Jack and Dick came in, carrying their own coffee and doughnuts. Dick was still limping slightly, but they both looked rested and cleaned up. They sat hunched over on the edge of my bed.
‘We missed the turnoff at Jesup,’ Fleming told me.
‘But no problem,’ Donohue said. ‘You kids did just right to hole up for the night. There are two or three ways we can get back on the Interstate from here. If we want to.’
I looked at him.
‘If we want to?’ I said. ‘I thought you were in such a hurry to get down to Miami?’
‘Well … yeah,’ Jack said, ‘I was. Still am. But me and Dick have been talking it over. Maybe it would be smarter to find some backwoods hidey-hole for a week or so. Someplace way off in nowhere. We could lay low till the heat’s off. We got plenty of money for that.’
‘It’s Georgia,’ Dick explained. ‘Jack says he knows the roads and the land like the palm of his hand. He says he can find us a safe spot.’
‘What do you think?’ Donohue said.
I thought that now the Donohue Gang was reduced to three living members, it was becoming more democratic. Our Leader was consulting rather than commanding.
The idea of holing up for a while seemed more attractive to me than fleeing from our nemesis down Route 95.
‘Sounds okay,’ I said, shrugging. ‘Where do we find this safe place?’
‘I figure we’ll go back to Waycross,’ Jack said. ‘Then head west toward Albany. I know that country pretty good. I’ll find a spot.’
‘We’ll stop for food at the first decent place we come to,’ Fleming said. Then he added: ‘Won’t we, Jack?’
‘Why not? We’ll take our time. No one’s going to find us in the Georgia boondocks. I’ll bet on that.’
So we went back to Waycross, then headed north and west to Alma, Hazlehurst, McRae, and Eastman. Jack
Donohue was driving. I sat beside him, trying to follow our route on a Mobil map. I thought he was heading toward Macon, but I couldn’t be sure.
I wasn’t sure because four-lane concrete highways became three-and then two-lane. Then we were on two- lane tarred roads. Then graveled roads. Then one-lane dirt roads. Everything dwindled down until we were running between bare fields so baked and dry that we spun a long plume of dust behind us.
We passed crossroad villages — no more than a filling station and a grocery store that sold beer and snuff. I saw men in faded overalls, women in calico dresses, mule-drawn wagons, and once, like something out of the past, a man in a field following an ox-drawn plow. The land here seemed bleached out, blooded and drawn, and so did the people. In our big Buick, dented and dusty as it was, we were visitors from another planet. To me, this was
I glanced sideways at Black Jack as he drove, and saw the light in his eyes, the twisted smile on his lips. I thought at first that he was seeking the most deserted, malign, and remote spot he could find, thinking of our safety and the enmity of our pursuers.
Then I realized it wasn’t wholly that. It was a return for him. He was coming home. After all his travels and adventures, happiness and pain, he was coming home. Yes, I decided, it was that. As paved roads shrunk to paths and we went jouncing over pits and rumbling across dried creek beds, I saw his lips draw back from his teeth and heard his low laugh. He was remembering.
‘Ran alky through here,’ he said, ‘in a beatup truck. White lightning, panther piss — whatever you want to call it. Clear as water and maybe a hundred proof. Scorch your tonsils, that stuff would. But pure. No artificial additives or flavorings, as the ads say. Vintage of last Tuesday. At least we let it cool off. I had a route. Delivered it to some regular customers and some local distributors. All kinds of bottles: milk, medicine, whatever. It had to hold a pint, at least.
That was the minimum. With a cork. You got a dime back if you returned the bottle. Two cents back on the cork.’
‘How old were you then, Jack?’ Dick Fleming asked from the back seat.
‘Shit,’ Jack Donohue said, ‘I was small fry. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — like that. They used kids for drivers, figuring if you all got caught, what would they do to you? Whump you up some, that’s all.’
Something else I noticed: As we got deeper into hardshell Baptist country, Jack’s speech subtly changed. Not changed so much as reverted. The rapid New York cadence slowed, a drawl became evident, and I noted the same lilt I had heard in the speech of that birthmarked lady back at the motel. It wasn’t ‘you-all’ or even ‘yawl.’ But there was only a tiny hesitation between ‘you’ and ‘all.’ And humor — dry, wry, and unsettling.
‘You heerd about how to handle a mule? First thing you do is to smack him across the skull with a two-by- four. That’s just to get his attention. This feller I knew tried the same thing on his wife. She just
This followed by a mirthless laugh.
So there we were in a foreign country, being chauffeured by a native guide. Only Jack Donohue spoke the language and knew the customs. It was like a time warp, going back to the 1920’s, a time of dirt roads, hand- cranked gas pumps, tin signs advertising Moxie and chewing tobacco. All the men seemed to spit endlessly, and the women looked old before their time.
Another thing I noticed as we went slowly through those small, sad, crossroad towns …
So many of the males were injured. One-armed men, boys with missing fingers, cripples jerking along on false legs or crutches.
‘Farm machinery,’ Jack said when I commented on this phenomenon. ‘You get in any rural area, anywhere in the country, you find guys who lost a finger or hand or arm to a tractor or binder or thresher. Happens all the time. One reason why I got out.’
We came, finally, to a village no smaller, no larger, no different from a dozen others we had passed through on the packed dirt road, trailing our cloud of dust.
‘Yeah,’ Donohue said, ‘this is it. Whittier, Georgia. We’ll settle in around here.’
‘Why this place?’ I asked. ‘It doesn’t look special.’
‘It ain’t,’ he said, grinning. ‘That’s the point. Just another spot that the mapmakers forgot. There’s a hundred places like this around here. I know them all. One gas station, one general store, one feed and hardware store. Maybe a small branch bank. A restaurant and liquor place side-by-side. A church somewheres. Maybe a school.’
‘No motels?’ Fleming asked.
‘Motels?’ Jack said. ‘Who comes through here? Exceptin’ folks who go
‘So where do we stay?’ I said.
‘What I’m looking for,’ he told us, ‘is a private home owned by a spinster or widow lady. It’ll have a sign on the front lawn that says, like, “Tourists Welcome.” Or maybe just “Boarders.” There’s bound to be at least one around here.’
He found it, too. A big white house set back on an improbably green lawn. The sign read: ‘Tourist Accommodations — Day, Week, Month.’ The house was all fretwork and gingerbread trim: a wedding cake of a house.
On the wide porch, a woman swung slowly back and forth in a rocker, cooling herself with a palm leaf fan. There was a crushed stone driveway that led up to the house, then curved away to a clapboard building that looked like a barn converted into a garage.
We pulled up on the edge of the dirt road. Donohue switched off the ignition, turned to Fleming in the back seat.
‘Hyme had a hat,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t wearing it when he got blown away. Is it back there? Or any hat?’
Dick rooted through the scrambled mess, came up with a stained grey fedora. He handed it over. Donohue clapped it on his head. It slid down to his eyebrows. He shoved it back so it was hanging.
‘We leave the car here,’ he said. ‘All of us, we walk slowly up to the porch. Just looking around, casual-like.
