The Truth of the Matter (15 page)

Again he tried to rise, and this time he made it to one knee, rested there for a moment, then gained his feet and staggered out of the cabin. He was making his way to where the boat was tied at the bank when he heard the hum of an outboard motor. Standing still, swaying in the agonizingly hot sun, he waited until the boat came into sight. Then he drew his revolver and fired three shots in the air in quick succession to attract attention.

There were two men in the boat. The beat of the motor slowed and the boat drifted in a lazy half-circle as the men looked toward the sheriff with their hands shading their eyes.

Blast them! Didn’t they see the uniform?

Boadeen fired another shot and waved them toward the bank impatiently. The longer it took him to get to a phone, the more foolish he would look.

Roebuck held the station wagon at seventy on the level stretch of dual lane highway. The side windows were open and the steady boom-boom of air pressure in the back of the car throbbed in his ears. Every mile, every foot and inch they traveled away from Lake Chippewa was that much closer to safety, he thought, and glancing into the rear view mirror he caught a glimpse of his own two wild eyes and his hair streaking with gusts of wind across his forehead.

“I suppose the sheriff has come to and called for help by now,” Ellie said, the backwash of rushing air whipping the collar of her blouse.

Roebuck bit his lower lip. “We should have torn the radio out of his car before we left.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ellie said. “He can’t get the State Patrol on that radio anyway.”

Roebuck looked sideways at her out of the corner of his eye, half his attention still riveted on the road. “How do you know that?”

“He told me about it once.”

“Oh, Christ!”

Roebuck braked the car to half its speed so violently that Ellie had to brace herself with her forearms against the dashboard. The highway stretched in a straight line ahead of them, and near the crest of a hill a mile or so away they saw sunlight glinting off the steel of several cars. Roebuck pulled to the side of the road and backed up a few yards until the distant cars were once more visible. They could see some men walking among the half dozen cars stopped on the highway, and two cars on the shoulder of the road had red lights mounted on them.

“Roadblock!” Roebuck spit the words out. “Already a damn roadblock! Boadeen must have a thicker skull than either of us thought.”

“Now what are we going to do?” Ellie asked.

“Going to do?” Roebuck looked at her as if she were something to be destroyed. “Going to do? Why, we’ll go back! What else can we do?”

He spun the car around and headed back the way they had come, toward a side road he remembered seeing.

“Do you think they saw us?” Ellie asked, twisting in her seat to look behind them.

The thought made Roebuck begin to sweat. Without answering he stepped down harder on the accelerator. They probably hadn’t spotted them, but they might have. The thought of a State Patrol car speeding after them now with a silent siren terrified him.

They reached the side road, Alternate Y, and he turned onto it with relief. The odds had increased in his favor now if they were being followed.

“Get out the map and see where we’re going,” he said to Ellie.

She opened the glove compartment and unfolded the service station road map. “This takes us to Highway Thirty after about two miles.”

She laid the map on the seat between them and they drove in silence for a while.

“I was thinking,” Ellie said as they turned onto an empty Route 30, “maybe we ought’a drive slower, in case we run up on one of those roadblocks and don’t have a chance to turn around.”

Roebuck said nothing but he forced himself to hold their speed at about fifty-five. He’d been thinking the same thing, but until Ellie had put it into words he’d been unable to do anything about it. All the weight of his fears had been pushing down on the accelerator with his right foot.

Again they came upon some cars backed up on the highway. This time the entrance to a state park was handy, and they turned into it as if that was their actual destination.

“Do you think it was a roadblock?” Ellie asked.

“It had to be.” Roebuck followed the road to where it made a circle around a concession stand, drove back out the park exit and turned the other way on Highway 30.

“We’ll have to go east,” he said in a tense voice. “They might not expect us to be headed that way. We might have a chance.”

He ran their speed up to sixty-five and headed the car away from the sun, into its own lengthening shadow on the rushing pavement.

They drove for some time before passing another car, and Roebuck wondered if the light traffic was a good or bad omen. A side road with a sign flashed by them, telling them to turn to visit Lake Chippewa, and Roebuck shuddered. They were dead center again, headed away from the scene of their attempted arrest in the opposite direction.

“If we drive east far enough,” Roebuck said, “we can double around and head west again south of the roadblocks.”

Ellie folded her hands in her lap. “It’s a good thing we stopped for gas.”

Roebuck had been watching the odometer. They had driven east for exactly fourteen miles when they ran into another roadblock.

Screeching to the side of the highway, Roebuck stopped the car and pounded on the steering wheel. “They’re all around us! The bastards have set up a ring of roadblocks so we can’t drive out no matter which way we go!”

A van sped by them in the opposite lane. “Let’s get off the highway,” Ellie said. “Let’s go back and try to find some kind of turnoff.”

Roebuck knew she was right. They had been run to ground. He turned the car around and drove slowly to a barely discernible road overgrown with weeds. It didn’t even really join the highway but began on the other side of a small drainage ditch. Probably it led nowhere, but at least it would take them off the highway, into the shelter of the deep woods. The station wagon bumped across the drainage ditch and Roebuck steered it slowly up the winding, uneven rut marks in the brush.

The road didn’t exactly end; it disappeared. Soon Roebuck and Ellie were surrounded by woods and there wasn’t even a shallow depression in the undergrowth to tell them which way the road might have one time gone.

Roebuck turned off the engine, leaned back in the seat and sighed.

He thought of the noose of the law that would soon be drawing tight around them. And he thought of Gipp. Oh God, Gipp would rush to the scene like a wolf closing on wounded game.

“Where do you suppose we are?” Ellie whispered through the silence.

Roebuck muttered with his eyes closed. “In the circle is where we are. In the net.”

Heat waves rose from the hood, distorting the view of the woods before them.

“Listen,” Ellie said. “Is that the wind?”

Roebuck held his breath and heard a soft rushing sound, too steady for wind.

“Water,” he said. “Moving water.” He opened his door and got out of the car.

Ellie came around to stand beside him. She pointed. “It sounds like it’s coming from over there.”

They began to walk through the woods, and with a suddenness that surprised them they found themselves on the bank of a small river about a hundred feet wide. The water was cluttered with debris, murky and moving slowly except where it turned to flow over some large rocks.

They stared at the current for a moment before either of them spoke.

“Too bad we didn’t bring our boat,” Ellie said.

Roebuck didn’t know if she was serious or not. “The State Patrol’s not stupid. They’d be watching this river if it’d get us out of here.” He looked up at the clouding sky. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see some helicopters pretty soon.”

“Do you think they can spot the car through the trees?”

“They can spot it,” Roebuck said. “In the service I could spot camouflaged tanks from thirty thousand feet.”

Uneasy with the wide expanse of sky above the river, they turned and began walking back to the car through the woods. Roebuck felt strangely sensible and collected. Desperate as things were, they had come to something of a standstill. He had time to think now, and he was thinking.

By the time they got back to the station wagon it was firmly fixed in his mind. “I know what we have to do,” he said.

Ellie opened the car door and sat sideways in the seat with her feet on the ground, listening.

“We’re going to walk,” Roebuck said.

“Walk?”

Roebuck nodded. “We’ll hike through the woods, around that roadblock we just saw, to the nearest town. Then we’ll steal another car and circle back around west.”

“But won’t they search for us?”

“They might think we slipped through the ring of roadblocks and we’re a hundred miles away.”

“They’ll spot the car, though, sooner or later,” Ellie said, “with their helicopters.”

Roebuck’s lips twisted in a smug little smile and he nodded toward the flowing sound off to his left. “The river. It looks deep and the water’s dirty.”

“I guess we don’t have any other choice,” Ellie said.

Roebuck tucked his thumbs in his belt. “Get the road map out of the glove compartment.”

They spread the map out on the warm hood of the car and set their destination at Ironton, a town about fifteen miles away, twenty miles after they made their curve around the roadblock. Quickly they chose what they would take and what clothes they would wear. Roebuck changed into the Levis and sport shirt he’d bought for the lake, and Ellie wore slacks and a long-sleeved blouse to protect her from scratches and insect bites. Into the plaid suitcase they put one extra pair of shoes each, some canned goods, some extra clothes and part of their money. Roebuck placed one of the pistols on top of the clothes before latching the suitcase and slipped the other pistol, the .38, into his belt.

“Think of anything we’re forgetting?” he asked, folding the road map and putting it in his hip pocket.

Ellie looked at the car and shook her head.

They both got in and with difficulty Roebuck drove the car to the river’s edge. Twice Ellie had to get out and signal him with her hands, and once squeezing between two trees they had left a vertical streak of green paint on each trunk. But at last the station wagon was parked facing the slowly moving water. A beer can went drifting past, lazily revolving in the gentle but irresistible current.

Roebuck snapped a fairly straight branch from a dead fallen tree and waded into the dirty water, testing for depth. He walked out until the water was well above his knees, then he threw the branch into the air like a javelin so that it struck the river’s surface at a right angle. It cut down into the water over half its length before bobbing up, and Roebuck decided that the river was probably deep enough at that point to conceal the car.

He waded back up on the bank, and he and Ellie rolled down all the car windows. Then Roebuck started the engine and laid a stone on the accelerator.

The engine’s roar was deafening in the still woods, and almost in a panic Roebuck slammed the car door shut, reached through the open window and flipped the automatic gear shift lever into low.

The station wagon’s rear wheels spun on the soft earth as it moved forward slowly. Then in a bouncing burst of speed it shot off the bank out into the water with a tremendous splash. The engine died immediately. Roebuck watched in horror as the car settled about five feet from the river’s bank. Then the station wagon gave a sudden lurch and drifted farther toward the center of the river, sinking slowly, evenly.

Roebuck thought the car might sink like a ship, with the rear end lifting into the air before taking the plunge to the river bottom. Instead the station wagon drifted downstream about twenty feet as the water rose in a perfect horizontal line around it. The long roof went under levelly, with a sucking rush of water.

Roebuck and Ellie stood on the bank and watched as the car gave out one last dying gasp of huge bubbles, then the quiet river rolled over the spot where it had sunk as before, leaving them alone.

They turned to face the ominously beautiful, silent woods, and they began to walk.

R
OEBUCK AND ELLIE
walked at a steady pace through the sun-dappled shade of the deep woods. Occasionally they would break into a small meadow, a green circle of sunlight with tall grass and wildflowers bent gracefully where the wind had passed. Then they would be back into the shadowed woods, trudging loudly through last winter’s dead leaves, stepping over fallen, rotting logs teeming with insects. Around them was the stench of decay, and the fresh scent of things growing out of decay.

As they walked they glanced frequently behind them at the sun, winking at them through their roof of thick foliage. It was the sun that was leading them east, and by whose setting arc they were fixing their path to take them around the State Patrol roadblock.

Roebuck felt an odd exhilaration in the woods, a feeling of solitude and safety. Here the two of them walked in a world that demanded nothing but survival, that most important object of life that society had permitted man to place low on his list of concerns. And as they crossed a leaf-filled dry creek and he helped Ellie up the eroded bank, he felt the primeval protective instinct of man for his mate. He felt a closeness to Ellie that he’d never before experienced, and he wondered if she too felt their solitude and oneness.

“I bet I have a million chigger bites,” she said, scratching beneath the elastic band of her slacks.

“Coal oil,” Roebuck said. “Coal oil is the best thing for chiggers.” He picked up a stick and began beating the sparse foliage that jutted up at wide intervals from the dead leaves to brush against their legs. A wonder that anything could grow, he thought, in the fetid sunlessness beneath the trees.

Ellie clapped her hands at a mosquito. “How far do you think we’ve gone?”

“Maybe a mile,” Roebuck said. “It’s rougher country than I expected. Another hour and we should be past that roadblock and we can walk straight east.”

“You don’t think they’ll be able to find the car, do you?”