Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [6]
The soldier turned a dial on his radio. The announcer lost interest and wandered away. Olivia Newton-John drifted in.
“Shoot,” said the robber.
I jumped.
“What’s a two-bit place like that want with cameras?”
I risked a glance at him. There was a little muscle flickering near the corner of his mouth. “But listen—” I said. The pistol nudged me, like a thumb. “Listen,” I whispered. “You’re gone now! You’re out of there.”
“Sure. With my face all over a roll of film.”
“What does that matter?”
“They’ll identify me,” he said.
Identify? Did that mean he was a known criminal? Or paranoid, maybe—some maniac from Lovill State Hospital. Either way, it didn’t look good.
“It don’t look good,” he told me.
His voice was thin and gravelly—the voice of a man who doesn’t care what he sounds like. I wasn’t encouraged by it. I shut my mind and turned back to the window, where peaceful farms were rolling by.
“What are you staring at?” he asked.
“Cows,” I said.
“They’re going to meet me at the next town, wait and see. What’s the next town?”
“Now listen,” I said. “Didn’t you hear the radio? They know you have a hostage, that’s all they know yet. They’re looking for a man who’s traveling with a hostage. All you’ve got to do is let me go. Doesn’t that make sense? Next place we stop at, let me off. You stay on the bus. I won’t say a word, I promise. What do I care if they catch you or not?”
He didn’t seem to have heard. He gazed straight ahead of him with that muscle still working. “One thing I cannot abide is being locked up,” he said finally.
“Right.”
“Can’t take it.”
“Right.”
“You’re staying with me till I see that bank film.”
“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