The Innocents

by Nathan Senthil

  That day they earned $38,000.

  Satisfied that he had made the bed without a crease, he shambled to the switchboard and turned off the AC. While he did, the hand-knotted Persian rug caressed his bare feet and tickled between his toes. He stopped and let the hedonistic pleasure travel up. Goosebumps blanketed his legs and hardened his morning wood into steel.

  The rug carried a price tag of $2,850 and was bought with the money he had earned from a job in San Francisco. The one where Ryatt had been forced to improvise. When they had bolted in through the entrance, to their dismay, they found the bank to be void of customers. No one to threaten the cashier with.

  Quick-witted and wild as ever, Ryatt acted upon the first idea that popped up in his head as a solution. He wedged his bag into the gap and began peppering the cashier’s safety window. Each shot cracked the see-through material. The eventual white blots on the “bulletproof” glass enlarged every third second; the cashier jerked involuntarily and could have possibly peed a little every fourth second. Her green eyes widened in horror when they espied that the slugs actually penetrated the glass at last and dropped on the other side. She quickly shut her ears and wailed at Ryatt to stop shooting.

  They only netted $10,200 that day, but the laughs Ryatt had, which lasted the 200 miles to Reno, were priceless. The stupid cashier hadn’t known that even though the bullets had penetrated the glass, they were as harmless as a foam ball from a Nerf gun. The glass was more “lethal energy absorbing” than “bulletproof”. This misnomer had helped Ryatt on more than one occasion.

  Ryatt never returned empty-handed from a job. He understood that if you could get inside the head of the cashier successfully, you had practically won the game. He would pick out a cashier who was middle-aged. The young ones tried to be heroes, and old-timers didn’t care enough about their lives to feel threatened. It was the people in-between, with various commitments hanging over their heads, who had the most to lose and would hold their lives most dear, at least for the sake of their dependents.

  Ryatt dragged his feet along the Persian rug, to a closet on the left, which he had aptly named ‘dirty closet’. On the far-right wall stood another closet, a walk-in one he called ‘clean closet’. It was three times as spacious as the dirty one. It contained clothes, sneakers, ties, watches, and boots, boasting the costliest price tag in the bedroom: $47,970.

  A proud smile escaped his lips. Ryatt had outdone himself.

  Ryatt followed just three simple rules for his phenomenal success in his profession:

  1) Show the cashiers murder, hence proving your shooting skills and determination.

  2) Get close, even if a glass is separating you both. This intimidated them as no normal person would look at a criminal that closely, especially a bank robber whose pistol had just torn away half the face of some innocent customer.

  3) Never let them think. Keep doing something that unnerves them. Shout or shoot. As fate would have it, Ryatt’s weapon was extremely loud, bringing everyone in its immediate vicinity onside very quickly.

  On one memorable occasion, a cashier in Staten Island just refused to knuckle under, even after Ryatt had demonstrated his shooting skills and determination. As soon as he dashed through the entrance, he had killed a security guard before the cashier’s eyes. He was an old black man with a lot of grit. This was where Ryatt had learned not to try to intimidate the elderly. Anyways, so when nothing worked, when the old man was visibly contemplating pressing the red button under his table, or maybe dropping a dye pack along with the cash, Ryatt stared through the white shattered glass, and warned, “No clowning and no tricks. And I will keep shooting until you give me what I want.”

  But this time, he hadn’t aimed at the cashier’s window. He pointed backwards at the gaggle of hostages. Not breaking eye contact with the old man, he shot at random angles. Leo cackled every time a bullet was ejected from the muzzle. As Ryatt squeezed the trigger, the old man’s demeanor changed. His half-closed, laid-back, you-don’t-shock-a-New-Yorker-with-violence eyes became big and glassy like a fiend high on meth.

  On Ryatt’s seventh shot, someone in the back screamed. A lady. The old man clasped his hands in front of his chest. Should be a big wound. Good. Some random citizen was hurt, and the resolute cashier would now think it was his fault. His adamance was to be blamed, the people would complain.

  Ryatt ejected the mag, pocketed it, and clipped on a new one.

  “Round two.” Ryatt lifted the gun again.

  “No!” the old man finally yielded.

  He opened a steel door behind him, and a minute later, handed Ryatt a full bag.

  When Ryatt turned to leave the booth, the old man called, “Stop!”

  Ryatt did.

  “Look around you,” the old man said, his voice shaky. “Look at the chaos you’ve caused.”

  Ryatt did, curiously. Thomas guarded his post, the front door, wearing his blue demon mask. Leo besieged the hostages. The security guard lay on the floor, missing a quarter of his head and leaking red. A woman crumpled in fetal position and held her torso, blood seeping between her fingers.

  The scene really was chaotic. But so what? Wasn’t chaos the natural order of how everything ended? The old man needed a lesson in entropy.

  “God’s watching you,” the old man said.

  That made Ryatt turn back. Hiding beneath his zombie mask, he stared at the old man. “Is he now, Gramps?”

  “You bet,” the old man said with so much conviction that Ryatt actually believed it.

  “Good. Then I hope that voyeur sees this.” Ryatt lifted his gloved hand and pointed a middle finger at the bullet-pocked ceiling.

  And that was how he had pulled his biggest robbery to date. $98,000.

  In order to live this good a life, Ryatt had done sixteen jobs, killed seventeen people, and robbed around $1,250,000, including his first two robberies in ‘81.

  As he reached above the dirty closet, his Giza cotton shirt lifted over the hem of his underwear. Manicured fingers found a key that he used to open its door.

  Displayed on the back wall was his threadbare NBA jersey, at the bottom lay his old shoes that suffered at least a pair of holes each. Literally rags to riches, Ryatt thought.

  The Desert Eagle, locked and loaded, and dozens of boxes of .44 rounds rested on the shelf to his left. Under it hung the gun with which he broke into this business. SW model 63 22LR. A special little guy.

  On his right was the tool he simply couldn’t put a price tag on. Yet it was the most invaluable thing he owned. A jackhammer with blackish brown stains on the tip of its chisel.

  Ryatt sat on his haunches, lifted the board on the floor, and recovered a bunch of magazines that had pictures of naked women on top. He understood his mom couldn’t see, but he considered it utterly disrespectful to have them lying around.

  He selected the one which had two girls, one black and one white, hugging each other erotically, their breasts pressing against each other like water balloons. This would do. With porno in one hand, he picked a rose-flavored lubricant and got up. He hadn’t used spit since his teenage years. Why would he have shower sex like a hobo when he lived like a king?

  Iris had tried to talk marriage to him, but he’d paid no heed. He didn’t think he’d ever felt love. Except the love he had for his mom and his best friends. Maybe he was scared, not willing to pull another woman into his life.

  And he didn’t dare break the cherry with the help of a prostitute. A hypochondriac like him would never live peacefully after that. However, his partners had dragged him along to a brothel once.

  Ryatt, in a room alone with the service-girl, begged her to lie to his friends that they did it.

  Ryatt and the girl came out from the room. Leo and Thomas both looked at him expectantly, because they knew he had never had sex. It was the argument they had used to coerce him into a brothel in the first place.

  “So?” Thomas asked.

  “I-it was wonderful,” Ryatt said, cursing
himself. His friends very well knew he stammered whenever he lied.

  Leo looked up at Thomas who shook his head disapprovingly. Leo burst out laughing. And the girl joined them too, massaging Ryatt’s tense shoulders. “It’s a’ight, lover boy. You good.”

  So yeah, Ryatt was the most wanted bank robber in the US, but also a twenty-seven-year-old virgin. A fact neither Thomas nor Leo failed to exploit.

  Sighing, he took the sex kit to the bathroom, readying himself to waste yet another million sperms into the shower drain.

  Chapter 13

  November 24, 1994. 01:39 P.M.

  Dabbing the towel on his shiny head, Ryatt unlocked the bathroom door and ambled to the clean closet. Leo, who had been losing hair in patches, had gone full bald a few years ago to conceal his condition. So Ryatt began shaving his beloved dreadlocks to support Leo. He had asked Thomas to do the same, but the narcissist was too proud of his looks to even consider it.

  Clad in a Gucci button down and jeans, $990 and $2,990 respectively, Ryatt exited his second-floor bedroom and walked down. In the dining room reposed a Brazilian rosewood table, complete with a rotatable marble top and chairs. $18,280. Made illegal before a few years, Ryatt knew he just had to get it, no matter the extra cost. It was the table he had imagined to be in his dining room when he was just a poor boy, peering into furniture shop windows.

  Sitting down, he looked at the sterling silverware. Each piece of cutlery had 925 inscribed under it, denoting its purity. The whole set was bought from Tiffany. $1,950. The money came from a job done in Baton Rouge.

  “Be right there, sweetie,” Iris said as she transferred hot gravy to a vessel.

  “No hurry, Ma. Need a hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure, Ma,” Ryatt said, pushing himself up. “What you want me to do?”

  “Finish everything I’ve cooked for you.”

  Ryatt, half-standing, chuckled and sat back down. “My favorite kind of work.”

  “Alright.” Iris sat at the head of the table and clasped her hands in front. “Just a moment, please.” Her lips mumbled a prayer. She knew Ryatt had an aversion to everything God related so she didn’t impose.

  Yawning noiselessly, Ryatt looked around. His eye settled on a framed photograph on the far wall in the hall. Iris and he were sitting on the steps of a church in the Vatican. Cross European tour, price tag $20,570.

  Beside the photo was a framed certificate that had been presented to his mom by the mayor of Detroit for actively participating in cleaning up the city. The ‘Lawrence Fund’ jar had ballooned and become ‘Lawrence Foundation’, as Iris had pumped Ryatt’s earnings into it. She reached out to young boys on the streets, rescued them from drugs and gangs, then got them enrolled in schools in other parts of the country where they could do well.

  Ryatt pleaded with her to stop wasting the money. And she had, in an uncharacteristic snit, argued with Ryatt.

  She had said, “What good is money?”

  “Um… you buy houses, cars, good food, comfortable beds.” Remembering Iris’s wish of getting him married, he played dirty. “And also, girls love a successful man.”

  “You buy the most luxurious bed, but you can only sleep for the maximum of eight hours. You buy a whole farm of wheat, vegetables, and fruits, you can only eat what your tummy can hold. And do you really want to be with a person who is impressed by your success, rather than your personality? And even then, you impress one thousand girls with your money, the cars, and designer attire, but you can only have coitus for a limited time…”

  Ryatt coughed and spluttered the milk he had been drinking.

  “… money isn’t going to buy you happiness. If money is synonymous with contentment, why do so many rich and famous people kill themselves?”

  “I don’t know, Ma. It’s really hard to earn. If I’d known you were gonna blow off all the dough, I’d have stopped working long ago and lived off what I’ve saved.”

  “No son of mine is going to retire young and slack. That’s irresponsible. God has given you certain abilities to become successful. Even if you are not going to make use of it for yourself, you owe it to the people down on their luck.”

  Ryatt had almost rolled his eyes, but stopped as if his mom could see it. He never treated her like a blind person. His heart would never accept it. Poor Iris was better off without the knowledge that it wasn’t God that gave Ryatt the abilities he used to become rich. It was his ex-employee downstairs.

  “After a certain amount,” Iris continued, “money is just a unit in the bank. Meaningless digits. Do you want to spend your life adding zeros behind that digit, just stacking on void after void, paradoxically hoping for fulfillment? Or do you want to make a change?”

  Ryatt liked to go with the first option, but he knew better than to tell his mom that.

  “But Ma…”

  “Will you not listen to your mom?” Iris had said.

  She had never asked him this question before. Ryatt felt guilty for talking back. He just loved his mom too much to even have this silly conversation. So what if she wanted to spend it all on children on the verge of becoming criminals? Fine.

  “Let’s dig in,” Iris said, crossing herself.

  “Finally.” Ryatt regarded the contents on the table. A 16-pound turkey, stuffing both traditional and Cajun, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean Casserole, ham, cranberries, and of course, pumpkin pie. $45.20. This money came from a job in Chicago they did last week. Just one dead.

  Killing people and living a good life from the profits didn’t bother Ryatt in the least. He was a man and a man’s primary objective was what it had always been: to provide. Ever since men dwelled in caves, they put themselves in constant danger, slaughtering their way to the top of the food chain.

  As Iris carved the turkey, Ryatt watched the fork being inserted into the glistening meat and his mind jumped to Bugsy. The last he heard, Bugsy was still alive. The new title the Detroit Alliance bestowed upon him was Don but on the street, he was known as Mr. Scarecrow, not Mr. Hat.

  Because doctors had to amputate his arms near the shoulders and legs near his hip.

  Befitting but funny monikers aside, he was still the head of the Detroit Alliance. With that came a lot of power and resources, most of which Bugsy diverted to one task: to identify Lolly. But as Ryatt had hid himself pretty well, both before and after the incident, no one was able to find him or his friends.

  Thomas had once asked Ryatt why he used the zombie mask Bugsy gave him. Ryatt answered, “So that he knows the same kid who made him a cripple is now the greatest bank robber in North America. It’ll piss him off beyond imagination.”

  Ryatt shoved the first forkful into his mouth and thought about how Bugsy would have to pay someone to feed him his Thanksgiving meal. Not just that, he needed assistance for everything else too. That image warmed his heart, and a smile found its way to his lips. Like Iris said, maybe money wasn’t everything.

  “How’s your team doing?” Iris asked.

  “Good, Ma. They’re getting ready for the Christmas season.” Ryatt didn’t stutter when lying because he knew she always brought up his work whenever he was home. So he had prepared himself for her questions pertaining to that.

  Ryatt had told her that he did not participate in the field anymore. He was now an assistant manager. People talked about football players, coaches, even managers, but not about assistant managers.

  “I heard that your team made good headway in the tournaments,” Iris said.

  “Yes, Ma. But I’m planning to change teams,” Ryatt said. If the team became too famous, then Ryatt ran the risk of being found out.

  “Why? They give you good benefits.”

  “We just lost an important match,” Ryatt lied again, feeling guilty because she would now try her absolute best to do her motherly bit.

  “Failure is like a cement and every success is like a brick.”

  “Cement and bricks?”

  “Even if you have more
than enough bricks to build a house, without the lessons that failure would have otherwise taught you, the wall will inevitably collapse in the long run and crush you. Dead under the weight of your own success. All you need to do is look at these teenage pop stars and millionaires and their meltdowns. They haven’t had the chance to become strong enough to handle success. Failure gives you character. It burns you, melts you, and molds you into a strong person who is able to handle the eventual, colossal success. Failure pressurizes you for a long time, but in the end, it makes you the best version of yourself.”

  Ryatt felt guilty even more. She was bestowing her wisdom upon someone who would never use it.

  He said in a tired tone, “Thanks, Ma. But I don’t wanna talk about work,” acting as if he was stressed and forlorn.

  Iris said, “You’re not gonna find a solution to your problem ducking or pouting. Nothing good comes out of sadness and self-pity. A happy brain is a fertile brain. But sure, let’s digress if it’s spoiling your holidays.”

  They both talked about her. She told him that the ‘Lawrence Foundation’ was attracting donors from around the city. This fall, she was expecting to send at least three boys to college. And her shop, which she still ran in the same neighborhood from the same disgusting building that used to be their home, did well. That neighborhood was notorious for crime, but she said that no one even thought about robbing Iris. Ryatt knew that because she was sort of like a beacon for unfortunate people living there.

  When they finished eating, Iris collected the vessels and went to the kitchen. She didn’t accept Ryatt’s offer to lend her a hand. Not like Iris needed help. Actually, she could take better care of herself. Her sense of place was far better than inborn blind people.

  He followed her in. As he watched her load the silverware into the dishwasher, his brain attached price tags to all the items inside their kitchen.

  Out of the blue, she said, “That Leo is trouble.”

  “I know, Ma. Won’t be friends with him no more,” Ryatt said. One of the oldest but most meaningless lies he had been telling her. And Iris knew it was a lie. But what could Ryatt do? He neither had the courage to challenge his mom nor the heart to abandon Leo.