Page 44 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #3

made him giddy. It’ll be somebody who don’t matter a good goddam to me. He and his bunk- mate, Rod Chapel, who preferred people calling him Snake on account of his tattoo, talked about it once in a while after sex, up in their room in the reformatory, the Vergennes Home. You can kill anyone until you got that little feeling for him, then you can’t kill him no more, Rod said. You could go straight to jail or to hell for it if you did. But kill a stranger, then maybe they couldn’t find you, that’s including the Devil. He wouldn’t know where to look.
grass. There was an enormous pile of manure be- side the barn, covered by black plastic, anchored by old tires.
Of course, a lot of good that theory did Rod Cha- pel. Benson was three weeks out on release from the home when the Devil caught up with Rod, a.k.a. the Snake. Went over a wall, stole some townie’s vehicle then got himself cornered. Ben- son heard about it over his father’s little transistor in the trailer.
The old man turned his head slowly as if it were on a swivel and then turned back to the road, not registering surprise, not registering anything. “Yuh-uh I see it.”
This old farmer man ain’t much for conversation, Benson noted. Sometimes Benson had ended up telling a whole made-up life story in the course of a ride of fifty miles or so. Sometimes he’d had life stories told back to him. Sometimes he ended up in the sack that way with someone.
“You can start by getting back on the road. And get more speed out of this rig. Go the speed limit at least. Then I need money and maybe this truck, I ain’t decided yet.”
They’d gone only a few miles when the old man slowed the truck down and stopped at the head of a dirt driveway, across from a mailbox with
the name “Farnham” stenciled in red. By the side of the road were two shapely maples, their large leaves pale green and withered, on the verge of turning color, and the remains of an abandoned farm stand, its wooden boards gray and bowed. The driveway led a short ways to a tiny white one-story house with a scarred-shingle roof and a lopsided front porch. Across the yard was a col- lapsing brown barn with a hole in its side, like the wood had simply rotted out from the ground up. A pair of reddish-brown horses stood in the front meadow, one smaller than the other, but other- wise identical, both dipped their heads to crop
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“I ain’t got much money.”
“I guess we’ll see about that.”
“Welp, this is as fair as I go,” the old man an- nounced. His voice seemed squeaky from lack of use.
Benson pulled out the .22. “See this, old-timer?” he asked a little too loudly.
“Good.”
“Whatcha want, fella?” The old man’s voice was high-pitched, and quivered slightly, but he sound- ed more irritated than frightened.
“You ain’t gonna get fair in this truck, neither.” “I ain’t worried about it.”
The old man swiveled his head toward Benson again. His lenses twinkled in the strong sunlight reflected in the rearview mirror. “Whatcha do, fella, escape from the pen?”
“Dontcha worry about me and the fucking pen. And quit your staring at me, wouldja? Just shut up and drive. I told you to get going.”
The old man pulled the truck back out onto the road, taking his sweet time with all his gear- shifting again. He took one long last look in the