The Getaway (Read a Great Movie) (11 page)

Then he broke off, listened incredulously to the newscaster's staccato voice:

"… The man has been positively identified as Doc (Carter) McCoy, notorious bank robber and criminal mastermind. Police are certain that the woman with him is his wife, Carol. Their descriptions follow…"

Then, late that evening, he heard the news about Doc and Carol; knew immediately that there was no longer any need for hurry. For certainly they would not be able to. The way things looked to him, he could probably roller-skate his way to California-and Golie's tourist court-and get there ahead of them.

So he informed the Clintons amiably that he had changed his mind. He'd decided to take Clinty-boy's advice after all, because what the hell was the use of having a doctor if you didn't listen to him? Anyway, they'd take it easy like Clint said, just take their time and get a little fun out of the trip; and they'd start in right now by turning in at a good motel.

They took connecting cabins, but only for the sake of appearances. They used only one of them, the three of them sleeping crosswise and partly disrobed in one bed, with Fran Clinton in the middle.

"Now we won't be getting lost from each other," Rudy explained, grinning. "Clint won't have to worry about me sneakin' off to the police, and reporting him for practicing medicine without a license."

Mrs. Clinton smirked lewdly. Rudy winked at her husband. "It's okay with you, ain't it, Clint? You've got no objections?"

"Why, no. No, of course not," Clinton said hastily. "It's, uh, very sensible." And he winced as his wife laughed openly.

He did not know how to object. In his inherent delicacy and decency, he could not admit that there was anything to object to. He heard them that night- and subsequent nights of their leisurely journey westward. But he kept his back turned and his eyes closed, feeling no shame or anger but only an increasing sickness of soul.

Just inside the border of California, they stopped for a picnic lunch at a roadside tourist park. Afterward, while Rudy dozed in the car and Fran Clinton thumbed through a movie magazine, her husband wandered off among the trees.

He did not return. When they found him, he was lying face down in a pool of blood, one of his small hands still gripping the razor blade with which he had cut his throat.

Rudy dropped down to the ground at his side. Clutching himself, he began to rock back and forth, groaning and gasping with what Mrs. Clinton mistook for a paroxysm of laughter. She could hardly be blamed for her error. She had never seen Rudy grief- stricken; the Piehead, overwhelmed by sorrow or laughter, appeared much the same.

So she began to laugh-with him, she thought. And Rudy came abruptly out of his fit and slugged her in the stomach. He beat her black and blue; everywhere but in her face. Except that he needed her, he would have beaten her to death. Then he made her carry the body into the bushes and cover it over with rocks.

She never again gave him reason to beat her. On the contrary, no one could have been more worshipful or watchful of his whims. Yet hardly a day passed after their arrival at Golie's that he did not pound and pummel her at least once. Because she annoyed him with her groveling. Because he was restless. Because he was very worried about Doc.

"Come on, boy," he would mumble fiercely, sitting hunched in front of the radio. "You can do it, Doc! You done it before, an' you can do it again!"

He seldom mentioned Carol in these injunctions; seldom thought of her. She would be with Doc, and as long as he was safe, so was she. Rudy couldn't see them as splitting up, getting fed up to the point of wanting to split. Like 'em or not, those two were really nuts about each other. And Rudy was sure that nothing short of prison or death could break them up. Just in case, though…

Rudy grinned evilly, considering the impossible possibility of a falling out between Carol and Doc. It couldn't happen, but if it did, it wouldn't change a thing.

Carol needed Doc; she'd never been on the run before, and she'd never make it without him. And because she wouldn't, Doc couldn't split with her or let her split with him. She'd be too apt to rattle the cup on him. Buy herself a deal at his expense.

They were tied together, bound together inextricably. And Rudy roared with crazy laughter when he thought what would happen if either attempted any untying. That would be something to see, one of them trying to get the jump on the other. Hell, it would be like trying to do something with your right hand without letting the left know about it.

They were still very hot news. Rudy himself was mentioned frequently, but the focus was mainly on Carol and Doc.

They'd been seen in New York, Florida, and New Orleans. They'd boarded a train for Canada, a plane for South America, a ship for the Straits Settlements. It was mostly nut stuff, Rudy guessed, the kind of hooroosh that always sprang up around a big name or a big kill. But not all of it.

Doc had friends everywhere. The really slick rumor-planting-the stuff that got more than a second look from the cops-would be their work, done to repay an old favor or simply to give a hand to a brother in need. One of their stunts even had Rudy going for a while.

Two stiffs were found in a burned-down house in Washington, D.C. They were charred beyond recognition, but of a size with Carol and Doc, and the woman's almost melted ring bore the inscription D. to C. As a clinching bit of evidence, the fire-blackened refrigerator was found to contain several packets of small bills, all banded with Bank of Beacon City tape.

The police were sure they had found the remains of Carol and Doc. So, almost, was Rudy. Then some eager beaver of a lab hound had managed to raise a latent print on the man's corpse, establishing him indisputably as an underworld in-and-outer who had acquired a bad name for reliability. And with this much to go on, the police hunted out the printing shop where the bank bands had been obtained. Aside from admitting that they had been made from his stock and type, the owner denied all knowledge of them. He was of the opinion, however, that the bands had been turned out during a burglary of his shop-said burglary having been duly reported to the police several days before.

So the hoax was exposed, if not the hoaxers. No one seemed interested in learning their identity. No one seemed to care who the woman had been. Rudy wondered about her in his weirdly oblique way, and was sullenly envious of Doc. The in-and-outer had been a bum, a no-good with neither the physical attractiveness nor the cash to attract a lady friend. So, apparently, Doc's friends had arbitrarily provided him with one. Just any dame that met certain specifications. They weren't sore at her, as they were with the man. It was a hundred to one that they didn't even know her. They'd snatched her and bumped her simply to help Doc.

Rudy was forced to admit that he had no such good friends. Even little Max Vonderscheid would never kill anyone to help him. Not that he cared; if a double-crosser like Doc had friends, then he could do without 'em. But just the same…

"Come on, Doc," he pleaded. "Come to Rudy, Doc. What the hell's holding you up anyway?"

It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity.

You cannot do what you must unaided. So throughout your struggling, your creeping and running, your thieving and killing, you are on the hunt for help. And if you live, you find it, sooner or later. Rudy Torrento found his sooner, in the Clintons. Doc found his later in a family of migratory farm workers; sharecroppers turned crop tramps.

There were nine of them, husband and wife and seven stair-step children-the youngest a toddling tot, the eldest a rawboned boy who was the scantling shadow of his father. They were camped alongside the muddy trickle of a creek. Two of the tires on their ancient truck were flat, and its battery stood on the ground. Their clothes were ragged but clean. When Doc emerged from the underbrush and approached them, trailed nervously by Carol, they drew together in a kind of phalanx; and the same look of wary phlegmatism was on every one of their suntanned faces.

Carol had no reason to be nervous. Doc knew people; and having been born among them, he knew this kind very well. Their existence was centered around existing. They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay.

Doc knew them well. He knew how to talk to them.

Beyond a casual nod, he ignored the man's wife and brood. They had no authority, and to imply any to them would have been discourteous. Drawing the man aside, he spoke to him circuitously; casually hunkering down on his heels, talking with the man's own languid caution. Sometimes whole minutes passed in silence. And speaking, they seemed to discuss almost everything but the subject at hand.

Yet they understood each other, and they came to an agreement quite quickly. Doc gave the man some bills, not many and none of them large. For integrity cannot be bought, and they were simply men in need assisting one another. Then the man gave drawled instructions to his family.

"These here folks is friends," he said. "They'll be movin' on with us. We don't let on about it to no one, not any peep or whistle."

He sent the eldest boy and the second eldest into town for "new" secondhand tires, a battery and food. In the morning they headed westward, and lying prone in the rear of the truck, Doc and Carol heard the woman's cracked voice raised in a spiritual and they smelled the smoke from the man's nickel see-gar.

The seven children were squeezed into the truck bed with them, the bigger ones sitting with slumped shoulders to accommodate themselves to its low canvas cover. They were all around them, shielding them from view, hiding them as effectively as though they had been at the bottom of a well. But close as they were physically, they were still worlds apart.

Carol smiled at one of the girls, and received a flat stare in return. She started to pat the tot's head, and barely jerked her hand back in time to avoid being bitten. The eldest boy protectively took charge of the child. "Wouldn't do that no more, ma'am," he advised Carol with chill politeness. "He don't cotton none to strangers."

The truck's best speed was barely thirty miles an hour. Despite their early starts and late stops, they seldom made two hundred miles a day. Their food was monotonously unvaried, practically the same from one meal to the next. Salt pork and gravy, biscuits or mush, and chicory coffee for breakfast. For lunch, mush or biscuits and salt pork eaten cold while they rode. And for dinner, there was more biscuits, salt pork and gravy, with perhaps some sweetnin' (sorghum) and a poke salad-greens boiled with pork into a greasy, tasteless mess.

Doc ate heartily of everything. Nauseated by the stuff, Carol ate no more than she had to to stay alive. She acquired a painful and embarrassing stomach complaint. Her small body ached constantly from the jouncing and bouncing of the truck. She became very bitter at Doc; the more so because she knew her predicament was her own fault, and because she dared not complain.

These people didn't like her. They tolerated her only because she was Doc's woman (his
woman
, for Pete's sake!). And without Doc, she would be lost.

Whether the family knew who they were-the most wanted criminals in the country-is a moot point. But reading no newspapers, having no radio, living in their own closemouthed world of existing to exist, it is unlikely that they did. And probably they would have turned their back on the opportunity to inform themselves.

These folks was feedin' them. These folks' business was their own business.

Ask no questions an' you'll hear no lies.

Curiosity killed the cat.

Leave well enough be, an' you'll be well enough.

The old truck limped westward, carrying Doc and Carol far beyond the danger zone of roadblocks and police checks, and into the safety of California. And there, after another day or so of travel, they parted company with the family.

Doc didn't want them to know his and Carol's destination, to get any closer to it than they already were. That would be asking for trouble, and asked-for trouble was usually gotten. Moreover, the family did not wish to go any farther south-into an area that was traditionally hostile to vagrants or anyone who might possibly become vagrant. And they hoped to have other fish to fry, or rather, apples to pick in the Pacific Northwest.

So there were monosyllabic farewells, a final exchange of money; then the family moved on, and Carol and Doc remained behind… Quite inappropriately in the City of Angels.

Doc was dressed in blue overalls and a jumper, and a striped railroad worker's cap. He carried himself with a pronounced stoop; a pair of old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses were perched on the end of his nose, and he peered over them nearsightedly as he paid for his ticket from a snap-top money pouch. A metal lunch bucket was tucked under one arm. Beneath his clothes-and Carol's-was an outsize money belt.

Carol came into the railroad station several minutes after him. She also was stooped, crone-like of figure. She wore a long, shapeless black dress, and under the shadow of her head shawl her face was wizened and sunblack.

They boarded the train separately, Carol taking a rear seat, Doc entering the men's lounge. Then, when their tickets had been collected and the train was well out of the yards, he came out and sat down at her side.

He opened the lunch bucket and took out a pint bottle of whiskey. He drank from it thirstily, wiped the neck with his sleeve, and extended it toward Carol.

She shook her head, her nose wrinkling distastefully. "Do you have to keep hitting that stuff?" she frowned.

"
Keep
hitting it?" He returned her frown. "That's the first drink I've had in days."

"Well, it's one too many at a time like this! If you ask me, I…"

"But I didn't." He took another long drink, then returned the bottle to the lunch bucket. "Look," he said reasonably. "What do you want to do anyway? Break up? Go it on your own? I'd like to know."

"As if you didn't already know! What the hell difference does it make what I want to do?"

"Well," said Doc. "Well, then."

Actually he did not want to be separated from her. Even if it had been practical, he would not have wanted it. And despite anything she said or did, he knew that she felt the same way. They were still in love-as much as they had ever been. Strangely, nothing had changed that.

His eyes drifted shut. He wondered where the family of sharecroppers was by now, and subconsciously he wished that he was still with them. It hadn't been at all bad, that long creeping journey across half of the United States. Nothing to do but ride and ride, with every day exactly like the one before. No worries, no decisions to make. Above all the freedom, in fact the necessity,
not
to talk.

He had never before realized the blessedness of silence-the freedom to be silent, rather, if one chose. He had never realized, somehow, that such blessedness might be his privilege. He was Doc Mc Coy, and Doc Mc Coy was born to the obligation of being one hell of a guy. Persuasive, impelling of personality; insidiously likable and good-humored and imperturbable. One of the nicest guys you'd ever meet, that was Doc McCoy. They broke the pattern when they made him. And, of course, Doc
did
like people and he liked to be liked. And he'd been well compensated for his efforts in that direction. Still-well, there you were. It had become an effort, something else that he hadn't realized.

Maybe he was just very tired, he thought wearily. And very worried. Because exactly what they were going to do after they got to Golie's he didn't know.

"Doc," Carol said. "What's the next step, after we get to Golie's?"

Doc grimaced. She can read my mind, he thought. "I'm thinking about it," he said. "I haven't decided yet."

"You don't know, do you? You haven't any plan."

"Now, that's putting it a little strong. I'll have to check around, and-" her scornful smile stopped him. "All right," he said, "I don't know."

She waited, staring at him demandingly. He fumbled the lunch bucket open and took another drink. He gestured with it diffidently, then quickly recapped it and put it away.

"I-it would have been simple enough ordinarily," he explained. "I mean, if we could have made it before they had the alarm out for us. Coming back from Mexico, you're apt to get a pretty thorough going over. But going over, they hardly take a second look at you. You can just walk across the border, or drive across and…"

"All right! But that's what we
could
have done!"

"Well-maybe we still can. There doesn't seem to be much noise out here about us. Maybe…"

He broke off, unable to continue so palpable a lie. Perhaps there wasn't any general search for them on the West Coast, but the border patrol would certainly have been alerted.

"We'll see," he mumbled. "I'll have to look around. Maybe I can get a line on Ma Santis."

"Ma Santis!" Carol let out a disgusted snort. "Just like that you're going to get a line on Ma Santis, huh? You already told me you thought she was dead, and even if she wasn't I'd like to know how you're going to get a line on her or anyone else. You can't make any inquiries. You can't go wandering around and…"

"That's right. I can't," Doc said curtly; and he got up and entered the rest room.

Seated on the long leather couch, he lighted a cigarette, looked wearily out into the moonlit night. He had always thought this was the most beautiful stretch of country in the world, this area of orange and avocado groves, of rolling black-green hills, of tile-roofed houses- all alike yet all different-stretching endlessly along the endless expanse of curving, white-sand beach. He had thought about retiring here some day and, though the idea was preposterous, he still thought about it. He could see himself and Carol on the patio of one of those incredibly gay houses. Barbecuing a steak perhaps, or sipping tall drinks while they stared out to sea. There would be a cool breeze blowing in, temperately cool and smelling of salt. And…

"Doc-" Carol murmured suddenly from the doorway.

He said, "Coming," and rejoined her in the seat. And she patted his hand and gave him a lingering smile.

"You know something, Doc?" she whispered. "This will be our first night together. Our first night together and alone."

"So it will!" Doc made his voice hearty. "It doesn't seem possible, does it?"

"And I'm not going to let anything spoil it either. Nothing! We'll just pretend like we don't have a worry in the world tonight. Just push everything out of our minds and have ourselves a nice long hot bath, and something to eat and-and…"

She squeezed his hand. Almost fiercely.

"Sandy-Egg-O!" bawled the conductor. "Next stop is San Diego!"