I crawled around until I came to a shallow culvert. I scampered in there, my hands feeling broken gla.s.s, dead weeds, gnarled cigarette packs, and the hard dried pebble-like feces of rats and rabbits.
The car came down the road. I could feel the vibrations in the concrete of the culvert.
It seemed to slow as it drew closer. I had an image of the Chief"s car, Garrett sitting next to him with a shotgun, winking at each other. They knew where I was but they were going to be coy about it. They"d slow down a little right here to scare me but then they"d go on, as if they didn"t suspect anything at all, and then they"d stop about a quarter mile down the road, just pull off on to the shoulder the way pheasant hunters do in the autumn, and then start their trek back for me.
The car rolled on.
I listened to its weight and rumble recede into the night. What if it was the Chief? What if he was just trying to trick me?
I was already tired of the culvert. I was scrunched up inside almost foetally, the d.a.m.ned thing was so small.
I had a terrible moment of claustrophobia. What if I couldn"t get out of here? What if I was stuck?
I forced myself out of the culvert and back into the night.
Where to go?
In the morning, a road like this would be heavily traveled with trucks bringing milk to market. Somebody was bound to see me.
I started running again. All I could think of was that Cindy would tell the Chief the truth and the manhunt would be called off.
This time I didn"t fall. I felt sure-footed in a way I never had before in my entire life.
My feet crunched through snow and ice. My eyes roamed the vast blue-white fields that stretched to the moon itself. My breathing came deep and natural, as if my lungs were adjusting to this pace, even though I"d rarely exercised since coming home from the Army. The cold, far from stinging me, balmed me. I felt one with winter the way a wolf must.
I ran.
When I finally collapsed after four or five miles, I began to wonder what Josh and my parents were doing right now.
I doubted they were asleep. Sleep was going to be impossible for them tonight. For many nights, probably.
Even though I"d done nothing to bring on my fate, I hated myself for making them suffer for me. They were good and decent and true people.
I thought of suicide. Maybe that would be best for everybody. No more struggle, no more shame.
The trouble was, I wasn"t suicidal. I was one of those people who"d be screaming for life right up to my last breath.
When I finally began to look around, I realized that I was standing in a beaten old deserted barn that sat directly above the line shack and the well in the timberland below.
I walked out into the empty barnyard and looked down into the timber.
Down there. Cindy and that crazy obsession of hers. Alien beings.
Shared Psychotic Disorder.
I had my place for the night.
In one of the horse stalls, I found an ancient dusty horse blanket that didn"t smell too badly of horses.h.i.t, and I draped myself in it, and I parked my b.u.t.t in the deepest darkest corner of the stall, and stayed there until dawn, when a plump mother racc.o.o.n appeared at the head of the stall and started staring at me.
Her gaze woke me. I sensed ita"and hera"on some kind of pure animal level.
I wished I had something for her to eat. I wanted to show her I was friendly.
I wanted to pet her the way you would a cat. I needed that animal warmth and love.
I moved as carefully as I could.
Maybe she wouldn"t spook and run away.
But spook and run away, she did.
I felt spurned, as if a lover had walked out on me. I wanted to plead with the racc.o.o.n to come back. She was a mother, she could mother me.
Then, slowly, I realized that fear and lack of good sleep had made me more than a little crazed.
She wasn"t a human being, she was a racc.o.o.n, and she hadn"t spurned me, she"d simply done what racc.o.o.ns do when they encounter species larger than themselvesa"run away.
I stood up and walked down to the open barn door and took my morning p.i.s.s.
The dawn sky was gray and low. The color had been blanched out of everything. It was like looking at a black and white photo.
I went back to the barn for the horse blanket and set it on a piece of tumbledown fence to let it air out for a while.
Then I heard them.
Voices.
Coming up the hill through the timber.
The Chief.
Running away as I had, the Chief was sure to use a posse to find me. They never use that word anymore, "posse"a"they call them "concerned citizens" now or something like thata"but that"s what these men were.
A posse with guns and mean intent.
I ran out to the blanket and brought it back inside. I didn"t want any signs of me hanging out there for them to see.
I had to make a quick decision.
I could hide here, probably up in the hay mow, and maybe they wouldn"t find me, and I"d be safe for a day or so till they doubled-back to some of the places they"d covered before.
But I"d have a better chance running.
I looked at the horse blanket. It might be the only thing I"d find to keep me warm tonight.
Take it with me?
No, it"d be too bulky to carry, and if I was forced to drop it somewhere, they"d find it and be able to track my course.
I reluctantly pitched the blanket into the corner of the stall and then I went to the far eastern door of the barn, the one that pointed away from the timber, and even higher up into the hills.
I got outside and then I did the only thing I could do.
I ran.
CHAPTER TWO.
I spent the stern gray morning running across ice-hard creeks and working my way through rough stands of birch and dragging myself up hills, even though all my stamina was gone.
I had a desperate idea for escape. I would work my way all the way up into the hills and then double back to the west, eventually working my way down to the line shack and Cindy"s well.
Close to noon, I heard the angry barking of hunting dogs, followed by two quick shots.
Obviously, somebody thought they"d found me.
I kept on moving, staying to trees because somebody might see me from one of the county roads.
A couple of times, I dropped to my knees and just stayed there for long, gasping minutes. I was tired, hungry, confused, scared.
I hadn"t killed anybody yet there was a good chance I"d lose my lifea"either in the electric chair or by a bullet from one of the posse members. Not for nothing does this kind of man carry a shotgun rack in the back windows of his pick-up, daydreaming of the day his prey isn"t a deer but is instead a real live human beinga"one he"ll soon make dead.
Then voices sounded on the air like gunshots. A small group of them had apparently fanned out west.
The dogs were barking loudly and incessantly now. They must have scented me.
I ran. I didn"t know what else to do. There was no place to hide.
I ran until I came to a shabby little acreage with a shack for a house and some sad scrawny chickens eating silage corn from the snowy ground.
An old woman in longjohns and an ap.r.o.n and men"s hunting boots walked the chicken yard, dispersing the corn from a sack. She was a throwback. There hadn"t been pioneer women like hera"hard, and often more resilient than their male counterpartsa"in almost a century now, not since the Oklahoma land rush.
She didn"t see me on the far side of her garage.
I peered in through a grimy window.
A twenty-five year old Plymouth sat there, buff blue with jet wings and a few hundred pounds of chrome. The last era when America strode the world like a Colossus.
My first guess was that the d.a.m.ned thing probably didn"t run but then I saw the tire tracks running from the road to the garage.
The dogs were closer, louder now, just back of the rise.
I eased over to the side door of the garage and snuck inside. I had to move quickly.
I had an idea for fooling the dogs. Might work, might not. I didn"t have a h.e.l.l of a lot of choice at the moment.
The garage smelled of car oil, a lawnmower bag"s dead summer gra.s.s, cat p.i.s.s, and ancient water-soaked lumber.
The garage was small. I had to squeeze my way to the back of the car.
I found a small coil of wire on a hook, took it down, and proceeded to work on the trunk lock.
I had no idea what I was doing. Burglary had never appealed to me before.
I jimmied that lock for a good five minutes, all the time the dogs growing louder and louder, nearer and nearer.
And thena"voilaa"it popped open.
This was not a testament to my skills. The rusted lock had simply surrendered to the wiggling and waggling piece of wire. Twenty-five-year-old locks have a tendency to do that.
I got in the trunk and pulled the lid down.
Darkness.
The smell of new rubber. I blindly felt the tread of a new spare tire.
By now, I had so many cuts, nicks, and bruises that huddling inside the trunk wasn"t even especially uncomfortable.
If I hadn"t had to pee, I wouldn"t have been uncomfortable at all.
I waited.
A few minutes later, I heard the men and the dogs reach the acreage.
They shouted h.e.l.los to the old woman and she shouted a h.e.l.lo back, her voice as hard as their own.
The dogs must have scented me because their barking increased. Maybe I"d dropped something that they were now focusing on.
I heard the woman say, "I sure hope you catch that little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Mae Swenson was a good friend of mine. And if you do find him, do me a favor and kill him right on the spot."
The dogs kept barking but they didn"t move any closer to the garage.
Just as I"d hoped, they could not scent me through both the wall of the garage and the metal of the car trunk.
The men moved away then, the barking receding on the stillness as they moved higher into the hills.
Then silence.
Needing to p.i.s.s. The smell of rubber. My breath still coming in hard sweaty gasps.
Do me a favor and kill him right on the spot.