(This was the God’s honest truth, as a matter of fact. I had trouble believing it myself, but it was. The company didn’t ever do a thing that was illegal. If a crew boss ran things on the shady side, they didn’t want to know about it. If a crew boss ran things on the up and up, that was fine with DTE. Of course an honest crew boss couldn’t possibly clear fifteen cents a month, but that was the way it went. You couldn’t call the company crooked just because all its employees were crooked, could you?)
“We’ll be out of this in no time,” Flick said. “Youse guys just trust me on this without you all lose your heads and get rattled. All right, we gotta go see the Sheriff, that’s what we got to do. That’s all.”
They finished getting dressed, and they talked about things, and they asked the cops if Cherry was really only fifteen, and the cops said she was, and Lester asked one of the cops how often Cherry generally got statutorily raped, and the cop said as often as she possibly could, and Lester asked why anybody would make a fuss over it then, and the cop said it was because it was the sort of thing the city couldn’t take lying down, and Lester said that if Cherry could take it lying down, he didn’t see why the city couldn’t. The cop laughed and said that was sure a good way of putting it. I think this comes under the heading of Fraternizing With The Enemy.
And I kept waiting for somebody to say, “Hey, what happened to the kid we had to hit over the head?”
Or for one of the guys on our side to say, “Say, what the hell happened to Chip?”
Or for somebody, anybody, to sing out, “Look who’s hiding under the bed!”
But they found other things to say, and the door opened, and they trailed out of it and left it ajar. I don’t know to this day where Cherry was during all of this. I didn’t see her or hear her, and I didn’t hear anybody talk to her, or say anything that gave the impression she was in the room. But I didn’t see how she could have been taken anywhere because all of the cops were still in the room, so who would have taken her away? I guess either they sent her home by herself or a matron came for her while I was unconscious. Or else she was what you would call a plant, and the police had sent her over there to begin with so that they could give us all the shaft. (I don’t really believe that last one at all. But I’m putting it in to give you an idea of how paranoid a person can get under the right set of circumstances. After all, somewhere out there is my old roommate Haskell, and I want to make sure the book has a certain amount of psychological significance so he won’t feel guilty while he reads it and turns the pages with one hand. Hi, Haskell, you hypocritical jerkoff!)
They left the room, as I said before I got off course again. They went out, and I heard them in the hallway, and I got out from under the bed, still waiting for them to wonder what had happened to the kid. I went over to the window and yanked it open. And somebody must have wondered about me, although they were too far away from the room for “me to hear them say so, because I heard footsteps racing back up the hall and a voice — Jimmy Joe, God bless him — shout out my name.
I stepped out of the window. It was the first floor, which was the one good thing that had happened that evening. And it was at the back of the motel, away from the parking lot and nowhere near where the other cops had been heading. That was the second good thing that happened that evening. And, because they come in threes, a third good thing happened that evening, which is that I ran like a cat with its tail on fire and got away without being spotted.
Which was very good.
But it could have been better. I mean, even considering the fact that my commissions were all being held for me by the Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc. office, and that I had been doing my Coke buying and moviegoing out of my own savings for a couple of months, the fact remained that I had over a hundred dollars in my wallet, along with various cards to prove I was me in case I died and they wanted to make sure the body wasn’t Judge Crater or Ambrose Bierce. There was also a picture of Aileen that I kind of liked, and that I would miss.
It would have been good if I had been able to bring my wallet. And it would have been even better if I had had something to put my wallet in, because although the night was unseasonably hot, it’s never a good idea to rum amok in Indiana’s fifth largest city with no clothing whatsoever on your body.
I’ve read books where the hero suddenly gets struck naked one way or another. Or he breaks out of jail and has to get something to replace his prison uniform. Or he soaks his clothes swimming to safety and can’t wait for them to dry. Or there are these telltale bloodstains telling tales all over the place.
When this happens in books, what the guy usually does is swipe clothing from an untended clothesline. The authors don’t generally dwell on it too intently. They just throw something like Dressing himself with clothes purloined from an un tended clothesline, Stud Boring relentlessly took up the trail of the three pencil sharpeners. Then they plunge right into the action without giving you time to think about it.
In the movies, they’re even cooler about it. I saw this done just the night before last, as a matter of fact. This guy broke out of prison, out of a chain gang actually, and one moment you saw him running down the road with his prison clothes all shredded from the brambles and wet from the swamp he went through to throw the dogs off his trail, and then there was another shot of him getting off a bus, wearing a shirt and tie and carrying a leather suitcase. They didn’t even cheat by giving you the abandoned clothesline bit. They just came right out and admitted that they didn’t know how the hell Stud Boring got those clothes, and that they weren’t going to try to fake their way out of it. I suppose you have to admire them for it.
The thing of it is that if you can find a clothesline in the middle of the night, tended or untended, you are better suited to this sort of thing than I was. I don’t even think I’d care to look for one in the daytime, because the checking I did showed that (a) people don’t leave their clothes hanging out overnight and (b) most of them don’t even have clotheslines nowadays. I went zipping through backyards looking for clothes and the whole thing was a large zero. No lines and certainly no clothes. I wouldn’t have thought of looking in the first place except that I remembered all those dumb books. You’ve got to be very suspicious of everything you read.
I think I know what happened. Years ago nobody had clothes dryers, and everybody who washed clothes had to hang them out to dry, and with that many people washing clothes, there would always be a certain number who would forget to take their clothes in for the night, or who wouldn’t get around to it because they were baking bread or beating rugs by hand or putting up preserves or watering the horses or any of those good old-time things that people don’t do anymore. So in those days it was perfectly open and aboveboard to have Stud Boring steal clothes from a wash line. (Open and aboveboard for the writer, I mean. It was still illegal for Stud Boring.)
But nowadays when a writer is trying to get old Stud out of a tight place, the first thing he thinks of is what he read somewhere else. (That’s why so many books are the same. The writers all get ideas from each other.) And because they were never running around naked in the middle of the night, they don’t know that they’d be better off looking for an abandoned clothes dryer, for Pete’s sake, in this modern day and age.