“I didn’t mean for nothing like that to happen,” Bill said.
“That’s what I hate about jobs where you got to have guns,” Fat Boy said. “I hate it.” Fat Boy drove off peeling rubber. “I hate it big. I knew someone was gonna get shot.”
“Well,” Chaplin said, “it weren’t you, so that’s good.”
“It ain’t good,” Fat Boy said. “It ain’t good at all.”
“It don’t matter now,” Chaplin said, counting the money. “Goddamn, we got maybe three thousand dollars here.”
At that moment there was a loud explosion and the car’s rear end did a quick dodge to the right, went off the road and into a ditch, turned over and righted again next to the woods.
Bill licked blood off his mouth and let his stomach fall back down to its proper place. He had taken a bite out of the seat in front of him, but all his teeth were still intact, and his tongue wasn’t bit in two. He only had mashed his lips.
Chaplin sat next to him, very still. The sack with the Roman candles had been in front of Chaplin, and the wreck had driven him forward into one of them; it had fitted itself snugly into his eye socket. He was bent at the waist with the candle in his eye. He had one hand on the candle as if to pull it out, but he hadn’t lived long enough. Blood ran along the candle and down over his hands and spilled into his lap and onto the car seat.
Fat Boy, who had a split bloody nose and a knot on his forehead big enough to wear a hat, turned in his seat, held his head, and looked at Chaplin.
“Shit!” he said. “Shit!”
Bill opened the door, stumbled out and fell down. Fat Boy got out. He leaned against the side of the car. He said, “Blowout. Fuckin’ tire blew out. Dumb shit Chaplin could have stole a better car.”
Bill fell down and lay on the grass for a moment, then got up. He used his pocketknife and a few hard kicks to open the trunk, pulled out the jack, the tire iron, and the spare.
“What you doin’?” Fat Boy said.
“What’s it look like?”
“Chaplin’s dead!”
“He ain’t gonna get no more alive if we leave the tire flat. We got to get out of here.”
Bill put on the emergency brake and set to work jacking up the bumper to get at the blown tire. It was a real job in the dark and Fat Boy continued to wander about the car like a lost duck. He seemed to want to go somewhere but couldn’t quite figure which direction to take.
“Get your ass over here and help with these lug bolts,” Bill said.
Fat Boy lumbered over and got the lug wrench and went at it. He worked the bolts loose, popped two of his knuckles open in the process, pulled the tire off. Bill slipped on the spare. Fat Boy screwed down the bolts and Bill lowered the wheel and Fat Boy tightened them. Bill rolled the bad tire off into the woods and tightened down the trunk lid with a piece of a coat hanger he found back there. They got in the crumpled car, Bill on the passenger side now, and Fat Boy drove them out of there.
Three
They drove along the highway very fast and passed a deputy sheriff’s car running emergency lights and siren.
“Shit,” Fat Boy said. “Is that for us?”
“Got to be. Or at least for the shooting. Someone must have heard it and called. You think anyone could have seen us in the dark?”
“Ain’t that dark,” Fat Boy said. “And the stand had lights. We got to hide this car.”
“Can’t we dump it near your car?”
“Too far away. In a minute them cops’ll be on our ass like hemorrhoids.”
Fat Boy found a little road to the right and took it, drove down into the thick woods. The headbeams showed sparkles to the left and right. Bill realized there was water in the woods.
“Where the hell are we?” Bill said.
“I ain’t never been down here,” Fat Boy said. “But I know it’s the bottoms. I know some niggers fish down here all the time. They say you get down in here good, ain’t nobody ever gonna find you. There’s supposed to be enough bodies down here, you could dig them all up and count ’em, there’d be enough to fill a town.”
Fat Boy threw an eye on the rearview mirror, said, “Fuck!”
Bill looked over his shoulder.
Lights flashing. A moment later, sirens. Chaplin’s body bounced around the back seat like a jumping bean, the Roman candle sticking out of his face, his dead hand clutching it as if holding a telescope to his eye.
“Goddamn,” Fat Boy said. “Cop turned around. Someone must have given them a make on the car.”
“Probably one of my nosy neighbors ’cross the highway,” Bill said. “Show them fuckers you know how to drive.”
Fat Boy put his foot to the floor. The car leaped. A curve showed up in the headlights, Fat Boy made it, threw dirt as he went. The dirt reflected in the red tail-lights like a bloody mist. In the back seat, Chaplin hopped about as if excited.
The cop car made the turn too. When Bill looked back the cop car was rocking left and right, but it fell in line and jumped close to them.
“Go! Go! Go!” Bill yelled.
There was a big curve coming up. Fat Boy went around it, pedal to the metal, nose forward, ears back, balls sucked up tight as mad baby fists.
They made the curve and the cop didn’t. His car went through a barbed wire fence and smacked a tree. The front turned butter soft and looked like an accordion. Steam hissed out from under the crumpled hood and made a white mushroom cloud.
Just as they approached another curve, Bill looked back and was amazed to see the cop car back away from the tree and onto the road. It wasn’t exactly motoring like it had a rocket in its ass, but it was coming. The hood flapped up and down like a gossip’s tongue.
“He ain’t got a prayer and a sandwich now,” Fat Boy said, laughed, and they made the curve. Then there was a clunk and a grind and a bumpty-bumpty, bumpty-bump.
Fat Boy said, “Goddamn muffler’s hangin’. But we ain’t gonna let that stop us.”
Around another curve they went, and the muffler swung to the left and came loose. But not before the rear tire met it and the muffler snapped and the end of it drove into the rubber and the tire blew. The Chevy, going about eighty, spun around in the road and left it, knocked through a barbed wire fence, rampaged over a few small trees, slapped the hell out of a couple of unsuspecting frogs, then sailed out into the water.
It was odd the way that car went in. All white and shiny, spinning around and around, almost levitating across the top of the water, then suddenly it nosed down fast. Then, as if it were a cork, it bobbed in the swamp a moment next to a blackened cypress stump.
Creatures in the water and the woods moved. The car gave off steam. The water rippled way out from the impact and frogs croaked and hopped away. The moon’s image lay full and huge on the swampy water, as if God had dropped a greasy dinner plate. Inside, Chaplin had been tossed over the seat to join Bill and Fat Boy. Bill pushed Chaplin aside, put his foot on the corpse’s head, climbed over the seat, and rolled down a back window as the Chevy began to slide into the gloom.
Bill climbed out. Fat Boy, wearing a steering wheel tattoo on his forehead next to the mountainous knot he had acquired earlier, fought the floating body of Chaplin off, and followed.
Moments after they abandoned the Chevy, the car went down, along with the firecrackers, the money, and Chaplin.
Bill and Fat Boy swam in the warm water. The water was thick as good beef stew. Underwater weeds and vines grabbed at their ankles and tried to hold them. They swam back toward the road. But as they did, the injured deputy’s car, hissing smoke from under its hood, pulled up and stopped and the deputy, his cowboy hat twisted to one side on his head, got out, pulled a pistol, and started shooting at them.
