A Maidens Grave

rains I’m talking. Stuckey’s’s only five miles. Look there. You wanta stop?”
    Harriet, their daughter, had made a dinner that could be described only as inedible—woefully overdone and oversalted. And the husband had found what he was sure was some cigarette ash in the succotash. Now they were both starving.
    “Might do that. For coffee only. Lookit that wind—whooee! Hope you shut the windows at home. Maybe a piece of pie.”
    “I did.”
    “You forgot last time,” the wife reminded shrilly.“Don’t want to lose the lamp again. You know what three-way bulbs cost.”
    “Well,” the husband said. “What’s going on here?”
    “How’s that?”
    “I’m being stopped. A police car.”
    “Pull over!”
    “I’m doing it,” he said testily. “No point in leaving skid marks. I’m doing it.”
    “What’d you do?”
    “I didn’t do nothing. I was fifty-seven in a fifty-five zone and that’s not a crime in anybody’s book.”
    “Well, pull off the road.”
    “I’m pulling. Will you just settle? There, happy?”
    “Hey, look,” the wife offered with astonishment, “there’s a lady officer driving!”
    “They have ’em now. You know that. You watch Cops. Should I get out or are they going to come up here?”
    “Maybe,” the wife said, “you oughta go to them. Make the effort. That way if they’re right on the borderline of giving you a ticket they might not.”
    “That’s a thought. But I still don’t know what I done.” And, smiling like a Kiwanian on Pancake Day, the husband climbed out of the Nissan and walked back to the squad car, fishing his wallet out of his pocket.
     
    As Lou Handy drove the cruiser deep into the wheat field, cutting a swath in the tall grain, he was lost in the memory of another field—the one that morning, near the intersection where the Cadillac had broadsided them.
    He remembered the gray sky overhead. The feel of the bony knife in his hand. The woman’s powdery face, black wrinkles in her makeup, dots of her blood spattering her as he drove the knife downward into her soft body. The look in her eyes, hopelessness and sorrow. Her weird scream, choking, grunting. An animal’s sounds.
    She’d died the same way that the couple in the Nissan just had, the couple now lying in the trunk of the cruiser he was driving. Hell, they had to die, both of the couples. They’d had something he needed. Their cars. The Cadillac and the Nissan. This afternoon Hank and Ruth’d smashed the fuck out of his Chevy. And tonight, well, heand Pris couldn’t keep driving in a stolen squad car. It was impossible. He needed a new car. He had to have one.
    And when Lou Handy collected what he was owed, when he’d scratched that itch, he was the most contented man on earth.
    Tonight he parked the cruiser, which stunk of cordite and blood, in the field, fifty yards from the road. It’d be found by tomorrow morning but that was okay. In a few hours he and Pris’d be out of the state and flying over the Texas-Mexico border, a hundred feet in the air, on their way to San Hidalgo.
    Whoa, hold on tight . . . . Damn, the wind was fierce, buffeting the car and sending the stalks of wheat slapping into the windshield with a clatter like birdshot.
    Handy climbed out and trotted back to the road, where Pris sat in the driver’s seat of the Nissan. She’d ditched the trooper’s uniform and was wearing a sweater and jeans and Handy wanted more than anything else at the moment to tug those Levi’s down, them and the cheap nylon panties she always wore, and fuck her right on top of the hood of the tinny Jap car. Holding her ponytail in his right hand the way he liked to do.
    But he jumped in the passenger’s seat and motioned for her to get going. She pitched her cigarette out the window and gunned the engine. The car shot away off the shoulder, hung a tight U, and sped up to sixty.
    Heading back in the direction they’d just come from. North.
    It seemed crazy, sure. But Handy prided himself on being as off-the-wall nuts as a man could be and still get on in this life. In reality their destination made sense, though—because where they were going was the last place anyone would think to look for them.
    Anyway, he thought, fuck it whether it’s crazy or not. His mind was made up. He had business back there. Lou Handy was owed.
     
    The Heiligenstadt Testament, written in 1802 by Beethoven to his brothers, chronicles his despair at hisprogressive deafness, which a decade