Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [18]
And then, a more forward-looking early thought. Where was his goddamn money? Where else but with the mute witness kids?
Bud walked down the street to the bank and checked Lily’s account balance. It was exactly what he’d guessed it would be. He zeroed it out, which only bought him a beat-up Remington revolver and one box of shells at a pawnshop. Only enough left over for a club sandwich and a Coke at the Woolworth’s counter.
Homeless and penniless, but armed and pondering deeply, he wandered the streets of the capital city. The lawyer already had papers for the house, so about all Bud could claim were the furnishings. Flea-market shit. Selling scratched chifforobes and stained mattresses was not how he cared to spend time. He knew Lily had family up in a hillbilly mountain town. Minus a mother who’d had the sense to fly away many years earlier to places unknown. So, nothing left here worth fooling with. But he had a damn hoard somewhere. Dusky dark, Bud hot-wired a new Chevy coupe and took off west.
THAT FIRST NIGHT, in a thunderstorm, Bud hit two filling stations, one right after the other, for the day’s receipts. Pretty simple transactions, when it’s just you and one guy at the register, and you’re the one waving the gun. Afterward, Bud kept driving west on slick black roads for a couple of hours, and checked into a linoleum-floor motel in time to flop on the plaid bedspread and watch The Twilight Zone. Next morning, he did two more filling stations and a country store. Fifty miles onward, he drove the Chevy down a red dirt road and pushed it over a steep clay bank into a brown river. He knew enough about sinking cars from teenage joyriding to roll the windows down and open the trunk and hood. The car bobbed briefly, and then went all the way under, nothing but fat bubbles breaking the surface of the water. A rainbow sheen of gas trailing with the current. Reluctantly, Bud pitched the Remington and the unused ammo to midstream. Then, figuring you can’t be too careful, he pulled out the red bandanna he had worn over his face for the stickups, cowboy-movie-bandit style. He knotted it around a rock and threw it into the river and walked on to the nearest town.
At the first used-car lot, he bought a happy-faced green Ford pickup from deep in the previous decade for two hundred and sixty dollars cash. He put the title in the glove box for future reference by any interested party, such as the highway patrol. They were welcome to have a look. Title and tag were clean, and he had been turned loose and was unarmed. The law was his friend, and he was off to start a new life in his farmer pickup with the wood sideboards grey as old fence palings. Such was the attitude he would strike if he got pulled. But he didn’t plan to get pulled. He drove carefully and no more than five over at all times.
NIGHT AND RAINING AGAIN. Bud had driven across two mountain passes and through a dark twisting gorge. All the way, the narrow road hung either at the brink of a long drop or else ran right alongside a rush of white water. Few signs of life out in these black mountains. If there were houses, the folks shut out the lights and went to bed early. Probably no TV this deep in the vertical country. The radio in the piece-of-shit truck barely worked due to a possible short in its wiring, so mostly it picked up a lot of static and one strong blast of race music, and then, in between patches of silence, strange gibber that sounded like Cuba or Mexico or Texas, one.
The gas gauge alternated between half a tank and empty. Pecking at it with a forefinger clarified nothing. There hadn’t been an open station for two hours, and not even any closed ones lately. The only business for miles, a dark roadside shack with a hand-lettered plywood sign offering boiled peanuts.
His map said the town had to be not far ahead, but for all the evidence the road offered, it might well go nowhere from here. Drive and drive through winding steep cliffs, and then without warning the pavement would end. And immediately