Florida, visit your dad. That wouldn’t be hard to take. I think what they said is bullshit, we stay with relatives there’s a chance they could find us. I’m leaning more toward what you said, it doesn’t have anything to do with the Mafia.”
“But they want to believe it does,” Carmen said, “and if they’re right ... well, we’d be better off in Cape Girardeau than here.”
“I never heard of it.”
“It’s on the Mississippi . . .”
“I still never heard of it,” Wayne said. “You can’t tell much from the literature.” He took a sip of beer. “What do you think it’s like?”
“I don’t know,” Carmen said. “You want to find out?”
Wayne didn’t answer, looking out the window now at the police car. “We’d have to tell Matthew. Make up a story for your mom. Tell her I’ve be come a boomer, gone down to Missouri to work on permit, they got this two- story structure they’re putting up.”
“It’d be a change,” Carmen said.
Wayne turned to look at his wife. “You wouldn’t mind doing it, would you?”
“Well, if it’s a choice of going to Cape Girardeau or getting shot at.” She took a sip of beer and said, “Every once in a while I wonder what it would be like to be someone else. See the way they look at things and what their life is really like.”
“You’re telling me,” Wayne said, “you’d rather be somebody else than who you are?”
“No, I don’t mean be
“You’re just nosy then.”
“There was a movie we saw a long time ago,” Carmen said, “where Jack Nicholson takes on another man’s identity who died and then finds out people are after him thinking he’s the guy?”
“Yeah ...?”
“I don’t remember the name of it or what reminded me. It isn’t anything like what we’re into at all.”
“Jack Nicholson’s in it and they’re in Spain? He’s driving around in a red convertible with this broad he picked up?”
“That’s the one.”
He watched her nod, calm as always, that clear look in her eyes. Sometimes she knew things before he could figure them out and she’d tell him you had to feel as well as think. Feel what? She’d say, just
“Why can’t we go anywhere we want?”
She didn’t answer him.
“We can. Who’s gonna stop us?” Arguing with himself.
She touched her hair and seemed to shrug. “They have a house for us, two bedrooms . . .”
“I can just see it.”
“It sounded nice, on the edge of a woods.”
“We have a woods,” Wayne said, “right out there.”
The sheriff’s deputy from the living room came in carrying a cup and saucer. He didn’t look at Wayne. He said to Carmen, “I wonder if you could spare a refill?”
“You having trouble,” Wayne said, “staying awake?”
The deputy glanced at him with his blank look, but didn’t answer. Carmen poured him a cup of coffee. She got a milk carton from the refrigerator and brought it to the counter where the deputy was helping himself to sugar.
Carmen said, “Would you like some cookies? Or I can make you a sandwich.”
Stirring his coffee, the deputy said, “Like what kind?”
Carmen paused. Wayne watched her reconsider and tell him, “Why don’t you take the cookies, all right?”
He did, a plateful of chocolate chip with his coffee, back to the living room where the television was going, television laughter letting the deputy know what was funny.
Wayne said, “We have to get out of here.”
Carmen nodded. “I think so.”
“We’ll give them three weeks to find those guys and that’s it,” Wayne said. “Deer season opens we’re coming home.”
12
ARMAND HAD TOLD RICHIE, “All right, from now on you don’t leave my sight. You go off and do crazy things.”
“All I did was blow out a couple of their windows. I didn’t get caught, did I? I brought us the car.” A nice one, an all-black Dodge Daytona with smoked-glass windows as dark as the body. Stuck in Donna’s garage all week. If it was clean why hide it? The Bird had only one thing on his mind:
“You don’t leave my sight.”
“Okay then,” Richie had said, “how about when I go to the bathroom? You want to watch? How about when I give Donna a jump and you’re in there looking at
“Okay,” Armand had said finally, “we stick our heads out, see what’s going on.”
Now they were riding along in the black car past open fields in the night, the radio and heater on, the blower going, Richie driving with the seat pushed way back, stiff-arming the wheel, raising his voice over the rock music coming out of the speakers, saying to his Indian buddy in the dark, “The first time? The first time was a guy name Kevin, suppose to be a friend of mine.”
Armand hunched over to turn the radio down a notch. “He snitch on you or what?”
“No, I was clean, right out of the joint with this new identity they gave me ...Wait a minute. Shit, this is weird. You ask me what was my first time and right away I think of this guy Kevin I knew from before. But there was the guy at Terre Haute, my cellmate. Some guys wanted him taken out, so they slip me a knife and say if I don’t kill him they’re gonna kill
Armand turned the radio off, getting rid of that irritating noise. Richie looked at him and Armand said, “What about this guy Kevin?”
“I was just getting to him. See, here’s Kevin, he finds out I’m being sent up he tells me he’ll look after Laurie, if she got sick or anything, as a friend.”
“I can see it coming,” Armand said.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think nothing about it till one night me and Kevin are in this bar after work and right out of nowhere he goes, ‘I want you to know something. I never fucked Laurie while you were in prison, not once.’ I start to think, well, shit, what’d he tell me that for if he didn’t? It must mean he did.”
“Sure he did,” Armand said. “How you gonna stop him, you’re doing time.”
“I go home ask Laurie, ‘You ever go to bed with Kevin?’ Her eyes get big, she goes, no, she swears she never