He went up and checked the other windows (turning the lights off as he went). Ten altogether, all of them virtually the samedistance from the ground. He took off his shoes and, carrying them, he walked from room to room opening all the windows. Now he was really trapped. July could sit calmly in the living room, listening for him scrabbling down the side of the house, and shoot him at his leisure.
Looking through a front window in a room completely bare of any furniture—three suitcases and an armload of empty cardboard boxes—he saw the patrol car arrive. The morning was brighter now. The motor was shut off, and the lights dimmed. One of them got out; the other remained talking into the microphone in quick, hushed tones. A cracked, spitting voice came from the dash speaker. They came toward the house together, unfastening the snaps on their holsters, but conscientiously not removing their pistols.
Captured. Relief overwhelmed him. In his whole life, it was the best feeling he’d ever had.
A little later a highway-patrol car arrived, then two more. He could hear them below, prying the door open, and one of them came into the yard and called up to him with a loudspeaker to give himself up. They carried Ollie out on a stretcher, but he wasn’t dead. No sirens. Tossing his gun out the window, Earl went back to the hall, put on his shoes and sat on the stairs until they opened the door. Only one of them had a drawn gun. They didn’t push him around, but let him walk downstairs with dignity, accept the handcuffs and go out to the back seat of one of the cars. He thought they respected him.
SEVENTEEN
It was after seven thirty before they were all gone. Several of the men had stayed and helped July bury his dog in back of the garden. Lieutenant Helm was there. “It seems someone wants to do you harm,” he said. “Do you have any idea why?”
July didn’t. His life seemed completely out of his own hands, and a hard core of violence lay, like a cinder, in his heart. At the age of twenty-two years it seemed he was cursed to go on living. It would be better, he thought, if I had never been born.
He watched them leave, and went into the house. The walls retained the sense of violence, like a captured scream, just beyond the painted surface. He sat in the living room and tried to think.
There seemed nothing he could do about the swelling personal horror, and as he tried to form an encasement which would contain it, the pressure became as bad as the growing.
You must do something quick, he told himself. The cream-colored walls stared at him through the two square holes in the charcoal drawing. They watched him walk to the window and look out, then cross the room to the kitchen where he stood running water into the sink. He went into the living room and sat on the sofa and looked at the red clay vase and the hardened and brittle wildflowers. Mal had picked them in the last week of July. He lifted the receiver of the phone on the table before him and dialed.
It rang twice and the crisp, friendly voice of his Aunt Becky met him on the other end.
“Hello,” she said. “Hello . . . Hello, who is this? . . . July, is it you? . . . July?”
“It’s me,” he said. “I guess I sort of, well, need someone to talk to.”
“Oh, July,” she cried, bursting into tears which were as clear to him as if they’d fallen on his hands. “I’ll come right over. Wait where you are and I’ll be right over.”
“Well, if you don’t mind, I think I’d rather come over there. I mean there’s been some things going on over here . . . and I’d rather not stay.” He could tell his voice frightened her. It was too cautious.
“I’ll be here. Don’t you worry. Come right over. Will your cars drive?”
“Yes. I’ll come right over.”
And as he hung up, just before he took away the earpiece, he heard her say to herself as though with the phone crushed to her breast, “Praise the Lord.”
July went upstairs, looked in all the rooms of his house once more before closing the doors and clasping the windows. Downstairs in the basement, he turned off the electricity, turned off the water, the heat, and closed the valve from the gas tank. Then ran the water from the lines. He locked the house and placed the key in his pocket, put Butch in a box, started the Chrysler and drove away.
On the road he tried only to keep his mind on driving, but something called to him in an old but not-forgotten voice. And as he drove, it began to soothe him with its sound. He reached the blacktop and turned right, heading for Sharon Center. By the time he reached the four-way stop sign at the intersection with the black sunken-pebble highway to Hills, he was willingly giving himself to it, forming himself to a shadow of what he was, and instead of turning in, he continued on.
His aunt saw him from the kitchen window, and immediately put on her hat. She hurried outside, climbed into her car, backed out of the garage and started after him as he disappeared around the first corner a mile away. She lost sight of him again on Highway 1 when a truck pulled in front of her, saw him make a lefthand turn onto Riverside Drive into Iowa City and then lost him again. Shedrove from block to block looking, with no success. A half-hour later she had an idea and drove to the old train station. There in the lot was the green Chrysler, empty. She hung her head, closed her eyes, folded her hands and thought in prayer: “Keep yourself
