Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (17 page)

There is no activity so stimulating as running away from prison. I leaped, stride by stride, up a grassy slope avoiding every quick snake through the trustee cherry orchard and across the four-lane highway. I stopped on the far side of the road. It was comforting to be standing next to a road again. There was no traffic. The rain was half snow now and thickening in the dark. The first attempt at a storm of the fall. The trusties were weeping in their shanties over the damaged cherry crop. I raised and lowered my arms a few times: this is my body, redelivered. Then I threw myself dramatically down the gravel incline of the highway and sneaked, stepped into the first convenient post-prison culvert to think about the next thing.

It was about four-feet high and I ducked in and sat down the way you should in a sports car, knees up, and leaned my head back against the rough brushed cement. It was pleasant to be out of the recent precipitation, to be breathing in this round sanctuary. I hadn’t run so far since high school when I intercepted one of Skyline’s passes in the end zone and ran it back, slalomming the field back and forth with the help of that wily guard, Boyd Marsing, to the nineteen: an eighty-one yard run. I could see my breath, a broad plume, in the culvert and in the light at the far end of the tube I could see snow falling. After a moment I felt I was in a simple round elevator, rising through snow. The dizziness passed and I focused. Scratched in the curved wall opposite me were several sets of initials and dates—B. T., W. D., G. C—and beside them this legend: “This is the first place they’ll look! Get out and don’t hitchhike!” Someone had also taken the time to draw a picture of a large submachine gun. Heh. Heh. I picked up a jagged rock from the culvert bottom and wondered what I should add. Looking again at the shifting snow outside the porthole I called, “Okay Fitzgerald, what should it be, given this once in a lifetime opportunity? Come-on, Scott, you devil, what’s it going to be?” There was no real or imagined answer. Inevitably, what I was doing and where I was doing it were what Scott would have considered relatively low life. Few things glimmered. Finally I scrawled “The Scottsboro Boys, all nine of us!” and underneath, “411”, which was my batting average, and which you know is not bad in any league.

I felt like scratching some angry news about how disappointing these prison escapes really are and how things are apparently in general decline. Don’t mistake me: I’d rather be alive than shot or even partially shot, wouldn’t you? But once in a while someone should look up from the strangling void of their own misery to see dangerous criminals climbing the wall. I guess. I couldn’t figure how to get that all into a rhyming couplet, and so I let it go.

There was a noise outside the culvert, a noise like teeth on a sandy clam, and a small animal ran across my lap and kept right on to his next life out the other end. I hoped it was a rabbit. The noise, a grinding, continued and as slowly as my returning heartbeat came the beam of the flashing light.

I am apprehended, I thought. Someone has missed me and I am apprehended. The proper authorities have checked my vacant cell and found my bed badly stuffed with a workshirt imitation of myself, and they have apprehended me. It was convenient being in the culvert, then, because it gave me only two options as to which way I should run. I chose to follow the rabbit, and crawled the eighty feet to the other side and stepped out into the flat world. The light, a yellow beacon, flashed in flecks on the snow, approaching, and I appropriately, I thought, raised my hands and mounted the roadway. The blinking beacon pulsed nearer and nearer as the police car’s headlights lensed the falling snow. I could smell the snow in my hair. Here I am standing in the oddest snowfall of the year, reaching for the sky, which can never be a bad ambition.

I wondered if they had caught Panghurst, that wonderful crook, or Salvatore. It would not be that clever to be the first or only one caught. I hoped they had caught at least six others so we could raise a team again; you can play with seven but you must forfeit with six. What if I were the
only
one captured? I could see the felons moving away from me on the bleachers; oh and then it struck: Spike. Oh, devils in heaven, Spike would commit his fourth murder and this one with good reason. “Listen, Randy, I’m sorry about the fitzers …” No, I was had in that regard. Once a man has taken the risk of telling you his name, betrayal, say trampling his bushes and leaving him in landscape solitude, is unforgivable. He would rake me thoroughly into the dirt and trample me; it would be an environmental mayhem. He would tamp me fatally with a shovel. He would perforate me with a rake.

The flasher on the monstrous police car pulsed up to where I stood, arms aloft, in snow, and then ground right past. It became a snowplow. I blinked and lowered my arms and watched the huge truck move away, like a steamboat.

My incredulity took several seconds to settle as I stood calmly on the highway looking down at the lights of the prison. It looked like a minor constellation of stars. I could see the circling beacon wave my way once every little while, fooling no one, and suddenly I was running again. I remember the culvert’s carved advice: don’t hitchhike, but if I could catch that grinding snowplow …

After I fell the second time on the slick gathering and melting snow, I was back in my Boyd Marsing football run-back reverie. Everytime I breathe hard, I think of intercepting that pass in front of Inez LaNonca and 700 pubescent fans. She could breathe also, if my memory, that bastard, fails me not. After two hundred yards I caught up with the slow-moving truck. As I approached the tailgate where I thought I’d hop on, a stiff ream of sand slapped me in the face, eyes, teeth. Argh. I stumbled to my knees on the ice and spitting sand, felt the thick perfume of truck exhaust. In a second I was up again and learning by my mistakes for once, hooray, I ran up to and alongside of the truck. I grabbed one of the canvas stays on the side box of the truck, and pulled myself up beyond the five-foot tires waiting to tread on me. Stepping drunkenly, like a man fallen off a trapeze onto the safety net, I found a corner of the canvas covering the tons of sand the plow carried, and crawled underneath. The sand was dry and felt warm. With the grinding softened by the sand, and the safe smell of canvas, and the simple monotonous vibrations of the truck as it cleared the road back toward Salt Lake, I thought two inconsequential thoughts about Lila, and went into sleep on that strange humming shore.

I’ve never been one of those people who think it important to wake out of a dream and write it all down before it evaporates. The people who do this feel that otherwise they will miss out on a third of their lives. My own feeling is that we should pay attention to what goes on, but when we’re out, leaning on one of the shelves of the comatose, high or low, we should
be out
. If a dream is important, it will come around for you later as you’re putting the keys in the car or ordering coffee; you’ll recall your mother with the hatchet over your cradle, or your family waving from their side as the earth splits massively in half. I also think it appropriate that one day when I’m sixty, I’ll wake up and realize I’ve slept twenty years, which was enough for Rip Van Winkle, and looking around with everything changed under my feet in my own town (even perhaps my progeny, those surprised heirs, will be different), I’ll have to nod then and say, “Yup, yup, guess I was asleep.” It’s the only way we can rectify the large changes that move our lives away from us. As a child I awoke to find the seasons changed. Snow on the clothesline. So I don’t think we sleep to rest, but to swallow. The raveled sleeve of everything is knit, and I’m not interested in chasing up those wispy alleys of semiconscious scheming known as dreams and writing them down. This is a long way to say that I should have dreamed under that canvas on that sand aboard that truck of sleeping on the last dune before a troubled ocean. Umbrellas. As is, as you can tell, I did not dream but passed out in a dark attempt to get over not being shot out of my pants escaping from prison.

WHEEEEEEERRNNNN!

The brakes closed, and I awakened. The truck dipped and jolted down three tortuous inclines and stopped. The motor quit, and I heard the door slam. And echo. It sounded as if we were in a cavern.

After the driver’s footsteps faded, I looked out from under the canvas. It was some sort of underground garage, and there was a neat row of trucks parked in their snowplow line. I climbed out of the sand and rappelled down the side of the huge truck, standing finally on cement firma shaking sand out of my loose trouser legs, and listening. The machines all ticked and dripped as they warmed and cooled, settling. Once in awhile I could hear the wet crash of an iceberg as the snow clods under the wheel wells fell to the floor. First snow falls in this lifetime. Each crash sounded like a sneeze. After the initial fear passed, the fear that doesn’t allow you to move, I moved to the front of the truck, then skipped back and up into the cab. The little fears ran up and down my legs now like adrenalin. Over both visors were pouches of pens and pencils. The driver was probably a writer. In the glove compartment there was a pair of gloves; a copy of
Calling All Cars
, a mystery by Duke Milk; and an old package of Pall Malls. I took the Pall Malls as a favor to their rightful owner, and then found the pair of overalls under the passenger-side seat. They were crumpled and white, but looked official. I couldn’t find a hat.

I explored the basement, walking around in the wrinkled white suit trying to look rightfully tired after a hard night of plowing. The mouth of the cave was sealed with an electronic mesh gate. There was no switch on the inside, and I contemplated for a minute how much easier it would be to roll away a large rock. At the other end, one hundred yards away, was a caged section labeled: M.V.C. Through the chain-link fence in the darker portions of the garage, I could see rows and rows of tagged used cars.

Walking along the chain-link enclosure further, I saw my own used truck. I stopped, shocked by this new voltage, my mouth trembling involuntarily, and no words. “You too,” I wanted to say, hating this surprise, “They’ve got you too!” I thought of my watch and wallet locked in lockers at the prison; the new penal theory being that if you lock up a guy’s stuff, you’ve really got him. My truck waited like a good horse back three rows, and its windshield stared back at me. This is sadness, I thought then, firming my jaw, teeth locked, in the confirmation of my resolves to haul the negligent Lila forward onto the proper witness stand. I tried to hum then, to dissolve the lump assembling in my throat, because music is one of the verities (“There’ll always be music!”), but after a few wavering bars I recognized the tune as one of Barbar Durrant’s melodies: “Lost without a Compass in Your Love” and I let it die, settling instead for the choking throat clot.

Trying to turn self-pity into anger can at times resemble falling off a log; it is just not that hard. By the time a tear ticks the nose: done.

I found an elevator around a cement corner. I descended and opened, empty. I entered and looked back across the space at my truck. “Don’t worry, big fella, I’ll be back,” I said as the door closed. As the elevator ascended, I felt again the ancient worry of being hoisted into the arms of the law. I smoothed the overalls and tried to look authentic. That failed so I tried to look tired. I mastered this fairly well, although I know part of my face still read: This man is scared out of whatever wits he once had and should be wrestled to the ground.

The door opened and across the vast marble hall I read:
METROPOLITAN HALL OF JUSTICE.
I couldn’t move. The doors closed again. They opened and a policewoman carrying a bouquet of parking tickets walked briskly inside. The doors closed. I rode with her to the third floor where she marched off in her blue skirt, and a person in what are called plainclothes entered. We went back down to one, and when he waited for me to exit, I did. If he hadn’t made the gesture, I might be there still. As I shuffled down the steps of the Hall of Justice, in my own custody, into a night lightened by a minor dusting of snow, it bothered me again that those people didn’t know who I was. Perhaps they had the news already that I was innocent. Let it pass, Larry, I thought, shake it off. Let’s get Lila.