The Truth of the Matter

by John Lutz

  “It would be better than just waitin’ for news,” Clacker said, “but that’s a pretty big area to search.”

  “Surely is,” Boadeen said, “unless those two are holed up in a house, and we know where every house in the county is and the quickest way to get to it. We can figure out a route and watch the woods while we’re following the side roads.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  Boadeen nodded, still smiling. He didn’t really like Clacker, but the man posed a minimum threat to his job. There weren’t many one-armed sheriffs.

  “When do you want to start?” Clacker asked.

  “Soon as the rain lets up.”

  “It’ll take a good while,” Clacker said. “You sure we ought’a just drop everything else and do this without the Patrol’s authorization?”

  Sheriff Boadeen looked hard at him. “You’ve got my authorization.” He walked to the bulletin board and stared at Roebuck’s wanted poster, now pinned neatly in the upper left hand corner. There were still four sharp creases in it where it had been folded to fit in his uniform shirt pocket.

  “We’ll find those two if we have to cover every house in the county,” Boadeen said. “After all, I’m the one that let ’em slip away.”

  Outside the rain began to slacken.

  4

  The rain passed quickly, the dark scudding clouds moving away to the east. Within a few hours the sun had erased all traces of moisture from the baked earth around the farmhouse and the only sign that it had rained was the fresh coolness coming from the surrounding woods.

  Roebuck spent the rest of the day with Claude, repairing small things around the farm, mixing a bucket of pitch and sealing the roof where it had leaked during the rain.

  All that day Ellie listened to the radio, but there was no new announcement about them. The State Patrol still had their roadblocks up, and it was believed impossible for anyone to have slipped through. They were admitting now, however, the slim possibility that the net of roadblocks hadn’t been put up in time, and that the fugitives may have been well away before their route was closed behind them.

  Let them believe that, Roebuck thought, sinking into the worn armchair after supper. Let the bastards believe it and pick up their roadblocks and guns and go home.

  He slept that night, better than he’d slept in a long time.

  It was four o’clock the next afternoon, and Roebuck and Claude were outside trying to find the trouble with the water line, when Ellie called to them from the farmhouse.

  “I just heard something on the news!”

  Roebuck could tell by her voice that the something had alarmed her. He jabbed his shovel into the ground and walked toward the house with Claude trailing behind him.

  “What was it?” he asked as he stepped into the comparative coolness of the house and the screen door slammed behind him.

  “The State Patrol’s giving up on their roadblocks,” Ellie said, “but starting tomorrow morning they’re going to make a careful search of the whole area.”

  Roebuck heard Claude come into the house behind him.

  “You sure that’s what you heard?”

  Ellie nodded.

  “Damn!” Roebuck began to pace. “Damn! The bastards won’t let up on you!”

  “What now?” Ellie asked, as she had asked before.

  “Haven’t I always thought of something?” Roebuck shouted.

  “Don’t yell, Lou.”

  Roebuck hooked his thumbs in his belt and drew a deep breath. Iris was sitting at the table clenching her wadded handkerchief, and Claude was behind him, staring wide-eyed at him.

  “We’ve got a little time, anyway,” Ellie said.

  “Yeah.” Roebuck walked to the door and leaned there, looking outside. “They did give us that.”

  “You gonna make a run for it?” Claude asked in a small voice.

  “I don’t know,” Roebuck said. He could feel things pressing in on him, as if the woods, the sky, the sun, all were drawing closer, shrinking around him.

  “We can’t stay here,” Ellie said. “That’d be just waiting for them.”

  Roebuck had to agree to that. “How do you get to Ironton from here?” he asked.

  “You take that road there,” Claude said, pointing out the door to the rutted, dusty road from the farmhouse. “It runs for about three miles till it hits Highway R. Then you make a right on R and go about another five miles or so.”

  “It takes about a half hour,” Iris said in her straining voice. “It ain’t a good road.”

  “It’ll have to be good enough,” Roebuck said. He knew also that they would have to trust Claude and his mother, for he would need them to help push the truck to get it started. If the truck would start.

  “When we going to leave?” Ellie asked.

  “Tonight, just before it gets dark.” That seemed to Roebuck the ideal time to make their run for freedom. Not only would there be less chance of being seen in the pickup truck, but they would arrive at Ironton at night and could steal another car when it was dark.

  “I’ll get our stuff together,” Ellie said, smiling her broad and wistful smile. “Seems like I’m always getting our stuff together.”

  Roebuck held the screen door open for Claude. “We might as well finish trying to find the break in that water line.”

  The sun was hovering over the horizon when they said goodbye to Claude and Iris Mulhaney.

  “I sure hope your throat gets better,” Ellie said to Iris as they were walking toward the pickup.

  “It will, ma’am.”

  “Your shotgun’s under some leaves by that big rock up the bluff,” Roebuck said to Claude. He felt he could trust both these people now, felt they were on his side. They were all battling odds, and people battling odds had an affinity for one another.

  Roebuck opened the squeaking truck door and tossed the suitcase into the cab. He turned to Iris. “We trust you not to call the police on us, Mrs. Mulhaney.”

  “We’re law-abiding folks,” Iris said, “but nobody’d expect me to send a boy over a mile through the dark woods to get to a phone.”

  “An’ nobody’d expect a boy to go,” Claude said with a grin.

  Ellie got into the truck and sat behind the wheel.

  “Got the key on?” Roebuck called.

  Through the back window he saw her blonde head nod.

  “Okay, son, let’s go.”

  Roebuck and Claude leaned into the truck together, rocking it at first, then rolling it faster and faster down the slight grade toward the road.

  “Now!” Roebuck yelled.

  Ellie popped the clutch and the engine sputtered to life, then died.

  “It’s okay,” Roebuck said. “It’ll start.”

  They pushed again.

  This time the engine sputtered and broke into an uneven roar.

  “You’ll get your truck back!” Roebuck yelled as Ellie scooted over and he climbed into the cab behind the wheel. “I promise!”

  Claude raised one hand in a slow wave and Iris stood watching, the setting sun turning the sky blood-red behind them.

  The gears meshed with a loud grinding sound.

  Roebuck felt like Robin Hood as he and Ellie sped away down the narrow dirt road in the wildly bucking truck, a magnificent plume of dust hanging behind them in the still summer air.

  They had gone almost a mile in the rattling truck, driving as fast as they thought safe, afraid that at any moment something would fly apart on the ancient pickup. The bumpy road was a series of sharp curves, and there was so much play in the steering wheel that it took all of Roebuck’s concentration and energy just to keep the truck from veering and hitting a tree.

  “Watch out!”

  As they lurched around a bend Ellie’s scream rang in Roebuck’s ear. He twisted the wheel a full turn and a half, sideswiping the car that had been coming from the opposite direction.

  He couldn’t believe it as he looked out the truck’s rear window at the car they had just run o
ff the road. Sitting at an angle in the high weeds at the edge of the road was Sheriff Boadeen’s vaunted cruiser, a nasty red scrape down the two tone paint of its shining side, through the ornate gold badge on its door.

  Even as Roebuck watched the sheriff was turned and gaping at him, his blue uniform cap crooked on his head, his lips moving in a surprised shout to his deputy who was also twisted in his seat and staring at the truck. The cruiser roared backward across the road as Boadeen attempted to turn it around.

  “It’s Boadeen!” Roebuck yelled, and he slammed his foot down on the accelerator. Ellie turned in the seat and looked out the rear window as the ancient truck gradually gained speed. They half-slid, half-tilted around the bends in the rutted road, bucking and shimmying violently.

  “They’re after us!” Ellie yelled as she caught a glimpse of the cruiser’s smiling grill through the haze of dust just as they rocked around a corner.

  They were rolling now. Roebuck mashed down with all his strength on the accelerator, feeling the mad vibrations of the rattling truck’s racing engine run up his leg and through his body. His teeth were clacking together and the seat of his pants was slapping up and down against the hard upholstery as he barely kept the roaring, bucking pickup on the road.

  “They’re g-g-going to c-c-catch us!” Ellie shouted, bouncing up and down beside him.

  “They’re n-n-not!” Roebuck screamed back.

  They heard a popping sound behind them and Ellie grabbed Roebuck’s shirt.

  “They’re sh-sh-shooting at us!” she screamed.

  “G-G-Goddamn them!”

  They smashed over a rut so deep that the truck was momentarily airborne, bouncing down with such a jolt that Roebuck actually struck his head on the cab roof. He tried to steer with one hand as he drew his pistol from his belt, but he fumbled the gun and it dropped to the floor and began clattering around between his feet. In the back of his mind he realized that Boadeen’s gunfire would be ineffectual anyway, for the bumpy road wound so tightly that the two racing vehicles were seldom within sight of each other long enough for a clear shot.

  Wham!

  The truck was suddenly all over the road, then off the road and rocketing through the woods, barely passing between trees as Roebuck braced himself and struggled frantically with the suddenly alive wheel that was writhing in his hands like a coiled snake. They spun sideways as the bed of the pickup ricocheted off a tree, and the truck tilted partway over, paused, then bounced back to sit upright on all four wheels with the engine dead and the radio suddenly blaring. Roebuck rubbed his eyes and turned to see the cruiser flash past with screaming siren.

  “They didn’t see us!” Ellie yelled over the blare of the radio. “What happened?”

  “Blowout! Come on!”

  They were out of the truck, running unsteadily through the woods.

  “Wait a minute!” Roebuck whispered hoarsely as they crashed through the woods. “I don’t hear the siren anymore.”

  They stood still, listening vainly, then they went forward more quietly.

  After moving carefully through the woods for a short distance they both stopped, both hearing the same faint rustling sound at the same time.

  “Over here,” Roebuck whispered, and he guided Ellie by the arm to some thick underbrush behind two trees that grew close together. They crouched, waiting.

  Ellie squeezed Roebuck’s hand and pointed. About a hundred feet from them a blue uniform cap with a gold badge was moving slowly just above the brush on the edge of a slight depression. As they watched, the cap disappeared behind some higher brush, then reappeared a few feet away. For a second they glimpsed a slowly moving figure through the trees, bent forward, gun drawn, staring intently ahead. Sheriff Boadeen moving in for the kill, unknowingly stalking past his quarry.

  Roebuck knew that the deputy was somewhere near, probably creeping through the woods on the other side of the road. The sheriff must have seen almost immediately that there was no raised dust ahead of him and realized that the pickup had run off the road. Now he and his deputy were backtracking, and Roebuck suddenly realized that they were closing in on the barely audible, static-filled sound of the blaring truck radio.

  “Let’s go,” Roebuck whispered when Sheriff Boadeen was well past them. He took Ellie’s arm and they moved through the woods as fast as they could with reasonable silence, parallel to the winding road.

  Then they too heard a sound, a low and rhythmic rumble.

  “What the hell is that?” Roebuck asked in a whisper, sweat pouring down his face.

  “Sounds like a car engine.” Ellie bent over, her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.

  Roebuck felt a sudden elation course through him. “By God, it is! It is a car engine!” Ellie followed him as he began trudging in the direction of the low, steady sound.

  They stopped at the edge of the woods and looked all around them. The cruiser sat in the middle of the road facing away from them, shimmers of hot exhaust fumes rising from its tailpipe with every throb of the engine.

  We’ve got to chance it! Roebuck thought, breathing in unconscious rhythm to the quick beat of the idling motor.

  He and Ellie exchanged glances, and it was Ellie who stepped out onto the road first, pulling Roebuck after her by the shirt sleeve.

  The road was empty for the short distance they could see in each direction.

  They climbed quickly into the powerful cruiser, careful not to slam the doors and alert Boadeen or his deputy. Roebuck put the car in gear and with a trembling foot applied just the slightest pressure to the accelerator.

  The cruiser moved forward slowly and quietly, around the bend in the road, up a hill and through another curve. Then he gave it more gas and they picked up speed smoothly as the big car took the winding road with ease. They opened both doors and slammed them shut all the way.

  Roebuck let out a long sigh, like a sharp wind through the trees.

  “That’s going to be one surprised sheriff!” he said loudly, and he began to giggle.

  Before Ellie knew it, she was giggling with him.

  They pulled the cruiser off the highway, into a grove of trees just outside Ironton, and walked the last half mile through the darkness of mid-evening. Now they sat on a hill overlooking the strip of lights along either side of the highway and the dotted white lights of residences beyond.

  “Where we going to get a car?” Ellie asked.

  “I don’t know yet, but it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have gotten much farther in a stolen police car.”

  “You think we better hurry?”

  “We’ve got time.” Roebuck fingered the .38 police special Ellie had found in the cruiser’s glove compartment. “Boadeen will never get that pickup running again, and even if he did they couldn’t drive very fast on that flat tire.”

  “Just the same,” Ellie said, “I’ll be glad when we get out of Clark County.”

  An unexpected shiver of dread ran through Roebuck. If only Gipp would stop his deadly pursuit at an imaginary line, to turn around and go back according to the rules. But no line, imaginary or otherwise, could stop Gipp, and no rules applied to him.

  A long shrill whistle drifted up to Roebuck and Ellie from the town below. It came from a low complex of factories or plants of some sort, with tall smokestacks in bunches of threes stretching up toward the night sky. In a few minutes they saw below them a string of automobile lights leading from a parking lot behind one of the buildings.

  “What kind of place is that?” Roebuck asked.

  Ellie shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “It looks like the afternoon shift getting off.” Roebuck broke off a. tiny blade of grass and began chewing on it. “There should be a night shift. Maybe we can get a car off that lot.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Ellie said, “and it might not be missed for eight hours. But how we going to get it started?”

  “I don’t know,” Roebuck said. “I’ll hot wire it or something.” He had
no idea how to hot wire a car. Actually he had been counting on someone leaving their keys in their car, as many people do in public parking lots. But Ellie had a point. The odds were against his finding a car ready to go on a lot like this.

  On the other hand, how hard could it be to change the wires on a car? He would use a dime for a screwdriver and switch a few connections around until he got the right combination. At this point a man had to kind of play things by ear.

  “There is a night shift,” Ellie said.

  Roebuck looked down to see three or four cars going into the lot where the outgoing string of headlights had been. Soon more sets of headlights showed up, driving the same curving pattern around the building to what looked like a well-lighted parking area. Roebuck counted forty-two cars before he and Ellie began walking down the long grassy hill.

  They walked quickly but relaxed, their heels digging into the soft, slanted earth. Below them the lights of Ironton, above them the detached tranquillity of the stars. The shrill, wavering whistle sounded again, louder now as they were nearing the parking lot.

  “I hope to hell there’s not a guard or something,” Roebuck said.

  “It doesn’t look like there would be,” Ellie said. “This looks like a pretty small town.”

  “Yeah, but who knows what this place makes? Maybe they manufacture parts for the hydrogen bomb.”

  They could see now that the low building was bigger than it had appeared from atop the hill. The only windows on the long walls were slit-like affairs near the roof, and every one of them had light streaming from it.

  “There’s no fence or anything around it,” Ellie said in a breathless voice, though there was obviously no point in whispering.

  “We’ll go around to the side where the parking lot is,” Roebuck said firmly.

  There was no one in sight on the lot, only the cars in neat rows between freshly painted yellow lines. The lot was discouragingly well-lighted.

  “This place is a steel mill,” Roebuck said, as he and Ellie stood in darkness just off the parking lot. There was a weightless, nervous feeling in his stomach.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Ellie asked.