Уильям Макгиверн - Odds Against Tomorrow

“The police want him now. Not only for the bank but for kidnaping. You heard. The FBI is here! They execute everyone connected with a kidnaping!”

“Sambo took the guy back home,” Earl said anxiously. “We didn’t hold him for ransom or anything, for Christ’s sake.”

“Earl, listen to me.” Lorraine took his face in her hands, forced him to meet her eyes. “We can’t tell him about this broadcast. Do you understand?” She was fighting to control her voice, speaking with the desperate clarity of a mother giving life-and-death instructions to a helplessly trapped child. “We must get away from him. The police are searching for a black man and a white man — we’ve got to leave him. We couldn’t go into a restaurant or a hotel or a drugstore with him. Even stopping for gas would be dangerous. We’d be stared at, talked about, questioned. People would remember a colored man traveling with a white couple. Don’t you understand that?”

“But there’s just one car. You expect him to make it on foot?”

“I don’t care, I don’t care. Just so we’re rid of him.”

“You can’t expect him to buy that deal.” Lorraine shook him roughly. “Will you listen? He will if he doesn’t know about that broadcast — if he thinks he’s still in the clear.”

“Good God, we can’t do that! The cops want him. We got to tell him that much for his own protection.”

“If you do he’ll stick to us like a plaster,” she said in a vicious whisper. “Tell him you heard the broadcast. Tell him the police aren’t looking for him — just you. Don’t say anything about the doctor. Maybe he’ll think the doctor gave him a break. You said the doctor might — you said that yourself.”

“You think he’ll believe me? He’s no fool, Lory.”

“You’ve got to make him believe it. Darling, darling, how can I get this into your head? We’re not taking the easy way out. There is no easy way. For him or us. If he travels with us we’ll be caught — all of us. Maybe he can make it on his own, get to his own people and find someone to help him. And maybe we can reach Mexico. We have a chance. But if we stick together, there’s no hope at all.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Earl said slowly. He rubbed his hand up and down his leg, trying to force some heat into his body. “I hadn’t thought of that, Lory.”

With a movement that caught him completely by surprise, she stood and picked up the radio. “Tell him he’s still in the clear. Tell him he can go on alone.” She raised the radio high above her head, then let it drop to the iron-hard floor.

The plastic case cracked with a sound like splintering ice, and shining screws spun around his feet in giddy little circles.

“You tell him he’s safe,” she said. “Tell him you heard that just before I stumbled against the table and knocked over the radio. Do you understand?”

“All right,” he said very quietly. It seemed important to conserve all his strength now; his wound ached dully, and he felt suddenly weak and empty, without weight or guts of any kind. “I guess I have to.”

“Yes, you have to.”

A shrill laugh sounded behind them, and Lorraine turned quickly, a hand moving to her throat. Crazybone stood in the kitchen doorway, the light glinting on her rimless glasses, and a childishly malicious smile brightening her tiny face. “Time to make Pop’s breakfast, dearie,” she cried with a pointless air of triumph. “Want to help me drag his bed back where it belongs?”

“Yes, I’ll help you,” Lorraine said in a stiff, unnatural voice.

“He fusses if he’s around the food,” Crazybone said, jerking and twisting her head about like a confused hen. “Tries to get at it.” She laughed and patted her thin gray hair with a coquettish gesture. “I never had the meanness to teach him manners, starve him a little bit. It would be easy in the winter when he can’t move around. I will sometimes, I swear. Just starve him a little.” She moved her head in a pecking gesture at Lorraine. “Oh, I’m bad, all right. Bad and sinful. But I don’t go around breaking up folks’ furniture. Not without cause. Come on now, help me drag Pop’s bed in here. Lend a hand, dearie. He’ll want his Bible, too, because tomorrow’s Sunday. And his medicine for his sores. Oh, we’ve got lots of work to do. Come on, dearie.”

Lorraine forced her dry lips into the semblance of a smile. “Yes, I’m coming...”

Ingram came downstairs at eight o’clock, his body pinched and shrunken within the folds of Earl’s big overcoat. He rubbed his hands together and crouched by the small blaze that Lorraine had started in the fireplace. Without looking at him, Earl said sharply, “You should drink something. You’ll freeze to death.”

“I’m okay, just cold.” Ingram could hardly feel his hands; they were hard and dry as weathered bones.

The old man was back in his customary place, snoring feebly under the mound of gray blankets. There was a worn Bible under his bed, beside a jar of medicine which generated the foul, acrid stench in the room.

Lorraine stood close to the fire, hugging herself tightly; she had washed in cold water, and now her skin stung uncomfortably and the sinuses had begun to throb behind her forehead and cheekbones.

“Maybe you better go upstairs for a while,” Ingram said to her. “We can take turns. It’s too cold to stay up there all day.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll come up when I get warm. We want to keep—” He stopped and stared at the splintered case of the radio. “Hey, what happened?”

“I turned my ankle and stumbled against the table,” Lorraine said, watching Earl’s frowning face. “We heard the six-thirty news, and I was just turning off the radio.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Ingram said slowly. “But you heard the news, at least.”

“We heard it,” Earl said without looking at Ingram. “I told you I’d listen, didn’t I?”

“Sure, that’s right,” Ingram said, wondering what had got Earl into this mood; he was staring at the floor, his face hard and drawn with tension. Maybe his wound was hurting a lot.

Lorraine walked across to the kitchen door, but stopped there and looked back at Earl. “Tell him what we heard,” she said.

“Yeah, let’s hear it,” Ingram said, puzzled by the insistence of her tone, and the restless anger in Earl’s face.

“It’s your lucky day,” Earl said, limping over to the windows.

“What do you mean?”

“The cops don’t want you, that’s what I mean. I’m the only one they want.”

So that’s what’s bothering him, Ingram thought. He glanced around at Lorraine, but she must have slipped through the door as Earl was speaking.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Ingram said. “The cops might have been confused for a while. But they’d get the real story quick enough.”

“You’re just lucky, that’s all.” Earl stared out at the broad, black meadow that swept up to a stand of poplars a quarter of a mile from the house. Everything was cold and lonely; the very earth seemed beaten and helpless and forsaken. Crows winged through the damp gray air toward the bare trees, occasionally crying out pointless warnings against the silence. The sound tightened the sick, weightless feeling in his stomach, and made the muscles of his throat crawl with nausea. Say it, finish it, he thought. Lorraine was right. Who the hell was he? What did he mean to them? Not a goddam thing. A colored guy they’d never seen before. A loud-mouth, smart-aleck jig. Brush him off like a piece of dirt... He tried to pump up his anger, but he was too weak and sick...

“You sure you heard that news straight?” Ingram said dubiously.