“Hey, can you give me a hand? Just need a second.”
Then a small tan station wagon drew to a stop and a thin-faced young man with glasses and neat dark hair leaned out and asked, Trouble? in a cheerful voice.
“Look,” Jerry said, “I need three hands for a second and I only got two.”
The young man elevated his eyebrows and, grinning, pushed open the car door. “Like the way you said that.” He was long-legged, long-armed, and walked with shoulders bent forward, as if being tall bothered him. He left the engine of the wagon running.
“This is a problem,” Jerry said.
The tall man said, “You sure got a gas leak.” And then, in an interested voice, “Those bullet holes?”
Jerry took a blackjack out of his hip pocket and hit the tall man hard on the side of the head above the right ear. The blow made a solid, single sound. His glasses flew off. Long legs buckled, folding him over the edge of the trunk. His head and shoulders dropped inside. Jerry shuffled sideways, struck twice more. He placed the blows carefully, leaning into them. He tried to heave the tall man into the trunk, could not turn the body. Legs dangled.
Grunting with the effort, he hauled the tall man out and wrapped both arms around his body. He lugged the limp figure along the side of the Toyota. Sue Ann stared at him, face convulsed.
“Get out of there,” he snarled at her.
She leaped away, scattering comic books on the cement.
He stuffed the body onto the seat, fought the long legs into the compartment. The head flopped over to expose an ear webbed with blood. From the rear, he jerked out a gray blanket, threw it over the body, pulled the head right, hiding the scarlet ear.
She was crowded against him, breath loud. “Is he dead? Is he dead, Jerry?”
“No, no.”
“Oh, Jerry.”
“Get that car loaded.”
“Oh, Jerry.”
He came at her, furious and tall, shoved her violently against the Toyota. She yelped as her head cracked against the glass. “Listen to me. Move.”
They tumbled boxes into the station wagon. They jerked their possessions from the backseat, rushing between the cars, stuffing sacks, arm-loads of coats, shoes, fishing rods blindly into any unfilled space.
A Volkswagen pulled in behind the wagon, blasted its horn. “Get this thing outta the street, buddy.”
“Go on around.”
“Dumb jerks parking in the road.”
The Volkswagen snarled around the wagon and was gone. Sweat iced his body; his fingers were lengths of marble.
“Let’s go,” he said to her.
“Oh, no,” she said, backing away. “No no no.”
He said in a soft distant voice, “Sue Ann, get in that car or I am going to have to hurt you bad.”
Her mouth fell open. She went back from him, taking small uneven steps as if moving ankle-deep through a marsh. She tottered around the car, got in. He darted back to the Toyota and, leaning in the driver’s side, fumbled under the gray blanket until he found the tall man’s wallet. He locked all the doors. Stuffing the wallet into his pocket, he swung into the station wagon, eased it away from the building, down the road, turned left, moving with precise care, went down the clipped access road to I-65. The wagon handled fine. Sue Ann, staring and white, slumped in the corner.
The fingers of his right hand felt greasy. Making a fist, he saw the back of his hand smeared darkly with blood.
From the car radio a slow voice whined the lyrics of “Whiskey Woman.”
Behind the voice pulsed guitar, bass, drums, filling the interior of the automobile with urgent pressure. Over that sound their intense voices went back and forth, birds riding a heavy wind.
“You did. You beat on him.”
“I had to.”
“Oh, you didn’t have to. Take away your hand. It’s bloody.”
He clenched the fist, lifted it, rotated it before her face. “You see blood? You tell me, you see blood?”
“You beat on him and beat and beat. I heard you.”
He said thick-voiced, “You shut up and hear me. I had to get us a car. Us with a shot-up old bomb, the police maybe lookin’.”
“Police?”
In the southwest, mouse-gray clouds ledged in the silver sky.
“You don’t know anything at all, do you? You sit there like a dummy, big grin on your dummy face, don’t know a thing.”
Fear came between them and she strained away from him, her back against the door, feet jamming the floor.
“We need a car, I took us a car. Nobody going to give us a car. Nobody going to give us anything. You need it, you go and get it.”
“You was always so nice.”
“I’m same as I always was.”
“No, you’re not.” She stared at him and it was like looking into a long tunnel with a fire burning in it, far back. “You’re glad you hit him.”
“I didn’t and you wouldn’t be in this car right now, going to Florida, going to have you some fun.”
She began to cry. Country rock poured from the radio. They were building in the fields beyond the highway, orange iron skeletons rising in the sun, with trucks shuttling back and forth and men small among the shining beams.
Eyes on the fields, she said, “You don’t like me any more.”
“I don’t want to hear that. I’m not going to listen to that all the way to Florida.”
“It isn’t right.”
He felt the shaking begin then, the glorious deep trembling that would build and rise, wave on rich wave, half fear, half joy, a terrible exhilaration lifting him out of himself to tower gigantic, invincible, striding, and magnificent.
“It’s what I do.”
Her voice, muffled, wept. “But you hurt them, Jerry.”
“Shoot,” he said, feeling his body stretch and grow. “I busted their heads. Didn’t hurt them. Didn’t feel a thing. Old Davidson, too.”
“Mr. Davidson?”
He said, with cold satisfaction, “I knocked his head loose of his shoulders. Him with his mouth — ‘Gimmie, gimmie, you pay.’ Him with a big fat wallet and a nice blue car.”
“He’s a nice man.”
“He’s nothing now. He’s dead on the floor with his head cracked.”
“Dead?” she asked. “Dead?” Her mouth went quite square and bloodless.
He began to laugh. “You wanting to put a blanket on a dead man.”
“I want to go home. I want to go home, Jerry.”
He laughed.
“You let me out.”
She was across the seat then, snatching at the wheel, jerking it toward her. The car reeled right. He smashed her hand away as the metallic shriek of tires cut above the music. The world outside weaved and bobbed. He drove the back of his hand against her face, wrenched the wheel, accelerated, felt the skidding berme under the tires and the pop of stones flung against the body, felt the sheering lurch back onto the highway. Fought the wheel, tapped the brakes as the station wagon steadied. Struck past her snatching arms.
He slammed her forehead, her ear, drove her back, hands up before her face, smashing the hands back into her face. Awkward blows, slow and deliberate as if he were pounding nails.
She made a thin, high sound, like tearing flesh.
Steady on the road, the wagon lost speed as he pumped the brakes. They swerved to a stop on the shoulder.
“You get out,” he said.
She squealed thinly, without sense, brown eyes rolling.
“Don’t hurt me, Jerry.”
He showed her the point of the knife. It glittered unsteadily in the sunlight, the hot tip jittering in arcs and circles, trembling with a dreadful eagerness. She grew quite still.