He gestured impatiently. “Oh, I’ve got money. I’ll pay you back. But I can’t get into the bank until nine. And I’m flat broke and I’ve got to get out of here fast. I need dough for gasoline. You’ve ten or twenty, haven’t you?”
I went into the bedroom and fished in a suit and found my billfold. I came back and handed him a twenty and a five, all I had in the house. He shoved it into his pocket nervously. I could see that fear still crawling in his eyes but his nervous pacing subsided a little when he had the money in his pocket. He muttered a short thanks and turned as if in a hurry to get started. Then he hesitated again and turned back.
“How bad is it?” I asked. I sat down at the table again and lit a cigarette.
“Sam Harley’s after me.”
The match burned my fingers. “He finally caught you?”
“Caught me? I hope to hell he caught me. It was awful.” He was shaking and he came over and sat down across from me under the light of the kerosene lamp and drummed on the table with his fingers. I thought of the old saying that animals could smell fear, and wondered how he would smell to one of them right now.
He just had to talk. I didn’t want to ask him about it because I didn’t want him to waste any time. With Sam Harley after him he wasn’t in any position to be dawdling around with small talk, because he was in a bad spot and it was getting worse with every minute. It was something I had been trying to tell him for a long time but he had to find it out for himself and now he was doing it the hard way.
But he had to get it out of his system. I knew it had been bad, from the way he had to talk. “Now, for God’s sake, don’t preach to me, Bob. I’ll admit I’ve been getting to that Angelina and you warned me about it, but dammit, don’t preach to me.” I hadn’t said a word.
“He almost caught me once before. Or somebody did. But I got away with it. Only I didn’t have sense enough to stay away. I can’t. Christ, if I only could. I tell you, that girl’s a witch.”
“Or anyway, something that sounds almost like it,” I said.
“He got wise, all right. Because he was laying for me this time. But I had the car parked farther up from the house, and we weren’t in it. I took a blanket out there with me and we had it spread out in a pine thicket fifteen or twenty yards from the car. Because she enjoys it. Jesus, how she enjoys it! She’ll almost beat you to death in the seat of a car. So I brought this blanket. She’d been getting word to me the nights he was going foxhunting and she was sneaking out. She has a room of her own and her mother is a sound sleeper. Only this time I guess he wasn’t going hunting, or else he sneaked back and found she was gone. Anyway, he was looking for us, and I guess he found the car. But he never would have found us if that damned girl didn’t make so much noise. You’d think she was being killed.”
“Look,” I said, “I’ve been living out here alone for a long time, and I mean alone, so would you mind leaving out some of the stuff about how much she likes it and how much noise she makes?”
He didn’t even hear me. He was trying to light a cigarette but his hands were shaking so much he couldn’t strike the paper matches.
“Hold it over the lamp chimney,” I said. I had to light it for him. He went on, talking jerkily. “The first thing I knew about it was just after we’d got quiet and all of a sudden I heard a footstep in the dark behind us and a gun cocking and he said, ‘Get up from there, Crane. I don’t want to kill her too.’ Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus.
“I rolled and got up running and he shot twice but it was awful dark in there in the pines and he missed both times. I heard one of ‘em hit a tree and glance off and whine and I ran that much harder. I hit a tree and took a lot of skin off my hip and I fell down once, but I made it to the car, I’ll never know how. I was lucky I’d left the keys in it instead of in my pants because I was naked except for a shirt. My clothes were back there on the blanket. If he found the car first I’ll never know why he didn’t take the keys himself. If he had, he’d have got me. I guess he didn’t think of it. Anyway, I got it in gear and stepped on the starter and the gas all at the same time, without even shutting the door. I must have thrown sand for a hundred yards, getting started. He shot once more and it went through the back of the top and blew a hole in the windshield. I wouldn’t drive that road again at night at that speed for a thousand dollars.
“I drove home with just the shirt on and sneaked in a window and got these clothes on and packed a bag and then remembered all my money was there in my other pants. I found Mary’s purse without waking her up, but she only had two dollars in it. I drove over to Billy Gordon’s house and a couple of other places but I couldn’t find anybody home and I couldn’t get away without some money. So I came out here. And just as I was coming through the square, headed this way, I saw Sam’s car coming into town. He didn’t see me.”
“He’ll be here. You better get going.”
I couldn’t figure him out. He was scared to death and he knew Harley was going to kill him if he caught up with him and he knew that the only thing that would save him was distance, and still he couldn’t get started. He seemed to want to stay and talk about it.
“I thought I’d go to Dallas this morning and then as soon as I can get some money through from the bank I’ll go on to California or somewhere for a while.”
“For a while?” I asked. “For good, you mean. If you come back here five years from now, Sam will kill you.”
“You’re kidding. He’ll forget it in a while.”
I shook my head. “I know. I was kidding before, too, wasn’t I? When I said you were going to get in a hell of a mess if you didn’t leave that alone.”
“You think he’ll remember it that long?”
“Listen,” I said, “you’re washed up here. You can’t ever come back, as long as Harley’s alive. And I guess you’re finished with Mary, too. How are you going to explain it to her?”
“I don’t know, Maybe I can think of something.”
“Well, you’d better get going,” I said. “Sam will be here as soon as he tries in town.”
Then we both heard it. It was a car coming down the road, and from the way it sounded it was going as fast as they’ll run.
It turned into the driveway. The lights flashed down the hallway, dim at first, and then very bright as it went into low in the sand. I could see Lee’s face in the flash of it and it wasn’t a pretty sight. A man that sick with fear isn’t something you want to look at.
“Duck out the back way,” I said, grabbing him by the arm. “He’ll come in here and I’ll try to stall him long enough for you to get back around to the car. You got the keys?”
He nodded and patted his trousers pocket. He couldn’t talk. Going on out the back door, he disappeared into the darkness and I sat there at the table facing the hall, thinking for a second of what a putrid joke it was to be wearing a white linen suit when you’re playing hide-and-seek in the dark with a man after you with a gun.
I heard the door of the Buick slam and knew Sam was in there after those keys. He’d missed the boat once tonight by forgetting about them. Thank God, Lee had them with him. And then I heard something else. It was unmistakable. It was the sound you hear in the filling station when the man raises the hood of your car to check the oil. The Buick wasn’t going anywhere for a while now when Sam finished with the ignition wiring. I heard the front screen door open and then his slow steps in the hall. He stopped in the doorway to the dining room and looked at me carefully. Then he thought better of it and came all the way in and stepped to one side and put his back up against the wall.
“Howdy, Bob,” he said quietly.
“Hello, Sam,” I said.
He had on overalls tucked into those big laced boots and no shirt and was wearing a faded blue denim jumper that was tight across his big shoulders and wet with sweat under the armpits and I could see the tangled mat of black hair on his chest above the overall bib, where the jumper was open. In the right-hand pocket of the jumper was the big bulge of a gun, and I knew it was a .38 or .45 from the size of it. There was shiny sweat on his face, and his eyes were like wet black marble in the lamplight. There was a two or three days’ growth of black stubble on his face, and now as he passed his hand across his mouth to wipe off the sweat I could hear the rasp of it against the calloused hardness of his palm in the silence.