On the Run

by John D. MacDonald

  “Well, we’re running ahead of time. The only possible solution is to find another motel and steam up another mirror and spend the night writing messages to each other.”

  “Sir! You owe me a message, not a communications center.”

  “Okay. S.S. loves P.L.”

  “I’ll never believe it until I see it carved into a tree.”

  “Or painted on a national monument.”

  She looked at him oddly. “You’re getting better, Sid, You were so heavy and kind of reluctant. You were out of practice. Do you know you are actually laughing out loud once in a while?”

  “I’m traveling with a very comical woman.”

  “I swear it, Sid, some day we’re going to laugh until we cry. We’re going to totter around, weak and gasping, trying to stop and not being able to. And you don’t know how good that is going to be for you.”

  “Climb into the back, woman. You’re overdue.”

  “For what?” she asked with a vast innocence. “Oh! I see what you mean. I should sleep. Yes six, captain sir. For a moment there I had the idea …”

  “Nurse!”

  With mock haste and fright she clambered lithely over the back of the seat and stretched out. He heard her humming to herself, slightly off key. In a very little while she was sound asleep. The sun moved lower behind them. The big pike rolled through the gentle country.

  At two o’clock on Monday morning he was again driving, and they were on a narrow country road just thirty miles from Bolton, moving through the summery moonlight. When he saw the silvered chimney of a burned farmhouse and the slanted roof line of a collapsing barn, he stopped and backed up and turned into the overgrown driveway and, moving slowly picked a way between the saplings and the berry bushes back to a place beyond the barn, out of sight of the road.

  When he turned the lights and motor off, the night was all a stillness edged with silver, with a faroff sound of tree toads.

  “Is this AAA approved?” Paula asked.

  “They’re remodeling. Low low summer rates. Cross ventilation in every room.”

  In a little while they settled themselves for sleep. The night was warm. She had the mattress and made a pillow of the folded blanket and insisted he take the pillow into the front seat. He opened the door on the driver’s side to give himself leg room. Their heads were close, but the barrier of the seat back was between them.

  “Sid?”

  “Yes, Miss Paula.”

  “Sid, were you doing well in that agency business?”

  “Pretty well. We were making the regional distributor happy.”

  “What were you after?”

  “My goal in life? Hell, I don’t know. To prove I could swing it, I guess. A little respect. So that anybody looking at me wouldn’t know but what I’d been there all along.”

  “Suppose, Sid, just suppose that all of a sudden you didn’t have to run any more. Would you go after the same thing all over again?”

  “I guess so.” She did not answer. In a little while he said, “No. I wouldn’t. I answered too fast. In Jacksonville I was imitating something I’m not. Thelma was part of the imitation too. I proved I could get away with the imitation, and I wouldn’t have to prove it again. I don’t know what I’d do. I would have to find something. It would have to mean a little bit more, I think.” He hesitated. “But it isn’t something I have to figure out right now. I’m still running.”

  “There’s always room to run.”

  “There better be. I’ll see the old man. And I’ll take off.”

  Her voice was strange. “What if I don’t know what I’m supposed to be, either. What if things don’t make any sense to me, the way they’ve happened.”

  “Are you asking me something?”

  “You don’t know how damned many things I’m scared of. I’m supposed to be a grown up woman. It’s like there’s a big room and I hide in the corners. Girlish. And I’m twenty-nine. Neither of us are living, are we? Ghosts in the moonlight, and the words don’t mean much either.”

  She stirred, and she was suddenly looking down at him over the back of the seat, a featureless pallor of her face framed by the dark of her hair. She reached and drew her fingertips across his lips. She said in an agonized, secret voice, “Sometimes, right or wrong, don’t you have to make something real out of it?”

  He caught her arm, then knelt upright to reach her lips. When he ran his hand down the arch of her back she gasped and shuddered.

  “Paula. Paula, it doesn’t mean that we …”

  She tugged fiercely at him. “Don’t talk. Just please don’t talk.”

  He clambered awkwardly over the back of the seat to be with her. For a little time she was a separate thing, an object for his hands, something he could be aware of as separate as she flexed and jerked and panted under his touch, as he peeled the gunmetal fabric back from the moonlight white bursting of flesh. And then soon he lost his own identity as never before. They became one creature, wise and knowing in its own sweet uses of itself, catching its breath in the slow hesitant ecstasy of union, then tipping and tilting into itself with a long deep sweet pulse of purpose, blended and knowing and growing. A thin voice called him, in a rising joy and plaintive impatience, and he lifted to it and roared his response and went tumbling after, to die very savagely and then very gently, and then with no movement at all in the deep clench of moonlight, adrift in a silence of bug-whine and toad-sound and distant farm dog, their hearts sobering, a deep breath catching from time to time, and the little symbolic offerings of kisses for the cooling flesh, caresses like the last echoes of a great sound that had filled the world.

  She rolled her lips into the hollow below his ear, tautened the long softening scissors of her thighs and said, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” said it in a blurred and drunken little voice, all bees in a honey patch, her temples sweaty, her hand patting his shoulder as if in reassurance.

  “All hundred percent,” he said in half question, turning her, stretching beside her.

  “Hundred and ten,” she said. “The lady shamelessly willing. You see, it was this damn jiggly mattress.” She giggled. “Undermining my virtue for hundreds of miles.”

  “Never trust a sneak.”

  In a sudden and resolute tone, she said, “My God, it’s valuable to have something so final and true you can joke about it without making it trivial. Something you can’t talk to death and you can’t remember to death. Something that just is, now and forever, the way I always thought I might able to be with someone and never was. If I died yesterday, I’d think it was all a big cheat, and if I die tomorrow, I’ll have, right at the end, a funny little smile. Hey! That’s the smile on the Mona Lisa, Sid darling. I never knew it until now. She’s saying we can do anything to her we want, and it doesn’t matter a bit, because once she stopped the whole world for a little while. I’m babbling. I don’t care. You have to put up with it. I don’t have to worry about you, sir. I don’t have to ask you how it was for you. I know how it was. It was for you as it was for me, because there was only one of us.”

  “You’re a rare thing,” he said.

  “I’ve got Indian blood.”

  “That John Smith was no fool.”

  He sat up and shook the blanket out and spread it over them. When he lay back, she hitched upward until she could hold his head against her breast. She stroked his cropped wiry hair. She crooned to him, “Now you’re not running. This is where you’re safe. I love you. This is where you’re safe.”

  It bothered him a little. He wanted to try to tell her that it could never be quite that simple. But the voice and the warmth and the closeness took him down into sleep, his face against a sweet plumpness of velvet, each breath scented with her, with the faint aromatic musks of her, the gentle fragrances of love.

  He awoke to early sunlight. It had heated the interior of the wagon, and in their sleep they had pushed the blanket aside. Their clothing lay entangled where they had thrust it away. She lay curled w
ith her back to him, taking up all the narrow mattress, and his hip was lamed where it rested on the hard floor of the wagon. He stroked her awake, and she gave a gasp of surprise, a leap of astonishment. They were sweaty from the imprisoned heat. She was uncertain for a little while, her body awkward, her eyes evasive, but soon she limbered into her wanting, her expression inward and watchful, her responses taking them back to what they had learned so surely. When it had ended, and, in their diminishing, they drifted back into their separate identities, she laced her hands at the nape of his neck, smiled at him, kissed the tip of his nose and said, “Good morning!”

  “A lovely morning.”

  She looked gravely at him. “This time was different. It was as much, but different.”

  “Yes.”

  “A little bit of sadness mixed in with this time, Sid. A little bit of despair. Like putting something away to take out later.”

  “I felt that too.”

  “You don’t have to say it. We’ll always feel exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. Not before and not afterward. But during. No, don’t leave me yet. Not for a minute. I want to say a funny kind of thanks. What we have, I tried to find it before, Sid. I tried to find it with one man I thought I loved, and I tried to find it with my husband. I’ve always known I was … well, lusty is a good enough word, I guess. And I thought the way to it was through sensation. To have them help me get myself so terribly worked up, that I was practically out of my mind. I’ve never talked like this to anybody. I would get … carried away. I guess I scared poor Jud. But it would all be … a self-involved thing. All my attention would be on me. And I would achieve … a terrible, grinding, screaming climax where I didn’t even know who I was with. But it was only skin deep, sort of. The moment it was over it was over. Without sweetness. And I would feel sort of mealy and sick, and I wanted to roll myself up into a ball and have them go away and not touch me. Can you understand that? But with you, I don’t need all the little things that take me so far. They’re sort of all there to begin with. And all the way through I know it is you. Completely you, like nobody else in the world can ever be for me. Somehow I knew that when I saw the picture of you that Fergasson brought. I knew it way back then. I’m aware of you, and it happens more than skin deep. My God, it happens in every tiniest nerve and muscle, and most of all in my heart, and afterwards there is this aching sweetness and tenderness and holding and loving. Nothing mealy, and nothing sick. So this is a funny kind of thanks, for letting me find out I’m a woman. And right now I have the feeling I’m crying without crying at all. I’m a woman, and I’m your woman. And I would die for you.”

  “Paula, Paula.”

  “Hush up! I don’t want affirmations you don’t want to give. I’m not fishing, my friend. I made my affirmation, and so did you. Now do we stay right here all day and lose twenty or thirty pounds?”

  They got out into the tall grass that tickled their calves, dried themselves on the blanket and on the shirt and the blouse discarded the previous day. When she went off behind the bushes, he walked down to the end of the back pasture and found an icy brook at the edge of the woods. He followed it along and found a deep black pool under the shade of a stand of willows. He went back and got her and they went back to the pool with toilet articles and fresh clothing and the improvised towels. He had soap in his toilet kit.

  She stripped and tried to lower herself into the black water, holding onto willow roots, yelping at the iciness, gasping and chattering, until he pried her hand loose and shoved her in. She came screaming to the surface, and her long body had a saffron look under the cold water. She swam hard. He floundered in and it took his breath. In a little while they were reasonably able to endure it. They played and laughed and splashed and then, in the shallows on the far side, standing in the yielding mud of the bottom, took turns with the soap.

  She rinsed and watched him. “I like your body,” she said. “I like the way the muscles are sort of long and flat and they pull tight when you turn and bend. What’s that mark on the back of your left thigh, dear?”

  “Purple heart. Silly goddamn thing. Night patrol and they heard us and put a flare over us and I sent everybody into holes and then ran like hell and went diving into one myself, rolled over and over and landed in the lap of one of my guys sitting there holding a trench knife. We thought it was very very funny until I passed out on the way back home from loss of blood.”

  “It makes me feel sick to think of that body I love being where there are sharp things and bullets and blood. I don’t feel strange about looking at you. As a nurse I’ve looked at hundreds of naked men. But I always felt a little strange about looking at their sex. Not shy about it. But as if it was something kind of … ludicrous and sort of self-important. But not with you. You look dear to me, and bold and … like statues. That must mean something, to have it be so different.”

  “Maybe it means trust,” he said, and waded deep to rinse away the suds.

  She looked startled. “That could be it.” She waded all the way out and stood on the bank. She said, “I want you to look at me.”

  “I have been.”

  “No. Really look. I never wanted to be looked at. It always made me feel sort of … impatient and silly for anybody to want to look at me. But I want you to look. I wish it was better for you. If my hips were a little smaller, and my legs weren’t so heavy up here.”

  She stood in a slanting patch of morning sunlight, with the darkness of the woods behind her. She turned slowly, as gravely sweet and remote as a model. Her body had an ivory duskiness, the lines long and firm, breasts round and high and widely set. There was a soft and muscular sweep to the depth of the belly, and a slight hollowness of spine that gave an impudence to the strong buttocks.

  “I wouldn’t change it, Paula.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “You’re a lovely woman.”

  “For you.”

  They took the blanket out into the edge of the pasture and lay on it, and the grass was flattened under them and tall around them, making a private world in the sunlight. And afterward, as they walked back toward the car, hand in hand, she said, “The first was magic, and the second was sadness and this last time was truth. What is happening to me? I want to say things and I have the words to say them. That never happened before. I want to disappear into you like a second heart. I never knew that feeling before. I don’t have enough gifts for you.”

  “I’m not worth the ones you have.”

  “Neither am I,” she said. She grinned at him. “That’s the new arithmetic, lover. The sum is greater than the total of the parts.”

  To their enormous astonishment, when they drove out from behind the shelter of the collapsing barn and turned east, it was only twenty minutes before nine. She sat close to him, her hand on his thigh. She hummed her small songs, and her eyes looked smiling even when her lips were not. She pointed out things to him as they neared Bolton. “We had school picnics down there by that stream,” she said. “See that big elm tree beyond the picnic tables? That’s where I was kissed the very first time. I was twelve. It was a game, and Ormie Gerner was It and he picked me. We had to go around behind the tree, and when we got there he said in a very jittery way we could just stay there a couple of minutes and then go back to the others. I guess he picked me because he thought that would be all right with me. His eyes were all goggly. So I grabbed him and kissed him a good one. I was a very forward child. He told his friends, with embellishments. I got a reputation of being a very hot little item.”

  “Now I know where to carve those initials.”

  She pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “I love you for saying things that make me feel good, and now I have to go way over there and sit up straight and look cool, because we’re coming into town, right over that bridge, dear.”

  “You have no family left here, Paula?”

  “None here. A married sister in Perth, Australia. Suzanne. And her three boys I’ve never seen. A cousin out in Mon
tana. Frank. There was nobody left here when I came back to take care of Tom. A town this small is sort of like a big family. But they disapprove of me, sort of. There was the early reputation, you see. And becoming a nurse, and being divorced sort of confirmed it all. And now I’m trying to work on that poor senile old man so he’ll leave me his money. They wouldn’t give me credit for being a damned good nurse, or for being necessary to that old man. Emotionally necessary as well as medically. Here’s the town. Remember it at all?”

  “No.”

  “Keep on this road. See, we have a few summer tourists roaming around this time of year, but we don’t let them disturb our deep sleep. We were both in this town at the same time once before, Sid. You were a frightened little boy. I was cooing and sucking my toes. No. There’s five years, isn’t there? I guess I was curled in the womb, big as a mouse, but I was here when you were here. A foetus looks so ancient and wise. It knows everything. And then, when it is born, it forgets it all and has to learn it all over again. So I probably knew about you and I was all curled up and dreaming about you, and knew just how it would be. That’s why it doesn’t seem such a surprise now. I’m just learning all over again what I used to know. There’s the house and the iron fence, and that’s the driveway at the far end of the fence. Turn in there, dear.”

  Now she sat on the warm stones of the wall and he looked down at her and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to spoil it.”

  “You can’t,” she said. “That’s the point I have to make. It wasn’t conditional on anything. I want you close enough to touch for the rest of my life. I have to admit that. You know that. But if last night and this morning in the car and in the field was just … a way to try to trap you and hold you, then it wouldn’t be worth what it was worth. And there will be tonight too, and if you leave tomorrow and I never see you again, I am your woman and I have been your woman, and I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “You don’t have to be suspicious. I’m not a coward, Sid. If I hurt for you all the rest of my life, that’s my bargain. I accepted it. Now sit down right here on these old stones and think it over while I go take a look at him.”