Mad River

like a rape. After loading Jimmy into the truck, and they got back on the road, Becky began to weep again. Jimmy’s pain had diminished, but he was confused, partly by shock and partly by the drugs, and he asked, “What the fuck’s wrong with you, anyway?”
    She looked over at him and said, “I told you. Tom raped me.”
    “What the fuck?”
    “He raped me,” Becky said. “He pushed me down on the bed and raped me and beat me up. Then he did it again and then he took off. Then the guy came and I shot him and I’m just, I’m just, I’m just . . .”
    Jimmy seemed to think about that for a while, or maybe his mind just wandered, but finally he said, “I’ll kill the motherfucker. Where is he?”
    “He took off. I don’t know where he went,” Becky said. She looked over at Jimmy. “You gotta promise me.”
    “What?”
    “If we catch him, I get to kill him. I’m gonna cut his balls off, and then I’m gonna shoot him in the stomach and watch him die.”
    “Deal,” Jimmy said. And, “Where’d you get this truck?”
    •   •   •
    BECKY TOLD HIM the whole story, from the time they left him in the cornfield until she loaded him into the truck; he remembered everything after that. “We gotta get your leg bandaged up better and I got some stuff we can put on it.”
    “We need to get as far away as we can,” Jimmy said. “They’ll be tearing up the countryside. Did Tom get all our money?”
    “No, no, we got the money, it’s behind the seat,” Becky said.
    “See if you can reach it,” Tom said.
    Becky fished around behind the seats and got the handles of the two grocery bags and pulled them over the seat and put them in Jimmy’s lap. She said, “You know what I think? I think he’s gonna turn himself in and blame everything on us.”
    Jimmy nodded, but didn’t seem to be tracking very well; his eyes were bright, either because he was reviving, or because he was feverish. She reached out and put her hand on his forehead and thought he felt warm. Not real warm, but pretty warm.
    “You might be getting an infection,” she said. “We need to get some medicine on there.”
    “Need some pills, penicillin or something,” Jimmy said.
    Becky sobbed again, then wiped the tears out of her eyes, steadied her voice, and said, “You’re sounding a lot better, honey.”
    “Feeling better,” he said. Then, “We better cut on south. We don’t want to meet any more cars than we have to. Stay on the gravel. If you see any gravel dust, try to find a place to turn off.”
    They went south, and she said, “What are we going to do? Everybody in the world is looking for us.”
    Jimmy said, “We need to get down south of Arcadia. There’s this old guy down there, he lives alone, off the road. You can hardly see his house. My old man and I ground up his stumps one year. Mean old motherfucker, wouldn’t let me in the house to take a shit. I had to go out in the field.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Joe something. I don’t know. But I’ll remember the house. He’s got an army tank out behind the house. All fuckin’ rusty, but it’s a real tank.” He was quiet for a moment, then added, “I’ll remember the turnoff. We’ll get the truck out of sight and lay up there for a day or two, until I’m better.” He weighed the two bags, bouncing one in his left hand, one in his right, chose the heavier of the two and counted the money.
    “Thirteen thousand,” he said, when he finished.
    “Oh my God,” Becky said.
    He counted the other bag and said, “Nine thousand. Holy shit, we got twenty-two thousand dollars. We can go anywhere we want.”
    “If we don’t get caught first,” Becky said. “How far is this old man’s house?”
    “Twenty minutes, half hour. I’m not exactly sure. But I know how to get there from here.”
    And he did, but it was more like forty minutes, snaking around on back roads every time Jimmy got a bad feeling about the road they were on. By the time they got there, he was fighting to stay awake. “Fuckin’ dope’s all over me,” he said. “But we’re close. See them silos?”
    A big farm on the north side of the road showed five huge blue metal silos, standing shoulder to shoulder, in three different heights, like brothers.
    “Is that it?”
    “No, but he’s down this road. Maybe a mile.” A minute later he said, “There. Up that hill.”
    Becky looked up a long, low hill, under some power lines that had small black birds sitting on them,