooting, instead.
I clicked the safety and she heard it. She went limp.
“Now,” I said. “You’ve got one second.”
Then the phone rang.
The way those things happen is all in one motion which a smooth sentence, a long sentence, any kind of thing, can’t convey afterwards.
The gun wasn’t a revolver so I let go of the girl, hit down my hand, and slapped back the slide. It went click-clack nicely and the shell was in. Fast, all of it, and in one motion, because as soon as I let go of her collar she would make her dash.
She did nothing like it She spun fast but stayed where she was. She turned at the bars, held on with her hands, and looked up at me, pressed close, with her face terribly white.
“Please,” she said, “God — Wait!”
She was so close, so frightened — I would have had to shoot her while she was looking at me —
“Yeah?” said the deputy into the phone, and “yeah, yeah?”
I looked away from her. I put the gun into my pocket while she hung there at the bars. She was shielding the view. I poked and poked at my pocket and finally got the gun in.
Where her hands were holding on I could see her sharp knuckles and her nails turning dark.
“The State man!” the deputy called over to me. Then he listened into the phone again.
The girl had her head down and looked as if she were going to sleep. Only her hands told a different story.
“Yes, Sir,” said the deputy. “Yes, Sir, right away,” and he gave the phone to the State highway patrolman.
I almost touched her hand, to make it relax. Then I didn’t. The patrolman was saying, “Very well, Sir. Yes. We got him.”
She let go of the bars and walked away. I don’t know how it looked to the others but I thought she might fall.
The patrolman said, “Good night, Sir,” hung up, hitched his parka back so that it draped over his shoulders like a field marshal’s mantle. He walked towards me, halfway towards me, then waited for the old man. The old man came with the key. He opened the cell, stepped back for the patrolman, and when I didn’t move the patrolman stepped in. He put one hand around my arm and let the other one hang by his side.
“That was the State man. We got Jimmy Gallivan, he says. No hard feelings, Mister Thorpe.”
Then he used his free hand to shake mine.
• • •
I signed something or other. The girl stood by the door and put her arm into mine when we walked out of the door. The wreath jumped around when I closed the door and there was a great deal of snow on the steps.
She had a car outside and got behind the wheel. She backed into the street well enough and went along under the big trees and past all the old-fashioned houses. We passed the telephone booth at the corner. There was a man in it and I could tell by the way he stood, one hand in his pocket, straight with no effort Rand had made that call.
CHAPTER 9
She had a piece of paper with a small drawing on it and she used that for a map, getting us back to the highway. We went north but didn’t pass the place with the accident again, unless I didn’t recognize it because the snow had changed everything. There were drifts reaching into the road now. It had stopped snowing. The landscape showed white in the light and the sky was black.
She drove well and we both looked straight ahead, not talking. I thought she was very efficient Later she slowed the car and then stopped on the bare highway. She kept both hands on the wheel and put her head down. Then she had an attack of dry, violent crying. I sat like wood. After that she drove again.
At one point she got stuck in a drift but not bad enough to keep us long. I got out and shoveled snow with a hub cap. I pushed while she rocked the car and the exercise, which felt violent to me, shook me loose so that I felt like I was breathing for the first time.
She drove again and I said something about her skill, something about her strength in all of this — I forget the words — but she only nodded her head and said, yes, or something.
In a while we came to a trucker’s stop which turned out to be the rendezvous which had been arranged for the two cars. The diner looked old and steamy and in the big light in front were the pumps and a couple of trucks. The exhausts stuck up straight into the cold air and blue smoke bubbled out of them. A third trailer was pulled up by the side of the diner with the gates in back almost up to a pile of snow.
“We’ll wait here,” she said. “The others are late.”
We didn’t go into the diner but waited inside the car. We kept the heater on and smoked cigarettes.
“There are three truckers in that cab. Maybe you shouldn’t park right next to it?”
“That’s all right. They’ve been waiting for us.”
By bending towards the windshield I could look up to the cab of the truck but the three truckers up there didn’t look back. They talked, I could see, and one of them watched the highway. It said, Town and Country Movers, on the van.
When Jessie was done smoking I offered her another one but she shook her head. She took a small mirror out of her pocket and looked at her face, touching her nose a little and patting her hair. She didn’t make up, she just looked.
I wanted to say something to her, about the time in the station, but I felt as if that would commit me in some way — to Rand’s plan, and to her somehow.
When Rand and Micky came they pulled up next to us. I heard the ratchet sound when Micky pulled the brake. Then both men got out of the car, leaving the motor running. Rand bent to look at us, jerked his head, and went to the rear of the van. When Jessie and I were out of the car I saw two of the truckers climb out of the cab. They weren’t dressed like truckers at all. They wore suits and overcoats, with scarves showing over the collars.
“I hope you left the heater going,” one of them said to Jessie.
She said yes and we went to the back of the van.
Micky had the gate open and we all climbed in. The two cars we had come in took off before we were done. The third trucker, who was dressed like one, closed the gate for us from the outside.
It was cold and dark in the van and when Rand clicked his flashlight there wasn’t much to see. The inside of the van seemed piled full with furniture with maybe two yards to spare to the door.
“What did he say? The
easy chair?” asked Micky.
“A blue easy chair,” said Rand.
They looked for the blue easy chair and found it built into the furniture wall, low to one side. Micky pulled it and there was a hole.
On the other side was more room. There was a weird, tall space, as high as it was wide, cut off behind by the wall of roped furniture and gracefully round where the van had been streamlined in front The curve and the height of the place in the dim light reminded me of a church.
“You smell dust?” said Micky.
“Yeah,” said Rand. “Nobody has lived here for a while.”
There was one couch and a few blankets. Rand told Jessie to lie down on the couch and the rest of us sat on the floor. Rand left the flashlight on when he put it on the floor and when the truck began to move he put the light on a blanket so it wouldn’t roll around.
I think Jessie went to sleep almost immediately. The van made little jolts now and then and the girl’s shoulders moved in a loose way with each jolt It was hard to see her in the light.
After a while the tires started singing and the jolts became sharper. There was less snow, I thought, and we were going fast.
“You’re burning the blanket,” said Rand.
I looked where I was touching the blanket and put the cigarette into the other hand. I said “Thank you” to Rand and he nodded back. When I dragged on the cigarette again it tasted very bad but I hardly noticed it I got up and went over to sit next to Rand.
“And I want to thank you for the help back at that station.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Why did you do it?”
He turned and looked at me, but his eyes always seemed to point straight ahead. He hadn’t moved them at all.
“Why did I do what?”
“Get me pinched and then rescue me.”
“It was an accident Micky made a mistake; that’s all.”
He looked away again, and this time I could only see his profile. Everything looked smooth-black, except for a fine rim of brightness where his hair caught the light.
“Then I’ll ask it this way, Rand. What about the time when leaving me behind would have speeded you up and saved you a great deal of trouble?”
“In the yard, you mean.”
“Yes. You came back to drag me along. Why?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “You got a light?”
I gave him the light and watched how he lit up. When he blew out the smoke, there seemed more substance to the blue clouds rolling over in the light than to his face.
“You going to explain it, Rand?”
“I don’t think I can.”
I let it drop. He’d risked his neck getting me out during the prison break. And now he’d delayed his escape plan to get me out of a jam his wheelman had gotten me into.
“In the station,” he said, “why didn’t you shoot Jessie?”
He gave me a good jolt with that.
“How in hell do you know?”
“Micky saw you. He was behind the window, over the desk.”
The little black window that the deputy loved so much.
“The way she stayed plastered by the bars, when she should have been near the phone, with the yokels,” he said. “Micky was sure you’d drop her.”
“And then what?”
“I didn’t figure you’d make a play like that.” He dragged on the cigarette. “Anyway, Micky had a gun, too.”
“On me?”
“You? Why you?”
I thought about that for a moment but said nothing.
“You still got the gun Jessie gave you?” Rand asked.
“Yes. In my pocket.”
“You can give it back now, Gallivan.”
I shook my head and said, no, I wouldn’t give back that gun, I would keep it.
CHAPTER 10
After a while we took turns on the couch because the ride was so long. We ran out of cigarettes and later the flashlight went out. When that happened it seemed to get much colder.
Once we all sat on the couch, in the dark, sitting close for warmth and long past the point of talking. I wanted to say this reminded me of a row of birds on a telegraph wire but the situation wasn’t that humorous. I said nothing and the image changed to something much bleaker. Like a row of empty clothes, hanging in a draft.
Jessie sat next to me, but it was just clothes.
At one point — what point I don’t know — the truck slowed, bumped a while, then stopped.
“Very quiet now,” said Rand.
Later the back gate opened and we could see shafts of cold light past the furniture and feel slits of cold air.
“Stay,” said Rand. “I’ll get it.”
Then the gate was closed again. Rand came back with a warm bag of hamburgers and a carton of paper cups which felt soft and hot We ate hamburger and drank the coffee. After that, in the dark, we hunted for butts on the plank floor.
I tried to think and I tried not to think, because that’s how the subject pushed me. I tried to get it clear that I wasn’t in prison. I tried to hold on to that fact and not compare it to being out with the sentence completed. That wasn’t the case and never would be. But I was out. An incomplete sentence on the book would have to be the warden’s worry, and not my unfinished business. Any unfinished business I had was in the future, not the past.
Such as Rand.
They would have let me kill Jessie. They would have covered the cops from the little black window after that, to get me away. Micky’s gun, Rand had said, hadn’t been on me. They had watched the girl squeezed into the bars of the cell, hoping I wouldn’t fire into her back, but prepared for the bargain.
Jessie dead would still have been worth it; I was that important, that damned important.
Off and on I tried to sleep.
• • •
When the truck stopped again we all sat very still, waiting. There was no sound outside except wind blowing and then the trucker’s steps next to the van. He stopped and made a sound as if he were stretching, then walked again, the length of the van. He clanked the gate open in back and said, “Depot!”
Rand moved the chair out of the way and crawled through. Then the rest of us followed.
The light could have been early morning or late afternoon. The sky was thick with snow clouds and an unfriendly wind was rattling the black trees. There was a lot of white all around, and the big house where we had pulled up was white too. It stood all alone in the white park with the rattling trees, and the front of the building had tall, plantation-type columns.
“When we go in,” Rand said to me, “we’ll be quiet It’s a sanatorium.”
I thought he had made a bad joke but I was too tired to do anything about it Then it turned out he was serious. We went in at the side and took a big elevator. It was big enough for two or three carts, the kind they push patients around on.
Each time the little window in the door showed a floor it seemed I was looking at the same corridor. It was long and bare and there was a bulb over each door. Every so often one of them was lit On one floor stood a roll bed, on the next a green oxygen bottle, on the third was a flowerpot next to a door, with the flowers wilted.
We got out at the top. There was no corridor here, just a little hall. There was a coatrack in the hall and one door. Rand used a key to get in.
It didn’t look like a hospital any more, but still smelled like one. The corridor behind the door had a carpet, the solarium at the end had club chairs and ashtrays, and the doors had no lights over them. But a nurse passed us. She carried a tray with a sheet over it.
“Wait there,” said Rand. “I’ll see about rooms.”
We sat in the solarium and looked out at the landscape. I think we all looked at it so we wouldn’t look at each other.
Rand didn’t come back. He sent a man dressed like an orderly who said, “Hi, Micky,” and Micky said, “Hi, Joe.” Then he showed us rooms. One for Micky, one for me, and after me he must ha
ve shown Jessie hers.
I didn’t think about it, or about Rand, but only about the comfort I wanted. My room had the softest, white bed, the softest, deep chair, the softest, gray light from the winter outside. Inside, it was warm. I undressed, left my clothes on the floor, and crawled into bed. I woke up once, in the night, and found a tray with cold food on the night table. I ate the bread, cold cuts, and cheese, and drank the tea which had cooled to lukewarm. There were even cigarettes. After smoking one, slowly, I went back to sleep. It would be good to be very well rested tomorrow.
CHAPTER 11
I woke up knowing that the sun was shining and when I looked it was. The sleep had been good and the bright sight from the window was good to see. You wake up innocent as the morning sometimes, and that feeling may last for as long as a minute.
I don’t think it lasted that long. It caved in very suddenly when I heard the bell. It was loud and unpleasant, and seemed to rattle off with a nervous haste. Then it stopped, but it had been enough to remind me of seven years worth of bells, signals, buzzers, which had warned, turned, or stopped every move we had made.
Not quite seven years, but three weeks short of that.
If my brain could have made a sound I think it would have been something like that bell, something sharp and nervous. The sunlight was too bright now and the morning had happened too soon.
I took a shower, found shaving stuff all laid out, then got dressed. First thing I noticed after I had put on my jacket was how light it felt The gun was gone.
On the evidence, it would have been hard to convince anyone that I needed a gun. A friendly room, a quiet park in the morning sun — and the corridor outside my door was quiet, too. I went out and looked around but didn’t see anyone. A big fly was caught in the solarium. It thudded against the glass, once here, then there, and in a while it sat down on an easy chair and seemed to be taking a rest.
I stood around for a while and listened to nothing happening. There was a swinging door in one arm of the hall and on the other side of that there was nothing except a wider hall, another elevator — small this time — and a rubber plant by the window. There were various doors again, but no sounds.