Five

“Holy shit!” exclaimed Royce.

A wall of red cows in the windshield. The Angel swerved, the car fishtailed left, then right across the road with a sound like a giant rag tearing. The Angel yelled out, jerking the wheel back again to regain control. For a moment the front of the car seemed to straighten—cows behind them now—then a mighty force whipped and they plunged into a ditch.

The car suddenly seemed light, yet was as unguidable as a sled in the air. One bump, they tilted crazily up; another bump and they were rolling. The windshield flashed green blue, green blue, how many times?—till a bone-crunching jolt brought everything to a halt. Only the windshield continued the sense of their momentum. With a sound like static the glass buckled and veined into spiderwebs, quivered and cracked: then that stopped, too. The glass did not fall out, but there was nothing to see.

In that nothing, time shrank to a dot—and disappeared.

No one moved.

The engine whirred, and when Mr Nice Guy collected his wits and saw his surroundings again, even the sunlight seemed bent inside the car. He reached forward, pushed down one knee, then another, shakily unfastened his seatbelt, and leaned in from the back seat to turn off the ignition. “Hey, you fellows all right?” he asked, nudging their backs. “Hey, guys?”

Slowly The Angel pulled away from the steering wheel, moaning, clutching his chest, blood streaming from his nose and down his chin, while Royce didn’t move at all. His face was in the dashboard radio. “Hey! Hey!” Mr Nice Guy poked him. During the confusion, the futile attempts to open the crumpled car doors and to rouse Royce (blood seeped around one ear and now pattered audibly on the floor mat), Mr Nice Guy’s mind was clear about one thing—they should get out of the car promptly, in the event of a fire. He told them so.

“Whuhhh …”

Gasping, his lips bobbing out of the red pool of his face, The Angel looked back at him in the rear-view mirror like a fish choking in gore, trying to reply. He still hugged his chest where the steering wheel had branded him.

“This way!” shouted Mr Nice Guy. Lifting a leg, he kicked out the rest of his passenger window. The jagged glass chinkled away. “We can get out through here!”

The Angel groaned in pain; it was soon obvious that he could not bend or twist around into the back seat, so Mr Nice Guy helped him by rearing as high as he could, taking aim with his heel, and kicking out the cracked window next to The Angel. A minute later, after Mr Nice Guy had crawled out his window, he managed to pull and lever The Angel out of the car. “That’s it, that’s it! C’mon, baby, push, push! You can do it!” Once they were able to coordinate their efforts, it made all the difference. He slid out into the waiting light. “Atta boy! Yes! Yes! Yes!” Now The Angel sat upright in the weeds. His head turned slowly, taking in the trees and sky, purple swelling bloating his face. He let out a bleat. Mr Nice Guy found his footing and trotted excitedly along the ditch, unhurt, shaking broken glass out of his hair. “I’m so sorry, I really should’ve insisted that you and Royce use your seatbelts. For God’s sake! Even if you didn’t want to hear it, I should’ve insisted. Isn’t that the way?” He bent over and squinted into the wreck.

“Auhhhhh,” said The Angel.

“How we gonna do it? What do you think? We have to figure out a way to pull him free.”

“Noo, oh.” With two grunts The Angel stumbled out of the ditch, arms flapping at his sides. Kicking up dust before him, he began limping down the gravel road.

“Wait!” called Mr Nice Guy.

“Motherfucking cows!” cried The Angel. He coughed once and spat ferociously, and with this action seemed to recover his speech. Blood on his face and shirt, he paused to pick up a rock and chuck it at a fat red cow grazing at the edge. The rock fell short in the grass, and the cow slowly raised its head, looking first at The Angel and then at the smashed wreck of the car, chewing. “We get out and make it all this way and now look what stops us—cows! I can’t believe it! Get off the road!” The Angel screamed. “Get back in your fences!” He seized a handful of rocks and threw them, spraying the cow and two of its sisters close by. Rocks rained on their backs and flanks, which sent them huffing down the ditch, crashing through the weeds.

“We have to pry him loose!” called Mr Nice Guy, pulling with all his strength on Royce’s door handle, but to no avail. The crumpled car body made opening the door impossible. “Hey, come on, give me a hand!”

The Angel didn’t answer, continuing on foot down the center of the road, cursing. For over a minute Mr Nice Guy tried to force the door by himself but it wouldn’t budge. Though the window glass on this side of the car was shattered, it would’ve required a Hercules to extract Royce at this upward angle without the help of another person, especially since Royce couldn’t cooperate, either. No matter how much he called to him or pounded on the metal to rouse his attention, Royce didn’t stir.

“I’ll be back. Just hang on, okay?”

Mr Nice Guy climbed out of the ditch and hurried after The Angel, repeating to himself: Mustn’t panic. Mustn’t panic. There’s got to be a way. The first farmhouse we come to, we’ll go right in and call an ambulance.

One hundred yards down the road he caught up with The Angel just as a glint appeared on top of a hill—a car approaching in the distance.

“Get down!” The Angel commanded, heading for the ditch weeds.

“But they could help us. We should stop them and get some assistance. For you, too. Look at you!”

“Get down!” Then The Angel stiffened, lifted a hand in the air, let it drop. He stared as if struck again. He had wiped off the blood on his face but wide smudges remained, which had begun to brown and dry, while around the edges of his nostrils fresh red still trickled and gathered on his upper lip. “I forgot the gun! Can you believe that? It’s still under the car seat!” He stamped in a circle, little clouds rising around him. “All because of those cows, those fucking cows!” A new energy seized him, and his arms worked wildly. He strummed the air and punched the side of his head several times, hard. “Can you believe that? Oh Gawd. Get down, asshole!”

Mr Nice Guy protested but The Angel didn’t wait to listen. He charged Mr Nice Guy and grabbed him under the armpits, pulling him toward the ditch. When Mr Nice Guy resisted The Angel kicked savagely at his shins to break his balance, and wrestled him down into the weeds. There The Angel pinned him to the ground, with one hand on his throat while the other went higher, hovering above the bridge of his nose.

“You open your big mouth, I’ll kill you right here with my own hands, you little troublemaker, I swear, I’ll stick these fingers into your eyes and dig into your sockets all the way into your brain till it kills you.” Bringing his face closer, he hissed, “You’re going to do as I say.” He breathed heavily. A red bubble formed at the end of one nostril, grew—then popped. Mr Nice Guy, weeds poking into his back and his shins singing, didn’t dare move. He barely inhaled, for there was no doubting the man’s sincerity. The balls of The Angel’s brown-stained fingers, their nails, were less than an inch away. The Angel made a digging motion with his nails, bringing them closer still, menacing; his breath came in rasping shudders. A short time later a car rattled past on the road above them.

Then, releasing Mr Nice Guy’s head from his grip with a dismissive shove, The Angel sat back on his haunches in the weeds. Talking aloud to himself, he began to fret. Should he run back to the car and get the gun? Would they be able to extract it from the wreckage? And what about the lost time? No doubt the passing car would’ve spotted the wreck in the ditch—those cows on the loose would’ve forced the people to slow down. Once more, The Angel cursed those beasts, those stupid, useless goddamn animals, those four-legged cunts! While he ranted Mr Nice Guy sat up and massaged his shinbones, then reached under his shirt, checking. The Angel saw him and demanded, “What you got there? A knife?”

He leaned toward Mr Nice Guy. Not threatening, but hopeful.

“No,” said Mr Nice Guy.

“What is it? What?” Without waiting for an answer he seized the front of Mr Nice Guy’s shirt and thrust his hand into it. Mr Nice Guy shouted out, not with pain, but from horror because The Angel moved so fast and with such sudden violence that Mr Nice Guy experienced an unnerving sensation that The Angel were capable, if he desired, of reaching in and ripping out something from inside him—his very heart. The Angel would take anything he wanted.

“Stop wiggling, for God’s sake!” The Angel said. “What is this? Dope?” he inquired as he slipped the paperclips off the envelope and tried to peer inside.

“No, it’s my father’s—” said Mr Nice Guy, leaning forward, hands and face tensing, concerned that The Angel might spill it.

But The Angel merely handed it back, uninterested. Mr Nice Guy gathered up the paperclips and before resealing the envelope, bent back the top flap to take one last look for himself. At that moment a breeze moved through the ditch and blew the contents away.

“Oh no! No!” cried Mr Nice Guy. His head jerked right, then left in dismay. He reached out with twitching fingers, trying to grasp the vanished powder in the air. But too late.

Oh, where?

Lost.

The Angel watched him with swollen eyes. A bruise formed a puffy purple line around the front of his head. “You sure we haven’t met before?” he asked, gingerly touching the line. “Ahh—ouch! Holy fuck. This is bad.” He felt his way around the circle. “It’s like I’ve seen you somewhere.”

Mr Nice Guy didn’t answer; he was contemplating the scattered dust of his inheritance.

“What’s your name?” The Angel suddenly demanded. “You haven’t said your name.”

Mr Nice Guy replaced the crumpled envelope in his shirt and told The Angel the truth.

The Angel pondered. “Renfrow? No, that name doesn’t mean anything to me. Still, it seems … you sure you weren’t ever on Death Row?”

Mr Nice Guy shook his head again but did not volunteer the rest of the truth, that he’d sat in the jury box. He was in no mood for small talk.

“Well, you must remind me of somebody out of the Pit.”

He shrugged, and the conversation was interrupted when another car crested the hill, windshield flashing in the sun. Once more they ducked in the undergrowth, lying flat as it rumbled past. This time Mr Nice Guy did not have to be told to lie still.

“The road’s too dangerous,” said The Angel when he peeked out of the ditch again, moving crablike through the weeds. “We can’t wander around in broad daylight like a couple of turkeys. That’s just asking for it. Our car’s been spotted so the cops will be here before too long.” He craned his neck the other way and pointed across a field. “See that farmhouse over there, those buildings? Let’s give that a try. We can cut cross country. We ought to find what we’re looking for in all that clutter.”

He made Mr Nice Guy climb the fence before him, and quickly they shambled across an open pasture toward a clump of trees, where they would be out of sight from the road. Mr Nice Guy returned to himself and took stock of the situation. Though sore and shaken and mighty leery of The Angel, he was still determined to call an ambulance for Royce as soon as he could reach a telephone. Maybe he could try it from the farmhouse. And he still wanted to do something for the family they’d tied up and gagged the previous night. He hadn’t forgotten them, oh no. Things sure had a way of accumulating, when you were free!

Not to mention the tricky matter of keeping an eye on The Angel at the same time, making sure he didn’t dig his fingers into somebody’s eyeballs, or worse. Out here you had to think of the future, too. And to top it off, he would have to find a way to give everyone the slip and run for the Billy Hare—soon.

Really, there was so much at once, now that he could choose.

“Come on,” The Angel said. “What are you waiting for?”