“Throw ’em out,” said Earl.
“Just tell us what to do,” pleaded Wally. “That guy—the husband—somehow he knows us. He can identify us.”
“It’s quite a problem, all right. I hope you get out of it.” Ollie opened the door for them to leave.
“Wait. Here, look.” From inside his jacket Wally took a crumpled newspaper and unfolded it. “Here, look,” he repeated and handed it to Ollie. It was the write-up of the killing. It told how her husband had come home, what he had found, the absence of clues, statements by the police, and the assumption that, whatever the motive was, it hadn’t been money, because there remained $300 in an upstairs drawer and a diamond valued at over $2000. Ollie read it and closed the door slowly, handing the paper over to Earl, who spread it before him on the table and, chewing on a piece of bread, began to read. He read the name twice before his eyes came back to it. July Montgomery. He stopped breathing, and he turned the safety of the pistol on for fear his nerves would pull the trigger of their own accord and shoot a hole through his leg.
“Now, what’s this place like?” Ollie was asking. “You say he lives there alone—in the middle of the country? And already once you punks been there but didn’t take anything?”
Ollie talked to them for the next three hours while Earl sat staring down into the newspaper. The only time he spoke waswhen Ollie asked him, “Earl, hey, Earl! You want to do it?” and he looked up and answered in a breathless whisper, “Yes.”
“It’ll be a week or more,” said Ollie to the boys. “Time for us to get down there and look around. It’s perfect. Now, the thing for you guys to do is find yourself a place to stay—hide out, I mean—but where some people can see you. Not around here. That way you’ll have an alibi. Me and Earl, see, we already got one if we’re picked up ‘cause we was here. They’d have to think the two murders was associated, and if you didn’t do one and we didn’t do another, then there’s no worry. Just don’t stay anywhere around here. Get into another state.”
It was dark when the boys left the hotel, and before the next morning they had driven over five hundred miles of back roads and county blacktops, back into Iowa, heading for Omaha, where Leonard knew some people from reform school living in a house. They were hungry and the money they’d gotten from Wally’s friend in the trailer court was almost gone.
FOURTEEN
July was sleeping upstairs now; not on his side of the bed, but hers. It seemed warmer there. In fact, he avoided his own side away from the window as if it didn’t exist, so much so that when he arranged the twisted blankets (he used no sheets and slept fully clothed except for his shoes) he even avoided placing any over there. He had taken all of Mal’s clothes and put them in the closet, where they lived like spirits in the dark, waiting for him to have to look at them again, some of them laughing, some of them crying and some of them staring and never asleep. His dreams became more and more terrifying and it was increasingly difficult to get out of them when he was awake.
He no longer had those times when he would forget—fall back into his former habit of knowing that when she was out of sight she was just in the next room: now he no longer thought about anything else at all. Her death and memory had his undivided attention. Horror draped the walls. Every light in the house burned without rest.
Saturday afternoon he went outside. Wind blew and it was a little cold. He walked into the yard with his dog and cat, and later went into the garden. Round orange and green pumpkins had puffed up on the snaking vines. The summer squash was knotted and hard. Tomatoes were ripe and rotting and the rats had gnawed holes into others. The beans were nearly dried on the brown stalks. The sunflowers curled over at the head like hanged men. There were several big green-and-white-striped watermelons.
A person could save some of this, he thought. Freeze the beans and . . .
He felt an urge to do a little work and went into the barn to get a hoe. Something in his step seemed to infect the animalsand Holmes began running around all over the place and Butch scurried about in the hay after invisible mice. The wooden handle felt good in his hands and he advanced with it toward the garden, the hatred of weeds rising up at each step. He began to tear away at them, but within several minutes the cat and dog sat dolefully and stared at him from the fence. He stood there inert, leaning on the hoe, his eyes completely vacant. With an air of futility he took another couple of swipes with the hoe, and stopped again. Who cares? he thought. Weeds or no weeds, what’s the difference? Why hate weeds? Why not hate everything?
Once more he tried to go ahead and do more hoeing. But he couldn’t. Then unexpectedly he whirled and began smashing the watermelons and pumpkins, splitting them open with the blade of his hoe, swinging it down from over his head, blow after blow after blow. He chopped at the bean plants, and hacked down the standing yellow stalks of corn, crying and cursing.
That night he began to hear his
