The Cage Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page A

wagon after work and flipped out, that after he sobered up he was bound to calm down, realize how rash he had been, and have me drive him back to face the music. But then what about the knife? I hadn’t been letting myself think about that. Now that is all I am thinking about. If he’s smart enough to rip off a car and a driver nobody’s going to miss for forty-eight hours, if that’s part one, then what’s part two? And as we pass through the tiny sleeping town of Rimnath heading towards Bellington, my throat dry from coffee, my palms slippery with sweat, I just turn to him and ask him straight out, “Are you going to kill me, Elroy?”
    He looks at me and I can barely make out his expression in the early morning darkness, but I know that it has changed. That look isn’t on his face anymore, and his eyes have softened somehow, like all of a sudden nothing is funny to them or ever will be again.
    “I do not enjoy killing, Al. It is not a hobby for me.”
    I look back at the road and hear him sip from his bottle.
    “Though I have done it, haven’t I? As a soldier and a civilian I have done it. Just make sure you do it wearing their colors is all I can say. ’Cause mister, if you don’t—”
    I look at him for a second. He is looking straight at me. I look back at the road.
    “You are a cage keeper, Al. I can see you take your job seriously, too. You want to be a good cage keeper. Maybe someday run one like your brother, Mark, back at Fascist House. You are a good cop, Al. That is what you want to be. Just don’t try being one now, kid. I do not fancy the idea of snuffing you out, but I will if you start to play hero with me. I will slit you open like a fish.”
    I look at him then look back at the road, then look at him again. “You won’t get any trouble from me, Mr. McElroy.”
    He nods without a word and I go back to my driving. I want to check my watch but he still has his eyes on me; I don’t want him to wonder anything crazy. The sky is still very dark, no beginning signs of daybreak, but it can’t be more than a couple hours away. We pass through Bellington, just a short stretch of one-room stores with faded lettering in their windows, some framed with Christmas lights that cast orange and red and blue onto the empty sidewalk. We come to an intersection with a blinking yellow light and I keep going but up ahead on the left is a brightly lit Winchell’s Donuts. The only customer in it is a very fat police officer sitting at the counter with his back to the glass.
    “Don’t even think of speeding up or doing anything else to attract that pig’s attention.”
    That huge horse castrater is at my side. I look away from the doughnut shop as we leave Bellington and enter again the darkness of route 25 heading north.
    I HAVE NEVER BEEN IN Wyoming before, I am there now. We passed through Cheyenne shortly before five o’clock this morning and were out of there in no time. The highway runs to the west of it and as we passed this flat frontier metropolis, I looked past Elroy’s caveman profile to the still-lighted streetlamps at the base of the buildings; I saw the red taillights of a Trailways bus that was heading down one of the streets towards the center of the city and I thought then how I would like to be on that bus, how I have always liked buses, how I slept on one almost the whole day-and-a-half trip down to Fort Lauderdale with Gus and Lopes spring break our sophomore year. While I slept they drank beer that we had smuggled in after a stop in Georgia. But I just couldn’t stay awake in the soft jolts and vibrations of that moving bus. That’s what I thought of as this cutthroat bastard and I passed Cheyenne and hit the snow prairies of Wyoming just in time for sunrise. At first there was a pale lip of pink on the horizon. Then the sun was totally exposed, looking as orange and round as an egg yolk. Now it is daylight and I find myself driving alongside men and women in cars and trucks and vans on