Love in a Burning Cabin

“We still got hope,” she said, not looking at me. Her eyes were staring out the cabin window at the blue and red and black night. We could hear the town cops murmuring as they smoked cigarettes and drank coffee. We could hear their dog's yelping from the back of pickup trucks.

“Hope is never something to hang your hat on,” I said, and she laughed, “What’s that supposed to mean?” She was looking right at me now, the laughter gone, but the smile still in her eyes. “I wonder where they got that from?” she asked into my silence. “Something to hang your hat on.”

We were ten feet apart, sitting on the wood floor under two different shattered glass windows. Fuzzy lights, like colored smoke, pulsed in through the splintered walls, filling the room with reds and blues.

“So, what do we do now, Butch?” she asked.

I looked over. She, too, was changing colors. Her long legs in snug white Levis turned pink, then blue. She had no shoes, and her bare feet, now filthy, were scrunched up under her butt. I looked at her and thought once again how pretty she was, how out of my league. “We wait,” I said.

“I thought you had a hideout.”

“Yeah, this is it.”

“This is it? Your hideout? Good one, Capone!”

I put my head back against the wall and felt her eyes on me.

“What the hell happened?” she asked.

I said nothing.

“No, really dude, what the hell happened?”

“Might have been that last bank,” I said.

“You’re not going to blame me, are you?”

“I blame the die-pack exploding in the car. It wasn’t part of your great escape plan.”

“But we got away, right?”

“Oh, yeah. And here we are on a beach in sunny Mexico!”

“I mean, we lost them, didn’t we? For a little while, huh?”

“Maybe it was the day we met,” I said. “That’s when it went bad.”

“You were the hottest man I’d ever seen in an AA meeting.”

“Is that true?” I asked. I felt foolish asking, but I wanted to know.

She smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. She looked at me and saw a kid hoping for a lollypop.

“Ok, look. We will not sit here feeling sorry for ourselves.”

“We can surrender at any time,” I said.

“I think we got four more minutes to do that,” she said. “Then they gonna burn us out.”

“So, what do you want to do?” I asked, scared to hear her answer.

“I say we go out in a blaze of glory!”

“I knew it,” I said. “OK, Sundance. Lead the way.”

“I will not die without knowing your real name. What is it?

“They call it Alcoholics Anonymous for a reason, miss.”

“Spill it,” she said.

“You don’t want to know, sister,” I said. “I’m trouble, see. You don’t want to get mixed up with a cuss like me.”

“Well, your name’s not Bogart, we can rule that one out.”

“My name’s Oliver.”

“No, it’s not, It can’t be. That's a stupid name for a bank robber.”

I shrugged.

“I won’t allow it!”

“Sad but true,” I said. From where I sat, I could see the moon through the burned-out part of the roof. It could have been pretty, but it was changing colors with the flashing lights, which ruined it.

I looked at the girl. The woman. Older than me, wiser than me. “Let’s get out of here and go steal a car,” she had said the first day at AA. And that’s what we did. We did everything she wanted. We needed money, we robbed our first bank. It was a good time for a little while, which is to say, it was never dull.

“What now,” I asked.

“Waiting is not something to hang your hat on, Clyde,” she said. She was scooting across the floor now, coming toward me. I knew the look on her face. It was a good look, but I shook my head no. “You gotta be kidding me!” I said.

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

“You got two more minutes,” the man on the bullhorn roared from outside.

She pulled my shirt open, popping the buttons. “We got two minutes, Olly,” she said.

“What are we going to do with the last minute?” I asked.

“We can always cuddle,” she said.

I never did find out her name.

WC: 779