The Truth of the Matter

by John Lutz

  Ellie smoothed a fold in her slacks. “How’d you get out of it?”

  “We began shooting the wolves for food, one by one. There were only two wolves left by the time we reached Anchorage.”

  “That’s in Alaska, isn’t it?”

  “Near the border. Look!” Roebuck pointed to a roadside sign. “It says to slow down. That means there’s a town in front of us. We can do our shopping before people are in the stores.”

  “If anything’s open,” Ellie said. “It’s not even eight o’clock.”

  At first the entire town did appear closed, a string of dirty buildings that seemed to have sleep hanging over them. But a service station was open, and there was one of those all-night grocery stores. They filled up on gas and bought two bags of groceries. They would have to buy their clothes later.

  By the time they were on the road again the low mist had disappeared, and a clear sky promised a hot day. On each side of them the flat fields of Kansas stretched away, unbroken except for an occasional toy house and a few solitary irrigation pumps, rising and falling as if weary and unable to work faster in the heat.

  Roebuck felt more exposed than ever now as he pictured the car from above, crawling slowly across an endless plain, bound by a ribbon of road. He felt like a wingless fly on a white ceiling.

  It had been a half hour since a car had passed them from the other direction. How conspicuous they must be, Roebuck thought again. Maybe they should have tried to cross Kansas by night. But then headlights were visible for a great distance in this flat land.

  “I suppose we can buy our clothes and get some lunch at the same time,” Ellie said. “We have to go in someplace anyway.”

  “No reason we can’t do that,” Roebuck said. He was watching a tiny dot on the highway ahead, trying to estimate how far away it was. Amazing, he thought, how long it takes a dot to become a car on this highway. They could have taken the four lane interstate farther north and made better time, but the State Patrol might be watching that highway as a matter of routine! That’s what you had to watch out for, their damn routine!

  Roebuck saw the dot grow larger and change to the form of a car. Then it grew with astounding rapidity and became a red station wagon that whizzed by them. Roebuck’s glance flitted to the rear view mirror to follow the car’s shrinkage and disappearance, and his gaze stuck there. Far away, beyond the car that had just passed them, was another tiny dot on the highway.

  Roebuck watched the dot for the next twenty minutes. It got neither larger nor smaller. He began to alternate his speed, sometimes slowing to fifty-five, then zooming up to eighty. Still the dot remained the same size, too far away for shape or color.

  After the next ten miles the dot was so steadily, so persistently there, that Roebuck’s glances into the mirror were only unnecessary confirmations of its presence. It was as if he could see it from the back of his head.

  Ellie was dozing beside him, unaware of what was happening.

  Roebuck nudged her in the ribs. “We’re turning here.”

  “What?” She rubbed sleep from her eyes. “Turning? Why?”

  “This road goes into a town. It’s late enough to buy what we need and grab a bite of lunch.”

  Ellie looked at the dashboard clock, puzzled. “It’s only quarter to ten, Lou.”

  “Damn it, don’t argue!” He braked the car and swerved left beneath overhead traffic lights and signs onto a blacktop road. The tires sang. “Be making up your mind what you want to buy,” he said, stealing a quick look at her, a sideways dart of his eyes as he checked the mirror.

  “How much can we spend?”

  “I don’t know,” Roebuck said impatiently. “We’ll spend whatever we need to.” Again his eyes darted to the mirror. Nothing.

  “I need some makeup,” Ellie said, “and another blouse and a few dresses. Maybe some underthings. Some underthings, I guess.”

  Roebuck saw the town in the distance and speeded up to head for the biggest store so he could park the car in an inconspicuous spot.

  The biggest store turned out to be a dimestore. Roebuck swung into a parking area alongside the narrow walk of a side street and opened the door. “Come on.”

  “How come we’re parking here?” Ellie asked as she got out of the car.

  “Less likely to be spotted.” Roebuck led her into a side entrance of the dimestore.

  The clothes they bought were cheap but sturdy. A pair of pre-cuffed dress pants and shirts for Roebuck, slacks and two dresses for Ellie. Then they bought socks, underwear and whatever incidentals they needed. The whole thing came to only thirty-nine dollars.

  “We’ll take the front door this time,” Roebuck said, carrying the packages.

  “But the car’s over there.”

  Roebuck didn’t answer. God, would she never stop with her dumb questions! She followed him silently out the front door.

  He handed her the packages. “Hold these. I’ll be right back to pick you up.” Looking straight ahead, he strode toward the corner.

  Ellie waited for perhaps five minutes before the yellow sedan pulled around the corner and stopped before her. She put the packages on the back seat and got in.

  “What was all that about, Lou?”

  “I wanted to make sure nobody was watching the car. I didn’t want to put you in any danger.”

  “What made you think somebody’d be watching the car?”

  Roebuck turned onto the blacktop road and drove back toward the highway.

  “A car was following us,” he said. „I’ve been watching it for miles.”

  Ellie’s forehead creased in a frown. “The police?”

  “Or Benny Gipp,” Roebuck said. “The police would close in and arrest us, but Gipp would follow us, wait for the right moment.”

  “Are you sure the car was following us? Maybe it was just somebody going the same way we are.”

  “Sure?” Roebuck laughed quickly, nervously. “Yeah, I’m sure. When I slowed down or picked up speed, so did it.”

  “If it is this Gipp, do you think he’ll call the police?”

  “Hell no, he won’t call the police!” Roebuck was getting angry, angry with her stupidity and her senseless questions. “I told you, he wouldn’t want me to get a life sentence and be paroled. And if I was convicted, he wouldn’t want someone else to put the noose around my neck, to spring the trap. The bastard wants to do it himself! Don’t you understand, it’s his pleasure!”

  “Lou, relax.” Ellie stroked his arm as she looked behind them. “There’s no one back there now.”

  Roebuck sighed, checking the rear view mirror. “No,” he said, “not now.”

  They unfolded the road map they had picked up at the last service station and took to the side roads, still traveling west, but by a devious and more indirect route. Progress was much slower this way, but Roebuck felt it was safer.

  “Why don’t we stop early this afternoon at a motel?” Ellie suggested. “We know nobody’s following us now. Anyway, if this Gipp is after us, it’ll throw him off some.”

  Roebuck was biting his lower lip as he drove. “I don’t know if anything will throw him off.”

  “We have to eat anyway,” Ellie said. “We were going to eat lunch when we shopped and we forgot. If we have to stop someplace it might as well be a motel where I can fix us something. It’d be safer.”

  Roebuck did feel unusually tired, tired to the marrow of his bones, and he wished Ellie would just keep quiet and leave him alone. The very sound of her voice was beginning to annoy him.

  “It’s because I’m tired,” he said.

  “What is?”

  Roebuck cleared his throat. “I said we’ll stop at the next motel.”

  The motel where they stopped was old, with individual shingled cabins in a weed-grown, rustic setting. It looked cool and safe after the bare heat of the road. Roebuck steered the car through the entrance and under an arbor of withered roses to the office.

  After they checked in, Ellie prepared a
lunch of sandwiches and cold soda while Roebuck showered. They ate then, and he felt better, more relaxed, more tired. He got up, turned the window air conditioner on high and stretched out on the bed in his underwear.

  He closed his eyes, but the darkness wasn’t complete.

  “Pull the curtains all the way,” he ordered, his damp forearm thrown over his eyes. He listened as Ellie crossed the room and drew the curtains. With his eyes pressed closed he heard her walk back, run the sink water for a few seconds, then walk to the double bed. The bed rocked and squeaked as she lay beside him.

  Still Roebuck couldn’t sleep. He was tired, but his nerves were crying out, not letting him relax deep inside himself. He crossed his other arm over his face. It was the light, he decided, that would not permit him to sleep. There was something…unnatural about sleeping in the light. It made a man uneasy when other people could see him sleep. It made him feel vulnerable.

  Rolling over on his stomach, Roebuck tried without success to escape the sunlight that seeped into the room between the slats of the blinds, through the skimpy material of the curtains, along the tops of the windows, even under the door.

  He reached for Ellie.

  3

  Ellie shook him awake.

  “You screamed.”

  Roebuck lay on his back, breathing hard. The sheets were tangled about his legs. He didn’t remember screaming, but he remembered his dream. The past three nights he’d had the dream, but this time it had been fantastically real, immediate, as if he’d fallen back in time during his sleep.

  He fastened his gaze on the closed door, expecting at any moment to hear an alarmed knock.

  “Was it loud enough for anyone else to hear?” he asked, realizing for the first time that Ellie had a very tight grasp on his hand.

  She nodded. “If there’s somebody in one of the cabins near us they must have heard.”

  Roebuck looked up at her. “If somebody comes, you go to the door. Tell them I stepped on a nail. They’ll believe that.”

  “Why don’t I just tell them you had a bad dream?”

  Roebuck didn’t answer, and neither of them relaxed until a full five minutes had passed and it was apparent that no one was going to investigate Roebuck’s sudden scream.

  “No one heard,” he said to Ellie. It’s as if it hadn’t happened, he thought, freeing his legs from the twisted sheets and sitting on the edge of the bed. “Why don’t you fix us some coffee?”

  “I thought you might want to skip breakfast, Lou. It’s nine-thirty; we must have been tireder than we thought.”

  “Yeah,” Roebuck agreed. He didn’t tell her that he’d hardly slept at all since they’d gone back to bed at ten after a late supper last night. All those hours in bed had to do him some good, though, whether he’d had his eyes open or not.

  “Fix the coffee anyway,” he said. “You probably need it.” He got up and slipped into his pants, almost losing his balance as he stood for a moment on one leg. His head throbbed with pain as he stooped to pick up his boots and went into the bathroom.

  Roebuck stood leaning over the washbasin, listening to the hiss from the tap on the other side of the wall as Ellie ran water into the coffeepot. He turned the cold faucet handle on the washbasin and watched the trickle of water meet the sloping white porcelain and swirl down the drain.

  The cold water on his face revitalized him somewhat, and he hurriedly combed his hair and brushed his teeth. Then, posing, he smiled at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, examining the frown lines and puffy eyes of his reflection. The mechanical smile sagged. The man in the mirror looked so different! If he were grayer he’d look like an old man. Lack of sleep, Roebuck thought. Only lack of sleep. Picking up the bar of soap, he ran it edgeways across the smooth mirror, leaving a broad white X that touched all four corners of the glass. Then he squared his shoulders and turned away from the mirror. He got the can of shoe polish he’d bought yesterday, sat on the toilet bowl lid and carefully began to polish his boots.

  After coffee and some packaged donuts for breakfast, they left the motel to drive west again, winding over narrow and shimmering side roads, speeding like a free-scared thing over stretches of highway until they came again to another self-imposed detour. Now Roebuck began to picture the car as a huge yellow beetle, crawling across Kansas to evade a thousand natural enemies.

  Hour after hour, mile after mile, Ellie continued to aggravate Roebuck. The thing between them festered, for she would never defy or disagree with him, never give his challenges something on which to beat themselves. His frustration grew.

  “Look behind us!” he rasped at her, speeding down a flat and endless stretch of highway. “I told you to keep looking behind us! There are things I can’t see in the mirror.”

  Dutifully, she twisted in her seat and looked out the rear window. “The highway’s empty, Lou.”

  “Good thing,” Roebuck muttered. “See if you’re bright enough to remember to look back there every five minutes or so.”

  Ellie didn’t answer. Roebuck reached over and turned off the radio so violently that the knob almost twisted loose in his hand.

  “That goddamned thing is getting on my nerves!”

  “I thought you might want to listen for the news.”

  “You thought, huh?”

  Again she met him with one of her receding silences.

  They were nearing the state line before Ellie spoke. “Do you think you ought’a have that gun laying on the seat, Lou?”

  “Nobody can see it,” Roebuck said. “It’s up against my body.”

  “Just the same, there’s probably a law….”

  “Law!” Roebuck snorted the word with half a laugh. “Don’t you understand we’re wanted for murder?”

  “It’s not that, Lou. I mean, it just seems to be taking a chance, calling attention to us, to have a gun out in plain sight if somebody does come up to the car. Maybe a truck driver could even look down and see it.”

  “Law!” Roebuck spat the word out again, as if he hadn’t heard her last statement. “I’ll tell you about the law. If I had this gun in my pocket it would be a concealed weapon, understand? But here, right out where it can be seen, it’s not breaking the concealed weapons law. Don’t you see that?”

  Ellie’s voice was helpless, “I didn’t know, Lou. I’m no lawyer.”

  “You sure as hell aren’t! But I did go to law school for two years, so believe me, I know a little something of what I’m talking about.”

  “All you have to do is tell me, Lou.” Ellie sat primly with her hands in the lap of her new green dress.

  She was acting like what she was now, Roebuck thought. A ten dollar pickup who liked to be pushed around. What had he ever seen in her that made him want her so? What did he still see in her? Why didn’t he just stop the car and shove her out? She was one problem he could get rid of easily.

  He thought about that, and he decided that she was still good cover, would still come in useful if the law did force a showdown.

  “I told you, you tramp, take a look now and then out the rear window!”

  Ellie obeyed, but he saw the anger, the reddish flush at the roots of her blonde hairline when she turned back.

  “If I bother you, Lou, all you have to do is let me out at the next town. I can make my own way.”

  Roebuck was surprised. So she would actually leave him. “You wouldn’t go if I did try to get rid of you,” he said. “I’d have to drag you out of the car.”

  “I don’t want to go unless you want me to. But if you tell me to go that’ll be it.”

  She didn’t sound so sure now, he thought. The hell of it was that he didn’t want her to go, and she had a lot of nerve threatening him like that. He knew what she was.

  Taking a banked S curve, he paid more attention to his driving than was necessary. “You let Boadeen have you, didn’t you?” he said abruptly, surprising himself that the words came so easily. He had that on her, though; he had known it all along.

&nbs
p; “Yes,” she said, as if admitting to something of little importance. “I did that for us, to keep him from getting suspicious and investigating. And if he did get onto us, I thought he might not do anything for fear of getting himself in trouble.”

  Roebuck’s breathing was coming harder. “It didn’t work too well, did it?”

  “I didn’t know he was that rotten.”

  “He was that rotten! He didn’t do anything you didn’t! And are you trying to tell me you didn’t enjoy it?”

  Ellie’s hands were out of her lap, resting lightly on her knees. “I enjoyed it some, I admit that.”

  Roebuck slapped the seat beside him. “How the hell do you think that makes me feel?”

  “I didn’t think you’d find out,” Ellie said calmly, “or I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “At night you say you love me and the next day you’re letting that bastard take your pants off! What the hell kind of woman are you?” The words were rushing from Roebuck in a stream of bitterness, his voice tight, tears brimming his eyes. “There was only one other woman who ever did that to me, in Singapore, a high-class girl from the Wing family! A little bitch is what she was, like you, goddamnit! She was going to marry me and I found her in bed with my best friend and his brother! I knew a man who’d take care of her! The last time I saw her she was on a Mongolian slaver’s junk sailing off to God knows where and what!”

  “I did it for us, Lou, us!”

  Roebuck narrowed his eyes and looked straight ahead. She didn’t seem ashamed. That was the thing about it.

  “You’re a whore,” he said in a controlled and vicious whisper. “A cheap, hick town whore!”

  Even that didn’t seem to stir Ellie as she sat very still, not looking at him. “You didn’t have any trouble picking me up, Lou. It started out as a business proposition.”

  “You admit what you are, then? A small town, bar-hopping slut?”

  Her voice was tolerant, as if she were explaining something to a child. “I never said I was anything else, Lou.”