The Getaway Special

13

Trent and Donna both worked day jobs. Trent ran a construction crew, building new houses to replace the ones that had been destroyed when Bitter Creek—normally a trickle at the bottom of a crumbling gully—had flooded after a week of intense thunderstorms the previous summer; and Donna sold jewelry in the White Mountain shopping mall on the west side of town. They had both offered to stay home and help Judy and Allen plan their next move, but there was really very little they could do, and besides, calling in sick could cause more suspicion than it was worth. So they left their guests in the house when they went out in the morning, with instructions to make themselves at home. Judy thought she saw a vague what-have-we-gotten-ourselves-into expression on their faces when they left, but if they were thinking that, they never betrayed it in their words or actions.

As soon as their cars had rolled away up the street, though, she turned to Allen and said, “We’ve got to find a place of our own. We can’t impose on them forever.”

Allen said, “Right. Fish and visitors stink after three days. But if we’re lucky, we won’t have to be here much longer.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve got friends all over the world. Somebody’s bound to be able to help us.” He went to the closet by the front door and rummaged through the coats there, eventually pulling out a brown and black leather jacket for himself and a puffy pink nylon coat for Judy. Hers had a hood with a fur ruff around it; to cover his own head he took one of two well-used black cowboy hats off the closet shelf.

“Where are we going?” Judy asked him, eyeing the coat dubiously.

“We need to make some phone calls that can’t be traced back to here.”

They cut the map out of the phone book so they could find their way around town, then bundled up and headed out into the winter cold. Judy looked like a flamingo in Donna’s pink coat, and Allen looked like a beach bum doing a Clint Eastwood imitation, but nobody on the street paid them any special attention. Evidently people in Wyoming were used to funny-looking clothes, or else too polite to mention it.

There was one advantage to cowboy clothes: anyone looking for two downed astronauts would have a heck of a time getting past their first impressions to even bother looking at Judy’s or Allen’s faces.

There wasn’t much snow on the ground in town. By the low, dirty drifts in the lee of houses, it looked like most of it had blown away. It certainly hadn’t melted. The morning air felt like liquid oxygen in the lungs, and ice crunched underfoot where patches of it still clung to the sidewalks.

As they walked along the residential streets, their breath drifting away in white clouds behind them, Judy found herself thinking about the Earth under her feet. Not just the concrete and the dirt, but the whole planet. She could feel its mass pulling her against it, could feel the rock resisting her footfalls, transferring the force of her leg muscles deeper and deeper into its crust until it was lost in the myriad crisscrossing forces that echoed through its mantle and core. When she looked out through the bare branches of people’s yard trees, she saw undulating hills and gullies all the way to the horizon—a horizon that blurred to indistinct haze in the distance—and she felt for the first time the immensity of the planet she called home.

Yet only yesterday she was so far away she couldn’t even see it. The thought boggled her mind. She had been farther away from Earth than anyone else in the history of the human race, and here she was home again less than twelve hours later, walking on a sidewalk with her hands in her pockets like anyone out for a stroll around the block.

She’d never been to Rock Springs before, but it felt like home. Compared to where she had just been, how could anything on Earth not be home? Astronauts always liked to say that you couldn’t see national boundaries from orbit, but when you couldn’t even see the planet, the artificial boundaries that people put up between each other seemed even less important. She felt the irrational urge to run up to a total stranger and give him a big hug just to reaffirm her connection with humanity.

“Are you, uh, feeling a little weird right now?” she asked.

Allen cupped his hands together and blew into them. “Cold,” he replied. “Otherwise okay. How about you?”

“I think I’m in shock.”

“Oh?”

“Everything looks different to me all of a sudden. Not physically different, but sociologically. Like I’m seeing it from a different perspective now.”

Allen smiled. “Yeah, I’m getting a little of that. Maybe not as much as you, ’cause I knew what we were going to do up there, but I know what you mean.”

“I wonder if this is how the Wright brothers felt,” she said. “It’s like having a leg in the past and a leg in the future at the same time.”

“Maybe. But the Wright brothers didn’t really expect— whoa!” Allen’s left foot shot out from under him as he stepped on a patch of ice. He windmilled his arms and caught himself before he fell, but his hat flew off and rolled out into the street just as a dark brown General Electric van approached. The driver swerved, but the hat rolled right under the tires. It made a soft flap flap as they squashed it flat, then the driver hit the brakes and the van screeched to a stop.

He opened his door and looked back at Judy and Allen. He looked to be in his forties or so, and he wore a hat almost identical to the one he had just run over. “Sorry,” he called out. “I tried to miss it, but it was too quick.”

“That’s all right,” Allen said, stepping out into the street to retrieve the hat. He punched the top out into a dome and bent the sides upward into their potato-chip shape again. “There,” he said. “Good as new.”

The driver shook his head. “Nice try. Well, you’re a darn sight more calm about it than I’d be, that’s for—” He suddenly narrowed his eyes and peered at Allen as if he’d just switched to x-ray vision. Judy grabbed Allen’s arm and was just about to make a break for it when the driver said, “Uh … let me give you a little piece of advice. Dent the top in again so you don’t look like a Mountie, and pull the brim down low in front until you can get yourself a pair of sunglasses or something to hide those eyes. Your face is all over the papers this morning.”

“Uh… thanks,” Allen said.

“Any time.” The driver shut his door and the van started to roll on down the street, then it stopped again and the driver stuck his head out the window. “Hey, was that business on the TV yesterday for real?”

“Yep,” Allen said.

The man whistled softly. “I’ll be damned. My sister recorded it.” He put the van in reverse and backed up until he was even with them. “Hey, you two need a ride somewhere?”

Allen looked over at Judy. She glanced into the back of the van. No SWAT team huddled there to grab them. Just an empty baby seat and a bunch of plastic kids’ toys in bright primary colors.

“We’re looking for a phone,” she admitted.

“I can help you with that right here,” the driver said. He reached onto the dashboard for his cell phone and held it up, then he nodded his head sideways and said, “Come on around and get in where it’s warm.”

Allen twirled the hat around in his hands a time or two, then ran his thumb along the top until it once more had the three deep creases it had started out with. “Does everybody in this town help out fugitives, or are we just lucky?” he asked.

The driver shrugged. “It’s a pretty friendly town.”

“I guess.”

Judy and Allen walked around to the passenger side and got in. There were just two big bucket seats in front, so Judy climbed in back and sat behind Allen. From there she could keep an eye on the driver, too.

“Name’s Dale,” he said, twisting around and holding out his hand toward Judy. “Dale Larkin.”

“Judy Gallagher,” Judy said. When they shook, his hand felt amazingly warm against her cold fingers.

“Pleased to meet you. And you’re Allen Meisner. Wheeoo. Wait’ll Lori hears about this! Here, make all the calls you want.”

He handed Allen the phone and drove on down the street while Allen switched it on and started dialing, but Judy had a sudden thought.

“Hey, wait! Disable the caller ID before you dial.”

Allen nodded. “Good idea. What’s the code for that?”

“Star-six-seven,” Dale said.

“Does that disable the emergency locator, too?”

“Yep. So they say. Mine doesn’t work anyway, so you’re okay.”

Allen punched in the code, then tried calling his fellow mad scientists while Dale drove them down a steep hill into the center of town, but nobody was home at the first two numbers he tried. He tried a third, and a second later he broke into a big grin.

“Gordy! Hey, Allen here. I… yeah. No, we’re okay. I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you that, either. Listen, I need some help here. I’m going to have to buy some stuff, and I can’t use my own credit card for obvious reasons. I… yes, we’re going to… no, I really can’t tell you that. Somewhere in Colorado , all right?” He frowned. “Wait a minute. You’ve got federal agents breathing down your neck, don’t you? Don’t bullshit me, Gordy! They’re in the room with you, aren’t they?”

“Hang up!” Judy said.

Allen shook his head. “Listen, tell them… I don’t care about that; tell them it’s too late. The word is out, and by this time tomorrow, we will be, too. Out in space, you dumb shit! Yes, I know what the economic—oh, forget it.” He growled in the back of his throat and punched the phone’s “Off” button.

“Is he all right?” Judy asked.

Allen shrugged. “Sounded like. Sounded like Carl got to him first, though. Why is it,” he asked Dale, “half the people who hear about this are terrified that the world is going to fall down around their ears?”

The streets were labeled alphabetically, just “A,” “B,” “C,” and so on. Dale turned right on A Street and headed up a bridge over the railroad tracks. “Maybe they’ve got too much invested in the status quo,” he said.

Judy looked at him a little more closely, surprised to hear the phrase “invested in the status quo” coming from underneath a cowboy hat. “What do you do?” she asked. “For a living, I mean.”

He grinned. “Rob banks.”

“No, really.”

“I really rob banks.”