“Well, with your schedule I do need the company.”
Gail sighed at this pale jest, this introduction of an old issue between them.
“Kidding,” Richard said. “I’m only kidding. But really. I’m just going over to see if he wants work. I’ll just go see him, that’s all. I think the guy needs help. I think the guy needs me.”
Gail hugged Richard with big teacherly warmth, said, “Well, fine. Go get Dewey. But don’t come home barfing your guts out!” This last was the kind of joke she made to announce the end of an argument.
Richard laughed, remembering that day. Somehow the puking had given him a feeling of youth, had brought him back to a time when what was sensible didn’t usually turn out to be what was right or needed.
So on a Saturday in July he dressed as a biker, left Gail to her preparations for that afternoon’s 4-H luncheon, and headed on foot down the Avon Road. He hoped Dewey would be home. He hoped big Jim and Baker would be there. He hoped Jeremy Charles—Don’t He—would be there with his protective mom. And maybe today he’d have a beer. Maybe today he’d have a beer and then another, and then as much whiskey as Dewey. Who was to say he shouldn’t? And maybe today he’d make more of the jokes he’d made, and the guys would laugh as they had before, and maybe tomorrow he’d be sick. Maybe he would and what was wrong with that?
No one answered his knock at the trailer door. He waited, knocked, and waited some more, then gave up. As he walked away, Dewey tapped him on the shoulder, having appeared from nowhere and silently behind him. When Richard turned, Dewey pretended to hit him with a left, L-U-C-K, then stabbed him with a pretend knife in a tightly squeezed right. Dewey didn’t smile. A normal person would smile after a joke like that, Gail might say. But Richard knew what Gail did not: Dewey was a roughshod gem.
Richard said, “Just wondered if you wanted to come back and work.”
“I got another job.”
“Ah. Well, good. Good for you. Where?”
“It’s decent.”
Richard looked out over the trailer, Dewey looked out toward the road, a perfect silence in the dryness of the day. Finally, too eagerly, Richard said, “Got any beer?”
Dewey shook his head. “No way. You?”
Richard just shook his head. He made a decision, said, “Naw. But let’s go get us some.” Screw it: “And we can do us up some whiskey, too.”
Dewey said nothing, but went back into his trailer for a long minute. When he returned, the two men walked in silence back to Richard’s. Gail had left. Good. They climbed in the new minivan. Dewey didn’t want to go to the store in town, insisted they go all the way out to the general store in Leslie, a twenty-mile drive.
“Why not?” Richard said. He’d never stopped in Leslie, a one-store town up past the lakes.
To the Leslie store in silence. And in silence Richard and Dewey stood in front of the shelves of liquor, Richard feeling the money in his pocket, knowing he’d be the one to have to pay. Dewey picked out a half gallon of expensive whiskey, the most expensive they had, then motioned for Richard to pick his own. So Richard did, adding the prices in his head, shrugging it off: sixty bucks, so what? They walked to the counter, waited behind another customer, a woman who had a hundred questions about birdseed. Dewey nudged Richard, nodded subtly, meaningfully. Richard nodded back, as if he knew the meaning in that nod. When the counter person bent to find the price list for sunflower seed, Dewey leapt at the door, burst outside, ran to the van carrying his whiskey. The woman at the counter stood up and looked after him, looked quizzically at Richard. He paused, felt the money in his pocket, said, “Uhm …”
Then he jumped, too—burst out the door, into the hot sun, ran across the pavement. Behind him he heard the woman say, “Hey!” and that was all. She didn’t even run after them. Probably she was calling the cops.
Dewey had taken the driver’s seat so Richard had to adjust his flight at the last second and hop in the passenger side of his own little van. He flung Dewey the keys, and fast enough that no one could have gotten a good look they were out of there in a blasting cloud of front-wheel-drive dust and gravel, out of there and flying down Route 2 faster than Richard had ever dared drive. Somewhere before New Sharon, Dewey fishtailed off the highway and into the mouth of a dirt road and they bounced in the ruts to the woods.
“Jesus,” Richard said.
Dewey said, “Never pay for a drink.” He slowed down on the awful road. At a bend in the Sandy River, far from the main road, far from any house, high up on a bluff over mild rapids, Dewey parked. He opened his bottle and drank.
Richard’s breathing slowed gradually. He opened his own bottle, hefted it to his lips. The whiskey turned him hot. Careful not to smile, he said, “That was a blast.”
They watched the river.
“‘A blast,’” Dewey said, mocking him. Then he was quiet. After several good slugs from his huge bottle he said, “Think you got the nuts for a real job?”
Richard knew what Dewey meant. He straightened and used his own voice, an architect’s voice: “The nuts? I would say, yes. The desire, no.”
“Same thing,” Dewey said.
“Shit, Dew. Forget it.”
“I have this idea.”
“Dew, forget it.”
They drank from the ungainly bottles and watched the river and hardly said anything at all. Before long Richard found himself unable to prevent a smile, kept grinning and laughing and patting his bottle of booze. “I’m as happy as I’ve been in years,” he said.
Dewey seemed barely to hear him.
Because Richard had wondered aloud whether Dewey was married, big Jim called him Wedding Bells. Soon this was shortened to Bells, which seemed to stick. Happily, huge Jim was in the back of the minivan during the hour’s ride to Little Henry’s in Port Lawrence. Back there all his jabs and jibes and nervous patter seemed contained.
Little Henry’s was a rural convenience store, and Dewey had learned somehow that on Sundays the owner was “clown” enough to keep all the money from the whole busy tourist weekend in a little safe in back—as much as $10,000 (which to Richard didn’t sound like as grand a sum as it clearly did to Dewey and Jim)—such a little safe that Dewey knew Jim could lift it and carry it. Jim had been carrying rocks around for weeks—rocks twice the weight of the safe—and was ready.
Richard was to be the driver. Late nights he found it shocking that he’d agreed to this. But the plan and his place within it had fallen together incrementally, ineluctably. Richard had drunk with the boys and enjoyed the conversations—been part of the conspiracy. He honestly thought it was just talk, Sherwood Forest kind of stuff, thought nothing was ever going to come of it, thought Jim was putting enormous rocks in the van as a kind of conceptual exercise, nothing more. Yet, there was a precise night Richard had said yes. A precise night he’d taken Dewey’s hand and shaken it a long damn time and said yes right in Dewey’s dark eyes. Dewey’s logic had been unassailable: young Baker was back in jail (he’d punched his piggish parole officer in the neck), and the gang needed a driver; Richard’s minivan was perfect (wood paneling even, cute like something you’d drive nuns in); Richard (here Dewey’s voice dropped solemnly) was by now part of the gang, and it was like the Marines, or the muskefuckingteers: all for one, one for all.
So Richard had clasped Dewey’s hand, said yes. The very next morning, pleading at Dewey’s door, Richard tried to make it no. But Dewey put an arm around Richard’s neck and dragged him roughly into the trailer’s kitchen, pulled a big carving knife out of a broken drawer, poked the point into Richard’s forehead, drawing blood, touching skull. He said: “You gonna quit?” After a very long pause Dewey let go, put the knife away, said he was kidding, said, “Go ahead, Third Eye. Quit if you want.”
Richard hadn’t quit, so really he’d said yes twice. By day, the decision left him exhilarated. Nights, he slept poorly, wanted to wake Gail, desperately wanted to shake Gail from her overworked exhaustion and slumber and confess all. By da
y, he watched her drive off to meetings and laughed at himself: if he ever woke her she would only say he was a dope and too idle, turn back to sleep and in the morning drive off to her meetings just the same. At night he thought of Dewey’s woman, thought of Dewey’s kid, thought of his own kids, planned how he’d back out of this thing, how he’d tell Gail, then Dewey, how easy that would really be.
But by day he did the research required of him: the exact mileage from Little Henry’s to the State Police barracks, the exact mileage to the Port Lawrence Police Department, the exact mileage to the Ledyard County sheriff’s office, the exact distance on Route 2 from Little Henry’s to home, the exact distance on the circuitous Route 124, the distance to all of twelve different logging roads they might disappear on, the distance to two gravel pits and a quarry in which they might hide if (Dewey’s grave concern) “the pigs went bullshit.”
Oh, Richard liked the excitement, liked having such a fine secret from Gail. He liked his acceptance by folks who had never noticed him at all. He liked how his wardrobe had changed (black T-shirts, a big black belt, heavy boots). He liked the way he’d stopped fitting in at Gail’s many luncheons and dinners, liked how easy it was to skip them. And he loved his afternoons at Dewey’s: the camaraderie, the hilarity, the feeling these guys would take care of him.
They’d all been to Little Henry’s twice now, knew where the safe was (behind a white door that said EMPLOYEES ONLY and hard against a grimy toilet that the clerk had let Richard use); knew that Sunday night the kid at the counter (named Pete) would be alone; knew that the nearest police station (actually the Port Lawrence Town Office) was nearly eleven miles from the store; knew that the Sunday night police shift was the lightest of the week (one cop, who hung out in the station with the lady dispatcher, drinking coffee); knew that the much more professional state police tended to stay toward the coast and the interstate. The gang made a bunch of contingency plans, even practiced a couple of routes home, worked their way to the night they’d picked: July 23.
A hot night. Richard drove, wishing fervently that he’d said no when no was still possible. Dewey and Jim insisted on displaying their big handguns in the car. Saints wouldn’t need guns. They buffed them up, stared at them, called them maggies and bones. What the hell had he been thinking? Baker, languishing in prison, had donated his firepower to the cause in exchange for a 10 percent cut. Richard had opted not to go lumpy, as the boys put it, not to carry a gun, because he couldn’t use one if he had one, and had no intention of shooting or threatening anyone, no intention of getting out of the car, for that matter. He would sit there in jacket and tie, as planned, and earn his 30 percent quietly.
So in the parking lot at Little Henry’s, the night dark, Richard waited. He watched the mirrors, but no one else drove in. Dead night. Almost quitting time. He saw Dewey through the big store window, Dewey rummaging through the potato chips. He couldn’t see Jim. He couldn’t see the clerk, either, which was the idea: if he couldn’t see the clerk, the clerk couldn’t see him, couldn’t see the vehicle for an I.D. It had been Richard’s idea, in fact, to smear mud on the license plates. No one in the mirrors.
Richard needed something for his stomach, needed to crap, needed something to eat, needed the next fifteen minutes to be over fast. He saw Dewey step to the counter with a bag of popcorn. He saw big Jim step up, too, saw Dewey yank the gun from his pants, saw Jim do the same from his, big guns in their hands, now Dewey yelling something Richard could almost hear. They waved the guns and shook them, fingers on the triggers. Richard moaned with fear. No one in the mirror. Gail in the den at home, furious with him for going drinking again. Dewey leaning over the counter, handfuls of bills and checks and food stamps, looking mean, saying something. The kid clerk must be lying down now, as per their plan. Jim out of the picture, gone to get the safe. In the mirror, nothing. Richard remembered his job, leaned across the armrest into the back of the van, slid the side door open so the van would be ready to accept the safe. Dewey stuffing his pockets with cash. No sign of Jim. Shit: cop car, entering the lot slowly, no flashing lights, no siren.
Richard thought about honking the horn, realized that might seem suspicious. He got out of the van, oddly calm, walked into the store, announced it: “Cops.”
Jim was just coming out of the bathroom backwards, carrying the safe an inch off the floor. Clearly it was heavier than the rocks he’d been practicing with.
“Cops,” Richard said again, louder. He stood like a customer at the counter, looked casually out. Two policemen—Staties, as Dewey called them—big men, one of them smiling, finishing some joke as he climbed out of the car.
Dewey said, “Go behind. Like you work here.” He ducked down in one of the small aisles.
Richard stepped behind the counter. The clerk lay in old receipts with his face to the linoleum, panting. Jim left the safe in the middle of the floor, hopped back into the bathroom.
The cop came in.
“Hello,” Richard said.
“New guy,” the cop said, perfectly jocular. “What’d they? Fire Pete?”
The kid on the floor said, “Here!” Said, “Robbing! Guns!”
The cop didn’t even have time to look confused or respond before Dewey stood and blasted at him. The shot was bad, smashed the big store window. The second shot was better, seemed to catch the Statie’s shoulder. The gun was loud in that little place, louder than the practice shots.
“Jesus!” Richard cried.
The cop wheeled and fell to the floor and scurried forward, pushing the door open. His partner was quick, was on the radio, was out of the car, and both of them were behind it with guns drawn before Jim got out of the bathroom. He’d missed what happened, maybe thought Dewey had gotten it, ran to the door with his gun waving, opened the door even as he saw the situation, took several bullets in his chest, and fell. The kid on the floor at Richard’s feet—Pete—flinched but didn’t try to move.
Dewey peeked over the tampons, said, “Get over here, Bells.”
But Richard couldn’t.
Dewey waved the gun: “Get your shit-dick over here!”
Richard put his hands in the air so the cops would see he was unarmed, stepped from behind the counter. Dewey leapt behind him, put the gun to his neck, and said, “Go to the door.”
The cops were out there holding their huge guns, scared, trying to peer into the store.
Richard had to step in Jim’s blood to make the door, could hear something gurgling in Jim’s big body.
“Out,” Dewey said.
Richard pushed the glass door open with his belly, gun at his neck, hands in the air. “I’m an architect,” he called. “I’m an architect.”
“I’ll shoot him,” Dewey said.
“Put it down,” one cop said.
“Put yours down,” Dewey said. “Yours, or I shoot the architect.”
Richard could see the cops weren’t going to shoot, saw how young they were. Dewey led him around the van. They climbed in through the open side door, Dewey firmly pressing the gun to Richard’s temple.
“Go,” Dewey said, once Richard was in the driver’s seat. The cops looked helpless. The one who’d been shot slumped against the cruiser, a hand pressed to his bleeding shoulder.
Richard backed up slowly into the dark street, backed up so that Dewey was never exposed. The cops didn’t move till he put the van in drive and pulled out, then he saw them tumble into their car. Dewey said, “Fuck.” Money stuck out of his jacket pockets.
Richard said, “Jim …”
“‘I’m an architect,’” Dewey said. He climbed in back, opened the sliding door, and before the cops were far enough out of the parking lot to see, he leapt from the van and rolled onto someone’s lawn. Richard had a glimpse of him rising and running, kept driving. The cruiser’s lights began to flash; in seconds the cops were close behind. Richard put his hand out the window to show that it was he, the architect, and slowly pulled to a stop in front of a farmhouse.
He c
limbed from the car, hands in the air, stepped toward the cops. They climbed out both sides of their car, aimed their guns at Richard’s beautiful new minivan.
“He jumped out,” Richard said. “He’s gone.”
“Get over here,” the uninjured cop said.
Richard kept his hands up, made a couple of more steps.
“He’s gone?” the cop said.
“Jumped out,” Richard said, then lied: “He ran into the woods back there.”
“You’re a lucky man,” the shot cop said.
“Hostage is free,” the other cop said, into the radio.
Dewey was caught two months later trying to cash one of the checks from Little Henry’s, caught on the very day that Richard passed his architecture exams. In court, just before Christmas, Dewey never looked at Richard once, never said a word to implicate him, confirmed Richard’s story, the story Dewey must have read in the newspaper or seen Richard give on TV: two thugs, one of them an acquaintance, had commandeered Richard’s van right in his driveway and made him take them to Port Lawrence at gunpoint. It was a pretty good story, and no one but Gail ever questioned it: she knew Richard had planned some kind of outing with those drunken fools that night, but even she would never begin to suspect the whole truth, just thought some drinking game had gotten out of hand.
Richard didn’t sleep a full night till spring, waited for the lady at the Leslie General Store to come forward, waited for that kid Pete to remember that it was Richard who’d announced the cops, but the store lady never peeped, and Pete in court had called Richard brave, a hero.
Dewey is serving forty years. Jim is dead. Richard the hero mows Dewey’s yard when he can, and he talks to Dewey’s woman (who’s not saying what she knows about that night): she’s got an okay job now at the turning mill in Wilton. And Richard helps her with her many chores, takes the little boy out fishing, pays a bill or two quietly, and thinks she’s begun to regard him without suspicion. She’s even agreed to let him add a porch for her (it’s a design he’d like to try out, he says; it’s just a prototype; of course it’s free), agreed to let him clear the lot of car parts and dogshit and glass. He tells her he owes her—he owes Dewey—and it’s on those terms she allows him in.
Big Bend Page 6
