“Now,” John said, “I talk to Tom about more money.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Dortmunder kept squinting. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the light in here, which was ordinary enough, it was knowing about all that space out there, sensing it, just the other side of these blank walls. In here, in an airport terminal building in the unnecessarily large, flat, tan state of Oklahoma, Dortmunder stood against one of the walls with two small suitcases at his feet, hurrying travelers eddying around him as Tom, at one of the chest-high counters across the way, rented a car (again!) from a robot shaped like a short smiling girl. Dortmunder had shown his driver’s license to this automaton, since he would be driving the car when rented, but then he had retreated to this distant vantage while Tom handled the repellent commercial aspects of the transaction.
Finally finished, Tom stepped across the stream of travelers as though they weren’t there, causing several people to bump into one another but none to bump into him, and picked up his bag from beside Dortmunder’s left foot. “Okay,” he said. “We go out and wait for the bus.”
“No cars?” Dortmunder asked.
Tom lowered his eyebrows at him. “The bus to the car,” he said. “Don’t start with me, Al.”
“I don’t know about these things,” Dortmunder reminded him, picking up his own bag, and they went out of the terminal building, watched by every cop, Federal agent, and private security guard in the place, all of whom were certain in their hearts those two birds were up to something. When a lawman looked at Dortmunder and Tom Jimson, particularly together, he said to himself, “Probable Cause is their middle name.”
Outside, it was still just airport, normal airport, with horizontal concrete between the slabs of vertical concrete, but Dortmunder knew Oklahoma was just out there, just a step away, just around a concrete corner. “Sunny,” he complained.
Every car rental company had its own buses, and they were all weird-looking, with oddball color patterns and hatlike outgrowths and strangely placed fins, as though they were designed by the same people who draw spaceships in comic books. Tom rejected several of these, for no reason Dortmunder could see, and then accepted one, and they got aboard with a lot of white men in suits carrying garment bags. Among these solid citizens, Dortmunder and Tom looked like exactly what they were: ex-cons, up to no good. The driver was the only person who noticed them, and he kept an eye on them in his rearview mirror all the way out of the airport and down the wide sunstruck road to the rental company’s parking lot.
The driver had collected a stuffed envelope from each of his passengers, including Tom, and now he dropped off each renter right at the car he’d been assigned in the great lottery, giving Tom and Dortmunder a small white vehicle like a washing machine with four tiny doors. “I like Andy’s cars better,” Dortmunder said as they jammed their small bags into the no-leg-room backseat.
“I like a car the state cops aren’t looking for,” Tom told him.
They got into the front, Dortmunder at the wheel, and as he steered the little machine along, following one exit sign after another, Tom checked out the radio, to discover that his choices included thirty-seven stations playing rock music, four religious broadcasters, and one all-news station operating under the theory that “all news” meant “sports.” Tom finally settled on one of the religious programs and sat back, content.
“The bad man is among us, my friends, he is in our hearts and our minds, and our Lord and Creator sees him, my friends, sees us shelter him…”
“Hee-hee,” said Tom.
Soon enough they had left the airport and come out to nothing. Nothing. As far as the eye could see. “You wouldn’t believe how empty this all was before the white man came,” Tom said, looking around at the nothing.
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.
For somebody who had lived his entire life in cities or the tumbled landscapes of hills and mountains, this nothing was extremely scary. If somebody a thousand miles over that way accidentally shot a gun, he could blow your head off. Dortmunder drove the little white washing machine down the broad white road in the scanty-to-moderate traffic, and tried to pretend something had gone wrong with his peripheral vision so that there really was something to left and right; a building, a hill, a few trees, something. He was glad, at least, to be sitting down; if he stood up he’d run a real risk of losing his balance.
“Head toward Norman,” Tom said as they approached a cloverleaf interchange with another highway. The overpasses stood out like croquet hoops on a lawn.
“I’ll be able to see it, won’t I?” Dortmunder asked.
“What, Norman? No, we’ll turn off before we get there and head west toward Chickasaw.”
“No, I meant as soon as I turn toward it,” Dortmunder explained.
Tom frowned, working that one out, while on the radio the preacher described in loving detail various activities taking place even now in Hell. “You mean,” Tom said seriously, “that it’s kinda flat around here.”
“Something like that.”
“I grew up in this territory,” Tom said. “When the dust came.”
“The Okies, you mean,” Dortmunder suggested.
“I guess I was an Okie,” Tom said. “Not like in that movie, though.”
“No.”
“Sit around the campfire, sing a song. Go into a gas station with your big old dead truck fulla mattresses, women, dying old men, whadda you do?”
“Run,” said Dortmunder.
“In the movie,” Tom said, “they bought gas. Paid for it.”
“You rent cars,” Dortmunder pointed out.
“Not the same thing,” Tom said. “I do what I gotta do to make life smooth. I rent cars because I can.”
“Wha’d you do, back in the Okie days, in that gas station?”
“Shot parts off the kid until he remembered the combination to the safe,” Tom said. “There’s your turn up there.”
THIRTY-FIVE
The way it turned out, the stash in the church had been the only one of Tom’s unofficial banks situated in the northeast. Tom did grudgingly admit there were other stashes still out of the lawyers’ hands, but they were all far away, in different parts of the country. He didn’t feel like traveling, didn’t like the idea of giving up all his last stashes, didn’t want to be helpful at all, so finally Dortmunder had suggested the two of them go together to wherever the hell it was, bringing along overnight bags for if they had to stay a little while, but planning to do it all as quickly as possible. Go there, make the withdrawal, come back.
“But an easy one, okay, Tom?” Dortmunder had said. “No more weddings, okay? Not crowds of people all around.”
“Well,” Tom had said, “how about a place with nobody around? How do you feel about a ghost town?”
So that’s where they were headed, and along the way Tom explained what had happened to Cronley, Oklahoma, to turn it from a bustling cow town and transportation hub at the turn of the century into the dry, crumbling, empty shell it was today. “It was the railroad done it, mostly,” Tom said.
“Railroads,” Dortmunder echoed, steering along an empty two-lane road in the middle of Oklahoma but thinking about the steel tracks running down into the water back up in the green mountains of upstate New York. “All of a sudden there’s railroads all over this.”
“It was the other way around in Cronley,” Tom told him. “All of a sudden, no railroads at all.”