Earthly Possessions (3 page)

“What?”

“Half the time them things’re all blurry anyhow,” he said. “Why panic? We’ll wait and see. If the film’s no good, if they lose my tracks, why, then I let you go.”

“Well—how will you
know
the film is no good?”

“They show it on the tube,” he said. “Evening news, I bet you anything.”

“But where will you get to watch it?”

“Baltimore, where’d you think.”

He let his head fall back against the seat. I returned to looking at farms. I thought I had never seen anything so heartless as the calm, indifferent way those cows were grazing.

We must have been on the most local kind of bus it is possible to get, because we stopped at towns I’d never heard of before and a lot of other places besides. Crossroads, trailer parks, lean-tos covered with election posters. By the time we reached Baltimore it was twilight. I could look out the window and see my own reflection gazing back at me, more interesting-looking than in real life. Beyond was the outline of the bank robber, constantly shifting and fidgeting.

At the terminal, our headlights colored a wallful of black men in crocheted caps and satin coats, lounging around chewing toothpicks. “Balmer!” the driver said, and the passengers rose and collected their things. All but me and the bank robber; he held me down. He made me wait till the others were past. Now it was
my
turn to get fidgety. I have a little trouble with closed-in spaces. If a bus isn’t running its motor it is definitely a closed-in space. “I need to get off,” I told him.

“You’ll get off when I say so.”

“But I can’t stand it here.”

His eyes flicked over at me.

“Do you want me to have hysterics?”

I wouldn’t really have had hysterics, but he didn’t know
that. He stood up and motioned me into the aisle with a gleam of his pistol. We followed the soldier, whose radio was playing “Washington Square.” For some reason I always get “Washington Square” mixed up with “Midnight in Moscow” and it wasn’t till I was all the way off the bus, standing in a daze on the concrete and teetering from the long ride, that I decided it was “Washington Square.”

“Will you move it?” the robber said.

Couples were meeting and kissing in the gray light between buses. We dodged them and headed toward the street. There were a lot of people milling around there, mostly men, mostly no-account. It was the hour for getting off work but that wasn’t what they were doing here, surely—standing about in packs, loitering in front of cocktail lounges and peep shows and “Girls! Nitely!” There was a strong smell of French fries. Everybody looked dangerous. But I had this robber and his warm heavy gun, and anyway, what was left to lose? He was the one with the purse. I slid through the crowds as easily as a fish, unhampered, guided by that nudge in the small of my back.

“Stop,” he said.

We had come to a dingy little place with a neon sign sizzling in the window:
BENJAMIN’S
. A red wooden door so thickly painted I could have scratched my name on it with a fingernail. He pulled it open and we went inside. A TV set turned the air blue and dusty; rows of bottles topped with silver globes glittered before a mirror. We felt our way to the bar and sat down. I unbuttoned my raincoat. A man in an apron turned his cheek to us, while his eyes stayed fixed on the television.

“What’ll you have?” the robber asked me.

At our house, nobody drinks; but I didn’t want to seem unfriendly. “Pabst Blue Ribbon,” I said at random.

“One Pabst, one Jack Daniel’s neat,” said the robber.

The bartender poured Jack Daniel’s blindly, while watching
a commercial for potato chips. But he had to turn away to hunt a glass for my beer. Then the news began and he gave up, passed me a stark tall can unopened and held out his palm for whatever money the robber put into it.

Various politicians were traveling around the countryside. We saw them getting off airplanes, setting right in to shake hand after hand like people hauling rope. We saw a man who’d been acquitted by a jury. He believed in the American system of justice, he said. There was a commercial for Alka-Seltzer.

“Hit me again,” the robber told the bartender, holding out his glass. I opened and took a sip of my beer. The good thing about sitting at a counter was that I didn’t have to look at him. We could each pretend the other wasn’t there.

My eyes were used to the dark by now and I could see that this place was hardly better than a barn—barren, dirty, cold. It would have been cold even in July; no sunlight ever reached it, surely. I wondered what the restrooms were like. I needed to go to one but I wasn’t certain of the procedure.

They had never covered
this
problem on those cops-and-robbers shows.

In the local news, there was a school board meeting. A policeman’s funeral. A drug arrest. A five-car accident in Pearl Bay. A bank robbery in Clarion.

The announcer’s face gave way to film of a different quality, blurred and shadowy. On this film a small group of people stumbled in line, like dominoes. The foremost person, a squat man in a business suit, tore something from his chest. An arm loomed out. Another man backed jerkily away, half hidden by a tall, thin woman in a light-colored raincoat. The man and woman disappeared. Several faces swam forward, and someone put a white scarf or handkerchief to his or her eyes. I was fascinated. I’d never before been able to observe a room after I had left it.

The announcer returned, a little blank of face as if he’d
been caught unawares. “So,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Well, that was … and remember you saw it here first, folks, a genuine bank robbery in progress. Police have identified the suspect as Jake Simms, Jr., a recent escapee from the Clarion County Jail, but so far no one has stepped forward to name his hostage. However, roadblocks have been set up and Clarion’s police chief Andrews feels confident that the suspect is still in the area.”

“Come on,” said Jake Simms.

We slid off our stools and left. In the doorway I glanced back at the bartender, but his eyes were still on the screen.

“I knew it would work out like this,” the robber told me.

“But you’re
past
all the roadblocks.”

“They’re looking for me by name.”

We threaded our way through even larger crowds than before, none of them apparently going anywhere at all. As far as I could tell, the gun wasn’t jammed in my back any more. Was I free? I stood still.

“Keep moving,” he told me.

“I want to find the bus station.”

“What for?”

“I’m leaving.”

“No, you’re not.”

We stood square in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking the flow of pedestrians. He needed a shave, I saw. It made me uneasy to be at eye level with him; I distrust compactly built men. I reached out a hand, careful to make no sudden moves. “Could I have my purse, please?” I said.

“Look,” he told me. “It ain’t
me
keeping you, it’s them. If they would quit hounding me then we could go our separate ways, and believe me, lady, there ain’t nothing I’d like better. But now they have my name, see, and will track me down, and I need you for protection till I get to safety. Understand?”

We went to another bar, as dark as the first but with some
customers in it. This time we sat at a little wooden table in the corner. “Now let me think. Just let me think,” he told me, although I hadn’t said a word. Then he gave his order to the waitress: “One Jack Daniel’s neat, one Pabst. Couple bags of pretzels.” I decided not to drink the Pabst because of the restroom problem. I folded my arms on the table and craned my neck to see the TV—this one in color, a man reeling off the weather. Meanwhile, Jake Simms set my purse on the table between us. “What you got in here?” he asked me.

“Pardon?”

“Any weapons?”

“Any—no!”

He undid the catch and opened it. He pulled out my billfold, frayed and curling. Inside was a pathetic bit of paper money. Small change and bobbypins. A library card. He glanced at it. “Charlotte Emory,” he said. He studied a photo of me holding Selinda, back when she was a baby. Then he looked into my face. I knew what he was thinking: lately I had let myself go. However, he didn’t comment on it.

He pulled out a rubber-banded stack of grocery coupons, which made him snort; a pack of tissues, an unclean hairbrush, and a pair of nail scissors. He tested the point of the scissors with his thumb and then looked at me. I was still focused on the hairbrush; it had disgraced me. I didn’t connect. “No weapons, huh,” he said.

“What?”

The waitress brought our order and presented him with the bill. While he was rummaging in his pocket I sent her silent messages: Doesn’t this look odd to you, this man emptying out a lady’s purse? Don’t we make a strange couple? Shouldn’t you be mentioning this to someone? The waitress merely stood there, gazing dreamily into the marbled mirror above us and holding out her little plastic change tray.

When she had left, Jake Simms dropped the scissors under
the table and gave them a kick. I heard them scuttle across the floor. Then he reached into my purse again. This time it was a paperback—my
Survival Book
, worn to shreds. How to get along in the desert. He frowned. Turned the purse upside down, shook it—and out clattered something shiny which he trapped immediately. “What’s this?” he said, holding it up.

Oh, Lord, my badge. Little tin badge, shield-shaped, like something official or military. “I’ll take that,” I told him.

He looked suspicious.

“Can I have it, please?”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just a—like a lucky piece or something. Can I have it?”

He squinted at the writing across its face. “Keep on
truckin’?”
he said.

“I believe it’s from a cereal box.”

“Kind of trashy, for a lucky piece.”

“Well, it’s just from a box of … something or other, what does it matter?” I asked him.
“Most
lucky pieces are trashy. Rabbits’ feet, two-headed pennies … I found it in a cereal box while I was eating lunch today. I think it’s some kind of popular saying. I was going to throw it out except—oh,
you
know how your mind works. I took it as a sign. Not seriously, of course. I just thought, what if this was trying to tell me something? Like to get on the road, not sit around any longer, take some action.”

“Now, how’d you come to
that
meaning?” he said.

“I thought it was a sign to leave my husband,” I said.

There was a silence.

I asked, “Could I have my badge back?”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You were leaving your husband.”

“Well,
you
know …”

I held out my hand for the badge. He ignored it. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Things’ve finally started going my way.”

“What?”

“And here I was cursing my luck! Thinking I had put myself in some bind here! Waiting for your people to set the FBI on me! Oh, your fortune’s changing, Jake, old man.”

“Well, I don’t see how—how—”

“Things are looking up, it seems to me.”

“I want my badge back,” I said.

“Nope. Think I’ll keep it. Medals have pins, pins are deadly weapons.”

“It’s not a
medal!
It’s a little old, dull-pointed, cereal-box …”

But he dropped it in his shirt pocket, and I had to watch it go.

Then suddenly I got scared. I don’t know why. I mean I don’t know why
then
. just at that particular moment. But all at once I felt short of breath and shaky, and it didn’t seem to me that I had any way out of this. Nothing had prepared me! I was so peaceful, hated loud noises, passed sharp objects handle first. And I didn’t like confronting people face to face, even, let alone fist to fist. I took a tight hold on the table. I tried to get my air back. I fixed my eyes very hard upon the TV, which was no help at all: bandits on thundering horses. Old-fashioned train wheels clacketing past, a man leaping from saddle to baggage car in a slow high arc that was nearly miraculous. Some of the people at the bar started cheering.

“Yeah, well,” said Jake Simms, “that’s the trouble with these things. You watch long enough, you start expecting some adventures of your own.”

I let out my breath and stared at him. From this close I could see the graininess of his skin, the smudges under his eyes, and his thin, chapped, homely-looking mouth. But he was concentrating on the TV still, and he didn’t notice me.

By the time we got outside again it was really night. I rebuttoned my coat. He turned up his collar. We trudged down a
corridor of neon signs and music, took a right turn onto a darker street. Now we passed pawnshops, luncheonettes, cleaning establishments. We saw a laundromat where solitary people were folding up their bedsheets.

In the window of an appliance store, six TV sets showed a woman shampooing her hair. Then a news announcer mouthed something grave. Then Jake and I came on the screen and backed away: our same old soundless, hobbled dance. We stood at the window watching ourselves through the outline of our reflections. We were locked together forever. There was no escape.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been kidnapped. It had happened once before.

Here’s how it came about: I was entered in a Beautiful Child Contest at the Clarion County Fair. I was entered because the first step was to send in the child’s photo. If I won, it would be good advertising for my father. In fact I remember the large white letters that ran across the bottom of my picture:
PHOTO BY AMES STUDIOS
. Ordinarily, he just rubber-stamped that on the back.

In this picture my hair was wetted down, hanging in neat straight clumps to my jawbone. My expression was meant to be fierce but came out sad. (Nothing they could do would make me smile.) I wore a dark jumper over a puff-sleeved blouse. My mother thought puffed sleeves would make me look younger. I was seven at the time, the top age permitted in the contest. There was a lot of talk about how I’d been much rounder-faced
and—well, cuter, really, when I was six. My mother wished with all her heart that there’d been such a contest when I was six.