Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  Beside the pond in McKinley Park, Tania and Yolanda sit on a bench, sharing a cigarette and watching the approach of the switch car, a green and white Plymouth. Tania holds a Styrofoam cup of tea that she sips through a small hole she’s torn in the plastic lid. The car pulls to the curb, and Jeff and Teko get out. Roger, waving, attempts to catch her eye from behind the wheel. She lifts a single finger—not now. Actually, she feels like ignoring him. In fact, she feels a mild distaste for all three of them: for their fear, excitement, and affected bravado. She can tell immediately that everything went smoothly inside the bank, that the entire incident will assume an epic contour as it is told and retold and retold still again. As Jeff and Teko begin to relate their adventure, she cuts them off sharply. Yolanda allows herself a slight smile. Chastened, the men get back into the Plymouth and continue on their way, leaving behind a hemp bag containing the weapons and disguises and a green duffel holding the money for Tania and Yolanda to carry to the bus stop. Yolanda hugs the duffel tight as they ride back to W Street with kids playing hooky and two Mexican cleaning ladies carrying their supplies in a stained plastic caddy.

  GUNMEN ROB NORTH SACTO BANK

  (February 25) Two men robbed the Guild Savings branch on Arden Way shortly after the bank opened on Tuesday morning. The men entered the branch, located at the Arden Plaza Shopping Center, and immediately announced the robbery, displaying guns and ordering customers and staff to the floor. One suspect acted as a lookout while the other forced a teller to fill a bag with cash and money orders. Both suspects then fled through the bank’s rear exit with an undisclosed amount. No one was injured. The suspects are described as Caucasian males in their mid-20s. At the time of the robbery both were wearing long raincoats and hats, and one covered his face with a scarf or bandanna. Eyewitnesses told sheriff’s deputies that the suspects were dropped at the bank in an older blue sedan.

  This particular bakery yields an oven-fresh $3,729. They sit in a circle while Yolanda removes a small blue duffel bag from the larger green one that camouflages it and then counts up the cash, separating the folding money into neat piles of twenties, tens, fives, and ones, a skill derived from many games of Monopoly on the screened-in porch back in Clarendon Hills. Yolanda always liked to be the banker, an irony that does not occur to her now.

  “PAKES,” SAYS ONE OF the technicians. He is looking at the wrought-iron lettering, spelling out PAIX, affixed to the balcony handrail. He lights a cigarette and leans against the car. “That who owns this dump?”

  “No, it’s some fireman in New York. Lafferty.” An FBI supervisor from Scranton, Silliman, is outside talking to the technician because neither of them has much to do. The technician is up from Philly to look for trace evidence, but the place is turning out to be clean. Shoe prints? No. Tire impressions? Not even theirs. No semen, saliva, sweat, vomit, or blood in drops, pools, spatters, splashes, or stains. No slugs or shells. Plenty of hair and fibers. Some of the hairs appear to be synthetic, but there’s nothing in particular that looks foreign to the scene. Fragments of broken glass here and there, chips of paint. This and that. They bag the stuff and tag it. Each day for a frigid week they’ve returned to the farm.

  “You talk to him?”

  “We talked to him. He rented it out to Guy Mock all right. Summer thing. He said Mock claimed to be an author who needed a nice quiet place to work.”

  “Ain’t that pretty.”

  “He sure got it. Christ, go nuts out here.” Viewed from the house, the pines stand plain and lonely atop the bare gray hills. Silliman slaps his gloved hands together and rubs them briskly. The air feels cold enough to slice the skin.

  They’ve talked to everybody. Storekeepers, neighbors, mail carriers, the propane delivery man. Silliman’s certain that they have the right place. Everyone who’s gotten a look at it remembers Guy Mock’s face, everyone speaks of a nondescript couple, a pretty Oriental girl. Or gook, depending on who you talk to. Silliman has an inkling of who this person might be.

  “How’s the garbage?”

  “They burned it in a pit back of the house. The usual cans and bottles and bones. They’re trying to lift prints from them.”

  “They’re animal bones?”

  “Oh, shit yeah. Pork chops and chicken.”

  The propane man recalls seeing an additional woman, who lay on a cot with a blanket over her head for the entire time he was there. In July heat. Silliman elects not to show him the photo of the famous fugitive. No sense inviting every crank in the county to put their two cents in. He waits for the dogs to arrive on their chartered flight from California. They go apeshit when they get a whiff of the cot.

  Chartered flight. He likes that.

  “Let’s go in. I’m freezing my ass off.”

  Inside the house, furniture is draped with dropcloths while dusting for prints goes on nearby. No visibles. No plastic impressions. No latents so far, though there are plenty of indications the place has been wiped, not least of which is that there are no prints. But this is not evidence, this is not admissible, this is merely suspicious, something that gives cops a reason for rising each morning and banging their heads against the wall. Dusting continues. Elsewhere, where dusting and evidence gathering and photographing have already happened, the government men have tossed the place. Silliman knows the fugitives were here. Because there’s no sign they were here.

  Silliman goes through pockets in the mudroom. He finds receipts from local vendors dating back to the mid-sixties. He finds a shopping list that mentions “Tricks Cereal for Brian and Tim” and concludes that this is the work of Mrs. Lafferty, whoever she is or was. He finds thirty-seven cents in change, including a dime and a penny minted in 1974. He bags the coins. He bags a Bic pen that has bled half its ink into the pocket of an old field jacket. Screaming Eagles patch on the shoulder. He finds a book of matches advertising the U.S. Auto School and bags that too. In a Lee Riders jacket that looks as if it would fit someone about sixteen years old, he finds a beat-up copy of Penthouse Forum. It falls open to a certain page.

  Dear Penthouse Forum:

  I want to write about the greatest oral sex I have ever had. Now let me say that due to my above-average (ten inches) endowment I have never had satisfactory oral pleasure from any woman. I have long wanted someone who would eat me—all of me—whenever I so desired, swallowing all of the frothing sperm cocktail I pumped into her soft willing mouth, while asking nothing more in return than to be regularly walked, fed, and watered, the ultimate lover and soul mate. Well, in my four-year-old collie Donna I have found mine. Donna is gorgeous, with a long, silky coat and expressive brown eyes. One day when she was a puppy I awoke to find her licking dried sperm from my abdomen (I’d fallen asleep after jerking off). Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it I’d trained her to pleasure me orally. Now, let me tell you about the beautiful blow jobs I receive from Donna. Not once in four years has she bitten me, not even a nip. Well,

  Silliman closes the magazine. It does get lonely out here, he guesses. Brian? Tim? Lieutenant Lafferty himself, dreaming of the firehouse Dalmatian? He bags it.

  He went to bed one night a spectator and awoke—was awoken, actually—the next morning, engulfed. A weird feeling. He’s followed the whole thing in the papers and on the news. It’s the Bureau’s case, but it seemed to have little to do with anything he knows. Scranton Resident does some organized crime. It works with Treasury on bootleg cigarette sales and such. There are bank robberies; some laid-off mine worker will wander into a local branch with a peremptory note and wander out with a paper bag full of a thousand dollars in bait bills. It is not, in short, a glamour assignment. Now here comes this case, straight from California, filtered through the gaunt sunlight of a Pennsylvania winter. California’s not big enough for all the craziness it engenders? Silliman has twenty years in the Bureau. Silliman understands criminal pathology. He understands the easy money mentality of some moron who drives across state lines in a truck loaded with butts missing their re
venue stamps. He understands the miner whose wife closes the fridge and says there’s no food and there isn’t going to be any. He understands a lot of things, but he has trouble understanding these boys and girls who seem to want a different sort of government. What for? He is the government, and he can assure these kids that any conceivable alternative would have men just like him, doing just what he does, at its heart. Of course they wouldn’t believe this. He tries to imagine what they do believe but can envision only a buzzing rush of static in his head: a void, chaotic. It scares the living shit out of him. It has nothing to do with Pennsylvania. What do these sturdy old farmhouses have to do with revolution?

  His wife always wants to go out to California. She thinks it’s one big beach, full of movie stars.

  Silliman feels that he occupies the quietest zone in the case. Every day he enters a house that in its placid inscrutability tells him little yet offers the most reliable view into the missing girl’s daily life. She stood here, she sat there. Washed her dishes in this sink. When she came out and stood on the top step, this is what she would have seen. He drives down the road and walks the same three aisles she would have walked at the country store. Pork chops and chicken.

  The furious storm, and he’s at its eye. The papers have been full of it lately: no breaks, no news, the case already a year old. So quiet here: you could go nuts. But for now he wants to hold the isolation close. The press doesn’t yet know about this place. After interrogating him, Silliman recommended that the Bureau immediately ship Ernest Mock overseas on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He didn’t think Mock would be able to keep his mouth shut for a second.

  Just as Silliman is about to wrap it up for the day, an investigator comes into the room holding a bag containing a folded, crumpled section of newspaper, six months old. The New York Times, perfect. It has been discovered stuffed into a hole in the underside of one of the mattresses upstairs. That’s a good find. That looks promising. Silliman tells the investigator so; he likes his men to feel as if they’re not totally wasting their time.

  Back in Scranton the next afternoon, Silliman gets a call from the fingerprint examiner at the lab in Philly. He has managed to lift a latent partial print from one of the fragments recovered from the garbage pit, a piece of a shattered drinking glass. In the expert opinion of the fingerprint examiner, the print matches one on file with the United States Marine Corps listed as belonging to Andrew Carlyle Shepard, aka Richard Frank Dennis, aka William Kinder, aka Jonathan Maris, aka Jonathan Mark Salamone, aka General Teko of the Symbionese Liberation Army, currently wanted by the United States of America for violation of the National Firearms Act. The examiner also mentions that using ninhydrin spray, they managed to develop prints on the section of newspaper discovered in the mattress. No match as yet, but the examiner notes casually that the prints display the frequent whorls characteristically found on persons of Oriental origin.

  GUY WANDERS INTO A strip club, a workingman’s place off the highway: a perfect place to sit, think, and throw away a little more money. The girls onstage are dancing, if dancing is the word; mostly they sway off beat to contemporary hits, swinging from smudgy chrome poles.

  There’s not much to strip. Girls taking the stage wear a bra, heels, and a G-string, with maybe a boa or a cowboy hat, tops. “Midnight at the Oasis” is fading out as Guy takes his seat at the bar, and by the time his beer arrives Marvin Hamlisch’s version of “The Entertainer” is forlornly playing out. Guy figures he is witnessing an unusual confluence of indigenous American imaginative artifacts. A song written around the turn of the century to be performed in the genteel parlors of bordellos—scandalous then but currently popular as a nostalgic evocation, albeit a jarringly anachronistic one, of the 1930s—is serving as the accompaniment to a contemporary and aggressively vulgar display that falsely promises the sex the whorehouses delivered but hid from public view.

  In a hundred years, when vending machine sex-robots fuck us for quarters, they’ll probably play disco.

  The girls don’t know quite how to respond to this tune. One humps the pole, sliding up and down its length, her tongue hanging out in a caricature of rapture; another walks up and down the narrow stage, looking oddly reminiscent of a stewardess patrolling the aisle of a 707. The patrons, too, seem confused, confused and riled; these scoured westerners didn’t come here to listen to Scott Joplin tell them how damned sad everything is. It makes Guy nervous. He probably should have just taken a six-pack into one of the vacant cabins at his parents’ place, but he half expects to be arrested any day now, and that’s the first place they’re likely to look.

  Even the mindless serenity of the strip club is adulterated by the clanging and flashing of the slots parked in every corner. He is sick, sick, sick of Vegas. Sick of the heat, sick of the sun, sick of the recycled air, sick of the dry, rasping cough he rises with each morning, sick of tourists, sick of natives, sick of loud, dumb radio ads for the shows at the casinos, sick of getting the thermonuclear shakes from underground testing.

  “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” comes on, and everyone seems relieved.

  The phone rang one fine morning up in Oregon, and it was his mother on the line. Just wanted to let him know that Ernest had called to say that he would be visiting Europe for a while and that he’d informed on the whole family to the FBI. Agents would probably be paying them a visit once they’d confirmed the details of Ernest’s story. She spoke with a sort of polar calm.

  “What do you think I should tell them, Guy?”

  “Mom, don’t tell them anything.”

  “Well, if they are going to take the trouble of coming all the way out here, I feel bad just turning them away.”

  “They’re probably just coming from the Federal Building downtown, Mom.”

  “Still and all, they have a right to the truth.”

  “No,” said Guy, “they don’t. You need to call a lawyer. And in the meantime keep your mouth shut. Do you understand me?”

  “Guy, do you really think an attorney is going to be necessary?”

  “Yes, I do, Mom. This is serious business as your beloved son Ernest well knows. No wonder he’s—”

  “Maybe Dick Taranutz can recommend a good attorney.”

  “Taranutz? That guy across the street?”

  “He’s very well set up in business. I’m sure he’d know of a good one.”

  “Don’t you say word one to Taranutz about any of this.”

  “But he and Minnie are such good friends.”

  “Don’t say a word.”

  But three days later, after Guy and a more or less totally disgruntled Randi had decamped from Portland—Randi traveling to visit friends in San Diego while Guy flew to Las Vegas to head off an unsupervised encounter between federal agents and his parents—Guy arrived to find his mother riven and dispirited, gazing sadly at the huge stucco eyesore across the road with the Cadillac gleaming in its driveway. Apparently the Taranutzes had taken a dim view of the Mocks’ unlawful activities. The wonderful friendship was at an end. No lawyer had been retained.

  For two days Guy sat in his parents’ apartment watching his mother slice fruit—for fruit salad, for pies, for banana bread, for breakfast cereal. The woman handled a paring knife as if she were the skilled practitioner of some ancient and vaguely theatrical craft, like weaving or crocheting. On the whole it was pretty useless, Guy thought, because you couldn’t send the grandkids bowls of sliced fruit the way you could a sweater or a scarf. In fact, you couldn’t even eat it all, not in the quantities that she was cutting up. His father, sitting on the couch watching television as she desperately sliced apples and grapes and mandarin oranges, put forth the proposition that Dick Taranutz was a jerk and that he always had been. Neither of them would hear of Guy’s calling a lawyer.

  “I am ready to come clean,” his mother declared.

  “Bunch of thieves,” his father said.

  On the morning of the third day Guy was in the living room executing a headsta
nd and watching The Electric Company when there came a knock at the front door. His father groaned experimentally, rising from his seat, but Mrs. Mock failed to appear, so he went to the door and answered it himself. Two men stood outside in the fierce sun. They didn’t want a cabin.

  “Guy Mock, Senior?” said one.

  “Yes” said the old man.

  The man handed him a folded document. “You’re served.”

  “What is it?”

  “That is a subpoena directing you to appear before the Grand Jury of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania for questioning.”

  “Questioning?”

  “The subpoena provides details,” said the other man.

  In the living room Guy remained very still. In his shoulder he began to feel a piercing pain.

  “And who are you? Police?”

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation. Special Agents Vanaken and Oakes.” Out with the stupid badges.

  “Have you spoken with your son, Mr. Mock?”

  “Ernest’s in Europe. But I guess you knew that.”

  “Never mind what we know,” said Oakes.

  “I meant Guy, Junior.”

  “Guy? Sure, I’ve talked to him. He’s up in Oregon.”

  “Actually he isn’t,” said Vanaken crisply. “We were wondering if you could tell us where he might be.”