White Rabbit Chapter 38

38.

            A young nervous Bronson Fillmore and his renegade camera man, Chuck St. Clair, sit in their white unmarked minivan in the parking lot of the Keyser United States Military Prison around noon immediately following the unsuccessful interview of Warden Deutchle. Warden Deutchle has the day off work and is having a soirée with a thick-in-all-the-right-places red-headed Bettie he calls April Le Flame ten miles away in his Victorian home on Roosevelt Circle. Chuck is coaching Bronson on what to ask one of the exiting employees. They are taking sips of coffee from Styrofoam cups.

            “Go for the throat!” he urged. “First question: Who are the people locked up inside this prison? They may reply ‘no comment’ or ‘federal inmates’ but don’t take that for an answer. If they say either of those things you should reply with ‘For what crime are they being charged?’ Something like that.” Chuck was getting excited. Bronson took notes on a small Moleskine pad.

            “I don’t know if we should be here,” Bronson replied nervously looking around. A pair of men dressed in black BDUs with M16s walked through the parking lot checking cars.

            “Shit! Out the back. Out the back!” Chuck called frantically. Chuck and Bronson crawled through the van, slid out the back and swung around a row of cars taking position behind a blue Ford Taurus that had already been checked by the pair. Chuck held his camera like a bazooka. Bronson stuck his back to the car’s fender and started wishing to himself that he had taken the job with his hometown paper where all he would have been involved in were county fairs and elections. But he wanted excitement, he wanted to expose drug dealers and government corruption and shut down polluting power plants and so here he was. Chuck stuck an eyeball up and over the trunk of the car and saw the two guards. They were wearing black BDU pants, boots, knee and elbow pads, coats, facemasks, belts and goggles. There wasn’t an inch of skin exposed. On the backs of their coats it said KUSMDC in bright yellow letters. “They are coming closer!” Chuck cried.

            Bronson closed his eyes tight and curled into a ball by the front tire. “Please go away! Please go away! Please go away!” he repeated. Chuck looked over at him on the frozen ground and shook his head. He kept repeating the words quietly.

            “Shit, Fillmore! They’re leaving. They didn’t even check the van!”    

            Bronson was still in the fetal position repeating his line.

            “Shit! Did you hear me? They are heading back inside!” Chuck pointed his camera over the car and got footage of them scampering inside. “Must have been too cold for them! Your voodoo worked!”
            “What voodoo?” Bronson replied.

            “That shit you were saying,” he laughed. “Please go away! Please go away!”

            “Shut up, Chuck!” Bronson defended himself. Chuck felt bad and rubbed Bronson’s head. He was much older than the kid reporter. Old enough to be his father. Bronson didn’t share the story behind his weird fetal position chant. When he was a kid he had a stepdad who beat him. It seemed that whenever Bronson chanted that, he went away. So now it was a reflex.  

            Loud sirens began to squawk.

            “Shit!” Chuck’s favorite swearword. “Shit! Shit!”

            “What is happening?!” Bronson cried.

            “They are on to us! But I didn’t see any cameras!” Chuck complained looking around frantically. Below Bronson a patch of snow became yellow.

            “Oh, man!”

            Chuck didn’t notice. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Back to the minivan like Batman and Robin. Chuck had a bad knee.

He got in the driver’s side. Bronson sat in the passenger seat wet and discouraged. Should have stayed in Orrville. 1500 stories a year on Smucker’s jellies and jams. Safe as a baby. He ran his hand through his wild hair worriedly. Chuck turned the engine and stepped on the gas. Tires squealing. Rubber burning. Smoke on ice and salt. Men with M16s poured out the front of the prison and began to shoot. Automatic fire sounds like a loud raspberry from God. “They’re shooting at us!” Bronson yelled.

“No shit! Get down!” Chuck yelled. Bronson slumped down to the passenger side floor panel chanting again, “Please go away! Please go away!” They didn’t listen. More shots. Ping, ping, ping. The back doors swung open. The van screamed down the long lane that led to the prison. Ronald Reagan Way. “We didn’t shut the back doors! I swear I shut them!”

“Please go away! Please go away!”

Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping....

“Shit!”

They made it to the highway and breathed a sigh of relief. “They probably put an APB out on us. We got to ditch the van.” Chuck pulled out his cell. “Yeah, yeah, Pete! Pete! This is Chuck. Chuck St. Clair. I need a favor…”

Bronson sat back up in the passenger seat. The passenger side mirror was riddled with bullets and dangling there. The back doors swung open and closed. Chuck made a sharp right turn off the highway onto a small country road. “….Morristown Road,” he continued on his cell. “I see a junkyard. It’s, it’s called Dale’s Scrap and Heap. Dale’s Scrap and Heap on Morristown Road. See you in how long? Twenty minutes? Okay! Okay!” Click.

The white minivan pulled into the junkyard up a gravel lane. A Rottweiler named Butch chased it in through the gates to the office. The office was a shitty trailer with a handwritten sign. Magic marker on cardboard. “Stay here!” Chuck said. Bronson nodded, no problem. Butch sniffed Chuck’s rear and followed him into the dilapidated office. Five minutes later he and an old man with blue jean overalls and a green dirty trucker’s hat walked outside. Bronson couldn’t hear him but they shook hands and went back inside. Five minutes later Chuck returned. “Come on, Fillmore! I sold the van. He said we can sit in that old camper over there to stay warm until Pete picks us up.”

“Who’s Pete?”

“No time to explain. Come on.” 

The pair walked from the white van to the camper looking around cautiously for Marines or CIA agents, whatever the government had to throw at them. Butch followed but then Butch began to bark wildly behind them. The old man came out and yelled at him in a thick West Virginian accent. “Bless’it Butch! Gitchyer ol’tailbackin ear analiv’emlone!” The dog barked some more, thought it over, then went reluctantly back inside the trailer with the crowing old man.

Chuck and Bronson sat shivering in the camper. Thirty minutes and no sign of Pete but no sign of the government either. The old man drove the white van into a pole barn and shut the door. They were talking about what had just happened. “I sold him the van for parts on the condition he hides it. Imagine he’s probably seen the bullet holes. Told him we shot it up for target practice. He has no TV in the trailer. There’s a radio playing some hillbilly music so I think we’re okay. Not likely the government will put it out there that they shot at two reporters in a white van anyway.”

“No. Not likely.”

 “Shit! Where the hell are you Pete?”

            “Why do you think they were shooting at us anyway?” Bronson asked. “Seems a bit much.” He shivered partially from the cold and partially from his shot nerves. He had never been shot at before. Chuck served in Desert Storm and was shot at by his own side before. M16 fire coming his way was nothing new to him.

            “I was thinking the same thing. I don’t know. We must have stumbled onto something. Wrong place wrong time.”

            “If I may,” a kind voice said from the back of the camper, “I would say you were at the exact right place at the right time!”

            Chuck and Bronson frantically burst out of the camper. “Who the hell was that?!” Chuck yelled.

            “I was hoping it was you!”

            “I am not a damn ventriloquist!”

            “It was me,” the voice said calmly. The door swung all the way open and the camper depressed a little as he exited. Then Alex De Wolfe appeared in a black and white striped jumpsuit. “Do either of you gentlemen have any clothes to spare a fugitive?”

            “Who the hell are you?” Chuck gasped.

            “The man you helped escape from prison.”

            “You’re a…a….” Bronson couldn’t speak.

            “Invisible werewolf. Yes. Only they didn’t know that I was an invisible. I bided my time and waited for the right moment to escape. I have been in that hole for fifty six days. It was time to go. Do you gentlemen have any clothes I may borrow?”

            Chuck looked at Bronson and smiled proudly. This was their story. And it fell right into their lap.

            Alex sniffed, “What smells like piss?”

            “Piss probably,” Chuck said. Bronson looked down at his feet.

            Headlights shined up the darkening path. Pete honked his horn twice and flashed his headlights.