had said about the bed she’d made in the back? That
would be perfect. There would be a lot less chance of
our being spotted with just me alone up here than
with both of us. I put her down temporarily in the
seat while I reached for the keys to unlock the trunk.
Then I noticed I was still carrying the jailer’s key
ring in my hand. I threw it out into the street and
went around to the back, and unlocked the trunk and
raised it. She went into it perfectly, curled up like a
child with her head on the pillow. But suppose she
wakes up there in the dark, I thought. I ran back to
the front and looked in the glove compartment.
There was a flashlight, as I had hoped, and I
snapped it on and put it down beside her on the
blankets. She’ll know where she is, I thought.
I didn’t want to leave her. But it’s only for a little
while, I thought. As soon as we’re out of the worst of
the danger area I’ll pull off onto a side road
somewhere, by a little creek, and she can get out
and I’ll shave myself. I put the shell down and went
back and lifted the back seat up, pulled it out a little.
Feeling back with my hand, I could see there was
plenty of opening for air to get through, and with the
shell closed the carbon monoxide from the exhaust
couldn’t back up on her.
I jumped into the seat, and then discovered I had
left the keys in the lock of the trunk. I was getting
jittery with the hurry now. There still wasn’t anyone
in the street and it was growing light. I ran back,
snatched them out, and climbed in. It had been too
easy, and I was scared.
Take it easy, I thought. Keep your head. The worst
is over. They’ll discover it in a little while, but the
jailer didn’t see the car and they’ll have no
description of it. I hit the starter and had just got out
from under the street light when the other car pulled
into the street behind us. For an instant the
headlights washed across us, glaring in the mirror,
then they went out. He had stopped. Fighting the
terror, I went on, picking up speed without gunning
it. Just before I turned the corner I looked back. A
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man had gotten under the street light and was
walking up the steps of the jail.
He didn’t pay any attention to the car, I told
myself. Sweat was greasy on my face as I swung
around another corner and went up through the
deserted streets in the middle of town, headed for
the highway going north. When I passed the city
limits I was doing sixty and gaining speed. The road
dipped down in a long grade, across a valley two or
three miles wide, and over the hill on the other side.
Darkness was fading, with the sky growing pink over
to the east, as we shot across the valley and started
up the hill. They won’t know which road we took, I
thought. There are four of them out of town. Just
before we topped the hill I looked back and the road
was empty.
It was thirty miles to Woodley. That was a highway
junction too, and if we got past it before they got the
alarm on the air, the chances were against their
having all the roads blocked. They wouldn’t have
enough cars. In a few minutes I shot another look
behind me and felt the terror again. Headlights had
just topped a hill, far back. I hadn’t passed anybody,
and if a car was overhauling us at this speed it was
chasing us. It was nearly full daylight now, and I cut
the headlights as we went over another rise and
slowed to swing into a country road running west. At
the first crossroad I turned south. About fifteen
miles down there it should bisect the highway
running west from Harrisville. It did, but just as I
approached I saw a patrol car go careening past,
headed west. I’ll be behind him, I thought
desperately, and they’re going to plug it somewhere
up ahead. When he was out of sight I shot across the
highway, still roaring south on the secondary road.
I could feel the panic closing in. They were
plugging them fast now, too fast. North was shut off,
and west was being cut. About thirty miles south I’d
hit the east-west highway out of Bigelow, but could I
get west on that one now? They were turning me
inward in a big circle, and again I had that awful
sensation of going around and around in a big
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whirlpool and sliding toward the center I slammed
around a turn and was nearly on top of a farmer in
an old Ford. He was in the center of the road, and I
swung down into the ditch and clawed my way back
up just before I hit a culvert. The sun was up now,
and I could feel it burning the side of my face.
Everything looked unreal, like an impressionistic
painting, all the farmhouses and barns too sharpangled
and light-struck, so they hurt the eye, and
then suddenly I thought with amazement that it was
Sunday morning and people would be going to
church and that sometime before long I was going to
unwind like a broken clock spring because I couldn’t
remember what it was like to sleep.
The last highway going west was the one out of
Bigelow. I made the turn, throwing gravel across the
pavement, and then hit the brakes. A half mile up
ahead a patrol car waited, sitting beside the road. I
shot into reverse, swung, and was going east before
he could get turned around. We were trapped now.
No, I thought wildly, maybe not. It may be wide open
to the east and south, because all these cars had to
come from somewhere. They pulled them off the lake
when they heard I was in Harrisville. If I can get
through Bigelow I might get on down to Colston and
shake them going east. But I had to pull away from
him to get through town. It was fifteen miles and he
was almost out of sight by the time I hit the city
limits. I cut down side streets and missed the square,
not even recognizing anything because by now it was
all an endless mad race through a dream with this
part just like any other and having no connections
with the town I’d lived in all my life.
Then we were clear of town on the highway going
east. The car chasing us was nowhere in sight; I
slowed a little to make the turn four miles beyond,
where I had wrecked the other car, then began to let
it out. The pines began to blur and run together on
both sides, with the highway a straight groove down
the middle; the car was a projectile in a green-walled
chute, gathering speed. I was too tight now, dead on
my feet and lightheaded, and hypnotized by abstract
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speed. I couldn’t think connectedly of anything;
flashes of thought raced through my mind, jumbled,
like small sections of a hundred motion pictures
pasted together and run through a projector at
blazing speed. Why hadn’t I heard a sound from
Doris? If we could get by the lake I’d take to the
country roads before we got to Colston, try to get
another car. We’d be all right now if all the cars
down here had been pulled out. All the ones with
radios, anyway; the others didn’t matter.
Then, suddenly, there was a patrol car cruising up
ahead. I swung over in the groove and went around
him at a hundred miles an hour. I heard the shots,
and then the curve was coming up, and I had to ride
it down. Ninety, seventy, sixty, and still too fast. It
was almost right-angled to the left and poorly
banked. I could feel them riding up on my tail and
heard the guns again. Then we were into it and I
ground the throttle, hearing rubber scream. The left
wheels lifted, floating, and then were down again
and we were straight, going across the dam.
There was no road block, and I breathed again. I
could see a bunch of cars and men before the store
and beer joint, and on the other side by the place
where they rented boats, but the road was clear and
they couldn’t close it now. I bore down on the
throttle and was gaining speed, but the car behind
had ridden too far up on me on the turn. The guns
were very near. The windshield shattered, and then I
heard the tire explode. I caught it, held it for a long
half second, and then lost it again, and we started
over. I made it to the floor boards. It wiped the top
off clean, and then we came up, the lake and sky
swinging in a tremendous arc, and somehow the car
was gone.
The roaring and the flight chopped off, straightwalled
and clean, against the edge of vacuum. Then I
was on my knees in the broken bushes while dam
and lake and sky settled into place and sound
returned. It was a juke box in the beer joint wailing
“Falling in Love with Love” out across the water in
the early morning sun, and men were running. I
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watched them disinterestedly, from far away,
wanting only to go to sleep. Then I turned my head a
little and saw the car, and I tried to scream.
It had smashed through the young willows and was
lying on its side some twenty yards ahead of me, tail
down along the front slope of the dam with the rear
end of the trunk some four feet above the water. It
was balanced precariously on its right, the open
seats facing me with all the top and windshield gone,
and I could even see the keys dangling from the
ignition lock. And it was settling, slipping a little on
the smashed greenery beneath and then hanging up,
poised, precarious, to break and slip again, trunk
first, toward the surface of the lake. I got somehow
to my feet and began to run, holding out my arm to
point, my body bursting with all the horror of the
sound I couldn’t make. The men had almost reached
me, running past the car but up on the road above it,
ignoring it because they could see no one was in it
now. I was almost there when the vanguard piled
down off the road and reached me. Plunging into and
through them, I took them with me, fighting,
pushing, dragging them forward, still moving, trying
to reach the keys and trying to form words to tell
them, but making only hoarse animal sounds deep
inside my throat. I saw the car slip again, and poise,
hanging by a whisper to the slope just above the
water where it dropped away to a depth of twenty
feet against the steep face of the dam.
They thought I was crazy now, but they couldn’t
shoot because we were all so tangled together in a
writhing mass of men. I could see the saps swinging
in the sunlight, and the blows, and could even feel
them faintly, like a gentle rain, painless, unreal,
without effect, like something happening in a street
riot I was watching in a newsreel.
It slid once more. The rear bumper was in the
water now and I could see the whole front end rise a
little as it balanced, teetering, ready to plunge.
And then, somehow, my voice came back and I was
screaming “The trunk! The trunk!” I could hear it,
going up and up, above the blaring of the juke box
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and the meaty sound of fists falling and the
raggedness of breathing and all the roaring in my
ears. “The trunk! Get her out of the trunk!”
They must have understood, somehow grasped the
fact that she was not here and they had not seen her.
Some of them broke away from the heaving mass of
us and lunged for the keys dangling in the lock.
They got her out just before the car slid into the
water. I took five of them down there with me and
got my hands on her as they lifted her, but she was
already dead. Her neck was broken.
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Twenty-seven
In the exact center of the moving wheel there is no
movement. It is winter now, or late autumn, and one
day is very much like the rest. The leaves of the
trees outside the window were full of autumn color
for a time, but now they are mostly gone, and I can
look up the street through the naked limbs in the
early morning and see the frost across the lawns. It
looks very much as it did when we used to walk to
school that year when she lived here, when they had
the pictures of blue eagles inside the glass windows
of all the stores around the square.
People come to see me and talk a while and go
away. Abbie Bell comes every Sunday morning and
brings me a carton of cigarettes. She recovered from
the knife wounds and the case against Waites was
finally thrown out of court when she didn’t press the
charges or testify against him. She says she feels
sorry for men, and I don’t know whether she means
Waites, or me, or just all men together.
“You know, Jack,” she said once, looking at me
through the door, “it just doesn’t seem possible to
me that in only eleven million years, or however long
they’ve been here, men could have got as stupid
about women as they have. They must have
practiced somewhere before. Imagine them trying to
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do anything to that poor bastard, when someday he
might even get that girl back.”
I never see Buford. He ran. But he’ll be back.
They got Dinah’s car out of the lake. She came up
to see me the day it came back from the garage
where they fixed it up, and said she was leaving that
afternoon for California. I told her I was sorry about
the car, but she just looked at me and said it didn’t
matter, and after a while she went away.
They brought me down here for the district court.
There has been one trial, but something was wrong
with it, and there’ll be another. Or so the lawyer
says. He is very earnest, and explained it all to me,
but I guess I wasn’t paying much attention. He
comes in nearly every day, sometimes alone and
sometimes with the other men, the doctors or
psychiatrists who are working with him. They ask a
lot of questions, tap me on the knees, and try to find
out whether I know right from wrong, and go away
after taking down a bunch of notes. They are all very
earnest and seem to be trying so hard you want to
help them.
Somehow, they seem to think it matters.
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