Somewhere in the Wisconsin countryside and Pete saying, That’s it. I’m feeling pretty good. We could be anywhere now. The fields all gleaned. Some shocks still standing. It’s a big Buick, and the cold wind is blowing through it since we’ve taken out the windows.
We’re going to take them to the hideout, says Mac, kidding.
Meaning the two citizens we have.
Can you cook? I am asking the lady without smiling.
She’s wearing Pete’s coat. The fellow’s got on Pete’s hat.
Pete’s not even cold.
After a fashion, says the lady.
So we go along watching the phone wires. Down to two and then one. Birds all puffed up on them. Then no wires at all, just the fields and the white sky.
Pete runs them out into a turned field. Mac changes the plates. Pete turns them away, back to the wind. The three of them out in the big field. Pete ties their hands and then he comes back half the way, stops and goes back to get his hat and coat.
After Greencastle, we could kick back. It had been Homecoming weekend at the college, and the stores were making big deposits. Pete feeling grand. I say to him, Why don’t we move in with you two and share a place? He says, Sure, without asking the girls. At the Clarendon, we carried the bags with the guns while the boy took the rest. Margaret set out right away to bake the new money. Crumbling the bills as we made fists, then smoothing them out. All the time we talked about what to do next. Not thinking about it at all. It takes time for new money to get old. But it all fell apart when Terry didn’t do her bit. She sat and made up for hours though we weren’t going anywhere. One day there was no breakfast on the table. What gives?
There’s your girl friend, says Margaret.
Terry starts right up. I can’t cook.
Well, you better start learning, I say.
Pete making a fist all the time and the green squeezing out through the fingers.
If they don’t know me, they don’t know how to say my name. The g is like in girl or gun. When they showed up from the Star and News at the farm and asked Dad what he thought about me and said the name, Dad just said, I dont know him, never heard of me. But he’s a junior, they said.
That’s not my name, Dad said. And he pronounced it for them.
That’s all changed now, they said to him.
The old man just sat there right in front of them.
That’s okay. Left all that behind. Even left that g behind.
Who told me that? Toms of the Star in Tucson while we waited for Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin to double-cross us. He came up to the bars during the sideshow, all those locals going by to look at us for a quarter. Pete steaming at Leach. Mac saying how great the weather was down there. Toms called me by my real name and told me the story. He asks me if that’s how I wanted to be known, by the other name and all. Hell, it wouldn’t do any good. It’s out of our hands, just like everything else.
The police are leaving after doing nothing. They open the door, and there is a woman standing on the other side just about to knock. Shows she’s surprised to see them, but she knows them all by name. She asks them if it is that time of month again. They nod and file out, the plainclothes first and then the uniforms. She stops one who is eating a sandwich as he goes by, takes out a hanky, and polishes his badge. AU I had was a big bolt wrapped up in a neckerchief. I kept hitting him but only knocking off his straw hat. He’d pick it up and put it on again, and I’d knock it off. He was making that godawful sound, and I could hear the Masons come running. He didn’t have no money. I didn’t know a thing then. Just a kid. Same grocer gave me a talking to when I’d swiped some jawbreakers. He knew my dad. I ran, and someone chucked a bottle after me. They found me in the barn.
It was to have been all set. But the judge didn’t care. I heard he died falling asleep across some railroad tracks, a knife in his pocket because I was coming to get him.
Since the operation, it’s been like I had on thimbles. Patty wonders what’s happened to my fingers. She’s got them spread out in front of her eyes, tired of my fortune. She says, Well, hell. How do you pick up something like a dime?
I start thinking about all the things I’ve touched. Chairs and guns and the counter I hopped over in Daleville. The glasses. The sinks. The steering wheels. The money. It’s like those things remember how I felt. But me, I forgot it as soon as I let go.
Touched Terry all over. Must have left a print on her everywhere. Some cop dusting her rear, blowing it off, saying, We got the son of a bitch. And they’re all looking at her, looking for me. All the other women too. Shaking hands with men and having them look into their palms.
You think twice about punching a light switch.
Red rushing in saying that he killed a cop at the garage. Lost the Auburn, and they got his girl. He quieted down, started in telling us all over again what had happened and that the girl could be trusted. We looked at each other’s faces, knowing that we didn’t look like anybody else no more. Mac looked like a banker. Pete like some college kid, he’s going without a hat and wearing that floppy collar. He walked into Racine and put a big Red Cross poster on the window without anybody taking a second look. And I’m looking like a sissy bookkeeper. Putting on weight.
We got the girls to dye our hair. Thought it was funny, us sitting with sheets around our necks. I said red and let my mustache grow. Terry sitting on my lap, drawing the eyebrows in. Didn’t like your face to begin with, she’s saying. Pete telling me later about the two toes he’s got grown together. And Red holding up his hand, saying, What am I going to do with these. I never thought about them before, the fingers he left on the railroad track in the Soo.
They’re going to fry you, boy.
I could hear Pete calling from the next cell. Leach was taking me back to Indiana. I fought them off awhile and they put cuffs on too hard for it. Some vacation. There was the cop from East Chicago who ran away. He tried to stop me, I tell them. Where is Wisconsin’s Lightning Justice now? I could hear Pete screaming from his cell about going to Wisconsin and staying together and Mac calling from someplace else, See you, John!
I’ll never see them again. I can’t remember their faces. They went from Tucson to Ohio when Indiana waived the bust-out from Michigan City. They’ll get it for getting me out of Lima.
The last thing is voices.
So long, John. Sioux Falls, Mason City. South Bend wasn’t enough. I met their Mouth on the fair grounds to pass them the money. The parachutes dropping from the tower. Tell them I’ll get more.
Indiana flew me to Crown Point. The pilot said that over there is Mexico.
Blackie has won the boat on a bet. They sit together on the deck with the lights of the city behind them. He asks her what she wants to name the boat. She talks about having a house and family. It’s old-fashioned, she says but that is what she wants. Then Blackie kisses her, and she stops talking about leaving the city, sailing away.