Брайан Гарфилд - What of Terry Conniston?

He sat up, banging his head on the steering column; he emerged and stared. “What are you talking about?”

“Go after him, Mitch. You know where he went, don’t you?”

“Floyd? He’s a barracuda — he’d swallow me whole.”

“I’ll go with you. I’ll help.”

“ You’ll what? ”

“I’ll go with you. Let me go with you.”

He gaped at her.

Her face hardened; she lowered her eyes. “I want my father to go on thinking I’m dead, for a little while at least.”

He blinked at her, dumbfounded; she said earnestly, “I can’t explain it all in a sentence, Mitch. But I want to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget. I want to punish him for... for a lot of things, I suppose. If you were a psychiatrist you could find all kinds of names for it. Maybe it’s bitchy and mean and neurotic and sick. But I want him to think I’m dead. I want him to cry! ”

She turned away from him until he couldn’t see her face. He took a step forward but her back registered his advance; he stopped and opened his mouth, and closed it.

Terry said in a small voice, “If we run fast the world can’t catch us, Mitch. We can get the money from Floyd and disappear somewhere, together.”

He swallowed. For want of anything more coherent to say he mumbled, “I wouldn’t take that money on a Christmas tree if it’s got Floyd attached to it. He’d grind us up into hamburgers.”

“No he won’t. You can figure something out.”

“I’m not that long on brains. Floyd can think circles around me.”

“No.” She turned to face him. “You’re good, Mitch. Better than you think you are.”

“Am I?”

“You know you are. You just needed to have someone tell you.”

He wondered if he would ever emerge from this nightmare. Her voice pounded at him: “Go after him, Mitch. What else can you do? There’s nothing else. Go after him — and I’ll come with you.”

He shook his head slowly, not ready to catch up with the speed of her resolution. “Hell — what about her?”

“We’ll take her with us, at least as far as the border. He did go to Mexico, didn’t he?”

“Yah.” He turned and brooded at Billie Jean’s squat shape across the road. “Do you really think we can do it?”

“I think we have to try.”

Fastening his mind onto it, he got back down into the car and pushed wires together — and the starter popped and spun. Startled, he jerked back. He touched the wires again and the starter whirred. He grinned insanely and bent his head against the accelerator pedal and touched the wires again. The engine started with a rattle and began to hum. Disregarding the low-amperage current that tingled in his fingers, he pulled the starter wire away, marking in his mind that it was the red one, and sat up. He banged his head again.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“I always do.” He held one hand to his head, climbed to his feet and said, “What the hell. We might as well.”

She looked almost amused; she knew she had shamed him into it. If she was game for it, how could he refuse? Easy , he thought — I could use my head . But when he looked at her he suddenly knew he couldn’t.

He called Billie Jean. Hands impudently on hips, she took her insolent time, walking slowly forward with writhing buttocks. Her dress, wrinkled and creased and filthy, was stretched tight across her fullnesses; she came up and flicked her body at him.

“You get in back.”

“Huh? That seat’s built for little kids and dogs. Midgets.”

“Sit sideways,” he said. “Or would you rather I left you here to starve?”

Billie Jean’s eyes shifted toward Terry and back. “You cooked up something with her?”

He opened the little door. “Get in.”

“There’s something you two know that I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We’re going after the money. You want some of it, don’t you?”

“You mean going after Floyd?” she said, incredulous.

“Why not?” He tried to sound casual. “Half a million bucks, Billie Jean. Some of it’s ours.”

“What about her? ”

“She’s going with us. She can’t talk to anybody if she’s with us.”

“Why not leave her here?” Billie Jean said with quiet cunning. “Nobody for her to talk to here.” Her eyelids fluttered and she rolled her body humidly toward him with an invitation that had all the subtlety of an elephant’s mating trumpet.

He said, “I won’t argue with you. Get in or stay here, it’s all the same to me. More money for me if you don’t come along to split with.” With cavalier indifference he nodded gravely to Terry, watched her get into the right-hand bucket seat and went around the car to climb into the driver’s seat. He slammed the door, gunned the engine and shifted into gear.

With a disgusted grunt Billie Jean climbed over the back and plumped herself down sideways with her knees up near her chin. She was still squirming to get comfortable when Mitch winked at Terry and shot the clutch. The little car bolted forward; Billie Jean shouted, “Hey!”

He left town fast on the dirt road, trailing a swirling funnel of pale dust. He kept his right hand on the knob of the floor stick-shift and became aware that Terry’s hand was timidly creeping toward his. He had not been able to figure her out; his feelings about her were contradictory but he was no longer able to ignore the way she was constantly in his mind, raging like a fever. He glanced at her and saw that she was watching him, her hair blowing wildly in the wind.

He felt better on the move. The wind roared around the speeding open car; he had its power in his hands, he felt more in control of things. It was the first time in days when he had enjoyed any sense of self-confidence at all. Fleetingly he even entertained the heady thought that perhaps he could best Floyd Rymer after all. He would have to figure out the way to do it.

They reached the paved county road and turned west toward the Nogales highway. So far they hadn’t seen another car. The posted speed limit was sixty; at seventy the state police would give chase — if they detected the speeding car, and if they were in a mood for it; Mitch, with his attention whipping frequently to the rear-view mirror, was doing eighty-five. At that speed the little car bounced hard on its spartan springs; the wind flailed his face and he had to concentrate on keeping the car on the road, alert for chuck-holes and loose drifts of sand. Terry’s warm palm rested on the back of his hand; she sat at ease, not worried by his driving, and her confidence in him gave him lift. In the mirror he could see Billie Jean press her palms to her temples to keep her hair from lashing her face; her eyes were shut against the wind and she was smiling with her mouth open in sensual enjoyment. He wondered what was going on inside her head; he knew very little about Billie Jean, really — partly because he knew very little about the facts of her background, but mainly because it was impossible to make assumptions about her. She was, perhaps, as simple as she seemed — but her simplicity was shaped by a different pattern from the ones he was accustomed to. He had never known anyone as freely immoral, as innocent of conscience: she was capable of extreme brutality but somehow it was utterly without malice. In that respect she was eerily like Floyd. Neither of them would have any compunctions at all about killing a fly — or a man — but at the same time neither of them would trouble to commit the necessary violence unless the fly, or the man, happened to be annoying them; and even when they did commit violence they would do it with an almost apathetic insouciance, uncolored by even the faintest shading of animus or relish or anxiety. Back there this morning Billie Jean had been perfectly willing to kill Terry — had tried to, on the porch — but only because she had felt there was a practical reason for it: she had, or at least she displayed, no personal feelings whatever toward Terry as a human being.