The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Five and a half,” Mcrae said.

  “You keep repeating everything I say. I wish you’d quit that.”

  He wiped his hand across his mouth and then feigned a cough to keep from having to speak.

  “Five and a half people,” she said, turning a little in the seat, putting her knees up on the dash. “Have you ever met anybody like me? Tell the truth.”

  “No,” Mcrae said, “nobody.”

  “Just think about it, Mcrae. You can say you rode with Belle Starr. You can tell your grandchildren.”

  He was afraid to say anything to this, for fear of changing the delicate balance of the thought. Yet he knew the worst mistake would be to say nothing at all. He was beginning to feel something of the cunning that he would need to survive, even as he knew the slightest miscalculation would mean the end of him. He said, with fake wonder, “I knew Belle Starr.”

  She said, “Think of it.”

  “Something,” he said.

  And she sat further down in the seat. “Amazing.”

  He kept to fifty-five miles an hour, and everyone else was speeding. The girl sat straight up now, nearly facing him on the seat. For long periods she had been quiet, simply watching him drive, and soon they were going to need gas. There was now less than half a tank.

  “Look at these people speeding,” she said. “We’re the only ones obeying the speed limit. Look at them.”

  “Do you want me to speed up?” he asked.

  “I think they ought to get tickets for speeding, that’s what I think. Sometimes I wish I was a policeman.”

  “Look,” Mcrae said, “we’re going to need gas pretty soon.”

  “No, let’s just run it until it quits. We can always hitch a ride with somebody.”

  “This car’s got a great engine,” Mcrae said. “We might have to outrun the police, and I wouldn’t want to do that in any other car.”

  “This old thing? It’s got a crack in the windshield. The radio doesn’t work.”

  “Right. But it’s a fast car. It’ll outrun a police car.” She put one arm over the seat back and looked out the rear window. “You really think the police are chasing us?” “They might be,” he said.

  She stared at him a moment. “No. There’s no reason. Nobody saw us.”

  “But if somebody did—this car, I mean, it’ll go like crazy.”

  “I’m afraid of speeding, though,” she said. “Besides, you know what I found out? If you run slow enough the cops go right past you. Right on past you looking for somebody who’s in a hurry. No, I think it’s best if we just let it run until it quits and then get out and hitch.”

  Mcrae thought he knew what might happen when the gas ran out: she would make him push the car to the side of the road, and then she would walk him back into the cactus and brush there, and when they were far enough from the road, she would shoot him. He knew this as if she had spelled it all out, and he began again to try for the cunning he would need. “Belle,” he said. “Why don’t we lay low for a few days in Albuquerque?”

  “Is that an obscene gesture?” she said.

  “No!” he said, almost shouted. “No! That’s—it’s outlaw talk. You know. Hide out from the cops—lay low. It’s—it’s prison talk.”

  “Well, I’ve never been in prison.”

  “That’s all I meant.”

  “You want to hide out.”

  “Right,” he said. “You and me?”

  “You—you asked if I wanted to join up with you.”

  “Did I?” She seemed puzzled by this.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling himself press it a little. “Don’t you remember?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “You did,” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Belle Starr had a gang,” he said.

  “She did.”

  “I could be the first member of your gang.”

  She sat there thinking this over. Mcrae’s blood moved at the thought that she was deciding whether or not he would live. “Well,” she said, “maybe.”

  “You’ve got to have a gang, Belle.”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  A moment later, she said, “How much money do you have?”

  “I have enough to start a gang.”

  “It takes money to start a gang?”

  “Well—” He was at a loss.

  “How much do you have?”

  He said, “A few hundred.”

  “Really?” she said. “That much?”

  “Just enough to—just enough to get to Nevada.”

  “Can I have it?”

  He said, “Sure.” He was holding the wheel and looking out into the night.

  “And we’ll be a gang?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “I like the idea. Belle Starr and her gang.”

  Mcrae started talking about what the gang could do, making it up as he went along, trying to sound like all the gangster movies he’d seen. He heard himself talking about things like robbery and getaway and staying out of prison, and then, as she sat there staring at him, he started talking about being at Leavenworth, what it was like. He went on about it, the hours of forced work, and the time alone; the harsh day-to-day routines, the bad food. Before he was through, feeling the necessity of deepening her sense of him as her new accomplice—and feeling strangely as though in some way he had indeed become exactly that—he was telling her everything, all the bad times he’d had: his father’s alcoholism, and growing up wanting to hit something for the anger that was in him; the years of getting into trouble; the fighting and the kicking and what it had got him. He embellished it all, made it sound worse than it really was because she seemed to be going for it, and because, telling it to her, he felt oddly sorry for himself; a version of this story of pain and neglect and lonely rage was true. He had been through a lot. And as he finished, describing for her the scene at the hospital the last time he saw his father, he was almost certain that he had struck a chord in her. He thought he saw it in the rapt expression on her face.

  “Anyway,” he said, and smiled at her.

  “Mcrae?” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you pull over?”

  “Well,” he said, his voice shaking, “why don’t we wait until it runs out of gas?”

  She was silent.

  “We’ll be that much further down the road,” he said.

  “I don’t really want a gang,” she said. “I don’t like dealing with other people that much. I mean I don’t think I’m a leader.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mcrae said. “No—you’re a leader. You’re definitely a leader. I was in the air force and I know leaders and you are definitely what I’d call a leader.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. You are leadership material all the way.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “Definitely,” he said, “Definitely a leader.”

  “But I don’t really like people around, you know.”

  “That’s a leadership quality. Not wanting people around. It is definitely a leadership quality.”

  “Boy,” she said, “the things you learn.”

  He waited. If he could only think himself through to the way out. If he could get her to trust him, get the car stopped—be there when she turned her back.

  “You want to be in my gang, huh?”

  “I sure do,” he said.

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to think about it.”

  “I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned it to you before.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “No, really.”

  “Were you ever married?” she asked.

  “Married?” he said, and then stammered over the answer. “Ah—uh, no.”

  “You ever been in a gang before?”

  “A couple times, but—but they never had good leadership.” “You’re giving me a line, huh.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s true. No good leadership. It wa
s always a problem.”

  “I’m tired,” she said, shifting toward him a little. “I’m tired of talking.”

  The steering wheel was hurting the insides of his hands. He held tight, looking at the coming-on of the white stripes in the road. There were no other cars now, and not a glimmer of light anywhere beyond the headlights.

  “Don’t you get tired of talking, sometimes?”

  “I never was much of a talker,” he said.

  “I guess I don’t mind talking as much as I mind listening,” she said. He made a sound in his throat that he hoped she took for agreement.

  “That’s just when I’m tired, though.”

  “Why don’t you take a nap,” he said.

  She leaned back against the door and regarded him. “There’s plenty of time for that later.”

  “So,” he wanted to say, “you’re not going to kill me—we’re a gang?”

  They had gone for a long time without speaking, a nervewrecking hour of minutes, during which the gas gauge had sunk to just above empty; and finally she had begun talking about herself, mostly in the third person. It was hard to make sense of most of it. Yet he listened as if to instructions concerning how to extricate himself. She talked about growing up in Florida, in the country, and owning a horse; she remembered when she was taught to swim by somebody she called Bill, as if Mcrae would know who that was; and then she told him how when her father ran away with her mother’s sister, her mother started having men friends over all the time. “There was a lot of obscene goings-on,” she said, and her voice tightened a little.

  “Some people don’t care what happens to their kids,” said Mcrae.

  “Isn’t it the truth?” she said. Then she took the pistol out of the shawl. “Take this exit.”

  He pulled onto the ramp and up an incline to a two-lane road that went off through the desert, toward a glow that burned on the horizon. For perhaps five miles the road was straight as a plumb line, and then it curved into long, low undulations of sand and mesquite and cactus.

  “My mother’s men friends used to do whatever they wanted to me,” she said. “It went on all the time. All sorts of obscene goings-on.”

  Mcrae said, “I’m sorry that happened to you, Belle.” And for an instant he was surprised by the sincerity of his feeling: it was as if he couldn’t feel sorry enough. Yet it was genuine: it all had to do with his own unhappy story. The whole world seemed very, very sad to him. “I’m really very sorry,” he said.

  She was quiet a moment, as if thinking about this. Then she said, “Let’s pull over now. I’m tired of riding.”

  “It’s almost out of gas,” he said.

  “I know, but pull it over anyway.”

  “You sure you want to do that?”

  “See?” she said. “That’s what I mean. I wouldn’t like being told what I should do all the time, or asked if I was sure of what I wanted or not.”

  He pulled the car over and slowed to a stop. “You’re right,” he said, “See? Leadership. I’m just not used to somebody with leadership qualities.”

  She held the gun a little toward him. He was looking at the small, dark, perfect circle of the end of the barrel. “I guess we should get out, huh,” she said.

  “I guess so.” He hadn’t even heard himself.

  “Do you have any relatives left anywhere?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Your folks are both dead?”

  “Right, yes.”

  “Which one died first?”

  “I told you,” he said, “didn’t I? My mother. My mother died first.”

  “Do you feel like an orphan?”

  He sighed. “Sometimes.” The whole thing was slipping away from him.

  “I guess I do too.” She reached back and opened her door. “Let’s get out now.” And when he opened his door she aimed the gun at his head. “Get out slow.”

  “Aw, Jesus,” he said. “Look, you’re not going to do this, are you? I mean I thought we were friends and all.”

  “Just get out real slow, like I said to.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m getting out.” He opened his door, and the ceiling light surprised and frightened him. Some wordless part of himself understood that this was it, and all his talk had come to nothing: all the questions she had asked him, and everything he had told her—it was all completely useless. This was going to happen to him, and it wouldn’t mean anything; it would just be what happened.

  “Real slow,” she said. “Come on.”

  “Why are you doing this?” he said. “You’ve got to tell me that before you do it.”

  “Will you please get out of the car now?”

  He just stared at her.

  “All right, I’ll shoot you where you sit.”

  “Okay,” he said, “don’t shoot.”

  She said in an irritable voice, as though she were talking to a recalcitrant child, “You’re just putting it off.”

  He was backing himself out, keeping his eyes on the little barrel of the gun, and he could hear something coming, seemed to notice it in the same instant that she said, “Wait.” He stood half in and half out of the car, doing as she said, and a truck came over the hill ahead of them, a tractor-trailer, all white light and roaring.

  “Stay still,” she said, crouching, aiming the gun at him.

  The truck came fast, was only fifty yards away, and without having to decide about it, without even knowing that he would do it, Mcrae bolted into the road. He was running: there was the exhausted sound of his own breath, the truck horn blaring, coming on, louder, the thing bearing down on him, something buzzing past his head. Time slowed. His legs faltered under him, were heavy, all the nerves gone out of them. In the light of the oncoming truck, he saw his own white hands outstretched as if to grasp something in the air before him, and then the truck was past him, the blast of air from it propelling him over the side of the road and down an embankment in high, dry grass, which pricked his skin and crackled like hay.

  He was alive. He lay very still. Above him was the long shape of the road, curving off in the distance, the light of the truck going on. The noise faded and was nothing. A little wind stirred. He heard the car door close. Carefully, he got to all fours, and crawled a few yards away from where he had fallen. He couldn’t be sure of which direction—he only knew he couldn’t stay where he was. Then he heard what he thought were her footsteps in the road, and he froze. He lay on his side, facing the embankment. When she appeared there, he almost cried out.

  “Mcrae? Did I get you?” She was looking right at where he was in the dark, and he stopped breathing. “Mcrae?”

  He watched her move along the edge of the embankment.

  “Mcrae?” She put one hand over her eyes, and stared at a place a few feet over from him; then she turned and went back out of sight. He heard the car door again, and again he began to crawl farther away. The ground was cold and rough, and there was a lot of sand.

  He heard her put the key in the trunk, and he stood up, began to run, he was getting away, but something went wrong in his leg, something sent him sprawling, and a sound came out of him that seemed to echo, to stay on the air, as if to call her to him. He tried to be perfectly still, tried not to breathe, hearing now the small pop of the gun. He counted the reports: one, two, three. She was just standing there at the edge of the road, firing into the dark, toward where she must have thought she heard the sound. Then she was rattling the paper bag, reloading. He could hear the click of the gun. He tried to get up, and couldn’t. He had sprained his ankle, had done something very bad to it. Now he was crawling wildly, blindly through the tall grass, hearing again the small report of the pistol. At last he rolled into a shallow gully, and lay there with his face down, breathing the dust, his own voice leaving him in a whimpering animal-like sound that he couldn’t stop, even as he held both shaking hands over his mouth.

  “Mcrae?” She sounded so close. “Hey,” she said. “Mcrae?”

  He didn’t move. He lay
there, perfectly still, trying to stop himself from crying. He was sorry for everything he had ever done. He didn’t care about the money, or the car or going out west or anything. When he lifted his head to peer over the lip of the gully, and saw that she had started down the embankment with his flashlight, moving like someone with time and the patience to use it, he lost his sense of himself as Mcrae: he was just something crippled and breathing in the dark, lying flat in a little winding gully of weeds and sand. Mcrae was gone, was someone far, far away, from ages ago—a man fresh out of prison, with the whole country to wander in, and insurance money in his pocket, who had headed west with the idea that maybe his luck, at long last, had changed.

  WHAT FEELS LIKE THE WORLD

  Very early in the morning, too early, he hears her trying to jump rope out on the sidewalk below his bedroom window. He wakes to the sound of her shoes on the concrete, her breathless counting as she jumps—never more than three times in succession—and fails again to find the right rhythm, the proper spring in her legs to achieve the thing, to be a girl jumping rope. He gets up and moves to the window and, parting the curtain only slightly, peers out at her. For some reason he feels he must be stealthy, must not let her see him gazing at her from this window. He thinks of the heartless way children tease the imperfect among them, and then he closes the curtain.

  She is his only granddaughter, the unfortunate inheritor of his big-boned genes, his tendency toward bulk, and she is on a self-induced program of exercise and dieting, to lose weight. This is in preparation for the last meeting of the PTA, during which children from the fifth and sixth grades will put on a gymnastics demonstration. There will be a vaulting horse and a mini-trampoline, and everyone is to participate. She wants to be able to do at least as well as the other children in her class, and so she has been trying exercises to improve her coordination and lose the weight that keeps her rooted to the ground. For the past two weeks she has been eating only one meal a day, usually lunch, since that’s the meal she eats at school, and swallowing cans of juice at other mealtimes. He’s afraid of anorexia but trusts her calm determination to get ready for the event. There seems no desperation, none of the classic symptoms of the disease. Indeed, this project she’s set for herself seems quite sane: to lose ten pounds, and to be able to get over the vaulting horse—in fact, she hopes that she’ll be able to do a handstand on it and, curling her head and shoulders, flip over to stand upright on the other side. This, she has told him, is the outside hope. And in two weeks of very grown-up discipline and single-minded effort, that hope has mostly disappeared; she’s still the only child in the fifth grade who has not even been able to propel herself over the horse, and this is the day of the event. She will have one last chance to practice at school today, and so she’s up this early, out on the lawn, straining, pushing herself.