I shook my head, looked down at the box. It had handles on either side. I bent over and took one of them, and Terri took the other. We carried the money to the car and put it in the backseat floorboard.
It was good and light by then, and I figured it might be best to leave without drawing a lot of attention to ourselves or to the dead body up by Geronimo’s grave. I let the car roll downhill before starting it, and when we were going pretty fast, Terri said, “Oh, goddamn it.”
She was looking over the seat, and I glanced in the rearview mirror, and there was Johnson. He wasn’t dead at all. He was running after us, nearly on us, his arms flapping like a scarecrow’s coat sleeves in the wind. He grabbed onto the back-door handle and got a foot on the running board. I could see his teeth were bared and he had the knife in his free hand and he was waving it about.
I jerked the car hard to the right and when I did, the car slid on the gravel road, and Johnson went way out, his feet flying in the air, him having one hand on the door handle, and then I heard a screeching sound as that handle came loose of the car and Johnson was whipped out across the road and into some trees.
“Damn it to hell,” Terri said. “He done bent up in a way you don’t bend.”
I glanced behind me. I could see he was hung up in a low-growing tree with his back broken over a limb so far, he looked like a wet blanket thrown over it. That rock might not have killed him, but I was certain being slung across the road and into a tree and having his back snapped had certainly done it.
The motor hummed, and away we went.
It took us another two days to get home on account of having to stop more and more for the radiator, and by the time we pulled up in the yard, the car was steaming like a teakettle.
We sat in the car for a while, watching all that steam tumbling out from under the hood. I said, “I think the car is ruined.”
“We can buy a bunch of cars with what’s in that box.”
“Terri, is taking that money the right thing to do?”
“You mean like Sunday-school right? Probably not. But that money is ill-gotten gains, as they say in the pulp magazines. It was Uncle Smat and Johnson stole it, not us. Took it from bigger crooks than they were. We didn’t take any good people’s money. We didn’t rob no banks. We just carried home money bad people had had and were using for bad reasons. We’ll do better with it. Mama’s always saying how she’d like to have a new car and a house, live somewhere out west, and have some clothes that wasn’t patched. I think a rich widow and her two fine-looking children can make out quite well in the west with that kind of money, don’t you?”
“How do we explain the money?”
“Say Uncle Smat left us an inheritance that he earned by mining or some such kind of thing. Oil is good. We can say it was oil.”
“And if she doesn’t believe that?”
“We just stay stuck to that lie until it sounds good.”
I let that thought drift about. “You know what, Terri?”
“What’s that?”
“I think a widow and her two fine-looking children could live well on that much money. I really think they could.”
HANNAH MARTINEZ
by Sara Gran
THE BODY WAS put together from different parts—the door was one color and the hood was another and the bumpers were from an ’82. The Cadillac was pulled over by the side of a busy road where a big NO STOPPING sign was posted. A woman stood next to the car waving her arms. She looked pretty desperate. No one pulled over.
I didn’t pull over either. I had somewhere to go. Someone was waiting for me.
But a few blocks later I made a right and then another right and went a few blocks and made another right. The woman was still there. She was trying to make eye contact with people as they drove by, still waving her arms around. I pulled over about ten feet in front of her and put on my hazards and walked back to her. It was about a hundred degrees.
“Thank God you stopped,” she said. She was around fifty-something. Maybe sixty. Her voice was cracking and her hands shook. She was scared, I guessed—out by the side of the road alone. Her hair was white and tied up in a bun.
“Take it easy,” I said. “Let’s sit down on the curb. Try to relax.”
“I know,” she said.
We went and we sat on the curb next to her car. She took a few breaths and I put a hand on her arm and she seemed to feel a little better.
After a few minutes she said, “I don’t know what happened. I was just trying to get to my hotel. It’s down there. Just down the street. All the lights on the dash went on and it just stopped.”