Seven years ago, I killed a man and cut him up and buried him way out in the White Tanks Mountains. They caught me, thanks to my jabber-jaw girlfriend, and gave me life with no parole. I missed the desert so much though, and it missed me, that I ended up breaking out with a few other guys one night.
Me and them guys split up and now I'm on the run solo and, of course, on the run solo there ain't legit money (and money a man needs) so I walk into this bank and I say, “Hey, put all the money in this bag. I got a gun and I'll start plugging people if you don't.”
They do like I say, which I'm glad for, because all I want is to grab the money and go.
I say to the teller, “Show me what you're putting in that bag.”
“Don't hurt me,” she says.
“Hurry up and do it and let me see you do it.” They WILL slip a paint bomb in on you. I've seen guys show up in their booking pictures purple as hell. I watch her shove in hundreds and fifties.
I say, “Throw them twenties in there too.”
I believe the breath of life is the smell of creosote coming in through the windows when you're out there zooming along through the desert. I'm in a get-away car, some old thing I found by the bank and hot-wired. I'm doing about a thousand miles an hour across some old back highway I don't even know the name of, all my windows rolled down, with that wind loud and proud and bearing the lovely scent of that little scrub brush right up my nose. I don't even know how I got onto this highway, I just know it's some wide open ground to cover. Saguaros and ocotillos are whizzing past and saluting me and I'm leading this parade of sheriffs and cops and FBI, like I'm a big grand marshal or something, out over all this sand and through the evening sun and I can't believe how fast I'm going.
I turn the radio on and I turn it to a rock n' roll station and I turn it all the way up, so loud it's covering up those damn sirens behind me. Since I got all the windows down, I shout out into the desert, “Hear that gila monsters?” and I hear the gila monsters singing in time to the music, their snake friends and their tarantula friends joining in too, and I hope everybody back behind me realizes I got about a million scaly accomplices out here, who'd hide me in a heartbeat if I wanted.
Since there ain't no turns in the road coming up and since the sun is starting to go down a little, I speed up even more and then I start laughing and cussing and shouting. I decide, just for the hell of it, to holler, “You'll never catch me coppers!” at them patrol cars in the rear view mirror, so I lean my head out the window and turn around as best I can and I shout it and give them the finger. All of a sudden, ping! ping! on the back of the car. They're shooting now so I pull my head back in and start weaving all over the highway.
And then boom! They get my tire. It gets so loud I swear I go deaf. The car spins around and around and it just about flips end over end and and finally, it comes to rest about a hundred yards off the road. There's all this white smoke and I taste blood on my lip and my hip hurts and there's a million cops with pistols and rifles and shotguns. The cop closest to me shouts, “Get out of the car!” but I can't move at first because I'm still a little stunned, so he flips the door open real quick and grabs my left arm and starts yanking and yanking on it and shouting, “Let go of the wheel, let go of the wheel NOW!” So I do and my other arm is flopping around behind me, but I can't feel it. They pull me out and throw me down and step all over me.
We end up driving back to some station somewhere, me and these two big pigs up in front, and I say, “Where we going?”
“Jail,” they say.
“Yeah, but where?”
“Don't matter.”
“Yes it do. Some of 'em I can get out of.”
“You won't do that this time.”
“What if I do, though?”
“Well, then, you'd be a deadman.”
I look out the window. We're heading back the direction I just came from. The sun is really going down now, and those long, pink rays are stretching out over the whole desert. I ain't seen it like that for seven years. Longer and longer by the second, like skinny fingers, and I know it's me they're reaching for, trying to pluck me right out of the back of this car. I know it's just a matter of time before they get me again, probably grab me by the shirt collar when I'm least expecting it. Jails and cops don't like to give up what they got, but you better believe the desert don't either.
2008