No Beast So Fierce (36 page)

“Boy, you're lucky,” the cowboy said, cocking his Stetson for emphasis. He was squatted beside the left rear wheel, pointing a finger at a bulge the width of a fist. “Bad retread,” he said. “Ready to blow out any second. Got a spare?”

The spare was in the trunk, and beside it was the M16. “I got one but I'd rather have a new tire on that wheel. How long will it take?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes if ah don't get customers. Ah ain't figurin' on none this time a mornin'.”

“Okay.”

“Recap or new?”

“Recap. I'm not keeping this lemon very long.”

The cowboy wheeled forth an axle jack and raised the car. Allison came back while he was working. She stood shivering. He was fitting the wheel back on the car when he asked: “Ya'll from 'roun' here? Seems ah seen you afore.”

“I used to push a rig through here, stop for gas and eats.”

“Naw, ah jus' came to work here. Been in the service?”

“No.” I decided to go on the offensive. “When were you in?”

“Korea.”

“Where were you stationed in the States?”

“Fort Benning … Fort Ord.”

“When you were in Ord, did you go to 'Frisco?”

“Hell yes! Ain' nowhere else to go.”

“What bars you water at?”

“Buccaneer, mostly.”

“Hell, that's it. I was tendin' bar there. I remember you now. In there every payday. Big as you are, how could I forget?”

“Damn small world.” He grinned as if he'd found a buddy.

Ten minutes later we were back on the highway. Miles and hours rolled away. The threatened storm fell behind and the sun was a fiery disc thrown against a white sky. Allison remained quiet. Despite the fresh makeup, the burning daylight showed the effects on her face of recent days—hollow cheeks, lines where dimples should have been. Her hand trembled when she reached for the cigarette lighter. Gone was open loathing and anger; now the silence was from exhaustion.

As dusk approached, we were in New Mexico. Billboards proclaiming Albuquerque's countless motels sprang up. The city was an hour away.

Dusk came to the eroded land with unbelievable color, the lowlands turning oily purple, the mesas a blackish-green at their base, but their summits glinted burning pink, vermilion, and gold. An awesome, sudden change to darkness. And with the darkness came a chill wind. The benzedrine was going out of me and exhaustion was rising. I'd been twenty-four hours behind the wheel.

We ate boxed chicken and French fries while seeking a motel. I selected one that was older, less occupied. When the door was locked behind us, Allison sank to the bed without undressing, legs drawn high and hands thrust between them. She was like a captive who has lost the will to resist and has surrendered to despair. She waited for me to direct her. I told her to go to bed. She did what she was told, letting her clothes fall unheeded to the floor.

I shaved the fuzz and renewed my false baldness with lotion and watched the 10:00
P.M.
news. The killings received no mention in New Mexico. While getting ready for bed, I looked at Allison asleep and knew how to get rid of her without killing her. It would have to wait until tomorrow night. This was the wrong place.

6

I
T
was noon when we finished breakfast and turned back onto the endless highway. Allison was quiet and submissive, though not from fear. Nobody can remain enraged or terrified for very long. Allison was drained of the adrenalin needed for these feelings, and when I opened the restaurant door she gave me a wan smile—but sincere. None of this meant that the chasm in our relationship was bridged. We both knew without further words that whatever had been was no longer, and could never be anymore. We'd become strangers, but strangers without hostility for each other.

And the car raced across the flat plains of the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandle, dripping oil, so that every half hour I stopped and poured in another quart. The utter flatness of the land was broken only by sagebrush and an occasional gas station with café annexed, pulsing neon on a gray day in nowhere.

The turning wheels and growing distance from the crimes reduced the gut fear that pervaded me. They say time will heal, but distance is also a balm. I hadn't recognized how complete the fear was, for it mostly remained below the threshold of consciousness, erupting at odd moments.

That night, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we checked into another motel. I waited until Allison was asleep and then brought her clothes in from the car without waking her. I left eight hundred dollars and a dozen diamonds and a note:

Everything comes to an end. The time has come, girl, for us to go separate ways. I hope someday you'll think more kindly of me than you do now—but then everyone wants to he thought of kindly. Whatever I am, I tried to be right with you. Think about it.

Do whatever you feel is right.

Max.

Minutes later I was following the white dashes on the highway. Within the hour flurries of light snow driven by gusty wind appeared in the headlights. I could feel wind tugging the steering wheel, and the highway was snaking through the Ozarks. I'd planned to push through to Chicago, but the radio warned that the storm would be severe, and so I pulled into Joplin, Missouri, checking into a second-rate hotel over a bowling alley. The room was twin to my first residence on leaving prison, including chipped enamel on the dresser and a window facing a brick wall. A steam radiator thunked and clanked but fulfilled its duties, while outside there was a blizzard.

In the small bowling alley, where a single game was in progress, I telephoned back to the motel where I'd left Allison. She'd left in a taxi an hour earlier.

I went back upstairs to wait out the storm, deciding that if she'd taken a taxi it was unlikely she'd have gone to the police. The normal move would be to call them, and they'd have come for her. Actually, she'd be more likely to contact them after she'd reached home. She might confide in her family—and wild horses wouldn't keep them from contacting the police.

For me, for now, all I could do was stay in the room. I had no chains for the car, nor even clothes suitable for the freezing temperatures. I took twenty large diamonds, divided them into four batches, and put them into toy balloons, tying off the ends. These I slipped up my rectum, a valuable suppository. If anything happened, I'd have them with me no matter what.

The next day the storm abated somewhat, though not enough to travel. I bought fur-lined gloves and a mackinaw and a cap with ear flaps. Around the corner from the hotel was a Mom and Pop cafe. Beyond its vapor-fogged window moved shapes of persons and the aura of warmth. I went in as much for these things as from hunger. I wanted to be around people, and yet when I sat down, watching and listening (there were only a few, and they knew each other), my sense of aloneness swelled. Their warmth failed to warm me. I missed Allison intensely. I wished I'd kept her with me—even being hated is better than being lonely.

But I shook off the longing, and by the time I stepped outside into the icy afternoon I had the stoicism of accepted hopelessness, even glorying in it. The wind was needles against my cheeks, and I thrust my hands deep in the mackinaw, one clutching the pistol, my magic wand. The hunger for chaos, for my life as it was, swelled to swallow loneliness. I walked the dismal street aware of my freedom, a leopard among domesticated housecats. I felt contempt for the hunched, bundled creatures, all gray and colorless, hurrying desperately toward warmth and safety.

Two days later the snowplows cleared the roads and I took to the highway, having stolen another set of license plates for the car. The countryside was coated white, spotted with the barren skeletons of trees.

Memory of Chicago is more an impressionist watercolor, all blurred detail and color, than the clear image of a photograph. The city's tangle of red, green, and silver neon on wet streets was brilliance daubed on bleakness. In the day the winter light made a glare and wind shivered the sooty slush of melted snow. Chicago was cold and dirty.

The room I rented was in a neighborhood of blue movies, pawn shops, and honky tonks, a high risk area for a fugitive, but it was where the city's underworld surfaced and was visible—street hustlers, hookers, con men, boot and shoe junkies. Lines connected this milieu, the lowest stratum of criminal, with all the others. I claimed to be a bail jumper from San Francisco trying to get a passport. The money I spread around (and my criminal argot) overcame suspicion—but after three days it became evident that passports weren't on the underworld market. It was just that nobody ever wanted one. In time, no doubt, something could be set up. I couldn't wait. A black pimp told me that I might have better luck in New York, something I'd already decided. If nothing else, New York was closer to the ocean I wished to cross. I might even find a foreign ship's captain who'd carry me without a passport—if the money was right. And in New York I could probably sell off a few diamonds.

On the outskirts of Chicago, I stopped for a hitchhiker, a young man in fringed buckskin pants, brogans, and army surplus overcoat. He had a sleeping bag on his shoulder, long hair, a downy beard, and a funny round hat (an Indian hat?) with a feather in it. Actually, when I pulled over for him, I thought it was an old man, not recognizing that he was about twenty years old until he was in the car.

At first he was quiet, nervous, and unduly respectful, adding “sir” and such when he did speak. But there were also words and phrases common to the drug idiom. On a humorous and actually imprudent whim, I nonchalantly took out a joint of marijuana and began uncapping the twisted end with a thumbnail. The young man's eyes went wide in amazement. He actually blinked and shook his head, as if clearing his vision. I busted out laughing.

“Here … fire this up,” I said, handing him the joint.

He still disbelieved until he lighted the cigarette and inhaled the smoke. “Wow, man, you're a groovy old dude,” he said, sucking and gulping again.

Old! I'll be a motherfucker … Then I remembered the bald head, the eyeglasses—and I had to laugh again.

By the time we reached South Bend, Indiana, we were both bent, full of weed and pills. The youth's reserve was demolished. Problems were gnawing at him, and it is easy to pour out problems to the ear of a sympathetic stranger, someone who will never be seen again. He was running from the draft, not because he was afraid to fight but because he believed the war was senseless, wrong, certainly not a cause worth the risking of his life. He was on his way to Canada where organizations for draft dodgers were coming into existence. He'd never return to the United States, and if things got bad in Canada he could get a Canadian passport and go somewhere else. I began questioning him about how. In Montreal, he said, it was the easiest thing in the world to get a passport. Canadian regulations made it as simple as going to the supermarket—even under another name. When I pressed for details (veiling the intensity of interest), he was unable to give them, but he was certain that it was as easy as he said. A friend who'd gotten a Canadian passport said so.

The hitchhiker got off in Toledo, to lay over with a maiden aunt until he got in touch with friends in Canada.

I stayed on the superhighway heading toward the state of New York, but not toward New York City. The young man's information was vague, but it was something. My road atlas was marked with the route to Niagara Falls, for I felt the safest way to cross the border was among a crowd of tourists. Undoubtedly there were safer places, but I was from California and didn't know them. Nor was it something I could ask: “Hey, buddy, the police are looking for me and I want to know the safest way to leave the country.”

I would store the car for a month—long enough so it would go undiscovered until I was long gone over the sea or at a dead end.

Montreal occupies an island on the St Lawrence River, a fact that surprised me when I arrived. Montreal in late November is also unbelievably cold. By comparison, Chicago in winter is the Bahamas.

In Chicago the circumstances had demanded boldness. Hope of getting a passport had been concentrated in the underworld, forcing me into an underworld neighborhood. Montreal was different, and I moved with paranoid caution, entirely avoiding any tenderloin areas, never going out after dark, keeping the pistol with me every moment, though this was as much to force them to kill (if they came) as for me to kill anyone else.

For two days I lived in a good hotel—vast and gleaming new—on the Place Bonaventure, then rented a room in a French district on the eastern part of the island. The couple, though born and raised in Canada, had a mellifluous fleck of French accent, and everyone was bilingual. The woman was gone when I knocked on the door, holding the classified ad in hand, and the man was obviously ill: his clothes were hanging on his emaciated frame, his hair was gone at the side—which was from cobalt treatment of Hodgkin's disease, I later learned. The room they wanted to rent had been added to the house for their son, now married. The wife had gone to work at the onset of his sickness, and they needed money. I looked at the room—big and well-furnished—and took it immediately, sensing that with such problems as they had this family would not be snoopy or curious. I was right. The woman came to see me that night—she told me about the sickness—but after that we scarcely saw one another. The room had a private walk and entrance, and the sub-zero weather foreclosed backyard conversations. We sometimes passed each other on the sidewalk, nodding courteously, and once rode the bus together. Sometimes the sound of their television came through the wall. I was more than content to be ignored. I rented a portable television (watching only football games) and bought many books to pass the evenings: the perfect tenant, quiet, no visitors, stable in my habits.

Every morning I took the bus downtown, as if going to work. I spent two days in the library, studying Canadian laws. They proved my hitchhiker right; Canada had such liberal passport laws that the United States, by comparison, was Auschwitz.