“Where do you want to go?” Jerry asked.
“See a redheaded old pervert up on a hill. He can stash these guns and give me a ride. I’m going to buy a car this afternoon and send a telegram. I’m going for that dude up north. Where’ll you be?”
“At home with Carol.”
“I’ll give you a ring tonight. Man, I need some fuckin’ sleep. This fuckin’ benzedrine is killing me. I need rest and it won’t let me.”
The Soto Street off-ramp was ahead. “Get in the right lane and go north on Soto. That’s the quickest way to Red’s.”
“I’ll leave the .38 with you. I don’t want Carol to see it.”
“I’ll take it with me. Red can bury the shotgun until we need it.”
Cars whirred by us as Jerry slowed and eased up the ramp. It wasn’t quite noon.
11
L&L RED had sold the merchandise from the pawn shop for seven hundred dollars and was overjoyed when I told him to keep half. He was willing to drive me to Miami, much less to look for an automobile. He buried the shotgun.
The car I bought was a black GTO, four years old, but cared for with devotion by a young man who’d been drafted, sent to Vietnam, and blinded by a booby trap. His parents were almost in tears when they sold the car, for it reminded them too vividly of the tragedy. I paid cash, got the owner’s registration in hand, and never sent it in to the Department of Motor Vehicles. If something happened it would be another obstacle in tracing me.
It was late afternoon when I got the car and left L&L Red. I was totally enervated. I went back to the motel—stopping to send Aaron the telegram—and fell asleep fully clothed.
After midnight I awoke, went out to eat, and then, impulsively, turned the powerful automobile toward the highway north. There was a joy in driving it, feeling the force I commanded, seeing only blackness surrounding me and the white line racing before the headlights. I turned to a classical music station and let the sounds blow with wild volume.
By dawn the hills of San Francisco appeared. I was not sleepy, but I checked into the Fairmont Hotel, choosing it because it was the best in town—and reflecting that only the criminal can be in a two-dollar flophouse one night and a forty-dollar suite the next.
I napped for an hour and then went shopping, waiting while alterations were made. It wasn’t the complete wardrobe I wanted, but it was a major improvement. I bought clothes for Aaron, too—and boxes of ammunition for the .380 and .38.
The GTO crossed the Golden Gate into Marin during the commuter rush; everything moved with excruciating slowness. Soon, however, the river of automobiles began draining away as the highway passed through the outlying Bay communities. The freeway opened, traffic flying, and I hurtled along. The towns became farther apart, with rural landscape between them, and roadside billboards announced the virtues of Reno and Lake Tahoe hundreds of miles away. Near dusk I turned off the superhighway into a state highway. The yellowed farmland became foothills and woods, greenery. The last pink glow left the sky at the same time that the back highway was swallowed into the immense forests of northeastern California. I stopped in a small town for a hamburger. Soon there were no more small towns, or billboards. The pine forest was an endless, motionless wall of blackness, melancholy and mysterious. The headlights illuminated bushes that seemed like hostile shapes rushing to meet the automobile—until the highway inevitably curved away and they fell back into the maw of darkness.
The map had told me the route and the distance, but not the road conditions. I’d expected a more tortuous drive than was the reality and reached the destination an hour ahead of time. The headlights sprayed over the public campground, deserted except for the sign; there was the leveled ground, the cinder block bathroom facility, a barbecue, and a litter of trash. I backed out and continued up the highway, driving slowly. The side road of dirt with the sign designating Calif. Dept. Forestry Camp, two miles, was a mile from the campground. It meant Aaron would have to run three miles through the forest.
I swung the car around and went back to wait. Instead of sitting in the automobile, I took both pistols, the ammunition, and a blanket, and moved thirty yards to the concealment of the forest. If Aaron was wrong about when he’d be missed he might be hiking through the woods while the authorities sped down the road. They’d certainly stop to examine an automobile, and question its occupant, forty miles from the nearest town. It was colder in the forest, but safer. I could remain unseen, millions of acres of sanctuary at my back.
Settling on the blanket and leaning against the rough bole of a tree, I fired a cigar and began waiting. Above the high boughs of the trees, which rustled every so often from a vagrant breeze, a quarter moon cast just enough silver light to give some shape to objects. The sweeping majesty of the night overwhelmed me with a sense of lonely insignificance. I had the utterly senseless urge to fire the pistols into the forest, watch them spit inches of fire into the indifferent night—an act of defiance. Sad thoughts came into mind, Carol in the hospital, Mary in poverty, my father in a grubby furnished room without a friend, and Aaron somewhere nearby in the forest, running from the hounds, running for the hope of freedom.
I finished the cigar and tossed the butt. It described a red parabola and landed in a mat of dry pine needles. They began to crackle and spark. Would it start a million-dollar forest fire? What did I care if the forest, or the whole world, became ashes?
The question of what I’d do became moot when the cigar butt went dead without igniting a flame.
Half an hour went by. I was wondering how long I should wait before deciding he wouldn’t arrive. Just then he called my name, his voice coming from somewhere in the line of trees. He was calling to the parked car, its shape visible in the middle of the empty campground. He appeared twenty yards away.
A minute later the automobile’s tires were squealing on the curves as we stormed down the road. Aaron slapped me on the back and squeezed my neck in a headlock of joy. It was by far the most effusive I’d ever seen him. Of course it was the first time I’d ever seen him outside prison walls, which could have had something to do with it. It isn’t every day that a man serving a life term manages to escape.
“Say, man,” I said, “lighten up or you’ll wrap our asses around a tree. Take this biscuit”—I handed him the .38—“and there’s some clothes in the back seat.”
He accepted the pistol and scrambled to the rear to rid himself of the prison denim. “I knew I could count on you. Yet when I was running through the trees I wondered what I’d do if you weren’t there.”
“There’s ulterior motives. I’m talking you into bank robbery.”
“Bank robbery! You’d better talk cogently.”
“I’ll talk shit.”
“That’s cogency.”
Twin white-yellow orbs of headlights appeared ahead. Aaron crouched down, though it was impossible for anyone in the other car to see more than outlines. First there was the headlight glare, and the buffet of wind as the car passed. I watched the rear view mirror to see if the car began to turn. The GTO might outrun a highway patrol car especially when I was willing to take more chances for my freedom than they would for their pay, but it was impossible to outrun the two-way radio. If it was the highway patrol and they turned, I’d take a curve, slam on the brakes, and Aaron could dive into the brush. They were seeking a Negro. My identification could withstand on the spot examination.
The other car kept going, making the plan unnecessary. Yet I watched until we’d covered another twenty miles and turned on the superhighway—eight lanes—toward the south.
Aaron already knew from the grapevine that I was a fugitive. Rosenthal, or some other parole officer, might have told a parolee in jail—maybe trying to get information about me. The parolee went back to prison. The first few days he’d spend telling stories and answering questions: “I saw so and so; guy’s doin’ good.” Or, “So and so’s old lady is hooked to the cunt.” Or, “So and so is out there snitching.” Or, “Max Dembo belted his
parole officer and lammed.” Some other convict, going to camp, knew Aaron was my friend and told him.
“What happened to your good intentions?” Aaron asked.
“I was bullshitting myself. That’s not me.”
“That’s essentially true, but there’s more to it. What happened?”
I told him in detail, the image of Rosenthal in mind, adding venom to the story. Self-pity crept in too; I told him the awful tension and endless fear that went with being a fugitive. “It’s a bad way to live.”
“It’s better to be fugitive from a cage than already in it.”
I then realized that I was complaining to a man who was taking his sole chance for freedom. If caught, it would be twenty years before he had another chance. And in the recess of mind that stores opinions without examining them, I believed he’d be caught—sooner or later. Eighty percent of the escapees are caught within a week; less than 3 percent last a year. I could think of only two who’d been gone five years or more. One was an Australian, who’d travelled extensively around the world before his imprisonment and so was uniquely equipped to get away. The second, though still officially missing, had been dead and secretly buried within three months of his escape. He’d become deranged, paranoid, a threat to his friends, and one of them had shot him in the head and buried him in the wilderness. The story was common knowledge in the big yard, and undoubtedly the authorities knew it too; but there was nothing they could do.
My own chances of remaining free were just slightly better than Aaron’s. Yet being hunted was better than being caught. Death is also inevitable, but one runs from it, too.
The speedometer rested at seventy for hours. There were almost no automobiles. A ninety-mile-per-hour speed would have been safe, but some rural policeman might pull us over for speeding, and would be suspicious of a black and white man being together, especially so late at night. Aaron lacked identification. It could turn into something ugly.
Aaron had things on his mind. He’d anticipated that I’d have a place for him to hide, that I’d provide help beyond taxi service to town. He hadn’t expected as much help as I was able to give—money, clothes, identification—and he hadn’t thought of robbery, but he did need enough money to flee the country. He spoke excellent Spanish, and from his years of working in the prison’s dental department (convicts drilled, filled, cleaned, did inlays) he’d become a sufficiently qualified dentist to be in demand in many backward parts of the world. His knowledge of electronics was also an asset (one I wanted for us). He was thinking of Central or South America. First he needed a passport and money.
In the background of my own thoughts had been the idea to leave the United States, though definite plans—even the decision—had to wait until I had enough money to live comfortably. As a destination I was inclined toward Spain or somewhere else in the Mediterranean, preferably a country too poor to have a superefficient police force, or which was less than zealous in investigating foreigners with money.
Even now, as Aaron recounted his plans, mine were fuzzy about tomorrow. The Big Score was the dream, and who thinks beyond a dream?
At 3:00 A.M ., fifty miles north of Bakersfield, I started to doze at the wheel. Aaron took over while I slept in the back seat.
In San Fernando, sun and morning traffic rising simultaneously, I was thrown off the seat when Aaron slammed on the brakes and swerved to miss a milk truck. He hadn’t driven an automobile in a decade and needed practice before trying the Los Angeles freeways.
We found him a furnished room in a large Victorian house. The room was quite spacious, on the second floor. A huge window over-looked the front lawn and tree-shaded street. It was on the north-western fringe of the black ghetto. And it was a ghetto only in the sense that all who lived there were black. It was middle-class. The homes were old, but had been fashionable less than a decade earlier. Aaron would be inconspicuous in the neighborhood, and it was ten minutes driving time from Hollywood. I wouldn’t have to drive through hostile country to visit him.
I’d planned to spend the day with him, getting a photo for a false driver’s license, buying clothes. But driving a thousand miles in thirty hours, and the pell-mell pace, including the robbery, suddenly caught up with me. Absolute exhaustion came all at once, as if some giant suction force drained me. I was staggering with the need for sleep.
“Take a nap here,” Aaron said. “I can call my mother at work, let her know I’m all right. They’ve probably contacted her already and she thinks I’m wandering around the Sierras with rattlesnakes and bears.”
“No, brother. I’ve got a broad. I’ll go sleep at her place. A highborn southern gal.”
“I’d like to stick my dick into something wet, but there’s more important things first.”
I gave him the telephone numbers to Abe’s club and Allison’s apartment. I was leaving the motel, so that number was unnecessary. “If anything comes up, call me. There’s a shopping center three blocks from here. You can walk there and get yourself some rags.” I left him three hundred dollars and the .38. I promised to come back for him in the evening; then we could make some decisions.
He walked me out to the car. The landlady, a chunky black woman whose husband was retired from the services and working at Hughes Aircraft, was watering a flower bed beside the house. Each plant had different-colored blossoms—yellows and reds as bright as I’d ever seen, eye-penetrating. Aaron had already charmed the woman when we looked at the room, for his education, his manners, his intelligence were obvious. Now he commented on the zinnias, complimenting her touch with them, and the woman was captivated—so much so that I doubted if she would call the police even if she knew the truth.
“Get me that robin down from the tree,” I whispered when we went on to the car. We shook hands before I got in.
“Thanks, brother,” he said. “I appreciate what you’re doing.”
“Man, fuck you! You got your issue. Friends are to be used, though not misused, so everybody gets stronger. Nobody can stand alone. I need you too.”
“Quit running at the jaws like you’re on speed. Get going.”
“I’ll be back around nine. I might bring my partner so you can get to know each other.”
As I drove away, I hoped Jerry and Aaron would get along, respect each other as I respected both of them. If I could bind them together—as a cohesive factor, not as a leader—no score was too big to think about.
It was false to tell Aaron that a woman was “waiting”. Allison was at work when I parked on the hill road, my clothes piled in the rear of the automobile. I was too tired to go any further. I broke a window, unlatched it, and climbed in. When she came home I was sleeping in her bed, wearing only shorts. She was surprised, but not angry. On the contrary, my unshaven jaws and general haggardness aroused feminine solicitude. I mumbled a story of having driven a thousand miles back and forth in Mexico. She didn’t question me; I liked that.
It was getting dark outside. She was seated on the edge of the bed. It was time for us to make love. I knew it both from the yearning in her body and the silent waiting in her eyes. I reached for her.
Minutes later, already disheveled, blouse unfastened, skirt twisted, she got up and slowly took off her clothes. When she was naked, her body dappled by the dying sunlight filtered through a tree outside the window, she stood posing, breasts in profile. She was suntanned and they were strikingly light compared to her belly and shoulders and legs. “I like to make it delicious and slow,” she said, coming onto the bed with one knee, reaching a hand between my legs, bringing her mouth to my belly button, darting her tongue into it.
We took a long, long time, sometimes becoming clumsy because we were unaccustomed to each other, and we did all the things with mouth and hands that uninhibited lovers do. We began gently, worked up to ferocity, and rested in between, delaying exhaustion. She delighted in being alternately coy and vulgar, and liked having me whisper crudisms into her ear. Her skin had a velvet texture, and she was lithe; at one point
her legs were wrapped around me and she stroked my thighs with her soles. As we made love, now in darkness, I felt her warmth and caresses and all the splintered, harried facets of my days were drawn in and given repose.
Afterward, I went to sleep. When I woke up two hours later she was grilling hamburgers, wearing only sheer blue panties and slippers.
“How was I?” she asked.
“I thought you were going to suck my brains out for a minute.”
She laughed, blushed—not used to such crudeness but liking it.
“I live here now, huh?”
“Sure do. That’s what you had in mind, wasn’t it?”
“Precisely. But we’re going someplace, so get some clothes on.”
“Where are we going.”
“To pick up a friend of mine, take him to eat.”
“Are we going anywhere special?”
“Put on anything … Jeans are okay. But we’re supposed to be there now, so hurry.”
Aaron was gone when we arrived. He’d left a note with the land-lady saying that he was meeting his mother, that he’d tried to telephone me but had been unable to get through. He’d be back at midnight and, if I had to be somewhere else then, would call me in the morning.
“Your friend’s a Negro?” Allison asked when we were driving away.
“Didn’t I mention it?”
“No.”
“Does it make any difference?”
“None whatsoever. I just asked a question.”
“He’s a man—by anybody’s standards.”
“Don’t get defensive.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to sound that way.”
She moved closer to me, rested a hand on my knee. We drove that way, and I didn’t mind that Aaron had been gone. “What should we do?”
“Let’s go back to bed and fuck,” she said.
“Brilliant idea, baby. First, let’s stop by the club. I want to see Manny January.”
Before we were seated, Manny came through the crowd and excitedly beckoned me aside. The M16 was in the trunk of his car; that, and four hundred rounds of ammunition for it. The automatic rifle was precisely what I’d wanted to see him about, never believing there was a possibility he’d already have it. He’d even paid for it from his own money and said I could repay him when I tore something off—not knowing I had already made a move. I gave him back what he’d invested, and put my arm around his shoulder to show he’d made full amends for his earlier failure. It was what he wanted and he glowed in response.
No Beast So Fierce Page 19
