The Cage Keeper Read Online Free Page B

cognitively in charge, isn’t that it, Al?”
    “Whatever you say.” I look at him for a second and he is looking back at me, smiling.
    “Yes. I taught literature at Greeley. Now I’m no writer, but I do know literature. The Elizabethan period is my specialty, Al. And Al. Do not think for a second that one little bottle of French liqueur is goin’ to rob me of my senses and render me stupid.”
    “We’re in Niwot.”
    “That is correct.” He puts that huge knife point to my jacket side. “There’s a Sunoco station up here to your right. It’s full service.” He lowers the liquor bottle down between his legs onto the floor, and I pull in alongside the pumps. Dirty snow is plowed up against the side of the building. A young guy is inside reading a magazine. He’s leaning back in a chair and has his feet up on his desk. I honk the horn and the kid looks up then stands to get his coat that’s hanging behind him. I think about Wilson, about how maybe he should have noticed my fogged-up windows in the back alley when he pulled up on his motorcycle. Maybe he could have looked and thought about it for just one second. Elroy slips the knife between the car seat and where my kidneys are as the kid comes out of the building. He’s rubbing his hands together and his breath is shooting out in front of him in short foggy blasts.
    “Mornin’,” he says.
    I’m about to speak but then Elroy leans in front of me. “Fill it up, son.”
    “Yessir.”
    A frigid breeze is coming in steady through the window. I start to reach for the handle. “Mind if I roll the window up?”
    “Yes, I do, Al. That air is good for you. Keep you awake. Get out your money.”
    I reach around and get my wallet. He takes it from me then opens it and takes out all I got, a twenty and two ones.
    “I didn’t think you were making millions over at Fascist House.”
    I sit there in the cold, smelling gasoline. The attendant hangs up the nozzle, then comes around to the window.
    “Eight-seventy.”
    Elroy presses that Bowie flat against my lower back as he leans in front of me and hands the kid my twenty. “Hey partner, I wonder if you’d be willing to bring us four black coffees from your machine I see in there. I’d be happy to give you a couple extra dollars for your trouble.”
    I’m looking straight into this kid’s face. He’s got a few pink pimples on his chin and forehead, and I’m looking right into his watery brown eyes, moving mine all around then shooting them in the direction of Elroy beside me. The kid just smiles at me like he understands how it is to be with senile grandfathers or something. Then he says, “Sure. No problem.”
    IT WAS JUST AFTER Elroy had me get off 119 past Longmont, heading north on Highway 25, when I realized nobody would be missing me for at least two whole days. I’m not due back at the center until Friday, so unless someone saw a gray-haired man pop my car door lock then climb into my Monte Carlo with a huge knife in his hand, nobody would connect us. When this hit me, my heart started beating fast and my hands got slick on the wheel. I leaned forward a little in my seat to take a breath but then spilled coffee between my legs onto my crotch. A hot wave passed through me and for a second I felt like I was going to throw up. All of this Elroy didn’t seem to notice; he just kept sitting there in the dark holding his Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand, his Bowie knife in the other, leaning his head back against the seat and watching the white lines of route 25 come into my headlight space then pass under us like they were medicine for his old bones, water for a man in the desert. But then he turned to me and said: “No one will be looking for a sky blue Monte Carlo for two days anyway, will they, Al?” And I couldn’t say anything. Not a word came from my lips. And in the back of my head somewhere I realized I had been hoping that this hadn’t been planned at all, that he had just jumped off the