But that wasn’t fast enough the way I felt. A jet plane wouldn’t have been fast enough. A rocket would have seemed like crawling. I was so tense I couldn’t see straight, and despite the relative speed of the bus it was a far cry from a rocket or a jet plane.
I did not like that bus.
We had seats near the back, seats together, and there was just me and Candy and her suitcase. As soon as Candy was settled in her seat next to the window with the suitcase on her lap she was out like a light, sleeping like a babe in arms. She was the type of person who could do that. She was under the same strain I was, or at least she should have been, but she had the ability to put it all out of her mind and make like a junkie on the nod.
Not me.
It was night on the bus. The lights were out and the bulk of the passengers, like Candy, were busy counting sheep and sawing wood. I felt annoyingly lonely, a stranger and afraid in a world I had neatly unmade, and I wanted to crawl out of the bus and lie down in the road and let the bus run over me.
I told myself that it was ridiculous; that I should give myself up and let them throw the switch and send me to hell where I belonged. I told myself that I wasn’t built to run away, that this just wasn’t my scene.
That’s what I told myself.
And for a while I believed it.
But then I started devoting some concentrated thought to the matter—which is always a good way to louse yourself up, and at this point I began to see that running away was old stuff for Jeff Flanders. Old stuff—hell, it was my way of life. I’d been spending my whole life running away from something or other and I ought to take to the current situation like a duck to water.
Running. Not always from John Law—this was in the nature of a brand-new experience. But always from somebody and generally from myself. I was running away from myself when I took up with Candy in the first place instead of straightening up and flying right and sticking with Lucy. I was running away from myself when I moved out of the apartment on 100th Street and into the Kismet. And if the bouts with the bottle hadn’t been running, what the hell were they?
Now the preliminaries were over. This was the big race, the one I’d been spending my whole life shaping up for. Now I was running for the comparative safety of the Mexican border with the New York police baying at my heels and the world’s greatest lay sitting beside me.
Uh-huh.
I chain-smoked the night away. I lit one cigarette from the butt of another and prayed that I’d live long enough to die of lung cancer. I dropped the used-up cigarettes on the floor of the bus and ground them into shredded tobacco-and-paper and kicked the shreds into the center aisle.
It’s hard to say just when the full impact of it all hit home. Shocks of this magnitude don’t hit at first; you think you know what it’s all about and two hours later you start shaking. It’s like the time the car I was driving and the car somebody else was driving had a car-fight. It was the other guy’s fault—he missed a stop sign and I got a glimpse of his car out of the corner of my eye and we both hit our brakes about the same time. There was a disgusting brake-squeal and a moment’s silence and an incredible montage of unpleasant sounds as the two automobiles chewed each other up.
I reached for my door handle and it wouldn’t open—the crash had knocked things together. So I nonchalantly got out the other side, strolled over to the moron who had done such terrible things to my new car, lit a cigarette and offered one to him.
That was that.
And two hours later I was trembling so terribly that I couldn’t stay on my feet.
It was the same thing now, years later. What Candy had told me jarred me right at the start, knocked me off my pins, and I thought it was as much of a shock as I was going to get. But I still hadn’t adjusted to it at the time and I was calm enough to make love to her a few minutes after she clued me in on the happy fact that I was a murderer.
You see, I never completely accepted it. I made the neat mental entry on the immaculate mental file card, the pen-scribble that testified that one Jeff Flanders had brutally murdered one Caroline Christie. But the entry on the little white card was simply a definition, an equation. Jeff Flanders—murderer. That’s the equation, and in itself it was not reassuring.
The mental picture that took time to develop was even less reassuring and it damn near jolted me out of the bus. It did not hit all at once; it grew on me, snuck up on me until suddenly it was there and was awesome in the full force of its presence.
It was Caroline Christie, the attractive dyke with money in the bank and Candy in the bed, and she was lying on the floor of her apartment as dead as a lox. What had killed her? It might have been the beating, or the rape, or any one of a number of things I had done to her. How did she look now? Would there be the odor of death from her body when they found her?
How will the roses smell
When we are all blown to hell?
I looked down at my hands and they were the hands that had murdered Caroline Christie. I wanted to cut them off and fling them out the window.
And then, true to form, I began to think seriously of my own skin.
My own skin. Not the most ideal skin in the world, but one which had been with me for quite some time. I had grown rather attached to it over the years.
I could read the newspaper headlines in my mind, could imagine the tabloidic progress reports on the relentless pursuit and inevitable capture. The Daily News, direct and brutal, would say:
COPS CAPTURE
CHRISTIE KILLER
while the Mirror, in a rare display of ingenuity, would headline it:
CHRISTIE KILLER
CAUGHT BY COPS
We’d all have fun.
I thought about the trial. Maybe Lucy would cry, and maybe that bird Hardesty would be on hand to defend me, and the papers would have a field day with the whole scene. There’d be a conviction, and an appeal, and a denial of the appeal, and another appeal, and denial of that appeal. And then I’d sit in a cell on Death Row at Sing Sing and wait and wait and wait until they came along and took me to a room and strapped me in a chair and threw a switch.
It would burn for a minute or two, I supposed, and then nothing would happen at all. Jeff Flanders would have paid his debt to society and gone to heaven or to hell or, as I prefer to believe, into the gaseous cosmos.
I was sweating and the sweat was cold on my forehead. I wiped it off and sweated some more and lit another cigarette and smoked and sweated and smoked and sweated and looked at Candy while she slept and watched the sky lighten and the dawn come up through the rarely-washed green-tinted window of the big Greyhound bus.
When we pulled into Louisville, Candy’s eyes snapped open and she was instantly awake. We left the bus. I was unsteady on my feet but she made up for it with her absolute composure. She held the suitcase tight in her hot little hand and led me out of the dusty bus terminal and into the thoroughly uninviting daylight.
The dealer wanted twelve hundred for a green Buick sedan that wasn’t worth a grand. He got a grand—Candy did the talking and I stood around saying silent prayers. Only Candy could have beaten the guy down on the price. Price didn’t matter, we had fifteen times the price and needed the car desperately. Two hundred dollars weighed against the possibility of discovery was infinitesmal and I couldn’t have argued for a minute but I had to admit to myself that she was playing it the way it had to be played. If we didn’t haggle he would be much more suspicious than if we did. And she knew it.