Vanishing Act (8 page)

He made the turn and accelerated onto the eastbound highway. Then he looked at her again. "It’s a beautiful disguise." He seemed to realize he had gone too far. "Very smart."

"Yours has got to be better. It has to come from inside your head. When was the last time you were afraid for your life?"

"That’s easy," he said. "When I was a cop."

"Cops are dogs. Try to think in rabbit."

"What?"

She said it carefully, so he would understand. ’’This is like dogs chasing a rabbit. When the rabbit wins, he doesn’t get to kill the dogs and eat them. He doesn’t get to be a dog. He just gets to keep being a rabbit."

He opened his shirt and held out the pistol. "You mean rabbits don’t need one of these."

"It’s an asset if you think of it as a last resort. Just don’t imagine that a shoot-out with the people who are looking for us is going to help you. Once anybody has discharged a firearm, sooner or later everybody left standing has to talk to the police."

"And we can’t talk to the police."

"A few days in a jail cell won’t hurt me. I’ve done it before. But if these people are any of the things you think they are, then you can’t." She paused for a moment, then said, "Or any of the people you haven’t thought of yet."

"What people?"

"I don’t know."

"Why aren’t you saying it straight out? What is it?"

"Whoever it is wants you killed in jail before a trial. Doesn’t that have a familiar ring to it?"

He answered too quickly: "No."

"So you have thought of it."

"I’ve thought of everything. I’ve heard those stories too, but not from anybody who would know. And not in St. Louis."

"The contract on you is being circulated in prisons. Money doesn’t do a lifer much good. Other things do."

"It’s not cops."

"Nobody seems to be afraid that a prisoner who hears about it will take it to the authorities. It does make you wonder."

He was irritated now. "I wasn’t a dirty cop who knew things about other dirty cops. I did my job until the day I quit, and when I left, as far as I know, everybody else did his job too." He simmered for a few minutes while she waited in silence. Then he said quietly, "I’m sorry. I just... my life just kind of blew up. It’s taken a few days to get used to the idea that the last five years, when I was an accountant, were a waste. I was probably just being set up. I’m ready to give up everything I ever was, but I’m not ready to decide that everything I’ve ever done was worthless. Does that make sense?"

"Of course it does," she said. She had gone as far as she could for the moment. Some of the rabbits took to it instantly because they had been hiding and ducking all of their lives. Some took longer.

As they drove along Ridge Road, the dense thickets of bright electric lights along the river faded and threw no illumination in front of them. Ridge Road had been laid out on the northern branch of the Waagwenneyu, the great central trail of the Iroquois that ran from the Hudson to the Niagara. The north branch had been placed just below Lake Ontario on the long, flat escarpment that was the prehistoric edge of the lake.

As she looked out into the darkness past the little pool of light that the headlamps threw, she could feel the Waagwenneyu under them, just below the pavement. In the dark, the road sliced through the middle of the property of some rich guy who thought of himself as a country gentleman. Her view was blocked by a dense second-growth of trees that the owner’s farmer ancestor must have left there to protect his crops from the wind. The thick trunks presented themselves one after the other and swept by, and the overarching branches fifty feet above nearly touched each other in the middle, and looking up at them put Jane a few inches lower, below the pavement on the Waagwenneyu. The path was mostly straight, winding here and there to avoid a thick tree or a muddy depression. It was narrow, only eighteen inches wide, but deep—sometimes worn a foot below the surface by hundreds of years of moccasins. This was the branch of the trail that took the Seneca from the Genesee valley and the Finger Lakes northwest into Canada. The other branch was now Main Street in Buffalo, and it ran to the shore of Lake Erie and continued along it into Ohio and beyond. Those were the paths to war.

In the direction they were traveling now, it was the trail home, to the soft, rolling country where the Seneca felt most safe. The world then was all tall forests that had never been cut, oak and maple and elm and hickory and hemlock and pine, alternating in stands and mixed together. Sometimes runners would move along this trail eastward to tell something urgent—alarms or councils. They ran day and night, naked except for a breech-cloth and belt, their war clubs stuck in the belt at the back and their bows strung across their chests. They always ran in pairs, one behind the other, silent, never speaking. They could cover a hundred miles a day, so the trip from Neahga, the mouth of the Niagara, to Albany, in the country of the Mohawk, took three days. In all that distance there was no point where the trail emerged from the forest. It was marked at intervals by hatchet gouges on the biggest trees, but the runners didn’t need to look. Sometimes they would glance up and to the left to navigate by the constellation of the loon, but most of the time they could feel the trail with the balls of their feet.

When the trees had thinned out again, Jane replaced them with ghost trees beyond the range of the headlights, so that what was beyond eyesight could be the great forest again, deep and thick and shadowy. The secret was that the forest was still here, the descendants standing tall in parks and groves and windbreaks. The Seneca were still here too, driving this road to jobs in Lockport or Niagara Falls, dreaming Seneca dreams.

There was a disturbance coming from outside her, a light that rushed up from behind and pushed the forest back on both sides, where she couldn’t feel it around her anymore. She sat up. "How long has that car been behind us?" she asked.

"I don’t know," said Felker. "He just switched his brights on."

"Think for a second," she said. "Was it there when we made the turn?" She knew the answer. It wouldn’t have been so dark if the other car had been behind them. It must be all right. They hadn’t been followed.

"I don’t think so," he said.

The car came closer and closer, catching up quickly, but the driver didn’t dim his lights. Felker reached up and moved the rearview mirror to cut the glare of the rectangle of light that it threw across his eyes.

"There’s a long, straight stretch in a minute," said Jane. "When we get there, let him pass."

"I’d be delighted." He reached the section where the road straightened. On both sides were low, crooked fieldstone walls and houses built far back from the road, as houses had been when these were still farms. Felker slowed to forty, then thirty, but the car slowed too and stayed behind. Finally, he coasted off onto the shoulder and the car came up behind. When he had nearly stopped, the other car pulled to the left, its glaring headlights merging now with his to illuminate the slight decline ahead and then halfway up the compensating slope. The car slowly slid past and gained speed.

Jane stared at the back window while it was still in the beam of the headlights. There were four heads in it. That usually meant it was kids, probably farm kids who had spent the day in the city. Her eyes moved downward. It had New York plates, and that was a relief. But there was a license-plate holder around it with the name of a dealer.

"Does Star-Greendale mean anything to you?" she asked.

"Where did you see that?"

"People from around here buy their cars around here. I never heard of it."

"St. Louis," he said, frowning. "Greendale is a town outside St. Louis. But it’s not Star, it’s Starleson Chevrolet."

"Stop," she said. "Leave the lights on, but give me the keys. Somebody saw you get on the bus in St. Louis."

She slipped out and closed the door, then ran to the trunk. She pulled everything out and tossed it into the back seat, then climbed over it. He watched her in the back seat as she opened the backpack. "What are you doing?"

"The car has New York plates. They must have damaged them prying them off somebody else’s, so they left their holder on to cover it." She was busy pushing shells into the long tubular magazine of the shotgun. "They’re waiting for us up there somewhere. If we go back the way we came, we’re a half hour from anywhere crowded enough to lose them."

He checked the load of his pistol and then snapped the cylinder back into place. "There’s a box of ammo in my suitcase," he said. "I’d like to have that where I can reach it before we go ahead."

"We’re not going ahead. We’re not dogs, remember?"

"What, then?"

"Take the backpack. Put your money in it, or whatever else you think is worth saving. Don’t leave anything here that will tell who you are—I mean tell anybody, even the police. Wipe off everything you touched."

"We’re going to walk?"

She didn’t answer, so he quickly did what she had told him to. The money wouldn’t all fit in the knapsack, so he put some of it in his pockets. Jane put her leather bag over her shoulder and held her shotgun in her right hand. "Time to go," she said, and walked across the road. She swung her legs over the stone fence and into the empty cornfield beside it, then stood still as he hurried to catch up.

"All right," she said. "Walk only on the trenches between the rows. That’s the way the farmers do it because the corn is planted in the raised places."

"You care about their corn?"

"No, I care about leaving footprints you can see with a flashlight."

She started off across the cornfield, taking two rows at a step, and Felker followed. She could hear him coming along behind her, and it made her comfortable, because if he had stepped on the soft ridges of dirt, it would have been silent. Now and then he stopped to glance up the highway, and that put him behind, but she didn’t care. He was tall and strong, and he wouldn’t have any trouble keeping up.

She angled away from the barnyard, where there would be animals to smell them and bring the farmer out. When they reached the windbreak of trees at the north end of the field, she stopped and touched Felker. He leaned down and she put her lips to his ear. "We’ll watch from here."

She set down her bag and sat on it, leaning against a tree trunk, the shotgun butt on the ground and the barrel upward. Felker slipped the backpack off his shoulders and sat by the next tree. It took five minutes. The Chevrolet’s headlights came over the horizon, aimed first up into the sky and then dipping at the crest of the hill. The car was moving fast, at least seventy, judging from the way it gobbled up the space between the telephone poles.

When the driver saw the car parked by the side of the road, he slowed down. There were no heads visible in the borrowed Ford, so the driver had a decision to make. The Chevrolet veered to the center of the road and passed the parked car at about the speed of a walking man. It proceeded a hundred yards farther, and then its lights went out before it stopped. The doors opened and three of the four men got out and started to walk back along the road.

Jane didn’t see the dome light go on, and she didn’t hear any door slam. None of this was reassuring. The one in the car left the lights off and kept going down the road, then stopped and turned around. It was too far from the parked car for Jane and Felker to have heard it if they were hiding on the floor. The three men on foot spread out when they were still a hundred feet behind the parked car. Two of them went into the fields behind the stone fences on either side of the road, and all three slowly approached the car. When one was in front of it and one on each side, they stopped, pulled guns out of their coats, and aimed them at the Ford.

Felker leaned close to Jane’s ear and whispered, "If we’re going, shouldn’t we get started?"

She shook her head. "I want to see one more thing."

The Chevrolet began to move slowly up the road toward the parked car, its lights still off. When it was almost bumper to bumper with the Ford, it suddenly shot forward and rammed the back bumper to knock whoever was inside out of their crouch. The man on the road flung the back door open and aimed his gun. After a second he slammed the door in frustration, and the light went out before he turned his head.

"Now," Jane said. She turned and crawled a few feet deeper into the windbreak and then stood up.

9

She went off at a slow jog, going due north, first among the trees and then across a second field. This one was unplowed and full of short weeds that whipped against the stiff denim of her jeans. When they reached the far side of the second field, she stopped and looked back. The headlights came on suddenly and bathed the Ford in a pool of whiteness.

Then she was running through the night across the fields, the bag over her left shoulder and the shotgun balanced in her right hand. She could hear Felker’s breathing behind her, and she judged that he had the stamina to keep running.

It was going to be possible if she could keep her vision clear. Everything about modem life made people think of the world as a network of roads. But in country like this, the roads were just the narrow borders of broad expanses of rolling, fertile farmland. The four men weren’t about to abandon their car in the dark and take off on foot across the fields after them. If they were like most people, they wouldn’t even think of it. They would already be searching a map for the place where Jane and Felker would come out on a road. The obvious thing to do was to take a loop, come out behind the men on Ridge Road, and hope to make it eastward into Lockport, where there would be lights and police. But what if she and Felker didn’t double back? If she remembered, if her vision was clear, there were no more big east-west roads between here and Route 18, just on the outskirts of Olcott.

Felker moved abreast of her and said between deep breaths, "Where are we running to?"

She said, "Olcott."

"What’s Olcott?"

"About seven or eight miles."

"What’s in Olcott?"

"Save your strength," she said, then regulated her breathing again to bring in oxygen to keep her head clear. "Don’t talk."

They ran in silence then, and she lengthened her strides to match his, so the sounds of their feet struck her ear at the same time, a strong, rhythmic cadence, not a ragged pitter-patter pitter-patter that drained strength and wore out the runner. She kept her head up and tried to relax her shoulder muscles, but it was difficult carrying the shotgun and the leather bag that bounced against her hip at each stride.

She pulled the strap of the bag over her head so it went across her chest between her breasts and the bag was on her back. Then she slipped off her belt as she ran, and threaded it through the swivel on the end of the shotgun magazine, then through the trigger guard, and slung it tightly over her back so it was held against the leather bag. When she had done that, the running went faster.

It was a clear, cool April night, so the sweat formed and dried almost instantly, and the air came into her lungs like a cold intoxicant and came out in steamy huffs. She thought about Felker and listened to his breathing. He was disturbing. Jane had never taken a fugitive out of the world who had had this much trouble this early. Yet he seemed to be accepting it. She could hear him breathing deep, steady breaths, not short irregular gasps. He didn’t seem to be afraid. He had more to be afraid of than some of the people she had protected, less than others, but they had all been afraid. They had come to her because they had already tried all of the forms of shelter that people believed in: laws, blood relations, friends, even society’s capacity for simple outrage and disgust that a lone, powerless person had been laid open to evil. He had come that way too, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t afraid.

They ran through the fields and pastures, thickets of small bushes and groves of old trees, once coming so near to a house that they had to duck a clothesline before they slipped along beside the white clapboards. There was a dark window in the back where she could see the ghostly blue glow from a television set on the ceiling, but no people. The night was empty now. They were all penned inside houses and cars, separated from the night by plates of glass and the electricity they immersed themselves in, thick blankets of sound and light and warmth.

Jane felt strangely elated. She could feel the air and the trees around her, and because she could feel them and because she was running, she was part of it too. She was straining, exerting her legs and arms and her eyes and ears to move across the land in a way that people didn’t do often anymore, without some machine or a pavement to keep the land away from them.

She never glanced at her watch, because time had a different pace now. She couldn’t measure mechanical time against a distance she had only guessed was seven or eight miles but might be five or ten, and wasn’t uniform and smooth and level like a track at the university. The pace of her feet was the only time that mattered, and she kept it steady and even, like the beat of a song without any tune and without any words.

She saw Route 18 coming from a long way off. There were three streetlamps somewhere off to her right and, far beyond the road, the glow of more lights in the sky.

The houses were coming more often now, and they were harder to avoid because they weren’t farms but suburban houses on smaller plots of land. Now was the time when she had to decide about the shotgun. Even when most people were asleep, she couldn’t take the risk of walking down a village street carrying a weapon. She said to Felker, "Stop here."

He came closer. "What is it?" His breathing was hard and fast, and his voice was a little hoarse, like hers.

"Let’s catch our breath."

They walked along the fence of a big pasture, and she waited to let her heart stop pounding and her slower, deeper breathing come. She kept moving to fight off the cramps that were waiting to grip her calves and ham-strings. Felker swung his arms and walked along, trying to recover from the long run, but she could feel his eyes on her. She reached up behind her head and held up the long hair to cool the nape of her neck in the night air. Finally, she said quietly, "That road up there is Route 18. It’s the last big highway."

He said, "What’s beyond that?"

"A quiet little town."

Jane decided she couldn’t get close enough to the highway to detect a parked car without its occupants seeing her too. The two shoulders would be at least ten feet each, and forty for the pavement itself. Then, after they were across that, the other side might not be the houses she was hoping for. It might be more open land. She said aloud, "How does the chicken cross the road?"

"That’s it?" he said.

"If they guessed right, they’ll be waiting for us here. They’ll take us in the open."

"I guess I walk across and you cover me with the shotgun until something happens or I’m behind something. Then it’s your turn," he said.

She looked at him for a minute. "Not very good, but I suppose it’s the only way."

He shrugged. "It’s the only way they ever taught me."

They walked along the field until they could see the road ahead of them. On the other side there was an open field, but the trees beyond it gave her some hope. At least there weren’t a lot of lights on this stretch. They crept closer and closer to the road until they reached an empty lot overgrown with tall weeds that ran up to the shoulder.

She crawled forward in the weeds until she reached a shallow drainage ditch at the edge of the road, and looked hard to her right toward the lights, then down into the darkness to her left. There was nothing on the pavement in either direction, but she still didn’t feel right. Maybe it was just that the long run had made her light-headed. There never had been much chance that any four strangers would realize that she was heading north for Olcott.

She had been driving eastward when they had caught up. When that had failed, it would have made most sense either to walk around their ambush and keep going east or try to go back the other way, toward Niagara Falls. Olcott was a tiny community on the shore of Lake Ontario, at least half of it summer cottages closed from October until May, when the wind off the lake lost some of its cruelty. Besides, Olcott was too far. Nobody would try to run eight miles across country at night, through cornfields and woods and over barbed-wire fences.

She knew Felker was getting impatient. She looked in both directions again, letting her eyes stare at each tree, each distant building, each mailbox along the shoulder, then just looking, letting her eyes go unfocused to detect movement. It was foolish. The barrier was imaginary.

Jane rolled onto her side to nod at Felker, then watched him take a step before she rolled back onto her belly to watch the road. She heard Felker coming through the weeds, then heard his feet hit faster, and then he was stepping onto the open pavement.

Somewhere in the distance she heard the familiar sound of a car starting. She turned her head from side to side quickly, trying to hear the exact direction. Felker had heard it too. He quickened his pace, running now to get across before the car—any car—caught him in its lights. Jane still couldn’t see it, but now there was the sound of tires on gravel, and then the engine’s whispery hum, getting louder and louder as it accelerated. She pumped the shotgun.

The car swung out of the dark driveway of a house a couple of hundred yards off. Its lights were still off, and the hum grew into a deeper roar. It was too dark to see clearly, so the car seemed not to be coming nearer as much as growing in intensity and anger.

She rested on her elbows and hugged the shotgun tightly to her shoulder. She could feel the smooth, familiar stock against her right cheek. She stared down the barrel past the groove cut into the top of the receiver, but she couldn’t see the little ball that formed the front sight above the muzzle. Her finger pushed the safety. "Not yet," she whispered. "Not yet, not yet, not—" and she saw the dark shape of the car that seemed to materialize out of the darkness like something congealing.

She blew out a breath and held it, keeping her forefinger on the trigger just enough so she could feel it. She could sense Felker’s progress without looking at him as she strained to judge the car’s momentum. He was almost across the road now. She whispered, "Run, damn you."

The lights came on like a splash of caustic liquid thrown into her face. It was a flash that didn’t go away but burned brighter as the car approached. Suddenly, the car swerved away from her to the left side of the road, trying to hit Felker, but she knew it was too late. There was no Felker. The wind from the car’s backwash whipped the weeds around her as it passed, leaving the road in darkness again.

Jane was up and running now, sprinting for the other side in the dark. She watched the red taillights out of the comer of her eye as she ran. They seemed to expand when the brakes went on, like a pair of eyes widening. There was a squeal of tires, but the driver was good enough not to lock his brakes on a rural highway. As Jane left the pavement and felt the gravel under her feet, the car made a fast turn.

She made her legs pump hard, and slipped between the rails inside the fence, then lay there to look back at the road. The car started to accelerate again, then slowed and veered toward her. This is it, she thought. They were trying to get the lights onto her to pin her to the ground with them. She raised the shotgun again, and this time the front sight seemed to glow, then disappear as she pulled the trigger. There was a deafening boom! and the left headlight was gone.

As she pumped again and leveled the sight, she heard Felker’s pistol. There were three shots, and the car skidded away from her and gained speed. She went to her knees and leveled the shotgun on it, but it kept going down the road, faster and faster.

Felker was at her elbow. "You okay?"

She stood up. "We’ve got to get out of here." She ran northward again, through the field. She could see a light go on in a window of a farmhouse on the other side of the intersection, but it was at least a quarter mile away. The shots had awakened somebody. If the farmer was turning on his light, at least he wasn’t outside with a deer rifle. But he might very well be trying to see the dial of his telephone, arid that was probably worse. She ran through a muddy slough that smelled like a chicken yard. She kept going, trying to outrun the police car that might be on its way to the first real street on the southern edge of Olcott.

Then it occurred to her that she had not been thinking clearly. It had been dark, and the house was too far away. People had probably heard the shots in the middle of town. But the farmer would have heard it best, looked out his window and seen—what? A car with one headlight squealing off down the highway. Felker had been hiding out of sight of the car, and Jane had been lying on her belly inside the wire fence in somebody’s alfalfa. When the farmer called, he was going to report some drunks driving around and shooting road signs. She made it to the next fence and stopped. "Fence," she said, and heard Felker stop too.

The fence was a cordon of old wooden posts with little porcelain electrical insulators on them to hold the invisible wires. They had gone through a dozen like this in their eight-mile run. Jane had stopped at the first one and patted the wire, half expecting a jolt that would feel like a punch in the arm. It had been turned off, and so had all the others. Farmers in this part of the world didn’t leave their cattle in the fields at night. She tested this one too, but felt only the cold strand of metal on the tips of her fingers. "Dead," she said.

They ducked to step between the strands of wire and then entered a big apple orchard. As she trotted through it with Felker at her heels, she wondered if she had stumbled on one of the old places. The trees weren’t planted in the usual long, straight lines. They were just growing haphazardly at fairly regular intervals here and there. They were old. They couldn’t be old enough, but they could have been descendants. The Seneca had planted orchards wherever they lived: apples, pears, plums.

When the white people had taken the land after the Revolution, they had cut the hardwood trees and burned the stumps so they could plow, but not the orchards. She wished she had been here in daylight, so she could get a better look at the trees. Maybe she would come back when the fruit was on them and verify that they weren’t Macintosh or Rome but the small, hard apples that the women had planted in patterns like this.