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  I guess I must have realized sort of vaguely that nobody was paying attention to me, and that this was Just As Well. So I was very careful to stay where I was, and I closed my eyes again, and I found out that with my eyes shut my ears worked again, and I listened to what they were saying.

  A voice I didn’t know, a coppish voice, was saying, “Boy, your ass is grass. You’re gone be in jail so long you’ll be able to homestead your cell. I just hope you like what you got off of that little girl tonight, because you won’t get anything else off anybody else for the next twenty years. Indiana don’t care about statutory rape, now. Indiana don’t care for that at all.”

  “She did act like a statue at first,” Flick said. “But she was no statue toward the end there. Without you jokers were kicking the door in, she was humping like a camel.”

  “Now I told you about your rights,” the cop said. Or maybe it was another cop. If you’ve heard one cop, you’ve heard them all. “And about your rights to an attorney, and how statements made voluntarily may be introduced as evidence in criminal prosecutions against you. You recollect I gave you that warning.”

  “Cut the shit,” Flick said.

  “Because you’re just digging your grave with your tongue, boy, and I want to make sure you know what you’re about.”

  “Something about raping a statue,” Keegan said.

  He sounded as unconcerned as Flickinger, and I couldn’t understand it. Neither could the cops. The guys were drunk, but it didn’t seem possible that they were drunk enough to be this way.

  Solly said, “That was no statue, that was my wife.”

  “Not funny, boy. That young lady was under the age of consent.”

  “That was no young lady,” Lester put in. “That was my statue.”

  “What’s the age of consent here anyway?”

  “Eighteen, same as most everywhere else.”

  “And you mean to say that girl was seventeen?”

  “No, sir,” the cop said. He sounded very Jack Webbish. “I mean to say she was fifteen.”

  “Well, I declare,” Lester said. “Why, the little liar swore up and down she was thirty-five.”

  The room rocked with laughter. I didn’t laugh, and neither did the cops. They made threatening sounds and talked about going on down to the station house. Jimmy Joe hummed Dum Da Dum Dum and got a laugh. Flickinger stood up, stepped over me, and started rasping away in his No More Of This Nonsense voice. He saved it for special occasions, and it was very impressive. He told the cops that they could cut out this shit about warning us of our rights, because the same rights meant that they couldn’t kick the door in without a warrant, and since we were in a private room with a closed and locked door, they had no case, and—

  “We had a warrant,” the cop said.

  “Huh?”

  “Naming you six men.” He read our names. “That’s you folks, isn’t it?” Flickinger allowed that it was us, all right. I was relieved, for no particular reason, when he read my name as Chip Harrison. When he was going down the list I had the weirdest idea that he was going to read off Leigh Harvey Harrison, and that was all I needed.

  “And charging you six men with fraud, attempted fraud, soliciting without a license, several counts of trespass and criminal trespass, and miscellaneous violations of the following civic ordinances—” and he read off a batch of numbers.

  “Now just a minute,” Flick said. He still didn’t seem at all worried; and I decided he was crazy. I didn’t know what any of those numbers were supposed to mean, but it sounded as though they had enough against us to put us away for hundreds and hundreds of years. And the worst part of all was that this had happened before I could get to Cherry. Whatever jail they put me in, the odds were good that there wouldn’t be any women in it, which meant I’d be a male virgin until I was too old to be interested.

  I shuddered, then tuned Flick in again. “Where you made your mistake,” he was saying, “was that you came down here without you checked it all out with the sheriff. Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble. Now what you got to do is get on the phone and ring the sheriff and tell him what’s happening, and you can let me have a couple of words with him, and we’ll have this whole thing straightened out in a minute.”

  “You and the sheriff are close, is that right?”

  “The closest. And there’s no hard feelings, and to prove it there’ll be something in it for you fellows, too. More or less to make it up to you for your time.”

  “That’s attempting to bribe an arresting officer,” the cop said. “Write that down, Ken.”

  “You’ll have to spell it for him,” Keegan said, and then there was an oof sound, as though someone (like Ken) had hit someone (for instance, Keegan) in the stomach.

  “Officer,” Hick said, coming down hard on the first syllable, “I think I have to spell it out for you. The fix is in.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You talk to the sheriff and—”

  “I talked to him an hour ago. That’s his signature on the bottom of the warrant there, boy.”

  “Like hell it is.”

  A long pause. Then Flickinger said, “It says Harold M. Powers. Now who in the precious hell is Harold M-for-Mother Powers?”

  The cops all laughed. They really enjoyed themselves. I guess when you’re a cop you don’t get all that many opportunities to cut loose and laugh, and they made the most of this one. “Now who in the precious hell,” one of them started, and they broke up for a while, and another finished, “is Harold M-for-Mother Powers?” and they all fell out all over again.

  Until finally one of them said, “Why, I’ll tell you, boy, if you’re so close with him, how come you don’t even recognize the sheriff’s name?”

  “What about Barnett Ramsey?”

  “Why, we had an election some six or eight months ago, and old Barney got beat.”

  “He lost the election,” Flickinger said. Heavily.

  “After all those years. Yeah, it surprised a whole mess of folks.”

  “Great bleeding shit,” Flickinger said. “Jesus frigging Christ with a tambourine. Holy laminated bifurcated ocellated Mother of Pearl.”

  “I never heard the like,” one cop said softly.

  “Sweet shit in a bucket,” Flickinger said. “I bribed the wrong man.”

  Everybody started talking at once. I took a deep breath and said a quick prayer and rolled under the bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I DIDN’T REALLY expect to get away with it. But they had been doing such a great job of ignoring me that I figured I ought to give them all the encouragement I could. The easier I made it for them, the better.

  So I rolled under the bed, and since I was right next to it already, and on the floor, and more or less face down, it wasn’t that hard to do. In a sense I suppose rolled is the wrong word for it. I sort of crept on my belly like an earthworm. Sideways, though. Earthworms, as you probably know, tend to go back and forth. I don’t know how you tell an earthworm’s back from his forth. It was never very important to me. I don’t even like to go fishing, for Pete’s sake. I do know, though, that earthworms are male at one end and female at the other, so you know what they can do.

  Lying under that bed, I decided that the police force of the fifth largest city in the state of Indiana could do the same thing earthworms can do, for all I cared. Because it occurred to me that they, were not only going to give me the royal shaft, but they were going to give it to me for something I didn’t do. In the first place I was only seventeen myself, so what I did to Cherry wasn’t statutory rape, and in the second place I hadn’t done anything in the first place.

  Which seemed to indicate that as soon as I clued them in, they would let me go.

  But I didn’t think they would. So I stayed under the bed while Flickinger told everybody who would listen that it would take a while to straighten everything out, but that he knew everything would be straightened out, because one thing you couldn’t deny was t
hat he and his men represented Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc., and that DTE was no fly-by-night outfit but a company that had been a leader in its field for twenty-two-count-’em-twenty-two years, and that was by God a lot of goddamn years.

  (This was the God’s honest truth, as a matter of fact. I had trouble believing it myself, but it was. The company didn’t ever do a thing that was illegal. If a crew boss ran things on the shady side, they didn’t want to know about it. If a crew boss ran things on the up and up, that was fine with DTE. Of course an honest crew boss couldn’t possibly clear fifteen cents a month, but that was the way it went. You couldn’t call the company crooked just because all its employees were crooked, could you?)

  “We’ll be out of this in no time,” Flick said. “Youse guys just trust me on this without you all lose your heads and get rattled. All right, we gotta go see the Sheriff, that’s what we got to do. That’s all.”

  They finished getting dressed, and they talked about things, and they asked the cops if Cherry was really only fifteen, and the cops said she was, and Lester asked one of the cops how often Cherry generally got statutorily raped, and the cop said as often as she possibly could, and Lester asked why anybody would make a fuss over it then, and the cop said it was because it was the sort of thing the city couldn’t take lying down, and Lester said that if Cherry could take it lying down, he didn’t see why the city couldn’t. The cop laughed and said that was sure a good way of putting it. I think this comes under the heading of Fraternizing With The Enemy.

  And I kept waiting for somebody to say, “Hey, what happened to the kid we had to hit over the head?”

  Or for one of the guys on our side to say, “Say, what the hell happened to Chip?”

  Or for somebody, anybody, to sing out, “Look who’s hiding under the bed!”

  But they found other things to say, and the door opened, and they trailed out of it and left it ajar. I don’t know to this day where Cherry was during all of this. I didn’t see her or hear her, and I didn’t hear anybody talk to her, or say anything that gave the impression she was in the room. But I didn’t see how she could have been taken anywhere because all of the cops were still in the room, so who would have taken her away? I guess either they sent her home by herself or a matron came for her while I was unconscious. Or else she was what you would call a plant, and the police had sent her over there to begin with so that they could give us all the shaft. (I don’t really believe that last one at all. But I’m putting it in to give you an idea of how paranoid a person can get under the right set of circumstances. After all, somewhere out there is my old roommate Haskell, and I want to make sure the book has a certain amount of psychological significance so he won’t feel guilty while he reads it and turns the pages with one hand. Hi, Haskell, you hypocritical jerkoff!)

  They left the room, as I said before I got off course again. They went out, and I heard them in the hallway, and I got out from under the bed, still waiting for them to wonder what had happened to the kid. I went over to the window and yanked it open. And somebody must have wondered about me, although they were too far away from the room for “me to hear them say so, because I heard footsteps racing back up the hall and a voice—Jimmy Joe, God bless him—shout out my name.

  I stepped out of the window. It was the first floor, which was the one good thing that had happened that evening. And it was at the back of the motel, away from the parking lot and nowhere near where the other cops had been heading. That was the second good thing that happened that evening. And, because they come in threes, a third good thing happened that evening, which is that I ran like a cat with its tail on fire and got away without being spotted.

  Which was very good.

  But it could have been better. I mean, even considering the fact that my commissions were all being held for me by the Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc. office, and that I had been doing my Coke buying and moviegoing out of my own savings for a couple of months, the fact remained that I had over a hundred dollars in my wallet, along with various cards to prove I was me in case I died and they wanted to make sure the body wasn’t Judge Crater or Ambrose Bierce. There was also a picture of Aileen that I kind of liked, and that I would miss.

  It would have been good if I had been able to bring my wallet. And it would have been even better if I had had something to put my wallet in, because although the night was unseasonably hot, it’s never a good idea to rum amok in Indiana’s fifth largest city with no clothing whatsoever on your body.

  I’ve read books where the hero suddenly gets struck naked one way or another. Or he breaks out of jail and has to get something to replace his prison uniform. Or he soaks his clothes swimming to safety and can’t wait for them to dry. Or there are these telltale bloodstains telling tales all over the place.

  When this happens in books, what the guy usually does is swipe clothing from an untended clothesline. The authors don’t generally dwell on it too intently. They just throw something like Dressing himself with clothes purloined from an un tended clothesline, Stud Boring relentlessly took up the trail of the three pencil sharpeners. Then they plunge right into the action without giving you time to think about it.

  In the movies, they’re even cooler about it. I saw this done just the night before last, as a matter of fact. This guy broke out of prison, out of a chain gang actually, and one moment you saw him running down the road with his prison clothes all shredded from the brambles and wet from the swamp he went through to throw the dogs off his trail, and then there was another shot of him getting off a bus, wearing a shirt and tie and carrying a leather suitcase. They didn’t even cheat by giving you the abandoned clothesline bit. They just came right out and admitted that they didn’t know how the hell Stud Boring got those clothes, and that they weren’t going to try to fake their way out of it. I suppose you have to admire them for it.

  The thing of it is that if you can find a clothesline in the middle of the night, tended or untended, you are better suited to this sort of thing than I was. I don’t even think I’d care to look for one in the daytime, because the checking I did showed that (a) people don’t leave their clothes hanging out overnight and (b) most of them don’t even have clotheslines nowadays. I went zipping through backyards looking for clothes and the whole thing was a large zero. No lines and certainly no clothes. I wouldn’t have thought of looking in the first place except that I remembered all those dumb books. You’ve got to be very suspicious of everything you read.

  I think I know what happened. Years ago nobody had clothes dryers, and everybody who washed clothes had to hang them out to dry, and with that many people washing clothes, there would always be a certain number who would forget to take their clothes in for the night, or who wouldn’t get around to it because they were baking bread or beating rugs by hand or putting up preserves or watering the horses or any of those good old-time things that people don’t do anymore. So in those days it was perfectly open and aboveboard to have Stud Boring steal clothes from a wash line. (Open and aboveboard for the writer, I mean. It was still illegal for Stud Boring.)

  But nowadays when a writer is trying to get old Stud out of a tight place, the first thing he thinks of is what he read somewhere else. (That’s why so many books are the same. The writers all get ideas from each other.) And because they were never running around naked in the middle of the night, they don’t know that they’d be better off looking for an abandoned clothes dryer, for Pete’s sake, in this modern day and age.

  After I figured out that I wasn’t going to get clothes off a line, I sat in a dark corner of somebody’s garage and tried to think what to do next. I thought about going where the clothes were. Clothes in general, I mean. Not my own clothes, which were all in my room, which was a place I knew better than to go back to. But other clothes, that I could sort of find before they were lost. The first ideas I had all involved breaking into someplace or other. Somebody’s house, or some store that sold clothes.

  I figured if I broke in anyp
lace I would get caught, and if I got caught I would be worse off than ever, because in addition to fraud and statutory rape they could also put me in jail for burglary. And while I thought if worst came to worst I could probably get a suspended sentence for the other charges (assuming Flick remembered who to bribe for a change), I could see myself spending a long time in prison for burglary. I also figured anybody breaking into a house or a store stood a very good chance of getting opened up with a shotgun.

  Then I thought, but not for long, about Lying In Ambush and crowning somebody with a brick or something heavy, say a traditional Blunt Instrument for example, like a saxophone. Having just been hit on the head myself, I didn’t want to do the same to a stranger. Besides that, you may remember that I’m not even coordinated enough to pace the Upper Valley basketball team to a regional title, and that I get nauseous just thinking about violence for any length of time. I was violent enough with the three cops, but that’s something else. I mean, I had something to fight for.

  Then I tripped over a muddy shoe.

  To give you an idea how brilliant I was, I looked at what I tripped over and said to myself, Oh, it’s a shoe, and put it out of the way so I wouldn’t trip over it again. And I must have sat around scheming for another five minutes before I remembered that shoes were things you wear on your feet, and that I wasn’t wearing any at the moment, and that, therefore, a muddy shoe was better than no shoe at all, and I ought to follow the old proverb that starts out If the shoe fits.

  Here’s another proverb. If the shoe doesn’t exactly fit, wear it anyway, because shoes are almost as hard to come by as clotheslines.

  These shoes were a little loose, and down at the heels, and thin in the soles, and one of the laces had been broken and tied together again. If they’d been in better shape, the owner wouldn’t have used them for gardening and I wouldn’t have tripped over them, so I didn’t really have any right to complain.