The Getaway Man (15 page)

J.C. looked at me and shrugged his
shoulders.

“
D
o you like her?” Vonda
asked me, the day after J.C. and Gus took off.

“It’s
just a picture in a magazine,” I said. “I don’t know
her.”

“I don’t mean her personality, Eddie.
Isn’t she pretty?”

“She’s not as pretty as you,
Vonda,” I said. As soon as I said that, my face got hot, and I felt
stupid.

“How can you say that?” Vonda asked me.

“I … don’t know.”

“Look at the
picture, Eddie. Now look at me. What’s the difference?”

“She’s a blonde, and—”

“And she
doesn’t have any clothes on. So how could you say I’d be as pretty
as her?”

“I could just tell,” I said.

Vonda’s eyes got smaller for a second. Then she just reached down to
her waist and hauled her sweater up over her head.

“Watch!”
she said.

She took a deep, deep breath, and made her back curve.
Standing just like the girl in the picture. Her boobs stuck way out, like they
were going to pop loose from her bra.

“
Now
you can
tell,” she said.

F
or this job, there’s two cars I have
to get ready. One isn’t a car, really; it’s a truck. Not a
pickup—this one has the back all closed up, like those yellow ones you
can rent if you want to move your stuff. But I didn’t have to do much of
anything to it, really. Just check it over, make sure everything’s
working right.

The other car, the one J.C. bought, that’s
special. It’s a big black Cadillac. Kind of an old one, but that’s
right for what its job is. It’s a hearse. Not the open kind that carries
the flowers in the back; this is the one for the coffins.

I put a lot
of time in on that big hearse. We need it for the way it looks and all. But if
things go wrong, it will have to be our getaway car, too.

E
very time J.C. and Gus went away, Vonda would watch
movies with me.

One night, she didn’t come.

The next
morning, she didn’t make me breakfast, either.

I went out to the
barn to work on the hearse.

She came out to do her workout. When she
was finished, she came over to where I was.

“Did you miss
me?” she said.

“I figured you wanted to watch the TV. I
mean, in the cabin, not the movies.”

“You didn’t
figure, maybe I was sick?”

“No, Vonda. I
mean.…”

“You know I love to watch your movies with
you, Eddie. If I don’t come to be with you, there’s a good reason.
There’s always a good reason. Okay?”

It made me feel
all different ways when she said that. Like I was driving real fast, right at a
fork in the road, and I didn’t have a plan. But I just said
“Okay” back, like she wanted me to.

J
.C. came back from his trip alone. I didn’t know
where Gus was. J.C. asked me, could I have everything ready three weeks from
Saturday? I told him I guessed so, but I would rather have more time, if I
could.

I didn’t look at him when I said that. I was afraid he
would see it on my face. That once we did the job, we’d split up, and
I’d never see Vonda again.

I think that’s when he started
hitting her. I heard him late that night. Right through the wall. “You
stupid bitch,” then the slap. I didn’t know what to do.

I
closed my eyes and tried to think about something else.

He was gone the
next morning. I was working on the hearse when Vonda came out.

“You heard?” she said.

“Huh?” I said.
That’s what I always say when I don’t know what to say.

“I know you heard, Eddie. It’s okay. J.C.’s got a bad
temper, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.”

I kept my head
down. In prison, one of the things J.C. was famous for was never losing his
temper. Guys called him an iceman—it was high respect.

“It
was my fault, Eddie,” Vonda said. “J.C. told me I shouldn’t
spend all day sitting around on my fat ass, and I mouthed off to
him.”

“You don’t.…”

“Don’t what, Eddie?”

“You don’t sit
around all day. You always make breakfast, and you keep the house all nice and
you—”

She bit her lower lip and looked sad. “Oh, now
I’m disappointed.”

“Why, Vonda? What did I
say?”

“It’s what you
didn’t
say,
dopey. What you were
supposed
to say is, ‘You don’t have a
fat ass, Vonda. Yours is just perfect.’ You think I do all those workouts
to be fat?”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Come on, Eddie. Tell me the truth. You
do
think I have a
fat ass, don’t you?” she said.

“I
never—”

“Tell me the truth!” she said, like she
was mad. She bent all the way over, so she was touching her toes. She was
wearing little white shorts, and they rode up on her. She looked at me from
upside down, her long black hair trailing down to the ground.
“Well?”

“No, you’re not fat, Vonda.
You’re … perfect, is what you are. I swear.”

She
straightened up, came over to where I was working on the axle. She kissed me.
On the cheek. “You’re so sweet, Eddie. I feel much better
now,” she said.

I knew things had gone wrong, then. But I
couldn’t stop myself from watching her as she walked away.

W
e
watched some of my movies that night. I showed Vonda where they went off the
track. Where they stopped being real.

J.C. came back the next
morning. Vonda was real nice to him, fetching him his ice-cold Cokes, and
rubbing the back of his neck.

J.C. had a big map spread out all over
the kitchen table. He was sitting there, smoking. You could see he was thinking
deep. Making plans. Every once in a while, he’d draw something on the
map.

Vonda came over and tried to sit on his lap. “I’m
working,” he said.

“Oh come on,” Vonda said.

He pushed her away and said something mean to her.

I
went out to
the barn that night. I was going to fix up the little drapes that cover the
back window of the hearse so they stayed closed, but I ended up watching one of
my movies instead.

Vonda never came, not even for a minute.

Late that night, J.C.’s voice came right through the wall.

“What the fuck is
wrong
with you?” I heard him
say.

I couldn’t hear what Vonda said back, but I could hear the
hitting.

In the morning, he was gone again. Gus still hadn’t come
back.

W
e were watching one of the movies, when Vonda started to cry.
I asked her what was the matter—it wasn’t a sad movie.

She wouldn’t tell me. I kept after her. Finally, she said that J.C.
was really hurting her. She was terrified of him.

I didn’t know
what to say. I wasn’t thinking it was okay to slap her around or anything
like that, but I couldn’t see why she would be so scared, all of a
sudden. She’d been with J.C. a long time, I knew. And, in the daytime, it
always seemed like they had made up.

That’s when she showed me.
The little round scar. She took off her shorts to show me, like it was the only
way I would have believed her. I would have believed her, no matter what she
said.

Way high up on the inside of her leg, right next to her …
where it was so soft and tender.

I got sick thinking of the vicious red
tip of J.C.’s cigarette, making her hurt.

I kissed where the scar
was. She put her hands in my hair and pulled my head up. Then she kissed me,
hard.

T
he next night, she told me the scar was old. J.C. had done it
a long time ago. But he always told her he’d do it again if she ever
crossed him. The next time, it would be one of her nipples, he told
her.

“Right here,” she said.

I closed my eyes. I
looked down, so she wouldn’t see what I was doing. But she must have
figured it out.

“Look!” she said. “J.C. says it
wouldn’t be so bad, since they’re nothing but fakes.”

“Fakes?”

“My boobs,” she said, so soft I
almost didn’t hear her. “You know what implants are, don’t
you, Eddie?”

“I guess I do.”

“I
didn’t do that just to make them bigger,” she said. “When I
was a kid, the people who raised me never gave me enough food. Some days, all I
got was laundry starch and water. It makes your belly swell up, like
you’re pregnant, so you don’t get hungry. But it’s not real
food. That’s no nutrition.

“That’s what I had.
Malnutrition. It’s like when you almost starve to death. It sucks all the
fat out of your body. Didn’t you ever see pictures of kids like that on
TV?”

“Like in Africa?”

“Just like that.
Only, people here get it, too. Some people, anyway.”

“Why
didn’t they—?”

“I got taken away from those
people. And they put me in a different place. It wasn’t so great, but
there was plenty of food.

“And when I got bigger … older,
I mean, my boobs never grew. They were just these sad little droopy lumps on my
chest. As soon as I could save the money, I went and got the implants.

“You know what the doctor told me, Eddie? He said, now I look just
like I
should
have looked, if I hadn’t had that malnutrition
when I was a kid. I could have gone a lot bigger, like some of the girls do,
but I wanted to look natural.”

“They look perfect,
Vonda,” I said. “Nobody could tell in a million years.” It
was the truth.

“They don’t look perfect to J.C.,” she
said. “He’s always saying I’m a freak.”

“But you look—”

“There’s a little
packet in there,” she said. “They put it right over the muscle.
J.C. says it feels like a sac of water. He doesn’t like to touch me
there.”

“I don’t.…”

“Eddie, tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Do they feel like that to you? Like sacs of water?”

“Vonda.…”

“Just
tell
me,”
she said. She was crying.

I reached over to her. Even with my eyes
closed, my hand went right to where she wanted.

“They feel
perfect,” I told her.

“You swear?”

“No
one could ever tell,” I said.

That wasn’t true, but I guess
I fooled her, because she stopped crying.

“
I
hate him,”
she told me, the next morning.

It felt strange to talk about J.C. in
the cabin. The cabin was like J.C.’s place. The barn, that was my
place.

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked her. “Go
someplace else. Plenty of guys would be—”

“I’d
be too afraid,” she said. “You know J.C. How … dedicated he
gets to things. He’d find me, no matter where I went. I don’t have
any money. I’d have to go back to dancing. And you can’t do that
with a bag over your head. He has pictures of me. Somebody would spot me for
him.”

“This job … the one we’re going to do
… there’ll be a
lot
of money, Vonda,” I told her.
“With your share, you could—”

“My
share
?” she laughed at me. Only it wasn’t funny, the way
she did it. “I never get a
share,
Eddie. I only get what J.C.
gives me. When
he
wants to. You understand? It’s like he’s
got a chain around my ankle.”

“
W
e don’t have to
t.c.b. on the spot,” J.C. said to Gus. “He’s got no moves. He
doesn’t know where we’re going when it’s done, and he
doesn’t know about this place at all. He’s got to lay up at
wherever he runs to, and wait for us to contact him at the number so he can
pick up his share.”

“It’s fucking amazing amateurs
live as long as they do,” Gus said, shaking his head.

“
A
re you going to take all your tapes along when you go,
Eddie?” Vonda asked me a couple of nights later, when J.C. and Gus were
gone again.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got a lot
of them, maybe, but they don’t take up much room.”

“But your car’s so little.”

“The
trunk’s bigger than it looks. And I can put a lot of stuff next to me in
front, too.”

“That’s not such a good idea,”
Vonda said.

“Why not?”

“Sometimes, you
can’t have everything you want. You have to pick and choose. Let’s
play a game.”

“What game?”

“If you
could only take one movie, just one, which one would it be?”

I
didn’t even have to think about it. I went and got my copy of
Vanishing Point,
and plugged it into the VCR.

Vonda watched
the whole thing with me. Without saying a word, like always. Only this time,
she held my hand.

When it was over, she said, “Why that one,
Eddie? Why is that one your favorite of all?”

I tried to tell
her, but I think I got all confused.
Vanishing Point
is about a
driver. A great driver, driving against people trying to catch him. All over
the country. He’s not a robber or anything. Just a driver. And everybody
knows he’s running, because there’s a guy on the radio who’s
on his side. So the driver can listen to the radio himself, and the guy who
likes him can tell him what’s going on. The cops are trying to get him,
but a lot of other people are pulling for him, even regular ones.

“It’s a perfect movie,” I said to Vonda. What I meant
was, it’s not complicated, like
Moonshine Highway
. It’s
just the driver, driving forever.

“But he
kills
himself,
Eddie,” Vonda said, all upset. “At the end, he sees that roadblock,
and he’s speeding right for it. And he’s smiling. He knows
what’s going to happen, and he’s
glad
.”

“No!” I said. As soon as I heard how my voice sounded, I
apologized to Vonda. “I didn’t mean to yell,” I told her.
“But you don’t understand. He’s not smiling because
he’s going to die. He’s smiling because he thinks he’s going
to make it.”

“But there was no room,” she said.
“How could he possibly—?”

“He was a great
driver,” I said. “He had a chance.”