by Iain Levison
“The Lord will provide,” said the trucker, responding to something he heard over the CB. Something unintelligible came back.
“Amen to that,” said the trucker.
“Amen,” Dixon heard.
“Hey, Jojo, I’m going to pull over at the Flying J. I know it’s only thirty more miles to Concord, but I need a bite. And I need to find out where this gas smell is coming from.”
“Amen, my brother,” came the reply, the guy still high on religion.
“I’ll see you in Concord.”
Concord! New fucking Hampshire! Dixon knew his state capitals from a guy he had celled up with some years back, a guy named Erwin who had hung a map in their cell. They were going in the right direction. All this while, he had been going towards Canada. Luck, at last, had finally caught up with him. This guy was going to pull over in a truck stop in New Hampshire!
And the minute he pulled over, he was probably going to pull the curtains back. Dixon was going to have to think of something then.
A few moments later, he felt the truck slowing down, then come to a complete stop. Dixon exhaled softly, surprised at how relaxing it felt not to be moving for a few seconds. Then the trucker put the vehicle in reverse, and he was tossed forward again, almost to the curtain. Then it was parked. He felt the vibration of the idling engine as he heard the trucker shuffle around in his seat. What the hell was the guy doing? Any second, Dixon waited for the curtain to be yanked back and the guy would find him there, a gasoline-soaked stranger in his sleeper.
But the door opened, and Dixon heard the trucker exit the cab with the engine still idling.
This was it. His big chance to escape. Dixon sat up and was suddenly paralyzed by a stabbing pain that shot down his right arm, which he had hardly moved in the six hours since he had jumped into the truck. He gasped and banged his head against the back of the sleeper, holding his arm. When he moved again he was prepared for the pain, but it was no less intense. Jesus, what the fuck had happened to him? He put his hand inside his jacket and felt warm liquid. He was bleeding.
Oh, Christ. He had been hurt. The car. Maybe broken glass from the Maxima. Maybe anything. He grabbed the laundry bag and grunted as he threw himself into the passenger seat, another wave of pain almost making him vomit. What the hell was this? It hadn’t hurt the whole ride up here. Almost six hours. And NOW it hurt? He opened the passenger door and looked out, between two trailer trucks, where the trucker had parked. No one around, and no driver in the truck next to him, either. He hopped down quickly and shut the door, holding his laundry bag and gun. Another stab of pain, and he dropped the gun. He winced, and picked it up, then quickly stuffed the gun in his pants and pulled his jacket over it.
Dixon heard the footsteps of the driver as he checked everything, walking thoughtfully all around the truck. He could hear the guy coming around the end of the trailer, and he quickly ducked under another truck next to them and came out the other side, next to a field. He saw the trucker’s legs as the guy walked slowly along his own truck, examining it as it idled. Then the trucker walked up to his passenger door and stopped.
He must have found something, Dixon decided. He felt like bolting, getting the hell out of there, but he stood for an extra second, looking underneath the truck at the trucker’s legs as he stood by his passenger door. Then the trucker leaned over, clearly staring at something. The man kneeled down and looked at a spot on the ground very intently. What the fuck was it? Blood? Dixon backed up quietly, going under the next truck along, into total darkness, but he could still see the trucker as he picked something up off the ground.
Dixon saw the shape and recognized immediately what it was. A neatly wrapped stack of hundred dollar bills. Shit. It must have spilled out of the laundry bag. He backed up further and went under the next truck. The fucking Bible-thumper was going to call the cops, who would trace the money to the New Jersey bank robbery and then start looking here, in the boonies in New Hampshire. But just as he crawled under the trailer of the last truck in the row . . .
“Hallelujah,” he heard the trucker scream, and Dixon knew the cops were not going to be called. “Hallelujah! The Lord has provided.”
Ignoring the pain in his arm, Dixon took off running across the field.
3
Peace. Quiet. Night.
Just a few hundred yards from the bright lights of the truck stop, Dixon walked through the soggy bog of an empty field, not knowing or caring in which direction he was heading. He needed things. Food. A shower, a change of clothes, a place to rest. A way to look at, and fix, whatever the hell had happened to his arm. This was farm country, much like where he had grown up, but the grass was thicker and felt damp, not dry and dusty. Far off, he heard a cow mooing. There had to be a barn around. He went under a fence and through a copse of trees, and didn’t see a farmhouse or a barn anywhere, just more open space. He wandered on. The noise of the truck stop faded, then disappeared altogether, and then all he could hear were his own footsteps and the occasional chirping of crickets.
Another fence. This time he anticipated the pain in his arm and he held it against him, tendered it, as he slid under the lowest rung of barbs. He could smell the cow shit now, but still no barn, no farmhouse. How big were these farms? The pain in his arm was intense, but he knew what movements exacerbated it now and it was becoming familiar. Each step he took sent a dull throb from the inside of his bicep up into his shoulder, the pain radiating in a dull wash of misery along the top of his back and his shoulder blades. He gritted his teeth. Wasn’t so bad.
Through some trees, off in the distance, he could make out a car approaching along a road. The car was moving fast, maybe fifty or so, meaning the road was paved. Meaning it led somewhere worth going. Houses, barns, garages. Places to hide. Dixon walked through the dull, cloudy moonlight until he came to trees alongside the road, peered cautiously through them. The last thing he wanted now was an encounter with some people. He was too tired and pain-racked to pull his pistol out and horrify anyone into submission now. Robbing people at gunpoint took an intensity he knew he could no longer muster.
These first hours of the escape were the danger hours, when most robbers on the run got caught. No bank robber could sustain the mental intensity of evading the police for very long in that first desperate stage. Ten hours at the most, and even that was pushing it. It was like being a quarterback in the Super Bowl, or pitching a no-hitter. Your head had to be in the game every second or you were going to get dusted. Dixon had already been on the run a good eight hours now. Even the energy and discipline required to stay still in the back of the sleeper, to not reveal his presence, had drained him. That was why the cops rarely got into high-speed chases anymore. They knew that the soul-sucking concentration of continually wondering if you were being watched, of having to behave so that no one noticed you, of keeping your eyes out for every vehicle that had lights on top, had caught more criminals than any turbo-charged police cruiser.
But Dixon had experience on his side, because this was the third time he had been in this situation. He knew not to use phones. He knew that any idea that occurred to someone on the run was just a mirage. There was no help coming, there was just you, your sharp mind, and your ability to take pain.
In Wingate, Oklahoma, when he was twenty-four, after knocking off an armored car, he had called his girlfriend to tell her he’d be home soon. As he had approached her run-down trailer later that night, Dixon had noticed a police cruiser a few trailers down, backed up into an alley. Someone had parked it with the intention of concealing it. If it had just been out in the street, Dixon would have thought it was a cop car paying a visit to another trailer, and not paid it any mind. But this looked like a trick. He had taken off running, and the car peeled out after him. He had gotten away easily, but if he had just walked thirty seconds closer without noticing the car, things would have turned out differently.
What had happened that day, Dixon wondered, as he set off along the paved but unlit New
Hampshire road? Had she put up a fight when the cops came, lied to them, tried to get them to leave? Had she secretly hoped that Dixon had gotten away? Or had she been friendly and helpful? Danielle Wiley, that had been her name. Pretty, petite, but already a little world-weary at the age of nineteen. She had wanted to be a hairdresser. She had been working as a waitress in the roadside diner where Dixon had gotten his first post-prison employment, trying to save up the money for beauty school. For her, there had never been any question that Dixon wasn’t a pillar of the community, because she had been there the day Dixon’s parole officer came by to question the manager about his attendance. Dixon had never been late or absent from work, and had been really trying to get his life back together, working the flat grill on the late shift. The parole officer had left satisfied that Dixon would soon be fully rehabilitated.
“You’re coming along,” he had said to Dixon that night, as they both stood out by the dumpster, smoking.
Dixon had said nothing. I’m coming along? He was yet another success story of the legal-correctional system, which had tried and convicted him, and then let him remain in jail even after his innocence was known. By this point Dixon knew it was all about success stories, not about success. The appearance of rehabilitation was more important than the rehabilitation itself. To hate their guts was irrelevant. They expected it. But Dixon understood that showing them you hated their guts was more of a crime than crime. So he did what five years in prison had taught him to do, the dance of the shit-eaters: he shifted his feet and looked at the ground and grunted.
“You need anything?” the PO had asked.
It was such a friendly question, but Dixon understood it. Do I need anything? As in, show me your weakness, so I can control you better. Who would ask their PO for anything? What could a PO possibly provide that any con would need? Five years of my fucking life back would be nice, you pencil-pushing wannabe-tough-guy bag-of-shit with your middle-aged gut and your taxpayer-bleeding pension plan for twenty years of pretending to give a fuck . . .
“Nah,” said Dixon.
“I think that girl in there’s got her eye on you,” the man said, but Dixon had had enough of their warm bonding session, enough of pretending they were two guys on the same side of the fence, looking out at the world. The PO hadn’t just done five years in lockup, for nothing. The PO had a car. The PO drove around town trying to catch guys using drugs and skipping work, and trying to trick them into telling him things about themselves that would go into their files. There was no fence in the world of which they were on the same side. Dixon flicked his cigarette into the dumpster and opened the torn, battered screen door into the diner kitchen.
“I gotta get back to work,” he said. “Dinner rush.”
But he had been surprised to hear that the PO had thought Danielle had noticed him, because he had been wondering about it himself. He had noticed her the first day he had been hired there, was sure he would never have a chance with her, and had decided to put it out of his mind. He had to focus on work, earning some cash, keeping his record clean, putting all that shit behind him. And there really used to be days when he thought he could put the whole prison episode behind him, and just go to college, and maybe get a degree in engineering so he could build bridges. Since prison, he had become intrigued with bridges. Through the chain-link rec-yard fence he had been able to see a complex suspension bridge being built over a dam in the distance. That’s what he would do, he thought, on one of those rare days when he imagined a future: manage a bridge-building team. He didn’t need to get rejected by some nineteen-year-old diner waitress whose great dream was to work in a barbershop and who thought he was a seedy con like the guys he had known in lock-up. Just get by. Mind your own business, keep your ears open but your head down, just like in prison.
“Who was that guy?” Danielle asked him after the rush, when it was quiet but for the two of them cleaning up. He was scrubbing pans by the sink and she was wiping down the stainless steel waitress area right next to him.
“What guy?” Dixon asked without looking up.
“That guy you were talking to.”
They had never talked before, and her question seemed to Dixon to be a demand for information, not casual conversation. It was the way the police demanded information, and he felt rage boiling in him. He turned to face her, and the rage dissipated in a flash. He had never really looked at her before, made eye contact from up close. From time to time he had risked furtive glances as she refilled customers’ water glasses, or watched her body as she walked by with a heavy tray, but he had never had an opportunity to really see her face. It was pretty and honest and open and tired, and in that second he felt his anger evaporate, and that she just wanted a friend.
“He’s my parole officer,” Dixon said, as a rush of emotion hit him and the fury of moments ago turned to something else, like grief. He suddenly found himself stemming back a flood of tears. He turned away from her and busied himself with the wet, cleaned pans, as if he had to dry them and put them away immediately. It only took a second to compose himself, but he was horrified. Nothing like that had ever happened before.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“I’m fine . . . got some cleaning shit in my eyes.” He stared down into the soapy water.
“What are you doing later?”
“Later when?” He was still turned away from her, but he had composed himself now. Her question was odd, because after a mention of a parole officer, the conversation, in Dixon’s experience, would always take the same course. What did you do? How long were you in for? Blah blah blah. But she wasn’t interested.
“After work. Are you on work release or are you out?”
Obviously this girl knew a little something about the correctional system. “I’m out,” he said.
“Why don’t you come over and have a beer?”
He turned to face her again, a little panicked by the offer. What did she want from him? Was this some kind of a set-up? Would some guy with prison tats leap out from behind a curtain and stab him and rifle his pockets for his nine dollars and change?
“Awright.”
She had nodded and walked off. Later he had gone back to a run-down trailer which Danielle had been proud of, because she was able to live there without support from anyone else. She had smiled when showing him the garden, which coyotes had just destroyed, and laughed when pointing out the hole in the trailer wall covered with a bed sheet; but she was proud of the place. Dixon remembered looking at the trashed trailer and wondering if he would ever have this much independence, this much freedom. Then she smoked a joint on the stoop while he watched, wanting more than ever to share it but knowing the hot drug test would send him back for five more years. Then they went to bed together.
They had been dating two years, and were talking of marriage, when the armored car job came up. He could buy her a real diamond ring and the job would be smooth and quick, and he could quit the goddamned diner and they could live in Mexico or change their names. He never asked her about it, figured it might be best to show her the money first – forty grand, real cash. That would be an argument-winner right there, if he had the cash first. He doubted she would scream and yell much when the opportunity for a better life was right in front of her, in a laundry bag. So he went up to Oklahoma with three guys from the joint, swearing allegiance to each other as they drove along the highway to Wingate. After the robbery got fucked up and two of them got caught, Dixon knew that he didn’t have much time, that the allegiance-swearing session was all for show, that the two guys were in an interrogation room at that very minute flipping through mug books for Dixon’s picture. They had never told each other their real names. He had gotten away with $1,800, and he called Danielle to tell her that his visit to his aunt was over and he’d be coming home, and her voice had sounded just a bit off-centre, like she didn’t really care that much. Like there were cops in the room right then, and maybe the PO – the PO, who always wanted to help, probably trying t
o look down Danielle’s shirt as he leaned over her, his fingers on the handcuffs he kept on his belt. It was over then, Dixon knew, but he didn’t admit it to himself, though he had been smart enough to keep his eye out for cop cars from the moment he entered her street.
You couldn’t make phone calls. You took the pain, you took the hunger, you kept walking.
Five miles passed. There was a town coming up, Dixon knew, because the cars were driving by every few minutes now. He had to keep ducking into the woods. He went over a hill, and in the clouded moonlight he could read a sign that said Tiburn College, 4. Then he saw a row of houses, a quiet, tree-lined street off to his left. He crossed the street and walked through a field, and through the trees he could see lights on in most of the houses.
Common sense: the house with the fewest lights has the fewest people. The third house down had just a TV flickering in the living room. Dixon crept through the trees, careful not to step on any sticks or piles of dead leaves, his senses alert now, the pain in his side less noticeable. He checked the houses to the right and the left. Two lights on in each, one upstairs, one downstairs. Just the TV flickering in the third house. He drew closer, until he was at the edge of the unfenced backyard.