said, “You haven’t told me yet what we’re going to do, Jack.”
“I’m not sure about all of it yet myself,” I said, swinging out of the ruts to get past a high spot in the road. “A lot of it depends on what I find out in town. But right now I’m going to take you down to Colston, where you can get on a bus without being seen by anybody around here and where we won’t be seen together.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to meet you in Bayou City. Day after tomorrow, or that night.”
On the way down to Colston I stopped at a small town and bought a cheap suitcase and three or four Sunday papers to stuff in it so it wouldn’t feel empty. “You’ll need that to check into a hotel,” I said. “They probably wouldn’t give you a room without it.”
As I started to get back in the car I suddenly noticed her hair. I mean, I noticed it in the way that someone else would, the way I had when I had first seen it. I had grown accustomed to the way it was chopped up, and to me it was beautiful and I always wanted to get my hands into it and it made my breath catch in my throat to look at her, but everybody else who saw it was going to notice it and remember the girl who’d had her hair cut with a dull butcher knife.
She saw me looking at it and for an instant the tension went out of her face and her eyes were tender. “You’re still fascinated with my hair-do, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I wasn’t thinking of my reaction to it. The idea, for the next thousand miles or so, is to blend into the herd, or at least as much as a girl with your looks can do it, and you might as well be leading a couple of pandas on a leash.”
She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. “Can you run back in the drugstore and get me a package of bobby pins?”
She worked on it while I drove. It was long enough to roll into a knot on the back of her neck, and when she got through none of the ragged ends showed. “How do you like it now?” she asked, turning to lean toward me.
“Fine,” I said. “Now you’re just another beautiful girl. Women will look at your clothes and men’ll look at your legs. You’re safe enough.”
“Do you like it better this way? I could wear it like this.”
“No,” I said. “I liked it better the other way. Somehow, it was easier to imagine being lost in it and never finding my way out.”
She looked over at me with her eyes soft and reached out to pat my hand on the steering wheel.
“Warn me when you’re going to do that while I’m driving,” I said. “You’ll get us both killed.”
When we got to Colston I pulled off into a quiet side street under the big trees and stopped. Taking out the wallet, I handed her a hundred and fifty of the money.
“I’m going to tell you good-by here,” I said, “because I’m going to drop you off a block or so from the bus station and run. There will be a bus for Bayou City sometime this evening, around seven, I think. You’ll arrive there a little before midnight. Go to the State Hotel. It’s a small one, quiet, and not too expensive, but still not crumby enough for the cops to have their eyes on it. Register as Mrs. Crawford and just wait until I show up. Try to buy yourself a few clothes, but make the money go as far as possible, because we’re going to have to travel by bus. I won’t be able to bring the car the way things are going to work out. And be sure to remember this: When I get there, don’t recognize me. It may be safer for us to travel separately until we get clear out of the state. You can slip me the number of your room on the quiet, but don’t let anybody see that you even know me.”
I took her face in both my hands. “I won’t see you for forty-eight hours, and after that we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. So this is two days’ worth of good-by, and then there’ll never be another one.” She held onto