Peace Like a River Page 12

  “Unless he got out to the highway and hitched a ride,” Dad suggested. He was trying to sell Walt on calling off the posse, something Walt hadn’t the authority to do anyway. It was Davy’s second day out; Walt was off duty and had come by the DeCuellars’ for coffee; no doubt the sheriff thought it wise to keep an eye on Davy’s family. “He could be in Kansas City by now,” Dad said.

  “Possibility,” Walt admitted. “Though Pym believes otherwise. It was raining buckets, you know. How many folks are going to stop for some wet-muskrat-looking fellow, in a rainstorm, at that hour? Besides, he’s got the best-known mug in the state right now. You think he’d try and hitch?”

  It was a good point, and in fact Davy’s picture was on the front page of that very afternoon’s Minneapolis Star—a shot of him relaxed and laughing, hands folded back of his head. I still don’t know where they got that photo; it was the one they’d used in their early stories, the ones extolling his bravery. Later they’d replaced it with a police mug in which his chin looked dirty and his eyes gave you not one bit of hope or information. Now the flattering picture was back, with this caption:

  Bold outlaw Davy Land slips from jail, eludes manhunt.

  Fellow inmate: “He up and disappeared like smoke.”

  “Good grief,” Dad said. Having “up and disappeared,” Davy’d clearly reacquired the allure that had evaporated so easily when people heard about Bubby. Now he was back to “bold outlaw,” and while I liked the change I’d also learned a bit by now about public inconstancy. Not to mention Mighty Stinson’s inconstancy. Quoted at length by reporters, Mighty told the story as one smitten by legend:

  “And when I looked back up he was flat-out gone, I didn’t hear a sound. Like he was a ghost.”

  And worse:

  “You know something? I knew he was going to do it. Knew it when they first brought him in.”

  Pretty irresponsible of Mighty, since the truth, Walt said, was that Mighty had been sleeping like mortality itself when Davy made his move. But when else was anyone going to listen to a word Mighty said, much less put it in print?

  What actually happened—and we got this from Walt, whose colleague Stube Range was on shift—was this: Shortly before eleven, Stube was sitting at the night desk reading a paperback mystery. Subsequent research has revealed the book to be a Mike Hammer detective story. Stube was reading it despite Sheriff Pym’s disapproval of its author, Mickey Spillane. (More research: The sheriff had met Spillane once, far back in memory, on a turboprop airliner, and Spillane had made a humorous remark about Charlie Pym’s beard, which was sparse.) Suddenly Stube was distracted from the story by a polite call from Davy. The toilet in his cell wouldn’t flush, he said.

  Don’t flush it then, Stube answered.

  There’s a need to, Davy replied; sorry about that, but there’s a need. Davy jiggled the lever audibly. No flush.

  There was apparently some back-and-forth between them, Mighty Stinson snorting in his sleep through everything because the dampness stopped his nose, but finally Stube Range put down his book, grumping good-naturedly about it I’m sure, let himself into Davy’s cell, locked it behind him, and peeked in the toilet.

  No suspense here. Stube awoke propped against the wall of Davy’s cell. His head was sore and his memory flawed. The toilet, incidentally, worked fine; he had to use it before his replacement showed up at the stroke of twelve and released him from the cell.

  Swede would point out, rightly enough, that a man reading Mickey Spillane ought to have known better, but Stube Range, as they say, had a good heart. At this crossroads in his life he would in fact leave law enforcement to begin a new career as a school janitor over in Roofing. The district was hiring, you see.

  We stayed at the DeCuellars’ three days after Davy’s escape. Walt visited every morning, asking jokingly whether we’d seen Davy lately and bringing us news of the county’s frustration. Crisscrossing the area, talking to farmers and rural deliverymen and others who might’ve noticed a bedraggled boy slouching hastily elsewhere, the posse had come up dry. The chase paled. Posse members began to desert, offering as excuses their wives and families and, in rare cases, their jobs. Who could blame them? Not only was the trail cold, there hadn’t really been a trail to start with. By the time a bloodhound could be borrowed from a neighboring county, the great rains had blotted out Davy’s scent. They gave the bloodhound a try anyway. Poor over-anticipated fellow—he couldn’t smell anything but himself.

  Through all this, Walt said, Sheriff Pym was losing his happy nature. Justly or unjustly, Davy had grown a higher profile than any other desperado ever to sit in the Montrose County jail. His escape only raised it higher. Pym, Walt cautioned us, felt that people were laughing at him. He’d been heard shouting blue language at the phone in his office. A Minneapolis editorialist had thrown out the combustible phrase “hambone county rubes.”

  “He’s touchy what people think of him,” Walt told us—so you see, that Mickey Spillane business rings true.

  By Davy’s third day, Sheriff Pym had become so out of sorts Walt reported he was thinking of a house-to-house search.

  “It scares me, Mr. Land. Do you know how long it would take to look in every closet in Montrose?”

  Mr. DeCuellar said, “The sheriff is joking, it’s unconstitutional. Coffee?”

  The deputy accepted. “I’m worried about Charlie,” he said. “He’s just sure somebody’s got Davy down the basement. Some young lady, he says. He keeps saying that; it bothers him awfully.” Walt Stockard was beginning to look tired. “A lot of people like that boy, you know.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. DeCuellar, “they do.” He was brisk this morning—there were times he seemed mad at Davy for getting away, or maybe he was just sick of houseguests. It had been a pretty long visit.

  Walt said, “My girls’ve been treating me like I’m on the wrong team.”

  “They’ll recover,” Mr. DeCuellar said.

  Walt pinched the bridge of his nose. What a kind fellow he was. He looked capable of forgetting just about anything. He said, “Say, Rube, hand me one of those bismarcks, would you?”

  That afternoon, to everyone’s relief, a farmer name of Nelson Svedvig came into Montrose and filed a complaint about a stolen horse. An Arabian mare, taken from his south pasture; this would be less than two miles from Montrose.

  “Taken when?” Sheriff Pym asked. Walt was standing right there, listening, is how I know.

  “Not sure,” Nelson Svedvig admitted. “I hauled a load of hay out late last week; she was there then.” He saw the sheriff looking at him and added, defensively, “Those ponies kind of look after themselves this time of year.”

  “Are your fences okay? Could be she ran off.”

  Nelson replied, “She foaled in the spring. And the foal is still there”—adding, with rising dignity, “and you know my fences, Charlie.”

  That night the sheriff paid off what remained of the dispirited posse, and we took our leave of the DeCuellars. Oh, it was good to get home.

  Our first night back Swede propped herself in bed, typewriter before her, listing in quilts. At first I worried she’d go back to fretting and banging the wall; but she whacked away steadily, and I soon dropped asleep in my room across the hall. Here’s what I found in the morning, laid neatly on the floor beside my bed:

  The moon was black as a miner’s lung,

  The sky was black as a shroud,

  And deep in a cell that was black as a well

  Two men lay moaning aloud.

  And one was Rennie, who’d robbed a man,

  And one was Bert, who had killed,

  And the gallows outside hadn’t ever been tried

  But its mission would soon be fulfilled, lads,

  Its mission would soon be fulfilled.

  Three nooses swayed loose in a breeze like a sigh—

  But who was the third who was waiting to die?

  Swede came in while I was reading and perched on my bed like a satisfied cat;
she saw how breathless I was, it made her pretty confident. I said, “Is it Sunny?” But she only shrugged—she knew she had me.

  He’d been awake in his room one night,

  With his darling asleep by his side,

  When the bold Reddick boys, hardly making a noise,

  Pushed the front door open wide.

  His bride they had threatened not once but three times,

  When his travels had fetched him away.

  They had followed her round as she walked through the town,

  Calling names I would rather not say—no,

  The names I would rather not say.

  And what do you think any good man would do,

  No matter what judges or laws told him to?

  There was something about the poem—I almost felt I had read it before. “Swede,” I told her, “this is awful good!”

  “Aw, don’t,” she said.

  They opened the door and they crossed the broad floor

  With their minds full of evil intent.

  For in town they had heard the fortuitous word

  That Sundown on business was sent.

  And as they approached Sunny rose to his feet,

  Like a spirit he made not a sound,

  And his blood rose inside as they came near his bride

  And he shot the bold Reddick boys down, lads,

  He shot the bold Reddick boys down.

  So may a good man who has spared his wife hurt

  Face death with the likes of poor Rennie and Burt.

  “That’s it?” I couldn’t believe it; there wasn’t any more! “He dies? They hang him with these two guys?”

  “Reuben, how fast do you think I can write this stuff?”

  “Oh—it’s not done?”

  “Reuben!”

  “Well, I’m sorry!” The truth was, old Sundown really tugged at me. Glad as I was that Swede was back in whatever groove made the verses click, this business of hearing half a story was insufferable. Cautiously I asked, “What about Valdez?”

  She didn’t look at me. “What about him?”

  “Well, what happened to him? Who are these Rennie and Burt fellows?”

  She looked at me hard. I figured she was thinking I didn’t like the poem.

  “Swede, it’s a great poem. You know it is. I was only wondering.”

  She had tears in her eyes, just that quick!

  “I love the poem, Swede!” I was desperate, pardner.

  She said, “Sunny couldn’t beat him, Reuben. Valdez. I couldn’t write it.”

  Now why do you suppose that made me feel so bad? A lump arose as if I were reading my own mawkish epitaph.

  “So he got away?”

  She didn’t answer. Her silence placed or revealed a nub of fear in me—an unreasoning fear that Valdez was no invention. That he was real and coming toward us on solid earth. A preposterous idea, wouldn’t you say? Yet it blazed up, so scary in its brightness that I made a wall against it in my heart, in the deepest place I owned.

  The weeks wheeled along unbalanced. Swede leaned toward elation; she herself couldn’t have orchestrated Davy’s getaway in more fabled style. One day Walt Stockard reported to us that the Svedvig mare had come trotting home, whickering for oats but none the worse for wear. There was speculation that Davy’d ridden a dozen miles across country to the state highway and nabbed a ride. Swede also took satisfaction in the newspapers’ reversal of attitude, by now so complete that a stranger reading his first Davy Land article would’ve finished it believing the world was improved without these Finch and Basca characters anyway and that young Land ought merely to be thanked and let go. One columnist, Aaron W. Groap at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, was particularly susceptible to romance. I’ve saved a couple of his entries—here’s part of one.

  RIDE, DAVY, RIDE

  No fretting for the past for me, folks. I’m happy in the current century. Put me in a Lincoln Continental or a turboprop leaving frozen St. Paul; give me Huntley-Brinkley at six o’clock; meet me at Met Stadium for a ball game on a summer night. I’m a modern creature, friend, and I like it that way.

  So how come I envy Davy Land?

  He’s just a kid, after all, with an outdated sense of frontier justice. A kid who went too far and landed, most deservedly, in jail. A kid who’s exceeded the boundaries of our civilized lives. He ought to be locked up—isn’t that right?

  So how come, when I arrive at work, the first thing I do is check the AP wire to see if Davy Land’s been caught? And chuckle on seeing he hasn’t?

  He’s just a boy on a horse, after all. Just a skinny length of wire and persistence who still doesn’t know he can’t really escape. Such ignorance! For his face is known to every citizen. It’s pasted to the dashboard of every state cop and county hack. I mentioned Chet Huntley and David Brinkley? If you saw the news last night, you know they know him too.

  A boy on a horse can’t outride the law. Not in 1962. The police tell us so, and perhaps they are right. America is a grown-up place, after all. It’s been a long while since we loved our outlaws. Perhaps the songs we knew as kids—about Jesse James, and Billy the Kid, and the Dirty Little Coward Who Shot Mr. Howard—have no place in a world full of television and helicopters and rock and roll. Perhaps this is all for the best.

  Today is December 5. Davy Land escaped from jail twelve days ago. I’ve just checked the wires, and he is still free.

  Excuse me while I chuckle.

  You had to take Aaron Groap for what he was, of course; all but the very best columnists grab their causes with such operatic choke holds. Anyhow, as Swede said, this sort of thing beat the pants off the Bubby story.

  There was no comfort in it for Dad, though. He seemed to believe he had lost his son forever, and the popular melodrama of it only made it worse. He stopped answering the telephone; he became restive and joyless. Many a night I woke to the murmur of paper and knew he was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James—oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder. I remember creeping out once when my breathing was poor and there he was, holy Bible on the tabletop and himself bent to it, his back cupped as a weasel’s; when I tapped his arm he sat up straight, his breath seizing a moment as if the motion hurt. I told him my lungs were tight.

  “All right, Reuben.” But he sat still, not rising to put water on the stove.

  “What you reading?”

  “Ninety-first Psalm.”

  “Does it help?”

  He went to the sink and held a pan under the tap. He didn’t answer and I thought he wasn’t hearing me. I repeated the question.

  Dad lit a burner. There must’ve been something on the bottom of that pan, for smoke and burnt smell twined up its sides. When the water boiled he threw in baking soda, which foamed and subsided. I said, “You could read me a psalm if you want to, Dad.”

  But he said, “Not tonight, Reuben, my head hurts so.”

  In early December a blizzard swept in off the plains and struck with what was measured on the flats as twenty-seven inches of snow. This was the first in what became nearly a weekly cycle of snowstorms, some of them riven by lightning, a confounding phenomenon. Dr. Nokes, a medical student through much of the Great Depression, said he recalled lightning and snow mixed only once before, during a week of examinations; he said the snow came down not in flakes but the approximate shape and size of corn kernels, and he said it preceded a spring that brought neither rain nor hope of rain, so dry were most midwestern souls.

  I thought that was an awful lot to remember from something as simple as lightning in a snowstorm, but Dr. Nokes laughed and said one day I too would remember hard winters in detail more voluminous than anyone would care to hear. I suppose he was right and you don’t give a chipped dime for December of ’62, but it was an epic season all the same, the drifts rising eventually past the kitchen window and up to the very eaves. In the afternoons Swede and I, in layers of pants, would step from the highest snowbank onto the roof of the single-story a
ddition, then climb to the peak and go skidding down the other side to land with a poof in the front yard. How we missed Davy! In such snow he’d have led us into all sorts of thrilling and jeopardous traps—our backyard would’ve been veined with tunnels and candlelit caverns; our snowball wars would’ve been prolonged and ferocious. I remember one dream I had that winter, that Davy was home and climbing the roof with us, his leaps from the peak wondrously high, and in the dream the salesman Tin Lurvy was lying on his back in the snow, watching, admiration all over his face, and Lurvy was saying Oh, my, look at him—goodness’ sake, what leaping! And here is why I remember that dream in particular: because Lurvy said—and this woke me up laughing—I want to try that! Hey, kids, can I try that?