Whom Gods Destroy (23 page)

I put my arms around her and held her hard against me. “I love you, Vida. No matter what happens, I'll always love you. Now we've got to pack, Vida. We've got to get out of-here.”

“Roy, something has happened to us. I can't go on much longer without knowing what it is.”

“Nothing's happened. Everything's going to be all right, but we've got to get out of here. We'll head south, maybe to Texas. I know Houston pretty well, we can get lost there. They'll never find us, Vida.”

It was a lie and we both knew it. I touched her hair, feeling that strange gentleness inside me. “You don't have to go with me, Vida,” I said finally. “After a while, after it's safe, I can let you know where I am and you can come then.”

She clung to me as though it were for the last time. “We'll go together,” she said evenly. “I'll be packing.”

She had to know sometime about Sid. I had to explain it to her before it came out in the papers, but not now. My gaze drifted around the room. So this is the way it ends, I thought dully. One jump ahead of the law, two jumps ahead of the chair. At least I had money this time. Then I noticed the newspaper scattered on the floor where Vida had dropped it, the gaudy colored splashes of comic pages.

Geez! The realization hit me as I looked at those pages of colored comics. It was Sunday. The banks were closed.

All the money, I thought, near insanity, and no way to get it out! I couldn't wait until the banks opened the next day. I couldn't write checks to be traced. There was only one thing to do—leave Big Prairie the way I had come into it. Broke. I went through my pockets and found almost a hundred dollars in bills and change. Maybe Vida would have ten or twenty. I threw my head back and laughed idiotically. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My face looked back at me, gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyed, the face of an old man, a broken man. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the biggest-phony of them all? And the mirror answered—or. I imagined that it did—God, you make me sick!

I thought, I'm not beaten! I'll get out of this somehow!

The mirror laughed. Great God, you make me want to puke, Foley! Do you know what you'll be doing a month from now—if you're still alive? A
week
from now? You'll be in a hash house—another grease-stinking sandwich joint, that's where you'll be! Maybe you can get Vida a job waiting on customers. I'll bet she'd love that. Like hell she would! Imagine going to bed with Vida, smelling of onions and mustard, and never quite getting away from the odor of stale grease. There's another thing, too. What about Lola? Oh, Lola's going to love this! God, how she's going to laugh!

“Roy,” Vida called, “I'm through packing. Are you ready?”

“Yes.” Methodically, I began going through the drawers to see if she had missed anything of mine.

I found an empty wallet in one drawer. A hair brush and two handkerchiefs in another. The last thing I found was a beautifully blued bone-handled .38 revolver that I had bought to carry with me when I made the rounds with the runners. I held the gun in my hand, caressing it gently with my fingers. I checked the cylinder and saw that there were five live rounds in the chambers. For safety's sake, one chamber had been left empty and that was where the hammer rested.

“Roy,” Vida called tightly, “are you ready?”

“Yes.”

I gripped the cool butt, slipped my finger inside the trigger guard and gingerly tested the double-action. I thought It's so simple! and fleetingly I remembered the truck driver and guard. Merely by pointing it at a person and then exerting the slightest pressure with your finger, I thought, it is possible to put a complete, irrevocable end to a human life. Any life. A person could put an end to his own life, for that matter....

The thought rose suddenly, unexpectedly out of the darkness of my mind. I heard Joe Kingkade saying, “I won't have to kill you. You'll do it yourself.”

Stop it!

My hands were shaking. I told myself that I could pawn the gun or sell it if we got desperate for money and it would be foolish to throw a valuable gun like that away for no reason at all. I wasn't beaten. Somehow I would find a way to beat all of them—Kingkade, Lola. But I was tired. I felt as old as a mountain. I put the gun in the suitcase and locked it.

19

WE LEFT BIG PRAIRIE IN THE COOL quiet of early morning. Sunday morning. In a matter of two hours we had crossed Red River and were heading south toward Dallas.

I kept the radio on, tuning in all the news broadcasts I could find, but there was nothing at all about me. I thought: Maybe Lola didn't turn the recording over to the bureau after all, but I didn't dwell on it long enough for it to become a hope. I had only to remember that hate in her eyes. She would never forget what I had done to her, and she would never stop until she had ruined me.

We stopped in Dallas long enough to trade my Buick in on a '49 Ford. I got only five hundred in cash out of the trade, but I didn't have time to try to do better. We left Dallas and headed south again. There still wasn't anything about us on the radio.

Vida hardly said a thing all day. It was blazing hot and she sat on her side of the front seat, staring flatly at the shimmering highway. I drove until midnight, until I couldn't stay awake any longer, and then I turned the Ford over to Vida and she drove until almost dawn.

Both of us were too tired to go any farther. We pulled into a knock-up little tourist court to rest.

Day broke early. The blazing Texas sun beat down on our clapboard cabin and within an hour it was as hot and stifling as a bakeoven. The first thing I did was go out to the car and turn on the radio.

It had happened.

“A statewide search is being conducted throughout Oklahoma,” the announcer said, “for one Roy Foley and his wife Vida. Foley is wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Sidney Gardner, Oklahoma bootlegger. The Oklahoma State Crime Bureau has announced that, until recently the death of Gardner was believed to be accidental. However, new evidence has apparently been brought to light, and the bureau has hinted that other prominent Oklahomans...”

I snapped the set off and sat woodenly, listening to the pounding in my chest. Damn her! Goddamn her! But Lola was out of reach. There wasn't a thing I could do.

But the thing I dreaded now was telling Vida. I went back into the cabin and stood looking down at her, and I think at that moment I loved her more than I had ever loved before. I touched her hair—it was damp with perspiration—and she opened her eyes. Pale, tired eyes.

“Roy!” She put her hands to her breasts. “I didn't know at first where we were,” she said at last. “What time is it?”

“Almost one o'clock. We'll have to start driving soon.”

Suddenly I took Vida in my arms and crushed her. I felt a dampness as I kissed her. They were my tears, not hers. “Vida—I've got to tell you something. I've got to try to explain, and I don't know where to start.”

Finally she spoke. “Is it about Sid?” She worked her fingers into my hair and slowly brought my face down to her breasts and held me close. Then her arms went lax and she lay back, her eyes closed.

“You killed Sid,” she said flatly. “I think I've known it all the time. But I wouldn't let myself believe it.”

I took her shoulders in my hands. “Vida, you've got to believe me! I didn't kill him, he killed himself. He left a note for you, but I found it and destroyed it.”

“Because of Seaward?”

The right words just wouldn't come. I said, “All right, I made a deal with Seaward, and Keating was in on it too. But what the hell, Sid did the same thing, didn't he? But I didn't kill him, it was suicide.”

She laughed suddenly, and the unexpected sound shocked me. “We make a nice pair, don't we, Roy? We both killed Sid, just as though we had put knives into him, and whether or not it was legally suicide is not important. We've broken every commandment. What else is left for us?”

She started laughing again, but it sounded like no laughter I had ever heard before. I squeezed her shoulders viciously. “Stop it! I say stop it!”

The laughter broke off, hung uneasily in the silence of the room. “I did it for you, Vida. Anything I may have done was for you and because I loved you.”

“And Lola,” she said.

I felt myself cringing. She went on, evenly now. Lifelessly. “Remember when you broke your hand, Roy? I told you that she was hurtproof, that the harder you hit her the more you would hurt yourself.” She gazed vacantly at the shabby room. “Was it worth it, Roy?”

I had a sudden dazzling vision of Lola as she had looked that night in the crib. I remembered the enormous oath I had taken beside the highway, as I had walked madly through the darkness. I sat there, the white-hot anger bottled up inside me, compressed and hard in my brain. An anger that I knew would be with me always, sealed with hopelessness. Still, there was the savage satisfaction of that night, and—Yes, by God, it was worth it!

Vida could see the answer in my face. She made a small, hopeless sound as she lay back on the bed.

And, at last, I told her. Everything. I heard my voice going on—and on—and on—I listened abstractedly as the sordidness unrolled. And when it was over I fell across her, there on the bed, and held her hard in my arms.

After a while, she said wearily, “The police must know by now. We'd better go.”

We heard on the radio that the police had found the Buick in Dallas, and that scared me. The Texas troopers would be sure to have a pickup on the Ford, and every minute we stayed in it added to the danger.

When we got to the next town I parked it on a side street, then went to a service station and used the telephone to find out when we could catch a bus for Houston. When I got back to the car, Vida was sitting quietly, exactly the way I had left her.

“We'll have to leave the car here,” I said. “We can get a bus for Houston, but not for almost three hours. We'll just have to wait.”

“Where?”

“I don't know. There's a little hotel about two blocks from here that ought to do. We could use some rest.”

Vida looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. “When they find the car,” she said, “they're sure to start watching le bus stations. We'll have to do something to change the way we look.”

I rubbed the thick stubble on my face. “I can shave and leave my mustache; that may change my appearance some.”

Vida thought about it. “Get some hair dye,” she said after a moment. “We'll see what we can do after we get the hotel.”

The hotel was a wooden two-story building about two blocks from the center of town. Vida had taken off her lipstick, darkened her eyebrows with an eyebrow pencil, and put a scarf over her head to hide her almost-white lair. We brought two suitcases and there was no trouble checking in—then I went down to a drugstore and bought two packages of dark brown hair tint.

“This ought to do,” Vida said. There was no enthusiasm in her voice. She studied herself in the dresser mirror, then said, “See if you can find a razor blade.”

I got a package of razor blades out of one of the suitcases, gave her one and she began whacking ruthlessly at her long hair. While she did that I shaved, leaving the mustache, and by the time I had finished, Vida had hacked away almost half of her hair. “Mine will take longer,” she said. “I'll do it first.”

She mixed the tint in the wash basin in the corner of the room and began applying it to her hair with a toothbrush. The change was amazing, almost unbelievable. When she finished, she looked like a dark-haired boy who had just been swimming. She went to the mirror, studying herself again, then she began rolling up the ends of her hair, securing the tight curls close to her scalp until her head bristled with hairpins.

“When it dries,” she said almost to herself, “it will be all right. Bend over the basin. I'll darken your hair now; later you can go over your mustache with my eyebrow pencil.”

It took about an hour. We flushed away that blonde, glistening mass of hair that Vida had chopped off, we cleaned the dye out of the basin, and then we flushed away the paper packages the dye had come in. Vida sat in front of the window, saying nothing, letting the hot breeze dry her hair. I sat on the bed, looking at her, aching to hold her.

Around three o'clock she took the hairpins out and combed her hair and brushed it, and the ends snapped up briskly, boyishly.

I darkened the tips of my mustache and it looked all right to me. It changed the way I looked.

“Hadn't we better go?” Vida said.

I looked at my watch. “Yes, I guess so.” We put everything back in the suitcase and went out of the room.

20

I DON'T REMEMBER THE NAME OF THE next town. It was a squat, rambling little place, slow-baking in that South-Texas sun, and the bus pulled in there for a fifteen-minute rest stop.

“What are we going to do when we get to Houston?” Vida asked flatly.

“I don't know yet,” I said. “But it's a big place and it's easy to get lost in a place like that.”

“What if the police have found that Ford?” She was gazing out the window.

“The odds are against it,” I said. “We don't have to worry about that.” We had the suitcases in the baggage rack over our heads, and I got one of them down and opened it. My mouth tasted sour and dry, so I got out the toothpaste and a toothbrush, and while I was fumbling for them I found the pistol.