He helped her to her feet, and supported her as they stumbled down the road. They did not talk for quite a while, until she seemed able to carry her own weight, and then they moved at a regular pace, casting weary, threadbare smiles at each other from time to time. Harry was impressed with the girl’s recovery, and the uncomplaining way she jogged along beside him.
When they reached the bottom of the steep incline, they found a fire-gutted shack, and part of a barn. There was hay in the barn, and they climbed into it, burrowing deeply inside, at the back of the mow, and Harry kept an eye out for travelers down the road.
“Who the hell were those men?”
“The local enforcers. They were kicked out of the Klan ten years ago for unnecessary brutality, or something, and they’ve been surly ever since.”
Harry grinned. She was all right. “That’s a very funny line. How true is it?”
“Every word.”
“So who was the big stud with the whip? He didn’t seem to like you very much.”
She tried to adjust the ripped bodice of her dress, but it only exposed more flesh, and Harry caught a brief flash of dark aureole and pink nipple before she covered herself with a dirt-smeared hand. “That was my father. He has a tendency toward crankiness.”
“What does he do for entertainment, let babies play with plastic clothing bags?”
She grinned youthfully. “He was angry at me.”
“For what?”
“For wanting to run away. I hired on at the carnival, in the girl tent; to try and get out of town. I was desperate; I’d have tried anything.”
“What’s wrong with the bus?”
“Daddy runs the town. He has a fellow, Routener; he does dirty things for him. Routener would have stopped me, sent me back into town. I tried everything: bus, train, even hitching a ride on the highway. They always brought me back. I figured if I could slip out of town with the carnival, I might make it.”
Harry scratched at his stubbled jaw. “You must be a pretty popular girl, them wanting to keep you handy like that.”
She snapped out a sweet, deadly laugh. “Popular! Ha, that’s a good one. They’d like me dead, but Daddy won’t let them do it; he says I look too much like my mother to put me in cement and sink me in the lake.” She paused, and a cloud passed across her expression. “I don’t know why my looking like mother should keep the dirty bastard from killing me…he drove mother to her grave.”
She pulled her full mouth tight, and Harry noted that she had dimples. “And besides, I know too much,” she said. “He knows all I have to do is get out of town, and I’ll tell everyone about why the new hospital collapsed. He stole close to eighty thousand dollars from that job!”
“Your father’s a big man in construction, I gather.” A horrible realization was dawning on him.
She nodded. “Everything from the new school library to the mine excavations about ten miles from here.”
“Bingo,” he said, and lay back in the hay, wishing he had taken a nice quiet job tending cobras. “I was hauling that juice to the excavations for him.”
“Oh,” she said softly, looking at Harry with fear.
“Bonded driver,” Harry reassured her. “No connection with your old man’s outfit.” He lay back for a long time in silence.
“I’ll fuck you if you’ll get me out of town,” she said, and removed her hand from her breast. Harry closed his eyes very slowly, then opened them, and what he had seen was still there, breathing heavily at him. Oh boy, he thought.
“Well, that’s very nice,” he said, “but what makes you think we can get out of town without your Daddy’s group stopping us…hey!” She had her hand on his leg, and was moving it in slow circles.
“Maybe Daddy was killed in the explosion,” she said gently, moving nearer to him. “I think so, you know?”
“When that juice wagon went up,” Harry said, moving closer to her, “almost anything could have happened. I heard all four cars hit, but whether they were just piled up and the first car caught most of it, I don’t know. Or even if your old man was in the damned car, it’s simply a shuck, baby, we could be in real trubb—”
She came at him mouth first, and he caught her on the fly.
It was a long, twisting time before he got his mouth free enough to say, “You must want out of here pretty bad…”
“Very bad,” she answered, pulling up her skirt. “Daddy was whipping me because I was working the girl show after the regular show ended. That’s how bad I wanted out.”
“You mean the ‘blow-off,’ in the raw?”
She nodded, and did something interesting with her underpants. “What’s your name?” she asked him, just before their bodies ran together like lava.
After the third time, they lay in the hay, and she lit a cigarette for him. Her name was Angela; she told him to call her Angie.
“You’re going to be a problem if your old man didn’t buy it in the crash back there,” Harry said. She grinned and took a deep drag from his cigarette. He grinned in mock ferocity and yelped, “Wowch!” as she handed the cigarette back, and it burned his fingers.
He dropped the butt, and it disappeared in the hay, and she started giggling at him. “I think good fucking really shakes you up, doesn’t it, Harry?”
“Stop clowning!” he yelled. “This hay’s drier than hell, and that cigarette’s in there.” He started scrabbling through the debris, trying to hitch up his pants at the same time. He began throwing hay like a dog burying a bone.
“Oh Harry, don’t be such a jerk! It’ll put itself out.” She tried to drag him back down to her, just as the first wisp of smoke floated up out of the mass. An instant later a thin tongue of flame leaped past their faces.
“Run!” Harry yelled, and dragged her to her feet. They struggled hip-deep out of the hay, and by the time they had reached the open door of the ruined barn, there was a wall of thick, acrid smoke and yellow-crimson flame behind them.
They stumbled out into the weed-overgrown yard between the stump of the tarpaper shack and the furiously blazing barn. They stood there choking, trying to rub the smoke from their eyes, trying to empty their lungs of smoke.
“Good show,” Harry said resignedly, just as the first bullet cracked across the hillside, and whanged past his head, losing itself somewhere in the woods behind the burning barn. The second and third shots were wilder, far wide of the mark, but Harry got the message. His head came up and he saw the bunch clambering down the roadside toward them.
“Shoot by the light of the barn!” one of the men was shouting, and even across that great a distance, Harry could recognize the voice of the girl’s hooded Daddy. “But watch Angela! Don’t hit Angela!”
Angle’s hands went to her face in terror, as though on puppet strings, and Harry spun around in confusion. “I don’t know how they came out of it alive, but we’ve got trouble, little lady.”
He grabbed her by the wrist and turned, looking for an avenue of escape. “C’mon, the woods!” He plunged forward, dragging her along behind.
They hit the woods at a gallop, and lost themselves in the twisted shadow mass among the trees. They ran on through the twisting stands of short-leaf pines, oak, poplar and hickory trees that seemed to converge on them, mass against them, send them deeper into the murky undergrowth, blot out the sky overhead, trip them, send them sprawling.
They were on their feet again, plunging through a clump of dogwood, and suddenly, they were out on the other side. Against the night sky, now just lightening into dawn with a gray, zombie-flesh paleness, they could see the huge grotesque bulk of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
They were in a field of ripe tobacco.
“Run, for chrissakes!” Harry gasped. They ran, hurling themselves forward through the great leafy plants, the flat green fronds slapping their faces. They did not hear the chopper till it was almost overhead, and spinning down on them. “Harry!” Angie shrieked, looking up into the whirling rotors.
“Jeezus, Christ, Awm
iddy!” Harry bellowed, and tried to run in another direction. The eggbeater followed his progress. They tried hiding in the tobacco, but the backwash of the rotors cleared them out like maggots from under a piece of fetid meat.
“A chopper! Where the hell did that come from?”
Harry was running as hard as he could. Angie dragged hard on the end of his hand, and her words came as gasps: “He has a…radiophone in his…car…he uses the heli, heli…cop…ter for surveying construction sites…he must…must have called it from the c-car…”
The chopper swooped at them, and they fled before it.
They were trapped.
The ’copter drove them forward, coming at them field-level high and hovering, sending them out of the tobacco, toward the road: the road that curved around the forest, that now carried the group of men in white hoods and sheets. The sheets were dirty and torn and some of the men were without cover, but when they saw Harry and the girl they yelled like rebel troops at Missionary Ridge and pounded down the road toward them.
The first one to reach Harry caught a fist high in the face. It spun him like a dervish and his legs twisted like vines. He went down in an untidy heap; and then the rest of them were on Harry. He kicked out, and swung his locked hands like a mace, but there were too many, and when they grabbed him from behind he kicked off with both feet and jacked his heavy boots into someone’s crotch. There was a scream, and a moan, and Angie yelled something obscene, and then they hit Harry very hard with something very very hard, and he sagged in their grasp. Suddenly, the dawn (that had been coming up like thunder) went out like the light when you close the refrigerator door.
And Harry was in cold storage.
Angie’s Daddy was a cartoon impression of Little Orphan Annie’s Daddy. He was a huge phallus of a man, bald and glistening, with a pair of slitted eyes that looked as though they’d been cut in the yellow papyrus of his thick face with a serrated-edge bread knife. His mouth was almost entirely lipless; and aside from the resemblances to Daddy Warbucks, Mr. Clean and Disraeli, there was a salamander air about him. Harry expected Daddy to hiss, rather than shout.
But Daddy shouted. For a long time!
“If it hadn’t of been for that goddammed fire we never woulda seen your goddammed bodies standin’ out against the light. Thought you had old Daddy, din’tcha, you goddamned snotty punk! Thought you put old goddammed Daddy down for the long count, din’tcha? Well, old Daddy got nineteen lives an’ then some, like a mass’a. cats!”
“Daddy’s got a dirty mouth,” Harry said. And received a gloveful of nickels across the back of the head for his trouble. He slumped forward in the chair, arms tied behind him to the slats. His eyes fluttered closed, open, closed again. The man with the five-fingered blackjack was a short, extremely surly, box-shaped individual named Routener. His face was oily and his hair was very curly.
Harry came up from the pit again, and stared unfocused at Daddy.
“Boy, you know what old Daddy’s gonna goddam well do for you? He’s gonna introduce you to some of the finest goddam concrete that you ever saw. He’s gonna make your acquaintance all the way from your goddam feet to your gaahdam head. And then he’s gonna have a 111 heart-to-heart and mouth-to-hand talktalk with his goddam daughter. In’t that right, Angela girl?” Angle shivered. There was such loathing in her eyes as she stood against the wall of the construction shed, that it burned from her face like the inferno the barn had become.
“Is that the sandy concrete you used on the hospital?” Harry asked. “I hear tell it’s groovy goods; how many people got buried when the building collapsed and fell into the valley?”
“Shut your goddammed mouth!”
“Better use somebody else’s concrete, Daddy. I might be able to chew my way out of your product” The gloveful of nickels again. Wham! Across the temple. He went away for a while. When his eyes opened again, he was lying on the ground outside the shed, and Routener was standing over him, a big .45 packed in his mitt, and that oily face saying something. After a few minutes and several kicks in the ribs, he understood that Routener wanted him to get up.
“Where’s the rest of the group?” It was a toss-off question; Harry was merely glad the other hooded men were nowhere in sight. There was always a better chance of getting away without holes in untidy places if there were less cooks ready to stir the pot.
“Rggll,” said Routener.
“Thanks,” Harry answered, and moved forward as Routener shoved the .45 into his ribs, hard.
They walked toward the excavations and Harry found himself looking down into what must have been set-pits for three big buildings. The drop was easily a hundred feet, and at the bottom of all three was quagmire. It was suckmud of the worst sort. Harry had been around enough to know what Daddy was going to have to do, if he was going to build there: fill in that muck till it settled. And it looked as though they had started the fill already. With garbage. Soft sand. Rubbish.
The buildings would get erected, and then, slowly, begin to sink. If the residents were lucky they would find out in time and third-floor occupants could step out of their windows onto the surrounding ground. First- and second-floor tenants would have to take the elevators upstairs to free themselves. Harry wondered how much graft was attached to this little goodie. He didn’t wonder for very long; at that point Routener indicated the mixing trough of wet cement standing by the edge of the pit.
“Fszl,” Routener commanded Harry. He pressed the .45 even harder into Harry’s ribs.
And Harry was about to say screw it and take a chance on diving headfirst down the slope, trying to get away from the Neanderthal with the blocky .45—when he heard the click. It was right down alongside his ribs. It was the locking mechanism in the barrel of the .45—a mechanism that kept the pistol from firing as long as pressure was exerted against it. Harry stepped closer to Routener, swung heavily, keeping the .45 imbedded in his side, and stuck his thumb into the pistolero’s eye, as hard as he could. Routener screamed. The thumb went in. Harry dropped his shoulder, hauled back and grabbed the pistol. Then he swung hard. Holding the .45 by the barrel he caught Routener flush on the tip of his prognathous jaw. The squat bully-boy’s head flipped back like the top on a pack of cigarettes, and he did a gainer and a half off the edge of the excavation. Harry watched him go.
When Daddy turned around and saw the big mouth of the .45, his style was fine, just fine:
“How’d you like to drive for me, boy. How’d you like to make ten times what that bonding outfit paid you? You could make a goddamed fortune workin’ for me, boy, a goddamed fortune. Whaddaya say?”
“No thanks, big Daddy,” Harry said, untying Angie as he kept the .45 trained unwaveringly on the bald contractor. “You’ve got a foul mouth, and my family always brought me up to be genteel. Move!” He ushered Daddy ahead of him, with Angle bringing up the rear, rubbing her chafed wrists.
They went back around the construction shed, and Harry saw another nitro truck, a previous shipment from his company. “Get in; see if the keys are there,” he said to Angie. She climbed up, looked inside, said the ignition was empty. “Come here and hold this howitzer on your poppa.” She came to him, took the .45 and stood with legs wide apart staring down the blue-metal length of it,
“Move?” She dared him.
Daddy froze.
Harry went to the cab, opened the hood and proceeded to jump the ignition wires. He crawled behind the wheel, kicked it over, and the engine roared into life.
He was checking just how much juice had been left in the wagon when he heard the first two shots. He was out of the truck and around the side when the next three explosions ripped the air.
Daddy was bleeding profusely. It wasnt that she was a bad shot, just sadistic. She’d shot him in the neck, both arms, both legs, and seemed ready to put one into his stomach when Harry grabbed the weapon away from her. “Give me that! What the fuck is it with you! You some kind of goddam nut-case? Jeeezus!” She started crying then. She folded ag
ainst him. He helped her up into the cab of the nitro wagon.
“We’ll call a doctor for you, Daddy, first house we hit down the road,” Harry said. “Stay healthy, Daddy. See you around sometime.” He sprinted around the truck, popped behind the wheel and threw the monster into gear. He drove fast, but carefully, and the image of Daddy lying there, bleeding from every pore, was a heartwarming thought.
“Where are we going?”
“Raleigh. The capitol. I think the highway commission would like to know about Daddy’s dealings.”
“They’ll come after us. If you stop to call, they’ll come after us.”
“We’ll call.”
“Let him die, Harry. He let my mother die; let him die!”
“We’ll call.”
“They’ll come after us. They’ll catch us, there are plenty of them, all over the state. We’ll never get to Raleigh.”
“We’ll call, and we’ll get there. They’ll stay away from us in this truck. I’ve got enough juice in this wagon to turn a lot of hair prematurely gray. And they’ve had experience with my lousy driving already. Nobody’s going to make me too nervous.”
She smiled wanly and after they stopped at a roadhouse to call, the smile strengthened. They were on the highway, heading out, and Angie seemed pleased to be in the warm cab.
“Where will we go after Raleigh?” she said.
“You can go where you want, I suppose, it’s a big world.”
She was staring at him. There was a long moment of silence, then she said, “No, I asked where we would go after Raleigh?”
He stared straight ahead. Kept driving. There were no other cars on the road. “Wrong word. There’s no we. There’s you, and there’s me, and that’s two separate units.”
“Why, you sonofabitch!”
Then she started trying to slap him. Harry let her work at it for a few seconds, then punched her in the mouth. Not hard enough to put her away, but hard enough to convince her he wasn’t there for target practice.
“You’re like all the rest of them,” she said, with the nastiest tone Harry could remember having heard in years.
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