by Robert White
By then I was responding in kind, half-mocking his delusions. I was dressed to go out into the sub-zero weather, probably looking for something to steal to exchange for food. I was like a mad dog in the streets, breaking into places and selling what I stole to a fence in the harbor. I had been shot at by a rival near rue Cherrier for stealing in his territory.
I kept us alive while the old man succumbed to his phantoms, his brain imploding so fast that he would babble nonsense and wave his hands about. Carlos lived but he looked like one of those skeletons liberated from Auschwitz. He’d lost all his adolescent chubbiness that winter and kept forever the gaunt face I saw when he stood in my kitchen with his pet monster.
The pressure was on me that spring. By then, I was marked out by the municipal police. Nobody ever caught me with swag because they never found any on me. I had just made a good haul in silver from a mansion in the Quai des Brumes, and I was walking through the garden gate when I was spotted. The dogs in the place deceived me. People with guard dogs roaming about don’t use silent alarms. My father taught me how to handle my fear and something about dogs that most people never knew. I was so good at hiding fear that the dogs would come right up, tails wagging, while I was stealing their owners’ goods. This one cop hated me on sight and never missed a chance to throw me against an alley wall. When I saw him, I ran but I was soon trapped in an alley. I was climbing a rickety fire escape when the bolts snapped and I fell about ten feet to the dumpsters below. I pulled the sack out of my jacket and stuffed it inside one of the garbage bins, rolled off, and started to limp down the alley.
He was waiting for me as I came out. He strip-searched me right there in the freezing cold. He watched me shiver, mocked my shriveled penis. He suspected I’d tossed the stuff into one of the bins, but he wanted to put me away. I had made a fool of him and he was fed up with the taunts from his fellow officers.
He sucker-punched me in the solar plexus and called me some uncomplimentary names. He hated Americans and my French was never more than passable. He wanted to catch me coming back for the silver. I spent one whole night thinking about it, and I told Carlos how I was going to do it. Carlos’ eyes lit up with admiration: his daring older brother.
I had to find a way to get Carlos past my betrayal, past my leaving him with our psycho dad, past the dope Calderone and Marija were pumping into him, past all that had happened since then, and get him back to that moment. That, I knew, was the only chance I was going to get.
#21
I heard Calderone yelling into his cell phone, using the words “crazy motherfucker” several times. When he jerked me to my feet again, he threw me backwards on the bed and slashed the cords at my hands and feet with his knife; my legs splayed open. I still couldn’t get up no matter what violence he roared at me.
I came to inside the trunk of a car. I was aware that I had been in motion and that the motion stopped. When the trunk lid opened, I saw stars and a crescent moon hovering over Randall’s shoulder. I was upside down in a fireman’s carry and then dragged, pulled and finally dumped into a lit room. I tried rolling over onto my back, but that required more effort than I was able to make.
“Jesus, Randall, what did you do to him?”
A woman’s voice. I would know it forever from somewhere deep in my bones: Marija, blonde hair, succubus, Eurotrash accent, big breasts, betrayer, whore, enemy.
“He looks dead! His face is all black and blue – what did you do to him?” She was shrill, angry. “We might need him to get out of here, moron!”
“Don’t fuckin’ call me names, cunt.” The monster’s voice.
The slap that took her on the side of the face must have been a wallop because she flew into the wall and landed hard on the floor. I heard another woman scream.
Randall’s deep voice now: “I’m gonna show you two lazy bitches who’s running this fuckin’ show.”
“What about him?” the second woman’s voice asked, meaning me.
“Fuck him, he’s dead anyway,” he said.
#22
When I came to this time, a liquid was going down my throat. My head was being held up. I slopped at the water greedily, lapping it like a dog. The hands that held me were small. A balloon face hovered in front of me and I recognized my brother. I tried to get up but my hands and feet were secured by clothesline.
“Carl, watch him,” the other woman said. “I gotta take me a piss.”
I think I was a little disappointed I wasn’t dead. That blinding light burned me.
“How do you feel, Jack?”
I didn’t respond. If I could have spoken, I would have told him it wasn’t worth chewing through the leather straps to be alive.
“Here, drink some more water.”
I drank long, blissful draughts of it. It was ambrosia.
“Hell, Jack, go easy,” Carlos said. “Water here smells like shit.”
I saw the pupils of his eyes. He wasn’t as high as I remembered him that day in my kitchen.
“Carlos-”
“Don’t talk. Just hearing your voice makes him go crazy,” he said.
I suppose I shouldn’t have felt anything. I didn’t have much in the tank to feel with for one thing, but my brother’s betrayal still stung. It got through my battered hide and I was angry. The look on his face registered the truth of it.
“You were fucking around with our money, Jack,” he said as if that covered it. I didn’t have the words to reply.
“You got nothin’ to say to me, man?” Carlos said, as if I were the guilty party. “Not after ditching me in Montreal. Now we’re gonna finish this deal and I’m gone. You’ll never see me again.”
I used every bit of strength I had in my body to reach up to him and grab him. I pulled him down until his face was right in mine.
“The dumpster, Montreal...” I started to say.
“What about the dumpster?”
Randall stood in the doorway with his arm around Marija. Her face was flushed and her eyes had a hard set to them but she hadn’t cried. She was holding on to a ripped blouse in front of her heaving chest. Carlos stepped away from me.
“Shit, man,” Carlos said, tripping to what I had just said in code for his ears only. He stood up, stepped away, and I didn’t see where he went. Ten minutes later, he came out of the bathroom rubbing the inside of his elbow. I stared at him.
“Stupid crankhead motherfucker,” Calderone said, entering the room again, “can’t you leave that shit alone for five minutes?”
“Jesus,” Marija said. “You shot up again.”
“Bitch, I’m fine,” Carlos shot back. “You suck cock, I like a little crank to mellow me out.”
Randall strode forward and his right foot shot up and out and came down like an axe. It caught Carlos on the ear and sent him spinning into the table.
“I’ll fucking kill every fucking one of you.”
Calderone went berserk. He tore around the room grabbing anyone who came within reach and throwing whatever he touched. Marija went sideways into the wall and dropped next to me. He stomped like a furious child in a temper tantrum. The wings of his nose were whitened and his eyes were narrowed to black holes between his bunched-up facial muscles. Carlos’ eyes were glazed with fear.
I was waiting, holding my breath. His chest stopped heaving and his dark, thickened features cleared. He cupped one of Marija’s breasts in his hand and bounced it like a baby checking out a new toy.
“Get going,” he said to my brother. “When you-all come back, we’ll have us a nice little clusterfuck – except for him.” Jack Trichaud, designated voyeur. At least I wasn’t going to be pummeled into hamburger. Not yet.
He leaned down to me and flashed the blade under my chin and twisted it this way and that to catch the light.
“Change of plans,” Randall announced suddenly as if he too were mesmerized by the dancing light flickering off the blade. “We’re all going. I ain’t trusting none a you motherfuckers alone with that money,” he said. �
��That’s fucking that.”
I caught the look on Marija’s face. If she had been in control before, she wasn’t any longer. The sex or rape in the other room, if that’s what it was, hadn’t made any difference. She looked down at her breasts as if they, too, had had some part in the coup.
#23
Randall’s greed, however, won out over his desire to kill me. I now had a viable purpose. Marija was told to bring me along. I knew why as well as she did. I was her boat anchor. Calderone must have feared she might have a secret deal worked out – something she could have cooked up on her own while he was in hiding.
“I’m not getting back in the trunk,” I said. We stood outside in the dark beside the Volvo while Randall came out with an armload of guns.
“I don’t want you up front with me. You stink,” she said.
“Quit fucking around, get in,” Calderone said on his way past. He was carrying the big Taurus.
“Strap him in,” she said to Calderone. My cords were replaced by nylon cuffs; her ripped blouse by a baggy sweatshirt. The night air was damp.
He trussed me with ankle cuffs and a metal chain around my waist that hog-tied me to the seat. I could move my arms a few inches from my knees.
“If he twitches, shoot him in the balls, you want,” he said. He walked off to the others.
“Just look at this once,” she said to me. Her purse was open and the black grip of a small gun, maybe a .25 caliber, stuck out. The kind of gun that didn’t make holes in you – the kind where the slugs bounced around inside ricocheting off all your organs. “If you see more, it means I’m pulling it out and I will use it on you.”
We got in line behind Carlos, with Randall behind us alone in a white beat-up Datsun I hadn’t seen before. We drove off with headlights probing the dark. “The Côte d’Azur is beautiful this time of year,” I said. “But expensive to live there.”
“Fuck you, I won’t double-cross him,” she said.
“The Treaty of Utrecht was less complicated than this half-assed robbery,” I said.
“Shut up, Jack.”
“Money does that,” I said. “It’s like danger. It can be an aphrodisiac to some people.”
Carlos was increasing the distance ahead of us. The road was barren of houses out here. I couldn’t see any stars above the treeline.
“I wonder what you’ll see, Marija, when Mister Big decides it’s safe to divvy up the cash. Think you’ll see wads of money or the sharp end of that knife he likes to play with?” We both knew my own life expectancy was down to hours and minutes.
“I’m... I’m sorry things turned out this way,” she said.
“Your tame creodontus back there is never going to let you or my brother take so much as cab fare. Can’t you see that?”
“Creo-what? Is that like a dumbbell? You use a lot of big words for a florist.”
“Landscaper,” I corrected her. “My father insisted we read a lot of books. Voltaire had some nice things to say about gardening, by the way.”
“Randall will never hurt me,” she said after a pause. “My family is from Croatia. You need a lot of – I don’t know the word. Maybe, stamina – to survive over there.”
“You could get a job, Marija,” I said. “People here tend to work for a living.”
“What fun is there in that? In my country, I’d have to lie on my back all day while some pimp took all the money.”
“I see. Randall’s more like an equal partner, share and share alike, right?”
“He’s what he is. Now shut up, please, and let me drive. He said if you try anything, I am to call him on that walkie-talkie on the seat, and he’ll ram the car and drag you off to some tree where he’ll skin you alive.”
#24
The Lake cops rarely stopped drivers after the bars closed. But it took just one bored cop looking to fill his quota and I had pinned my tiny scrap of hope on that. Randall was packing for a siege. Besides the Taurus I watched him clean and tuck into his pants, I know he had a Beretta with a bobbed hammer stuck in his boot. He had enough high-powered weaponry in his trunk to make a South Bronx gangbanger delirious.
Carlos and I had to memorize gun catalogs for the old man. We committed weapon facts to memory while other kids our age learned math tables. He dragged us to gun shows all over Quebec and quizzed us afterward; a wrong answer meant no supper, two meant a beating. Three meant you better stay out of sight for a couple days.
The table in the farmhouse back there held some serious guns. I saw a Freedom Arms 454 Casull lying next to the Taurus PT 99 that Randall favored. A Savage Model 23 bolt-action rifle lay atop a Smith & Wesson 686 with a four-inch barrel. He had a shoulder-fired assault rifle that looked Czech-made. I couldn’t identify it but the banana-shaped magazine of the Uzi was Chinese-manufactured. Just a glance, and I picked out a 1911 Interstar 9mm and a Ruger Security Six in the pile and more boxes of Hornady and Blue Hills ammo than you could count, even a couple of Black Talons and an HP Silvertips – always good if you’re looking for a wider wound channel, according to the old man’s way of thinking.
“What if something goes wrong?” I asked her. “What if we’re stopped?”
She turned her head and gave me a look that said I was better off not asking.
Screwing a monster and killing for a monster were two different things. Sarah owned a gun, a Beretta Jetfire I had bought her for Christmas. I noticed her carrying it to Cleveland when her job required her to travel to the inner city late at night. “I know you can pull it out and point it at someone,” I told her, “but if you can’t pull the trigger and kill a human being, don’t carry it.” She left it home from then on.
We turned onto 531 and I knew exactly where the house was situated. I cursed Pippin for not going far enough with his dragnet. The countryside south of Jefferson was littered with back roads dotted with abandoned homesteads and farms that couldn’t survive. The sheriff’s office spent hundreds of thousands detoxifying meth labs. From here it was a straight shot north three more miles to Jefferson-on-the-Lake.
I thought: This is what a suicide bomber feels like. I didn’t have any religion to calm me, and no visions of dancing houris to open my eyeballs to. This was it. My life was coming to an end. I had as much chance as a duck in a Beijing meat market.
“So what’s your crystal ball say for my future?” she asked me.
“It says you’ll always be a self-centered bitch, Marija.”
“It must be your nerves. We’re so close to being rich,” she said.
I jerked my hands up – I forgot the chain. I wanted to slap the smirk off her face.
The digital glow of the dashboard gave her face a greenish tint. She was looking at me steadily. Her purse was still squeezed next to her against the door.
“I was stupid to think-”
“Think what, Jack?”
“Think you had a weakness...” I couldn’t finish it. She was a better pupil for my father than I ever was: find the weakness, exploit it.
“Randall gets a kick out of the fact that your brother is a queer.”
“They call them transvestites now,” I said.
“You should hear Randall go on about it,” she said. “He tells me how hard it is to keep a straight face every time he looks at your brother and thinks of him in a dress.”
“I thought he didn’t know,” I said.
“You underestimated Randall. I never made that mistake,” she said.
Carlos was set up before they came to Northtown. It meant I wasn’t the only dumb steer in the kill chute. We were within a mile of the Strip and I could barely make out Carlos’ headlights. The road narrowed and twisted in S-curves every half mile. I used to worry about Sarah coming home on roads like these in the dark during winter.
We were entering the curve now, and Randall pulled off to wait for us near a side street where the cabins were all rented to bikers. Marija saw Carlos slow down to the posted fifteen m.p.h. Both hands were in a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel.
“If we see a cop, I’ll have to kill you,” she said.
“Make it a head shot,” I said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
Carlos turned in to Andy’s Grill, which was slotted between the Sunken Bar and the Cove – two of my pit stops from yesterday’s trek. All the sidewalk displays and booths were closed down for the night and the workers were finishing their shifts after the customers had gone. Everybody here was a worker in one of the bars, motels, and restaurants lining the strip and belonged on the street or going to their cars. The cops might consider hassling a lone drunk staggering out of a bar at this hour but they knew better than to bother staff or sit in parking lots.
She turned right into an alley that led to a parking lot shared by the Cove and a go-cart track. I saw Carlos dim his lights. They sat there for a few minutes. We sat across from them and waited. Then a woman in her twenties in tight skinny jeans came into view. She joined a knot of teenaged girls leaving Andy’s by the side door. They came walking in our direction down the sidewalk. The girls were laughing. They seemed identical in age and appearance – grill workers, fry cooks and waitresses. No doubt they were following in their older sisters’ footsteps and probably their mothers’ too.
“There she goes,” Marija whispered.
“There goes who? Marija, don’t tell me this is what I think,” I said.
“I love her pussy,” she said in a husky whisper. “I wish she’d let me trim her down there.”
“Whoever she is, that girl,” I said. “Does she know what Calderone is? You just gave her a death sentence when you gave her that little errand. Calderone will kill her.”
