THE BEST OF IT, TO SWEDE IN PARTICULAR, WAS THAT DAVY ESCAPED BY PONY. We wouldn’t know this for several days, however, nor would the disturbed sheriff, Charlie Pym, who’d showed up pounding the door in the wee hours. Over breakfast Mr. DeCuellar told us how he’d wrapped himself in a tartan robe and peeked between curtains before opening the door: “Do you know who is up at four in the morning? Dairy farmers. Paperboys. Lunatics.” (Mr. DeCuellar was not himself that morning; he was, in fact, grouchy. It was indecipherable to Swede and me, to whom this news was cotton candy.)
Sheriff Pym had insisted on entering. The night was wet and freezing and Pym stood dripping sleet on the rug, giving Mr. DeCuellar what he called the “onus eye.” (I am sure he meant the evil eye; the word onus made Swede break into such unruly giggles she had to hunt Kleenex.) The sheriff then inquired whether Mr. DeCuellar had slept well.
“Thus far,” Mr. DeCuellar replied.
“No visitors,” the sheriff said.
Mr. DeCuellar looked at the door, then at the soaked Pym. He said, “You can’t possibly believe he would’ve come here.”
So all we knew, that first morning, was that Davy’d got out—maybe seven hours before. We hadn’t details except that he’d taken with him a police-issue revolver and that a posse had been formed. Twelve men in six cars were out parsing the county at this moment.
“We’ll have him by lunchtime,” the sheriff said—looking at Dad, who was standing in his long johns in the gloom. “We’ll try not to hurt your boy.”
It was Swede’s contention, as the morning stretched on, that a posse of twelve hundred couldn’t catch Davy. Let ’em try.
Dad said, “Swede, if you can’t talk sense, don’t talk at all.”
They were the harshest words I’d ever heard him speak. I watched him sipping his coffee, his face foreign with misgiving. How I wanted to understand him! But I was eleven, and my brother had escaped from the pit where my vanity had placed him (a vain notion itself, Swede has since pointed out, yet it was certainty to me). How could my father not be joyous over such a thing? Who in this world could ask for more?
Nevertheless, the following days must’ve been excruciating for Dad—dreading Davy’s recapture yet fearing worse. The state police were advised, and locally the posse grew exponentially; after early radio reports of the escape, fifty men appeared at the courthouse, every one of them armed. Such a profusion of goose and varmint guns and beat-up World War pieces you never saw—at least such was the description given us by Deputy Walt Stockard, whose unconcealed glee over the escape must’ve been repugnant to Sheriff Pym. Though the very word posse sounds archaic, it made all sorts of sense at the time. For one thing, Davy was believed to be on foot. Since no one in Montrose County had reported a stolen vehicle—not a car, not a tractor, not so much as a Schwinn—it was assumed he was still nearby, shivering in some hidey-hole.
“Unless he got out to the highway and hitched a ride,” Dad suggested. He was trying to sell Walt on calling off the posse, something Walt hadn’t the authority to do anyway. It was Davy’s second day out; Walt was off duty and had come by the DeCuellars’ for coffee; no doubt the sheriff thought it wise to keep an eye on Davy’s family. “He could be in Kansas City by now,” Dad said.
“Possibility,” Walt admitted. “Though Pym believes otherwise. It was raining buckets, you know. How many folks are going to stop for some wet-muskrat-looking fellow, in a rainstorm, at that hour? Besides, he’s got the best-known mug in the state right now. You think he’d try and hitch?”
It was a good point, and in fact Davy’s picture was on the front page of that very afternoon’s Minneapolis Star—a shot of him relaxed and laughing, hands folded back of his head. I still don’t know where they got that photo; it was the one they’d used in their early stories, the ones extolling his bravery. Later they’d replaced it with a police mug in which his chin looked dirty and his eyes gave you not one bit of hope or information. Now the flattering picture was back, with this caption:
Bold outlaw Davy Land slips from jail, eludes manhunt.
Fellow inmate: “He up and disappeared like smoke.”
“Good grief,” Dad said. Having “up and disappeared,” Davy’d clearly reacquired the allure that had evaporated so easily when people heard about Bubby. Now he was back to “bold outlaw,” and while I liked the change I’d also learned a bit by now about public inconstancy. Not to mention Mighty Stinson’s inconstancy. Quoted at length by reporters, Mighty told the story as one smitten by legend:
“And when I looked back up he was flat-out gone, I didn’t hear a sound. Like he was a ghost.”
And worse:
“You know something? I knew he was going to do it. Knew it when they first brought him in.”
Pretty irresponsible of Mighty, since the truth, Walt said, was that Mighty had been sleeping like mortality itself when Davy made his move. But when else was anyone going to listen to a word Mighty said, much less put it in print?
What actually happened—and we got this from Walt, whose colleague Stube Range was on shift—was this: Shortly before eleven, Stube was sitting at the night desk reading a paperback mystery. Subsequent research has revealed the book to be a Mike Hammer detective story. Stube was reading it despite Sheriff Pym’s disapproval of its author, Mickey Spillane. (More research: The sheriff had met Spillane once, far back in memory, on a turboprop airliner, and Spillane had made a humorous remark about Charlie Pym’s beard, which was sparse.) Suddenly Stube was distracted from the story by a polite call from Davy. The toilet in his cell wouldn’t flush, he said.
Don’t flush it then, Stube answered.
There’s a need to, Davy replied; sorry about that, but there’s a need. Davy jiggled the lever audibly. No flush.
There was apparently some back-and-forth between them, Mighty Stinson snorting in his sleep through everything because the dampness stopped his nose, but finally Stube Range put down his book, grumping good-naturedly about it I’m sure, let himself into Davy’s cell, locked it behind him, and peeked in the toilet.
No suspense here. Stube awoke propped against the wall of Davy’s cell. His head was sore and his memory flawed. The toilet, incidentally, worked fine; he had to use it before his replacement showed up at the stroke of twelve and released him from the cell.
Swede would point out, rightly enough, that a man reading Mickey Spillane ought to have known better, but Stube Range, as they say, had a good heart. At this crossroads in his life he would in fact leave law enforcement to begin a new career as a school janitor over in Roofing. The district was hiring, you see.
We stayed at the DeCuellars’ three days after Davy’s escape. Walt visited every morning, asking jokingly whether we’d seen Davy lately and bringing us news of the county’s frustration. Crisscrossing the area, talking to farmers and rural deliverymen and others who might’ve noticed a bedraggled boy slouching hastily elsewhere, the posse had come up dry. The chase paled. Posse members began to desert, offering as excuses their wives and families and, in rare cases, their jobs. Who could blame them? Not only was the trail cold, there hadn’t really been a trail to start with. By the time a bloodhound could be borrowed from a neighboring county, the great rains had blotted out Davy’s scent. They gave the bloodhound a try anyway. Poor over-anticipated fellow—he couldn’t smell anything but himself.
Through all this, Walt said, Sheriff Pym was losing his happy nature. Justly or unjustly, Davy had grown a higher profile than any other desperado ever to sit in the Montrose County jail. His escape only raised it higher. Pym, Walt cautioned us, felt that people were laughing at him. He’d been heard shouting blue language at the phone in his office. A Minneapolis editorialist had thrown out the combustible phrase “hambone county rubes.”
“He’s touchy what people think of him,” Walt told us—so you see, that Mickey Spillane business rings true.
By Davy’s third day, Sheriff Pym had become so out of sorts Walt reported he was thinking of a house-to-house search.
“It scares me, Mr. Land. Do you know how long it would take to look in every closet in Montrose?”
Mr. DeCuellar said, “The sheriff is joking, it’s unconstitutional. Coffee?”
The deputy accepted. “I’m worried about Charlie,” he said. “He’s just sure somebody’s got Davy down the basement. Some young lady, he says. He keeps saying that; it bothers him awfully.” Walt Stockard was beginning to look tired. “A lot of people like that boy, you know.”
“Yes,” said Mr. DeCuellar, “they do.” He was brisk this morning—there were times he seemed mad at Davy for getting away, or maybe he was just sick of houseguests. It had been a pretty long visit.
Walt said, “My girls’ve been treating me like I’m on the wrong team.”
“They’ll recover,” Mr. DeCuellar said.
Walt pinched the bridge of his nose. What a kind fellow he was. He looked capable of forgetting just about anything. He said, “Say, Rube, hand me one of those bismarcks, would you?”
That afternoon, to everyone’s relief, a farmer name of Nelson Svedvig came into Montrose and filed a complaint about a stolen horse. An Arabian mare, taken from his south pasture; this would be less than two miles from Montrose.
“Taken when?” Sheriff Pym asked. Walt was standing right there, listening, is how I know.
“Not sure,” Nelson Svedvig admitted. “I hauled a load of hay out late last week; she was there then.” He saw the sheriff looking at him and added, defensively, “Those ponies kind of look after themselves this time of year.”
“Are your fences okay? Could be she ran off.”
Nelson replied, “She foaled in the spring. And the foal is still there”—adding, with rising dignity, “and you know my fences, Charlie.”
That night the sheriff paid off what remained of the dispirited posse, and we took our leave of the DeCuellars. Oh, it was good to get home.