Brian Garfield: Necessity

Even if someone does, most likely this will be as far as they’ll be able to trace her.

She drives away, seeking the Interstate. Her tears, she thinks at first, are for Ellen-for the photograph. But eventually she realizes it is more than that.

The suitcase contained the last of her belongings from home. Everything personal: everything but a ring of keys and a driver’s license and a valise full of diamonds and cash.

On your own now, Jennifer Corfu Hartman A/K/A Dorothy Holder. Starting newborn. Might as well be stark naked.

She breaks the 500-mile trip to Los Angeles with what promises to be a sleeplessly hot night in a nondescript motel on the California border.

She eats in a diner and fends off the awkward advance of a middle-aged drunk who seems not so much offensive as simply lonely; he drives away in a car with Indiana plates, after which she goes for a short walk while there is still a dusky light on the desert.

Rather to her surprise the Colorado River turns out to be a muddy trickle at the bottom of a wide dry weedy riverbed spanned by bridges that seem ludicrously too huge for the tiny flow underneath. For a moment she suspects her own elaborate scheme must be equally disproportionate-but then she thinks: there’s no such thing as too careful.

She’s reasoning with herself:

“If you don’t do this right they will find you and kill you.”

Startled by the sound of her own voice she looks all around to see if anyone has overheard her. This is just terrific. Turning into one of those crazy bag ladies who crawl the city streets like slugs, incessantly talking to themselves in loud voices.

Try to relax. Gentle down.

Oh God. Oh dear God.

On the way back to the motel she catches her reflection in a shop’s glass door. The dark wig still has the capacity to startle her. It’s the third wig she has employed. First there was the long straight brown one-it gave her the appearance of the sort of graduate student who’s deep into health foods and Zen-and then in Pennsylvania just before buying the blue car she changed to a frizzy Afro-style dark red wig and wore it as far as Denver. She remembers leaving it in a trash bin in a roadside rest area.

In the room she considers switching the television on but she doesn’t really want that sort of company; she sits in the plastic armchair listening to the walls shudder when the big trucks rumble past. They set up a rhythm in her mind: a music to which she fixes images of a dancing couple in tights and ballet slippers gliding across a long diagonal of light. For a moment she is caught up in her visualization of the formal pas de deux-the sensuous nobility of its gesturings-and then she remembers that she must no longer admit to an interest in dance.

The trucks rattle on.

She thinks of Ellen and weeps again.

Later in a half-waking dream she pictures big faceless men coming in the door, hauling her to her feet, manhandling her outside into a car-all this without ever speaking, for she visualizes them as sinister menacing hulks who prefer wordlessly to rend her nerves and provoke her broken babblings, the sort of damaging confidences that she might blurt out merely to fill the dreadful silence.…

Can the scheme work? Is there any chance at all? How many things can go wrong? How many things has she failed to take into account?

And what of Ellen?

Ellen, poor thing. So betrayed …

It is past midnight before she gets into bed; another hour and a half, drifting between innocence and evil, before she finds sleep.

In the morning it is easier: daylight pushes the panic back. She is relieved to get on the road.

At an exit just past Blythe marked Gas-Food-Fuel she aims the car into the first filling station she sees. Under the alluring sign sixty feet high it turns out to be an unappetizing dump but she’s too numbed by road weariness to seek another.

A punk-haired teen-age hoodlum slams the nozzle into the filler pipe and leaves the pump ticking while he checks the oil and smears bugs across the windshield with inadequate swipes of a long-handled squeegee. She stands in the shade waiting; the kid darts his furtive eyes toward her and she wishes she were wearing something that had more practical armor than this thin cotton print.

She pays in cash and drives around the side to park in the shade while she visits the Ladies’; it’s not until the tires crunch that she notices where the filthy pavement is strewn with the glittering remains of broken beer bottles.

It’s a choice between broken glass and the hot sun: she chooses the shade, steps out with care, and picks a path away from the car, tiptoeing through shards.

The stifling bathroom is repulsive visually and olfactorily. She departs in record time. Nevertheless the upholstery is so hot she can’t relax her spine against it. She sits bolt upright when she backs the car out.

Watching her, the young hoodlum stands beside a gas pump with a bottle of beer in his hand. His very lack of expression seems malevolent.

The desert has been carved into farms here, kept alive by the trickle of water at the bottom of tapered concrete canals; past the irrigated area there’s nothing but scrub and sand and the heat against which the air conditioner struggles.

She has gone only a few miles and she’s doing about seventy when the wheel begins to pull to the left and she hears the rapid flubbing tattoo of the collapsing tire. With more stoical resignation than anger she takes her foot off the gas and fights the wheel, hauling it to the right. Thank God for power steering. Prompted by a fragment of memory from her teen-age years she forces herself not to touch the brake pedal.

The car chitters all over the road. It feels as if it’s ploughing through thick mud but in fact the speed is still high-fifty miles an hour now and only dropping slowly. She thinks: emergency brake? Does that operate on the back wheels or the front ones? But she’s not sure; she knows only that if she does the wrong thing it may flip over, as her mother and father found out.

She lets it coast, weaving from lane to lane. She’s very lucky there’s no traffic.

Finally the momentum comes off the charging automobile and she is able to horse it onto the shoulder.

She steps out into the blast of heat and examines the damage.

The car droops over its flat tire.

She’s no mechanic but she knows this much: drive any farther on it and the wheel rim will be destroyed.

All right then. What are the choices?

You’re supposed to wait for help. She knows the procedure. Open the trunk and the hood; tie a scarf on the door handle and lock yourself inside the car.

In this sun with the engine idling and the air conditioner blasting-how long will it be before the old car overheats and dies?

And who wants to sit here for six hours expiring of dehydration before the next highway patrol cop drives by?

And do you really want to take the chance that a cop won’t ask to see some identification?

Change the damn tire, then.

There must be tools in the trunk. She opens it and sees the spare and realizes she’s never paid any attention to it before. Suppose it’s flat?

Leaning in under the useless shade of the upraised trunk lid she unscrews the butterfly nut that secures the spare. Just this little effort drenches her in sweat. Now to lift the thing out and see if there are tools under it.

She hoists it over the bumper and lets it bounce when it hits the ground. What do they make these things out of-solid lead?

At least it bounces. Maybe it actually has air in it.

She sees a cluster of cars approaching as if afloat on watery mirages that hover above the highway. She pretends to busy herself in the trunk and does not look at the cars as they whoosh past. The last one seems to slow down and she glances that way as it goes by-an open convertible, young driver in a cowboy hat. He seems to be looking at her in his mirror but she doesn’t try to flag him down and finally he guns it and the old Cadillac fishtails away with a loud pneumatic hiss of noise.