Good Behavior Page 16

  Philip had rolled blankets up under his sheet to make it look like he was still there. She came back to the phone, said he was gone. Gladine got dressed and drove to my parents’ house. The deputy sheriff came and made a report. Then they waited.

  A few hours later the Paradise County sheriff’s department called Mom and Dad. Their car had been used in a robbery in Illinois. About an hour after that, they called again, said a high-speed chase was under way outside a town called Burroughstown. They called back later and said we’d been arrested, and that they’d better come.

  So they drove to Illinois.

  What a nightmare.

  I had two hundred dollars in the bank in Brickville but, amazingly, I forgot to withdraw it. Two hundred dollars might have gotten us legally all the way to Utah—wouldn’t have had to rob anyplace until after the murder. Besides, I was beginning to think maybe executing Joan wasn’t such a good idea. When I told Philip, a little north of Dayton, that I might not kill her, he asked if we could stop anyway, if I minded if he fucked her.

  “Yes, I mind. Jesus …”

  “Just asking, dude.”

  Interstate 70 heading west for hours, forever, it felt like, and by the time we crossed the state line, we were almost out of gas and the engine was overheating. It had to be soon. Philip kept falling asleep and I woke him up again and again, asked him how the fuck he could sleep on the most important night of our lives. He said he had to piss. He either slept or pissed all night long. We walked into a rest area and he asked me if I had my piece, and I said of course. “Do you? Go get your fucking gun, man. Keep that thing with you at all times, dude. This is not a goddamn road trip to the Grand Canyon—we’re not on a fucking weekend vacation. Go get the fucking gun. I’ll wait here for you, keep an eye out.”

  In the harsh fluorescent light, Philip was pale, his eyes were red, and he looked like a little boy. He was fourteen years old and he thought I was going to take care of him.

  “Man, it’s like a dream,” I told him. “I could slaughter a whole family right now and not feel a thing.”

  We crossed the state line into Illinois.

  We pulled into a gas station and parked. The engine was too hot to go on. It was about three thirty in the morning and the place was dead. There was one guy inside, behind the register reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette. I went in and asked him if I could get some water for the radiator. He found me a bucket, showed me where the spout was out behind the building, even filled the bucket himself and carried it out to the front for me. Philip popped the hood and we opened the radiator. It was empty. The guy went back into the shop, back to his magazine; Philip and I went around to the rear of the car and leaned against the trunk, lit up cigarettes. Philip asked if this was the place.

  “No, man. This guy’s way too cool.”

  “Where, then?”

  I pointed to a place directly across the street—one of those giant truck stops, a mega truck stop, one with a full-size restaurant and oversize fueling area, practically a mall inside—but it was dead. There were no customers. The place was all lit up, but it looked like a ghost town.

  “You pump the gas,” I said. “And I’ll go inside, use the john. When you’re finished pumping, get back in the car, start it up, and slide back over into the passenger seat. Be real careful with the gas pedal—it’s touchy. If you flood the thing out, we’re fucked.”

  “Okay.”

  As I swung the door open and pocketed the .25 auto that I’d stolen from Dad—he must have hidden his .380; I couldn’t find it anywhere—Philip assured me that he had my back. “Anything goes wrong and I’ll open fire on the motherfuckers.”

  I said all right and headed for the door. It was a long walk from where the car was parked to the front door.

  I walked, strutted, looking around lazily like I was minding my own business. Looked back and Philip was already pumping gas.

  Hit the door and nodded to the guy behind the counter, noticed another guy crouched on the floor by the counter talking to him. This guy wore all white, a cook or dishwasher—I nodded to him too and headed for the restroom. Stood at the urinal and pretended to piss. I wore a navy blue trench coat with holes cut into the pockets—I slid the gun through the hole for practice. Smooth. Put the gun away and moved to the sink, turned on the cold water, looked at my bad self in the mirror. I was never so calm, never so in control as I was right then. Turned the water off, cracked my neck, smiled at that stone-cold hard-ass motherfucker looking back at me and headed out to do some business.

  “Don’t take this personal, man,” I said. “It’s got nothing to do with you. I just need the money.”

  The dishwasher was gone now, had gone back to the kitchen or out back to smoke a joint or whatever.

  I said, “I don’t want to hurt anybody,” and as I said this, I gripped the top portion of the automatic, slid it back and chambered a shell.

  The guy asked me if I wanted the checks too.

  “Nope.” I grabbed the stack of cash from his hand and backed out of the store, gun level with his chest. Ran to the car, jumped in, tossed the cash and the pistol at Philip—Philip whooped like he was out of his goddamn mind—and we drove away like the Billy the Kid, James Gang, Wisdom-style dumbasses we were—hadn’t even thought about wearing masks, hadn’t even thought about concealing the license plate—and when we got back out on the freeway, the engine was still hot.

  [ FIFTY-THREE ]

  I had a little over one week to go and I was beginning to feel it. For so long I had pushed away thoughts of home that now, when they began to crowd back in on me, it was as if I were imagining a mystical world coming back out of the mist and fog of the ancient past, revived, vivid, shimmering with promise. I called Mom every day now.

  “I’ve got your room vacuumed and dusted,” she said. “Your blankets and sheets are all washed and ready for you.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said. “I feel like I’m going to blow up. Every day it gets worse and worse. I can’t sleep.”

  “Well, you got to get your sleep.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you want to do after we pick you up?”

  “Go to McDonalds, get a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. Oh, my God! Just the thought of it blows my mind.”

  “Well, I think we can manage that.”

  “You know, I think I’m different now, Mom.”

  She was silent for a moment. “How so?” she asked.

  “I don’t know really. I just feel different. I feel like I’m able to appreciate things more.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know … everything.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “I know, honey. I know you are.”

  “I don’t want to keep doing this.”

  “I know.”

  [ FIFTY-FOUR ]

  It was a hot night, August, three thirty in the morning. The engine was still hot and the getaway car was stuck at forty miles an hour.

  “We can’t drive like this on the freeway, man. They’ll get us for sure.” I pulled off at the next exit, wound away from the freeway on one-lane dirt roads that cut between cornfields. The corn was five to seven feet tall. We had to find a spot to stop and let the car cool down. Philip had to piss. We drove and drove, slowly—dead silence except for the knocking engine of the Dodge.

  I couldn’t find a decent pull-off, so I stopped the car in the middle of one of those roads and cut the engine, killed the lights. There was a farmhouse about a mile away—I could see the lights from where we were—but aside from that there was nothing. Philip jumped out and ran down into the ditch to piss. I leaned against the hood, counted the money—a hundred and sixty-three dollars—not much, but more than either of us had ever had at one time. I set the bills on the hood and put the gun on top of them, lit a cigarette.

  “Philip, this is what all those guys must have felt, all those bank robbers and outlaws—like we crossed some lin
e, like we’re on the outside of everything now.”

  Philip nodded. “Fucking crazy, man.” He held the small stack of bills, not counting them but shuffling them again and again. He said, “I can’t believe we just fucking did that, man! We’re badasses, dude!”

  I didn’t know how far we’d gotten away from the freeway. All those roads looked the same. Dirt roads, cornfields, little patches of trees every once in a while. There was no other span of time so pure, when so many of my concerns had been eliminated, when I was so alive, as during that hour or so directly after the robbery.

  We sat on the hood and smoked for half an hour. Philip was elated, the happiest I’d ever seen him. He talked about California—didn’t know what he was talking about since neither of us had ever been there, but he said, “They’re gonna dig us in California, man.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because we’re badasses. They’re all badasses out there.”

  I didn’t say much. We’d just entered the peak of this trip, and a hundred and sixty-three dollars would not get us all the way to the West Coast—there would have to be more robberies, and things might get a lot worse. The plan all along had been that if we were stopped by a cop, the cop would be shot, and this would be the last trip either of us would ever take. As far as I was concerned, we’d probably never make it to California. I imagined us ending up like that scene in Bonnie and Clyde when they’re finally ambushed, blown to pieces by those cops with machine guns. Philip, I think, didn’t understand this aspect of the journey, that it might not have a happy ending. And it didn’t take long for my suspicions to be confirmed.

  After the engine had cooled and it was time to get back on the road, we started off in the direction we thought the freeway was. We entered a small city called Burroughstown at about four thirty in the morning.

  “What the fuck is this place? We didn’t come through here before.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Little redneck town. Customary grain elevators. The whole town was asleep—we were the only car on the road.

  We came to a stoplight.

  “Oh, fuck,” Philip said. “Oh, fuck, oh, fuck.” And I saw right away what he was oh, fucking about. We came to the intersection from the north. On the southwest corner there was a grocery store, and in the parking lot, facing the intersection, was a police cruiser, parking lights on.

  Philip said, “What the fuck are we gonna do, man?”

  I said, “We’re gonna be real cool about this. Just calm down.”

  Our light changed to green and we pulled forward, slow and easy. The cop pulled out behind us, began to follow at a distance of about thirty feet. Exactly twenty-five miles per hour, we crawled along. I made a left turn, the cop made a left turn. All of Philip’s blood had collected in his feet, and he looked like he was about to pass out.

  “Oh, my God, man,” he said. “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”

  Burroughstown was larger than I had thought. After a few minutes, there were three more cruisers following along behind us. Still at exactly twenty-five miles an hour, we were catching all green lights and this silent caravan kept moving. I told Philip to calm down. He was mumbling now.

  He looked back. “Oh, God,” he said again—more like yelped it. “There’s two more cops back there.”

  I looked in the rearview and, sure enough, there were now six cruisers, one behind the other. My gun had been on the seat between us, so I picked it up, checked the chamber to make sure it was ready to go, and held it in my right hand, in my lap.

  “I don’t want to die,” Philip said again, his voice weak. He had to force the words out.

  “You’re not gonna fucking die, man. Pick up your gun.” He seemed to shrink into the seat as if all the juice had gone out of him, as if his muscles had stopped functioning. “Philip, get your fucking self together.”

  When there were seven police cruisers in single file, all moving along behind our little maroon Dodge Aries, probably the entire Burroughstown police force, they finally decided to act. The instant their lights came on, I hit the gas. The roar of the powerful engines in the police cars filled the air. I jammed the gas pedal into the floor, and within seconds this absurd snake of vehicles, its whole body a mess of spinning lights, was shooting down the city street at ninety miles per hour.

  Philip was in a frenzy, spewing terrified gibberish into the dashboard. The gun was still in my right hand, both of my hands on the wheel. I was on the edge of the seat, hunched up over the wheel. I was screaming—screaming at Philip to get his fucking gun out.

  A cruiser tried to move up beside us, I swerved toward him, and he fell back. Red and blue lights were everywhere, bouncing off the houses that lined the street. Everything was a blur—we were running red lights, we were all over the road.

  Ninety-five miles per hour.

  A pickup truck pulled out in front of us at an intersection and just in time jumped the sidewalk to avoid the ugliest nine-car pileup Burroughstown would have ever seen.

  When we left the town behind, I could see that on almost every road connecting to the one we were on, there were blue and red lights moving in our direction. They were coming from everywhere. They were converging on us from every direction, and far ahead there were more coming toward us.

  “Philip, pick up your fucking gun and be a man, you fucker!”

  He had his mom’s little pearl-handled .22 pistol in his two open hands on his lap, and he was looking down at it with horror, yelling, “I don’t want to die, Nate!”

  “Fuck these bastards, Philip!” And as we passed the mouth of a little road where another cop sat, ready to pull out and join the caravan, I aimed the gun at him, about to shoot the cop, but we passed too quickly to squeeze off a round. Or maybe just for an instant, I was reasonable enough not to—Jesus, imagine if I had …

  “Fuck! They’re everywhere!” Philip screamed. The one coming toward us was getting closer and closer.

  “Hold on, man, we gotta get off this road.” I hit the brakes and cut the wheel to the right and the Dodge shot off the road, through a ditch, and into a cornfield. When the car came to a stop, fifty feet into the field and the engine dead, we jumped out simultaneously and ran off into the corn.

  [ FIFTY-FIVE ]

  They finally moved me back to P-13 about a week before my release. Timmon was still next door, and on the other side of him, in P-11, was Dicky the Grandma Slayer. Those poor bastards. In one of my books I’d read the term “signifying.” That’s when a prisoner is getting out soon and starts to signify this, whether verbally or through his general behavior (like not concealing his excitement), to those around him. To those who aren’t getting out, it can be quite upsetting. Well, I was a shameless signifier.

  “Timmon!”

  “What the fuck you want?”

  “Six days, motherfucker!”

  He and Dicky both yell, “Shut the fuck up!” And I laugh my ass off.

  “Six days, bitches, and I’m smoking cigarettes, and eatin’ pussy, gettin’ fucking laid, chowing on whatever goddamned food I wanna eat. Did I mention pussy? Did I mention that? I don’t want to forget that.”

  Day and night I went on this way.

  “Hey, Dicky! Dicky!”

  “Nate, please …”

  “FIVE DAYS, MOTHERFUCKER! HAHAHAHA!”

  On my last night in jail, I couldn’t sleep. I could barely believe I was getting out. Three hundred sixty days and I was walking out tomorrow. I paced. I tried to read, couldn’t, paced, harassed Dicky and Timmon, paced. I couldn’t contain myself.

  At one point Josh and Kline, two of the guards I was closest to, ran into my cell suddenly and attacked me, literally, and wrestled me to the floor.

  “Butt fuck him!” Josh yelled.

  I screamed my head off.

  Kline yelled, “He’s resisting, he’s resisting! File charges, quick!”

  “Fuck him and then charge him!”

  Then they calmed down, punch
ed me on the shoulder, shook my hand, and said if I ever came back, they were definitely going to butt fuck me.

  I said okay.

  Josh smiled. “Good luck,” he said. “I mean it.”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  Later I asked Dennis if I could hang out with Dicky for a while, play some cards, just to pass the time. So he took me down to Dicky’s cell, and we played rummy until the sun came up.

  Then I packed all my shit up in garbage bags. Leonard took me down for a shower, got the clothes I was arrested in out of the locker where they’d been stored for a year. They stuck me in P-1, to wait until eight o’clock.

  I was sitting on the bunk in P-1 with three hours to go. P-1, where it had all started. I remembered that cocksucker Arnold, wondered how he was faring in the big house, whether he’d been shanked or not. Probably.

  My cell door opened and Evans came in. He sat down on the other bunk.

  “So, what’s it gonna be, man?” he said. “Gonna see you come back here?”

  “I hope not.”

  “What, you think you got no control?”

  “Sometimes I feel like I don’t,” I said. I got up and leaned against the sink. “You know, man, sometimes I really feel like I can’t trust myself.”

  He shrugged. “Just keep doing the right thing.”

  “I’ve done the right thing before. Then I did the wrong thing.”

  “It can always be different.”

  We were quiet for a while. Then I said, looking at the floor, “I’m afraid of myself, man.”

  He looked up at me and nodded.

  “I’m really afraid of myself. I don’t know who the fuck I am half the time. I mean, I don’t know why I’ve done the things I’ve done. I don’t feel like I can just, you know, determine to save myself from destruction. I feel like it’s already arranged that I’m going to blow everything up. I feel like I’ll do the right thing, get everything in order, start school, get a job, maybe get my own place, and then suddenly one night I’ll just go out and rob some place and have no idea really why I did it. I’ll be sitting back in jail, wondering how it happened. I can’t trust myself. I can’t believe in the future, you know?”