Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it.”

He went back to the Chevy and started it, certain that the ignition noise must be audible for miles. But no one emerged from the cabin’s door or appeared at its windows. He drove it out of sight down the road, then edged back and forth in the narrow road until he had succeeded in turning it back in the direction they had come from. He drove it back past the cabin and parked opposite the Pontiac. He left the engine running and told Betty to get into the Chevy.

Then he parked the Pontiac right where the Chevy had been and ran to the Chevy and drove off grinning.

They were back on the road to Ruidoso before she said anything. He knew she was trying to puzzle it out and he let her work on it.

Finally she said, “What if there was somebody in the cabin?”

“What if there was?”

“Well, isn’t he a witness?”

“Sure is.”

“But—”

“You didn’t want any more shooting, and I thought I’d do what I could to spare your feelings.” He had to laugh at the expression on her face. “Oh, it ain’t all that complicated. First off, I think there was either nobody home at that cabin or whoever it was was taking a nap. So he’s not about to miss that car right away.

“Fact is, he might take a look out the window and think his car’s still there. Pontiac and a Chevy look about the same from a distance. Both of them dark cars.

“But he’ll know the difference sooner or later, and that’s just fine. He’ll call the cops and tell ’em his car’s gone and there’s another in its place, and they’ll get the license plate and know it’s the one we were driving, and then they’ll know what car we’re driving now.”

“You’re smiling and all, but I don’t understand it.”

“Well, what are they gonna be looking for? A dark Chevy with New Mexico plates. And we’ll be in a dark beat-up Chevy, but that’s about as rare as a nigger in a melon patch, and the Chevy we’re in has Texas plates on account of that’s what I took off the Coronet a million years ago, and I switched the plates.”

“I didn’t know that. I wondered what you were doing.”

“What I was doing is switching plates. They’ll be looking for New Mexico plates going to Mexico and we’ll be wearing Texas plates and going to Canada.”

“Canada?”

“Hell, yes. You got anything against Canada?”

“I don’t—”

“Great big country. Cold in the winter, I guess, but that’s a ways off in the future. They don’t watch the border the way they do in Mexico. Just drive on in and go about your business.”

He sped up, overtook a white Volkswagen. He felt a whole lot better now. Those bennies they sold at the trading post were the best he’d had yet. And they’d been keeping him up just where he wanted to be. The car switch was smooth as you could ask for.

She said something. He didn’t catch it and asked her to repeat it.

She said, “How can we get to Canada?”

“Nothing to it.”

“I mean it. How can we possibly get to Canada?”

He shot a hard look at her, then softened it right away. “Why, just by driving north,” he said. “You just point yourself north and keep pointed that direction for a couple of thousand miles, and you can’t hardly help but get to Canada. Big as it is, you’d be hard put to miss it.”

North to Albuquerque, west to Gallup. North again through a Navaho reservation. A left turn at Shiprock and across the line into Arizona. A few miles of Arizona and another turn, this time to the right, and they were out, of Arizona and into Utah.

Amazing you could be in and out of a state in so little time.

He’d been playing the radio since shortly after they took the Chevy. It wasn’t much of a radio, and in the mountains the static was heavy, but he kept it on anyway and listened to it through the static. First there was news of the shootout in Roswell, including the misinformation that the slain policeman had succeeded in wounding his killer in the leg. Later there was a description of the Pontiac. At first the license number was incomplete, but the next time around they had it in full, probably through a records check.

And for awhile that was all they had. Then they found out about the last car switch, and they got it wrong just as he had planned. The license number they were circulating was the number the Chevy had previously borne, not what it now carried. And authorities were certain the car was bound for either Texas or Mexico, and were establishing roadblocks to cut them off. The search was narrowing down now, the announcer concluded, and authorities expected to have the youthful thrill-killer and his teeny-bopper moll in custody before nightfall.

The poor damned fools.

He said, “I never told you about the store. In Roswell.”

“What about it?”

“You know, I didn’t go in there figuring on trouble. I walked on in and there’s this little round guy behind the counter and a little round woman over at the cash register. I swear they looked like Porky Pig and his girlfriend. What the hell was her name?”

“Pauline.”

“Was not. Pauline Pig? Hell.”

“Wait a minute. Petunia.”

“Petunia. I was about to say Petula like Petula Clark but it was Petunia. Porky behind the counter and Petula, I mean Petunia, over by the register, and a tall skinny guy over by the back wall studying fishing rods. I’d say he looked like Bugs Bunny to make a better story but to be truthful I didn’t notice what he looked like.

“So I went up to Porky and put the empty box of shells on the counter and said could I please have two boxes of the same, and he said sure, no trouble, and I thought that was perfectly fine, and then he got out this little old notebook and thumbed it open and asked my name and address. So I made up a name and gave Albuquerque for the address, figuring maybe they couldn’t sell to anybody from out of state, and he said he needed the street address, so I made up a number and said Washington Avenue, figuring there might be one in Albuquerque and how was he to know if there wasn’t? So he wrote all this down, and Petunia stays at the register and Bugs Bunny puts one fishing pole back and starts getting the feel of another one, and then Porky says he has to see my driver’s license.”

He shook his head at the memory. “So I didn’t see where I had a choice. I tried saying I left it in the car and I was in a hurry but he said it was the law, and I thought the hell with it and pulled out the gun and stuck it in his face. I thought he was about to have a stroke. I said he could give me those shells without any shit or I would blow his fucking head off, and all I can think is the dumb son of a bitch was too rattled to believe me. Or too stupid to think straight. He got all white in the face and kept saying it was the law, he had to see identification to sell me shells, and I told him again what I told him before, and he said again how it was the law, so I just turned and shot his goddamned customer.

“I said, ‘Now, damn it, are you goin’ to forget the fucking law or do I have to shoot you too?’

“He saw the point then but he just couldn’t be cool about it. He brought the wrong shells first time around. I had the sense to read the side of the box even if he didn’t and I sent him back for the right ones, and then the damn fool starts telling me the price and trying to figure the tax and reaching for paper to wrap them in, like it still hasn’t dawned on him what’s happening even with his customer bleeding to death on the floor.

“I grabbed the two boxes. And then I thought how many people I had to kill who never did anything to me, but I just had to kill them so we could get free. And here’s this son of a bitch that I really am ticked off at. So I told him he was too damn dumb to live and I shot him, and then I turned and shot Petunia, and then I went outside and there were the cops.