The Getaway Man (10 page)

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
she said. “Taking chances? I always do that. Look at you. I don’t
know you. I don’t even know if your name is a real one. You seem like
some kind of a criminal to me. A dangerous man. Are you a dangerous man,
Eddie?”

“Only behind the wheel,” I said, thinking of
that judge, from when I was a kid.

“Oh, you’re
precious,” she said. She was laughing or crying; it was hard to tell with
her face buried.

L
ate that night, she woke me up. I
was on my back, looking up at her. She was holding the silver box with the red
ribbon.

“What’s this?” she said. “A present
for someone.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s for
me,
now,” she said.

She tore off the paper like she was
in a hurry. When she saw the perfume, she made a little noise in her
throat.

“Is this your favorite?” she said.

“I
don’t know. I never smelled it.”

Daphne opened the top of
the bottle. She put her finger on the top and turned it upside down. Then she
patted herself all over. Behind her ears, between her boobs, on the front of
her legs. She kept going back to the bottle for refills. When she was done, she
turned her back to me, so I could see where else she was putting the
perfume.

“
W
here are you going?” she asked me the next
morning.

“I have to see someone about work,” I
said.

“Take the Lexus,” she said. “I’ve got
another car. Bring it back when you come tonight.”

It took me a
couple of hours to find my way to where I’d been staying. I had to
backtrack over and over again, but I didn’t want to ask anybody for
directions.

I
guess it all started when Daphne said I had to tell
her a secret.

I felt myself go cold in my spine when she said that.
In my life, only one kind of person wants to know such things.

“What secret?” I asked her.

“Not any
particular
secret, you dope,” she said. “
A
secret, that’s all. It doesn’t matter which one. Everybody has
secrets. When people share their spirits, that’s part of the
deal.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I say that
a lot, to buy time. But, when I think about it later, I always see that I
hadn’t been lying.

“Didn’t I tell you secrets?”
she said.

“About stealing?”

“Yes!”

“I already knew that,” I said. “I mean, I saw you when
you were—”

“Secrets aren’t about
what,
” she said, whispering. “Secrets are about
why.
Remember what I told you, Eddie? About feeling guilty? And being
punished … ?”

“I.…”

“That
was a
special
secret. You’re the only one who knows. I never
told anybody. Do you know why?”

“Because they
wouldn’t understand?”

“That’s right, Eddie!
Don’t you have feelings like that? Feelings you know other people
wouldn’t understand?”

“I … guess.”

“You know you do. Everybody does. Everybody in the whole
world.”

It made me feel good, to know that. It made me more like
a regular person.

That was the night I told her about driving.

I
could never explain exactly what driving was. I guess I
shouldn’t say it like that. Before Daphne, I had never really tried. She
worked real hard at understanding what I was telling her, but I guess I
wasn’t making much sense.

“Remember I told you, about a
dream I once had?” she said.

“About getting
caught?”

“Yes. The truth is, I have that dream all the
time, Eddie. Not just that once. And even when I’m awake. Do you have any
dreams like that?”

“About getting caught?”

“No!
Any
dream that you have over and over.”

I
didn’t say anything. I wanted to tell her. There was no reason I
couldn’t. I mean, it wasn’t like I would be ratting anyone out. My
dream wasn’t about stealing, it was about driving. But something was
making me not say it out loud.

In my dream, I’m standing in the
dark, by the side of a road. Yellow beams cut through the night; a car, coming.
I can’t tell what kind, but it’s low to the ground. The car is
black. Not pitch black—the same black as ravens, with a glisten to
it.

The car stops. I can’t see inside, but I know there’s
no one in the driver’s seat.

The car sits there, waiting. I know
if I get in, I’ll be driving for all eternity.

I never get in.
But I know one night I will.

“I dream about girls,” I
finally told her. That was the truth, too.

Daphne smiled at me, like
I’d done something good.

I
was on a blue leather couch, in the
room next to the black and white one, waiting for Daphne to get dressed. She
had the biggest TV I ever saw in there. I was pushing the button to change
channels. Daphne has a setup where there’s so many stations you could
never really get through them all. She said there’s a way to do it fast,
depending on what kind of shows you like to watch, but I didn’t
care—I was just passing time.

On the screen, a car came along
the road. A black car, with black windows. I watched. It was a killer car. Not
the driver, the car. That was the name of the movie,
The Car.
I’d seen it before. It was pretty stupid, a car with no driver.

Not like my dream. In my dream, the car was
waiting
for a driver.
Waiting for me.

I didn’t hear Daphne come in. “What kind of
car is that?” she said, right next to me.

“A crazy
one,” I told her. Then I explained what the movie was about, as best I
could.

“Oh, that’s like
Christine,
” she
said.

“Who’s Christine?”

“
Christine
is the name of a book,” she told me.
“It’s about a car that’s possessed by an evil
spirit.”

“What kind of car?” I asked her, just like
she’d asked me. I wanted to see what she said, so I could say it myself,
if anyone ever asked me about that movie again.

“Oh, I
don’t know,” she said. “An old one. It was in the book. By
Stephen King, did you ever hear of him?”

“I think
so,” I said.

“He’s the biggest horror writer in the
world.”

“Oh.”

“It was a movie!”
she said, clapping her hands.

“What was?”

“
Christine,
Eddie. It was a movie. Would you like to see
it?”

“I … guess I would. But if it’s like this
one.…”

“No, it’s a
lot
better,
I’m sure. Come on, let’s go get it.”

W
e went to a
video store. They must have had thousands of movies there. You could buy them
or rent them.

Daphne said the movies were all in sections, so you
could find what you were looking for pretty quick. I looked for a section about
driving, but there wasn’t any.

“Just ask the clerk,”
Daphne told me. “Here,” she said, putting bills in my hand,
“buy whatever you want, okay?”

“I’ve got my own
money,” I said. “Plenty of money.”

She took the bills
back from me. Put her hands behind her back and looked down.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said. “I didn’t mean
anything. I just wanted to buy you a present, like you bought me.”

I started to say I hadn’t bought that perfume for her, but I stopped
… she looked so sad.

“It’s okay,” I said.
“I’ll just look around by myself.” I took her by the
shoulders and turned her around. “You see if you can find that
Christine
one,” I told her, and gave her a little smack on the
bottom so she’d get moving. I saw Tim do that once with Merleen, when
they were in a store, and Merleen had liked it fine.

From the way she
walked off, I guessed Daphne did, too.

I
found four different movies
that looked like they might be good from the stuff on the package. When I
walked over to the register, Daphne was there. She held up a box for me to see.
It said
Christine
on the cover.

“I got it!” she
said.

When we got out on the highway, Daphne wanted me to go fast. She
opened her purse and took out a videotape. I couldn’t make out the
writing on the cover, but the picture was of two girls, without any clothes
on.

“I couldn’t bring this one to the register,”
Daphne said. “It would be so embarrassing, I’d just
die.”

W
hen we got back to her apartment, Daphne showed me how
to work her VCR, then she went off to change her clothes.

I was
watching one of the movies I found—I didn’t think it would be right
to watch
Christine
until Daphne got back—when I heard her come
up behind me.

“Let’s watch this one, first,” she said
in my ear.

It was the one with the naked girls on the cover. When I
turned around from putting the cassette in, Daphne was naked, too.

C
hristine
turned out to be a pretty scary movie. The car was a
demon. A kid owns the car, but the car gets jealous of him and kills him. And
even when his friends figure out what the car is, nothing they could do would
kill it.

“Did you like it?” Daphne asked me, when it was
over.

“I guess not.”

“Why is
that?”

I thought about it for a minute. Then I told her, “I
like movies about driving, not about cars.”

“Well,
let’s look at the ones you picked out,” she said.

A
fter
a few days, I could see that the place where I had delivered the car
wasn’t going to come up with anything for me to drive out.

Daphne found me a room in a motel. A really nice one, but it cost a lot. I
didn’t say anything about the price, because I’d already told
Daphne I had money, and I didn’t want to look like I had just been making
myself big.

It was when I was staying in the motel that Daphne got me
my portable unit. I always carry it with me now, whenever I’m going to be
away. It’s a TV and VCR all in one. The screen isn’t all that big,
but I only watch by myself, so it doesn’t matter if I have to sit
close.

I usually went over to Daphne’s in the afternoon. Then
I’d come back to the motel real early in the morning, before it got
light.

After a while, I got used to sleeping in the daytime.

Daphne’s place was perfect for watching movies, but she didn’t
like them all that much. What I would do was read in the TV guide about a movie
that looked like it could be good, and then I’d watch it for a little
bit. To see if I wanted to tape it, like she showed me. Even with all the
channels Daphne got, it was pretty slow work.

Back in my room, I had
that VCR that Daphne bought me, so I could watch the stuff I had taped at her
place.

There were a lot of video stores in that city. I spent time in
some of them, just looking. Other kinds of stores get all annoyed if you spend
a long time doing that, but the video places didn’t care.

One
store had a guy working there that knew a lot. I could tell, because people
were always asking him questions. I didn’t understand a lot of what he
said, but I could tell he knew what he was talking about from the way everybody
listened to him.

Even though it wasn’t all that bright inside the
store, he always wore sunglasses. And a red T-shirt with a black vest. His head
was shaved, but I knew he wasn’t a skinhead—his tattoos were all
wrong.

I waited until he was alone, and I went up to him.

“Do you have any movies about driving?” I asked him.

“Car chases? We’ve got them all, my man. From the classics to
the contemporaries.
Bullitt
to
Ronin.
Are you looking for any
particular director?”

“Not chases,” I said.
“Movies about driving.”

“There’s all kinds of
driving,” he said. “
Grand Prix
was amazing. The original,
I mean, not
Driven.
That was a Stallone remake. Bor-ring! If you want
to stay with the classics, there’s always
Duel.
That was a
made-for-TV, but we have it in stock. Did you know Spielberg helmed that one?
Brilliant. You know the
Bandit
series? As in
Smokey and the
… ? Burt Reynolds is a comic genius. It wasn’t recognized at the
time, but you look at
Striptease
or
Boogie Nights,
and you
can see that
somebody
on the Holy Coast knew it all along. And
there’s a lot of cult stuff, too, like
Death Race 2000.
Everybody thinks Carradine, but Stallone was in that one, too, before he caught
fire. Then you’ve got truck driving, crime—”

“Crime,” I said. “You have any of those?”

S
ome of the movies he sold me were pretty good ones. But none of them
were what I wanted.

One night, Daphne said she wanted to go
shopping. I didn’t say anything—I didn’t think she was asking
me.

“You have to come, too, Eddie,” she said. “Only
you can’t go in the store with me, okay?”

“I
guess.”

“Eddie, don’t you understand what I’m
telling you? I need you to be outside. With the motor running, so I can jump in
and you can take off, fast.”

“What are you going to
do?”

“You know.”

“That won’t
work,” I said. “If anyone follows you out to the sidewalk,
they’ll get the license number. And they’d have a real good
description of you. The way you’re dressed up and all, people will notice
you. And remember you, too.”

I thought she’d be glad I
warned her. I even thought she’d be a little impressed. But her face
closed up and her mouth made a straight line. “Never mind,” she
said. “It’ll be fine.”

I
was in the room with the
TV when Daphne walked in. At first, I thought she wasn’t wearing
anything.

“You know what this is?” she asked me, coming
into the light where I could see her better.