CHAPTER TWENTY

1958

Charlie was heading us north toward Valentine, on Nebraska highway 2, and I was still his girl. There wasn’t anyone else in sight. No headlights. Just the line of the land. I had been resting my forehead on the window, watching the cold world rush by, till I closed my eyes and almost forgot where I was. Charlie woke me up, poking me in the rib. “I saw you,” he said. “Don’t think I didn’t, Caril Ann. It’s no fair for you to sleep while I do all the work.”

It was enough to make me roll over and pull the covers over my head, only there weren’t any covers, just the coat from the lady who lay dead in her beautiful house. I held my hand in front of the heat to move the blood back through, then pushed up my feet and stared for a time at the tips of my shoes. Ice painted pictures on the windshield. “I’ll drive for a while,” I said finally.

“Now where would we be if I let you do that, Caril Ann, some ditch? You don’t even know how to drive. Remember last time?”

“It’s different.” And then I got to thinking maybe that’s where the whole thing started, with me behind the wheel of Charlie’s car, spinning on the road, and how if it happened again I could spin back the other way, and nothing would ever be the way it had been.

“You’re too young anyway,” Chuck said. “It’s how come you need me. You’re helpless. Like a baby bird.”

I looked straight ahead and crossed my arms to tell him no place was worse than where he’d got us. I tried to tell myself I wasn’t really mad, though. Charlie was different now, and things weren’t always right between us, but I knew he loved me anyhow. I also knew he was afraid; evening was coming on, surrounding the car in a kind of ice-blue shade. It was brittle cold and he had no idea where we would sleep. Or if it was safe to, though this road looked deserted.

We had stayed a while at the big house in Lincoln, lying still in the dark on account of Charlie needing a rest. But I couldn’t sleep right with the dead people around, even with him next to me like we were. I tried to stay in one place without moving like Charlie said to, but there was a nasty smell to everything. I sneaked upstairs in the dark, trying not to breathe, and spilled perfume on the carpet, to try and cut the smell. But this was no help so I went into the closet and snipped on the light, and took her ruffle blouse and coat, too, on account of being cold. There was a diamond necklace half sticking out of a box so I put it in the pocket. I didn’t feel bad about this. After all, the lady wasn’t going to miss it.

Charlie did not notice my new shirt, and I didn’t tell him about the diamonds. He and me didn’t so much as talk about what happened, we just kept going. We knew what was in the cards. We sneaked out of the house that morning before the sun came up and drove around in the dead man’s car for a while, looking for a plan. There were stories on the radio we heard, about all the crazy things me and him did. But they were wrong about one thing. It was not me and Charlie. I never did so much as a thing.

*   *   *

All day I had been drawing things I saw, using only my one gray pencil. I’d wished I’d grabbed my colored set, but it didn’t matter, most everything being frozen and gray. I had filled one sketchbook already. I tried to find pretty things, like the sand hills covered in snow that made shadows over each other or a naked tree coming up out of the prairie, wearing nothing but white icing. I thought of drawing a diamond even, but I knew it wouldn’t shine right. There were sad things too. I did not avoid these because someday I thought maybe I would be an artist, and famous pictures are not always pretty. Some day I thought I’d paint the poor smashed barn cat caught in a puddle like a chewed-up stuffed thing, just north of Broken Bow. Or the burnt-out freight car laughing in the sun. Or Charlie’s face, crunched up over the steering wheel. At a roadside gas stop in Grand Island, I drew a picture of his face trying to hide how mad he was over not having money for a full tank. It wasn’t his fault, he said. He’d sure done his share. I worked on the picture for a long time, shading even the shadows under his eyes. I ripped out the page and handed it to him. Charlie took it as we sped away. Then he balled up my drawing, rolled down the window, and threw it out onto the empty road. I turned around to watch it go.

I said, “Hey, I worked hard.”

He said, “Sweet Christ, Caril Ann, I ain’t ugly like that. Stop your dumb drawing!”

I tried not to take it as an insult that he thought my picture was ugly, saying, “How come I love you you’re so ugly, then?” I patted his knee, though I was angry. I tried to be real nice. I always did, like it was my job. Sometimes he could be so low. I tried to remind myself I was his one true thing that mattered. I smiled over this fact to keep from crying and tried to forget all the rest. But I couldn’t. The car was gray inside with high seats and silvery details, and I fiddled with the radio, flipping by commercials to find a song. There was nothing on about us right then, so I found “Poor Little Fool,” and this was good because I was mad for Ricky Nelson. I went drifting off. For a time it was all OK to me.

But soon enough it was getting dark, with the gas gauge almost empty. Outside, a ghost moon hung in a faint blue sky. “Hey!” Charlie yelled, every time I closed my eyes. He pointed at the dash like he couldn’t believe what the needle was telling him. “Hot damn fireball, that’s red,” he said. He looked at me. “What you been doing this whole time while I drive besides dream?” He shook his head to scold me. “Why didn’t you tell me we got no gas?”

I didn’t say a word. I was hungry, but I would never say it to Charlie.

I did not say that the pancakes we ate so long ago had melted inside me like they had never been. I had not eaten much, sitting there in that library with winter light coming through the window and the deaf maid making those sounds right there in the closet for everyone to hear. Upstairs in the room the lady had told me, If he loved you he wouldn’t do this. But the lady didn’t get it. She couldn’t understand. I didn’t envy to be her, caught in a balance on the seesaw of Charlie’s plan.

Charlie drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. His shoulders were hunched up by his ears. He studied me a moment. Then he reached over and tweaked my arm. “Hello?” Charlie held his hand up to his ear like he was talking on the telephone. “Hello, operator? Can you please connect me to the girl of my dreams?” It was our old routine, but instead of taking the call I rolled my eyes to the ceiling of the car and watched the shadows pass.

Charlie turned fast and looked at me in the dark of the car like he was trying to tell what I thought. I pretended a yawn. Putting my hand in the pocket of the coat I felt the necklace, wishing it would take me someplace else, and looked out the window. We were getting only static on the radio now, voices coming in and out. A little dab will do ya: Brill Cream. Vick’s. Finally I just turned it off. I wondered if anyone had found that lady yet.

Charlie smacked his palms on the edge of the wheel. He reached over and yanked at the collar of my coat. “What’d you do that for? There might be something on about us.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “They’re not talking about what you did,” I said. “No one cares.”

Soon the moon turned silver and shone so bright we could see without headlights. We were miles from Valentine yet. Charlie didn’t know if we had one gallon left in the Packard or one hundred. Finally, I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Maybe you can’t do a thing about this, but it’s just too bad to run out of gas after all the crazy things you got away with, Charlie.”

Charlie’s breath came out when he spoke in plumes of cold. He turned slow to me in the dark. He said, “The only crazy I ever been is crazy for you, Caril Ann.” Tears collected in the pockets of his eyes. I could see them shining. He wiped one away with the heel of his hand and sucked the wet back through his nose.

It had been a cruel thing for me to say. He was very tired. He had done so much. It was cruel because I knew he would never do me harm: this whole thing being for me, he always said, everything back in Lincoln and then all this. After Valentine would come the Pine Ridge Reservation, where Jonny Magpie’d let us drive on through, then a place called Saskatchewan, where we would make our home in peace forever and I had the diamonds to get us going. I wondered if people would understand us up at the end of the world. I had imagined new sights to draw, big antlers to try to get right, and the sun on mountains which I have never seen.

I wanted to throw up my hands and laugh and cry. Sometimes it got so tiresome to make everyone happy. I kissed him instead, to make it up. I kissed him deep. I trailed my pinkie over his blue jeans in tiny circles. “I want to make your babies,” I whispered in his ear, on account of there being nothing else to say.

“You’re too young to have babies,” Charlie said. “That baby would break you clear in two squeezing on out.” He didn’t blink but kept on staring at the road. His eyes went dry. He looked ahead like I didn’t exist.

*   *   *

We were passing a tangle of brush when I saw the barn over his shoulder, just in time. So I pointed my finger and grabbed the arm of his cold leather jacket. The barn rose up dark from under the moon, a little way back from the road. It was a chewed hand with no light and no warmness, and broken boards. Where the land ended in a smooth roll, a house stood with only one porch light. Behind the barn was a fringe of trees. Charlie veered left off the highway, between the bushes, with no word to me for finding it. Real silent, he barely poked his foot to the pedal, like he was trying not to wake the world.

When Charlie spoke it was to justify. “We got no choice. If I have to do it again for a gas gallon, Caril Ann, I’ll do it again if it comes to that. I won’t care.”

“I know, Charlie,” is all I said. There was no doubt to me he wouldn’t care. He’d blow up the world for a stuffed dog, if he thought I wanted it enough.

Charlie ground the car over ice and we jumbled off the drive behind the barn, into a stand of frosted trees where a tractor laid buried under a hunk of snow that had loaded up on the seat. All this we could see by the light of that moon, and the doors to the barn stuck open a small bit in the ice. Charlie shut off the car, and the dash went black. The world was silent. He got out. There wasn’t any wind. Cold air bit me on the face. I put the necklace in the glove box so Charlie wouldn’t know about it. He reached in back for the .22. “Get out,” he said.

I buttoned the coat and held the wide flaps around me. He opened my door and drug me by the elbow out of the car. Charlie was not usually so rough. He was jittery and bent out of shape. He would be sorry for it later and try and nuzzle up to my heart, only I would push him off. I could do that. I had means to make my own way. I held on to his arm. Charlie and me both slipped on the ice and caught each other like lost lovers. I could see his eyes searching me, dim in the dark. The gun fell against my arm. My hand smacked the barrel. Everything hurts more when the air is cold, and I caught my breath for the nasty bruise. We passed on through, into the barn. It was so dark we couldn’t even hope to find a gas can, and I remember the smell of farm animals and the sound of them shifting in their stalls. Pale blue light fell over Charlie’s face, and he grabbed my arm.

I shrugged him off. I just walked farther into the darkness like I wasn’t scared at all.

He followed after me. He whispered, “Caril Ann. Where are you?” He was no good at seeing in the dark, and somewhere along the way he had lost his glasses. He said, “Give over that coat to cover the window so we can get some light.”

Charlie was holding the gun and standing in the middle of the darkness leaning on his bowed left leg. He was appearing a shadow of himself, confused in things he couldn’t see. He didn’t make a move for me. He just stood there.

“Don’t be sore at me, Caril Ann,” he said. “I’m all you got.” But he was wrong, on account of me having the lady’s jewels.

I took off the coat then, button by icy silver button, because Charlie was only wearing the one T-shirt underneath and I felt sorry for that, and the coat wasn’t mine to keep anyhow. I tossed it at him. It flapped over his arm, and the buttons clinked the rifle in a happy silver cry. But there was nothing happy about tonight.

Because we did not find any gas after all, because we were tired and hungry and cold, we turned off the light, took down the coat from the sill, and wrapped ourselves up in it. That’s when I unbuttoned my shirt and hoped for nature to take its course. We had made it in garages, and in a drain tunnel behind the capitol building, almost on top of the O Street viaduct, in his work truck once, he got so needy. But Charlie didn’t want it now. He shifted himself over in a flake of hay and said, “I’m fixed to go up to the house and cause some trouble. There’s nothing else to do.”

I said, “Later,” and he was silent a moment. Then he whispered in my ear. “Caril Ann.” His breath was cottony and shallow. “The thing that gives me faith is you. If I go down you’ll be there to cry.”

“Sure, Chuck,” I said. “Shhh.”

He nestled his head in my armpit. His eyes glittered at me in the dark like a scared little animal. I wondered if they were tearing. “Do you think I’m mean,” he asked, “or just bad?”

I thought for a moment about what he would want me to say. “Bad,” I said. “Not mean. Like James Dean.”

“No,” he said. “It’s the other way.”

“OK,” I said. “Hush.” It was cold, but I kept my shirt opened anyhow, and if I had a skirt I would have pulled it up like the other Carol, the one that was dead. I scratched my fingers through his slicked back hair till his chest went heavy with sleeping from under the coat.

*   *   *

I laid there a spell, stiff as wood, listening to his breath. Then I rolled slow from under the coat so as not to shift a thing. The bracelet slid down my arm, cold and tugging at me. The prickly straw stuck in my back and my hair, and I didn’t even breathe. But Charlie, he just laid there like a little baby in a patch of moon with his ducktail hair, shoe-polished to hide the red, slopped over his brow. I slipped between the doors fast and smooth as oil. I slipped over the field with the dead cornstalks rustling at the edges, with only the big moon hanging over to watch. I was shivering with my whole body tense and pounding. If he didn’t think of me, I would have to think for myself.

I followed that porch light of the house, winking at me with a little dark secret. My body was weak from not eating or sleeping proper in so long, and my hands clutched each other down my pants to be warm. I thought of myself melting over the snow and my cowboy boot prints behind me left like Indian legends, and how people would find them days after we passed safe on through. They would be saying, “Who was that masked lady?” And maybe she would breathe down their necks, and draw pretty little pictures in blood while they dreamed, and leave them on pillows like symbols to find. S.O.S.: save your selves.

I moved closer to the house, on up to the back door, a different color than the white wood. I crept with trying not to make a sound toward the house and all those frosty windows. There wasn’t a breath, and nothing moved. There were three steps up, and I thought I’d try the door before lifting a window and swinging myself in like a burglar. I pulled back the screen with only a mild creak. The knob turned in my hand. I stepped inside and closed the door behind. I went quiet and leaned up against the wood, my breath held, waiting for some ape-shit dog to come rushing at me. Now I imagined it ruining everything, waking the house with barking and biting. But it wasn’t like that. It didn’t happen like that at all. Making as if to laugh in my face, some mangy old thing shifts up out of the dark corner and starts beating his tail like I’m the best thing he ever saw. The dog, so old he could barely walk, hunkered over with his nails clicking and licked my hand without so much as a growl. I bent down my face to the bugger and scratched his ear, and we were friends forever.

It was a long dark kitchen I was standing in, with the moon shining through the window and over a sink that had dishes stacked beside it, and an icebox shifting with new electric noises. Me and the old boy padded over to the box like there wasn’t a thing to fear. I opened the metal door slowly. I kneeled down and stuck in my head with the dog right beside, my straight hair falling tangled around my eyes, my bracelet twinkling with success. These were real family foods people had long dinners over. Nothing like the lady’s high cupboards in Lincoln with her minty fashion cookies and chocolates. Here there was a half-eaten up chicken wrapped in cellophane, a bowl of peas and mashed potatoes, and a tin of tiny gold kernels of corn. There were sweet things too: a jar of pears, runny and sweet, and some chocolate mass on a plate with crust broke in it, most likely pudding pie. I made for this, lifted off its wrapping, and stuck in my finger. I brought the sweetness to my lips, then dipped a piece of crust into the pudding and crunched it. It tasted so good, melting down my throat. I swiped in my finger again and lifted it up for the dog, who was at my shoulder, panting down my neck. He wrapped his grateful warm tongue around it from under his old muzzle. He licked. I patted his head. I whispered, “You love Caril, don’t you, boy?”

There was the sound of a chair then, scooting back across the floor to tell me I was not alone. My heart kicked up. My hand smacked the pie plate as I pulled it back. It shattered in globs around my feet. I kneeled there frozen, as the light snapped on.

A man was standing by a wood table against the wall, staring at me as if I had crawled out of his own head and come to life. His hand still rested on the light switch and I did not breathe. He held an alcohol drink up close to his face. He could not let it go in the brief moment, it seemed, but clutched it for a sort of belief in what he saw. He didn’t say a word. His hair was tossed over his eyebrows with pieces of gray. The man wore blue pajamas with stripes and nothing over them. It seemed I had waked him from a very deep sleep. The dog was licking the spilled pie splattered around me. There was only the sound of his tongue sliding over my boots.

“Edna always has good taste.” The man pointed over at the spotty dog with his drink, as it ran its wide pink tongue along an edge of chocolate. The man let go the wall and put his hand at his side.

My blood went thundering through my veins so much I couldn’t hear. He just stood, waiting for me to say something.

I breathed deep. I said, “Edna deserves what she wants,” as if I had every reason to be where I was. I moved forward a space from the cold metal door. My foot crunched a piece of plate. “Funny name for a dog.” I reached down slow to pat her head without moving my eyes from the man where he stood. I did not act afraid, but I was ready to run if he made a move. My heart was coiled and about to spring. I said, “I thought sure she was a he, she liked me so much.”

The man thought I was funny, and I was very pleased for this. He smiled a touch. He seemed to look in my face. This was a good sign he did not know who I was, standing in his kitchen. After all, it wasn’t a thing to smile about. I tucked my face behind my hair and peered at him through the curtain of it. “This old dog’s my only woman left,” he said. “She’s the only loyal thing I know.” He sat down heavy in the chair and put his drink on the table. He called the dog over and petted her on the head.

“Well, someone must love you a lot to make all that good food you got in there.” I said, pointing at the icebox. I looked down. “Sorry I broke the plate.” I said this though I had no idea how to explain my being there and sticking my finger in the pie. All I could do was pretend a naturalness.

“I’ve been waiting for my wife. I’ve been sitting here waiting two nights for her to come back through that door, dragging her suitcase. I thought sure it was her when I heard the door, but it’s just you,” he said, as if I was supposed to be sorry for being me, and not his old bag. “Some little girl.”

“I’m not so young as I look.” I pitched my chest out a little from under my shirt. I swung my hair behind my shoulder. “She wasn’t smart to leave you,” I said. The man looked up at me from the bottom of his empty glass.

He reached below and picked up a bottle from beside his chair, and stood it in the center of the table. He crossed his legs, looking from the bottle to me like it was a deep mystery we came to occupy that same place. “May I offer you a drink then, madam?” he said with the play of a smirk at the corner of his mouth. He leaned back and kicked a bare foot against the wood leg of the table. It was pale and long as no foot I’d ever seen. The man crossed his arms over his pajamas. The bottle rocked and jiggled. The alcohol rippled. “Do you take bourbon?” He closed his eyes like it hurt too much to see. Then he leaned forward and put his head in his hands.

I brushed the metal back of a chair with my fingers. A doorway spilled my eyes down a warm, dark hall. I imagined his wife moving along it in the night. I imagined her with lipstick, and the city hairdo I have always wanted, pulling a red suitcase quiet over the carpet while he slept. I imagined her closing the door and not looking back, and why would she do that, leave this big warm place, and all of it for what sort of better things? I held one wrist in my other hand and lifted up the cuff of my shirt a bit so the man could see the gold bracelet I wore, so he could see I was not just some tramp spat out of the cold.

“Is your wife making for Hollywood?” I asked. “’Cause that’s where I’m headed.”

He opened his eyes. He stared at me a moment like I had just appeared, and squinted like he might be upset. Then he let out a huge laugh, and for a minute all the sorrows were gone from his eyes. It was a wonder I could do this for a man so sad. He slapped his hands down on the table like I was the funniest thing that ever lived. I would have painted him in deep blues and a charm. He would have liked it. He would have hanged it on the icebox with a sharp little magnet. The man said, “That’s unlikely, sweetheart. My wife’s not very talented. Vegas would be more her type of place.” He poured himself another drink and slammed it back like a stiff-drinking cowboy, though he was an elegant man with that long nose, those deep eyes, and that light skin. There was a sweet shadow of gray over his chin.

“I’ve been told I’d be good on television,” I said, “but my real talents lie in painting and polite conversation.” I got guts up from somewhere, and I pulled up a chair and sat down across from the man. I pushed out my wrist across the table for him to see the bracelet and said, “I got this before I left. It’s an heirloom of my family.”

He looked down at the shiny gold, never disbelieving I would have it. He took my wrist then in his neat hands. He turned his eyes to my face with a long expression. Then he let go my wrist and poured more from the bottle without taking his eyes from my face. The dark liquid hung below the label.

“Have a drink with me,” he said.

“I don’t take alcohol,” I replied, smiling with a great sweetness I am capable of. I said, “Got any pop?” I shifted my hands under my thighs. I imagined us—the man and me—and how we looked, sitting at the table. We were frozen in the bright frame of the kitchen, a happy little picture in the cold dark night. Outside the wind slammed and tossed dead husks of corn, yawning through the empty hills. Maybe Charlie was shifting in his sleep or grabbing my body for warmness and coming up with a handful of straw. This thought filled me with a wonder.

The man nodded his head, like all he wanted was me happy. He got up, went to the cupboard, and reached down a cola. Then he dropped the bottle. The old dog nosed it along the baseboard, but the man did not make to pick it up. He reached me another and smacked off the cap on the side of the table. There was a force behind his movement, as he put the cola before me with a great flurry and then stepped back. The man ran his long fingers up through his hair and stuck them there an instant. His eyes went strange, and he looked me up and down, sitting in his kitchen like it was the first time I appeared.

He asked, “How did you get here all by yourself?”

I didn’t know what to say then. I folded and unfolded my hands around the pop bottle. I said, “I came from Lincoln.”

This seemed to be an all-right answer. He put his hands at his sides and cleared his throat. “Is there anyone else I should know about, trespassing on my property?” He didn’t seem mad about it, only jealous maybe, like all he wanted to know was where things stood between us.

I looked down into the mouth of my pop, with my hair falling around me to hide the redness in my face, like I would do at school for not knowing the answer. I could feel him watching me, waiting.

Then I looked up at him and straight into his eyes to make him see he was the only one for me. His eyes were brown and soft. They seemed to understand. I shook my head earnest. I said, “No, only me. Cross my heart. I swear.”

He nodded his head slowly. He said, “Excuse my impoliteness. Nature calls.” He stared down at his feet a moment and went toward the door. He turned his face over his shoulder and looked at me sitting. He said, “Don’t budge your pretty body.” He smiled at me like a full glass of water in a dry empty desert and disappeared down the hall.

Things were OK with us the way they weren’t with me and Charlie. The dead girl with her skirt pulled up didn’t matter. I sat tight, sipping pop. I did not think of leaving. There was a thing between the man and me. I knew that now. I sat listening to sounds in the house, the man’s footsteps somewhere, and a door closing, the dog’s wet nose sniffing the broken plate on the floor. The dog laid down beside my chair with a heavy sigh. She put her gray nose between her two paws. I was wondering offhand what I should do about Charlie and his rifle, but I wasn’t real worried yet. He would never hurt me. It seemed far off, the morning when he would wake up, wanting trouble, and me being right beside him like I’d been there all the night, watching the moon through a board in the barn.

The man came back after a few minutes. He paused in the door, a soft colored sketch on a coal-black background. He lifted his fingers to his hair and rubbed them through, watching me sit there, sipping his pop in the middle of the night. I smiled to give him a little boost. I put my knee up on the chair and leaned my chin on it. My hair swayed around my leg. I pulled him over the floor with my eyes. He came over then, to my chair. He had put on socks that drug out from his toes when he walked. The man’s pajamas were misbuttoned and rumpled like he had taken them clear off to use the john and put them back on all wrong. He seemed not to know what to do, and me sitting there. It occurred how someone like me could save a man like him. I could put him to bed, pull the blankets to his chin. No one would know the better, me lying here forever, losing myself in the squeak of a brass bed. It was all right with me to make my own choice, to shed Charlie like an old skin for someone who appreciated my gifts, to leave him lying empty on the road, the wind screaming through his teeth for me having gone.

The man looked at me very close. I didn’t reach out and squeeze his hand or cry for all the things gone wrong. I didn’t throw myself at his feet and beg him to tuck me away in some old forgotten room upstairs. I stood beside him with a realness I have never felt. I balanced on my boot tip. I reached up below his collar, where the buttonhole was skipped. My finger grazed his cheek. His hair fell in his eyes. He looked down in my face, and his lips, very close, smelled strong with a whiskey I wanted to wrap around me like an old blanket, like I was very small. He did not move an inch. I could feel the nearness of that open place between his legs like a target I was not sure of hitting. I had spent nights sleeping in cars or in houses where people were dead. I smelled used by the nasty things I had seen. They hung around me like a bad taste. But I pretended I was the most beautiful woman. I pretended I belonged here. I kept on going. I took the button between my fingers. I pulled it through the hole and whispered in his ear, “Let me straighten you out. You’re all messed up.”

The man plucked off my fingers one by one. He wove them through his hand. He ran his thumb along the edge of mine. He squeezed the bones tight. He ground them together. He stared into my face. He bent his mouth to the inside my ear. Then he shoved me off. I fell back into a chair. My head hit the table with a shock. “Why don’t you get out of here,” he told me, “before I call the sheriff.”

*   *   *

Charlie was no longer asleep by the window when I thrust myself into the barn, cold and shaking. The moon hung over the empty straw like a spotlight. It was matted from where his body had laid. I had no idea how long it had been since I left or how long he had been awake. My whole self went strange with a shaking I could not control. I looked around in the glowing blue darkness of the barn. I wanted to gag all over the ground for ruining everything. I wanted to throw myself up at the feet of the empty sky. The cows shifted and lowed from their sweet heaven of warmness. I started to cry for hating the man and what he did. Little sounds came out of myself like the black poodle I had seen in Lincoln, hiding under the blood-splattered dust ruffle in the boy’s room with its neck broke by Charlie’s rifle.

It had twisted its head all strange and was mewling in pain. I had been glad of the boy not being there to see his dog like that. I had been glad of his mother too, too hurt to ever see all that we’d done. But there was no reason to have hurt the little dog.

“Where you been, Caril Ann?” Charlie was sitting on a bale of hay, the lady’s coat throwed over his shoulders. The .22 was across his lap. I saw the metal by the moonlight, glinting like a surprise for me in the darkness. But it was not aimed on me, so I knew he could not know the whole story of what I had done in the house. He would have shot himself right there for my behavior. So, it was a great responsibility I held, to make it right.

I said, “I went to pee, Charlie.” I could not help the crying and the shaking, or my throat closing up, and the sickness in my heart to look at him with that gun, and to think about the grown man shoving me against the chair.

He stared at me and shaked his head. “Where’d you pee, Caril Ann, the moon? You think I’m dumb?”

“No.” I cried some more and kicked at the hay bale with the tip of my boot. I could feel the snot running down, and the tears, and how no one right would want me ever.

“Don’t lie to me.” He said, “Sweet Christ, Caril Ann, do anything but don’t lie.” He stood up. The gun was dragging like a part of his foot on the floor of the barn. He was not thinking about it.

I knew it might be all right then, that he really couldn’t know how bad things were. He was quaking with a madness, but it was not for hating me. “I’m not dumb. I know things about the world you don’t know about, ’cause you always have me to save you from them. You got it easy. It’s harder for me. Sometimes I hate it.”

I fought back my tears. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. I thought a moment about how to fix it. There wasn’t any other choice but to love him.

I went over to him, to make him feel strong. My tears were still running down. I felt sick inside. I said, “I went to snoop for gas around back.” I held him a minute. He smelled like shoe polish and grease. He was a shell, a boy with bow legs so wide a pig could run through, who everyone teased, and a spray of pimples over his cheek. I buried myself in him and said, “I’m sorry to have left.”

He narrowed his eyes and grabbed my hair in his free hand. He said, “You shouldn’t have did that, but there’s no sense crying.” He held me away and looked in my face. My heart was yelling in my ears because I knew this is where I deserved to be no matter how I hated it. He put the lady’s coat over my shoulders. I didn’t want it anymore, but I hugged it around me. “It’s not your fault you don’t know how it all works.” Charlie petted me on the head. “You don’t know better than to play along. I know a thing or two. They try to teach you in school to be nice and fair, but there’s no such thing.”

“You’re right, Charlie.” I sniffled.

“People take one look and think ’cause you haul trash you are trash,” he went on. “It ain’t fair.”

“I know,” I said. “No one’s gonna melt the ice off your grave when hell freezes over.” Charlie smiled at me for finishing his line. I reached over and kissed his cheek. It was cold, with little bristles of hair, and smelled sour as milk. I looked down and moved my feet in the dirt. I stared at them like they were separate from my own, moving without my thoughts to tell them where to step. I felt sorry about what I had to do now. The gun was heavy against Charlie’s thin bow leg. I thought of the man’s face inside the house, and how easy it could end up like all the other faces I had seen lately, down the barrel of the gun, down on the clean kitchen floors or in bedrooms surrounded by lace, eyes empty and alone without a hint of pleading to Charlie left, without a hint of who they were or the things they’d done before we stepped on the scene in our bad little boots. This was my price to be paid.

“Is that thing loaded?” I said, pointing down at the gun with my head. I tightened my arms around Charlie like I could ride his bullet through a heart. I wished I was the same girl as when it all started, as when he found me that one day in the tree house crying to myself for all the things gone wrong, and I chose him to love because he chose me. The angriness inside him had seemed closer to something real than anything I knew.

“It is,” Charlie said of the gun. “It’s ready to go.”

“I’m scared, Charlie,” I said. “I’m scared he knows we’re out here.” I had stopped the crying.

“Who’s he?” said Charlie.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The farmer in the house. There’s lights on in the house, I saw. I think we’re done for.” I put my face in his shoulder.

Charlie’s muscles were waiting to spring. He held me close. “We ain’t done for, whoever he is,” Charlie said. He pushed me away and went to combing his hair through his fingers.

It seemed in that second I never had so much as a choice in anything. I felt I would always be paying someone else’s price for the things that happened.

I rested my elbow on the window ledge. I looked down at the lady’s gold bracelet and twisted it around my wrist. Her diamonds felt very far away. Charlie was pacing around in back, working himself up. He said, “Caril Ann, I think after we do this thing we gotta ditch the Packard.”

“I don’t want to ditch it,” I said, but I was looking out at the moon and he did not hear. The tears started up again with all my heavy thoughts, but Charlie couldn’t tell from my voice. I didn’t make a sound. I lifted my sleeve to my nose and wiped it around. That’s when I thought I saw something, a trace of silver from the bushes that caught the corner of my eye from the dark. A fast motion that caught me in its likeness to Charlie and the way we moved together. It was someone—a man—and that’s when I first suspected they had found us.

I had not imagined them creeping around in the dark outside a barn on the edge of Valentine, over the rippled land, their feet barely whispering through frozen husks of corn, waiting in the shadows to spring on us from the darkness. That was our game. I had imagined it happening right after we left Lincoln, looking back over our shoulders, our necks twisted to meet the shots, or much later, way far outside this state in a world of green where we thought we were free. But you change your choice to suit the situation. This time I could see through to the other side and pick the way I wanted it to be.

I stepped away from the window. I stood against the wall. “Charlie,” I whispered. I tried to be still and not panic. I tried to think what to do. I held my wrists together behind me and fingered the bracelet because I didn’t want it anymore. I found the clasp and worked my nails to pull it back. The gold tickled my skin as it fell to the cracks.

“What?” Charlie said. “What’s wrong?” He had stopped the pacing. I could see his eyes full in the moonlight, looking at me from the corner of the barn.

I did not say a thing then. My voice was stuck.

“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I got it all figured out.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not that.” My heart pounded in my chest. I pointed sideways at the window. I picked up my head. “I want us to keep the Packard.”

“Well, we can’t,” said Charlie. “It’s no good for us. And the radio’s busted up anyhow.”

“Have it your way,” I said. My voice never even tremored. I walked away from him, across the barn.

“Don’t be sore,” said Charlie. “We’ll get another.”

I didn’t answer him. I kept my back to him. I didn’t look behind. I was like the magic man at the Lincoln County Fair who pulled the nickel from my ear last August. I was doing my own trick. I felt like that. Anything could happen anywhere. You just had to make a choice and stick to it. I rolled open the barn door, and the dark world spilled out in front of me. In that instant I could see all the way to Valentine. The sand hills rolled up to meet my heart. The lights twinkled. Then the wind bit my eyes and I couldn’t see a thing. “Help!” I cried, as loud as I could, to the empty wind. My voice met with a silence. It echoed on forever.

“Jesus, Caril Ann!” I heard Charlie say.

“He’s hiding in the barn!” I screamed. I stepped out farther, but then—I couldn’t help it—I didn’t know what to do. I looked over my shoulder back into the barn to see if he had the .22 pointed my way. I thought maybe it was over and I was done for, that he had finally had it. But Charlie was standing in the shadows without the gun. He wasn’t even holding it. He would never hold it on me no matter what I did. I knew that now. I could see through the dark, his arms held out to me, his palms facing up and empty toward where the sky would be without the roof.

Then lights came at me from somewhere. They yelled for me to get away from the barn. I let go a sob. I couldn’t see a thing. I stumbled toward where I knew they must be. I lifted my hands in front of my face to show I had not a thing to hide, not even that bracelet. One officer reached for me. I could feel his hands dig in my arms.

I squinted up in his face. “You don’t need to do that. I’m trying to help.” But he cuffed me up rough anyhow, like a real killer, though I had not done a thing wrong. I pressed my cheek to his badge, but he wouldn’t hold me nice. He pushed me away rough, like a piece of trash, and held me still to see Charlie get pulled from the barn by two more lawmen. Instead of fighting, Charlie was crying, his chin tucked down to his chest like he didn’t have a thing left in him. “You goddamn baby,” I whispered. “I’m not crying.”