The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

  The officer said she could show herself out.

  5.

  At first everything goes perfectly at the Farmers & Mechanics Bank. They are all in their gorilla masks. Cora is pointing her gun at the tellers. Dana is aiming hers at the handful of customers who had the misfortune of being in the bank. They are crossed-legged on the floor; they have been ordered to sit on their hands, like elementary schoolers who can’t stop hitting each other. Dana tries to ignore the little girl with braided hair. Pinky is guarding the door. Jackie, the getaway driver, is idling around the corner. Dana watches one teller load bricks of money into a bag. He has red hair and a mustache. The other teller is a woman. She’s used so much hair spray, her hair doesn’t budge when she whips her head left then right. Her lips are slick with pink, her lashes clumped with mascara. There’s no sign of the fat, sluggish tellers Pinky described, but it looks like these two will do just fine.

  It’s the woman who fucks everything up. They see her hand slide under the counter and know she’s going for the alarm. Cora shouts at her—Hands in the air—but the woman doesn’t listen. Pinky is pacing by the door and pawing his rubber face. Dana takes small, quick breaths behind her gorilla mask. Be cool, she whispers, but it sounds artificial and weak. Stronger words are needed. She just doesn’t know what they are.

  The gunshot stops everyone. The mustached teller stops putting money in the bag. Pinky stops pacing. The customers stop squirming. The female teller is clutching her left eye. Blood seeps between her fingers. Cora’s gun is still raised. It takes Dana more time than it should to understand that one of the Gorillas has just shot a bank teller in the face.

  Her hands are numb. She concentrates on not dropping her gun. She thinks she’s going to suffocate behind the mask.

  “Give us our money.” Now Cora is aiming at the other teller. His shirtsleeves are drenched in sweat. He goes back to heaving cash into the bag.

  A woman in cowboy boots raises her hand. Her mouth is open, but she’s not saying anything. She’s pointing at something by the door. Dana turns and there’s Pinky, slumped against the wall. He’s kneading his gorilla mask in his hands. The customers and the tellers and the security cameras are all taking in his face. They are memorizing it. They are branding it onto their brains like Dana did with the interior of that bank in Jackson City.

  “He is in such deep shit.” Cora is waving her gun. She swivels toward Dana. “Can’t you do something?”

  But Dana can’t. If she were a Go-Go Girl, then maybe she could, but she is just herself. The female teller is hunched over the counter and whimpering. She sounds like the wild dog Dana’s father once had to shoot in Elijah. He kept coming onto their property, frothy and snarling, but once he had a bullet in him, he was docile as a lamb. Blood is still squirting through her fingers, as though her hand is a dam that’s about to give. She’s blinded at best. In the distance, Dana hears a siren. She looks at Cora and her cousin nods. They run for the exit. She pauses only to yank Pinky up by his shirt collar. He drops his gorilla mask on the sidewalk, but right then it doesn’t matter. All that matters is diving into the waiting Impala. Of course Jackie wants to know what happened and where’s the money and why isn’t Pinky wearing his mask. Cora tells her to shut up and drive. They blast out of Galesburg. It’s nearly dusk. The sun looks like it’s setting the sky on fire.

  They drive through the night. Pinky is up front, next to Jackie. Dana and Cora are in the back. The window is cracked and Jackie is chain-smoking. They are heading to a little town called Wapello. They think it will be a good place to lie low, but soon Pinky’s face will be all over the news and there will be no lying low from that.

  “He can’t stay with us anymore,” Cora hisses in the backseat.

  Dana just shakes her head. He could get plastic surgery, she thinks. A crazy idea. She gazes at her brother’s profile. They are on a dark, straight highway. A little slicing, a little rearranging. She thinks of how handsome he could be.

  On the radio, they hear that one of the Go-Go Girls has been shot in the stomach. She fell behind during a getaway. The officer who shot her said that he meant to hit her shoulder. Turns out that she wasn’t an acrobat or Romanian. Just a girl from Minnesota.

  “This is the problem with being famous,” Dana announces to the car. “It makes everyone want to kill you.”

  No one says anything. Not even Cora. Dana leans her head against the window. As they’re passing signs for Kirkwood, she thinks of the girl at the morgue and her parents in Chicago. She wonders if the cop ever tells her story, about the woman who conned him into checking out a dead body. If anyone ever tells her story.

  Tornadoes are still in the forecast. A few times Dana thinks she sees a big black funnel moving toward them in the night. She thinks she hears that locomotive sound and feels the ground shake. She imagines being swept away. But there is nothing coming for them. Not yet. There is only this highway and this car and this darkness. She leans forward and squeezes her brother’s elbow. He doesn’t move, doesn’t look at her. The remaining Gorilla masks are piled in his lap. He knows he’s in a world of trouble.

  They stop for gas and Dana makes Jackie hand her the car keys. When she says she wants to be sure no one gets left behind, Cora gives her a look. Pinky needs to use the bathroom. Dana stands outside and jingles the keys. She can see her parents hearing about Pinky on the radio. She can see them turning up the volume and leaning in close. Maybe they are being kept company by a robot made of soup cans and chicken wire, or maybe they are alone. Through the bathroom door, she hears the toilet flush. Her brother takes his time washing his hands.

  When they’re all back in the car, Cora passes her a note written on a paper napkin. We are leaving him at the next fucking gas station! it says in jagged black letters. Dana crumples the note and drops it on the floor. She slumps back and something crunches under her sneaker. She peers between her knees. It’s the robot. Pinky got one of the eyes glued back on. If she tilts her head the right away, the metal gleams and she can tell herself it’s their treasure, their loot. She thinks about rescuing the robot from the floor and giving it to her brother. She thinks about doing him that kindness. Instead she nudges the robot under the driver’s seat and then feels sad about it. Poor Donald. She has to remind herself that robots don’t have feelings. All these little choices that push her closer to something she’s not sure she wants.

  They pass a billboard with the slogan WANT A BETTER WORLD? It’s too dark for Dana to see what’s being advertised, but she guesses it’s something religious. Of course she wants a better world. Who wouldn’t want that? A world where everyone was like Pinky, pure and soft and full of dreams. Or she could just do things differently when it came to those small choices. She could give her brother the robot. She could throw her gun in a river. These could be her lessons. It’s right there for her, that better world. She barely has to go looking.

  Dana knows this, just as she knows that this is not the day she will find it.

  ACROBAT

  The day my husband left me, I followed a trio of acrobats around the city of Paris. The whole time my husband had been talking—telling me, presumably, why he was leaving—I was watching these acrobats do backflips and handstands in synchrony, an open violin case at their feet. They wore black masks over their eyes and white face paint. The little gold bells that hung from the sleeves of their red silk jumpsuits jingled like wind chimes. My husband and I were in the Jardin des Tuileries, sitting on a bench underneath a tree. We had come to Paris for the weekend, to revive our marriage. It was what the books and the couples counselor had recommended. The day he left was our last day there. We were, in fact, supposed to fly home that evening. We’d risen early to go to the Louvre and had gotten into a fight because he didn’t want to wait in line to see the Mona Lisa.

  “You have patience for things that I don’t,” he said while we were on the bench. “That’s just the truth.”

  He said other things, too, but I was busy watching the a
crobats perform in front of a fountain. They made a tower by standing on each other’s shoulders and then leaped down, landing en pointe like dancers, their ballet slippers barely making a sound when they hit the pale dirt. Now, that’s teamwork, I thought.

  When I looked over at my husband, he wasn’t sitting next to me. He was standing, his hands filling his pockets.

  “So I guess that’s that,” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said. It was dawning on me that I might have missed something important.

  “I’m going now.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Surely we can still fly home together. Surely we’re not that bad off.” I checked my watch. It was noon. Our flight was only six hours away. Our luggage was packed and awaiting us in our hotel room and I was pretty sure I’d put my toiletries bag in my husband’s suitcase. He told me he’d already canceled my ticket and left an envelope of money in our room to pay for a new one.

  “It’ll be better if we find our own way home,” he said. “I explained that to you already.”

  “You said that just now?”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “Just now.”

  From the bench, I watched my husband disappear into a gaggle of French teenagers with backpacks sagging from their shoulders. I’d known this was coming. That the books and the counseling and the trip to Paris were all just passing time. But I hadn’t expected it to happen right then, in the most romantic park in the most romantic city in all the world, or with so little drama.

  I went back to the acrobats. When they folded up the violin case and marched out of the Jardin des Tuileries in a single-file line, I followed them. They wound expertly around clumps of pedestrians, never breaking formation, like ghosts walking among the living.

  They went into the streets, past the Concorde, and down the Champs-Élysées. On the way, they stopped at a café and sat outside, smoking cigarettes and drinking espresso. They were there for over an hour. It was July; I imagined the acrobats were hot in their silk suits and face paint. I watched from a nearby food stand, eating a ham-and-cheese croissant. For once, I was grateful for my nonexistent sense of style. My clothes couldn’t have been plainer, a pale yellow sundress and black Teva sandals. A man in running shorts came up to me and said something in French that I could not understand. I shooed him away by flapping the wax paper my croissant had been wrapped in. Finally, one of the acrobats slipped euros underneath his saucer and then they all stood, dropped their white linen napkins onto their chairs, and filed out of the restaurant. The same acrobat who paid was at the head of the line. He also carried the violin case.

  We went down the Champs-Élysées, past Ladurée, where I was momentarily distracted by a tower of yellow, pink, and purple macarons in the front window. A million different languages buzzed around me like radio static. My husband had refused to go to the Champs-Élysées because he said he would be revolted by the gross display of materialism. I looked at the shopping bags swinging from slender wrists and the mannequins posing in store windows and felt glad to be doing something that he would not. So there, I thought. Life goes on.

  At the Arc de Triomphe, the lead acrobat stopped and opened the violin case. I watched them do the human tower trick again and then the leader pulled blue plastic balls from the case and they juggled. A couple had their picture taken with the two nonlead acrobats. The tourists were pale-haired, inelegant. They looked American, meaning they could have been my husband and me. The couple dropped coins into the violin case before leaving. The acrobats snapped up the case and moved along.

  I followed them all the way to the Palais de Chaillot—where they preformed briefly, unable to command the attention of the people wading into the huge oblong fountain—and then the Eiffel Tower. If I lost sight of the acrobats for a moment, it was easy to find them in the crowd; all I had to do was listen for the singsong of the bells. By that time, I had tired of walking, and as I watched the acrobats do backflips and frontflips, I realized I didn’t have a hotel reservation for the night. I had my passport, wallet, and guidebook in the satchel I was carrying. That was all. I sat down on a bench. A part of me was hoping that all this time, my husband had been following me around the arrondissements too. That, when I was least expecting it, he would sit down next to me. Or jump out from behind a tree and say, “Surprise!” That together we would still watch the lights of Paris grow smaller from the departing plane. I checked my wristwatch. It was five o’clock. Our flight—his flight—was an hour away. Soon my husband would be boarding, lifting his carry-on into the overhead compartment. He liked aisle seats. I hoped he didn’t get one.

  By the time the acrobats left the Eiffel Tower, dusk was falling, and I had become less concerned with being cautious. I followed close enough to see where sweat had seeped through their silk jumpsuits, forming shapes that looked like wings. They went to a small restaurant with a yellow awning called Florimond’s, where they got a table inside. In my broken French, I asked the maître d’ for a table in the same section. Both the acrobats and I sat facing the restaurant’s front patio and the street. Two empty tables stood between us. I pretended to study the menu. I felt my knee and noticed my dress was missing a button. When I stole glances at the acrobats, they were all looking at menus and smoking.

  I decided to order a big meal. I decided to eat until I felt like bursting. I started by asking for my own bottle of wine. As I sipped my first glass of wine, I felt something in the room change, like all the electrical currents had been moving in one direction and then suddenly started going in another. Or, as my husband would say, the “emotional weather” was different. He was always accusing my emotional weather of changing without warning. The forecast had predicted clear skies and then, out of nowhere, here came the rain clouds. Time after time, I tried to explain that I didn’t have much control over my emotional weather, and viewed the local weatherman with newfound empathy whenever I saw him on the evening news. I stared at my hands as I thought of these things. These moments that pass for a life.

  I heard a jingling and when I looked up, the lead acrobat was sitting across from me. I gasped and knocked over my wineglass. The acrobat righted the glass and mopped up the wine with a napkin.

  “Merci,” I said. I could see his dark eyes through the holes in the mask, which, up close, reminded me of the one Zorro wore in the movies. The white paint on his mouth had flaked away. I noticed the pinkish color of his lips.

  “Pourquoi nous suivez-vous?” the acrobat said.

  “Une minute.” I took out my travel guide and flipped to the translation section.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” the acrobat said when he saw what I was doing. “We all speak English.”

  “I didn’t want to assume,” I said, by which I meant I didn’t want to seem like some dumb American.

  “I’ll start over,” the acrobat said. “Why are you following us?”

  Naturally, I was at a loss for what to say.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he continued. “We’re quite flattered. We’ve never had such a loyal fan before. But still we have to ask.”

  I glanced over at the other acrobats. They were huddled together, staring, and then, after they caught my eye, pretending not to stare. It was my habit to lie to strangers, because how would they know the difference? On the flight over, my husband and I ended up in different rows and I told the man sitting next to me that I was a geologist. Talking to someone who didn’t know me, who couldn’t separate the truth from the lie, always gave me the most ruthless sense of freedom. But today was a different kind of day.

  “To tell you the truth, I was watching you perform while my husband was telling me something important and I missed what he was saying,” I said. “That’s the best answer I can give.”

  “Can’t you just ask your husband to repeat himself?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I think he went home without me.”

  “And where’s home?”

  “America,” I said. “Connecticut.”

  “I see,
” said the acrobat. He looked over at his comrades, then back at me. He said his name was Jean-Paul and invited me to sit at their table. I accepted. Jean-Paul informed the maître d’ and carried over my wine bottle. He introduced me to the other acrobats, Alain and Dominique. They moved their chairs to make room, pushed their glasses together. With the face paint and the masks, I couldn’t really tell the difference between Alain and Dominique. Both had light brown hair and greenish eyes. Jean-Paul I could distinguish because he was the tallest, with dark hair and dark eyes.

  “This woman is alone in the city,” Jean-Paul said once we were settled. The table was in a corner and I was sitting next to him, facing the street, Alain and Dominique across from us.

  “Not anymore,” Alain—or Dominique?—said. “Acrobats know how to treat their fans.”

  “There’s so much competition now,” Dominique—or Alain?—said. “Musicians, puppet shows, mimes. You practically have to set yourself on fire to get noticed.”

  “I love acrobats,” I said, unsure if that was even really true. “I’ve loved acrobats ever since I was a child.”

  Our food arrived. All three of the acrobats had ordered coq au vin. We ate quickly and in silence. I was relieved that I wasn’t the only one too hungry for polite conversation. After our plates had been cleared, Jean-Paul presented me with an open cigarette pack. I took one. It was slender and white. I’d never had a cigarette before. My husband was an environmental enthusiast and thought smokers were the scourge of the earth. He had actually used that word, “scourge.” I inhaled deeply and didn’t cough. I felt the smoke move through my chest like something alive.

  “Would you like to go to a party tonight?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “It’s an acrobat party,” Alain/Dominique added.

  “We’d have to get you a costume,” Jean-Paul said. “Or at least some face paint and a mask.”