I said, “Alright. Let’s go.”
James said, “Fuck it.”
We parked on Van Aken. We were up at Shaker Square. I said, “Raul, you go in first and I’ll follow ten seconds after you. James, when we go in you go around the curb to the right and we’ll get in around the corner. Raul, are you ready?”
“Give me a minute,” he said.
James said, “Are you gonna do this fucking shit or not?”
Raul said, “You want to do this?”
James called him a pussy: “Fuckin pussy.”
“Everybody calm the fuck down,” I said. “Let’s not argue.”
So James and Raul made peace. And James let Raul have his sunglasses to better hide his eyes. We drove up alongside the bank.
“Alright,” I said. “Raul, you go ahead. I’ll be right after you. Count on it.”
Raul got out and walked into the bank. I counted to five and said, “Well, here I go.”
I went in the bank and Raul was standing with his back against the back wall. He was standing across from the counter. There was only one teller. It was a small bank. The teller was looking at Raul and she looked scared because he was dressed up like a ninja in a parka and it was 40 degrees outside.
Then Raul ran. He ran past me and out of the bank. I was so goddamn depressed. The teller’s drawer was open and I leaned over the counter and cleared the money out of it. On my way out I passed a man coming in and he pretended that he didn’t notice me. Out on the sidewalk I went the wrong way at first; then I remembered what I’d told James to do and I went around the corner. Raul wasn’t in the car.
“Where’s Raul?” I asked.
James said, “Fuck. I don’t know.”
“Shit.”
James started to drive away. I took a breath.
“We can’t leave him. We have to look for him.”
James shook his head no and said, “Okay.”
He turned the car around and we looked for Raul. We were going at parade speed and it was a fuckload of people around so this wasn’t good. But James kept his cool. We were out there forever but he didn’t panic. And Raul came running from behind us and got in the backseat and said, “GO GO GO.”
We drove away.
“How much did you get?”
“I dunno,” I said. “Count it.”
I gave the money to Raul. He counted it.
“Thirteen hundred.”
“You didn’t get anything?”
He said, “No.”
* * *
—
I DIDN’T care about what happened to the money. I think Raul kept all of it. I didn’t ask. I was tired of everything. This had nearly been curtains for me and I felt like a fucking purse snatcher. James called later and said Raul had tossed his sunglasses away when he was running from the bank. James said he had paid three hundred dollars for those sunglasses. I went over to his place and gave him three hundred dollars. I had lost three hundred dollars on the bank robbery. And with his sunglasses money, James had broke even, minus the gas and a balaclava, which he had written off as negligible.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
It was Sunday morning. Emily and Livinia were asleep in the bed and I listened to them breathing, their little clicks and drafts, and the light glowed through the drawn shade. It would be a fine day, and I knew it just as well as anyone did.
When you have been afraid for a long time, you see how fear will come and go. How fear will overtake you. How fear will subside. How fear guts you for a moment. How hope puts you back together, till the fear comes back. Then the hope. Then the fear. I was only ever afraid of one thing in my life, and that was heroin.
There’d been a dozen witnesses the other day. Somebody had to have got the plates off James’s car what with all the running around and the frock coats and the parkas and the bank being robbed.
Raul had left his fucking mask outside the bank.
We were fucked.
Yet I was still free.
I went downstairs and I called Black.
I lit a cigarette.
Black said to come on.
I drove to the Walgreens over on Monticello. I was thinking about PFC Arnold, a kid I knew in Iraq, how the old boys used to say he was a shitbag. Then he got killed and they said he was a good guy, and his name was in with the good names, the names of our war dead, and if a shitbag talked bad about the name when the old boys were around he risked a punch in the mouth.
Honestly I didn’t know much about him; I can’t say we were friends. They put us in the same room and he lived in the room eight months till he was killed. I helped pack out his things. We spoke now and then and I’d had nothing against him. He cut my hair a few times. I’d thought he was alright, but not all the time.
He’d been a handsome enough motherfucker, 20 when he was killed, born and raised in Oklahoma, didn’t know his dad. His mom had raised him on her own. She was a hooker. He’d tell you that. But he didn’t say it like it was a bad thing. He liked his mom. And he was polite, always polite, so polite that when people talked shit to him they got away with it. Somebody might say, “Arnold, you’re a retarded shitbag.”
And he’d blush and look all around himself as if to say, Yes, I know. And isn’t it wonderful?
His wife was a few years older than he was. They knew each other from Oklahoma and had five kids together. Only it was maybe that two of them were his. His wife fucked around on him a lot. But then he fucked around on his wife a lot too and it didn’t seem to be a deal breaker for either one that the other was fucking around. They were Wiccans. So was his mom. They were all Wiccans.
His mom had come down to Fort Hood before we left for Iraq. It was Halloween. She was dressed up as a cat, with the black tights and the little furry ears on. It was nighttime and her hair was black. I met her by the stairs in the barracks. She was smoking a cigarette. She asked if she could use my phone. She was a while on the phone and I smoked two cigarettes. She said she was sorry she’d taken so long. I said I hadn’t noticed she was a cat. She said cats were her familiars. I didn’t know what that meant. She said it was a Wiccan thing. I still didn’t know what it meant. Did they help her do magic? No. It wasn’t really like that. It was more like she had a special connection with cats, especially black cats. It was hard to explain. She asked me for a cigarette and I gave her one.
She asked if I had a girlfriend.
I said I was getting married in two weeks.
She said, “I know a lot of guys still mess around though. I don’t judge. I get it. I understand why you guys want to have sex before you go over there.”
I said I wasn’t trying to fuck around on my girl. “Sorry.”
She asked if I knew Arnold. I said he was in my company. She said she was his mom.
She couldn’t have been much older than thirty.
“I was a child when I had him,” she said.
“Doesn’t Arnold live off-post?”
She said yeah. She had hooked up with some guys though and she was partying with them, but they were lame-os. She asked if she could use my phone again.
When she was on the phone there was a guy I knew but didn’t know; he was wearing JNCOs and a wifebeater and a cowboy hat and was skinny. He came outside.
She said, “I’m on the phone.”
He lingered, but only a minute. She gave me the phone back.
“That was one of the lame-os,” she said. “Ugh.”
Her people took forever to come get her. We went to my room so she wouldn’t have to wait outside. She asked if she could smoke. We smoked cigarettes and talked about what kind of music she liked. She liked alternative rock.
She borrowed my phone again. Eventually her people came and got her. I waited half an hour; then I jerked off.
A few days later Arnold asked me if I’d had sex with his mom. “She said you’re really nice,” he said.
I said I hadn’t had sex with his mom but I thought she was a really nice lady.
Arnold liked that. He was good.