Paul Kavanagh - Such Men Are Dangerous

We took the food along with us in the cab. He wanted to take along the Scotch and the beer, but I wouldn’t let him. I pointed out that it was against the law. We left them in the barn, and left the can opener so that whoever found the beer wouldn’t have to tear the tops off with his teeth. The sleeping bags we rolled up and left. George told me I ought to take the propane stove along, that it would come in handy on the island. I said I preferred fires in the open. He wanted to know what I did when it rained. I said I waited for it to stop, which it always did sooner or later, and I also said I didn’t want to talk about the island.

We were on our way by early afternoon.

The trip was boring. It was the kind of trip that was supposed to be boring, and the only way it would have been exciting was if something had gone wrong. Nothing did, which was the general idea, but after a few hundred miles I found myself almost wishing for a crisis.

We started out with the radio going. Halfway through Wisconsin neither of us could stand it anymore. The news casts were worst of all, because of course we listened to them intently, and of course there was nothing about us on them. The absence of publicity worked to our advantage, but it also worked on our nerves.

So I got edgy and kept changing stations, hoping to find one that would cease to irritate me, until George caught my mood and switched the thing off altogether. That left us alone with each other, which was worse, but I never even considered turning the damn thing on again, and I think if George had done so I would have shot him.

We tried talking, but that didn’t work either, and by the time we hit the Illinois line the motif had been established. Silence, that was the word for the day.

George drove as far as the Wisconsin pike. We picked it up a little ways south and west of Milwaukee. It occurred to me that Sharon lived in Milwaukee and that I wasn’t supposed to think about her. This might have been harder, but fortunately I took the wheel at that point and was able to think instead about driving. I had never driven anything that size before, and at first there was a lot of thinking involved.

There was also some tension, for a while, at turnpike entrances. But by the time we left Illinois and entered Indiana with George driving again — I couldn’t worry much about our cover slipping. The papers were in order, the weight was right, the truck was clean, and there was just no reason on earth for anyone to suspect otherwise.

We didn’t even have to worry about a speeding ticket, because the speed limit was seventy and everybody was doing eighty and our truck couldn’t make more than sixty-seven with a tail wind. It got so that it didn’t much matter which of us was driving. When I drove I had my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas pedal and my eyes on the road. When George drove I had both feet on the floor, my hands in my lap, and my eyes either closed or on the road, looking at the same view that was there in front of me ever since Chicago.

There was nothing to do but think, and most of the thoughts that came to mind concerned subjects I had already determined not to think about. I didn’t want to review the past or muse about the future, and that left only the present, and the present was me and George and the truck. My mind couldn’t do very much with the truck, so that left me and George.

I did a lot of thinking about both of us.

This went on for a long time. Sometimes it was day and sometimes it was night. Sometimes it snowed, but there was never much snow, and toward the end there was no snow on the ground, either.

Sometimes I dozed off, but not often, and I never dropped into anything more than a light dream state. George was eating pills again and, as far as I knew, never even closed his eyes.

And then, after close to eighteen hundred miles of driving and roughly thirty hours of endless tedium, George made a phone call.

It was eight at night, Thursday. We were in Georgia, we had been in Georgia for hours. The current road was a stretch of the Interstate Highway System with the services off the road. George took one of the exits and drove to a service station. The gauge showed almost half a tank, so I asked why.

“I want to call ahead.”

“Fine.”

“Want to tag along?”

“Why? You’re a big boy, you know how to make a phone call. The dime goes in the little slot in the middle. The big one’s for quarters.”

“Suit yourself.”

He was gone about ten minutes. By the time he came out I had paid for the gas and moved the truck clear of the pumps. He got into the cab next to me. I looked at him, and he had an odd expression on his face. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen it.

“I called them,” he said.

“And?”

“They were surprised. They hadn’t heard a word, they didn’t think we took it off. They can take deliver at 3:30 tomorrow afternoon in Tampa.”

“What’s that, three hundred miles? No problem.”

He said, “They made a point of telling me to bring it straight in tonight. They know a warehouse where we can put the truck, and they’ll give us beds for the night.”

“Sounds good.”

“You think so?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” He sat silent, opened his mouth to say something, then clammed up again.

“What?”

“Something in his voice. We talked in Spanish and it’s harder to read a voice in a foreign language. Know what I mean?”

I decided to let him do it himself.

“I’ll tell you,” he said when I didn’t. “They might be thinking about a cross.”

“So we’ll go to Tampa and stay somewhere else.”

“I thought of that. I don’t know.” His eyes caught mine, then dropped. He waited a beat, then straightened up with decision. “No,” he said. “No, what it comes down to is I don’t like Tampa. They want delivery at 3:30; that’s when we show up at the pier. Tampa, the whole city is so full of so many people, I don’t want to spend an extra minute in it. Where are we now? Is there a city around?”

I checked the map. “Waycross. Brunswick. Hmmm.”

“Something substantial. Are we anywhere near Savannah?”

“Oh, so we are. It’s closer than either of the others, actually. I missed it.”

“Well, that’s good. At least it sounds good to me. What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About spending the night in Savannah and hitting Tampa tomorrow. What did you think we were talking about?”

“Oh,” I said. I took a breath. “I’m sorry, I think my mind is coming apart at the seams. I guess it sounds good. At this point you could tell me to go to Washington and I would do it. Where do you want to stay? I know Savannah, but I mean where in Savannah—”

He put a hand on my arm. “Easy,” he said and started chuckling. “I knew I was in bad shape, but you’re even more of a case. Let me drive. We could both do with ten hours in a real bed. Don’t you worry, I’ll find us something.”

I wasn’t worried.

What he found us was a tourist court that catered to long-haul truckers. There were three rigs already parked there, so we could forget about being conspicuous. He got us two cabins about twenty yards apart. We locked up the truck, and he went to his cabin and I went to mine.

I turned on the light, closed the door, locked it. I took off my trucker’s clothes and hung them on a peg. I unstrapped my shoulder harness, took the gun out, and put the harness itself on the cabin’s only chair.

I took a quick look through the window. George had already turned out his light.

The bed was a double. I took it down and put both pillows under the covers. I stepped back and decided they looked too white, so I wrapped the top one in the bedspread. I left the light on for ten minutes, then turned it off.