“How was your Sunday with Jim?” asks Myrna. She is unwinding the cord from around her adding machine, which she prefers to Pastor Robert’s calculator. She likes to be able to consult the paper tape.
“He has all these extensions,” Mary says, her hand hovering over the box. She selects a glazed chocolate old-fashioned, a doughnut with some heft to it.
Rochelle is writing the church’s account number on the paper sleeves they roll the coins in. In about twelve seconds she will say, as she always does, that they should put in the account number ahead of time. Then she will empty out the cloth bag that contains the fifteen or twenty dollars in change the church received this week and begin to separate the coins.
“And how is your mother, Rochelle?” asks Myrna.
“She is OK,” says Rochelle, pausing. “I wanted to take her outside to feed the ducks after lunch but she wouldn’t eat lunch. I brought her a Quarter Pounder with cheese and she didn’t touch it.”
“How’s her mood?”
“She cried. All she does is cry and try to breathe.” Then Rochelle begins to cry herself. Myrna puts the adding machine down on the long folding table where she likes to work on collection deposit days. She walks over and puts both hands on Rochelle’s shoulders.
“It’s all right,” she says. “There, there.”
“I’m all right,” says Rochelle. “It’s just so sad.” She looks at the flattened paper sleeves before her and inhales deeply. “We ought to just put in these account numbers ahead of time. Save all this work.”
“Maybe,” says Myrna, happy to recite her part in the weekly litany, “you should just go ahead and write it in on some extra ones today.”
They go about their business. Mary, discomfited by Rochelle’s display, chatters nervously, forcing Myrna to add the receipts a fourth time. She likes the soft sound her fingertips make striking the keys of the machine. But she steals a glimpse at her wristwatch and sees that it is about twenty to nine. She can imagine the line at the bank first thing on a Monday, and she wants to arrive early. She asks Rochelle a question about her children’s doctor. This will quiet Mary down plus help to bring Rochelle back to the everyday, away from the awful place she inhabits alone with thoughts of her failing mother. Kill two birds with one stone. But especially quiet Mary down. As Myrna knows she will, Rochelle answers the question carefully. The doctor is a colleague, after all, of Trygve’s.
Mary finishes rolling the coins, and Myrna removes from the church secretary’s desk a canvas money pouch. The pouch says LOOMIS and has a zipper with a broken lock at one end. Myrna enjoys placing the money in this pouch so much. It makes the whole procedure extra significant somehow.
The three women leave the church building and walk to the parking lot under the broad eaves extending from the steeply gabled roof.
“Is it just me or—” says Rochelle, dabbing at her face with a Kleenex. She shouts over the noise as another jet from McClellan AFB rumbles into the sky overhead. She tries again.
“Is it just me, or is it hot? You certainly dressed right for the weather, Myrna.”
Myrna is pleased with this remark.
“I was saying to Jim just this morning that the temperature was starting to feel tolerable, but this is too much. Something is not right.” Mary sounds particularly adamant, as if she won’t be fooled.
Rochelle needs a lift home after the bank, so Mary says that if it’s OK with everybody can they just take one car to the bank and then she’ll just drop Myrna off back here? Of course they can. Mary just wants everyone to ride in her new Cutlass. However, Myrna is less than thrilled when in climbing into the back, she places the adding machine on the seat before sitting down herself and Mary says, “Please, dear, mind the upholstery.” She reminds herself not to be spiteful, to be a charitable adult who is aware of the many, many ways in which Mary fights her many, many weaknesses. But she can’t help herself, for she just has to say, as Mary is pulling out, “A new car somehow smells cheaper than it did when Trygve and I bought one two years ago. Or maybe it’s just the Oldsmobile, do you think?” and she is ashamed, especially when Mary lapses into a wounded silence that she sustains throughout the five-minute drive to Crocker Bank.
Mary turns into the bank’s driveway. The low structure is oriented lengthwise on its lot, and the building presents only its blankly decorative concrete walls to the street, its windows and entrances invisible to anyone passing on Marconi Avenue. Mary steers around the building’s pointed outcropping to park in one of the painted spaces near the bank’s entrance, joining several other cars there. Myrna checks her watch: 9:02.
“Look at them,” says Rochelle.
A small cluster of people are on the other side of the cyclone fence that surrounds the lot. One pushes his way through a large gap in the fence where its links have been cut and then holds aside the section of fence to allow the others through. In all, four figures climb into the bank lot. They wear heavy jackets and woolen watch caps.
“I thought I was hot,” Rochelle says, fanning herself.
“Maybe they were out hunting this morning,” says Mary. None of the women knows much about such things. The group of four begins advancing toward the entrance as the women get out of the Oldsmobile. Myrna carries her adding machine with her.
“You can leave that in the car,” says Mary.
“It’s all right,” says Myrna.
“I’m sorry,” says Mary. “I didn’t mean to be a so-and-so about it. A new car can make you into the nastiest so-and-so. I almost can’t wait until I put the first dent in it.”
“Or one of your kids does it for you,” says Rochelle.
“Amen to that,” says Myrna. Carl and Sonja both drive. Jon’s just learning. Her heart is in her mouth all the time now.
“Please don’t feel you have to carry it,” Mary says.
“I don’t mind. I’m already out.”
Mary reaches for Myrna and squeezes her wrist. Then the women head for the door, but here are the hunters—they’re young people, seemingly a little awkward in the presence of actual grown-ups, shuffling and avoiding eye contact, and Myrna is surprised when one of them reaches for the door and holds it open for the older women, making a stiff after-you gesture with his free hand. She smiles up at him and says, “Thank you.”
Inside a short line winds around the floor before the teller’s stations. Three butchers wearing yellow hard hats and long white bloodstained coats stand in line together, one leaning in toward the others confidentially, making compact motions with his hands as he tells a story. The three laugh quietly and then, the joke told, direct their attention toward the long counter and the tellers working behind it. A man stands filling out a deposit slip, and Myrna sees him pause, raising his right leg to scratch his left calf with the toe of his shoe. Rochelle fusses with the pouch for a moment, flipping through its contents with the fingers of one hand, checking.
“I’ll go ahead and get in line,” says Myrna. She takes a step forward.
“All right, everybody put your noses to the carpet!”
She turns around, and there are the hunters, and strangely enough they’ve brought their guns into the bank with them. There is a moment, a clear moment devoid of anything for Myrna but innocent curiosity, when she wonders if people really hunt with .45 automatics. She remembers her father’s telling her that you couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with one of those, and she imagines it must make it tough to shoot game. Then she realizes what’s going on.
“Get down!” says one of the hunters. “Get the fuck down!”
Myrna winces at the language. She does not understand why, she has never seen the sense of using such language to make a point. She is scared now, abruptly. Such language scares her, but mainly it’s the guns, here in this bright light. She has the general impression that people are carefully beginning to kneel all around her.
She turns to put the adding machine on the counter. There is a flash of light, and she is lifted.
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“For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun … Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”
Enter the long sleep of the soul, and rest thee, Myrna.
THE RADIO PLAYS ON Capitol Avenue, noise and life, excited voices cast across the territory, calling out the tragic news between Top 40 triumphs. A woman, a mother of four, has been struck down this day. And now, “Philadelphia Freedom.” Where the hits never stop coming.
They sit quietly in the kitchen. They haven’t counted the money, just shoved it in the closet. Doesn’t matter. The news tells them that they got away with fifteen grand. The news also tells them that numerous people took note of Teko’s stolen car’s stolen license plate: 916 LBJ. 916 being the local area code. LBJ being the memorable monogram of the late president. The car was ditched in Fair Oaks, though, so perhaps this is academic.
So what happened? You can always count on a few hairy moments, a few deviations from plan, a few chance encounters. These are normal operational risks. Try to minimize them, but there’s never an occasion you can call textbook. In this case everything went as planned except that Yolanda’s shotgun “just went off,” as anyone might have predicted.
Yolanda is pale and shaking. She appears to have been crying. But she manages to repeat, “She was just a bourgeois pig.”
“Shine a light through the eyes of the ones left behind.”
Tania smokes and smokes, lighting one from another, smoking right down to the filter. She thinks she feels awful about the woman. Definitely she feels fearful, and not of abstract retribution; for the first time she recognizes her likely punishment will be years in a cell. And for what? This is stage one of abandoning the revolutionary project. Tania is certain of this, at least. Nobody here knows what to think about it yet, but there’s a sack of cash in the hall closet: the primary objective of, the principle underlying, their action, and its useful consequence as well. The other consequence is lying on a slab. A woman is dead. A mother, if you want to privilege her that way, though why bother? What’s the difference? We freed no one today. Fed no one. We damaged no fascist enterprises, stopped nothing, disrupted nothing. What we did, we killed someone for a little chump change and then ran like thieves.
Teko takes a split and blistered shotgun shell hull from his pants pocket and holds it in the palm of his hand.
“The murder round,” he says. Only he seems to be in good spirits.
“Put it away, please,” says Susan.
“I’m going to put it where no one can find it,” he says, putting on his jacket. When no one presses him for details, he adds, “I’m going to bury it beneath a tree in McKinley Park.”
After he leaves, Susan says, “For God’s sake. There’s a Dumpster right out back. Collection day is tomorrow unless I’m sadly mistaken.”
“Maybe he wants to grow a shotgun tree,” says Joan.
Yolanda sobs without warning, with the rasping sound of a chair scraping across the floor.
“Are you OK?”
“She was just a bourgeois pig, a bourgeois pig!”
“Till the whip-poor-will of freedom zapped me right between the eyes.”
A little later Teko returns. “All done,” he announces. He hangs his jacket up, whistling.
Yolanda looks up at him with red-rimmed eyes. “I want to get out of this town,” she says. “I want to go back to the Bay Area. I’m going to really start the women’s collective down there.”
“Oh ho, not that again.”
“I’m taking my share of the money and moving back down there.”
“What brings this on? Just because you killed some bitch today?”
Yolanda doesn’t answer.
“Well, like let’s put it to a vote,” Teko says. “I think we’ve been doing real well here, considering.”
“You stay,” she says. “I’m getting out of here.” She gets up from where she’s sitting on the floor as if she were going to leave immediately.
“I’m certainly not to blame for what went on today.” Teko jabs himself in the chest with his thumb, lets his arm flop down at his side. He stands awkwardly for a moment. “Where’ll we live?”
“I don’t know where you’re going to live,” says Yolanda. “Look in the paper. That’s what I’m going to do.”
They all wanted to move down there anyway. The whole point is now’s their chance. The whole point is now there’s money available, to leave with. Fifteen grand in that sack in the closet, according to the Action News team. A daring early-morning bank robbery that’s left one woman dead and a grieving family asking why.
INTERLUDE 4
Adventures in Wonderland
TWO DAYS AFTER GUY arrives in New York, he stands at the counter eating strawberries from a lattice basket of green plastic. A sunny morning, the bright time in his kitchen. With a paring knife, he cuts soft spots out of the berries before popping them into his mouth. He grabs a sponge and is about to work a pink spot out of the Formica when the phone rings.
“Is that Guy Mock, then?”
“Yes.”
“Difficult one to pin down, aren’t you? I’m going round, all thorough like, but it seems you’ve left each of your last-known addresses unattended. I says to meself, he’s a crafty, peripatetic sort, this Mock is. Leaves with a secret face and a quiet mouth. Stops the papers and the mail. The milkman’s wholesome shadow does not darken his doorstep. Long holiday? I think not.”
“Who is this?”
“Me name’s Roy Hume. I represent the National Eye and Ear.”
Guy hears “iron ear,” pictures some nightmare prosthesis.
“It’s a journalistic enterprise of exceedingly poor reputation, it is. I shall save you the bother of asking and, standing in your own inquisitive place, rhetorically put the question of ‘How come?’ In keeping with newspaper tradition I shall now provide me own answer. There are three elegantly simple reasons. Number one is that as a national publication we feel no bleeding obligation to cover the news from a local angle. Sod that. A local angle would bore
our readers silly, it would. We’ve discovered via scientific inquiry that our sort of reader doesn’t seem to come from anyplace at all, actually. He simply appears in the foul hollows of the country, equipped with a modicum of literacy and an insatiable gullibility. This journalistic approach is in fact an innovation originating in the mother country, which for the sake of convenience we shall identify as Britain, although morally and ancestrally speaking, I consider meself a Scot. The second reason is that we have the sensibility of a bricoleur, as the poofs like to say. We have a few stock bits we keep round that time and still another scientific inquiry have amply demonstrated are evergreens of reportage, stimulating constant reader interest. Contrary to popular opinion, the average end user of news and information tends to rally round the familiar bits of disaster, plague, and salacious ruin. Contrary to popular opinion, novelty’s not what he’s after. Not a bit of it. He wants the familiar bits. They provide comfort, they do, in all the vague specificity of their permutations. He wants the water levels to rise and submerge Manhattan. He wants mass murders in the remotest points of South America. He wants a joint Soviet-American project to develop an invisibility spray in an aerosol can. He wants the devil to rule the earth from 1975 to 1978. He wants the seat of world government to be switched to caverns under Wichita.”
“So,” says Guy, holding the sponge aloft and examining it, “what can I do for you?”
“Don’t forget there’s a third reason, mate.”
Trance Page 48
