Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

“Will they catch him?”

“Nobody catches old Trevor Cole. Not so long as he’s up there on his faithful steed. Damn if I can recollect the name of his faithful steed.”

“His faithful steed is a golden palomino.”

“Old Trevor wouldn’t have nothing else. A golden palomino and his name is Tornado ’cause he’s fast as the wind.”

“Why are they after him?”

“Oh, let me figure. Robbed a bank? No, Trevor wouldn’t rob no bank. Let’s see now. Well, old Trevor went back home and found out his old widowed mother got chased off the ancestral homestead by a sumbitch mining company. So he robbed the stage and took off their whole gold shipment and gave it to the poor folks and the Indians.”

“Does he have a faithful Indian companion?”

“Did. Had a sidekick named Pronto, but the sumbitch posse got him way off back of those hills. Nobody left but Trevor and Tornado. That puts me in mind of that car. Tornado and Toronado. Well, old Tornado, he’s got front-wheel drive his own self. No posse gonna catch up with him.”

She didn’t answer. He turned to look at her and saw tears in her eyes. He said, “Hey, girl,” and the tears began to flow. He kissed her and her hands dug into his shoulders.

After awhile she said she was all right. She straightened up and wiped her eyes dry. “I don’t know what it was,” she told him. “Just how beautiful it is here, I guess.”

“And running all this time, and not enough sleep.”

“I guess.”

“Not to mention you must be hungry. I shoulda got some sandwiches when we got gas but I didn’t want to leave you in the trunk.”

“I’m all right.”

“I’ll get us some carry-out next place I see. You won’t have to get in the trunk again, if that’s what you were thinking. It’s different at a gas station where somebody comes right up to the car. Probably be some sort of restaurant coming up in the next couple of miles.”

“Where are we?”

“New Mexico.”

“Well, I knew that.”

“It’s about as much as I know myself. Never paid much attention to the last few places we went through. Just went right on through ’em without taking time out to read. Remind me I got to get some bullets.”

“Bullets?”

“Uh-huh. Just a couple left besides what’s in the gun, and tomorrow’s Sunday, meaning the stores’ll be closed.”

She didn’t say anything until the car was rolling again. Then she said, “I thought we were safe now.”

“Since we got this car? I’d say we’re a whole lot safer than we used to be.”

“I thought we wouldn’t have to, you know.”

“Keep on running?”

“No, I know we have to do that.”

“Because we ain’t in no place that it’s safe to stay in for long.”

“I know that. I meant, oh, we wouldn’t have to shoot anybody any more.”

“Hope we don’t.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Hope we don’t,” he repeated. “Same as old Trevor, I know there’s no posse gonna catch us. But old Trevor, you don’t see him throwing his gun away. Even with Tornado going like hell under him, he’s still keeping that six-gun on his hip.”

The glorification of the criminal... is deeply rooted in all of Western civilization, with one version or another of the Robin Hood myth extant throughout European culture. In America the tendency finds perhaps its fullest expression. The popular mind endows Dillinger with a twenty-two-inch penis and depicts Pretty Boy Floyd as a friend to the poor. Willie Sutton appears on television endorsing a bank credit card; Arnold Schuster, responsible for his capture, was regarded as a betrayer, and his murder... aroused little popular outcry.

One wonders if it is not our sense of drama which endows the criminal with a heroism he does not possess. Innocent victims, after all, are not the stuff mythology is made of, nor does a methodical police bureaucracy enlist our sympathies. Whatever his true motives, whatever the real nature of his character, we prefer to cast the criminal as a lone rebel warring against a world he never made... And now, in an age in which the solitary heroics of a Lindbergh have given way to the mechanistic collective effort of moon shots, where warfare is the province of ignorant armies who clash by computer technology, the criminal is very nearly the only hero left to us.

It is not entirely surprising, then, that criminals have grown to believe the myths created about them.

I know some day they will gun them down

And bury them side by side

To some it will be grief, to the law a big relief

But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde

The sign for the Apache Tears Trading Post enumerated its offerings — Mexican and American cuisine, souvenirs, beer, package goods, mineral specimens, Navaho crafts. When they reached the place it seemed too small for all it provided. It was a square adobe building with a flat plank roof set fifty yards off the road in back of a large gravel parking area. There was a gas station opposite and a tavern diagonally across the intersection. He parked a good distance away from the half dozen other cars.

“You can hunch down in the seat a little,” he told her. “I’ll leave the motor running just in case we have to go somewhere in a hurry.”

The impact of his words didn’t register until he had already disappeared inside the trading post. Then she began to tremble. The Pontiac idled hard, the engine shaking the body slightly, and now she felt as though the barely perceptible movement was shaking her to pieces.

Just in case we have to go somewhere in a hurry. Just in case someone recognized him, or somehow made trouble. Just in case he had to yank that terrible gun out of his belt and kill more people. Or had he left the gun? She checked where he kept it, between seat and seat back, and it was gone. Of course he would have it with him, and for much the same reason that he had left the motor running. He couldn’t afford to take chances.

She kept bracing herself for the sound of gunfire. But would she hear it if it came? The building was a ways off, the door closed. She stared at the door and kept waiting for Jimmie John to burst through it, a smoking gun in his hand, racing to the car. And her mind kept throwing up ways things could go wrong. Suppose the engine stalled right now? Suppose it cut out and cost him valuable time when he ran from the building? Would she know how to get it started again?

The door opened, and she tensed, and someone else emerged with his arms full of packages. He got into a blue Ford, backed up in a wide arc, drove away.

The door opened three more times as other people left the place. Each time she tightened up, and each time she was able to relax a little more completely, telling herself that there would likely be no trouble if there had been none so far.

She put on the radio. He didn’t seem to want to hear it, but she could turn it off when he came back. She worked her way around the dial quickly without hitting a newscast, then as quickly turned the radio off again.

When the door opened she did not recognize him at first. A large brown paper sack obscured him from the waist almost to his eyes, and those eyes were covered by a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses. But it was him, and he was walking quickly but not hurriedly, moving with confidence, and she let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.

In the car he said, “You know, I bought these without so much as thinking about a disguise. Bright as the sun is, I thought they’d rest my eyes some on the road. Then I thought again and got a pair for you. Here they are. I’ll tell you, I won’t say I wouldn’t know you myself, but they do a powerful job of hiding you. You take ’em off every once in awhile, will you? I’d hate to forget what your eyes look like.”