The Ignored

by Bentley Little - (ebook by Undead)

  “I… I’m sorry,” the salesman said, his phony smile faltering.

  “It was a toss-up anyway. You just threw it into the Porsche’s corner. Thanks. You made my decision for me.”

  “Wait!” the salesman said.

  “Yes?” Philipe looked at him coolly.

  “Give us another chance. I know you’d be much happier with a Mercedes-Benz, and I can really get you a hell of a deal.”

  Philipe appeared to think for a minute. “All right,” he said. “Let’s test-drive that blue one there.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll just go get the keys.”

  Philipe and I looked at each other as Chris hurried into the office. I quickly turned away so I wouldn’t burst out laughing.

  The salesman sped back, almost out of breath. He handed the keys to Philipe. “Let’s take her for a spin, Mr…?”

  “Smith,” Philipe said. “Doug Smith.”

  We walked across the lot and got into the car, Philipe in the driver’s seat, the salesman in the passenger seat next to him, me in the back. Philipe and I put on shoulder harnesses. The salesman did not, obviously wanting room to move around in order to properly deliver his sales pitch. Sure enough, he shifted his position, half turned toward Philipe. “Air-conditioning is standard,” he said. “As is the AM/FM radio/cassette player.”

  Philipe started the car.

  “Pull out there,” he said, pointing to the lot’s front gate. “We’ll go around the block.”

  Philipe followed his instructions. The salesman droned on about the car’s features.

  We came to a stoplight. “Hang a left here,” the salesman said. He grasped the dashboard with one hand as Philipe maneuvered the turn. “Note how she handles on the curve.”

  Philipe slammed on the brakes.

  Chris flew sideways, nearly thrown out of his seat, hitting the side of his head on the padded dash.

  “Good brakes,” Philipe said.

  The salesman, obviously shaken, was moving back in his seat, trying to regain his composure. “You shouldn’t—”

  “Get out of the car,” Philipe said.

  “What?”

  “I have a gun in my pocket. Get out of the fucking car or I’ll blow a hole through your fucking gut.” Philipe had slipped a hand into his windbreaker pocket and he was holding it there, finger pointing outward.

  All trace of unctuousness was gone from the salesman’s voice. He was a frightened baby, and he was practically blubbering as he fumbled with the door lock. “Don’t shoot me,” he begged. “I’ll go… Take the car… Do what you want… Just don’t… shoot me….” He successfully managed to open the door and stumbled outside, closing the door behind him.

  Philipe took off.

  He was laughing as he sped down the street toward the freeway. “What a dick!”

  Through the back windshield, I could see the salesman running crazily down the sidewalk away from us. “You think he’ll remember us?”

  I looked up front, saw Philipe’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Dumb question.”

  We were the first of the new car owners to make it back to Bill’s house, our prearranged meeting place. The others were already there, waiting outside on the porch, and they came walking across the lawn to admire the Mercedes.

  John and Steve arrived with the Z about fifteen minutes later. Bill and Don and the Jeep pulled up soon after that.

  Buster looked at the old cars, the new cars, and shook his head. “It’s a damn fleet,” he said.

  Don patted the hood of the Jeep. “We’re moving up in the world.”

  Philipe had gone inside the house to get a beer, and he came back out, drinking straight from the bottle. He stood next to Junior, eyed the new cars, and shook his head. “You know,” he said, “it’s a shame to let these new wheels go to waste. Let’s do something with them.”

  “Like what?” Pete asked.

  “Road trip!” John said.

  “I was thinking of something a little more appropriate, a little more fitting for the Terrorists for the Common Man.”

  “Like what?” Pete asked.

  “Like knocking over some banks.”

  There was silence.

  “Banks?” James repeated nervously.

  “Well, ATM machines. Same difference.”

  No one said anything.

  “What are you, a bunch of old ladies? Come on, you pussies. We just stole a hundred thousand dollars worth of vehicles here, and you’re afraid of kyping a little cash from a teller machine?”

  “Bank robbers?” James said.

  “Don’t think we can do it?”

  “We can do it,” I said. “We’ve killed and not been caught. We’ve vandalized; we’ve stolen from stores; we’ve looted Rodeo Drive. We can sure as hell pick off a few bank machines.”

  “That’s true,” James admitted.

  “He has a point,” Steve said.

  Junior let out a whoop. “Let’s do it!”

  “Let’s do it,” Philipe agreed.

  We went first to a hardware store, walked out with sledgehammers and crowbars, exiting through the unattended nursery section on the side of the building. Then we drove around Orange County, picking out banks that were not in open, populated areas, that had instant teller machines hidden by trees or bushes. Following Philipe’s lead, we walked straight up to the machines, pushed aside whoever was there, and smashed the hell out of the metal withdrawal drawers. At that point, an alarm usually went off and the other customers began running, but we continued to bash in the machine until the entire front facade was gone, and then took the money from within before leaving our cards and walking calmly back to the cars.

  We hit six banks that first day.

  Ten more the next day.

  Our haul was somewhere around forty thousand dollars.

  We split it up, then deposited it in the ATMs of our own banks.

  The ATM robberies were high profile, big news, and we began reading about ourselves in the newspapers consistently, seeing the aftermath of our exploits on TV. It was downright creepy. There were the people who’d watched us commit our crimes, who were witnesses to what we’d done, and they remembered nothing. Some recalled seeing a group of people, but had no specific descriptions to provide. Some out-and-out lied, usually white middle-aged macho men who invariably recalled seeing black or Hispanic gang members.

  “Yeah!” Philipe would jeer, throwing pretzels at the television. “Blame the minorities!”

  It was even more unnerving a few days later watching the police arrest two Hispanic men for committing the robberies. The men looked rough, were definitely not upstanding-citizen material, and if I had not known better, I, too, would probably have believed them guilty.

  I thought of Frederick’s of Hollywood, of the “perps” who had been “caught.”

  “I guess they needed scapegoats,” James said quietly.

  “Fuck ’em,” Philipe said. “Let’s prove those men innocent. Let’s knock off a few more ATMs.”

  “One of these days those video cameras are going to capture our pictures,” Don said. “What’ll we do then?”

  “They’ve got our pictures already. But no one can remember what we look like. Don’t worry.”

  The next day we did rob three ATMs, all of them in the city of Long Beach, and that night at my apartment we tuned into the news, VCR at the ready, to see the results. The ATM robberies were not the top story—that went to a shooting outside a Westwood theater showing a new gang-themed movie—but they were second, and an obviously frustrated police spokesman said that the men arrested yesterday in connection with the crimes were now being released.

  Philipe grinned. “Kicked their ass.”

  “But we’re still not getting credit,” I said. “We’re a goddamn crime epidemic, and we’re still not getting the credit for it.”

  “Maybe the police are just trying to keep our names out of the news,” Buster suggested. “Maybe they don’t wan
t to give us any publicity.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  James was sitting in one of the chairs, staring thoughtfully at the television as a camera showed the police rounding up suspects in a drug sweep in Compton. He looked up. “You know,” he said, pointing to the TV, “we could solve this gang problem.”

  Philipe turned to face him. “What?”

  “We could get into places even the cops couldn’t go. We could walk in, confiscate drugs and weapons, walk out.”

  “We’re not superheroes, dipshit. We’re average, we’re not memorable, we don’t make an impression, but we’re not fucking invisible.”

  “What’s with you?” I asked Philipe. “It was just a suggestion.”

  He stared at me, and for a moment our eyes locked. I had the feeling that he expected me to understand why he was angry, what was bothering him, but I was completely at a loss, and he broke contact and looked away.

  I felt as though I’d missed something. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He nodded. He looked suddenly tired, worn out. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” he said wearily. “I’m going to bed.”

  Before anybody could say anything, he was heading down the short hallway to the bedroom.

  “What the hell was that about?” Tommy asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  John looked around conspiratorially. “You think he’s like… ?” He tapped his forehead, rolled his eyeballs.

  Junior looked at him disgustedly. “Shut the hell up.”

  I went into the kitchen, pulled a beer out of the refrigerator, opened it, drank. My face felt warm, hot, and I stood in front of the open refrigerator door, letting the cool air wash over me.

  Steve walked into the kitchen. “Can I get one of those?”

  I pulled out a beer, handed it to him.

  He stood there for a moment, twisting the bottle in his hands, fidgeting indecisively. “Look,” he said finally, “I know how you feel about it, but I think you should change your mind.”

  I looked at him over the refrigerator door. “About what?”

  “About rape.” He held up his hand to ward off my response. “I know what you’re going to say, but I’m just asking you to see it from our side. It’s been a long time since most of us have had sex. Not that we ever got a lot to begin with. And I know you know what I’m talking about there. You know how it is.” He paused. “All I’m saying is… well, don’t cut off our only chance. You’re close to Philipe. He listens to you. And right now he’s put the kibosh on the sex because you don’t like it.”

  I sighed. I really didn’t feel like getting into this right now. “It’s not sex I don’t like. It’s rape.”

  “Well, you don’t have to do it. You don’t even have to know about it when we do it. We’ll keep you completely in the dark, if that’s what you want. Just don’t… just don’t try to make us behave exactly the way you behave.” He was silent for a moment. “Some women like to be raped, you know. Some fat chick, she knows she’s not going to get sex on her own. She’d be grateful if we gave it to her. She’d love it.”

  “Then ask her if she wants to. If she consents, there’s no problem.”

  “But she won’t consent. The rest of the world… they’re not as uninhibited as we are. They’re not as free. They can’t say what they feel; they have to say what’s expected of them. But that fat girl? She probably fantasizes about being reamed by a group of healthy young studs like us.” He grinned. He tried to make his smile winning, but it came out rather sickly and pathetic.

  I looked at Steve and I felt sorry for him. He was serious about what he was saying, about the arguments he was putting forth. To him, Philipe’s elaborate theories about our existence and our purpose in life were nothing more than justifications for his own petty actions and small desires. His mind, his world, his worldview were that limited.

  Maybe none of it did have a purpose, I thought. Maybe there was no reason for anything. Maybe the others were right and we should do whatever we wanted to merely because we had the ability to do so. Maybe there should be no brakes on our behavior, no artificially imposed boundaries.

  Steve was still fidgeting with his beer bottle, anxiously awaiting my response. He really believed that my opposition to rape was the reason he wasn’t getting any sex. I looked at him. There were differences between us. Big differences. We were both Ignored and were alike in a lot of ways—in most ways, perhaps—but there were definitely differences in our value systems, in what we believed.

  On the other hand, here I was: murderer, thief, terrorist. Who was I to moralize? Who was I to tell the others what they could and couldn’t do, what they should and shouldn’t do? I closed the refrigerator door. “Go ahead,” I told Steve. “Rape away.”

  He stared at me, surprised. “What? You mean it?”

  “Fuck whoever you want. It’s none of my business.”

  He grinned, clapped a hand on my shoulder. “You’re a hero and a he-man.”

  I smiled wanly. “I know.”

  Together, we walked back out into the living room.

  We woke up late the next morning, all of us, and after a hurried catch-as-catch-can breakfast, we cruised over to the mall and caught a matinee of a bad science-fiction movie. After the flick ended, we walked out into the sunlight. Philipe blinked back the brightness, drew a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. He was silent for a moment. “Let’s go to my place,” he said.

  We were suddenly silent.

  His place.

  Philipe’s place.

  I could tell the others were as surprised as I was. Over the past months, we’d gradually gotten around to visiting everyone’s house or condo or apartment. Everyone’s, that is, except Philipe’s. There’d been reasons, of course. Good reasons. Logical reasons. But I’d always had the feeling that Philipe had arranged for it to be inconvenient to stop by his house, that he had, for some strange reason, not wanted us to see where he lived, and I suspected that everyone else felt the same way.

  Philipe looked at me archly. “Or not,” he said. “If you don’t want to, we can go to your place instead.”

  “No,” I told him hurriedly. “Your place is fine.”

  He chuckled, obviously enjoying my shocked surprise. “I thought so.”

  We followed him to his house.

  I don’t know what I expected, but it was certainly not the bland tract home in which he lived. The house was in Anaheim, in a typically average neighborhood, surrounded by rows of other houses that looked exactly the same. Philipe pulled into the driveway, parked, and I pulled in next to him. The other cars parked on the street.

  I was… disappointed. After all the waiting, after all the secrecy, I had expected something else. Something more. Something better. Something that was actually worth keeping secret.

  But maybe that’s why he had kept it secret.

  Without waiting for us, Philipe got out of the car, strode up the front walk, unlocked the front door of the house, and went inside. I hurried after him.

  The interior of the house was as disappointing as the outside. More so, if that was possible. The large, drab living room contained depressingly few pieces of furniture. There was a clock and lamp on a plain wooden end table, a nondescript couch, a long, unadorned coffee table, and a television set in a wooden cabinet. Period. There was one picture on one wall, a standard come-with-the-frame print of a young boy walking down a country lane with a fishing pole in his hand and a dog at his side. Other than that, the room was devoid of decoration. The entire scene looked unnervingly like something out of my grandparents’ old house.

  I said nothing, tried not to let the feelings show on my face, but I felt a strange hollowness inside me. And a nasty little unbidden twinge of superiority. I’d thought that Philipe’s taste would be… different. Bolder, newer, younger. More extravagant, more flamboyant. Something. Not this quiet old lady’s home with its June Cleaver furniture and its stultifying ordinariness.
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br />   “I have to take a whiz,” Philipe said, heading into the hall. I nodded as the other terrorists filtered in behind me. They were silent as they entered the house. Only Buster spoke, commenting on how much he liked the place. I saw James roll his eyes.

  Philipe returned. “Make yourselves at home,” he said. “There’s food and drink in the fridge. I just have to do a few things.” He disappeared again into the hallway, and Junior, Tommy, and Pete crossed into the kitchen. John turned on the TV, found a daytime talk show. I sat down on the couch.

  Next to me on the floor, half hidden under the end table, was a pile of lined notebook paper, filled with writing. The top sheet looked like the rough draft of a term paper or report. I reached down, picked up the paper, glanced at the corrections and crossed out lines, read what was written: “We’ve been blessed. We’ve been shown that we are disposable, dispensable, unimportant. We’ve been freed for other, greater things.”

  It was the speech Philipe had made at Denny’s that first day. The brilliant, stirring, spontaneous talk he had given.

  He’d written it all out ahead of time and memorized it.

  I reached down, picked up a handful of papers, quickly scanned the sheets: “We are of a kind. Our lives have traveled along parallel paths”… “Rape is a legitimate weapon”… “It’s places like this that have made us what we are. These are the places we need to strike against.”

  Almost everything he’d ever said to us, every argument he’d propounded, every idea he’d described, every theory he’d explained, was there, in that pile of papers, worked out and written down.

  Junior, Tommy, and Pete came out of the kitchen, Coke cans in hand. “No beer,” Junior said. “We got what we could.”

  Carefully, surreptitiously, I put the papers back on the floor where I’d found them. I felt cold, empty. I still respected Philipe, still thought he was the only one among us with vision and ideas and the will and courage to carry them out and see them through, but there was something sad and rather pathetic about those worked-over speeches in that old-lady house, and I couldn’t help feeling depressed.

  A few minutes later, Philipe emerged from the hallway with two packed suitcases. “All right,” he said. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”