The Getaway Man (14 page)

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said. “I never
should have doubted you. I know you’re not the kind of man who would lie
to a woman.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Well, it’s
not
okay. I make that mistake, sometimes.
Thinking all men are alike. But that’s
my
mistake, and I
shouldn’t put it on you.”

“It’s all right,
Vonda. I don’t mind.”

She looked over at where my carton of
tapes was next to the VCR. “Are these all just regular movies,
too?” she asked me.

A
fter that, Vonda came
out to the garage at night a lot. Not real late, and never for very long. First
I thought she was trying to catch me watching one of those movies she thought I
was watching that first time, but that wasn’t it.

“I’m just trying to figure out what you like, Eddie,” she
said.

“Well.…”

“Don’t tell me! I
think I know. It’s cars, right? I mean, that would make sense, you being
an expert and all.”

Nobody had ever called me that exact word
before. I felt the back of my neck burn, and I was glad it was dark in the
barn. But I had to tell her the truth.

“It’s not …
the movies aren’t about cars,” I told her. “They’re
about driving.”

A
couple of days later,
Vonda asked me if I knew if there was any more of that old carpet I put on the
couch. I said there was rolls and rolls of it up in the loft, but that ladder
was pretty rotten and you had to be careful going up there.

“Can you go up and throw down a roll for me?” she said.
“And is it okay if I set up in that corner way over there? I won’t
be in your way.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about,
but I went up in the loft and pushed a couple of rolls of carpet over the
edge.

Vonda worked hard for the next few days. She cut pieces off the
carpet, then she hung them over a line and beat them half to death with an
aluminum baseball bat Gus always keeps in his car. She washed down a section of
the barn floor, then she scrubbed it with a brush. When she was done, it
smelled like pine over there.

After the carpet was laid down over the
section she cleaned, it looked pretty good. Vonda came out with one of those
big radios, the kind that also plays tapes, or CDs, and has speakers on the
sides. She was wearing stretchy black pants and a white sweatshirt. She had
white sneakers on her feet, a white band around her head, and a thick pair of
purple socks that went up real high over the outside of her pants.

She
turned on the radio. A lady’s voice said they were going to work on
quads. Then the lady’s voice said to do things, and Vonda did them.
Different exercises. For each one, the lady’s voice would count while
Vonda did them.

It went on for about an hour. Every time I looked up
from what I was doing, it seemed like Vonda was doing some other exercise.

“Now we’re going to step,” the lady’s voice
said.

Vonda went over and pushed a button and the voice stopped. She
came over to where I was working.

“Eddie, I need a step
platform,” she said. “Do you think you could make me
one?”

“I don’t know what one is,” I told
her.

Once Vonda showed me what she meant, it only took a few minutes to
make one. She carried it back over to where her carpet was, pushed a button,
and the lady’s voice started up again.

Vonda stepped up, then she
stepped down. Over and over. Then she switched legs. After a while, she started
doing things with her arms, too.

I went back under the car.

W
hen the lady’s voice stopped, Vonda walked over to where I was
working. She had a big pink towel wrapped around her shoulders. Her face was
all dewy from the exercise, but she didn’t smell stale, the way guys in
prison did when they finished lifting weights or playing basketball.

“That is
hard
work,” she said.

“I
guess.”

“Men are always like that,” she said.
“It doesn’t
look
hard, does it? Just stretching and
jumping around. But it is. And it gets the job done.” She turned
sideways, stood on the toes of one leg, and pointed at the back of her thigh.
“Feel that,” she said.

I touched it, real light.

“It’s real strong,” I told her.

“
Squeeze
it,” she said. “Come on.”

I did what she said. I hadn’t been lying before—her thigh was
as hard as a piece of wood.

“See what I mean?” she
said.

“Yeah.”

“I do aerobics every other day,
religiously. And I do my stretches
every
day. I drink eight big
glasses of water every day, too.”

“How come?”

“How come I … ? Oh, the water? It flushes your system. Keeps
it clean. It’s very important for good skin.”

“Oh.”

“Eddie,” she said, with her hands on
her hips, “why do you keep a car tuned?”

“So it runs
good.”

“It’s the same thing with a person’s
body. You have to keep it tuned.”

“I guess that’s
so.”

“You wouldn’t want your car to let you down,
would you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“That’s because you rely on it, Eddie. It’s something you
need to get what you want. That’s the way I am about my body,
see?”

“Like a boxer?”

“Yes!
That’s exactly it, Eddie. Just like a fighter.”

S
ometimes, when Vonda was exercising, J.C. would come out and talk to
her. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Not that I would ever try and
listen.

Sometimes, she’d stop and go off with him. Sometimes
she wouldn’t.

J.C. came out to talk to me, too. About what we
needed for the car, mostly. But he’d talk about the job, too, a little
bit.

When J.C. would ask me questions, it was easy. When he stopped
talking, like he expected me to ask
him
a question, it was hard.
I’m never sure about things like that.

One time, Gus came out to
the barn. He had some work to do, on the stuff he makes.

There was
plenty of room out there. Gus put together a workbench out of sawhorses and
some planks, but, when he tried it, he said it wasn’t bright enough for
what he had to do. So I took a couple of the trouble lights you use for working
under the hood and hung them over a beam with extension cords. They dropped
right down over what he was doing, and he said they worked fine.

When
Gus was done, he walked past where Vonda was working out. I couldn’t hear
what he said to her, but I heard her say, “Get the fuck away from
me.”

W
hen Vonda was done with her workout, she always drank a
big bottle of water. Sometimes, she would come over and ask me if I wanted a
drink. I never did.

Vonda was always asking me about my movies.
After that first time I had told her, I thought maybe she’d think it was,
I don’t know, immature of me, or something. But she was real interested.
And it was nice to have someone to talk to while I was doing things to the
car.

She asked me when it started. With my movies.

I told her,
when I was a kid. I saw this one movie. Not
at
the movies; it was a
real movie, but it was on the television.

I had always wanted to see it
again, but I never did—until Daphne told me all about video stores.

The Driver
, it was called. I didn’t know who was in it, but
the star, the guy they called “The Driver,” he was real handsome.
Always very calm and cool, no matter what was going on.

When I told her
about it, Vonda asked me if I had it on videotape. When I said I did, nothing
would do but that she had to see it for herself. But I was … I
don’t know, kind of edgy about it.

So Vonda begged me. Not like
real begging, just playing around. “Please, please,
please
!” she said, leaning down to where I was working. I
thought maybe she was making fun of me, but I said okay. Only I didn’t
want to watch my movies in front of J.C. and Gus. I never did that. I
didn’t know what they would think.

She said that was all right.
“We’ll get our chance, Eddie,” is what she said.
“There’s no rush.”

F
inally, J.C. and Gus had to go
somewhere for a few days, to make sure about stuff for the job. They were
always doing that.

The first night they were gone, Vonda watched the
movie with me. I’ve been to movies with girls enough times, but Vonda was
the first one who never said a word all the while it was on. Not one word; like
the movie was important to her, and she didn’t want to miss any of
it.

And the minute it was over, she started asking me all kinds of
questions about it.

Nobody ever did that before, either.

So I
told her, the driver in the movie, he was supposed to be a getaway man, but he
really didn’t do it right. Vonda asked me, what did I mean? Asked me
serious. So I explained. The man in the movie, when he had to do a job,
he’d steal a car for it. That part was okay. But he never checked the car
out.

You have to do that. You have to make sure the tires are good.
Even the tire
pressures
are real important. The brakes, the shocks.
You can be the best driver in the world, but if the suspension’s no good,
you can’t make the car do what it’s supposed to. You can’t
just grab something off the street and use it on a job right away.

Vonda never knew any of that. Her eyes got real big when I explained it to
her. They had little black glints in the turquoise, like metalflake chips in
paint.

It made me feel good, that she could see there was a lot more to
my job than just driving for a few minutes each time.

So I told her
other stuff, too. The chases, they went on too long. In the movie, I mean. It
was like the driver had a plan that all the cop cars behind him were going to
crash, and then they’d just leave him alone while he rode off.
That’s plain silly. It never happens like that.

The driver in the
movie looked cool behind the wheel, but you could see he didn’t really
know how to do it—he was just acting.

Vonda told me the man who
played the driver was famous. He was once married to some girl who was so
beautiful she was in magazines. Vonda had a lot of those magazines. I thought
they were J.C.’s, when I first saw them around the cabin. Maybe they
were, even. But Vonda was always reading them.

T
he next morning,
Vonda cooked me breakfast. She always cooks, but she never eats anything in the
morning. I thought, with J.C. and Gus gone, she wouldn’t bother. But she
made me a real nice omelette, with all kinds of stuff in it.

I went
out to work on the cars we were going to use for the job. But I got distracted
by the way the sun came in through a crack in the beams.

The sunlight
fell right across my Thunderbird, and I felt bad, like I was not taking care of
it. I had a set of headers for it that I was pretty sure would fit, but
I’d never gotten around to trying them. I figured this was a good day to
do it.

“
D
id you miss me?”

It was Vonda, standing behind me. Real close.

I looked at my watch.
It was after three o’clock. I guess Vonda hadn’t come out to
exercise that day, like she usually did.

“I was working on the
headers,” I said. “I almost got it done. They’re going to
work perfect.”

“Is this your car, Eddie?”

“Sure,” I said.

“For real?”

“What do you mean, Vonda?”

“I mean, do you
own
it? Or did you just steal it?”

“It’s
mine,” I said. Just for a second, I thought about the preacher and the
sin of pride. I thought I knew how he felt. “I bought it, and I’m
fixing it up myself.”

“It’s so cool!” Vonda
said. “I think I saw one like it, once. In the movies.”

“It’s an original Thunderbird,” I told her. “A
nineteen fifty-five.”

“That’s as old as J.C.,”
she laughed. “Does it still run good?”

“It runs
great,” I said. “And when I get these headers all tightened down,
it’s going to run even better.”

“Let’s take it
for a ride!”

“You know I can’t do that, Vonda,”
I told her. “Nobody’s supposed to see any of the cars we’ve
got back here.”

“This cabin’s on thirty acres, Eddie.
We wouldn’t have to go off the property. Just a little ride, so I can see
what it’s like. Come on.”

“Somebody might still
see.”

“From where? The road’s got to be a mile away.
And the woods are so thick around us. Just around the back, on the dirt path.
We wouldn’t have to go fast or anything.
Please!
”

W
e went so slow a fast runner could have caught us. I was a little
worried about the undercarriage, but the ground was almost as smooth as a
road.

“It’s such a beautiful afternoon,” she said.
“Too bad your car’s not a convertible.”

“It
is,” I said. “I mean, I don’t have the convertible part of
it, but the top, this one, it comes off.”

“Oh, do it! Come
on.”

“It doesn’t just go back, the way a convertible
does. You have to lift it off. Like with a hoist.”

“But you
could
do it, if you wanted?”

“It’s nothing
special I’d be doing,” I said, so she wouldn’t think I was
blowing myself up. “It’s
supposed
to do that. It’s
called a removable hardtop. All of them had it.”

“So we
could do it, someday, right?”

“I guess,” I said. But
I didn’t really see how.

W
hen J.C. and Gus got back, Vonda
said, “You boys have a good time?”

“We
weren’t there to have a good time,” J.C. said. “After this
job, we’ve got the rest of our lives to do that.”

“Did you bring me anything?” Vonda asked.

“We’ve got to go again on Friday,” J.C. said. “Tell
me what you want, I’ll bring it back for you.”

Vonda turned
her back on him and walked off.