Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (7 page)

The bull guard was right about that. Sinkler had more than fifty dollars in poker winnings now, plenty enough cash to get him across the Mississippi and finally shed himself of the whole damn region. He’d grown up in Montgomery, but when the law got too interested in his comings and goings he’d gone north to Knoxville and then west to Memphis before recrossing Tennessee on his way to Raleigh. Sinkler’s talents had led him to establishments where his sleight of hand needed no deck of cards. With a decent suit, clean fingernails, and buffed shoes, he’d walk into a business and be greeted as a solid citizen. Tell a story about being in town because of an ailing mother and you were the cat’s pajamas. They’d take the Help Wanted sign out of the window and pretty much replace it with Help Yourself. Sinkler remembered the afternoon in Memphis when he had stood by the river after grifting a clothing store of forty dollars in two months. Keep heading west or turn back east—that was the choice. He’d flipped a silver dollar to decide, a rare moment when he’d trusted his life purely to luck.

This time he’d cross the river, start in Kansas City or St. Louis. He’d work the stores and cafés and newsstands and anywhere else with a till or a cash register. Except for a bank. Crooked as bankers were, Sinkler should have realized how quickly they’d recognize him as one of their own. No, he’d not make that mistake again.

That night, when the stockade lights were snuffed, he lay in his bunk and thought about Lucy Sorrels. A year and a half had passed since he’d been with a woman. After that long, almost any female would make the sap rise. There was nothing about her face to hold a man’s attention, but curves tightened the right parts of her dress. Nice legs too. Each trip to the well that day, he had tried to make small talk. She had given him the icy mitts, but he had weeks yet to warm her up. It was only on the last haul that the husband had come in from his field. He’d barely responded to Sinkler’s “how do you dos” and “much obligeds.” He looked to be around forty and Sinkler suspected that part of his terseness was due to a younger man being around his wife. After a few moments, the farmer had nodded at the pail in Sinkler’s left hand. “You’ll be leaving that, right?” When Sinkler said yes, the husband told Lucy to switch it with the leaky well bucket, then walked into the barn.

Two days passed before Lucy asked if he’d ever thought of trying to escape.

“Of course,” Sinkler answered. “Have you?”

She looked at him in a way that he could not read.

“How come you ain’t done it, then? They let you roam near anywhere you want, and you ain’t got shackles.”

“Maybe I enjoy the free room and board,” Sinkler answered. He turned a thumb toward his stripes. “Nice duds too. They even let you change them out every Sunday.”

“I don’t think I could stand it,” Lucy said. “Being locked up so long and knowing I still had nigh on three years.”

He checked her lips for the slightest upward curve of a smile, but it wasn’t there.

“Yeah,” Sinkler said, taking a step closer. “You don’t seem the sort to stand being locked up. I’d think a young gal pretty as you would want to see more of the world.”

“How come you ain’t done it?” she asked again, and brushed some loose wisps of hair behind her ear.

“Maybe the same reason as you,” Sinkler said. “It’s not like you can get whisked away from here. I haven’t seen more than a couple of cars and trucks on this road, and those driving them know there’s prisoners about. They wouldn’t be fool enough to pick up a stranger. Haven’t seen a lot of train tracks either.”

“Anybody ever try?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah, two weeks ago. Fellow ran that morning and the bloodhounds had him grabbing sky by dark. All he got for his trouble was a bunch of tick bites and briar scratches. That and another year added to his sentence.”

For the first time since she’d gone to fetch her husband, Lucy stepped off the porch and put some distance between her and the door. The rifle and axe too, which meant that she was starting to trust him at least a little. She stood in the yard and looked up at an eave, where black insects hovered around clots of dried mud.

“Them dirt daubers is a nuisance,” Lucy said. “I knock their nests down and they build them back the next day.”

“I’d guess them to be about the only thing that wants to stay around here, don’t you think?”

“You’ve got a saucy way of talking,” she said.

“You don’t seem to mind it too much,” Sinkler answered, and nodded toward the field. “An older fellow like that usually keeps a close eye on a pretty young wife, but he must be the trusting sort, or is it he just figures he’s got you corralled in?”

He lifted the full buckets and stepped close enough to the barn not to be seen from the field. “You don’t have to stand so far from me, Lucy Sorrels. I don’t bite.”

She didn’t move toward him but she didn’t go back to the porch, either.

“If you was to escape, where would you go?”

“Might depend on who was going with me,” Sinkler answered. “What kind of place would you like to visit?”

“Like you’d just up and take me along. I’d likely that about as much as them daubers flying me out of here.”

“No, I’d need to get to know my traveling partner better,” Sinkler said. “Make sure she really cared about me. That way she wouldn’t take a notion to turn me in.”

“You mean for the reward money?”

Sinkler laughed.

“You’ve got to be a high cloud to have a reward put on you, darling. They’d not even bother to put my mug in a post office, which is fine by me. Buy my train ticket and I’d be across the Mississippi in two days. Matter of fact, I’ve got money enough saved to buy two tickets.”

“Enough for two tickets?” she asked.

“I do indeed.”

Lucy looked at her bare feet, placed one atop the other as a shy child might. She set both feet back on the ground and looked up.

“Why come you to think a person would turn you in if there ain’t no reward?”

“Bad conscience—which is why I’ve got to be sure my companion doesn’t have one.” Sinkler smiled. “Like I said, you don’t have to stand so far away. We could even step into the barn for a few minutes.”

Lucy looked toward the field and let her gaze linger long enough that he thought she just might do it.

“I have chores to get done,” she said and went into the shack.

Sinkler headed back down the road, thinking things out. By the time he set the sloshing buckets beside the prison truck, he’d figured a way to get Lucy Sorrels’s dress raised with more than just sweet talk. He’d tell her there was an extra set of truck keys in a guard’s front desk he could steal. Once the guards were distracted, he’d jump in the truck, pick her up, head straight to Asheville, and catch the first train out. It was a damn good story, one Sinkler himself might have believed if he didn’t know that all the extra truck keys were locked inside a thousand-pound Mosler safe.

When he entered the yard the next morning, Lucy came to the well but stayed on the opposite side. Like a skittish dog, Sinkler thought, and imagined holding out a pack of gum or a candy bar to bring her the rest of the way. She wore the same dress as always, but her hair was unpinned and fell across her shoulders. It was blonder and curlier than he’d supposed. Set free for him, Sinkler knew. A cool, steady breeze gave the air an early-autumn feel and helped round the curves beneath the muslin.

“Your hair being down like that—it looks good,” he said. “I bet that’s the way you wear it in bed.”

She didn’t blush. Sinkler worked the crank and the well bucket descended into the earth. Once both his buckets were filled, he laid out his plan.

“You don’t much cotton to my idea?” he asked when she didn’t respond. “I bet you’re thinking we’d have to get past them guards with shotguns but we won’t. I’ll wait until the chain gang’s working up above here. Do it like that and we’ll have clear sailing all the way down to Asheville.”

“There’s an easier way,” Lucy said quietly, “one where you don’t need the truck, nor even a road.”

“I never figured you to be the know-all on prison escapes.”

“There’s a trail on the yon side of that ridge,” Lucy said, nodding past the field. “You can follow it all the way to Asheville.”

“Asheville’s at least thirty miles from here.”

“That’s by the road. It’s no more than eight if you cut through the gap. You just got to know the right trails.”

“Which I don’t.”

“I do,” she said. “I’ve done it in three hours easy.”

For a few moments, Sinkler didn’t say anything. It was as though the key he’d been imagining had suddenly appeared in his hand. He left the buckets where they were and stepped closer to the barn. When he gestured Lucy closer, she came. He settled an arm around her waist and felt her yield to him. Her lips opened to his and she did not resist when his free hand cupped a breast. To touch a woman after so long made him feather-legged. A bead of sweat trickled down his brow as she pressed her body closer and settled a hand on his thigh. Only when Sinkler tried to lead her into the barn did Lucy resist.

“He can’t see us from down there.”

“It ain’t just that,” Lucy said. “My bleed time’s started.”

Sinkler felt so rabbity that he told her he didn’t care.

“There’d be a mess and he’d know the why of it.”

He felt frustration simmer into anger. Sinkler tried to step away but Lucy pulled him back, pressed her face into his chest.

“If we was far away it wouldn’t matter. I hate it here. He cusses me near every day and won’t let me go nowhere. When he’s drunk, he fetches his rifle and swears he’s going to shoot me.”

“It’s all right,” Sinkler said, and patted her shoulder.

She let go of him slowly. The only sound was a clucking chicken and the breeze tinking the well bucket against the narrow stone wellhead.

“All you and me have to do is get on that train in Asheville,” Lucy said, “and not him nor the law can catch us. I know where he keeps his money. I’ll get it if you ain’t got enough.”

He met her eyes, then looked past her. The sun was higher now, angled in over the mountaintops, and the new well bucket winked silver as it swayed. Sinkler lifted his gaze to the cloudless sky. It would be another hot, dry, miserable day and he’d be out in it. At quitting time, he’d go back and wash up with water dingy enough to clog a strainer, eat what would gag a hog, then at nine o’clock set his head on a grimy pillow. Three and a half more years. Sinkler studied the ridgeline, found the gap that would lead to Asheville.

“I’ve got money,” he told Lucy. “It’s the getting to where I can spend it that’s been the problem.”

That night as he lay in his bunk, Sinkler pondered the plan. An hour would pass before anyone started looking for him, and even then they’d search first along the road. As far out as the prisoners were working, it’d take at least four hours to get the bloodhounds on his trail, and by the time the dogs tracked him to Asheville he’d be on a train. It could be months, or never, until such a chance came again. But the suddenness of the opportunity unsettled him. He should take a couple of days, think it out. The grit in the gears would be Lucy. Giving her the slip in Asheville would be nigh impossible, so he’d be with her until the next stop, probably Knoxville or Raleigh. Which could be all for the better. A hotel room and a bottle of bootleg whiskey and they’d have them a high old time. He could sneak out early morning while she slept. If she took what her husband had hidden, she’d have enough for a new start, and another reason not to drop a dime and phone the police.

Of course, many a convict would simply wait until trail’s end, then let a good-sized rock take care of it, lift what money she had, and be on his way. Traveling with a girl that young was a risk. She might say or do something to make a bluecoat suspicious. Or, waking up to find him gone, put the law on him just for spite.

The next morning, the men loaded up and drove to where they’d quit the day before. They weren’t far from the farmhouse now, only a few hundred yards. As he carried the buckets up the road, Sinkler realized that if Lucy knew the trail, then the husband did too. The guards would see the farmer in the field and tell him who they were looking for. How long after that would he find out that she was gone? It might be just minutes before the husband went to check. But only if the guards were looking in that direction. When the time came, he’d tell Vickery this well was low and the farmer wouldn’t let him use it anymore, so he had to go back down the road to the widow’s. He could walk in that direction and then cut into the woods and circle back.

Sinkler was already drawing water when Lucy came out. Primping for him, he knew, her hair unpinned and freshly combed, curtaining a necklace with a heart-shaped locket. She smelled good too, a bright and clean smell like honeysuckle. In the distance, the husband was strapped to his horse, the tandem trudging endlessly across the field. From what Sinkler had seen, the man worked as hard as the road crews and had about as much to show for it. Twenty years older and too much of a gink to realize what Lucy understood at eighteen. Sinkler stepped closer to the barn and she raised her mouth to his, found his tongue with her tongue.

“I been thirsting for that all last night and this morning,” Lucy said when she broke off the kiss. “That’s what it’s like—a thirsting. Chet ain’t never been able to stanch it, but you can.”

She laid her head against his chest and held him tight. Feeling the desperation of her embrace, Sinkler knew that she’d risk her life to help him get away, help them get away. But a girl her age could turn quick as a weathervane. He set his hands on her shoulders and gently but firmly pushed her back enough to meet her eyes.

“You ain’t just playing some make-believe with me, because if you are it’s time to quit.”

“I’ll leave this second if you got need to,” Lucy said. “I’ll go get his money right now. I counted it this morning when he left. It’s near seven dollars. That’s enough, ain’t it, at least to get us tickets?”

“You’ve never rode a train, have you?” Sinkler asked.

“No.”

“It costs more than that.”

“How much more?”

“Closer to five each,” Sinkler said, “just to get to Knoxville or Raleigh.”