by Jim Nisbet
“Nice,” Royce said. “If anybody comes looking for us we can just put a For Sale sign on the truck and burrow into the horse shit. Nobody’ll ever find us.”
“What time is it?”
Royce turned the key and fingered the button on the dash: 12:42. “That was quick.”
“Can you fix that dingus?”
“What? You mean the Your Door Is Ajar dingus? Are you serious?”
She looked at him in the darkness.
“Shit,” Royce said. “There’s a pair of pliers, I mean,” he caught himself, “three years ago there were tools in the dash there,” he said, pointing at the dash pocket. “See if they’re still there.”
She opened the glove box. The light that flooded out of it lit her face and gave it a very mysterious look, with her black hair partially obscuring it, like a sandblasted Madonna, as she leaned to sort through the junk in the glove compartment.
Royce switched the ignition key on, without starting the engine, and wedged himself upside down under the dashboard beneath the steering wheel. To do so he had to stick one foot out the open window to Colleen’s right, and fold the other up against the seat to her left. She worked over and under his left leg as she searched for tools in the glove compartment.
“Flashlight?” he asked. “Lighter?”
“There’s a penlight.”
“Perfect,” Royce said glumly. His head was wedged between the brake and gas pedals. He had to keep a strain on his neck and shoulder muscles to prevent gouging the back of his head on the corners of the pedals, his shoulders against the floormat. Working by the odd patches of light that leaked backward from the dash, he wedged one hand into the mass of wires and linkages above the steering column and found a small enclosed chassis that he thought might contain the terminals for the various standard and optional signaling devices on the truck. Holding it with one hand he worked his other hand through a loop in a heater hose and found the tabs for the cover. “Turn the light on and hand it to me,” he said. “Put it in my mouth.”
She had to lean over the middle of his upturned torso to do this, so that her breasts lay against his abdomen. Royce, concentrating on the maze in the darkness over his head, would not have felt a more electrifying jolt shoot through him if he had shorted out the entire truck. He inhaled sharply between clenched teeth. Suddenly he was seventeen years old again.
Colleen felt this charge run through him and laughed gently in the darkness. In spite of her proximity to him, she could not see Royce’s mouth beneath the steering column, so she felt for it with her fingers. Then she passed the thin tube of the penlight between his lips and teeth. Then she pulled it out a little. Then she put it back in a little. At the same time she gently flattened her breasts against Royce’s chest. He could distinctly feel one firm nipple against his lower rib.
“I like a man with a truck,” she said.
“I got it, I got it,” he said around the penlight, and gripped it with his teeth. Her fingernails caressed his cheek and disappeared out of the thin beam of the flash and back under the dash.
Boy, thought Royce, maneuvering the light up onto the wires above his face, never a dull moment with this bunch.
But then her hands found the zipper to his khaki pants and flattened the length of it against the very essence of his memory of youth, just as he got the top off the plastic box.
“12:49,” she said, and she pulled the tab of the zipper. Royce could feel every tooth on the zipper as the tab separated them. “You think you can get finished before I do?”
Ye gods and little fishes, Royce thought. “What about Eddie?” he said around the body of the penlight.
“Better hurry up,” she said playfully, “or we’ll blow everything.”
My God, Royce thought with a strange sense of urgency, this woman knows everything about me. “Open the side door,” he hissed. His breath was coming quickly, and because of the penlight most of it came through his nose, bringing with it the powerfully combined odors of horse manure and vinyl. No woman had willingly touched him in more years than he cared to remember.
Without interrupting what she had begun, Colleen freed one hand and cracked the side door. The annoying buzzer sounded, and the synthetic woman’s voice repeated its warning message.
“Your passenger door is ajar. Please close your passenger door. Your passenger door is ajar.…”
Royce could barely think as he methodically unplugged and re-plugged wires from the terminal strip inside the plastic chassis. His neck was in an uncomfortable strain, but now he willingly thrust his shoulders against the floormat as she took him in her mouth and worked him with her hand.
“…passenger door,” the voice continued. It had been programmed to nag seductively. But Royce and Colleen quickly discovered a use for its rhythm. “Your passenger door is ajar. Please close your passenger door. Your passenger door is ajar. Please close your passenger door… .”
The fifth wire silenced the alarm, and for a moment the only sounds to be heard in the truck were those usually associated with gluttony, backed up by the incessant whirr of all the crickets in Texas. Somewhere in the darkness a horse whinnied contentedly. Royce’s face was running with perspiration; it left a wet streak on the floormat as he turned it aside and spit the penlight against the truck door. He moaned deeply, loudly and thoroughly, in the throes of a pleasure he hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. It was enough to make him weep. Tears in fact started to his eyes and he kicked the foot dangling out the passenger window so high the window frame banged his shin. His spasm lasted longer than he’d ever known or thought possible.
Hardly had his shudders reduced to a mild trembling when Colleen kissed him and zipped him up.
“You won,” she said. “Let’s ride.” She slid out of the truck, opening the door so that Royce’s leg fell onto the seat. Royce quickly replaced the plastic cover over the terminal strip and struggled out from under the dash. Colleen got back in the truck as he started it. He accelerated back out of the dirt drive between the livery stable and the parking lot. She slammed the glove box closed and pointed up the road.
“You’re right, baby,” Royce said huskily, and rubbed her thigh. “I won.” He was breathing as heavily as if he’d just run from the fifty-yard line to the press box in the Cotton Bowl. But he felt like a new man. “You know what you just did for me?” he began effusively. “You just—” He caught himself. He just barely caught himself. Another moment, she would have had it all. Pamela, the overpriced ranch they couldn’t afford, the top-of-the-line Mercedes, the country club, all of it, right down to the last time he and Pamela had made love, badly, in ’74 or ’75 it might have been, right down to the fact that he’d never known Bobby Mencken at all, much less done hard time. But after a silence he said softly, “Two and a half years in stir. And I’m straight.”
He looked at the woman on the seat beside him. The shadows of the streetlights slipped over her shape in the darkness. “Take a right,” she said, her right hand holding onto the doorframe and her left onto the dash. “Now a left.”
“Colleen, why?” he asked, driving quickly, watching where they were going. “Why me?”
“Hey,” she said simply, “you’re helping me; I’ll help you.”
Oh boy, Royce thought, the primitive barter system.
“Besides,” she smiled, “crime turns me on.”
Royce held his breath a moment, then let a long, low, almost inaudible whistle escape his pursed lips. He had washed up among a fast crowd.
She glanced nervously at the dash. “What time is it?” she demanded, pointing at it.
“Take it easy,” Royce said. “That’s a radio station. Here.” He pushed the proper button and the time replaced the frequency: 12:02.
“We’re late,” she said between clenched teeth. “Right at the next corner; there’s a hydrant. Get our ass to the next cross street and slow down in the block after that.”
Royce threw the truck around the corner. The outside wheels sque
aled on the black tarmac and he had already depressed the accelerator before he saw that the next block was filled with flashing red and blue lights.
“Cops!” she hissed. “Goddamn it!”
Royce’s blood turned cold. He couldn’t think. He had the sense to back off on the accelerator immediately without slamming on the brakes. He tapped them enough to slow the truck down before they got to the last cross street, a block before the house with the willow trees.
“Don’t turn!”
Colleen slammed the dash with her fist and slid over the seat until she was as close to Royce as she could get.
“Turn on that goddamn radio,” she said quickly, watching the street. “Never mind. I’ll get it. Keep driving straight.”
“Are you crazy?” Royce said.
“Do just like we’re supposed to!” She fiddled with the dials without taking her eyes off the street in front of them. In a moment the languid strains of a banal country tune filled the cab of the truck: “… and you decorated my life…”
Colleen sat back and put her arm over his shoulders. “We’re rubbernecking,” she said.
He did as he was told. They really had little choice. In the next block three police cars were parked at various angles in the street in front of the house with the willow trees. Each had its headlights on and its roof lights flashing. Dark figures moved among the swiveling beams of red and blue. As Royce and Colleen drove past the intersection they saw a cop lighting the flares that would soon prevent access to the next block. The cop looked at them.
“We should turn—” Royce began.
“Keep going,” she said evenly, as she watched the officer with the frank curiosity of those born innocent and destined to die the same way. Flickering crimsons and the odor of burning magnesium wafted through the cab as they passed, and they could hear the flares spitting on the asphalt.
Royce slowed the truck to a crawl as he threaded his way through the cars and policemen in the street. The big house set back off the street by its driveway and willow trees was completely illuminated, and uniformed figures moved about in front of it. An ambulance was parked sideways on the lawn, its doors open. A spotlight showed a low stretcher on wheels, its sheets thrown back and straps dangling from it. The front doors of the house and the garage were wide open. People milled about on the steps and in the entry hall beyond. The garage and every window had lights in them.
Not a chance, Royce thought to himself, not a chance for Eddie. A sudden pang of sympathy arose in him for Lamark. As they slowly passed the house Colleen slid over to the passenger door. She leaned out of the window as if to get a last glance of a sensational scene in a quiet neighborhood, but Royce heard the click of the door latch under the armrest.
“What the hell are you doing?” he growled. But just then, as they drove past the Lincoln, parked right where it had been before, a cop came into the headlights. He stood on the side of the road in front of the nearest willow tree, almost exactly where Eddie had said he’d wait. The cop pointed away from them, down the street, with a flashlight in his right hand, and waved them on with a circular motion of his left.
“Hi, officer,” Colleen said brightly, as the cop moved past the passenger window. “What’s going on?” She sounded exactly like a dumb teenager. She even pretended to chew gum as she talked.
“Move along, please,” the cop said impatiently, looking up the road in the direction he wanted them to go.
“Gee,” Colleen said, and sat back in the seat just as the passenger window moved past the cop. She lowered her voice. “Ready to go road racing? Turn the corner,” she said matter-of-factly, staring expectantly ahead. In her hands she held the armrest and window handle of the passenger door.
His heart pounding in his chest, Royce did as he was told. He turned right, around the hedge that hid the last house on the block. A police car was parked there, on the opposite side of the street. Two uniformed officers were getting flares out of its open trunk.
There was no sign of Eddie.
Colleen bit her lip. “‘Et’s get out of here,” she said dully. Royce made a left at the next corner, much as they had done the last time. Then he took a right, then a left, then another right.
After a while Colleen opened the passenger door wide and slammed it hard.
ELEVEN
A few minutes after they left the scene of the crime, Royce asked a very simple question.
“Where to?”
Colleen Valdez scowled. “Fuck off!”
“Oh.”
He found the Northwest Highway and got on it going west. Then he drove north for a little while on Harry Hines Boulevard. When they came to the Lyndon Johnson Freeway he got on that heading east. After a while the LBJ goes south and he followed it. If they stayed on it long enough, they would circle the entire city.
After a half-hour or so it seemed she was going to let them do just that. Colleen Valdez sat as far away from Royce as possible and brooded against the glass in the passenger door.
Soon they were on the south end of Dallas, opposite the side of the city they’d started from. A sign warned of the impending intersection with the Thorton Freeway. She spoke.
“You got any money?”
Royce watched the highway.
She slid across the seat and placed one hand on the back of his neck and the other between his legs. The movement was so sudden Royce jumped in his seat and changed half a lane.
After a couple minutes of silence she asked him nicely, “You got any money, Frank?”
Royce shrugged against her persuading hands. “I got a few bucks.”
“Thirty?”
He looked at her. “Sure.”
She gave him a fond squeeze. “Take the Thorton, Highway 35.”
They took it north and got off going west on Illinois Avenue. A few blocks past Zang Boulevard they turned south, then back east, then south…. He knew they were near her apartment but it wasn’t exactly the same neighborhood. That is to say, it was the same kind of neighborhood, run down, lots happening on the streets in spite of the hour—perhaps because of it—but not the exact same one. She pointed. “Here.” He parked the truck across the street from an all-night grocery. Several people were leaning against the fenders of the cars out front, hanging around. “Let’s see the thirty,” she said.
Royce pulled out two twenties and gave them to her.
“Can you fit some whiskey into that?” he asked hopefully. “Ezra Brooks?”
She got out of the truck without answering.
He watched her cross the street. She had a fine body, seen from behind. Or from the front, for that matter. Were there other people like her in the world, who took sex so casually?
Instead of going into the grocery, she rounded the corner and disappeared into the darkness. The men and women hanging around the corner paid her little notice.
Half an hour passed.
Royce jerked awake when he heard the truck door open. She slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door.
“‘Es go,” she said in a thick voice.
He started the truck and pulled onto the street.
“Where?”
She didn’t answer him. A package thumped to the floorboard at her feet. She’d fallen asleep against the doorjamb.
“Hey,” he said a little more loudly, “where we going?”
She didn’t answer. He pulled over to the curb and stopped.
“Hey, Colleen.” He shook her.
“Home.” She smacked her lips like a sleeping baby. Then she looked at him in a most peculiar manner, by leaning her head back as far to one side as it would go and peering at him from beneath eyelids seriously under the influence of gravity. In spite of the gloom, each pupil was tiny, in about the same proportion to the rest of the eye as a ladybug to an eight ball. She didn’t look so pretty like that.
“S’long Eddie….”
Then her eyelids gave up their resistance and closed.
Royce retrieved the package from the f
loor between her feet. It was a brown paper bag and it contained two packs of Salems, matches, and a pint of Old Overholt. The seal on the bottle hadn’t been broken.
“Forty bucks,” he muttered, and cracked the seal.
The whiskey was decent. As it corroded its way to his stomach he realized how much tension he’d built up. After another hit on the bottle he decided crime wasn’t his bag. Too much pressure. His career as wheel man was showing a hundred percent failure rate.
On the other hand…
He contemplated the woman nodding a foot or two away from him. On the other hand, if Eddie Lamark had really blown it and gotten himself nailed red-handed breaking and entering, Frank Royce had inherited a right nice little spread. He took a third swallow. A man could get used to that idea.
He took a fourth, smaller swallow. No way Eddie and Colleen and Royce combined could make bail, no way conceivable. Pity. A slow grin crept over his unshaven face.
A little time passed. He idly tapped the neck of the bottle between his legs with a fingernail and watched the traffic. Big trucks ground past him, moving into the nighttime city to drop their loads. He heard laughter, a radio, a bottle break on the sidewalk. Behind all that he could hear a train. A silent white Cadillac limousine with a pair of steer horns bolted to its hood slowed as it glided down the opposite side of the street, made a U-turn in front of the grocery and eased into the parking space he’d left a few minutes before. He watched it in the side mirror of the truck. Colleen made little smacking sounds with her lips and twisted listlessly into the corner between the seat and armrest. The wide front door of the Cadillac opened into the street and a chauffeur in immaculate powder-blue livery cut like a western leisure suit stepped out. He flattened his string tie against his chest as he looked both ways, then crossed the street and disappeared around the same corner as Colleen had. None of the five or six people hanging around on the corner paid him any mind either.