What of Terry Conniston?

by Brian Garfield

“You helped me rob the place and you’re driving the getaway car.”

  “For Christ’s sake I didn’t even know about it.”

  Floyd turned sideways in the seat and laid his left arm along the back of it. “If I’d told you about it beforehand would you have gone with me?”

  “No. Yes. Christ, I don’t know, but at least you could’ve given me a chance to think about it first.”

  “Aeah. Well there are a few things you do all right, Mitch, but thinking isn’t one of them.”

  Mitch closed his mouth. There was no point arguing when Floyd was in one of his superior moods. Mitch spared him a brief sidewise glance. Floyd looked relaxed, one arm crook’d on the seat back, the other propping up the roof, elbow on sill. Mitch said, “We could get in a lot of trouble.”

  “Not if you keep your mouth shut.”

  “Is that why you brought me in on it, to make sure I’d keep my mouth shut?”

  Floyd made no answer of any kind. It was as if he hadn’t heard. But he said in a patient tone, “Look, we needed money, now we’ve got money.”

  “A few hundred bucks isn’t worth five years in Florence.”

  “You ought to know about that.”

  “I haven’t been in any trouble since I got out. I want to keep it like that.”

  The street dipped under a railroad overpass and Mitch leaned forward to see into the dimness underneath. When they emerged on the downtown side the street narrowed between austere new high-rise buildings and they inched forward in traffic clotted like blood. Mitch said, “When I asked you for a job I told you I’d done a few months’ time. You said that was all right so I thought you were doing me a favor, but I’m getting the feeling you hired me because I’d done time, not in spite of it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You’ll never make a living playing that guitar of yours—if you’ve got any talent it must be in your grandmother’s name.”

  “That’s not true and you know it.”

  “I do?”

  “I hold up my end. I’m the best you’ve ever had in this third-rate band.”

  “To be sure,” Floyd murmured. “But that does us a fat lot of good when we can’t get booked.”

  A light turned green and they started to move ahead. Floyd said, “Turn left up ahead and start looking for a phone booth. I want to make a call.”

  Mitch made the turn into the southbound boulevard. It was a woebegone strip of lumberyards, motels and bars. There was a tight string of intersection gas stations, pennants flapping, bitterly engaged in a furious price war.

  Floyd said, “Listen, there are millions of musicians around—do you really want to spend the rest of your life picking at a guitar in fifty-cent bars? How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Grade B jobs for Grade B wages. All you can get, Mitch. You want to eat beans the rest of your life? You want to get old and retire on your union pension? I don’t.”

  “It’s better than prison.”

  “Only the stupid ones end up there.”

  “Here’s your phone booth.”

  The sun was going down fast; neon signs were lighting up. Mitch stopped by the roadside booth and Floyd got out, leaving the car door open. He didn’t shut the phone-booth door and Mitch could hear the coins drop in the phone. After a minute Floyd spoke into the mouthpiece:

  “This is Rymer. I’ve got a car that needs fixing…. No, I’m afraid it won’t move at all. I’d like to have the mechanic come over here and look at it. I’m at the Twenty-first place, same as last time…. Sure, you’ve done some work for me before. It’s a 1949 Studebaker.… Yes, right away—say ten minutes.”

  Floyd hung up and got back into the car. “Let’s go down Twenty-first.”

  “You haven’t got any 1949 Studebaker.”

  “Think of that,” Floyd said.

  Don’t get uptight, he told himself. Don’t bust your mind until you find out what the bastard’s up to.

  It was a dingy maculose street. Shanties of corrugated metal, junkyards, here and there a squat adobe bar isolated by dusty yards. Floyd said, “That one on the corner under the Schlitz sign.”

  A wheelless Model-A Ford stood on bricks in the vacant lot beside the bar. Mitch pulled into the dirt yard by the billboard; dust hung around the car when Floyd got out. The door chunked shut and Floyd leaned his shaggy head in the window. “Come in with me.”

  “What for?”

  Floyd came around the car and opened Mitch’s door.

  “You going to rob another till?”

  “Relax. Nothing like that.”

  Twilight fanned gray and pink across the clouds. Mitch got out of the car and followed Floyd into the bar. It was dim and pungent, lit by blue bulbs and beer ads and redolent of stale beer and tobacco smoke. Four or five patrons—Mexican laborers and an old carpenter in overalls—sat on bar stools hunched over lonely drinks. The gaudy jukebox’s heavy speakers pulsed with the loud bass notes of a rock and roll tune.

  Floyd propped himself on a stool, one leg stretched to the floor, and ordered two beers. He looked at the clock. Mitch watched the bartender draw beers and bring them forward. A dumpy woman came into the place, looked at nobody, went straight through to the bathroom at the back.

  Floyd took a slow sip from his beer, yawned, and got off the stool. “Come on.”

  “What?”

  Floyd started toward the back of the room. Baffled, Mitch followed him into the rancid yellow dimness of the bathroom.

  Floyd let him through and shut the door. The dumpy woman stood just outside the toilet booth; she had a plain round face, a bulbous blob of a nose, a little sweetheart rose on the collar of her cotton dress. Her eyes expressed tired contempt. “I hope you ain’t wasting my time because I don’t do business on the cuff.”

  Floyd unrolled the paper bag and took out a fistful of cash. The woman watched with polite bovine interest. “You’ve just said the magic word,” she said. “How much stuff do you want?”

  Mitch glanced at the door; he felt irritated and apprehensive. He looked at the woman and at Floyd. Floyd stood motionless, the smoke of a cigarette making a vague suspended cloud before his cold face. “Enough to take care of a big habit for a week or so,” he said.

  “Ten pops?”

  “Make it fifteen.”

  “Cost you ten apiece,” she said with no show of emotion. “A hundred and fifty.”

  Floyd counted it off in twenties and tens, squared up the sheaf and put the rest back in the paper bag. He handed the bag to Mitch. The woman reached for the money but Floyd drew back. “Where’s the stuff?”

  “I’ll get it to you.”

  “No,” Floyd said.

  “You don’t trust me?” She smiled a little. “Look, my mother didn’t raise any stupid kids. I’m not going to walk into a place like this with that much junk in my handbag.”

  “Then get it.”

  The woman pinched her lower lip between two fingers. Her studious gaze shifted from Floyd to Mitch; several beats went by before she said, “You’re not users, either one of you. How do I know you’re not cops?”

  “We’re not cops,” Floyd said dryly.

  Uncertainty quivered, in her eyes; finally Floyd smiled and shook his head and said, “Use your head. Did I turn you in last time?”

  “All right, all right. It’s outside in the car. Follow me out in a minute.”

  When she left the bathroom Floyd made no move to follow her. The door squeaked shut and Mitch said immediately, “I didn’t know your brother had a habit that big. How long can he last like that?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Don’t you care at all?”

  Floyd just looked at him. There was no reading his face. Mitch said, “Why in hell don’t you send him in for a cure?”

  “He’s had the cure twice,” Floyd muttered, and turned, his mind on something else. He washed his hands at the sink and dried them on a paper towel. “All right,” he said, and went out.


  Mitch paid for the beers on the way out. They found the dumpy woman waiting in a dusty new station wagon. She had the engine running, the lights switched off, the door shut and the window open. It was getting dark fast. She handed Floyd a small package and Mitch saw Floyd turn over the money—it disappeared immediately inside her dress, which was probably where she’d had the goods hidden all along. She pulled the gear lever into reverse. Floyd said in a mild way, “If this stuff’s no good I’ll know where to find you.”

  The station wagon backed out and swung around into the street before she turned the lights on. It fishtailed away with a scudding of back tires chattering for traction. Floyd coughed and batted dust away. “That’s what happens when you give petty authority to scum like that. Let’s go.”

  Mitch got in the car and started it up and they drove through the raw, neon-lighted streets without talk. He was thinking there were a lot of things about Floyd that didn’t make sense. Floyd’s junkie brother couldn’t play the bass fiddle for sour apples—if Floyd had had a good bass man he could have put together a good band a long time ago. Georgie had a $150-a-week habit: he was nothing but a liability. Yet Mitch had just seen Floyd take stupid risks for Georgie’s sake. Floyd was not a stupid man. It didn’t quite add up. Brotherly love did not fit into Floyd’s image.

  They reached the freeway interchange and turned southeast on the superhighway. Floyd checked his watch and said, “Pull over to the shoulder when you get a chance.”

  “What for?”

  “Yours not to reason why, Mitch.”

  He rolled the Pontiac off the roadway and crunched to a stop. “Well?”

  “Just wait until I tell you to go. I want to see something. Leave the lights on.”

  Mitch curbed his tongue and settled back, fished out a cigarette and punched the dashboard lighter. The lights of cars passed them at speed. There was nothing much to look at—tall gooseneck highway lights, a few truck stops clustered around the interchange half a mile ahead, scrubby desert crowding the road shoulders, the Rincon Mountains vague in the falling night. The day’s heat was dissipating fast.

  Floyd sat twisted around, squinting through the back window. Mitch made a face and pressed the red lighter to his cigarette. Floyd was looking at his watch again and Mitch started to say something but Floyd cut him off: “Shut up. It’s just about time.”

  “Time for what, for Christ’s sake?”

  There was no response. Mitch drew smoke deep into his lungs and frowned. He had had enough; it was definitely time to quit. He didn’t like Floyd and what was the point of hanging onto a job that offered no work and no pay? He would pack his things as soon as they got back to the motel. It wouldn’t be wise to mention it to the others, particularly to Floyd; no, he would just pack and go.

  Floyd stiffened. Mitch followed the direction of his glance and saw a red sports car come up fast from behind, passing under the street light; it swept past and droned away in the beams of Mitch’s headlights. He had a glimpse of a vivid, pretty girl at the wheel.

  Floyd said, “We can go now.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Her name, my learned friend, is Terry Conniston. She takes an evening summer course four nights a week at the University and drives home about this time every night, home being the Conniston ranch down near Sonoita.”

  “Girl friend of yours?”

  “We’ve never met,” Floyd said.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Contain your impatience, there’s a good boy. Let’s get home.”

  Intent on his own plans to break away, Mitch didn’t press it. He flipped the cigarette out the vent window and angled the car back onto the freeway. Within a few minutes they turned off and rolled into the gravel parking yard of a truckers’ café. There were a few dead letters in the neon Modern Motel sign. When they had lost the last nightclub gig they had sought the cheapest rooms available, and here they were.

  Floyd picked up the sack of liquor-store money and the packet of dope—twin handfuls of evidential explosive—and they went around the side of the café to the outside staircase that hung uneasily to the flimsy side of the building. Through the kitchen’s back door Mitch could see a fat Mexican woman in an apron slapping corn tortillas from arm to arm. The place was flyblown and filthy. The stairs creaked when Mitch put his weight on them.

  The upstairs door let them into a long narrow hall, seamy and waterstained, lit by one yellow forty-watt bulb. Mitch stopped at the door to his room and said vaguely, “I’ll see you,” and watched Floyd go on toward his brother’s room; Floyd said over his shoulder:

  “We’ll get something to eat in a little while.”

  “Sure.” Mitch went inside and shut the door behind him. He looked around the tiny room without expression. It smelled of cheap disinfectant and the washbasin and cracked toilet-bowl had yellow stains from the dripping erosion of years. The room had one plain kitchen chair with chipped offwhite paint and a sagging bed redolent of hasty sex, loveless furtive perversions, tired-eyed whores. Once when he was seventeen he had spent part of a night with a high school girl in a room like this. It had been awkward and frantic and unhappy.

  He heaved his suitcase onto the bed and threw his meager belongings into it. After that he sat down in the chair and smoked; he would wait and leave after the others were all asleep.

  He could see himself in the corner-cracked mirror over the basin. It surprised him how boyish he still looked—the youthful broad face still not far beyond a careless ease of smiling. It was hard to understand how he had possibly come to this dreary place in his life. He had always had the best of his world: he was athletic, smart, attractive to girls, the son of decent middle-class parents from an ordinary suburban town. He was no hippie, no rebel. But in his pleasant youth he had never been tested. His splendid health and brain and surroundings had let him assume that things would always come easily.

  His sophomore college year had ambushed him—a few too many beer parties and rehearsals and band gigs at fraternity houses, and he had walked into the physics final exam knowing with sudden hollow fear that he was not going to pass. And the tough old Lit professor had failed him for spelling mistakes. Flunked two courses out of five—that had put him out.

  His father and mother had tried to be kind and understanding but through the brave pretense Mitch could see their crushed bitter disappointment. His father had got him a job in the real estate office. Mitch had tried but he couldn’t face them every day seeing what they were thinking: twenty-one and a failure. He had run away, baffled and hurt. He would become a success, build up a band of his own, make records and money. He joined a band in New Mexico, swingers, and then had come the months in jail, and now this.

  He supposed he ought to start thinking about where he would go. To another town, maybe, check in with the musicians’ union local and see if anyone was hiring. He had enough for a bus ticket to Salt Lake or Las Vegas. Then too he could always wire his father for money and go home to Cleveland. But that would be admitting he had failed again. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want to say a word to them until he could show them he had made a success of himself.

  He crushed the cigarette out underfoot, got up and took the cased electric guitar from the corner and put it on the bed beside the suitcase. That was everything he owned. The sight of it sagging on the dilapidated bed turned his sense of dismal depression to fear, a sudden lonely sense of panic. A dry taste like brass on his tongue, an urgency in his groin. He remembered how, when he had been twelve, his father had taken him duck-hunting on the remote north shore of the lake. In the cold wet dawn his father had left him in a blind and moved away to a farther blind beyond earshot or sight. For hours Mitch had been convinced his father had got lost, forgotten where he was, forgotten about him entirely. He had felt the terror of being lost and alone.

  He jumped when his door latched open. Floyd Rymer, in the door, gave him a dry look and said, “Know what you need?”

  “A lock on m
y door?”

  Floyd started to speak but then his eye fell on the cases on the bed. “Well, now,”—sarcastic—”what’s this?”

  Mitch said reluctantly, “I’m clearing out.”

  “Just like that?”

  He needed to talk fast. “Look, we’re not doing each other any good, are we? I’m just a fifth wheel the way things are—you can get bookings a lot quicker if you cut back to three men and anyway I’m getting sick of this hot country. I think I’ll head north and see what I can pick up around Vegas or Tahoe.”

  “You won’t have any luck. It’s a slow summer everywhere—they’re all buying jukeboxes and Muzak because it’s cheaper than live musicians.”

  “I’ll take my chances, I guess.”

  “Then take them with me, Mitch.”

  “Why?”

  “Believe me, you’ll do far better with me.”

  “It doesn’t look that way from here. Anyway I’d think you’d be anxious to get rid of me.”

  Floyd said, softly so he would know it was important, “I need somebody around here with a level head on his shoulders.”

  Floyd pushed the door shut, hooked the chair over to him and sat down cowboy fashion, legs astraddle the back of the chair and arms folded across the top. “Besides, you know too much. Suppose you get picked up for vagrancy and decide to earn brownie points by turning me in? I can’t very well afford to let you do that, now, can I.”

  “I’d have to implicate myself to turn you in. With my record that’s hardly likely.”

  Floyd had a dry quizzical smile. “Do you want to know why I pulled off that liquor-store thing?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, to me. I did it because I wanted to make sure it would work. I wanted to be sure I could get away with something like that. And I wanted to see which way you’d jump.”

  “So?”

  “It was a rehearsal,” Floyd said. “A practice scrimmage to warm us up for a bigger ball game. Is that a spark of interest I see in your eye? That’s good because I’ll need your help to pull it off.”

  “I don’t think I even want to hear about it.”

  “Of course you do. If you don’t find out what I’m talking about your curiosity won’t ever let you alone.” Floyd got up abruptly, shoved the chair away and reached for the door. “Come on, Mitch,” he said, in a voice gone suddenly flat and hard.