Fleeing Sanctuary

Thankfully for Sandy, the good-bye is brief. He doesn't have to bring much along on his excursion, no luggage or shaving kit or anything like that, so as soon as he's got his nerve up, he can bid his adieus and jump in his wood-panelled wagon and go.

"I can't say thanks enough," he says to Frank, his voice shaky.

"Oh, no trouble," Frank says in his slow Mississippi drawl. "We'll be fine, right, sport?" He's standing behind Bobby. His hands, each big enough to engulf a football, rest on Bobby's shoulders. Sandy has often marvelled at the size and deftness of those hands; they make his own look so puny.

Bobby rubs his eyes sleepily. He and Frank were outside all day yesterday, and his face is a little sunburnt. Bobby sunburns really easily, just like his mom did.

Frank pushes him at Sandy. "Go say goodbye to your daddy," he says. Sandy kneels and takes Bobby into a tight hug, which is casually returned.

"I'll be back soon, kiddo."

"Um-hum," murmurs Bobby.

Sandy almost says I love you, you know but at the last second, he bites the words off and just lets go. The boy ambles back to Frank.

Sandy gets in the wagon and turns the key. The engine cranks for a few seconds before it catches, but once it does, it idles smoothly. This is a relief to Sandy. He wasn't sure how the car would run. He's only started it once in the past year.

"Godspeed," Frank says, through the window.

Sandy nods. Without looking at Frank or his son, he backs out of his driveway and creeps down Sanctuary's smoothly-paved central boulevard.

It's not quite dawn yet. The only person he sees outside is Mr. Diebau, who's watering his gardenias under the porch lights of his barn-style bungalow. The old man of Sanctuary at 76, Diebau found himself on a Jewish hit list in 1947 and was shot at three times before Taylor took him in. He claims he was working in Stockholm during the war, far away from Treblinka, which another Diebau had some hand in running.

Next to Diebau lives Sanctuary's most eligible woman, the still-pretty Allison Jenks. Allison will freely admit the self-defence stabbing of her speed-addict husband to anyone who's curious. This frank black widow shtick hasn't dissuaded the wooing Sanctuary menfolk in the slightest, though Sandy has stayed away. Sandy has acknowledged that he probably has little to offer her.

He passes a dozen more houses—each with its own story of quasi-innocence or justifiable guilt—then he's passing Taylor's. Sanctuary's head honcho is out and about too, sitting on his front porch with a coffee mug in his hand. It's not strange to see Taylor up at odd hours. Sandy's not sure if he even needs to sleep. In fact, there's very little about Taylor that Sandy is sure of—most prominently, how he does what he does with Sanctuary.

They wave at each other casually, like two farmers on a country road.

Now he's almost out. Sanctuary doesn't have a big iron gate or walls topped with broken glass or anything heavy like that. There's just the line where the pavement ends and the gravel begins, and that's all that's needed.

Sandy rolls up to that line, stops, and puts the car in park. He grabs the bulbous plastic earphone of his cassette recorder from the passenger seat and pushes it into his ear. It doesn't fit right; it's too big and his ear is already tender from it, but it was the best tape deck he could trade for. It was lucky for him that Al Simms the bribe-taking Tallahassee DA had it on hand.

(Simms used those bribes to send his daughter to a cancer clinic in Geneva; he was indicted two days before she died.)

Sandy presses PLAY. When he hears his own voice, he hits the gas.

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