Free An American Outlaw by John Stonehouse Page B

the grocery store. Glance up and down the street. Then head inside.
    There was barely a car, no people anywhere. 
    If she was setting me up, where was everybody? 
    I took a breath. Stepped out. Across eleventh.
    I reached the store. 
    I pushed open the door, stepped inside. 
    Tennille's at the far end of an aisle, filling up a plastic basket—there's nobody else inside there, that I can see. The counter's empty.
    “Hey,” I called.
    She turns, sees me. “They're everywhere,” she says. “Wait for me outside.”
    I just stared at her.
    “Go,” she breathes.
    I turned around. Walked out. Scanned the street. 
    At the end, on main, the state trooper's walking by the intersection with the highway. 
    I backed around the side of the grocery store. Waited by the garbage cans, stinking in the mid-day heat.
    From the corner of the store, I could just about watch the highway. A car was turning in off it, rolling up the street. It drove up, and then by me. German Shepherd watching me from the passenger seat. 
    I heard the door. Tennille coming out. 
    She was carrying a paper grocery bag.
    I called out; “Over here...”
    She turned her head a fraction. “Stay there,” she says. “We're going out the back way.”
    She walks toward the intersection. 
    She's about to turn and head towards her truck, when the trooper steps back in view—from the opposite sidewalk. She checks her step. Nods toward him. Lifts her hand to the side of her face. Little finger and her thumb extended. Like a telephone sign.
    Then she turns the corner. She's out of sight. The trooper still waiting. 
    I'm rooted; no way I can move.
    A minute passes. 
    I'm staring down the street, at the highway. The front end of her truck swings past the intersection. She turns in slow, around the corner. 
    She drives up the street, pulls the truck over, steps out. 
    “You're driving,” she says. 
    She wrenches open the rear door of the crew cab. Jumps in back.
    I stepped out from behind the grocery store. Climbed in, behind the wheel. 
    She's holding out a piece of paper in her hand. 
    I glanced at it; saw my face staring back at me. 
    I took the square of paper; studied the photograph—it was an out of date driver’s license, taken back when I was still in the service. Hair cropped close in to the scalp. Look on my face like I'm in a bad mood. What people tell me.
    When I looked up she was holding the shotgun on me. Beneath the line of the window.
    “Call your friend,” she says.
    “Are we doing this?”
    “Get him out of Marfa. We can't go there. There's too many cops.”
    “Then how's he going to make it out?”
    “You see his picture anywhere on that piece of paper?
    “So?” 
    “They're not looking for him.”
    “You don't know that.”
    “Use a payphone. There's a post office. Three blocks from here.”
    I checked the street. Pulled out from the kerbside. Drove away from the highway, past a bunch of houses on fenced lots.
    “They stop you?” I says, “they talk to you?”
    “They had a roadblock on the entry into town. I guess you got that right.”
    I nodded. “What you tell 'em?”
    “That I was headed into Alpine.”
    “They buy it?” 
    I scanned the dirt blown streets to either side. Brick barns at the end of a grit track.
    “Some marshal was there,” she said. “He gave me that picture. Turn the next left—by the church.”
    I turned past the white-sided building. 
    “How about that trooper? How come he stopped you? I saw. He gave you something.”
    “His phone number.”
    “You serious?”
    “Yeah.”
    “He looking for a soul-mate?”
    “I doubt that.”
    I drove down the street. Saw the post office. Out front, a payphone on the wall.
    “Tell your friend,” she says, “ten miles out of Marfa, you pass a ranch entrance. FD Ranch. You see a track. It runs south off the road.”
    “Okay.”
    “Tell him to follow it up in the hills. To Paisano Pass.”
    I pulled the truck over. Jumped out, walked