Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.

It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity.

You cannot do what you must unaided. So throughout your struggling, your creeping and running, your thieving and killing, you are on the hunt for help. And if you live, you find it, sooner or later. Rudy Torrento found his sooner, in the Clintons. Doc found his later in a family of migratory farm workers; sharecroppers turned crop tramps.

There were nine of them, husband and wife and seven stair-step children-the youngest a toddling tot, the eldest a rawboned boy who was the scantling shadow of his father. They were camped alongside the muddy trickle of a creek. Two of the tires on their ancient truck were flat, and its battery stood on the ground. Their clothes were ragged but clean. When Doc emerged from the underbrush and approached them, trailed nervously by Carol, they drew together in a kind of phalanx; and the same look of wary phlegmatism was on every one of their suntanned faces.

Carol had no reason to be nervous. Doc knew people; and having been born among them, he knew this kind very well. Their existence was centered around existing. They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay.

Doc knew them well. He knew how to talk to them.

Beyond a casual nod, he ignored the man's wife and brood. They had no authority, and to imply any to them would have been discourteous. Drawing the man aside, he spoke to him circuitously; casually hunkering down on his heels, talking with the man's own languid caution. Sometimes whole minutes passed in silence. And speaking, they seemed to discuss almost everything but the subject at hand.

Yet they understood each other, and they came to an agreement quite quickly. Doc gave the man some bills, not many and none of them large. For integrity cannot be bought, and they were simply men in need assisting one another. Then the man gave drawled instructions to his family.

"These here folks is friends," he said. "They'll be movin' on with us. We don't let on about it to no one, not ary peep or whistle."

He sent the eldest boy and the second eldest into town for «new» secondhand tires, a battery and food. In the morning they headed westward, and lying prone in the rear of the truck, Doc and Carol heard the woman's cracked voice raised in a spiritual and they smelled the smoke from the man's nickel see-gar.

The seven children were squeezed into the truck bed with them, the bigger ones sitting with slumped shoulders to accommodate themselves to its low canvas cover. They were all around them, shielding them from view, hiding them as effectively as though they had been at the bottom of a well. But close as they were physically, they were still worlds apart.

Carol smiled at one of the girls, and received a flat stare in return. She started to pat the tot's head, and barely jerked her hand back in time to avoid being bitten. The eldest boy protectively took charge of the child. "Wouldn't do that no more, ma'am," he advised Carol with chill politeness. "He don't cotton none to strangers."

The truck's best speed was barely thirty miles an hour. Despite their early starts and late stops, they seldom made two hundred miles a day. Their food was monotonously unvaried, practically the same from one meal to the next. Salt pork and gravy, biscuits or mush, and chicory coffee for breakfast. For lunch, mush or biscuits and salt pork eaten cold while they rode. And for dinner, there was more biscuits, salt pork and gravy, with perhaps some sweetnin' (sorghum) and a poke salad-greens boiled with pork into a greasy, tasteless mess.

Doc ate heartily of everything. Nauseated by the stuff, Carol ate no more than she had to to stay alive. She acquired a painful and embarrassing stomach complaint. Her small body ached constantly from the jouncing and bouncing of the truck. She became very bitter at Doc; the more so because she knew her predicament was her own fault, and because she dared not complain.

These people didn't like her. They tolerated her only because she was Doc's woman (his woman, for Pete's sake!). And without Doc, she would be lost.

Whether the family knew who they were-the most wanted criminals in the country-is a moot point. But reading no newspapers, having no radio, living in their own closemouthed world of existing to exist, it is unlikely that they did. And probably they would have turned their back on the opportunity to inform themselves.

These folks was feedin' them. These folks' business was their own business.

Ask no questions an' you'll hear no lies.

Curiosity killed the cat.

Leave well enough be, an' you'll be well enough.

The old truck limped westward, carrying Doc and Carol far beyond the danger zone of roadblocks and police checks, and into the whilom safety of California. And there, after another day or so of travel, they parted company with the family.

Doc didn't want them to know his and Carol's destination, to get any closer to it than they already were. That would be asking for trouble, and asked-for trouble was usually gotten. Moreover, the family did not wish to go any farther south-into an area that was traditionally hostile to vagrants or anyone who might possibly become vagrant. And they hoped to have other fish to fry, or rather, apples to pick in the Pacific Northwest.

So there were monosyllabic farewells, a final exchange of money; then the family moved on, and Carol and Doc remained behind… Quite inappropriately in the City of Angels.

Doc was dressed in blue overalls and a jumper, and a striped railroad worker's cap. He carried himself with a pronounced stoop; a pair of old-fashioned steelrimmed glasses were perched on the end of his nose, and he peered over them nearsightedly as he paid for his ticket from a snap-top money pouch. A metal lunch bucket was tucked under one arm. Beneath his clothes-and Carol's-was an outsize money belt.

Carol came into the railroad station several minutes after him. She also was stooped, cronelike of figure. She wore a long, shapeless black dress, and under the shadow of her head shawl her face was wizened and sunblack.

They boarded the train separately, Carol taking a rear seat, Doc entering the men's lounge. Then, when their tickets had been collected and the train was well out of the yards, he came out and sat down at her side.

He opened the lunch bucket and took out a pint bottle of whiskey. He drank from it thirstily, wiped the neck with his sleeve, and extended it toward Carol.

She shook her head, her nose wrinkling distastefully. "Do you have to keep hitting that stuff?" she frowned.

"Keep hitting it?" He returned her frown. "That's the first drink I've had in days."

"Well, it's one too many at a time like this! If you ask me, I…"

"But I didn't." He took another long drink, then returned the bottle to the lunch bucket. "Look," he said reasonably. "What do you want to do anyway? Break up? Go it on your own? I'd like to know."