The Kind of Man Who'd Go on the Run

There weren't many places to hide in Fort Pratt.

A little town of thirty thousand out in the east Colorado prairie, Fort Pratt didn't have the teeming crowds you could lose yourself in. There weren't subways and buses you could use to disappear. There weren't any mazes of back allies where nobody looked.

If you wanted to get away for a tryst, you went to the derelict sugar mill.

A tall, ragged old cluster of four white silos with a big nineteenth-century brick building clinging to the side, it was a haven for all things you couldn't do in public, but you couldn't do in your own home either.

I ducked through a rusted-out hole in the chain-link fence around the mill, scaring up crickets and wasps as I waded through the waist-high grass. As I stepped in through the doorless entryway, I saw a woman sitting on a lawn chair in a little makeshift kitchen, a man behind him.

He wasn't menacing her. He was massaging her shoulders. Fifty years ago, this old sugar mill would have been full of male vagrants fighting each other and forming gangs and dragging women around by the hair or whatever they did back when men ran things. But times had changed. When the Women's Power Movement had replaced husbands with wives in charge of the family, and the Justice and Female Leadership Act made men legally beholden to their wives, things had changed all up and down society. Now that a man couldn't get a job unless he had a woman's sponsorship, down-and-out men attached themselves to women who would have them. Sometimes, the women would build up little harems of diamonds-in-the-rough. The women weren't always beacons of civility themselves, but at least they required their men to stay clean and groomed and sit up straight and eat with a knife and fork. From the stories my grandma had told me, homeless men before the matriarchal age hadn't even been able to manage that.

I, thankfully, wasn't here to trawl for boyfriends. I already had one, and he and I always met on the top floor of the beet mill.

I climbed the brick staircase to the dark upper floor, lit dramatically by little square shafts of light that filtered through the grid-paned windows. I sat by what had once been a window but had now crumbled into a gaping hole in the wall, and I waited. I checked the time on my digital wristwatch—I left my phone at home in case anyone tried to use the GPS to stalk me and find out what I was doing—and saw 5:57 PM. I was three minutes early.

Austin's timing was impeccable. Ten seconds after the clock struck 6 PM, I heard scrabbling on the wall outside. I peeked over the edge, and a ladder was leaning against the wall of the building, just barely reaching up to the lip of the hole. And Austin made his way up. Tall, athletic, with dreamy hair flowing from beneath his baseball cap and a cool but determined look in his eye, he was a dream in denim jeans and a tight T-shirt. I always had him meet me by climbing the ladder because I thought it would be too obvious that we were meeting if we both entered the mill through the same door. Or at least, that's what I always told him. I didn't really believe that. The truth is, I had him use the ladder just because it was more romantic to have him climb up to meet me, like a cowboy Robin Hood saying hello to Maid Marian.

He levered himself up, not at all winded. "Cary," he said, "how's your life?"

It was always 'how's your life?' Never 'how's it going?' or 'what's up?' or 'how you doing?' He said what no one else said, and for some reason, I liked that.

"Hey Austin," I smiled my happy-to-see-you smile and sat against the wall. "What's happening?"

"Still in good shape after all."

"I got good news," I told him. "My sister finally got that job she was looking for."

"Wonderful!"

"Yeah, and she's earned it. No more of having a deadbeat sister, because now she's an independent woman." I smiled. "And now she'll finally be off my couch."

He sat in front of me, our eyes just a foot apart. "About time, right?"

I let my feelings out. "It's not that I'm mad she needed the help, it's just that she really needed to be on her own, you know? It wasn't good for her, relying on me, because you need to be able to help yourself, or else you're just not an adult." I pretended my sister was in front of me and told her, "I love you, but I'm not your mother, so you've got to take the initiative here."

"So now," he said, "You've got your house all to yourself."

"Yeah. Think I'll put up a home theater where her desk was, now that all that space is freed up."

"You could do that..." his voice trailed off suggestively, and he sat against the wall next to me, let his limbs go slack and gave me the bedroom eyes. "It also means you can have friends over."

It was Austin's best attempt at being subtle. For a man, it wasn't bad. I responded by kneeling on his lap, my hands on his shoulders. "Now," I said sarcastically, "if I only I could think of someone..."

He answered my touching in kind. First, his hands lay gently on my ribs, where he had learned that I liked him to start. As I kissed him, he edged his hands farther down to my waist. His palms massaged over my stomach, stoked the heat underneath it. Then he plied my hips.

I sighed out my comfort and melted against him, my chin on his shoulder, my body draped over his chest. I could feel his heart beating, fast and vital. I could feel his breathing push gently against my breasts.

I started to fondle him back. I palmed his chest, felt his male nipples through his shirt. I ran my fingers along every line of his muscles, tracing paths I knew well. He had showered just before leaving his house, but there was already a little sheen of sweat on his skin, inevitably on a late-June day like this. He felt warm, earthy, alive. My hands made their way down to his lap where I felt the little metal bulb. It was the chastity cage I had put on him. It was, literally, an ironclad promise that he was committed only to me.

He could not feel my fingers, but he could feel his cock moving under their pressure, and his breath ever-so-slightly caught. I looked at him, saw him trying to look suave even as he blushed. He mostly succeeded.

"I've been saving myself for you all week," he said.

All week, since the last time I had had him.

"Do you want it?" he tried.

I gave a little hum of consideration. "Next time," I told him. "I don't really feel like it today." Sex was fun as hell, but it was just fun. Cuddling made me feel supported and loved. It made me feel like a wife.

He let it go. Bless him, he was enough of a gentleman to know that my pleasure came first.

"Maybe you can take me to your house," he whispered in my ear. "If we're going to get serious, we should get used to living together."

I sighed bitterly. It was his one flaw as a gentleman: he wanted me to take the first step. I was free to marry him, even without his mother's permission. A few months ago, I'd asked her for permission anyway, and she had thrown a frying pan at me. After that, I had just assumed that Austin would tell her off and show up at my door in a suit and bow tie, ready for marriage. Instead, he'd done nothing. He had expected me to do all the work.

"Get away from her first." I said. "It's not that hard."

"It is that hard. The police will be after me."

It was true. We lived eight miles apart, and a man couldn't legally travel more than five without the permission of the woman of the house—and since he was single, that was his mother. But I still wasn't impressed. "Come on," I told him. "you know that shouldn't stop you. I'm not asking you to go rob a bank for me, alright? Just come to me. Don't make me come to you."

"Cary, I love you, but you shouldn't ask me to break the rules for you."

Fair point, except for one thing. "Now hold on, Austin, you know damn well you're not afraid of that. Just being here, we're breaking the law by trespassing, and I haven't heard a peep about that. You're just scared to defy your mother."

"No I'm not!"

"Then prove it. Prove to me you're willing to do something big and you're not too scared." I restrained myself from calling him a mama's boy—not that it was groundless, but I wasn't mean enough to say it.

"Why don't you just marry me now? Then I'll be legally bound to you." He forced a horny smile. "Then you can do anything you want to me, and you don't need anyone's permission. Why not?"

"Because I don't want to marry a mama's boy, okay?"

Okay, I guess I really was mean enough to say it.

He gaped back at me. Those words had cut right through him.

I slipped off of him. "Austin, I want to love you. I really do, because you're pretty and you're sweet and... it just feels good when you're around. Okay? But you've got to get away from her. I'm not going to make it happen for you." It hurt, telling him what he didn't want to hear. It wasn't really what I wanted to hear either. Part of me wanted to lie to myself that he was perfect just the way he was, marry him, take him home and keep him. But if I did that, I knew the lie wouldn't last. I'd be bitter about having to rescue him, and that bitterness would fester like an old sore. And then I'd turn into one of those angry old wives who one day snaps and beats her husband. I couldn't do that, especially not to him.

But I did love him. So I gave him a quick little kiss on the lips before I dismounted him.

* * *

I was at my day job, stocking the shelves at the grocery store when it happened. Well, it'd be more honest to say I was slacking off and chatting with my friend Patricia. The store had a cafe that was only half-occupied at most, so she and I set up camp at a vacant two-person table and chatted about life.

Patricia worked at the truck stop down the street, where she sold diesel and cigarettes and beef jerky and checked the male truckers' travel permits that their wives had signed. She and I were talking about news and friends when I got the call.

It was a number I recognized. It had been on my contact list once, and I had taken it off, but I still knew the number. I tapped 'accept,' put the phone to my ear and forced myself to sound bored as I said, "hello?"

"Cary, you slut! What have you done?" Austin's mother was as diplomatic as ever.

"Now I'm picking up on some hostility here," I replied, "so can I ask if you're upset with me for something?" I still sounded bored, but now I was doing it just to tweak her nose.

"Where is Austin?" she demanded.

My eyebrows rose. "Well I don't know, where is Austin?" it was a dumb thing to say, but it was all I could think of. Had he really...?

"He's gone! He's supposed to be in bed, and he's not there!"

"Mrs. Branby," I said, wrinkling my nose, "you sound like he's eight years old—okay?—and he's not. He's a man." I grinned. "Believe me, I tested him out myself."

"You stole him! I'm calling the police, and if you don't turn him in right-fucking-now, they'll throw your ass back in jail!"

For some reason, Mrs. Branby had it in her head that I had a criminal record. I had once showed her a statement to the contrary, written and signed by a county sheriff, and she hadn't budged. "Okay," I said. "I'll... uh... thanks for the heads-up. Goodbye." I hung up on her.

I put the phone down. Patricia had heard both sides of that conversation, and now she looked at me like I'd just won the lottery. We both knew what this meant.

"He did it," I said, looking down at the phone. "Austin finally grew a pair and skipped town."

"You wanted him to do that?" said Patricia.

"Yeah. Well, yes and no. I didn't want to rescue him, right? I wanted him to do that himself."

"But how's he going to meet you? They'll be looking for him."

"I don't really know."

"You don't know?" Patricia leaned over the table. "You seriously told him to run for it and you don't have a plan?"

"I..." I shrugged. "I guess I wanted him to figure something out on his own." In hindsight, maybe he'd had a point. Maybe it was asking too much, expecting him to break the law, even if it was a stupid law. But damn, it felt so damn good to know he'd done it!

The phone rang again. This time, it was a number I still had on my contact list. It was Austin. Patricia and I looked down at the screen, then up at each other with identical looks of excitement. I got up from my seat and sat down next to her, squeezed up close so she could hear, and no one else could. I answered the call.

"Austin?" I said. "I heard about what happened!"

At the same time I said that, he gasped, "Cary, I'm doing it. I'm running away!"

"Good job, Austin!" I squeezed the phone until my palms were white, wishing I could squeeze him instead.

"Let's establish a place to meet after this, okay? When do you get off work?"

"Austin, don't tell me where you're going. Someone might be tapping your phone!"

He paused.

"Look," I said, "I'm so glad you called me, but don't tell me anything important, okay? We're not private here, it's like we're talking in public."

"I don't think I'm being followed. Just meet me at the Arikaree River, right where it crosses the Washington county line. You know where that is, don't you?"

"Austin, I just told you! Look, just don't go anywhere and-"

"Be there as quickly as possible. I love you. Goodbye." He hung up.

I stared at the silent phone. "Shit." I said. "Shit, shit, shit." Now he'd just announced where he was going. He had turned this into a wild-west manhunt, and if I didn't get to him before the cops did, he was toast. I got up and ran to my boss.

Usually, it's frowned on to go to your supervisor and beg for the rest of the day off with no advance notice and no questions asked. But I'd worked here for three years and never once been late or absent. Where my boss might have given me an old-womanish cross of the arms, or a suspicious raised eyebrow, she told me, "Go for it. I'll see you tomorrow." Maybe she had guessed that my love life was in the middle of an emergency—it was probably written all over my face, after all. As I clocked out and left the store, I promised myself I'd make it up to her somehow.

I ran out to my car, trying not to think about how stupid it was to try to outrun the police. In just the time it took me to get to my car, they'd probably called the state troopers and-

There was Austin. He leaned against my car as if he belonged there, eyes shaded by a baseball cap, casting lazily around. It was a perfect impression of not being a wanted man.

"Austin!" I ran up to him, ripped off his hat and kissed him. He put his hands on me, and I could feel the fear in his cold, tense fingers. He'd kicked the hornets' nest, and he knew exactly how much trouble he'd gotten himself into.

"As soon as you said they were listening," he told me, "I changed plans. If you take me to the bus stop, we can lose them."

"And then what?" I asked.

"And then? You're in charge."

I wanted to kiss him again. I wanted to put my hands all over him, inside him. I wanted to throw him into the passenger's seat and fuck him until I blacked out. But I had already risked blowing his cover with that first kiss. "Get in," I told him.

We piled in. I turned on the engine. We were off.

"There's no rush," he told me. "I parked a block or two away, and they don't know I'm here, so just drive natural."

I barely heard him. My brain was going at a mile a minute, trying to think of what this meant. Now that he was on the run, one of two things would happen. Either he'd be caught and jailed, or he'd stay free. But when we tried to marry, they'd check the registry to make sure he wasn't a runaway, and we'd be out of luck. Unless we did it in a marriage-first state, and Colorado wasn't one of them for some reason. So we'd have to go to Kansas, but if someone pulled us over on the way, that was that. So we'd have to make sure nobody was onto us. Even if we got away today, we had a long road to go before he was safely mine. I shook my head. 'One thing at a time,' I told myself. If I ended today with him in my house, and nothing else happened, it would be a good day.

Something occurred to me, and I pulled my phone out of my pocket and handed it to him. "Here," I said, "There's an app called 'FM First Responders' or 'AM Heroes' or something like that. Download it, and we can listen to what the police are saying over the radio."

"What's your unlock number?"

I told him. He tapped furiously at my phone, looking up periodically to scan for threats.

I stopped at the bus stop, the only one in town. A great six-wheeled monster of a bus waited there, ready to start its twice-daily trip to Colorado Springs in the Rocky Mountain Front Range. Austin got out of the car, and I opened my mouth to tell him this was a bad idea, that he'd be caught if he tried to flee town on the bus. But he didn't get on. He looked over his shoulders, weighed his phone in his hand, then pitched it up onto the roof of the bus and got back in.

"There," he said, buckling his seatbelt. "I really don't think they're allowed to track my phone, but if they are, they'll think I'm on the bus going west."

"Austin, you're a genius!" I sped off.

"Drive natural!" he reminded me. "You'll look suspicious!"

Damn it, he was right. I forced myself to drive like a sane person.

On my phone, a static-washed radio voice crackled to life, and I looked over to see that he had tuned in to the police radio. The thing was damn near incomprehensible. Voices mumbled and cut out, and sometimes nothing but static registered when no one was talking. But I caught a snatch of a sentence, "Blue Ford Focus, number Molly Dan Sarah, One Zero..."

MDS-10. Those were the first digits on my license plate. On my blue Ford Focus.

"They're onto us," said Austin, before I could. "I've got an idea. Go to the greenway, and we can shake them."

"Sure," I said, "But first, we're stopping." I pulled over at a combined truck stop and department store. "Wait here."

"What are you-"

I closed the door. I went in, and less than two minutes later, I was back out with a battery-powered shaver, basketball shorts and a medium men's shirt. I had also taken a quick shower. He would thank me for it soon.

"Take your clothes off," I told him, "and put these on."

He changed clothes while I drove, and through a supreme act of will, I didn't watch. Understanding that we were putting him through quick-and-cheap disguise, he left his hat off.

I parked at the public space just opposite the greenway that ran along the river, looked both ways for the police, then got us out. Austin had the presence of mind to reach back into the car, grab his old outfit and stuff it deep into a public garbage can until the older trash covered it completely. Good move— if the police found my car and searched it, they wouldn't find his old clothes and know that he'd changed.

Austin's plan, I could tell, was to walk down the greenway and put some distance between the parked car and where we were. As long as we weren't seen on the greenway itself, the police would lose our trail when they found the car. But the plan broke down after that. They knew who owned the car with that license plate, and soon they'd be knocking on my door.

But that was okay, because I had a plan of my own.

There weren't many places to hide in Fort Pratt. If you wanted to get away, you went to the derelict sugar mill.

"Cary?" said Austin, as I pulled us off the trail, towards the old mill. "If we hide here, they'll find us. It'll be the first place they look."

"I'm counting on it," I said. "Kneel right here. I want to do something to you."

I put him on his knees right in front of the river, then I clawed the electric shaver out of its box and took it to his hair. He looked sadly up at it, but he understood. He kept his head still, and it was my sad duty to shave off his beautiful, beautiful flowing hair and leave him with a military cut. The clippings fell into the stream, where they washed out of sight. As far as the landscape was concerned, this had never happened.