“I guess that’s a matter of opinion, Mr. Johnson,” Terri said.
“I swear, girl, I’m gonna cut you from gut to gill if you don’t hush up.”
Terri went silent. I glanced at her in the mirror. She was smiling. Sometimes Terri worried me.
“Thing was, I couldn’t let him mail that map, now, could I? So we had this little scuffle and he got the better of me by means of some underhanded tricks and took off with the car, left me stranded but not outsmarted. You see, I knew he had a gal he had been seeing up near Lawton, and the money was around there, so I figured he’d go back. He might mail that map, and he might not. Finding the map in your car when I come up on missy here, that was real sweet. I knew then you knew Smat, and that he was the uncle you were going to see.”
“Did Uncle Smat ever mention us?” I said.
“No,” Johnson said. “I hitched my way back to Oklahoma, went up to where we buried the money one night, had me a shovel and all, but I didn’t use it. Wasn’t nothing but a big hole under that tree. Smat had the money. I thought, Damn him. He pulled it out of that hole on account of me. I didn’t know if he reckoned to give the bad boys a new map with the new location of the money or if he took it with him, deciding he wasn’t going to give it back at all. Now he could keep it and not have to split it, which might have been his plan all along. I was down in the dumps, I tell you.”
Terri was leaning over the seat now, having forgotten all about Johnson’s harsh warning and the knife.
“Sure you were,” she said. “That’s a bitter pill to swallow.”
“Ain’t it?” Johnson said.
“I’d have been really put out,” Terri said.
“I was put out, all right. I was thinking, I caught up with him, I’d yank all his teeth out with pliers. One by one, and slow.”
“He wouldn’t have liked that,” she said.
“No, he wouldn’t. But like I said, I knew he liked a gal in Oklahoma, and I’d met her, and he was as moony over her as a calf is over its mother, though it wasn’t motherly designs he had.”
“It wouldn’t be that, no, not that,” Terri said.
I thought, How does Terri know this stuff? Or does she just sound like she knows?
“I got me a tow sack of goods I bought with some of that money I had, made my way to her house, and hid out in the woods across the road from her place. I lived off canned beans and beer for two or three days, sleeping on the dirt like a damn dog, getting eat up by chiggers and ticks, but he didn’t come by. I didn’t know where he was staying, but it wasn’t with her. I was out of beer and on my last can of beans and was about to call in the dogs on my plans when I seen him pull up in front of her house. He got out of his car, and, let me tell you, he looked rough, like he’d been living under someone’s porch. He went inside the house, and I hid in the back floorboard of his car. When he come out and drove off, I leaped up behind him and put my knife to his throat, which was all I had, having lost my gun in a craps game on the way back to Oklahoma. I had some good adventures along the way. If you two are alive later, I’ll tell you about them.”
Considering Johnson was telling us everything but what kind of hair oil he used, I figured he wouldn’t want us around later. We knew too much.
“So there I was with my knife to his throat, and you know what he did?”
“How would we?” Terri said.
“He drove that car into a tree. I mean hard. It knocked me winded, and the next thing I know I’m crawling out through the back where the rear windshield busted out, and then I’m falling on the ground. I realize I’m still holding the knife. When I got up, there was Smat, just wandering around like a chicken with its head cut off. I yelled at him about the money, and he just looked at me and seemed drunk as a skunk, which I know he ain’t. I say, ‘Smat. You tell me where that money is, or I’m going to cut you a place to leak out of.’ He says to me, ‘I ain’t got no mice.’”
“Mice?” Terri said.
“I’m sure that’s what he said. Anyway, I got mad and stabbed him. I’m what my mama used to call real goddamn impulsive. Next thing we’re struggling around, and he falls, and I fall, and I bang my head on the side of the car, and when I wake up I’m on my back looking at stars. I got up and seen Smat had done took off. So I went looking for him high and low, thinking I’d got a good knife thrust or two on him, and he’d be dead thereabouts. But he wasn’t. So I went wandering around for a few days, thumbed a ride back to Texas, knowing Smat knew a fellow just over the river. But Smat wasn’t there. I cut that guy good to find out if he knew anything about where Smat was, but I killed him for nothing. He didn’t know shit. I went wandering for a couple more days, and then I seen you two at that station. Ain’t that something? Ain’t life funny?”
“Makes me laugh,” Terri said.
“I wandered a couple more days, finally caught a ride from a farmer and was dropped off at the Red River bridge, and when I got to the other side, what do I see but your car and this little fart outside of it, and I think, Where’s that boy? He’s gonna drive me. Then I seen the map on the seat and knew you knew Smat and knew he hadn’t mailed any map at all, ’cause there was the same one he’d drawn. I figured you knew where he was, that he’d been in your car, and then the rest of it you can put together.”
Before Terri could say anything, I said, “He ain’t alive no more, but before he died he said he done that map to trick you so you’d think he was letting go of the loot, but he came back for it. He moved it, all right, but it’s still in the same place, buried right behind Geronimo’s grave. You missed it.”
He studied me a moment to see if there was truth in what I said, and he saw truth where there wasn’t any, which goes to prove if I want to lie, I can do it. So we got our bearings and headed out in the direction of Geronimo’s grave after stopping at a station for gas and at a general store across the street from it to buy a shovel and some rope. Johnson gave me some money and I went in and bought the goods. Johnson sat in the backseat with Terri to make sure I didn’t talk to anyone at the station or the store. He kept the knife close to her.
At the store I was supposed to ask how far it was to Fort Sill, where Geronimo was buried, and I did. When I told Johnson how far it was, he figured we could drive through the night and be there early morning, before or just about the time the sun came up.
It started raining that afternoon, and it was a steady rain, but we drove on, the wipers beating at the water on the windshield.
Johnson said, “Every time it rains, someone says, ‘The farmers need it.’ I don’t give a hang about the farmers. Papa raised hogs and chickens and grew corn and such, and he spent a lot of time beating my ass with a plow line. To hell with the farmers and their rain. I hope their lands blow away. I can eat pork or beef or chicken or a squirrel. I don’t care about the farmers. The farmers can go to hell.”
“If I’m reading you right, you don’t seem to like farmers,” Terri said.
“That’s funny,” Johnson said. “You’re gonna funny yourself to death.”
Johnson sat quiet after that and didn’t say another word until we came close to Fort Sill. Now, it’s supposed to be a fort and all that, but the graveyard wasn’t really protected at all. We parked up near it, Johnson grabbed the shovel and coiled the rope over his shoulder, and we all trudged into the graveyard, the rain beating down on us so hard we could barely see. We fumbled around in the dark awhile, but Johnson, having been there before, found Geronimo’s grave easy enough. A blind man could have found it. There was a monument there. It was made of cemented stones, and it was tall and thin at the top, wide at the bottom. There was a marker that said GERONIMO. On the grave itself were pieces of glass and bones and stones that folks had put there as some kind of tribute. The sun was rising and the rain had slackened, but we could see it had beat down the dirt at the back of the grave, behind the pile of rocks that served as Geronimo’s marker, and damn if we couldn’t see a tin box down in a hole there. The rain had opened t
he soft dirt up so you could see it clearly as the sun broke over the trees in the graveyard.
I thought, Uncle Smat, you ol’ dog, you. He had done exactly what I was pretending he did. The box really was there. Uncle Smat figured hiding it right near where it had been before would fool Johnson, and it would have, had I not told a lie that turned out to be the truth. Uncle Smat might actually have meant to mail that map but then he got stabbed, went off his bean, somehow ended up back at the chicken coop where he’d been staying, and died of the stabbing.
Johnson handed me the shovel, said, “Dig it the rest of the way out.”
“What happens to us then?”
“You drive me out of here. I can’t carry that on my back, and I can’t drive. Later, I tie you up with the rope somewhere where you can be found alongside the road.”
“What if no one comes along?” Terri said.
“That’s not my problem,” Johnson said.
I scraped some dirt off the box with the shovel, and then I got down in the hole to dig. Water ran over the tops of my shoes and soaked my socks and feet. I widened the hole and worked with the shovel until I pried the box loose from the mud. I slipped the rope under the box and fastened it around the top with a loop knot. I climbed out of the hole to help pull the box up. Me and Terri had to do the pulling. Johnson stood there with his big knife watching us.
When we got it up and out of the hole, he took the shovel from me, told us to stand back, and then used the tip of the shovel to try and force open the lid. This took some considerable work, and while he was at it, Terri stepped around beside Geronimo’s grave.
Johnson stopped and said to Terri, “Don’t think I ain’t watching you, girlie.”
Terri quit inching along.
Johnson got the box open and looked inside. I could see what the sunlight was shining on, same as him. A lot of greenbacks.
“Ain’t that fine-looking,” Johnson said.
“Hey, Johnson, you stack of shit,” Terri said.
Johnson jerked his head in her direction, and it was then I realized Terri had stooped down and got a rock, and she threw it. It was like the day she killed that bird. Her aim was true. It smote Johnson on the forehead, knocking off his hat, and he sort of went up on his toes and fell back, flat as a board, right by that hole we had just dug.
I looked down at Johnson. He had a big red welt on his forehead, and it was already starting to swell into a good-size knot.
“Girlie, my ass,” Terri said as she came up.
I bent down and took hold of his wrist but didn’t feel a pulse.
“Terri, I think you done killed him.”
“I was trying to. Did you hear the way it sounded when it hit him?”
“Like a gunshot,” I said.
“That’s for sure,” she said. “Let’s get this money.”
“What?”
“The money. Let’s get it and put it in the car and drive it home with us.”
“A million dollars? Show up at the house without Uncle Smat and with a large tin box full of money?”
“Here’s the way I see it,” Terri said. “Uncle Smat has left enough of himself in the car it ought to satisfy Mama that it was best we didn’t bring the rest of him home, his stink being more than enough. And this money might further soothe Mama’s disappointment about us not hauling him back.”
“We just pushed him in a sump hole and left him,” I said.
“Really want to go pick him up on the way home?”
I shook my head, looked down at the box. It had handles on either side. I bent over and took one of them, and Terri took the other. We carried the money to the car and put it in the backseat floorboard.
It was good and light by then, and I figured it might be best to leave without drawing a lot of attention to ourselves or to the dead body up by Geronimo’s grave. I let the car roll downhill before starting it, and when we were going pretty fast, Terri said, “Oh, goddamn it.”
She was looking over the seat, and I glanced in the rearview mirror, and there was Johnson. He wasn’t dead at all. He was running after us, nearly on us, his arms flapping like a scarecrow’s coat sleeves in the wind. He grabbed onto the back-door handle and got a foot on the running board. I could see his teeth were bared and he had the knife in his free hand and he was waving it about.
I jerked the car hard to the right and when I did, the car slid on the gravel road, and Johnson went way out, his feet flying in the air, him having one hand on the door handle, and then I heard a screeching sound as that handle came loose of the car and Johnson was whipped out across the road and into some trees.
“Damn it to hell,” Terri said. “He done bent up in a way you don’t bend.”
I glanced behind me. I could see he was hung up in a low-growing tree with his back broken over a limb so far, he looked like a wet blanket thrown over it. That rock might not have killed him, but I was certain being slung across the road and into a tree and having his back snapped had certainly done it.
The motor hummed, and away we went.
It took us another two days to get home on account of having to stop more and more for the radiator, and by the time we pulled up in the yard, the car was steaming like a teakettle.
We sat in the car for a while, watching all that steam tumbling out from under the hood. I said, “I think the car is ruined.”
“We can buy a bunch of cars with what’s in that box.”
“Terri, is taking that money the right thing to do?”
“You mean like Sunday-school right? Probably not. But that money is ill-gotten gains, as they say in the pulp magazines. It was Uncle Smat and Johnson stole it, not us. Took it from bigger crooks than they were. We didn’t take any good people’s money. We didn’t rob no banks. We just carried home money bad people had had and were using for bad reasons. We’ll do better with it. Mama’s always saying how she’d like to have a new car and a house, live somewhere out west, and have some clothes that wasn’t patched. I think a rich widow and her two fine-looking children can make out quite well in the west with that kind of money, don’t you?”
“How do we explain the money?”
“Say Uncle Smat left us an inheritance that he earned by mining or some such kind of thing. Oil is good. We can say it was oil.”
“And if she doesn’t believe that?”
“We just stay stuck to that lie until it sounds good.”
I let that thought drift about. “You know what, Terri?”
“What’s that?”
“I think a widow and her two fine-looking children could live well on that much money. I really think they could.”
HANNAH MARTINEZ
by Sara Gran
THE BODY WAS put together from different parts—the door was one color and the hood was another and the bumpers were from an ’82. The Cadillac was pulled over by the side of a busy road where a big NO STOPPING sign was posted. A woman stood next to the car waving her arms. She looked pretty desperate. No one pulled over.
I didn’t pull over either. I had somewhere to go. Someone was waiting for me.
But a few blocks later I made a right and then another right and went a few blocks and made another right. The woman was still there. She was trying to make eye contact with people as they drove by, still waving her arms around. I pulled over about ten feet in front of her and put on my hazards and walked back to her. It was about a hundred degrees.
“Thank God you stopped,” she said. She was around fifty-something. Maybe sixty. Her voice was cracking and her hands shook. She was scared, I guessed—out by the side of the road alone. Her hair was white and tied up in a bun.
“Take it easy,” I said. “Let’s sit down on the curb. Try to relax.”
“I know,” she said.
We went and we sat on the curb next to her car. She took a few breaths and I put a hand on her arm and she seemed to feel a little better.
After a few minutes she said, “I don’t know what happened. I was just trying to ge
t to my hotel. It’s down there. Just down the street. All the lights on the dash went on and it just stopped.”
I figured she’d run out of oil or gas but I was no expert. I said I would drive her to her hotel. She hemmed and hawed a little but I told her I had nowhere to go anyway, which wasn’t true, and finally she agreed. We left a note on the car. She’d just have to hope the Cadillac would still be there when she arranged for a tow.
She got in the car and I put the air on. We drove for a while. Turned out the hotel was actually all the way at the other side of the valley. She said her name was Hannah Martinez. She said she’d been a dancer, which I believed because of how straight her back was, and that she was in town for a job doing outfits for the girls in “a little revue.” She said she was also a musician and she’d written a song that was a big hit in Germany about seventeen years ago.
“Boy, I tell you,” she said. “Those were some good years. We ate well.”
I didn’t know if it was true, but so what? What did I know about hit songs in Germany? Everyone had the right to the story they want, I supposed. So what if maybe things happened a little different in real life. Who was keeping score?
Finally, after close to an hour, we got where she was going. It was a motel way over almost in the next county. Nearby were a bunch of places that fixed dents and hubcaps and engines, which I figured was kind of ironic.
She thanked me a bunch of times and I could tell she meant it. I told her it was nothing. When I got home there was a big fuss and no one believed where I’d been. They were a bunch of clowns. That whole crowd was good for nothing. They all said it sounded like a story—about the costumes and the hit song in Germany. Well, I got news for you, kids, I told them, everything interesting sounds like a story. That’s life. A bunch of stories. If you think you know what’s true and what isn’t, good for you.
Before she got out of the car, in the dark of the parking lot, where she wouldn’t see what I was doing, I stuck a couple of dollars in her purse and a prayer card I’d been carrying around with me for a while. Saint Francis.
The Highway Kind Page 19