BAD TRIP SOUTH (18 page)

“
And what if I do?”

Heddy grabbed her green vinyl bag from the floor next to the driver’s seat and flung herself at the handle of the sliding side door. She went out, slamming it behind her. The van rocked.

Crow twisted on the sofa to watch her through the window. She stomped away toward the corrals of the stockyard. She climbed the board fence and sat on top, staring out across the trodden ground to the big hulking warehouse where trucks brought in livestock when there was a public sale.

Crow muttered, watching her, “Crazy bitch.”

“
Do what she says,” Carrie said.

Crow said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? We put you all out here and you flag down the next patrolman to point out we’re traveling in this fancy van on our way to Mexico.”

She shook her head. “We don’t have to tell anyone anything.”

“
And what about
him
? You think he’ll keep quiet?”

Carrie looked away and took more bread from the package. “You could tie him up. You could...you could even knock him out.” After she’d said it, she seemed shocked at herself.

“
Oh, that’s real nice, Carrie,” Jay said from the front. “I want to thank you for that.”

Crow looked outside again, wondering if Heddy would go for it, if maybe that wouldn’t be the wisest move, and saw a car turning into the stockyard.

“
It’s a cop,” he said, hurriedly shuffling through his leather bag for his gun.

“
I hope he blows your eyes out,” Jay said.

Crow rose, went to the door and stood hunched over before it, watching through the window there. The car drove close to the van and stopped. A cop in full uniform got out, hitching his pants up by his belt. He looked over the van from front to back before approaching the door. Crow said quietly, “You say anything, I kill the bastard.”

Deeper night darkness had swept in even as Crow had been talking to Carrie so that now he couldn’t even see the fence of the stockyard where Heddy had gone to perch. He felt sweat break out under his arms and the smile plastered on his lips felt like a smear of glue across the lower half of his face. He took one step down and reached out to open the sliding door just before the cop went up to the passenger’s seat to talk to Jay.

The door slid open noisily. He stood looking down at a young man with green smiling eyes.

“
Howdy, folks. Thought I’d stop to see if you’re having any trouble. This is private property and I’m afraid you can’t stay here.” He peered past Crow’s body to the woman and child making sandwiches.

Crow had his gun behind him. He said, “I’m sorry, officer, we didn’t mean to break any laws. Our engine was running hot so we just pulled over for a little while. We’ll be on our way in a few minutes.”

“
Would you mind stepping out so we can talk, sir?” The cop asked. “Bring along registration and your insurance card, if you don’t mind.” He was still smiling, being sociable, but behind his friendly words camped pure steel. If everything was as it seemed, it was going to be all right. If it was hinky, they were going to be in trouble--that’s what his voice promised.

Crow saw only the flicker of a shadow behind the policeman before the flash and the blast caught the intruder in the back. The cop stood one moment facing Crow, shock entering his smiling eyes, before he crumpled forward, his head hitting and clanging off the chrome running board before striking the ground.

Heddy stood silhouetted from the light spilling out the door, the gun dangling at her side. She said, “We have to get out of here.”

“
Christ, Heddy, you could have waited a minute, I think he believed me.”

“
Oh, fuck, just get back inside and get outta my way.” She crawled up the steps and brushed past him to the driver’s seat to start the van.

Crow glanced once more at the body lying on the ground before closing the door and locking it against the night. “I wish it wasn’t so far across Texas,” he said to no one in particular. “Mexico seems two million miles away.”

#

BY the time Heddy stopped at a service station for gas and let me go to the bathroom, I thought I’d bust. She came into the bathroom before I was finished, and stood in front of the sink mirror, drinking whiskey. She actually growled at me when I came out of the toilet so I didn’t even try to wash my hands. I just wanted out of the room with her before she decided to use her gun on me.

Have you ever seen anyone stare at you like you’re a nasty bug? That’s how Heddy looked at me all the time. Like she wanted to crush me and walk on.

“
Go straight to the van,” she said, giving me that Wish I Could Stomp You Dead look.

I shut the door to the bathroom and heard her lock it. For some reason I stood there a minute, listening. That’s when I heard her thoughts so loud they were like cymbals crashing. I put my hands over my ears, to block it out, but that didn’t help. I started backing away from the door, horrified.

Heddy didn’t have thoughts like other people. She didn’t even have thoughts like Crow did when he was messed up on dope. I can’t even tell you what exactly the thoughts were, they were too mixed up and crazy, but if thoughts were colors, hers would have been blood red. Like the fury of a whirlwind coming down out of the sky with chariots on fire in them. Like Satan riding a giant horse down over a city and knocking apart all the buildings like they were stacked dominoes.

She hated herself so much that the hate spilled over onto everything. Onto me, Crow, her life and everything in it. I’d never known anyone who hated that much. Or anyone who scared me more.

I didn’t even know what I was doing. I started running away from the locked bathroom door just to get away from her. Before I knew what I’d done, I was across the service station parking area and then across the broken pavement of an alley and then I was in the middle of someone’s yard yelling, calling, crying, begging for help, hoping someone, anyone, would rescue me.

I didn’t see Crow coming. He must have seen me take off because he caught me up by the waist and threw me over his shoulder, loping back across the alley and the parking lot and to the van. He threw me inside the open sliding door so that I landed on the floor, crying.

Mama reached down and took me into her arms. I had wanted to get away, just get away from Heddy and never come back. I didn’t care, when I ran, what happened to my mother and father anymore. All I wanted to do was run and find help, any kind of help from anybody, but there was no one in that alley and no one in the house where I stood screaming in the night. The house was empty, deserted, and dark, and no one paid attention to a kid yelling her head off before Crow caught me and took me back.

“
Don’t pull a stunt like that again,” Crow warned. He was all out of breath and sounded scared himself. He got inside and slammed the door shut.

No one said anything else while I cried and Mama brushed her hand over my hair.

I couldn’t tell them what had scared me so. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway. Mama knows I know things I shouldn’t, but she doesn’t really understand how I do it. She just thinks I’m sensitive and observant and that I pick up on things because I watch grown ups and I pay attention.

How could I tell them that Heddy’s brain was torn up and more crooked than her mouth? That she was mad as a coyote beneath a bad moon? That her head was full of chaos and death and blood and darkness so deep that it was swallowing her?

Crow couldn’t even know what was in her head. If he did, he would have run away with me and screamed for help just as I did. Or killed her. Crow should have killed her and stopped her misery, but he didn’t know about it. No one knew but me.

I don’t know where people get their problems from or how they live with them once they get that messed up in their heads. Looking at Heddy, how she drove the cars and how she never said much, you’d think she was a normal criminal--a woman heading for Mexico with her lover and how ever much money they had stolen from St. Louis. But that’s not what Heddy was about at all.

She hated herself so hard that she was like a walking hole in the world. She was like a door into some other awful place where demons lived.

Not that I believe in demons and stuff. I used to go to the Baptist church with Mama and I couldn’t quite believe some of those stories about Hell and the devil or even Heaven and God.

All I knew, tapping into Heddy’s thoughts, was that real Hell was inside people’s heads and it was worse than what the Bible said about it. Worse than a lake of fire and brimstone.

No wonder Heddy drank all the time. It was the only way she kept from stepping out in front of a truck speeding down the street.

I would have been sorry for her if I hadn’t been so scared.

When she came back to the van, I turned my face into Mama’s stomach and kept my eyes shut tight. I locked her out. Locked out Heddy’s mind and hoped I never stumbled onto the opening to it again.

I’d tell you more about what it was like, but I can’t talk about it. Just believe me. Heddy was the one we had to watch from now on. Crow didn’t feel any regret when he had to kill people to steal their cars or steal their money, but he was like a cleaning machine that swept the streets. It was nothing to him, meant nothing at all.

For Heddy, killing was personal and it was something she liked. When she did it, she did it like someone with a job she enjoyed. It was a pleasurable thing because if she didn’t kill other people, she’d kill herself.

That made her our real enemy and the only one we had to worry about. If she’d been an illness, she would have been a real slow painful one where your skin and muscles fell off your bones while you watched, unable to believe it was so.

I was afraid we’d never get away from Heddy.

#

FRANK walked through the corridors of Leavenworth, a security officer unlocking and re-locking doors behind them as they made their way to a room where one of the recaptured escaped inmates waited.

Frank remembered his impatience as he entered the room and took a chair at a scarred blue table with the prisoner. He realized the Anderson family must be hostages of Craig Walker, but they would never know where the family had been taken unless they discovered where Walker was headed. The FBI was dispatching someone soon to the prison to question the inmates, the same as Frank was doing. He just got to them first.

The initial three briefings with the returned prisoners didn’t give Frank anything to go on. They claimed the escapees hadn’t told one another of their plans for the outside. That way if one was caught, he couldn’t squeal on someone else.

Frank almost believed that. Almost. But he had to keep questioning because if he didn’t get a lead that meant Jay, Carrie, and Emily were on their own somewhere no one could ever find them.

On the fourth inmate interview, Frank got a break. Charlie Holland had been caught two days after the escape. He had been roomed in a cell next to Craig Walker for eight months before the breakout.

Frank approached him in a different way than he had the others. He said, “Look, we believe Craig’s taken a family hostage. There’s a little girl involved, ten years old.” He paused. “You have kids, Charlie?”

Charlie squirmed in his hard chair. He finally said, “Yeah, I do.”

“
How many? What’s their ages?”

“
What’s the difference, man?”

“
Just answer me, okay?”

“
Two, girl and boy. Seven and five.”

“
Then you know what you’d feel like if your kid had been kidnapped. Would you want your girl or boy on a joyride with Walker?”

Charlie shrugged, but there was worry on his face. He looked as if he were having trouble with the idea of it.

“
Tell me where Walker was headed. I know he told you. Or you know something. We just want to get the family free and the little girl out of this safely.”

“
He didn’t tell me nothin.”

Frank lit a cigarette, offered the pack to the prisoner. Charlie took one and Frank put the Bic lighter flame to it. They sat smoking for a couple of minutes. Frank said nothing.

Charlie said, “I don’t know what you want from me. I didn’t take no kid.”

“
I want to save the little girl, Charlie. And her mother and father too. Maybe you overheard something, maybe you noticed something. If Walker didn’t tell you...”

Charlie dragged deeply on the cigarette. As he exhaled he said, “Craig was hanging around the Spics before we broke out.”