Children of Paranoia

  “Chicago it is,” you replied.

  “Chicago,” I repeated, nodding. It sounded right. “I think we should get a couple of hours of sleep tonight. I’m going to drive for another two hours, get us pretty far into Pennsylvania. Maybe there we can find a good place to rest until morning. Until then, you can sleep while I drive.”

  “I really don’t think that’s going to happen, Joe,” you said. “Not tonight.” Apparently you looked stronger than you felt too.

  We drove on, passing the Delaware Water Gap and moving into Pennsylvania. As we drove past the Water Gap, I remembered how my grandfather used to bring me down there when I was a little kid. We’d leave from home early on Sunday mornings, before the sun came up, so that we could go down to the Water Gap and release homing pigeons that he kept as pets. We’d drive down, the pigeons cooing in their cages in the back of my grandfather’s station wagon. We’d pull the car down near the river. We’d get out of the car. My grandfather would pull the cages from the back of the station wagon. Then we’d sit and wait for a few moments. As we waited, I could hear the pigeons rustling with excitement. They knew the drill. They knew that they would soon be free, free to fly. My grandfather was a pretty stoic guy. Thinking back on it now, I can’t even remember the sound of his voice. I can’t remember ever hearing him speak. I remember driving down to the Water Gap to release those pigeons, though.

  Soon the cages would begin rocking as if they were alive. My grandfather would want to wait until the pigeons were at peak excitement before opening the door to their cages. The more excited they were, the faster they’d fly. Once the cages began to rustle with enough excitement, we’d open them up and the pigeons would fly out. They’d fly straight up in the air. Then they would make one giant turn as a group, twisting toward the heavens, trying to get their bearings. They’d shoot up until they were little more than specks in the early-morning sky. Then they’d flap their wings and fly away. It would all happen in a flash and then they’d be gone. Once we couldn’t see any of the pigeons anymore, my grandfather and I would load the cages back into the station wagon, climb back into the front of the car, and head back toward the highway. On the way home, we’d stop for breakfast and I’d gorge myself on pancakes and bacon, dumping syrup on everything on my plate. My grandfather always ordered scrambled eggs, extra dry. I can’t remember his voice but I can remember what he ate. Memories are funny that way. When we were done eating, we’d get back in the station wagon and drive home.

  The trip home, including breakfast, would take me and my grandfather about two hours. In two hours we drove probably about fifty miles. When we got home, we’d go to the backyard. There were two lawn chairs in the backyard that my grandfather kept facing the pigeon coop he’d built. We’d sit in them and wait. It would still be early, so the morning dew on the grass in the backyard would just have started to dry off. We’d take our seats and my grandfather would take out his watch and his clipboard and we’d wait. The way I remember it, we never waited long. Soon, one by one, the pigeons that not long before had been so eager to break free of their cages and fly away would return. One by one, they’d land by the pigeon coop and walk back into their cages. They could have flown anywhere. Yet here they were, diving out of the sky, returning to the little coop my grandfather had built in his backyard. My grandfather knew each bird on sight. As they returned, he’d mark each of their times down on the pages on his clipboard so he could compare the times to previous weeks. He’d smile when one of his favorites was the first to make it back. He’d worry when it would take any particular bird longer than he expected. In the end, they always made it back. My grandfather never lost a pigeon. They’d struggle through winds, through rain, through whatever obstacles got in their way. Once each bird had made it back into the coop, my grandfather would walk up to it, close the door, and snap the lock shut. When I was a kid I always wondered why those pigeons worked so hard just to be locked up in their cages again. Driving out of New Jersey with you on that night, I finally felt like I knew.

  In minutes, you and I were through the Water Gap, leaving New Jersey behind us forever. We pushed on into Pennsylvania and the farther we drove, the more rural our surroundings became. We were surrounded by trees. The two-lane highway seemed to stretch on in front of us forever. We’d drive mile after mile and it didn’t feel like we’d gotten anywhere. We kept moving, pushing forward. I drove within a few miles per hour of the speed limit, not wanting to attract any attention. Every so often a truck would drive past us or we’d see the headlights of one headed back the way we’d just come. Mostly, however, there were just trees.

  I tried to keep hard to our schedule. Discipline. That’s what we’d need. Always stick to the plan. Always be ready to change plans on a moment’s notice. At three-thirty A.M. I took an exit off the highway leading to a small town somewhere in Pennsylvania. The idea was to get the car off the road somewhere, pull out our sleeping bags, and see if we could get in a few real hours of rest before the sun came up. The night was pretty clear. It was chilly, but not too cold. We wouldn’t need to pitch the tent. We made one pit stop on our way into deeper country when we passed an old gas station. There were three beat-up cars sitting on cinder blocks next to the garage. I pulled into the parking lot and stopped the car.

  “What are we stopping here for?” you asked. You hadn’t slept. I thought you would, despite your fears. You didn’t. I motioned toward the beat-up old cars parked at the edge of the property. “We’re going to steal a car?” you asked. “We’re going to steal one of those?” you asked incredulously.

  “Not the cars, babe,” I responded. “You steal a car and people come looking for it.” I dug through my duffel bag that was in the backseat of the car until I found my pocket knife. “We’re just going to take the license plates.” The people looking for us knew the car that we were driving. They knew the make, the model, and, most likely, the license number. I unscrewed the Pennsylvania plates from one of the cars. Then I took the rear plate off a second car and screwed it onto the front of the first so that it wouldn’t be too obvious that the plates had been stolen. The odds of anyone at the shop noticing that two of their old junks now had the same license number were pretty slim. It was obvious that no one had worked on these cars in years. I took our Massachusetts plates and threw them in the trunk. Then I screwed on the new plates. We were now in disguise.

  We drove on. I turned onto every smaller road that I could until we were on a long, barely paved road, running between a small forest and a cornfield. When there was a large enough clearing in the trees to fit the car through, I pulled the little rental car into the woods. I got us as far from the road as I could before putting the car back in park. We were only about thirty feet from the road. The gray car would be visible from the street in the daytime, but in the dark of the night, we were pretty well hidden. We were home for the night.

  I got our new sleeping bags out of the trunk. “We should have brought pillows,” you said after seeing me carry the sleeping bags into a small open spot in the woods.

  “Well, you can’t think of everything,” I replied. You took two sweaters out of your duffel bag and wrapped them in the plastic bags we had gotten while shopping the day before.

  “Pillows,” you said to me, throwing me one of the sweater-filled bags. We laid our sleeping bags out on the ground and climbed in. We were about three feet apart. I had placed my duffel bag next to me. Inside the duffel bag, on top of all the other items, was the gun, just in case. I placed my pillow under the sleeping bag, placed my head down on top of it, and closed my eyes. Sleep would be hard to come by that night, but I knew we needed it.

  “Joe?” you said, lying on your side and propping your head up on your arm. I opened my eyes again.

  “We’re going to need to sleep, Maria,” I said. “We have to try, anyway.”

  “One quick question,” you said. Then you continued, before I could argue or dissent. “What happens now?”

  “What do you mean??
?? I replied.

  “I know that we run and we hide, but what do they do?”

  “They look for us.”

  “How? Has this ever happened before?”

  “This specifically?” I wondered out loud, glancing down at your stomach. “I don’t know. I’m sure it has. I’ve never heard any stories, though, never heard any details.” You looked relieved. The relief didn’t last. “I do know about one time when somebody went on the run, though. Guy’s name was Sam. Sam Powell. He was one of them. He was a hit man for their side. Anyway, during the course of one of his jobs, something went wrong. He’d gone to a restaurant on Long Island. He was supposed to kill the cook. He waited out back, in the parking lot behind the place, after it had closed down for the night. He’d scoped the joint out over a couple of nights before that and on each of those nights the cook came out back with these big bags of garbage and tossed them into the Dumpsters they had at the back of the parking lot. So he’d be carrying these two heavy bags of garbage across the empty parking lot, alone, in the middle of the night. He’d be totally defenseless. Nobody knows what they had on this guy, the cook. I never heard who he was or why they’d be after him. Just because, I guess.

  “So that night, it was really dark. And this Sam Powell guy stationed himself behind the Dumpster with a knife. He was planning on waiting until the cook came out and, just as he was about to toss the first bag into the garbage, at that point when he was most vulnerable, Sam was planning on popping out and sticking the guy. Sam was, apparently, an old pro at this. One jab was all it was going to take. So Sam waited and listened and when he heard the right sounds, the sounds he’d heard the two nights before, the sound of the cook bending over to try to toss this bag of garbage into the Dumpster, Sam popped out and knifed the guy right in the throat. The guy was dead in less than a minute. The problem was that it wasn’t the cook. For some reason, that night, one of the dishwashers was the one put on garbage duty. He had the same build as the cook, but he was just some poor immigrant dishwasher. And he was a civilian.

  “Now, protocol dictates that, when you kill a civilian, you’re supposed to turn yourself in. You turn yourself in to your own side. They can then either turn you over to the other side, which never happens, or they can carry out the execution themselves.” You flinched at this, apparently not a fan of capital punishment. “So there’s Sam. He just knifed some poor bastard in the throat and now he’s supposed to sacrifice himself on the pillar of justice. He’s supposed to give up his life for the cause. Instead, he runs. It’s the only time I’ve ever heard of it happening.” I had been speaking for a good five minutes when I looked up at you. You looked horrified. Those people that say that imagining a monster is scarier than actually seeing a monster, I don’t think that they’ve ever actually seen a monster. Children are afraid of the dark because they don’t know any better. If they were smart, they’d be afraid of the light.

  “So what happened?” you asked. The expression on your face almost made me stop, but you needed to know the truth. If we were going to make it on this run, you needed to know what we were running from.

  I went on. “The Long Island police were clueless about the murder. Just another random act of violence. It never gets solved. A Mexican gets stabbed in the back of a restaurant. There are no clues, no motives. The story comes and goes. But it didn’t take long for us to realize what happened. The cook knew right away. The other side knew that Sam was on that job and that Sam had disappeared. So word gets out. I’m sure that both sides put some official people on the case. They probably had to for appearances, if nothing else. But that’s not the problem. The problem for Sam is that when the call goes out, Sam is cut loose. No one on his side is allowed to protect him anymore. Not only that, but they have to release all the information they have about him. They literally send out packets on the guy. The packets have his picture in it. It lists all of his known aliases. And there’s more. I know because I got one of Sam’s packets. Like I said, I’m sure some people are officially put on the case, but a bunch of other guys are sent the packet. And in the packet, it lists every job Sam’s ever done. Every man or woman he’s ever killed is on there. Every death he’s ever been involved with. And they send this packet out to everyone who’s got an interest in the information. I had never heard of Sam Powell before I got that packet. But it turns out, Sam Powell took part in my father’s murder. He murdered a lot of people. I wasn’t even the only one who got that packet because of my dad. Everyone who was close to my father got it. Now, Sam’s list of jobs was pretty long. So there’s a lot of people out there with this information. They know what he looks like. They know where he’s lived. They know a lot about him. They all get this packet that basically says, you try to get him and we won’t try to stop you. And everyone who got one of those packets has reasons to want to get him.

  “Sam was a real professional. I don’t say that with admiration. It’s just a fact. He lasted six days. His body was mailed back to his family from Holland. I don’t know any of the details, but I know that the funeral was closed-casket.”

  “Did you go after him?”

  “No. I had work to do.” I paused. “I never thought of myself as a vigilante.”

  “So what does that mean for us?”

  “First think of every sin you’ve ever committed. Think of every person you’ve ever wronged. Now imagine that all of those people are given the chance to get back at you for those sins, guilt free, repercussion free. You with me so far?” You nodded. “Now pretend that what you did to them was unforgivable.”

  I looked into your eyes. You were frightened. That was good. Fear would serve us well. “They’re going to come after us. They’re going to come after us and they are going to try to kill me. They are going to try to kill me and they are going to try to steal our child. To be honest, I don’t know what happens to you.”

  “Who are they?” you asked, but what you meant was “How long is your list, Joe?”

  “I don’t know who they are,” I replied, “but there are a lot of them. Don’t trust anyone, Maria.”

  We both stayed awake for some time after our conversation, listening to the chirping crickets, listening for any strange sounds that might come out of the woods. Eventually, we fell asleep.

  The next morning we had breakfast out of the trunk, dry cereal and water. I didn’t bring up money to you yet. I didn’t want to pile the problems on you. You’d digested enough already. It wasn’t going to be long, however, before money was a problem. We had less than five hundred dollars between us. I had the credit cards, but I didn’t dare try to use them. From that point on, we were off the grid. It’d been seven hours since we left my house. In seven hours we could have been anywhere between Montreal, Cleveland, and Richmond, Virginia. It was a big circle. We were going to need money, though, and a doctor to monitor your condition. Eventually, I was going to have to find work. It was that or stealing, but I’d never thought of myself as a thief.

  We were about nine hours from Chicago, but I didn’t want to get there for another two days. Once in Chicago, maybe I could find a job. Maybe there we could find a cheap apartment. Maybe there we could settle down for a bit. It sounded nice, but it was a lot of maybes.

  For the next two days, the idea was simply to avoid cities and lay low. I didn’t want you to have to spend too long in any one stretch in the car. It wasn’t healthy. I’d started to notice your changes. You needed a lot more sleep. Your appetite was voracious. The way you’d been eating, we’d eat our way through the supplies we’d brought in two days. We’d do some meals on the road. We’d only go to places far off the highway, though. The highway was dangerous. People would be traveling to try to find us. We wanted to stay away from those people. You tried to hide it from me, but I could tell that you were nauseous. You weren’t throwing up, but I would catch you clutching your stomach with a pained look on your face. I assumed this all was normal. I hoped it all was normal.

  That first day was pleasantly uneve
ntful. So was that night. We ate breakfast at some little diner in some corn-fed town in the middle of the state. We hit the highway again for a few hours, heading west. The highway made me nervous. I felt a lot better when we were off the road. We stopped in at a gas station and I bought a detailed map of the state. The gas prices were going to eat into our cash pretty quickly, but we didn’t have much of a choice. If we had to, we could have tried to siphon some from another car at night. It would be safer later. For now, we just needed to stay invisible.

  You slept during most of the car ride. We stopped once during the day. I passed the map to you and you devoured it. You marked every exit. You announced every sight that we passed, whether we could see it from the road or not. I told you that I thought we should get some exercise, so you led us off the highway to some state park you found on the map. We did a two-mile hike around a creek. It was good to stretch our legs. My wound was healing well. The two miles knocked you out again. Once back in the car, you were asleep in minutes, the map unfolded in your lap.

  I counted every hour that we went unnoticed. Every one was another hour closer to our being forgotten. It wasn’t about distance, just time. That afternoon we crossed into Ohio. We took another random exit in Ohio to find a cheap place for dinner. The money was quickly dwindling. The night was clear again, so we found another deserted place on the side of a back road to sleep. I watched you as you slept that night. I felt so guilty. You were seventeen, pregnant, and homeless. We were floating on the edges of civilization, hoping no one would find us. One day I’ll bring you back to civilization. I just don’t know when.

  That night, we made love for the first time since we’d told each other our secrets. You climbed into my sleeping bag with me. It was so much warmer with both of us inside one bag. We clumsily undressed each other from the waist down, leaving our sweatshirts on to fight off the cold night air. We kissed. The sleeping bag fit snug around us with both of us inside it. Our movements were restricted but we could move enough. We moved slowly, carefully. It was different. We were different people now. Before we were innocent people playing a dangerous game. Now we were dangerous people, doing the most innocent, primal thing we could imagine. Near the end, you bit down on your lip and your body shuddered but you didn’t make a sound. The whole sleeping bag shook with you. When we were done you cried.