Bagombo Snuff Box (32 page)

“He knows about jail. He’s been there before,” said his father.

“Let him keep his mustache if he wants to,” said his mother.
“I just wish he’d look in a mirror once to see how silly it makes him look.”

“All right—let him keep it,” said his father, “but I’ll tell
you one thing he isn’t going to keep, and I give you my word of honor on that,
and that’s the automobile.”

‘Amen!” said his mother. “He’s going to march down to a
used-car lot, and he’s going to sell the car, and then he’s going to march over
to the bank and put the money in his savings account, and then he’s going to
march home and give us the bankbook.” As she uttered this complicated promise
she became more and more martial until, at the end, she was marching in place
like John Philip Sousa.

“You said a mouthful!” said her husband.

And now that the subject of the automobile had been introduced,
it became the dominant theme and the loudest one of all. The old blue Ford was
such a frightening symbol of disastrous freedom to Rice’s parents that they
could yammer about it endlessly.

And they just about did yammer about it endlessly this time.

“Well—the car is going,” said Rice’s mother, winded at last.

“That’s the end of the car,” said his father.

“And that’s the end of me,” said Rice. He walked out the
back door, got into his car, turned on the radio, and drove away.

Music came from the radio. The song told of two teenagers
who were going to get married, even though they were dead broke. The chorus of
it went like this:

We’ll have no fancy drapes— No stove, no carpet, no refrigerator.

But our nest will look like a hunk of heaven,

Because love, baby, is our interior decorator.

Rice went to a phone booth a mile from the Governor’s Mansion.
He called the number that was the governor’s family’s private line.

He pitched his voice a half-octave higher, and he asked to speak
to Annie.

It was the butler who answered. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but
I don’t think she’s taking any calls just now. You want to leave your name?”

“Tell her it’s Bob Counsel,” said Rice. Counsel was the son
of a man who had gotten very rich on coin-operated laundries. He spent most of
his time at the country club. He was in love with Annie.

“I didn’t recognize your voice for a minute there, Mr. Counsel,”
said the butler. “Please hold on, sir, if you’d be so kind.”

Seconds later Annie’s mother was on the phone. She wanted to
believe so desperately that the caller was the polite and attractive and
respectable Bob Counsel that she didn’t even begin to suspect a fraud. And she
did almost all the talking, so Rice had only to grunt from time to time.

“Oh Bob, oh Bob, oh Bob—you dear boy,” she said. “How nice,
how awfully nice of you to call. It was what I was praying for! She has to talk
to somebody her own age. Oh, her father and I have talked to her, and I guess
she heard us, but there’s such a gap between the generations these days.

“This thing—this thing Annie’s been through,” said Annie’s
mother, “it’s more like a nervous breakdown than anything else. It isn’t really
a nervous breakdown, but she isn’t herself—isn’t the Annie we know. Do you
understand what I’m trying to say?”

“Yup,” said Rice.

“Oh, she’ll be so glad to hear from you, Bob—to know she’s
still got her old friends, her real friends to fall back on. Hearing your
voice,” said the governor’s wife, “our Annie will know everything’s going to get
back to normal again.”

She went to get Annie—and had a ding-dong wrangle with her
that Rice could hear over the telephone. Annie said she hated Bob Counsel,
thought he was a jerk, a stuffed shirt, and a mamma’s boy. Somebody thought to
cover the mouthpiece at that point, so Rice didn’t hear anything more until
Annie came on the line. ,

“Hullo,” she said emptily.

“I thought you might enjoy a ride—to kind of take your mind
off your troubles,” said Rice.

“What?” said Annie.

“This is Rice,” he said. “Tell your mother you’re going to
the club to play tennis with good old Bob Counsel. Meet me at the gas station
at Forty-sixth and Illinois.”

So half an hour later, they took off again in the boy’s old
blue Ford, with baby shoes dangling from the rearview mirror, with a pile of
comic books on the burst backseat.

The car radio sang as Annie and Rice left the city limits behind:

Oh, baby, baby, baby,

What a happy, rockin day,

‘Cause your sweet love and kisses

Chase those big, black blues away.

And the exhilarating chase began again.

Annie and Rice crossed the Ohio border on a back road and listened
to the radio talk about them above the sound of gravel rattling in the fender.

They had listened impatiently to news of a riot in
Bangalore, of an airplane collision in Ireland, of a man who blew up his wife
with nitroglycerine in West Virginia. The newscaster had saved the biggest news
last—that Annie and Rice, Juliet and Romeo, were playing hare and hounds again.

The newscaster called Rice “Rick,” something nobody had ever
called him, and Rice and Annie liked that.

“I’m going to call you Rick from now on,” said Annie.

“That’s all right with me,” said Rice.

“You look more like a Rick than a Rice,” said Annie. “How
come they named you Rice?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you?” said Rice.

“If you did,” she said, “I’ve forgot.”

The fact was that Rice had told her about a dozen times why
he named Rice, but she never really listened to him. For that matter, never
really listened to her, either. Both would have been bored stiff if I had listened,
but they spared themselves that.

So their conversations were marvels of irrelevance. There
were only two subjects in common—self-pity and something called love.

“My mother had some ancestor back somewhere named Rice,”
said Rice. “He was a doctor, and I guess he was pretty famous.”

“Dr. Siebolt is the only person who ever tried to understand
me as a human being,” said Annie. Dr. Siebolt was the governor’s family
physician.

“There’s some other famous people back there somewhere, too—on
my mother’s side,” said Rice. “I don’t know what all they did, but there’s good
blood back there.”

“Dr. Siebolt would hear what I was trying to say,” said
Annie. “My parents never had time to listen.”

“That’s why my old man always got burned up at me—because I’ve
got so much of my mother’s blood,” said Rice. “You know—I want to do things and
have things and live and take chances, and his side of the family isn’t that
way at all.”

“I could talk to Dr. Siebolt about love—I could talk to him
about anything,” said Annie. “With my parents there were just all kinds of
things I had to keep bottled up.”

“Safety first—that’s their motto,” said Rice. “Well, that
isn’t my motto. They want me to end up the way they have, and I’m just not that
kind of a person.”

“It’s a terrible thing to make somebody bottle things up,”
said Annie. “I used to cry all the time, and my parents never could figure out
why.”

“That’s why I stole those cars,” said Rice. “I just all of a
sudden went crazy one day. They were trying to make me act like my father, and
I’m just not that kind of man. They never understood me. They don’t understand
me yet.” “But the worst thing,” said Annie, “was then my own father ordered me
to lie. That was when I realized that my parents didn’t care about truth. All
they care about is what people think.”

“This summer,” said Rice, “I was actually making more money
than my old man or any of his brothers. That really ate into him. He couldn’t
stand that.”

“My mother started talking to me about love,” said Annie, “and
it was all I could do to keep from screaming, ‘You don’t know what love is! You
never have known what it is!’”

“My parents kept telling me to act like a man,” said Rice. “Then,
when I really started acting like one, they went right through the roof. What’s
a guy supposed to do?” he said.

“Even if I screamed at her,” said Annie, “she wouldn’t hear
it. She never listens. I think she’s afraid to listen. Do you know what I mean?”

“My older brother was the favorite in our family,” said
Rice. “He could do no wrong, and I never could do anything right, as far as
they were concerned. You never met my brother, did you?”

“My father killed something in me when he told me to lie,”
said Annie.—“We sure are lucky we found each other,” said Rice.

“What?” said Annie.

“I said, ‘We sure are lucky we found each other,’” said
Rice.

Annie took his hand. “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes,” she said fervently.
“When we first met out there on the golf course, I almost died because I knew
how right we were for each other. Next to Dr. Siebolt, you’re the first person
I ever really felt close to.”

“Dr. who?” said Rice.

In the study of the Governor’s Mansion, Governor Southard
had his radio on. Annie and Rice had just been picked up, twenty miles west of
Cleveland, and Southard wanted to hear what the news services had to say about
it.

So far he had heard only music, and was hearing it now:

Let’s not go to school today,

Turtle dove, turtle dove.

Let’s go out in the woods and play,

Play with love, play with love.

The governor turned the radio off. “How do they dare put
things like that on the air?” he said. “The whole American entertainment
industry does nothing but tell children how to kill their parents—and
themselves in the bargain.”

He put the question to his wife and to the Brentners, the
parents of the boy, who were sitting in the study with him.

The Brentners shook their heads, meaning that they did not
know the answer to the governor’s question. They were appalled at having been
called into the presence of the governor. They had said almost nothing— nothing
beyond abject, rambling, ga-ga apologies at the very beginning. Since then they
had been in numb agreement with anything the governor cared to say.

He had said plenty, wrestling with what he called the
toughest decision of his life. He was trying to decide, with the concurrence of
his wife and the Brentners, how to make the runaways grow up enough to realize
what they were doing, how to fix them so they would never run away again.

‘Any suggestions, Mr. Brentner?” he said to Rice’s father.

Rice’s father shrugged. “I haven’t got any control over him,
sir,” he said. “If somebody’d tell me a way to get control of him, I’d be glad
to try it, but...” He let the sentence trail off to nothing.

“But what?” said the governor.

“He’s pretty close to being a man now, Governor,” said Rice’s
father, “and he’s just about as easy to control as any other man—and that isn’t
very easy.” He murmured something else, which the governor didn’t catch, and
shrugged again.

“Beg your pardon?” said the governor.

Rice’s father said it again, scarcely louder than the first
time. “I said he doesn’t respect me.”

“By heaven, he would if you’d have the guts to lay down the
law to him and make it stick!” said the governor with hot righteousness.

Rice’s mother now did the most courageous thing in her life.
She was boiling mad about having all the blame put on her son, and she now
squared the governor of Indiana away. “Maybe if we’d raised our son the way you
raised your daughter,” she said, “maybe then we wouldn’t have the trouble we
have today.”

The governor looked startled. He sat down at his desk. “Well
said, madam,” he said. He turned to his wife. “We should certainly give our
child-rearing secret to the world.”

“Annie isn’t a bad girl,” said his wife.

“Neither’s our boy a bad boy,” said Rice’s mother, very
pepped up, now that she’d given the governor the works.

“I—I’m sure he isn’t,” said the governor’s wife.

“He isn’t a bad boy anymore. That’s the big thing,” blurted
Rice’s father. And he took courage from his wife’s example, and added something
else. “And that little girl isn’t what you’d call real little, either,” he
said.

“You recommend they get married?” said the governor, incredulous.

“I don’t know what I recommend,” said Rice’s father. “I’m
not a recommending man. But maybe they really do love each other. Maybe they
really were made for each other. Maybe they really would be happy for the rest
of their lives together, starting right now, if we’d let ‘em.” He threw his
hands up. “I don’t know!” he said. “Do you?”

Annie and Rice were talking to reporters in a state police
barracks outside of Cleveland. They were waiting to be hauled back home. They
claimed to be unhappy, but they appeared to be having a pretty fine time. They
were telling the reporters about money now.

“People care too much about money,” said Annie. “What is
money, when you really stop to think about it?”

“We don’t want money from her parents,” said Rice. “I guess
maybe her parents think I’m after their money. All I want is their daughter.”

“It’s all right with me, if they want to disinherit me,”
said Annie. “From what I’ve seen of the rich people I grew up with, money just
makes people worried and unhappy. People with a lot of money get so worried
about how maybe they’ll lose it, they forget to live.”

“I can always earn enough to keep a roof over our heads and
keep from starving,” said Rice. “I can earn more than my old man does. My car
is completely paid for. It’s all mine, free and clear.”

“I can earn money, too,” said Annie. “I would be a lot
prouder of working than I would be of what my parents want me to do, which is
hang around with a lot of other spoiled people and play games.”

A state trooper now came in, told Annie her father was on
the telephone. The governor of Indiana wanted to talk to her.

“What good will talk do?” said Annie. “Their generation
doesn’t understand our generation, and they never will. I don’t want to talk
to him.”