Mad River

instead of punching through, it deflected and spent a few hundredths of a second rattling around inside Card’s brain, which Card didn’t know because he was already dead.
    He fell in the street, on his back, and in a last dead reflex motion, threw his arms out to his sides, so that he looked like a picture of a dead man.
    Jimmy dragged himself to the car and crawled in, and bleated, “I’m hit bad. Man, I’m hit bad.” He’d brought the guns and money with him.
    Tom was in the back, with his bag of money, and he shouted, “Go, go,” and Becky put her foot down and cried, “How bad are you? How bad?”
    “It’s pretty fuckin’ bad,” Jimmy cried. “Jesus, it hurts so bad.”
    •   •   •
    JIMMY HAD PLANNED to go fourteen miles straight up County 9, then left on 99, a side trail, then up a jigsaw path of back roads to the house of an old man who’d once hired Jimmy’s father to cut a bunch of dead trees and grind out the stumps. Jimmy had been made to go along and help, and he’d remembered two things: that the old man was an asshole, and that he was isolated. He lived alone in an old farmhouse with a garage on the side, farming a half-section, making just enough, in a good year, to keep himself in a decent truck and a winter vacation on the Gulf Coast.
    Jimmy figured to kill the old man and take his truck. They’d lock the Boxes’ car in the old man’s garage, and since nobody liked the old fucker, it could be weeks before anybody went looking for him. Probably not until it became obvious that he wasn’t doing his spring plowing. By that time, they’d be . . . somewhere else.
    He hadn’t told Tom where he was planning to go, because Tom . . .
    He no longer trusted Tom. Truth to tell, Tom’s days on earth were numbered, and truth to tell, that number was One.
    •   •   •
    BUT THEY DIDN’T go to the old man’s place, not then. They wound up in a cornfield. Sometimes, the corn didn’t get harvested before the snow fell, and wound up standing through the winter. Eight miles out of town, down a narrow side road, they saw a field like that, and Jimmy, screaming with the pain of the rough roads, pointed them down into a dry ditch, then sideways to the field. They didn’t care about the car, and drove it right over the fence and into the cornfield. They could be seen from the air, but not from the road.
    Jimmy was hurt bad, but not as bad as he might have been. The cop’s bullet had blown open a wound along the outside of his thigh, almost like the flesh had been gouged out with an ice-cream scoop. There was blood everywhere. Becky got a blouse out of her bag and made a bandage and tied it tight around the wound, knotting the bandage with the arms of the blouse.
    Blood began soaking through, but it didn’t seem uncontrolled.
    Becky said, “We gotta get some medicine. Some pain medicine.”
    “Where we gonna do that?” Jimmy groaned. His face was white as a dead man’s, his teeth showing yellow against his white skin.
    “They’re gonna be all over this place,” Becky said. “Tom shot that cop, and he wasn’t moving. He might be dead. In an hour, we won’t be able to move. Not until night.”
    “Well, what’re we gonna do?” Tom asked. “He’s hurt too bad.”
    “I’m getting better since we stopped,” Jimmy said, but then he groaned again.
    “We passed that little house, not more than a half mile back there,” Becky said. “We could go back, see if they got any medicine.”
    Jimmy said, “You’re just going to say, ‘Can we borrow some medicine?’”
    “I’ll take a gun,” Becky said.
    “You think you can pull a trigger?”
    “As good as you. I’ll come back, fix your leg as good as we can, then we’ll . . . go on.”
    Jimmy groaned and finally said, “I can’t think of anything else.”
    “We’ll leave you in the car. You can run it if you get cold,” Becky said. “I don’t think it’s even a half mile back there, we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Back in a half hour.”
    Jimmy looked at Tom: “What do you think?”
    “I think you need that medicine,” Tom said. “If we’re lucky, we could get something to kill the pain.”
    “Okay,” Jimmy said, and after a minute, “Don’t leave me. Becky, don’t leave me.”
    •   •   •
    NEITHER BECKY NOR TOM was in very good cardiovascular shape. They jogged and walked when they ran out of breath, then jogged some more; the house was actually only six hundred yards