Saturday, 4 August 2012

322

West Kansas and the birds sang above Denver. Where were the old Denver Birds, the ones I understood? Horrible nauseas possessed Neal and I in the morning. First thing he did was go out across the cornfield to see if the car would carry us East. I told him no go but he went anyway. He came back pale. "Man, that's a detective car and every precinct in town knows my fingerprints from the year that I stole five hundred cars. You see what I do with them, I just wanta ride man! I gotta go! Listen, we're going to wind up in jail if we don't get out of here this very instant." "You damned right" I said and we began packing faster than our hands could go. Dangling neckties and shirt tails we said quick goodbyes to our sweet little family and stum-bled off towards the protective road where nobody would know. Little Nancy was crying to see us, or me, or whatever it was, go---and Johnny was courteous, and I kissed her and apologized. "He sure is a crazy one," she said "he reminds me of my husband that run away. Just exactly the same guy. I sure hope my Mickey don't grow up that way, they all do now." Micky was her son, the one in delinquent school. "Tell him not to steal coca cola cases" I said "He told me that's what he was doing and that's the way he'll innocently start till the cops start beating him up." And I said goodbye to little Sally who had her pet beetle in her hand, and little Billy was asleep. All this in the space of seconds, in a lovely Sunday morning dawn, as we stum-bled off with our wretched baggage across the nauseas of the night before. We hurried. Every minute we expected a cruising car to sud-denly appear from around a country bend and come sloping for us. "If that woman with the shotgun ever finds out we're cooked" said Neal. "We MUST get a cab" I said "Then we're safe. We tried to wake up a farm family to use their phone but the dog drove us away. Every minute things became more dangerous, the coupe would be found wrecked in the corn by any early-rising country man. One lovely old lady let us use her phone finally and we called a downtown Denver cab but he didn't come. We stumbled on down the road. Early morn-ing traffic began, every car looking like a cruiser. Then we suddenly saw the cruiser coming and I knew it was the end of my life as I had

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