The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [100]
examining the car, and no sign of German. I slipped into the filthy side hall and glanced into the kitchen, where an old Negro was washing dishes, and passed behind him without being noticed, over a bushel in the doorway, into the intervening yard, or lot, and I saw Gorman beating it along the wall of the garage, swiftly, towa'rd the border of trees and bushes where the fields began. I ran parallel, having a start of ten yards or so and met him back of these trees, and there was almost a disaster before he recognized me, for he had a pistol in his hand--the gun Einhom had warned me he carried. I clapped my hand to the barrel and pushed it away. "What've you got that out for?" "Take your hands off, or I'll clobber you with it!" "What's got into you? What're you running from the cops for? It's only for speeding." "The car's hot. Speeding hell!" "I thought it was your car!" "No, it's stolen." We started to run again, hearing the motorcycle in the lot, and threw ourselves down in plowed field. It was open country, but dusk. The trooper came as far as the trees and looked but did not come through. Luck was with us that he didn't, since Gorman had him covered with the gun on a sod for a rest, and was cowboy enough to shoot, so that I tasted puke in my throat from terror. But the trooper turned off, splitting the beams of his lamp on the evergreens, and we beat it over the plowland to a country road well back from the highway. This place, for sure, had a demon; it was blue, lump-earthed, oil-rank, and machinery was cooking in the dark, not far back of us, into heaven, from the Lackawanna chimneys. "You weren't going to shoot, were you?" I said. He was reaching inside his sleeve with a lifted shoulder, almost like a woman pulling up an inside strap. He put away his gun. Each of us, I suppose, was thinking in his own fashion that we didn't make a pair--I of the vanity of being so leaping dangerous, and he, despisingly, that I must have shit in my blood, or such poolroom contempt. "What did you run for?" he said. "Because I saw you running." "Because you were scared." "That too." "Did the guy in the garage notice two of us?" "He must have. And if he didn't somebody in the hamburger joint must be wondering where I went." '"^en we'd better split up. We're not far outside of Buffalo, and pick you up there tomorrow in front of the main post office at nine oclock." r "Pick me up?" "In a car. By then I'll have one. You've got the tenner I gave you for the chow--that'll take care of you. There must be a bus into town. You go up the road and take it; I'll go down. Let a couple of buses go by so we won't be getting on the same one." So we split up, and I felt safer without him. Narrow, tall, sharp in the way his shoulders, hat, and features broke, he seemed, as he watched me get started up the road, like a city specialist on this unfamiliar interurban ground. Then he turned swiftly too, going low on his legs downhill, fast, scraping on the stones. I tramped a considerable distance to take the first crossroad back to the highway. Headlights on a barn approached around a curve and made me drop down. It was a state police car, and what would it be doing on a side lane like this if not looking to pick us up? Probably German hadn't even bothered to change the license plates of the car. I got off the lane into the fields then, and made up my mind to take the shortest way back to Lackawanna and not to meet him in Buffalo. He was too inspired for me, and his kind of outlawry wasn't any idea of mine; therefore why should I be sprawling in the mud waiting for him to commit a hothead crime and get me in as accessory for a stiff sentence? When I had left him to go up the road I had already begun to think of this and was actually on my way back to Chicago. I began to run cross-country because I was tired of picking my way, and I came out to the highway near town, where the edge of Lake Erie approaches. And there I saw a crowd, forming up in old cars, with banners and signs, blocking the traffic. I think it was an organization of the unemployed, many veterans,