The Getaway Man (17 page)

I thought about the doctor. The one with the gold
coins. I wondered how long Vonda had been with J.C. If it had been her
who.…

“That’s not being a whore,” I said.
“It’s more like being … a spy, maybe.”

“Spies don’t have to go to bed with the people they’re
spying on.”

“Sometimes they do,” I told her. “I
saw it in a—”

“This wasn’t a movie,” she
said. Her voice had gone from sad to sharp. “This was real life. And this
guy wasn’t a Russian spy; he was a truck driver. That’s something
J.C. always says: a man can’t eat pussy with his mouth closed. And, once
it’s open.…”

“Why do you have to talk like
that?”

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said. Her voice
was back to being sad. “It’s not the way I like to talk, not
really. It’s just that being around J.C. and Gus all the time, I started
to sound like them. Now it’s a habit, I think.”

A
fter I was sure the truck was running perfect, I took
it out near the spot where it was going to happen. J.C. says it’s no good
just measuring with your eyes; the only way is to take the thing itself and see
if it will fit.

I drove the truck down into where we would be
leaving it. And I was glad I had listened to J.C., because it didn’t fit
right. When I walked back out onto the road and took a look back, I could still
see the truck pretty good. I couldn’t tell how it would look at night,
but I knew we couldn’t take a chance.

Gus showed me how to make
curtains out of branches and leaves. You cut some branches that have some heft
to them, but they still have to bend, so they hold their tension when you put
them in place. Then you lay smaller branches across, like a lattice. Finally,
you weave even smaller branches—ones with leaves on them—in between
the slots. Unless someone gets
real
close, it looks just like part of
the forest. At night, it would be impossible to tell.

Gus said to build
the curtains back at the cabin, then, when we’re ready, we could move
them in the back of the truck. It would only take a little while to set them
up.

“Where did you learn to make these things?” I asked
Gus. “In the army?”

“Where else?” he said. He
was squeezing his exercisers in both fists. They’re just a pair of wooden
handles connected by a spring. I tried them once. It takes a lot of power to
make them close all the way. I could barely do it ten times with my right, and
I couldn’t hardly do it at all with my left. Gus can do it for hours, so
fast you can hear the handles click against each other when he closes his
fists. “Just one of the many valuable skills they taught me.”

“Why do you call them curtains? Because you can slide them
open?”

Gus laughed. His laugh is always short and dry. Not like
something’s funny; like he’s making fun of something. “We
called them that because it was curtains for anyone who walked past them,
see?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You missed out
on all the fun,” he said. “How old were you when you first went
down?”

“Nineteen,” I said. I knew he meant real
prison, not the kiddie camps.

“I was a year younger than you when
it was my turn,” Gus said. “Only, back then, as long as your beef
wasn’t too bad, they gave you a choice. You could take the ride, or you
could give Uncle four years.”

“You could go in the army
instead of jail?”

“Sure. Happened all the time. It was just
the same, really. In the army, you know what they called guys who made a career
out of it?”

“What?”

“Lifers,” he
said. “You see what I mean?”

“Yeah. But, being in the
army, it’s something, you tell people you did that, they respect you,
right? Not like being in prison.”

“Maybe they do
now,
” Gus said. “When I was in, nobody respected you.
Vietnam wasn’t a real war.”

“But there was fighting,
right? People died.”

“Oh, a whole
bunch
of
motherfucking people died, kid.”

T
here were some parts of the
job where the best you could do was look it over real good. When I checked
those things, it wasn’t really scouting. It was the part I was going to
have to do myself, like practicing on the roads.

When I went out to
check everything for the last time, I took Vonda with me. For cover, like J.C.
said.

We parked over near where we were going to leave the truck. After
I made sure everything was going to fit just right, we drove over to the place
Gus had picked out for J.C.’s trick on the cops: an old played-out quarry
that hadn’t been worked in years.

I pulled the car way off to the
side, where you couldn’t see it from the road, then I walked over and
took a closer look.

The ground up to the lip of the quarry was all
rock and hard-packed dirt. I came up on it real careful, just in case it got
loose without any warning.

When I looked over the edge, I could see Gus
was right. It must have been a thousand feet to the bottom, easy. Sometimes, a
quarry will have water at the bottom, but this one was nothing but stone all
the way down.

I paced it off a half-dozen times. There wouldn’t
be any lights around the night we did the job.

W
hen I got back to
the car, Vonda was waiting for me. But she didn’t act impatient, even
though she couldn’t play the radio or smoke while I was gone, in case
someone might take notice.

“That curtain thing for the truck
is amazing, Eddie,” she said. “You really did a great
job.”

“It was Gus’s idea,” I told her.

I reached over for the ignition key. Vonda put her hand on mine.

“They don’t know how long it’s going to take you,
Eddie,” she said. “Let’s go back to where the curtain is.
We’ve got plenty of time.”

It seemed like it didn’t
take long. But when I looked at my watch, it was more than an hour later.

“
W
e’re really kind of late,
already,” I told Vonda.

“
Please,
” she
said. Real soft, like the first time she play-begged me. “I’ll just
run in and get what I want. It won’t take five minutes.”

Even though it was a video store, I didn’t go in with her. I could
never get out of a place like that in five minutes.

When Vonda came
out, she was swinging a plastic bag in her hand. She looked so happy.

“I got you a present, Eddie,” she said, when she got in the
front seat.

“What is it?”

“It’s a
surprise. I mean, you know it’s a movie, right? But
what
movie?
That’s
the surprise. You have to take it with you, so J.C.
doesn’t see it.

“Put it in the garage with your other
tapes. But you have to promise me not to look at it. I want us to watch it
together, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“
W
hat the hell are you up to?” J.C. asked
me.

It made me jump a little bit—J.C. almost never comes out
to the barn at night.

“I’m making something. For the
hearse. Just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“In case we get chased.”

“We’re not going
to—”

“I know that,” I said. “But this
won’t slow us down any. And it could buy us some time.
If
we
ever needed it.
If
it works.”

“Show me,” he
said.

So I showed him the tank I had welded up, with the rows of
spigots coming out the bottom. It looked something like the mufflers you see on
those old Volkswagens some guys convert into dune buggies for off-road
racing—that’s where I had got the idea.

The tank was going
to run across the back of the hearse, just over the bumper. I was going to fill
it with ball bearings—I had a whole barrel of them, soaking in
forty-weight. When I pulled the lever, the ball bearings would spill out behind
the hearse. No way anyone chasing us could stay on the road when they ran over
them.

“That’s a sweet piece of engineering,” J.C.
said.

Even with all that had been on my mind, it still felt good when
he said that.

“It’s like you always say,” I said.
“If you plan for things to go wrong, they usually
don’t.”

He gave me a big grin. Then he went back to the
cabin.

V
onda came out to the barn that night. I was on the couch,
but I was just sitting there, thinking.

“You didn’t
watch that movie I bought, did you?” she said.

“I would
never do that. I waited for you. Did you want to watch it now?”

“No, not now. I can’t stay long. And, anyway, I don’t
want us to watch it out here. J.C. and Gus are taking off again in a day or
two, for one last time. We can watch it then.”

“Okay.”

Vonda picked up my pack of cigarettes and lit
one for herself. She didn’t sit down. I couldn’t see her face in
the dark.

“When this is over, he’s not going to take me
with him, Eddie,” she said. “I’m good for some things, sure.
But, after this job, he won’t need me for any of them.”

“But … but you said … you said, if you ever tried to
get away from him, he’d track you down, Vonda. If he doesn’t want
you anymore, why would he care?”

She took a long drag from her
cigarette. I could see her face behind the red glow for a second.

“Think about it,” she said.

“I
have
been
thinking about it,” I told her. “Only, this makes it different.
Makes it easy. If J.C. is going to leave you, you can go with me. In my car.
I’ll split my share with you, Vonda. There’ll be
plenty—”

“You think it’s that easy?
You’ll be in the hearse; they’ll be in the truck. With the
money.”

“They have to come back here, Vonda.
Everything’s here. Their cars and all their ID and—”

“Oh, they have to come back all right,” she said. She took
another drag. “They have to clean up all the loose ends before they get
gone for good.”

“But if they—”

Vonda
ground out her cigarette in the hubcap I used for an ashtray. “I have to
go in now, Eddie,” she said. “Just
think
about it,
okay?”

T
he next day, we were all eating lunch in the cabin.
The television was on, with the sound off. Gus liked it that way. He was
squeezing his hand things.
Click-click.

J.C. told Gus about
what I was rigging up with the ball bearings. Gus nodded at me, like he does
when I finally understand something he’s been saying.

J.C. wanted
to know when I’d be finished with the hearse. “A few more
days,” I told him.

Vonda and J.C. argued about something before
they went to bed, but I didn’t hear any sounds of hitting through the
walls all that night. I guessed they had made up.

When I got up the
next morning, nobody was around. I made myself some bacon and eggs. I
don’t cook as good as Vonda, but I do pretty good. Virgil always said he
was going to teach me to barbeque someday, but he never got the chance.

I made plenty extra, in case they came out and wanted something, too. But
nobody did. So I went to work.

I was in the barn when I heard the car
take off. When I went back over to the cabin, J.C. and Gus were both gone.

It was after lunchtime, so I made myself a sandwich.

Vonda
didn’t come out of the bedroom until almost three o’clock. I looked
at her face, but I couldn’t see any marks.

I asked her if she
wanted something to eat.

“Not now, Eddie,” she said.
“I have to take a hot bath.”

V
onda was in there a long
time. I didn’t know what to do. I went over to the door, stood real close
by, but I couldn’t hear anything.

I knocked. Soft, but loud
enough for her to hear.

I still couldn’t hear anything. I opened
the door, slow. In case she was.… I couldn’t even say the rest of
that in my mind.

Vonda was in the tub. She was crying, but quiet, like
she didn’t want anybody to hear.

“What is it?” I
said.

She started crying louder, then.

I went over and held the
back of her head.

It took a long time for her to tell me what happened.
The reason I hadn’t heard anything the night before was because J.C. had
tied her up. He wanted to do something to her she didn’t like. And he
wanted Gus to do it to her, too. He put tape over her mouth, so she
couldn’t yell.

That’s why she needed the bath, because what
he did hurt so much.

She said, sometimes, J.C. and Gus had her at the
same time. She said Gus liked to hurt girls, and J.C. let him do what he
wanted.

I closed my eyes. When I did, I saw little red dots, like the
tips of cigarettes.

“Wash me, Eddie,” she said, crying.
“Get me all clean. I have to get all clean.”

She was so
limp, I had to hold her arms up to wash under them. When I was all done with
her front, I said, “Vonda, do you want me to.…”

“I’m dirty, Eddie,” she said. She turned over in the tub.
She put her hands on the edge so she could keep her face out of the water, and
I did her other side. “Scrub
hard,
” Vonda said. “Get
it all.”

When I was all finished, I helped her stand up. I got
the towels and patted her dry.

Vonda turned her back, and said
something real low.

“What, girl?” I said.

“Am
I all clean now, Eddie?”

“All clean,” I said.

She turned and kissed me. Not a sex kiss; on the cheek.

“I
can always count on you,” she said. “I’m going to get dressed
now.”

W
hen Vonda came out of the bedroom, she had her hair in
a ponytail, like she did before, and her face was all scrubbed. She was wearing
a big white T-shirt that came down over her knees. For a second, a picture of
Janine popped into my mind. I wondered if they had treated her good in that
foster home.

“I want to tell you a secret,” she
said.

I sat down in the easy chair. Vonda sat on my lap. Not the way a
woman does. All curled up, like a little girl.