“Uh!” I said. “Typewriter repairman going in.”
“What say?”
“Typewriter repairman,” I repeated; and immediately could have bit my tongue. I’d made the announcement without thinking, partly because it was so rare for anything at all to happen over there at the bank, but mostly because I really didn’t want to know what Billy had done to the naked man in the woods. I was identifying too completely.
“Typewriter repairman,” he said, finally understanding, and when I glanced at him he was laboriously printing the information in the notebook in his large childlike hand, misspelling magnificently and concentrating on every curve and every straight line. A pink tongue-tip protruded from a corner of his mouth, like a flower on a slag-heap.
It was too late. I knew at once the typewriter repairman was our route into the bank, and I also knew there was no way now to stop the information from getting back to Joe Maslocki and the rest. If only I’d kept my mouth shut Billy, absorbed in the story he was telling, would never have noticed the typewriter repairman at all. But I’d told him about it, and he was writing it down, and in the fullness of time the rest of the group would also know. My last hope was gone, and I’d done it to myself.
If only he wouldn’t think to write down the name of the company.
He said, “What’s the name on the fella’s truck?” Shit fuck. I looked at the Ford Econoline van out in front of the bank, reading the company name emblazoned there. Did I dare lie? No, I did not dare lie. “Twin Cities Typewriter,” I said.
“Twin,” he said, and wrote it with all the grace and speed of someone etching his initials on cast iron with a rock. “Ci—” he said. “—tieeeees,” he said.
While he was working his way through typewriter, the last nail was hammered into my coffin. “Here he comes out,” I said, despairing, all hope gone. “He’s carrying a typewriter.”
“Hee hee,” Billy said. Even he knew what it meant. “Wait till the boys hear about this.”
I was willing to wait forever. I watched the repairman put the typewriter away in the back of his truck, then get behind the wheel and drive away. Billy kept hee-heeing.
I felt so miserable that I forgot and took a sip of the coffee.
17
There was a certain morbid fascination in watching the gang put the pieces of the robbery together. Like, no doubt, the condemned man gazing out his cell window as the scaffold is being built.
I lived the next several days in a combined state of dulled terror and fatalistic interest. The caper movies I’d seen over the years had led me to understand that a major robbery was a complicated affair, and yet the movies had somehow glided over those complications; if a gang needed a truck, or a centrifuge, or a Warsaw telephone directory, they simply got one between scenes, when no one was looking. The truth I was living turned out to be equally complicated, but much more difficult.
There were so many elements to the thing. Either some way had to be found to borrow a truck from Twin Cities Typewriter on the afternoon of the robbery, or some other Ford Econoline van would have to be stolen and stored and repainted with Twin Cities’ name and colors. A uniform had to be found for Eddie Troyn to match the uniforms worn by the bank guards. The names and addresses and home phone numbers of the late-staying bank employees had to be learned, to cut down the possibility of a double-cross—a teller, for instance, phoning police headquarters rather than his wife. A typewriter had to be picked up somewhere for delivery to the bank, and it had to be the same color and make as all the other typewriters used there.
Then there was the laser. That was another entire robbery in itself, as major in its own way as the bank job. And, in fact, even more frightening; forcing entry into a bank began to seem like kid stuff in comparison with breaking into an Army storage depot patrolled by rifle-toting soldiers. So Camp Quattatunk had to be cased, more uniforms had to be obtained, the specific location of the laser had to be determined, a getaway vehicle had to be provided for, and a complete game plan had to be organized.
It turned out that Phil Giffin, Joe Maslocki, Billy Glinn, and Jerry Bogentrodder all had experience in this line of work—were in fact professionals at it. Phil and Billy were both in Stonevelt because of capers that hadn’t quite worked out—another cheerful thought—while Joe and Jerry had been sent up for activities outside their professional careers: manslaughter during a barroom argument on Joe’s part, check-kiting during a slack robbery season for Jerry. Max Nolan’s professional qualifications were more along the line of burglary and credit card thievery, Bob Dombey it turned out was a forger by trade, and Eddie Troyn never quite got around to mentioning what it was that had brought him here. As for me, the role I was called on to play was that of general thug, a utility hoodlum with more of a social and educational veneer than most. All of the members of the group subscribed to the theory that the toughest guys are the ones who brag about it the least, which I suppose made me the toughest tough guy any of them had ever met in their lives. I did no bragging at all.
But I did play an ongoing role in the robbery preparations. I followed the bank manager’s secretary home one evening to get her address, then hung around and got the family’s last name from the mailbox. I was not present when Max Nolan bought the Minox camera with the stolen MasterCharge card, but I was exceedingly present when Phil Giffin used it to make an interminable photographic essay of the interior of the bank. I was along to shield him from curious eyes that time, though he did complain later that I tended to spend most of my time shielding him from the things he was trying to take pictures of. There were three or four pretty good pictures of me when we got them all developed, but Phil didn’t offer them to me and I didn’t feel I should ask, so I never did get them.
I was also present to stand chickee when Max Nolan burgled the appliance store late one night to steal a beige Smith-Corona electric typewriter, and he felt I was so assured and helpful on that little sting that he chose me to be his partner two nights later when he broke into the Army-Navy store for military uniforms. Standing out on the sidewalk both those nights, watching the flashlight flicker here and there in the depths of the store, cowering as the occasional late automobile drove by, I shivered and my teeth chattered and it was not at all from the cold.
During this same time, my efforts to rehabilitate myself as a practical joker and booby-trap setter went into total decline. Gimmicks and snaffles poured from me like some sort of nervous tic, bedeviling my fellow prisoners like a sudden outgrowth of poison ivy. Coffee cups when lifted turned out to have no bottom, or the sugar put in them was salt. Ankle-high cords mined the hallways. I learned that the hot and cold water lines to the main shower room could be reversed and did so on Thursday morning, just in time for the Joy Boys. Benches in the mess hall turned out to have loose screws holding them together, so that when ten men sat down the bench would drop with a clatter and a chorus of startled cries. Sink faucets were plugged so that water didn’t run down into the sink but shot straight out onto the belt of the man turning the tap on. Floors were greased, doorknobs were soaped, milk pitchers in the mess hall were buttered; I’ve seen a half-full milk pitcher spurt from the hand of the man trying to hold it, sail up and out into the air, arch over the flinching man on the other side, and land in a bowl of green beans on the next table.
Of course there were occasional fights, loud recriminations, every once in a while some angry soul dripping water or ketchup or egg yolk yelling that the joint was infested with a practical joker, but the place was just too large for my activities to become generally noticeable. The prison population was nearly six thousand, and even in a good week I couldn’t expect to drench, draw or drop more than a hundred of them—usually less than half that number. And not every one of my victims realized he’d been deliberately attacked; a man trying in vain to open a greased doorknob, for instance, was more likely to curse the stupidity or dirtiness of the person preceding him than to think this gook had been put on here on purpose.
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p; I also left my fellow bank robbers strictly alone. I’d done a few things to them in the beginning, but my terror of the robbery had spilled over into a general fear of the men planning to commit it. I decided to be discreet for once, and did none of my little tricks anywhere around the gym. All I needed was for Phil Giffin, say, to start looking for a practical joker, and to talk to some trusty from the warden’s office who might know the truth about me, and I wouldn’t have to worry about bank robbery or anything else ever again.
On the following Saturday, three days before the robbery, Max and I double dated again, this time with another pair of girls, whose names were not Mary Edna or Dotty. I have no idea who they were, what they looked like, what they did for a living, or anything else about them. I was in a kind of immobile frenzy, unable to think about anything other than the steps leading to the robbery or my string of little land mines. After the inevitable double feature—I retained no memory of either movie—we went to the Riviera for the inevitable hamburgers and beer, and all at once I began, in a loud and cheerful and obnoxious voice, to tell dirty jokes. I never tell dirty jokes, and I was amazed at how many of them it turned out I knew. The girls and Max—and probably everybody else in the place, too—seemed stunned by me, but I just went on recounting my stories, whether I was rewarded with hollow laughter or not. I had no idea what I was doing, but I’d lost control a long time ago so I just sat there and let it happen.
Finally I got to take the girl home. Remembering Mary Edna, I ordered myself to kiss her, because I didn’t want her to feel slighted or insulted. But when the time came, she repulsed me with something like real panic, and fled into her house without even giving me the ritual line about having had a real good time. My dirty jokes, I decided, must have convinced her I was a mad sex fiend rapist. I wanted to feel bad about that, but walking back to the Dombey house all I could think about was that three days from now I was going to become a bank robber.
The next day, when Max asked me how I’d made out, he informed me that his date had become sexually inflamed by my stories and that they had had intercourse first in a parked car on the way to her place and then again on the living-room sofa once he got her home. So you never know.
18
As if I didn’t have troubles enough, I happen to be a forty-two long. So on Monday afternoon, two days after my double date with Max and one day before the scheduled bank robbery, I was the one who put on the other uniform Max had stolen from the Army-Navy store and joined Eddie Troyn to be the inside men in the great laser caper.
Eddie had been spending a lot of time out at the camp this past week. Partly of course it was to get the lay of the land, but I think also it was partly nostalgia; Eddie liked Camp Quattatunk, he liked walking around an Army base with a Captain’s uniform on, he liked giving and receiving salutes, he liked dropping into the Officer’s Club and having a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks and signing the bill ‘Captain Robinson.’ (“There isn’t an Army base in the country,” he explained to me, “that doesn’t have at least one Captain Robinson assigned to it.”)
I, on the other hand, was not happy at all. I was in the uniform of a First Lieutenant, but my own Army experience a dozen years ago as a draftee had been strictly limited to the life of the enlisted man and I didn’t feel at all comfortable in the role of officer. I was positive I would make a social or military gaffe, some immediate blunder that would tell any real officer I was a fake and an impostor and probably a Russian spy.
Max had provided us with identification, in what I had to admit was a clever way. Eddie and I, applying at the bank where we had our checking accounts, first obtained credit cards bearing our photographs. Then Max, who considered himself an expert in altering and adapting credit cards, altered these, with heat and colored ink and the assistance of Bob Dombey to do the tricky lettering, into Army ID cards that Eddie decreed were “certainly good enough.” They didn’t look good enough to me, but Eddie insisted no one would look closely. The card, he pointed out, would stay inside one of the scratchy plasticene pockets in my wallet, and all I’d ever have to do would be flash it at someone disposed already to believe in it. “The color is close enough,” he said, “the size is right, the photograph is accurate, the general appearance is appropriate. That’s all we need.”
Maybe. But all I could think was, I wouldn’t be shot on Tuesday as a bank robber, I’d be shot on Monday as a spy.
There was a free Army bus only for Camp Quattatunk personnel that went out to the base from downtown Stonevelt every hour on the hour, seven A.M. till midnight. We boarded the bus at five in the afternoon, Eddie matter-of-factly and me with terror in my heart, and the driver barely glanced at our identification. We shared a seat away from the other passengers, and all too soon the bus pulled away from the curb and joined the ebb of rush-hour traffic.
I seemed to be blinking a lot. I kept looking out the window at the happy Christmas shoppers strolling along the sidewalks. None of them were penitentiary prisoners, none of them were escapees, none of them were impostors in Army uniforms, none of them were on the verge of becoming bank robbers, none of them were compulsive practical jokers, and none of them were named Harry Künt with or without an umlaut. To be any one of those things would be disheartening, and I was all of them.
The bus very soon left the town of Stonevelt and its rush hour behind and we traveled for a while on a small curving road through open countryside, mostly either apple orchards or uncleared forest, like alternating groups of neat and unruly children. There was an occasional farmhouse, an occasional roadhouse, an occasional grubby mobile home mounted on concrete blocks. There was little traffic once we were clear of town, all of it faster than the bus, a big-shouldered hulking lumbering thing in Army brown, looking like an ancient school-bus that had been drafted by mistake.
Nevertheless, slow or not, inevitably it did reach Camp Quattatunk. My first indication of our arrival was the sudden high metal fence topped by barbed wire that appeared on the right side of the road, cutting us off from thick pine woods. Through the screen of pine needles I glimpsed an occasional building in tan or light green, set well back from the road. At one point I seemed also to see a row of dark-colored tanks, all with their snouts pointing my way. Much more clearly I could see the red-and-white signs on the fence itself, warning the civilian world that the strands of barbed wire were electrified.
I felt they didn’t want me there. I felt it was a mistake of me to intrude.
The bus slowed at the entrance gate, but didn’t stop. We had already showed our identification to the driver, and so wouldn’t have to show it to anyone else to gain entry to the camp. It had been Eddie’s contention that the bus driver, since he was physically removed from the camp at the time of seeing our identification, would be psychologically inclined to be more lax about ID cards than the MPs manning the gate, and he had turned out to be right. Now if only he was also right about everything else connected with this base there was just a chance we would get away with tonight’s burglary.
Though not tomorrow’s robbery. Was I going to go through with it? Would I actually walk into that bank tomorrow afternoon with these desperate criminals? If I ran away I would have to run away from the prison as well and become a hunted escapee, a role I doubted I was suited to. I would never again be able to use my rightful name, which in my case wasn’t an entirely unmixed curse, but I just couldn’t see myself as a successful fugitive. The question came down to a choice between fugitive and bank robber, and just which of those roles would I be the least ridiculous in. So far, I hadn’t found a satisfactory answer.
And I was, in any event, about to commit my second felony, assuming the milk box trick to have been the first. But this was much more serious than any stunt with milk box and note; this was the United States Army.
Camp Quattatunk. The bus, waved through the main gate by a white-helmeted MP, had entered a neat but unreal community, looking like some science fiction parody of the Norman Rockwell type of small town. There were
well-tended black-top streets, concrete sidewalks, neat lawns, shapely small trees, ordinary lampposts and stop signs. But the buildings were all large dull rectangles, one or two stories high, all clapboard, all with the same kind of windows, all painted either tan or light green. Walks were lined with whitewashed rocks, there was no litter anywhere, and the occasional pedestrian—mostly neatly uniformed military men, plus a few neatly dressed civilians—seemed more like wind-up toys than human beings. It was a model train layout, a miniature of itself. Only the automobiles, the few of them moving on the streets and the batches of them tucked away in parking lots that I caught glimpses of between buildings, hinted at reality. Bulging or beetled, shiny or rust-pocked, they showed more variety and liveliness than everything else in the place combined. I never thought I’d be anywhere that an automobile would look more natural than a tree, but the Army had managed it; Stonevelt Penitentiary was a sprawling, teeming human beehive by comparison.
The bus drove three blocks through this bloodless complex and stopped before a larger building than any of the others: three stories high, light green clapboard, same windows, whitewashed rocks flanking the path, one plane tree centered on each side of the crewcut lawn, large wooden sign out by the sidewalk telling us this was Headquarters of the 2137 NorBomComDak, Ninth Army, General Lester B. Winterhilf, Commandant.
We joined the other debusing passengers, and on the sidewalk Eddie looked around and said, “We might as well wait in the Officer’s Club.”
Fine. If I was about to be shot as a spy, I wanted my last meal to be a martini.
We walked two blocks through this architect’s rendering, me carefully avoiding the eyes of everybody we passed, certain that some colonel, some master sergeant, even some raw new recruit, would suddenly stop, stare, point at me and yell, “You’re no Lieutenant!” I was only here because this damned uniform was my size, yet it seemed badly fitted; the blouse collar was too big and sleeves too short, the shirt was too small, the trouser legs too long. I couldn’t decide if my garrison cap felt too large or too small, but I was sure I was wearing it wrong—tilted too far forward, or possibly too far back.
Help I Am Being Held Prisoner Page 9