Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

“And your grandmother too?”

“She never goes anywhere, but why—”

“You’ll call them now. Whoever answers the phone, you tell them you’ll be home for dinner tonight and you’ll tell them everything then. You’ll say you don’t have time to explain anything now but you’ll explain everything at dinner. Just keep talking right on through so they don’t have time to interrupt and then hang up the phone.”

“But I don’t want to go there for dinner. I—”

He took hold of her wrist. “Now use your brain, Betty. Call them now and they won’t be calling any police until they see you. And then we’ll see them together and get your stuff and tell them we’re going away together.”

“They won’t let us.”

“Nobody stops me doing what I want to do.”

“My father has a temper. You don’t know what he’s like.”

“There’ll be a phone at that drugstore. Now let’s go over what you’re going to say, all right?”

“All right.”

“My mother was home,” she said.

“What did you tell her?”

“Just like you said. I’ll be home for dinner and explain everything, blah blah blah. She yelled at me.”

“Hey, you’re shaking, baby.”

“I’m all right. She yelled at me. Not worried about was I hurt, not wanting to know how I was, just yelling that my father was mad and who did I think I was and—”

“Easy.”

“That bitch.”

“Don’t worry about her.”

“I’m all right now. Everything’s all right when I’m with you. I don’t want to go back there, Jimmie John.”

“It’s something has to be done.”

“They’ll make trouble.”

“They won’t make no trouble. And you’ll need your clothes and anything else you want. They’re your clothes, I guess you got a right to them.”

“I can’t go there alone.”

“I’ll be with you, baby. Right next to you.”

“Okay.”

He pulled the car away from the curb. “Now we got the whole afternoon to ourselves,” he said, “and we can do anything you want to do. Anything at all.”

She suggested the movie. He protested that she had seen it just the day before, but she told him that didn’t make any difference, that it would still be like seeing it for the first time because she would be seeing it with him. But it might be a mistake to let him see the film, she added, because he would fall in love with Cybill Shepherd for sure. “Oh, I don’t guess that’s something you have to worry about,” he said, and he squeezed her hand and gave her a look that made her melt.

They drove around, killing some time before the movie was due to start. They held hands and listened to the radio. The news came on after awhile, with a report that a gas station north of town had been held up just last night. The bandit or bandits had rifled the cash register, and the sole attendant, nineteen-year-old Richard Sturdevant of nearby Elbow Ridge, had been shot to death.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” she said, and Jimmie John agreed that it was.

ALL I can say is it’s a terrible thing. He was a fine boy, hard-working, bright, ambitious. Finest boy I ever had working for me at the station.

I can’t understand how it happened. I had told him to always cooperate with any holdup men, give them whatever they want, don’t make any trouble for yourself. Get a license number or a description if you can but take care of yourself first and foremost. You oughta print that in your newspaper story. Might do somebody else some good.

It’s a terrible shock to me.

God, Hon, what a day. Cops and reporters all over the damn station asking more questions than you’d ever believe. You see me on the six o’clock news? Somebody said they saw it, somebody drove in special to tell me about it. We’ll just see if they don’t run it again on the eleven o’clock.

And that kid’s mother pissing and moaning all over the place. Oh, not to take away from it being a terrible thing, but I’m damned if I know what she expected out of me. You know, I’d love another beer and I don’t think I’ve strength enough to walk into the kitchen. You sure you don’t mind?

Thanks, Hon.

Now speaking good of the dead and all, but I believe I told you about that boy Dick, as to how he must have been standing in the wrong line when they handed out brains. Very day I hired him I told him last thing we want’s a dead hero. Give ’em the damn money, I told him. It’s all insured, let ’em take the damn money and get the hell out. The troopers’ll get it back or the insurance’ll pay it back and all you got to do is give ’em the money and leave well enough alone. You know how I tell that to every boy ever works for me.

All you got to do in this world is use common sense. How many times I been held up since I opened the station? Eight times, and each time I just handed over the money and that was the end of it. If I’da been there last night wouldn’t of been no trouble, not a bit of it. But this boy has to be a football hero or some such and he catches enough lead in him that it takes three men to lift him off of the floor.

Top of the cops and reporters and what else, we must of pumped three times the gas today we normally do. Maybe four or five times, and I’d say we had ten times the number of individual sales. People would come in for a fill-up and their damn car wouldn’t take more than a dollar’s worth. Day shift alone I sum I took in ten times in extra sales what those sonofabitches got out of the cash register.

That is people for you. They just want to get near where the blood is. Human nature, but you think about it a little and it could make you sick.

He paid only the slightest attention to the movie. There were times when he would let himself get lost in a scene, but even then he made no attempt to relate what he was seeing to the continuity of the film, and when his attention wandered he speedily forgot what he had been watching.

Yet he enjoyed the time they spent in the quiet little movie house. The film was restful in the way that dull conversations with strangers were restful, giving his mind free rein to work its way back and forth over the problem at hand. Had the movie succeeded in absorbing his attention he would have resented it.

He liked the movie, too, for the way she got caught up in it. It amazed him that she could get that involved in something she had seen less than twenty-four hours earlier. From time to time he would turn to watch the play of emotions across her face. Each time his gaze interrupted her concentration, and he would give her hand a light squeeze and turn his own eyes, if not his attention, back to the screen.

He let different thoughts play through his mind. It wasn’t so much a question of having to figure out what to do. He already knew what he had to do. It was more a matter of fitting all the pieces into place in just the right order, and he worked this out by composing different possible scenarios and playing them out one by one. That way whatever happened he would already have given it some thought, would already have seen himself doing whatever he would have to do under certain circumstances, and there would be no danger of freezing up when push came to shove.

It was the weak ones who froze at the switch. That kid at the gas station — what was his name? He couldn’t recall it at first and smiled in the darkness at the thought of it, shooting a man down one night and forgetting his name the next afternoon. He closed his eyes for a moment and put himself back to when he’d heard the name. Riding around in the car, and the radio on, and Betty sitting next to him, holding one hand while he had the other draped light and easy over the top of the wheel, and the newscaster’s voice talking about the midnight robbery, and—