On the Run

by John D. MacDonald

  “Next question. What happens to you if Wain finds out you were holding out on him? But there are some assumptions there. That’s assuming he never has caught up with your brother, which is a big assumption. And, if he hasn’t, that he’s still eager. It’s hard to stay mad too long. But Wain could stay mad as long as anybody you would ever want to meet.”

  “I’m wondering about if I go there and the kid brother is there too.”

  Boardman gave him a deathly smile. “So we are down to a question of loyalties?”

  George said hastily, “I told you the kid means nothing to me.”

  “You want an opinion? If Wain hasn’t found him and still wants him, and if Wain finds out you tried to be cute with him and resents it, it would become a policy matter, and Lesca couldn’t give you an inch of protection. You could find out how far you can swim with some cinder blocks four miles off Imperial Beach.”

  “Don’t say a thing like that!”

  “You’re not very bright and you have a nervous stomach, Georgie. I read you before you open your mouth. And don’t worry about cinder blocks, I forget the modern improvements. You’d have a heart attack.”

  “Claude, please, all I want is …”

  “You want me to find out how things stand.”

  “I want to go there. Maybe there’s a piece of money in it. Even ten would help a lot, with no tax bite out of it.”

  “You five too big, Georgie. It keeps you poor and jumpy.”

  “Will you …”

  “Shut up,” Boardman said. He looked at the letter again. He handed it back. “Go away, Georgie. I’ll call a friend from here. Go downstairs. Have some coffee. Stop sweating. You smell up the office.”

  At the door George turned and moistened his lips and said, “Another thing. If there’s still that … that money for fingering him …”

  Boardman sat up slowly. “Your brother? Your own brother?”

  “But if I got to do it anyway. I mean as long as I’ve got to do it …”

  “What you’ve got, I’d rather have cancer.”

  “But …”

  “Get out! Get out!”

  The anger tired him. After George left he lay back for another few minutes. He went to the desk and took the small notebook from his wallet. He made a call to Miami. He talked for ten minutes. He made another call to Mobile. He stretched out on the red couch again. It amused him to find he enjoyed having a reason to make some of the careful calls, the kind that would mean nothing to anybody who tapped the line. Even on such a dirty little thing like this, it was good to have a reason.

  George Shanley waited thirty minutes before Boardman shuffled into the lunch room and sat on the stool beside him.

  “They still want him,” Boardman said in an almost inaudible voice. “They missed twice. Wain wants him. Anyway, you’re in the clear now. Go see Grandpa. It will be checked out. Maybe somebody gets there before you do. I wouldn’t know. If he’s there when you get there, the kid brother I mean, and if he should disappear right after you get there, you won’t look very good, Georgie.”

  “But I don’t want to be around if there’s going to be any …”

  “You better go see Grandpa. They want you to go see Grandpa. Maybe you can help out a little. I don’t know. But they want it to be very quiet. Very quick and quiet and no fuss. Maybe Wain wouldn’t want it that way, and maybe he won’t find out until it’s done. Maybe Wain isn’t quite as big as he used to be because he worries too much about his face and about your brother, and he doesn’t keep his mind on the operation. Maybe people are a little uneasy about him. So it will be like a favor for a friend, and we’ll tell him later. It means no five for you, Georgie, because that was from Wain on a purely personal basis. Cheer up. Maybe you make up for it by getting his share of Grandpa’s money. A fellow getting his brother knocked off should get something for his trouble.”

  “Don’t do me that way, Claude. I had to protect myself, didn’t I?”

  “You’re protected.”

  “Any time I can do anything for you, Claude …”

  five

  On Saturday morning, after phoning her room, Sid walked over with his suitcase and they drove over to the airport in her rental car. She wore the blue skirt he had first seen her in, with a fresh white blouse. She seemed subdued and distant, and he imagined her attitude toward him was that same impersonal approach nurses used toward a patient they did not like. After she had turned the car in, and they had put the baggage into the blue station wagon, they went back to the terminal and had breakfast. He noticed dark smudges under her eyes.

  “I’d like to call Tom,” she said.

  “Can he talk on the phone?”

  “There’s an extension by his bed. But it doesn’t ring there. If he’s sleeping, I can try again. It will make him very happy to hear I’m bringing you back.”

  “And it fills you with joy, too.”

  “I’m just a messenger. I’m glad I’m able to do what he wanted me to do.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “If he’s awake, do you want to say hello?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “It’s a small place. It would go through a little switchboard, wouldn’t it? I don’t think you ought to be … too specific about who is coming back with you.”

  “It’s a small place, and I imagine that everybody in town knows Tom has been trying to locate his grandsons. But nobody would know you’ve been on the run. Or probably care particularly.”

  “Try to keep it short and vague.”

  She looked at him. Her dark eyes were cool. “Anything you say, Sidney. I guess that being nervous can become quite a habit. It’s a strange way to live, not trusting anybody.”

  He stood outside the booth as she made the call. He saw her face in profile, expressionless in waiting, then suddenly warm and softening, the smile curving, and he knew she was talking to the old man. To see her like that gave him a surprising feeling of loss. She had worn that look for him, for a little while. When she came out, her face was still again.

  “He’s very pleased.”

  “That’s nice.”

  He went to a news stand and bought a road atlas. She had no sun glasses. He bought her a pair.

  As he headed north out of the city on Route 59, she said, “You said we’d have to buy some things.”

  “We’ll get them up the line.”

  The wagon was heavy and powerful. After it had cooled off, he turned the air-conditioning to low. It had been a long time since he had taken a trip. He liked the feel of the car, the way it snugged to the road at high speed. She sat far from him, looking out her side window at the baked land. The silence between them seemed to be an uncomfortable truce.

  He was curious about her driving, so when they reached Lufkin, a little over an hour out of Houston, he had her take the wheel. She was erratic at first, picking up too much speed and then glancing at the meter and dropping back, going into the gentle curves too fast, wandering slightly. But then she found the rhythm of the car and the road. She held the wheel high, her hands clenched at two o’clock and ten o’clock, chin high, lips slightly compressed. He lounged back against the passenger door, elbow hooked over the back of the seat and studied her. The blue skirt was hiked above her knees. Her forearms had that little-girl look. Her breasts were high and firm under the white material of her blouse. The line of her throat was lovely. There was, he thought, something obscurely erotic about an attractive woman driving a big car at high speed, an interest composed of contrast. There she sat, the vulnerable animal, perched on her soft and useful hindquarters, all her flesh humming to the vibration of the road speed, with one dainty foot and ankle urging the hammering ton of metal along. Her face held a gravity and a sadness, and he thought it wasteful that after being shut up so long with the dying, she had lost any flavor of holiday in this long trip.

  “I want to say some things without you saying a word,” he said.

 
“You certainly …”

  “That’s two words, and this is something that won’t work if we turn it into a discussion group. You just keep driving and you won’t be able to keep from listening. Maybe it won’t work no matter how I say it. I don’t want to make any apology about last night.”

  He paused and watched her mouth. It looked as if she was going to speak, but then she compressed her lips more tightly.

  “I thought about it after you went back to your room, Paula. I wondered why I should have done such a crude and lousy thing. I don’t have anything against you personally. This isn’t an apology. It’s just sort of … exploring the things behind it. That means understanding me a little bit. I don’t have the instincts of a loner. From my background, I guess I should have. But I’ve always wanted roots. I’ve wanted my own people around me. A nest-builder or something. So for over two and a half years I’ve had to live with the realization that I can’t afford roots. In the first year I made a couple of very close and very warm contacts with decent human beings. But I had to fake a history for them. And I had to leave without warning. And it hurt. It hurt like hell. Like tearing out little bits of yourself. From the moment you walked into the shack yesterday, I felt that warmth in you, and I felt my own response to it. You seemed to be a symbol of the kind of thing, the kind of relationship I can’t have. And as I felt us getting closer … I don’t know whether you felt it or not … I had to slam the door. I had to do something to make it impossible. I remember part of a college psychology course, about insecure children breaking favorite toys to punish themselves. Okay. I broke any chances we had the first time I had a chance. I know how it made you feel, I think. Cheap and humiliated. I got you heated up when you didn’t want to be heated up. The funny thing about it, I knew I could do it. I didn’t have any question in my mind. I would have looked like an idiot if I couldn’t. I think I was able to because, by then, we were already carrying on a second conversation, aside from the one we were saying to each other. I guess I spoiled things, but perhaps that was the smartest thing to do. I wasn’t tracking right. From the moment you showed me that jade box, the whole day was unreal. I can put on an act. Hard and cynical and so on. Probably I’ve made you believe it. But look. I don’t think you were humiliated, and I was the only one there to see it. You’re a healthy woman, but if there hadn’t been something starting between us, it wouldn’t have happened. I couldn’t have made it happen. I thought of taking you. Maybe I could have. I don’t know. You asked me why I quit. You meant it as a bitter question. I think I quit for the same reason I started, that I sensed a strong attraction and I wanted to knock it off before it got a fair start. I have to protect myself and you, because there’s no offer I can make. Okay. Now we have to be together for a time. And I don’t want it to be lousy for you. I want you to have a better idea of me, a better opinion of me than what you’ve got right now. I was an insecure kid breaking toys. And having that jade box appear out of nowhere, I felt as if I’d been turned inside out. I felt raw and scared. I’m still scared. I’d built a pretty good wall and it started to crumble. I don’t want the kind of a truce we have right now. I want you to feel better. And I guess the only way you can is if you try to understand why it happened. I’ve been trying to be honest with you. But nobody knows the whole truth about himself, I guess. All I can do is give you some clues. But now suppose you just keep still and think about it for a few minutes, and then say what you think. I … I want you to have a better time than you’re having. I think you deserve it.”

  There was no change in her. She kept the speedometer motionless at seventy. He watched her. She bit into her underlip and began to frown. Suddenly she hit the brakes too hard. He was thrown forward. The car fishtailed, tires screaming. She fought the wheel, straightened it out, pumped the brakes again, then went over onto the shoulder in a rumbling of gravel and cloud of dust, and the big car rocked to a stop, stalling the engine.

  She slid over toward him, turned to half face him, put her hands flat against his cheeks and looked into his eyes. She took the sunglasses off, took his off, stared thoughtfully at him. “Not one full hour of sleep,” she said in a husky voice. “Not one. Laying awake there and trying to hang onto the feeling you had dirtied me and you were an evil bastard. Trying to hate you. But I couldn’t hang onto it. And I figured it out my way. And came up with the same thing you’ve said. It was another act of running. So I decided to wait and watch and see if I could find some clue that I was right.” Tears spilled out of her eyes. “Damn you, Sid. Damn you! I’m not the enemy. You don’t have to try to smash me. I’m your friend Paula. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She kissed him on the mouth, her lips as tender as though she were kissing a child. He put his arms around her and held her close. Finally she gave him a little push. “Now you drive. I’m too shaky.”

  He went around the car and got behind the wheel. In a few moments he had it back up to road speed. He glanced at her. She smiled at him. She settled herself so close to him they touched from thigh to shoulder.

  “You know, I certainly didn’t get to see much of Houston,” she said.

  He passed a pipe truck and settled back into the right lane. “No punishment?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, Sid?”

  “Don’t you have to get even a little? Shouldn’t it cost me a little more than this? It seems too easy.”

  She reached to the wheel and put her hand on his for a moment. “The ones who matter punish themselves.”

  “You’re a rare one.”

  “That’s what I tried to tell you last night.”

  They stopped in Marshall for a late lunch. While he bought a thermos, an air mattress, a pillow and a blanket, she went down the block and bought a pair of slacks, a pair of sandals for driving and, at his suggestion, a warm cardigan. When they made a gas stop at the far side of the city, she went to the ladies’ room and changed into the slacks. He had folded the rear seat down, moved their bags to one side, and had just finished inflating the mattress with the air hose when she came walking back across the wide concrete apron toward the gas island. The tailored gunmetal slacks made her look leggier, but did not obscure the tilt and tensions of her hips as she came toward him. He saw her become aware of herself observed, and saw a small constraint. She came toward him, properly aware of self and moment, the lines of her, long and strong and clear, coming near with the heavy brows shadowing the dark eyes, her mouth level with promises, grave with awareness. It was disconcerting to him that all of this could have happened so quickly, and kept happening, changing, growing with each hour of nearness. What had been an irrevocable affront to her pride and dignity as a woman now seemed merely a little awkward hitch, a catching of balance, even a quicker way of knowing. All the wanting was there, but this was not the gross simplicity of lust. This was the complexity of a total involvement, a promise of all the ninety percent she had spoken of. Involvement is the heart committed, in the way of an adult—and with this woman, anything less than that would be worse than nothing. But all he could offer was one small option on despair.

  They went off into afternoon, the sun behind them. She looked at the maps. “How are we going?”

  “Texarkana, and then if we move east too soon we fight too many hills. We’ll cut over on 60 to 51. Up through Cairo, Vandalia, Decatur, angle right on 66, and then take the pikes. Fast and flat.”

  “I don’t want to get lost when you’re sleeping.”

  “I’ll mark it out for you when we change.”

  In a little while she said, “Whatever became of Sid Wells?”

  “He was a quiet type. Peddled the cars, ran the lot, wrote the ads, paid his bills. He isn’t quite dead yet. I’ll kill him off after I unload this car. His name is on the paper.”

  “What do you do then?”

  “Sell the car for cash, find a new city, pick a new name, start picking up the little bits of paper a man has to have. Write myself some predated references and weather them up a littl
e. They never check. Avoid the outfits that want to bond you. It isn’t hard.”

  “You talk as if you won’t get any money from Tom.”

  “I might get it. But I might not want to show up to claim it.”

  “Would you try to change your looks again?”

  “Again? Oh, you mean the change from Jacksonville. I was getting too heavy. A little soft. Wore my hair a lot longer.”

  “Do you wear contact lenses now?”

  “No. There was a fair amount of correction in the lenses. It bothered me for a couple of months, being without glasses. Then it stopped bothering me. I think my eyes adjusted some. Things are hazy way off, but not enough to matter. I think Wain could walk right by me on the street. I mean, I like to think he could. I’m not about to test it.”

  “Nobody should have to live that way!”

  “Go to any big city at random and go up behind ten strangers, one after the other, and clap them on the shoulder. One out of ten will try to run right up the side of a building. When somebody wants you dead, you make a choice. You kill, or you run, or you build a fort, like Trotsky. Anyway, save your indignation. Name somebody with complete freedom of choice. I feel sorry for myself, but not all the time. I’m alive. I’m healthy. I can make a living anywhere I go, a good living.”

  “So can a nurse,” she said thoughtfully. “Not a good living. But get along.”

  In a little while she began to yawn. He stopped and she got into the back. He’d arranged the bed on the right side of the car. He found he could sit tall and get a quick glance at her. When he was up to speed he said, “How is it?”

  “Golly, it’s awful jiggly. Like some kind of therapy.”

  “Will you be able to sleep?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  A few minutes later there was a sudden warmth of her breath against his ear, a nearby fragrance of her hair, a hand light on his shoulder. She was kneeling behind him. She kissed his cheek. “Thanks for not letting me be gloomy, Sid.” She chuckled deep in her throat. “That damn thing will jiggle me to sleep if it doesn’t get me too excited first.”