3 Nowhere to Go and All Day to Get There (2 page)

"Then that's what you're gonna have to do," Big Joe said.

"Joe,
no!
" I protested. "Just because
we're
prepared to die, that doesn't mean all these other people are. This man starts shooting in here, he may never stop. We have to do what he says."

I moved away from him before he could stop me again and went over to where Ryback was standing. I didn't want to, but I did.

"You're a smart lady," Ryback said. He looked over at his lady friend, Cee, and said, "Forget the food, honey. We gotta go now—"

The wide-eyed look of surprise that suddenly came over her face caused him to turn, just in time to see two blue-and-white police cars pull into the gas station's driveway, dome lights flashing like crazy. A pair of uniformed policemen poured out of each vehicle, three of the four men brandishing shotguns, and immediately began to confer with the state trooper, who had rushed over to brief them on the situation.

We all knew this was only the first wave of an onslaught yet to come.

"Lewis, we got to give up," Cee said, her eyes filling with tears. "There's too many of 'em out there now. They gonna kill you for sure, we don't give up."

"No. No! It's gonna be okay. You'll see." He pulled her to him and said, "Now, come on. We're gettin' out of here."

"But, baby—"

"You hush now, woman, and come on."

Ryback put his gun to my head and said, "You go first, grandma. So they can see I mean business."

He tried to guide me toward the door but I stayed where I was, turning around to take a good hard look at his face. Maybe it was a little late to be getting cold feet, but I had them all the same. I didn't want to go out there with this man until I was dead certain I had no other alternative, that he really would shoot me if I didn't.

It was a hard call to make.

My intuition told me Ryback was more harmless than he was letting on, but intuition is not an exact science. It's fine for choosing boyfriends for your daughters and spotting surprise birthday parties coming a mile away, but it's nothing any sane woman would wager her life on. Sensing Ryback was putting on an act, and
knowing
he was, were two completely different things.

"I said let's go, lady," Ryback said, nudging me in the back with his free hand. "Don't make me tell you again."

"I don't believe you'd really shoot me," I said, holding my ground. I could actually hear my husband mumble "Jeez Loweez" under his breath, his favorite expression of disbelief whenever I do something he thinks is reckless or irresponsible. Or just plain stupid. He says it a lot when I do something stupid.

"You don't, huh?" Ryback asked, pressing the business end of his pistol right up against my forehead, then pulling the weapon's hammer back with his thumb. The
click
it made sounded as loud in my ears as a freezer door slamming.

"Dottie," Big Joe said, "for God's sake—"

"No. I don't," I said to Ryback.

When I'd agreed to be his hostage earlier, I'd liked the odds of him letting me go, safe and sound, once he had put enough distance between himself and the Texas state trooper to make himself feel comfortable. But now the situation had changed. Now there were five law enforcement officers out there bracing to bar his way, not one, and the chances of his escaping the gas station without some kind of gunplay breaking out had been greatly diminished. Again, if I was going to subject myself to that kind of risk, he was going to have to convince me right here and now that he was ready and willing to kill me if I refused to play along with him.

And so far, he was doing a pretty good job.

"Listen to me, you old fool," Ryback said, mustering as much patience as he could manage under the circumstances. "We been on the road a long time, my family an' me. I'm hungry, an' I'm tired, an' I don't much give a damn if I live to see tomorrow or not. So I'm tellin' you straight, so help me Jesus: You don't turn around and go out that door with us right now, I'm gonna shoot everybody in this goddamn room. Includin' this baby girl right here." Without taking his eyes off mine, he brought his pistol around to point it at the infant in his woman's arms, the gun's hammer still cocked and ready to fire.

To this day, it remains one of the most chilling things I've ever seen a man do.

"So what's it gonna be?" Ryback asked me, returning the muzzle of his pistol to its earlier resting place against my forehead. "You gonna go with us, or not?"

"No," I said flatly.

Then I went to the door on my own, opened it wide, and waved the police inside, assuring them Ryback was ready to give himself up peacefully.

When I turned around again, Joe was standing there with Ryback's gun in his hand, looking at me like I'd just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived to tell about it. Behind him, Ryback was in a heap on the floor, where Joe had apparently left him after disarming him. Cee was standing over him, asking him over and over again if he was all right, but he looked to be too busy shaking the cobwebs out of his head to answer her.

"I know you've got a reason for what you just did," Big Joe said as the police began to pour into the mini-mart, "but whatever it is, I don't want to hear it. All I want at this moment is a divorce. You understand? I want a divorce!"

He was only joking, of course, but it took him close to an hour to admit it.

*     *     *     *

The Amarillo police officer who questioned me later was a redheaded, clean-shaven young pup named Bodine, and the first thing he said to me when we sat down to talk was, "You're a very lucky woman, Mrs. Loudemilk."

He told Joe and me that Lewis Daniel Ryback was a very dangerous man, an ex-con out of Arizona with a number of violent offenses to his credit, and that it was nothing short of a small miracle that our chance meeting with him had ended as peacefully as it had. Ryback had never actually shot anybody before, Bodine admitted, but he certainly had demonstrated the willingness to do so on more than a few occasions. Why he hadn't put a few rounds in me when I'd turned my back on him to summon the police, Bodine said he'd never understand. So he asked me to try and explain it to him, if I could.

And I could.

"His gun wasn't loaded," I said simply.

"How did you know that, ma'am?" Bodine asked.

"She doesn't," Big Joe said.

"Yes, I do," I said.

"You
think
you do."

"No, I
know
I do. You think I would have done what I did if I hadn't been absolutely
certain
that gun wasn't loaded?"

"And what made you 'certain,' ma'am?" Bodine cut in, trying to seize control of an interrogation that my husband seemed intent upon running himself. "Was it something Mr. Ryback said, or did?"

"It was when he pointed the gun at that baby."

"Yes?"

"He put the barrel of that gun right up against that child's head, with the hammer pulled back and everything."

"I see. You thought he had to be bluffing, pointing a gun at his own child like that."

"No. I—"

Bodine looked over at Joe and smiled. It was the smile men always put on their faces when they think a woman's done something so wrongheaded it's cute. "I got you. You figured if he was bluffing about that, he had to be bluffing about everything else."

"No. That's
not
what I figured," I said.

"It's not?"

"No. I never said I thought he was bluffing. I said I knew his gun wasn't
loaded
. There's a difference. For all I know, that man is perfectly capable of shooting his own child, he has a gun with some bullets in it. But he didn't.
That's
what I knew. Not that he was bluffing, but that his
weapon wasn't loaded
."

"And how did you know that, ma'am? You still haven't said
how
you knew."

"Because I'm a mother, that's how. A mother always knows these things."

"Excuse me?"

"That man put the nose of that gun up against that baby's head and the child's mother never
flinched
. I was looking right at her, and she
didn't bat an eye!
Right then I knew, no way that gun had a single bullet in it. No way. There's not a mother in this world who'd just stand still like that while a man pointed a gun at her child unless she knew for certain it wasn't loaded. Believe me."

"That was it? That's what made you take the chance you took? His wife's reaction to him pointing a gun at their baby?"

"Yes. She didn't
have
a reaction to it. Because that gun was empty and she knew it."

I smiled and waited for Bodine to congratulate me. Score another one for old folks with smarts.

When he started to laugh, I was surprised. And when he tried to stop laughing and couldn't, I began to worry.

"What?" Big Joe asked him, after training his patented What-Have-You-Done-Now glare on me for several interminable seconds.

Bodine wiped his eyes, tried to speak, and failed. Joe and I let him convulse without interruption for a little while longer, then he tried to speak again.

This time he made it.

"Like I said before, Mrs. Loudermilk, you're a very lucky woman," he said, looking at me through a veil of tears, his head cocked playfully to one side.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that that 'mother's intuition' of yours is some powerful stuff, all right, but I'd make tonight the last time I bet the farm on it, I was you."

He started laughing again.

"You trying to tell us Ryback's gun
was
loaded?" Big Joe asked.

The Amarillo lawman nodded, once more struggling to compose himself.

"Jeez Loweez," Big Joe said. The shock made him sag like a slowly deflating party balloon.

Black people like myself can't turn white, per se, but we can change to a broad range of other sickly colors, something scares us enough. I think right about now I was something akin to chartreuse; it
felt
like chartreuse, anyway.

"But—"

"Oh, you were right about his wife, Mrs. Loudermilk," Bodine said, wiping tears from his eyes again. "She
did
think that gun was empty. Both she and Ryback agreed he hadn't had bullets in it for months. Hell, they were close to starving, who had money for bullets? But a couple days ago—"

"He bought some," Big Joe said.

"Yessir. Actually, he made a trade for some, is what he said. Gave somebody the spare tire out of his van for a box of shells down in Littlefield."

"Without telling his wife," I said.

"Yes, ma'am. Seems she's been on 'im to clean up his act lately, and he didn't want to upset her, so"—he shrugged—"he let her go on thinkin' the gun wasn't loaded. I'm sure she would have had somethin' to say to him otherwise, just like you said, when he pointed that thing at her baby. But she didn't know. She thought the gun was
empty
, same as you."

"Then why—"

"Why didn't Ryback shoot you? Because he
was
bluffing, I imagine. Like I said, his missus had been on 'im a while to turn over a new leaf. Maybe he's done just that, in his way." He grinned at me and closed his little notebook, marking an official end to my questioning. "'Course, there's no way any of
us
could've known that at the time. Some things, Mrs. Loudermilk, even a
mother
can't know. You take my word on that, okay?"

When he stood up and walked away, he was laughing all over again.

*     *     *     *

The next day, out on Interstate 40, on our way to Memphis, Tennessee, Big Joe and I were still discussing the close call we'd had in Amarillo, and whether or not anyone else besides the two of us ever needed to know about it.

"Joe, please don't tell the children," I was saying.

"They have a right to know. They don't know you're crazy, you could maybe get one of
them
killed someday."

"Nobody got killed."

"Besides, I need witnesses. I ever decide to have you institutionalized, which is looking more and more likely every day, I'm going to need a few voices to back me up. The more the kids know about what I have to put up with out here on the road with you, the better off I'm gonna be when that day comes."

"It'll never happen," I said.

"You don't think so, huh?"

"No. I don't."

"You think I love you too much to ever put you away, is that it?"

"Exactly. That, and the fact you're just as crazy as I am. Or do you think every Airstream owner foams at the mouth whenever somebody refers to their trailer home as a Winnebago?"

"I do not foam at the mouth."

"Okay. I tell you what. You bring one of our kids to the competency hearing, and I'll bring a Winnebago owner. See if
you
aren't wearing a jacket you can't take off before
I
am."

It took a while, but he had to laugh at that.

I did, too.

Better Dead Than Wed

"You see that?"

"I saw it."

"That has to make what? Three times in the last half-hour?"

"It makes four. But who's counting?"

"I am. He's gonna kill that woman at this rate!"

"No, he isn't. He isn't hurting her, he's just bullyin' her. But even if he wasn't—"

"Joe..."

"Close your eyes, Dottie. Try to get some sleep. That's a private matter, and you know it."

It was sound advice, I knew, but I couldn't take it. Tired as I was at 3:30 in the morning, the long-haired, Stetson-wearing cowboy in the blue Dodge pickup two car-lengths ahead of us had my blood boiling too vigorously for sleep. My husband Big Joe and I had been lagging behind him for a little over forty minutes, his truck and ours apparently locked on identical cruise control settings as we pushed north on Interstate 15 toward Salt Lake City, and four times now the big man had taken his right hand off the Dodge's wheel to reach over and slap at the face of the woman sitting in the cab beside him. The first time it happened I thought I'd imagined it, but then the hand went out a second time and I heard Joe mumble a curse under his breath, and I knew he'd seen it, too.

"We have to do something, Joe," I said, fighting to keep my eyes open. I was only an hour relieved from a six-hour shift of driving, and my tired old bones were begging for sleep.