Mad River

14

Becky Welsh had spent a lot of time around rough guys, and had slept with a few, but had never before experienced anything like a rape. After loading Jimmy into the truck, and they got back on the road, Becky began to weep again. Jimmy’s pain had diminished, but he was confused, partly by shock and partly by the drugs, and he asked, “What the fuck’s wrong with you, anyway?”

She looked over at him and said, “I told you. Tom raped me.”

“What the fuck?”

“He raped me,” Becky said. “He pushed me down on the bed and raped me and beat me up. Then he did it again and then he took off. Then the guy came and I shot him and I’m just, I’m just, I’m just. .”

Jimmy seemed to think about that for a while, or maybe his mind just wandered, but finally he said, “I’ll kill the motherfucker. Where is he?”

“He took off. I don’t know where he went,” Becky said. She looked over at Jimmy. “You gotta promise me.”

“What?”

“If we catch him, I get to kill him. I’m gonna cut his balls off, and then I’m gonna shoot him in the stomach and watch him die.”

“Deal,” Jimmy said. And, “Where’d you get this truck?”

Becky told him the whole story, from the time they left him in the cornfield until she loaded him into the truck; he remembered everything after that. “We gotta get your leg bandaged up better and I got some stuff we can put on it.”

“We need to get as far away as we can,” Jimmy said. “They’ll be tearing up the countryside. Did Tom get all our money?”

“No, no, we got the money, it’s behind the seat,” Becky said.

“See if you can reach it,” Tom said.

Becky fished around behind the seats and got the handles of the two grocery bags and pulled them over the seat and put them in Jimmy’s lap. She said, “You know what I think? I think he’s gonna turn himself in and blame everything on us.”

Jimmy nodded, but didn’t seem to be tracking very well; his eyes were bright, either because he was reviving, or because he was feverish. She reached out and put her hand on his forehead and thought he felt warm. Not real warm, but pretty warm.

“You might be getting an infection,” she said. “We need to get some medicine on there.”

“Need some pills, penicillin or something,” Jimmy said.

Becky sobbed again, then wiped the tears out of her eyes, steadied her voice, and said, “You’re sounding a lot better, honey.”

“Feeling better,” he said. Then, “We better cut on south. We don’t want to meet any more cars than we have to. Stay on the gravel. If you see any gravel dust, try to find a place to turn off.”

They went south, and she said, “What are we going to do? Everybody in the world is looking for us.”

Jimmy said, “We need to get down south of Arcadia. There’s this old guy down there, he lives alone, off the road. You can hardly see his house. My old man and I ground up his stumps one year. Mean old motherfucker, wouldn’t let me in the house to take a shit. I had to go out in the field.”

“What’s his name?”

“Joe something. I don’t know. But I’ll remember the house. He’s got an army tank out behind the house. All fuckin’ rusty, but it’s a real tank.” He was quiet for a moment, then added, “I’ll remember the turnoff. We’ll get the truck out of sight and lay up there for a day or two, until I’m better.” He weighed the two bags, bouncing one in his left hand, one in his right, chose the heavier of the two and counted the money.

“Thirteen thousand,” he said, when he finished.

“Oh my God,” Becky said.

He counted the other bag and said, “Nine thousand. Holy shit, we got twenty-two thousand dollars. We can go anywhere we want.”

“If we don’t get caught first,” Becky said. “How far is this old man’s house?”

“Twenty minutes, half hour. I’m not exactly sure. But I know how to get there from here.”

And he did, but it was more like forty minutes, snaking around on back roads every time Jimmy got a bad feeling about the road they were on. By the time they got there, he was fighting to stay awake. “Fuckin’ dope’s all over me,” he said. “But we’re close. See them silos?”

A big farm on the north side of the road showed five huge blue metal silos, standing shoulder to shoulder, in three different heights, like brothers.

“Is that it?”

“No, but he’s down this road. Maybe a mile.” A minute later he said, “There. Up that hill.”

Becky looked up a long, low hill, under some power lines that had small black birds sitting on them, looking down at her. She could see the roof of a house, but nothing else, set behind a woodlot of winter-gray trees. A dirt track went up the hill from a mailbox on the road.

She turned past the mailbox and started up the hill. A line of barren apple trees edged the driveway on the left, and a patch of dirt with the remnants of last year’s vegetable garden trailed away on the right, at a flat spot halfway up the hill. The track was rutted in places, and Becky steered around the ruts, and when they came to the crest of the hill they saw an old man in overalls standing next to an older red Ford pickup, about to get into it.

“Pull up there next to him, like we want to ask a question. Run my window down and put your fingers in your ears,” Jimmy said. He had the pistol in his hand, between his legs.

Becky did what he said, pushed the button to roll the window down, and stopped next to the mean-faced old man, who asked, “Who are you?”

“Just us,” Jimmy said, and he stuck the gun out the window and shot the old man in the chest. The man reeled backward, then fell on his hands and knees, and then, improbably, got to his feet and staggered toward the house.

Jimmy got out of the truck, but his leg gave way and he fell down. He used the running board and then the fender to pull himself back up, and then hobbled after the old man, feeling not much pain but weak and unsteady, limping so hard that he could barely lift his hand up.

He chased the old man that way, the two of them barely making headway, the old man looking fearfully over his shoulder while holding his hand over the hole in his chest. Jimmy fired another shot and missed, and then another one, and missed again, but hit the house. Then Becky was there and said, “Give me the gun.”

The old man was almost to the side door of the house, and she ran after him and she aimed the gun at the old man’s back and pulled the trigger and the old man went down again, but was still alive, groaning, and Becky saw that she’d shot him in the shoulder.

“Go ahead and kill me, bitch, you got me,” the old man said, rolling over and trying to stand again. He had blood on his mouth. Becky pointed the gun at his face and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened, and she saw it was locked open: out of ammo.

“Fuck this,” Jimmy said. He limped back to the truck and the old man tried again to get into the house, and Becky kicked his legs out from under him, and he went down, flat, and she saw the big growing patch of blood below the straps on the overalls. She stepped to the door and pulled it open, and saw what he was going after. An old pump.22 was standing in the corner of the mudroom. She picked it up and stepped back outside.

Jimmy was digging in the truck for another gun, but Becky was figuring out the safety on the.22, clicked it off, pointed the gun at the old man, who moaned, “I give up.”

She shot him in the head, and he shook, and tried to push himself up again, so she pumped the gun and shot him again, and he shuddered, and this time got to his hands and knees, and she pumped again, and the third time shot him behind the ear and he went down hard.

Jimmy called, “He dead?”

“I think so,” she said. She prodded the old man’s face with the muzzle of the gun, and he didn’t flinch or move or tremble.

Jimmy came limping back with a pistol and pointed it at the old man’s temple and fired. The old man’s head bumped up, and this time, there wasn’t any doubt.

“Okay. Let’s get him out of sight,” Jimmy said.

Becky dragged the body away from the house, toward a tumbledown wooden shed that stowed a couple of rusty pieces of farm equipment, a grain drill, and an ancient disk. The old man was amazingly light, and she had no trouble at all: she hid the body behind the shed door.

When she turned around, she saw the tank. No question about what it was, a real tank, but the front end had sunk deep into the turf, and its barrel seemed to slump with age, like it needed some kind of military Viagra to get it going again.

She shook her head, puzzled by it, then turned back to the house. There were two scuff lines in the dirt of the driveway that looked exactly like the heels of somebody who’d been dragged to the shed. She thought about kicking some dirt over the scuff marks, and over a couple patches of blood, but then thought, if the cops get that close, they were done anyway. She followed Jimmy inside.

About half the lights in the house worked; and it smelled like a hundred years of chicken noodle soup, Life magazines, and National Geographics, and cigarettes. But there was a big flat-screen television in the front room, with a La-Z-Boy and a couch and a satellite connection, and a DVD player, and a stereo system with hundreds of CDs.

“I’ll check the bathroom and the bedroom and see if the old fuck had some medicine,” Becky said.

The old fuck did. The medicine cabinet was a gold mine. He’d apparently had tooth problems, and had yellow plastic tubes half-filled with more OxyContin and a couple of dozen penicillin tabs. Some of them were outdated, but they’d be better than nothing, she thought. She also found a plastic box with a red cross on it, and a label that said: “Farm Family First Aid Kit.”

She took them downstairs and found Jimmy figuring out the TV. “I looked at the CDs, just a bunch of shit,” Jimmy said.

She picked one of them up and it said: Goldberg Variations. She’d seen some stuff in Cosmo about variations, but that didn’t seem like this. She tossed it on the floor and said, “Lay back on the couch. I need to look at your leg.”

“Let me get the TV on,” he said. His eyelids were drooping again.

He got the TV on, to a replay of Dancing with the Stars, and lay back and closed his eyes. Becky decided not to try to get his pants off, so she got a knife from the kitchen and cut through the denim. There was an entry wound at the back, and then a blown-out channel in the flesh along the outside of Jimmy’s thigh. Another two inches to the left, and the bullet would have missed completely. On the other hand, two inches to the right, and it would have blown the bone out of his leg.

It looked bad, she thought, but not that bad.

She said to Jimmy, “I can fix this.”

“That’s good,” he said, distantly, and then apparently went to sleep. She got to work, cut off the pant leg and pulled it down, went into the kitchen and got some paper towels, wiped off the wound with hot water. When it was clean, it looked worse, like raw meat. She sprayed it with some Band-Aid disinfectant, then covered it with two four-by-four-inch sterile bandages from the first aid kit, one for the entry wound, the other for the exit.

When everything was covered and looking neat, she woke up Jimmy and made him eat four of the penicillin tabs. “You’re gonna be okay,” she said.

“That’s good,” he said, and he went back to sleep. She covered him with a blanket from the bedroom, then went back to the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and stood in the shower and washed away every bit of Tom McCall.

That done, she went back out to the living room, wrapped in a towel, and found Jimmy snoring on the couch. She left him there, went back to the bedroom, and fell on the bed. In two minutes, she was asleep.

Five hours later, she woke up and heard music. Strange music, like something from a nightclub. What was that?

Holding the bed blanket over her shoulders, she went back to the living room and found Jimmy watching television. She looked at the screen, which showed a half dozen men having sex with one another in an improbable oral-anal chain. Jimmy cackled and said, “The old fuck was queer as a three-dollar bill. He’s got, like, a hundred of these things.”

She looked at the screen and said, “Jeez. That’s nasty.”

“Look at that guy,” Jimmy said. “He’s got a cock like a fuckin’ horse.”

Jimmy, Becky thought, looked wide-awake; more than this, he looked excited.

And she looked at the screen again and back to Jimmy, and suddenly understood a lot. She thought, Oh, no.