The Getaway

11

Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.

It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity.

You cannot do what you must unaided. So throughout your struggling, your creeping and running, your thieving and killing, you are on the hunt for help. And if you live, you find it, sooner or later. Rudy Torrento found his sooner, in the Clintons. Doc found his later in a family of migratory farm workers; sharecroppers turned crop tramps.

There were nine of them, husband and wife and seven stair-step children-the youngest a toddling tot, the eldest a rawboned boy who was the scantling shadow of his father. They were camped alongside the muddy trickle of a creek. Two of the tires on their ancient truck were flat, and its battery stood on the ground. Their clothes were ragged but clean. When Doc emerged from the underbrush and approached them, trailed nervously by Carol, they drew together in a kind of phalanx; and the same look of wary phlegmatism was on every one of their suntanned faces.

Carol had no reason to be nervous. Doc knew people; and having been born among them, he knew this kind very well. Their existence was centered around existing. They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay.

Doc knew them well. He knew how to talk to them.

Beyond a casual nod, he ignored the man's wife and brood. They had no authority, and to imply any to them would have been discourteous. Drawing the man aside, he spoke to him circuitously; casually hunkering down on his heels, talking with the man's own languid caution. Sometimes whole minutes passed in silence. And speaking, they seemed to discuss almost everything but the subject at hand.

Yet they understood each other, and they came to an agreement quite quickly. Doc gave the man some bills, not many and none of them large. For integrity cannot be bought, and they were simply men in need assisting one another. Then the man gave drawled instructions to his family.

"These here folks is friends," he said. "They'll be movin' on with us. We don't let on about it to no one, not ary peep or whistle."

He sent the eldest boy and the second eldest into town for «new» secondhand tires, a battery and food. In the morning they headed westward, and lying prone in the rear of the truck, Doc and Carol heard the woman's cracked voice raised in a spiritual and they smelled the smoke from the man's nickel see-gar.

The seven children were squeezed into the truck bed with them, the bigger ones sitting with slumped shoulders to accommodate themselves to its low canvas cover. They were all around them, shielding them from view, hiding them as effectively as though they had been at the bottom of a well. But close as they were physically, they were still worlds apart.

Carol smiled at one of the girls, and received a flat stare in return. She started to pat the tot's head, and barely jerked her hand back in time to avoid being bitten. The eldest boy protectively took charge of the child. "Wouldn't do that no more, ma'am," he advised Carol with chill politeness. "He don't cotton none to strangers."

The truck's best speed was barely thirty miles an hour. Despite their early starts and late stops, they seldom made two hundred miles a day. Their food was monotonously unvaried, practically the same from one meal to the next. Salt pork and gravy, biscuits or mush, and chicory coffee for breakfast. For lunch, mush or biscuits and salt pork eaten cold while they rode. And for dinner, there was more biscuits, salt pork and gravy, with perhaps some sweetnin' (sorghum) and a poke salad-greens boiled with pork into a greasy, tasteless mess.

Doc ate heartily of everything. Nauseated by the stuff, Carol ate no more than she had to to stay alive. She acquired a painful and embarrassing stomach complaint. Her small body ached constantly from the jouncing and bouncing of the truck. She became very bitter at Doc; the more so because she knew her predicament was her own fault, and because she dared not complain.

These people didn't like her. They tolerated her only because she was Doc's woman (his woman, for Pete's sake!). And without Doc, she would be lost.

Whether the family knew who they were-the most wanted criminals in the country-is a moot point. But reading no newspapers, having no radio, living in their own closemouthed world of existing to exist, it is unlikely that they did. And probably they would have turned their back on the opportunity to inform themselves.

These folks was feedin' them. These folks' business was their own business.

Ask no questions an' you'll hear no lies.

Curiosity killed the cat.

Leave well enough be, an' you'll be well enough.

The old truck limped westward, carrying Doc and Carol far beyond the danger zone of roadblocks and police checks, and into the whilom safety of California. And there, after another day or so of travel, they parted company with the family.

Doc didn't want them to know his and Carol's destination, to get any closer to it than they already were. That would be asking for trouble, and asked-for trouble was usually gotten. Moreover, the family did not wish to go any farther south-into an area that was traditionally hostile to vagrants or anyone who might possibly become vagrant. And they hoped to have other fish to fry, or rather, apples to pick in the Pacific Northwest.

So there were monosyllabic farewells, a final exchange of money; then the family moved on, and Carol and Doc remained behind… Quite inappropriately in the City of Angels.

Doc was dressed in blue overalls and a jumper, and a striped railroad worker's cap. He carried himself with a pronounced stoop; a pair of old-fashioned steelrimmed glasses were perched on the end of his nose, and he peered over them nearsightedly as he paid for his ticket from a snap-top money pouch. A metal lunch bucket was tucked under one arm. Beneath his clothes-and Carol's-was an outsize money belt.

Carol came into the railroad station several minutes after him. She also was stooped, cronelike of figure. She wore a long, shapeless black dress, and under the shadow of her head shawl her face was wizened and sunblack.

They boarded the train separately, Carol taking a rear seat, Doc entering the men's lounge. Then, when their tickets had been collected and the train was well out of the yards, he came out and sat down at her side.

He opened the lunch bucket and took out a pint bottle of whiskey. He drank from it thirstily, wiped the neck with his sleeve, and extended it toward Carol.

She shook her head, her nose wrinkling distastefully. "Do you have to keep hitting that stuff?" she frowned.

"Keep hitting it?" He returned her frown. "That's the first drink I've had in days."

"Well, it's one too many at a time like this! If you ask me, I…"

"But I didn't." He took another long drink, then returned the bottle to the lunch bucket. "Look," he said reasonably. "What do you want to do anyway? Break up? Go it on your own? I'd like to know."

"As if you didn't already know! What the hell difference does it make what I want to do?"

"Well," said Doc. "Well, then."

Actually he did not want to be separated from her. Even if it had been practical, he would not have wanted it. And despite anything she said or did, he knew that she felt the same way. They were still in love-as much as they had ever been. Strangely, nothing had changed that.

His eyes drifted shut. He wondered where the family of sharecroppers was by now, and subconsciously he wished that he was still with them. It hadn't been at all bad, that long creeping journey across half of the United States. Nothing to do but ride and ride, with every day exactly like the one before. No worries, no decisions to make. Above all the freedom, in fact the necessity, not to talk.

He had never before realized the blessedness of silence-the freedom to be silent, rather, if one chose. He had never realized, somehow, that such blessedness might be his privilege. He was Doc McCoy, and Doc Mc Coy was born to the obligation of being one hell of a guy. Persuasive, impelling of personality; insidiously likable and good-humored and imperturbable. One of the nicest guys you'd ever meet, that was Doc McCoy. They broke the pattern when they made him. And, of course, Doc did like people and he liked to be liked. And he'd been well compensated for his efforts in that direction. Still-well, there you were. It had become an effort, something else that he hadn't realized.

Maybe he was just very tired, he thought wearily. And very worried. Because exactly what they were going to do after they got to Golie's he didn't know.

"Doc," Carol said. "What's the next step, after we get to Golie's?"

Doc grimaced. She can read my mind, he thought. "I'm thinking about it," he said. "I haven't decided yet."

"You don't know, do you? You haven't any plan."

"Now, that's putting it a little strong. I'll have to check around, and-" her scornful smile stopped him. "All right," he said, "I don't know."

She waited, staring at him demandingly. He fumbled the lunch bucket open and took another drink. He gestured with it diffidently, then quickly recapped it and put it away.

"I-it would have been simple enough ordinarily," he explained. "I mean, if we could have made it before they had the alarm out for us. Coming back from Mexico, you're apt to get a pretty thorough going over. But going over, they hardly take a second look at you. You can just walk across the border, or drive across and…"

"All right! But that's what we could have done!"

"Well-maybe we still can. There doesn't seem to be much noise out here about us. Maybe…"

He broke off, unable to continue so palpable a lie. Perhaps there wasn't any general search for them on the West Coast, but the border patrol would certainly have been alerted.

"We'll see," he mumbled. "I'll have to look around. Maybe I can get a line on Ma Santis."

"Ma Santis!" Carol let out a disgusted snort. "Just like that you're going to get a line on Ma Santis, huh? You already told me you thought she was dead, and even if she wasn't I'd like to know how you're going to get a line on her or anyone else. You can't make any inquiries. You can't go wandering around and…"

"That's right. I can't," Doc said curtly; and he got up and entered the rest room.

Seated on the long leather couch, he lighted a cigarette, looked wearily out into the moonlit night. He had always thought this was the most beautiful stretch of country in the world, this area of orange and avocado groves, of rolling black-green hills, of tile-roofed houses-all alike yet all different-stretching endlessly along the endless expanse of curving, white-sand beach. He had thought about retiring here some day and, though the idea was preposterous, he still thought about it. He could see himself and Carol on the patio of one of those incredibly gay houses. Barbecuing a steak perhaps, or sipping tall drinks while they stared out to sea. There would be a cool breeze blowing in, temperately cool and smelling of salt. And…

"Doc-" Carol murmured suddenly from the doorway.

He said, "Coming," and rejoined her in the seat. And she patted his hand and gave him a lingering smile.

"You know something, Doc?" she whispered. "This will be our first night together. Our first night together and alone."

"So it will!" Doc made his voice hearty. "It doesn't seem possible, does it?"

"And I'm not going to let anything spoil it either. Nothing! We'll just pretend like we don't have a worry in the world tonight. Just push everything out of our minds and have ourselves a nice long hot bath, and something to eat and-and…"

She squeezed his hand. Almost fiercely.

"Sandy-Egg-O!" bawled the conductor. "Next stop is San Diego!"