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“But she’s watching us.”
“Just keep going.”
“What’s she want?”
“Just go.”
I started backing down toward him and Elro again moved down the ladder. At the bottom, he let his hand slide up my back as I stepped off onto the lawn. The ground was soft from the rain, and the grass felt cool and damp. He handed me my bag and picked up the ladder. Side by side, we moved silently around the house, all the time under Grandma Porter’s silent gaze.
Elro had parked his pickup a block up the street. I threw my bag on the seat and climbed in. The truck wasn’t new, but Elro and his brother had kept the cab neat. The seat was patched in spots with pieces of green canvas. A clean rubber mat covered the floor. Someone had attached a little plastic cow to the dashboard in the place where people put statues of Jesus.
“Where’s your luggage?” I asked, after Elro had climbed in.
“In back.”
I looked through the rear window. Besides the ladder, the only thing in the truck was a small, battered suitcase—actually, it wasn’t any bigger than a briefcase. The handle had been replaced by a few strands of rope. Even compared to my Piggly Wiggly bag, it seemed a thin, pathetic way to start an adventure.
Elro was still feeling spooked by Grandma Porter. “Do you think she’ll tell anyone?” he asked.
“No. Now drive me to Bunny’s.”
“There? Why there?”
“I have something to drop off.”
He glided the truck down Oak, then left on Charles, and back up Sycamore. No one else was around. The streets, with their ceilings of leaves and lamplight, were deep, quiet tunnels. Elro stopped about fifty feet from Bunny’s driveway and I got out and walked in the grass so as not to make any scuffing noises. The house was dark. It’s the smallest house on the block, just a box really, plopped in the middle of an unruly yard. Tiptoeing over the lawn, I thought of the summer days I’d spent playing on this patch of ground. Tom and I would be let out like ponies, and we’d only come in for lunch and dinner. There was the glittery, gray rock—bottomless, since we’d never been able to dig it up—on which Tom had cracked his head open; the spot near the stoop where we’d held a burial service for a mouse Bunny had caught; the circle worn permanently bare from being home base. Now, even the grass over home was luxuriant, almost to my ankles. I’d mowed the lawn the day before I went to the Benedicts’, and Bunny probably hadn’t thought of it since.
At the front door, beside the three concrete steps, I paused for a moment to listen, not really sure what I’d hear—the familiar creaks and groans of the walls, perhaps, or the clunk of the refrigerator revving up to cool itself off. Voices, maybe—some assurance. But the house was dead quiet. I lifted up the mail slot in the bottom of the door and silently dropped in my letter.
THIRTY-ONE
When I got back to the pickup, Elro was drinking out of a bottle, and the medicine smell of whiskey filled the cab.
“I swiped this from my old man,” he said. He thrust the bottle toward me. The whiskey inside looked black. “You want a drink?”
I shoved it away. “You shouldn’t drink if you’re going to drive.”
“I’m used to it.” He started the truck and let it roll quietly past Bunny’s house. “Where should we go?” he said.
“I thought you had a place.”
“No place special.” He took another gulp from the bottle. He was holding it with one finger crooked around the neck, and he tilted his head back when he drank, as if swigging from a jug. “What about Chicago?” he said.
I remembered Mrs. O’Brien’s story about the girl who’d run away to Chicago with her boyfriend. Chicago sounded remote and dangerous. “How about Wisconsin?” I suggested. “You mentioned Wi
sconsin once.”
“Yeah! Wisconsin. I been fishin’ there.” He guided the truck down East Morgan and turned onto the deserted square. A few spots of all-night neon enlivened the storefronts but only made the place look emptier. The tall concrete Civil War monument, a lone soldier with a rifle, stood out in the center of the park like a black, hulking scarecrow.
“Why’d you come to the square?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Just habit, I guess.”
“Well, let’s get going. I want to get out of here.”
“Yeah, yeah, take it easy.” Gulping another drink of whiskey, he misjudged a corner, and the truck’s tires screeched over the concrete.
“Elro!”
