I decided to turn right – it could have been left or right, it didn’t really matter – and just follow the road; at some stage we’d find a vehicle, or at least discover where we were, then work out what we were going to do. ‘Ready?’
She looked up and gave a nod and a sniff, and we crawled backwards, deeper into the tree line. I got to my feet and she accepted my outstretched hand. I hauled her upright and we started running again, paralleling the road. After only a minute or two I heard a car; I got down and watched as it splashed through the potholes, lights on dipped, side windows misted up and the wipers on overtime. As soon as it had disappeared from view we were up and running.
The next vehicle was a truck loaded with logs; its wheels sank into an enormous pothole and threw up a wall of water which fell just short of us. There seemed to be a vehicle of some description every five minutes or so. Most were going in our direction, which was a good sign. I didn’t know why, but it felt that way.
After another two kilometres or so I began to see lights forward of us and on the opposite side of the road. As we got closer, I could see that it was a gas station-cum-small general store with a tall neon sign saying, ‘Drive Thru – Open’ in orange letters. It was a one-storey, flat-roofed, concrete building with three pumps on the forecourt, protected by a high tin canopy on a pair of steel pillars. The place had probably been state of the art when it was built in the Sixties or early Seventies, but now the white paint was grey and peeling, and the whole fabric of the building was falling apart. I knew how it felt.
There were windows on the three sides of the shop that I could see; above the ones at the front were large, red, raised letters telling me the place was called Happy Beverage & Grocery. Faded posters advertised coffee and corn dogs, Marlboro and Miller Lite. They were all the same, these sorts of places, family-run as opposed to franchised mini-markets, and I knew exactly what this one would smell like inside – a mixture of stale cardboard and cona coffee, fighting with the aroma of the corn dogs as they rotated in their glass oven. All rounded off, of course, with a good layer of cigarette smoke. The main sound effect would be the hum of fridges working overtime.
Even the pumps outside were early Seventies. This place was in decline; maybe years ago, when the road was first built, it was a major hot spot, but once the freeways had been laid to move the growing population of North Carolina, the traffic went elsewhere. Happy Beverage & Grocery looked like it was already history.
I stopped just short of the Drive Thru sign on the other side of the road and got down. Sarah joined me, and I told her to wait where she was. I crawled forward. I’d been right; now that I could see through the windows my eyes hit on packets of everything from Oreos to Cheerios, and a line of glass-doored fridges which were less than a quarter full of milk cartons and Coke cans. A large glass pot of coffee was stewing away on a hob, alongside a whole range of polystyrene cups, from two pints down to half a pint, depending on how awake you wanted to be. If you wanted cream, it would be powdered, without a doubt.
On her own, as far as I could see, and sitting down behind the counter, was a large woman in her mid-thirties. I could only see her top half; she had peroxide-blond ‘big hair’, which was probably kept that way with a can of lacquer a day; she must have been one of those Southern women the radio programme had been talking about. The T-shirt was probably her daughter’s, going by its tightness. I couldn’t see her bottom half, but no doubt she’d be wearing leggings that were about four sizes too small. She was eating a corn dog and reading a magazine, and somehow managing to smoke at the same time.
I crawled back to Sarah.
‘Can we take a vehicle?’ she said.
‘Not yet. It doesn’t look as if she has one.’
Beyond the shop was another tarmac road that met this one at a T-junction. The only thing that interested me was that, where you have junctions, you nearly always have signposts.
We headed for the junction. The neon light was reflecting off the rainswept road and the hard standing of the pump area. I had to remind myself that it was still daytime. The sign said, ‘Drive Thru’, and I’d do just that, given half a chance.
I started to envy the woman with big hair. She was sitting in there with a TV or radio on, and the heaters would be blasting away to keep the condensation off the windows; in fact, she was probably keeping so hot that she might need to knock back a Coke after the corn dog. I wondered how she’d keep the cigarette in her mouth.
We passed the shop and carried on to the junction. I motioned for Sarah to wait, but she’d got her breath back, and with it some of her old habits. She’d never liked being ordered around and not being part of the show. She came with me.
I moved forward the last ten metres and spotted a signpost, green tin on a tin stake. To my left, the way we had come, wasn’t signed; to my right was a place called Creedmore, which was no good to me – I didn’t know it from a hole in the ground. But I knew where Durham was. It was just west of the airport; lots of people and traffic, somewhere we could get lost. The sign said that the road facing me was going that way.
It passed the gas station at the junction on the left, went uphill for about half a mile, with muddy drainage ditches on each side, then disappeared to the right behind a line of tall firs. That was where I wanted to go once I’d lifted a vehicle, but before I did anything I had to make sure the woman couldn’t call for help. My eyes followed the phone lines from the building across the junction. They paralleled the road running from my left to right.
I moved in the Creedmore direction, about twenty metres beyond the junction, and crawled back up to the road, looked and listened. Absolute silence. I got to my feet, nodded at Sarah and we sprinted across. Once back in the trees, I followed the phone lines until I found a pole about five metres short of the junction.
I started taking my belt off, and asked Sarah for hers. This time she didn’t question me. She followed the line of my gaze as I studied the top of the pole. ‘Are you going up there?’
‘I want to cut the line to the gas station.’
‘Are we going to rob it?’
Sometimes she only had a nodding relationship with reality. I stopped pulling my belt off and looked at her. ‘Are you serious?’ I wondered about what had happened to all those expensive years of university training. She had enough brain power to move a glass without even touching it, but sometimes she didn’t seem to have even an Eleven Plus in common sense.
‘We’re just going to get a car and get the fuck out of here,’ I said. ‘We have guests arriving, remember?’ I mimed a dog biting with my hand.
I took her belt and buckled the two together to make one big loop. Hers was the American’s heavy biker’s belt, with a Harley-Davidson logo that said, ‘Live to ride, ride to live’. I dropped the loop at the bottom of the pole, hooked my feet inside either end, gripped the pole with my hands, and started to climb. I’d learned how to do this from a documentary on the South Pacific, when I’d seen blokes use similar devices to climb coconut trees. You slid your feet up as high as you could, keeping the strap taut, then pressed down until it gripped. It was then a matter of reaching up and gripping the pole with both hands, lifting your feet again, and so on. That was the theory; the pole was so wet and slippery, however, that it took me several attempts to master it. At the end of the day, though, I was rather impressed with myself; if ever I was marooned in Polynesia, I wouldn’t go hungry.
I heard the hiss of tyres and the drone of an engine getting closer. My heart missed a couple of beats while I wondered how I’d explain myself, then both sounds changed direction and died as the car turned and headed towards Durham. It happened twice more. Each time, I stopped and waited until the vehicle had gone. At least the treetops gave me some cover.
I had just another couple of feet to go when I heard a fourth vehicle approaching, but this time from the direction of Durham. It was going slowly and coming close.
I looked down for Sarah, but she was already moving away from the pole and into cover.
The car drew up at what I guessed was the junction and stopped. I heard a door open and the sound of radio traffic. It had to be a police cruiser.
I couldn’t reach down for my weapon, because it was taking all my strength and grip just to stop myself sliding back down the pole. I wondered about climbing up the last couple of feet so I could rest on a cross spar, but the way my luck was going I’d probably fuck it up and come hurtling down like Fireman Sam and land on their heads.
I heard a burst of laughter and looked down again. Sarah was nowhere to be seen, but a smoky-bear hat was, covered in clear plastic, shaped so it kept the felt dry. It moved into the woods, above a dark-brown raincoat that stuck out at the sides. State troopers have zips up the sides of their coats to enable them to draw their pistols easily, but this guy wasn’t doing that, he was undoing his front zip. I saw his knees jerk as he released himself, then the sound of piss hitting the tree just a few feet below me. Steam rose in front of the hat. I didn’t want to make the slightest sound. I didn’t even want to swallow. My fingers were starting to lose their grip on the rain-slicked pole.
I searched frantically for the trooper’s mate. I couldn’t see him; he must have stayed in the car, as you do when it’s raining. I could see raindrops ricocheting off the garage roof, glistening in the light from the Drive Thru sign. The stream of urine against the tree subsided as he finished off, then he let go a resounding fart.
I started sliding. I pressed down hard on the belt with my feet, and gripped the pole like a drowning man. The sounds below had stopped, and I watched him jigging up and down to shake off the drops. He packed himself away, checked his coat, and strode off.
I heard the troopers joking to each other. The car door slammed, and then they drove off. I let out all the air I’d been holding in my lungs, inching myself further up the pole to increase my range of vision. The cruiser was finally driving into the gas station. Why the fuck didn’t he go in there in the first place? Maybe he was trying to chat up the woman and the last thing he wanted was for her to hear him farting away and stinking the place out.
I reached the top and hooked my left arm around the cross spar. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself down, then looked for Sarah. She was emerging from the bush she’d been hiding in, and I wondered if she knew how lucky she’d been: it looked a very inviting bush, and she might easily have got drenched by old fartypants.
I followed the telephone line to make sure it was the one to the gas station, reached down and retrieved the Leatherman from my pocket. Where these lines come in to a pole, they get hooked up to take the tension from the line, and then there’s a nice little loose bit which carries on through. I leaned out, squeezing hard with the rubber soles of my feet, got the pliers part of the Leatherman over the line, and snipped. Then it was just a case of sliding down the pole nice and slowly so I didn’t land up with half a ton of splinters in my arms and legs.
Sarah was straight in at me: ‘Give me a gun, Nick. What if he’d seen you?’
It made sense but I felt uneasy. Giving Sarah a weapon seemed to be a lot like giving Popeye spinach. On the other hand, if he’d spotted me she could have done something about it. I still wasn’t sure whether she would fuck me over, but decided she still needed me too much. I’d let her have it for now.
I got Lance’s semi-automatic, 9mm Eastern-bloc thing out of my jacket and handed it over. She said a sincere ‘Thanks’ as she pushed back the topslide half an inch and checked to see if there was a round in the chamber.
The cruiser was driving out of the gas station and coming back in our direction. We both got down, and she used the time to put her belt back on. The blue and white passed us heading towards Creedmore; maybe they were helping to man a roadblock or something further up the road.
I wanted her to stay where she was while I went back to the gas station to hijack a vehicle. She insisted on coming with me. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘a man and a woman turning up at a gas station, stealing a vehicle – don’t you think there’s a bit of a chance they’d make a connection with the lake?’
‘Nick, I’m coming with you. I’m not going to take the chance of us getting split up and this all going wrong. We’re going to stay together.’
She was right; without realizing it, she had reminded me what I was here to do. If there was a drama with the police or whoever, and it was obvious I was about to lose control, I would have to kill her before they could get her. Not the ideal option, but at least she’d be dead. Looking at her with my not-happy-about-it face on, I gave in to her demand. ‘Fuck it, come on then.’
We finished doing up our belts, moved back up the road for more distance and crossed. We turned right and paralleled to a point where I could get a clear view of the pumps and the shop again.
One car, a white Nissan saloon, was already on the forecourt, but it was four up, with two couples in their mid-twenties. The driver had just started the engine and out he rolled. I heard a distinctive
ding-ding
as the tyres ran over a rubber tube sensor. He got to the road, stopped, turned his wipers and dipped lights on, laughing with the rest of them – probably about the woman with the corn dog – turned left and off they went. We lay there, waiting in the rain.