So we walked. I had a stitch in my side myself, and I was just as glad to stop running for a while. We walked, and whenever one of them got closer than half a block away we trotted for a while. But what a way to escape.
Finally I said, “Doesn’t Westbury have a downtown?” We’d traveled six or seven blocks now, three running and the rest walking, and we were still in the same kind of genteel residential area. There had been no traffic and no pedestrians, and looking both ways at each intersection I had seen no neon or any other indication of a business district. Sooner or later those guys back there were going to take a chance on opening fire at us and hoping nobody in any of these houses would notice, and for myself I believed none of them would notice a thing.
“There must be something somewhere,” Abbie answered, in reply to my question about downtown. “Don’t talk, just keep walking.”
“Right.”
So we kept walking, and lo and behold when we got to the next corner I looked down to the left and way down there I saw the red of a traffic light and the blue of a neon sign. “Civilization!” I said. “A traffic light and a bar.”
“Let’s go.”
We went. We walked faster than ever, and we’d gone a full block before any of our pursuers limped around the corner back there. I looked back and saw there were only four of them now, and seven had started after us, so it looked as though we were wearing them away by attrition. I’d seen two quit earlier, falling by the wayside, sitting down on the curb and letting their hands dangle between their knees. Now a third must have done the same thing.
No. All five had been fine before we’d turned the corner, they’d been striding along like a VFW contingent in the Armed Forces Day parade. So where had the fifth one gone?
Could he be circling the block in some other direction, hoping to head us off?
“Oh,” I said, and stopped in my tracks.
Abbie stared at me. “Come
on,
Chet,” she said, and tugged.
I came on. I said, “One of them went back for a car.”
She glanced over her shoulder at them, and said, “Are you sure?”
“I’m positive. The momentum of the chase kept them going this long, but sooner or later one of them had to remember they had wheels back there in front of Golderman’s house. So one of them just went back for a car.”
She looked ahead at that distant red light and distant blue light. “How much time do we have?”
“I don’t know. He’s tired, he’ll be walking, it’s about seven blocks. But we don’t have forever.”
“We should have gone zigzag,” she said. “Turned a lot of corners. That way maybe they’d be lost by now, and they wouldn’t be able to find their way back to the cars.”
“Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner,” I said. “Do you know this is ridiculous?”
She looked at me. “What’s ridiculous?”
“There are four guys back there who want to take us away some place quiet and murder us,” I said. “Plus three others somewhere else behind them. And we’re
walking.
”
“So are they.”
“I know it.”
“So what’s so ridiculous about that?”
“We’re walking and we’re having an argument,” I said. “That doesn’t strike you as ridiculous?”
“It would strike me as ridiculous if I tried to
run
at this point,” she said.
I looked over my shoulder. “Get ready to laugh, then,” I said. “Because one of them back there has his second wind, and we’re about to run.”
He’d gotten very close, much less than half a block away.
About three houses away, in fact, so close that when we began to stagger into a sort of falling, weaving half-trot we could clearly make out the words he spoke, even though he was gasping while saying them.
We ran to the next intersection, and across, and I looked back, and he was walking again, holding his side. He shook his fist at me.
Abbie said, “Did you hear what he said he was going to do to us?”
“He didn’t mean it,” I said. “Just a quick bullet in the head, that’s all we’ll get.”
“Well, that’s sure a relief,” she said, and when I looked at her to see if she was being sarcastic I saw that she was.
How far were those blasted lights? Maybe four blocks away. Thank God it was all level flat ground. I don’t know about the mob behind me, but a hill would have finished me for good and all.
We went a block more and came suddenly to railroad tracks. Automatic gates stood open on either side. I said, “Hey! Railroad tracks!” I stopped.
Abbie pulled on me. “So what? Come
on,
Chet.”
“Where there’s railroad tracks,” I said, “there’s a railroad station. And trains. And people.”
“There’s a
bar
right down there, Chet,” she said.
“And there’s seven guys behind us. They might just decide to take us out of a bar. But a railroad station should be too much for them.” I looked both ways, and the track simply extended away into darkness to left and right, with no station showing at all.
“Which way?” Abbie said. “I suppose we have to do this, even though I think it’s wrong.”
“This way,” I said, and turned left.
There was an eruption of hollering behind us when we made our move. We hurried, spurred on by all that noise, but it was tricky going on railroad ties and we just couldn’t make as good time as before. We tried walking on the gravel beside the tracks, but it had too much of a slant to it and we kept tending to slide down into the knee-deep snow in the ditch, so it was the ties for us.
Abbie, looking over her shoulder, gasped, “Here they come.”
“I never doubted it for a minute.”
It was getting darker, away from the street. There should be another cross street up ahead, but so far I didn’t see it. And in the darkness it was increasingly difficult to walk on the ties.
Abbie fell, almost dragging me down with her.
I bent over her, heavily aware of the hoods inching along in our wake. “What happened?”
“Damn,” she said.
“Yeah, but what happened?”
“I turned my ankle.”
“Oh, boy,” I said. “Can you walk?”
“I don’t know.”
Light far away made me look in the direction we’d come from. “You better try,” I said. “Here comes a train.”
We stood in snow up to our knees in the ditch beside the tracks, Abbie leaning most of her weight on me. The train was taking forever to get here, just moseying along as though it was out for a little jog around the neighborhood, not going anywhere in particular.
At least the hoods had also stopped, and were also standing around in the ditch, watching the train. Four of them, all on our side of the track.
My feet were freezing. Abbie was protected by those boots of hers, but I was soaked and freezing from the knees down, and shivering from the knees up. And stupid from the neck up, since I had very obviously made a bad mistake coming in here instead of continuing straight on to that bar, where maybe I could have phoned the local police, or at least found a cab handy. Now Abbie could barely walk, we were moving deeper and deeper into the kind of darkness in which those four back there would have no problems about taking care of us for good and all, and to make matters worse, as the train ambled by them they began jumping up onto it, standing between cars or on the narrow platforms outside the closed passenger car doors.
“Abbie!” I shouted. “They’re cheating!”
It was obvious what they meant to do. They’d ride the train up to where we stood, and then jump on us. Four against one and a half, which is about what we added up to, and the outcome was not in doubt.
“Oh, Chet. Chet, what are we going to do?”
None of them had gotten on the first car, or in the space
between cars number one and number two. I said, “Honey, we’ve got to get on that train, too. It’s our only chance.”
“I can’t
walk!
”
“You’ve
got
to! Come on, now.”
I half-dragged her up the gravel slope, and saw the engineer of the train looking at us in open-mouthed bewilderment. His big diesel engine trundled by, and he looked down at the top of our heads, and I’m sure he kept looking back at us after he’d gone on by. I’m sure of it, but I didn’t look to check. I saw a chrome railing coming toward us, and in a car farther on I saw the first of the hoods, with his gun out.
I had one arm around Abbie’s waist, holding tight. She had both arms around my neck. I was about as nimble as a man in ankle chains wearing a straitjacket, but if I didn’t connect right with that chrome handle it was all over.
Here it came. Here it was.
I stuck my free hand out, grabbed that bar, and held on.
The train took me away.
Funny how fast it was going all of a sudden. And my feet were dragging in the gravel, while simultaneously my arm was being pulled out of its socket. I pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and Abbie babbled a million things in my ear, and I finally got my right foot up onto that narrow ledge of platform, and then it was possible to get the rest of me up onto the train, and there I stood, with Abbie hanging on me as I held to the train by one hand and one foot.
Something went
zzzt.
That louse hanging on the next car was shooting at us!
“Abbie!” I shouted. “They’re shooting at us! Get in between the cars!”
“How?”
“I don’t know! Just
do
it!”
So she did it, I don’t know how. It involved putting her elbows in my nose, one at a time, and spending several hours standing on my foot—the one foot I had attached to the train—but eventually she was standing on something or other between the cars, gasping and panting but alive.
So was I, for the moment. There’d been several more
zzzts
and a
ping
or two, but the train was rocking back and forth so much it would have been a miracle if he’d hit me. I was a moving target and he was a moving shooter, and since we were on different cars our movements were not exactly synchronized.
Still, I wasn’t all that happy to be out there in the open with somebody shooting bullets at me, no matter how much the odds were in my favor. Some gambles I’d rather not take. So I swung around the edge of the car and joined Abbie amidships.
It was very strange in here. We had three walls and no floor. A sort of accordion-pleated thing connected the end doorways in the two cars, so we couldn’t get inside, but fortunately the ends of the cars were full of handles and wheels and ladder rungs to hold on to, and there was a narrow lip along the bottom edge of each car to stand on, so it was possible to survive, but very scary to look down between your legs and see railroad ties going by at twenty or thirty miles an hour under your heels. I spent little time looking down.
In fact, I spent more time looking up. A metal ladder ran up the back of the car, and I wondered if we’d be safer on top than here. I called to Abbie, “Wait here! I’m going up!”
She nodded. She looked bushed, and no wonder.
I clambered up the ladder, my arms and legs feeling very heavy, and at the top I discovered that the top of a railroad car sways a lot more than the bottom does. It was impossible for me to stand, impossible to walk. So I inched along on my belly,
and no matter how cold and windy it was, no matter how icy and wet my feet were, no matter how I ached all over, no matter how many people were after me with guns, I must say it did feel good to lie down.
Still, I was there for more than that. I crawled along the top of the car for a little ways, and it did seem safe up here, so I edged back and called down to Abbie to come on up. She did, slowly, with me helping her at the top, and when she was sprawled out on the roof, I yelled in her ear, “I’m going exploring! Don’t move!”
“Don’t worry.” She shut her eyes and let her head rest on her folded arms.
I stuck my mouth close to her ear. “Don’t fall asleep and roll off!”
She nodded, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. I patted her shoulder doubtfully, and then took off.
It didn’t take long to get to the other end of the car, and when I did, there was the pot-shooter, resting now between the cars. Waiting for the train to pull in at a station, no doubt. Then he and the others could just run along the platform to where we were, shoot us, and disappear.
Well, maybe, and on the other hand, maybe not. I pushed back from the edge and slowly sat up. I didn’t want to take my shoe off, wet and cold though it was, but I didn’t have much choice. So I took it off, and my foot promptly went numb. I wasn’t sure that was a good sign, but it was better than the stinging ache I’d been feeling up till now.
I lay on my belly again and crawled back to the end of the car. He was still there, feet straddling the open space as he faced outward. At the moment his head was bent a bit because he was trying to light a cigarette.
Perfect. I put one hand on the top rung of the ladder here to
support me, took careful aim, and swung the heel of the shoe around in a great big circle that started in outer space and ended on the back of his head.
Lovely. He popped out like a grape seed out of a grape, and landed in a snowbank. The last I saw of him was his feet kicking in the air, black against the gray of the snow.
One down. Three to go.
Sure.
I put my shoe back on and looked across at the next car, trying to figure out how to get over there, and a head popped into view two cars away. And after the head, an arm. And on the end of the arm, a gun. It flashed, the gun did, and I faintly heard the sound of the shot. It missed me, but I wasn’t encouraged. I quick hunched around and started crawling back the other way.
Something went
p-tiying
beside my right elbow. I looked, and saw a new scratch in the roof there.
He was getting too close. I hurriedly crawled back to the pile of laundry I knew was Abbie and shook her shoulder. “We’ve got to go down again!”
“Wha? Wha?” She lifted a shaky head and showed me bleary eyes.
“One of them came up! Back there! He’s shooting!”
“Oh, Chet, I’m so
tired.
”
“Come on, honey. Come on.”
I herded her onto the ladder, with her about to fall twice, but the more she moved the more she woke up, and when she finally put her weight on the bad ankle on the ladder she woke up completely. She also let out a healthy yowl.