by Lynn Kostoff
Evelyn puts in ten dollars of regular. Jimmy makes his call. He comes back out of the store tapping a fresh pack of cigarettes against his wrist and climbs into the car. Evelyn notices, for the first time, he’s got on a new white shirt and a new pair of jeans. He’s clean-shaven, and his hair has grown out enough that there’s something resembling a part running northwest of the stubborn widow’s peak.
“Was Don upset?” Evelyn asks. She waits for an opening and then punches back onto 17 North.
“He’ll live.” Jimmy thumbs the lighter. “He’s got this thing he wants me to go in on. The money sounds okay, but the problem is, he got the idea from one of his kids—Gabriella, I think—and she’s five years old.”
“Does that mean you aren’t going to do it?” Evelyn asks.
“I don’t know.” The lighter pops, and Jimmy pulls it out and jabs at the end of his cigarette. “I don’t have all the details yet. And like I said, the money’s not bad.”
The foothills lengthen. They’re at the edge of the Mogollon Rim, about to start a two-thousand-foot ascent. The outcroppings of rock grow larger, more lunar, and eventually loom into jagged mountains and massive rock formations that deepen in color, bands of mauve and orange and pink and ocher. The air starts to thin. The sky tilts.
Evelyn can smell the sunscreen on her bare arms and shoulders. A warm lazy coconut smell.
She’s wearing her favorite summer dress, loose and light blue and dotted with small red flowers. She’s driving barefoot. It’s the heart of the morning.
She feels good and she feels pretty, and right now that’s enough, more than enough.
It’s been over six weeks since Richard had gone to the convention in Atlanta, and Evelyn has continued to meet Jimmy every chance she gets, but the avalanche of self-recrimination and remorse she’s been expecting just hasn’t arrived. Evelyn has been looking for signs, the equivalent of loose rocks, the unexpected shifts, that would signal or trigger a slide, but nothing’s happened, and she’s discovering what the old Evelyn Coates, so tied to duty and the belief she was responsible for everyone’s happiness and well-being, never understood: that sometimes there’s more ego behind embracing and doing what you believe is expected of you than in pursuing and living out your desires.
She’s taken a lover.
She has no excuses. She knows that. But she’s not looking for any either. Not anymore.
What she wants instead are the hotel room in Prescott and how they will fill it and the heat and light of this day, the way the sun bakes the flesh and the dear, dean fall of light on the palo verde trees in the washes and on the slopes, the simple surprise of green in the middle of so much rock and desert, and the larger surprise after they reach the summit of the rim and start across the wide plateau that resembles a misplaced piece of the Great Plains, some lost corner of Nebraska or Kansas, herds of Angus and Herefords, a wide, flat blue sky, the grass combed by the wind.
Evelyn looks over at Jimmy and smiles.
“We could just keep going,” he says.
“Sure,” she says. “I’ll drive. You navigate. Where do you want? How about Cleveland? It’s nineteen hundred miles. Or Miami, maybe? It clocks in at around twenty-four hundred. New York. It’s twenty-five hundred.”
“I was thinking Helena,” Jimmy says.
“Might as well go to Cleveland,” Evelyn says. “At least the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is there.”
Jimmy lights a cigarette and looks away for a moment. “I mean it,” he says finally. “We could just skip the hotel, and you could blow off that dinner tonight, and we could just keep going. What’s to stop us?”
Evelyn plays along. “Are you saying you want to run off with me?”
He nods. “To Helena.”
Evelyn smiles again and changes lanes, passing a dark green minivan loaded with family. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll run off to Helena with you on one condition.”
“What?”
Evelyn says the first thing that comes into her head. “We’ll run off, and I’ll stay with you until you quit making me laugh or come. Whichever happens first.”
“Fair enough,” Jimmy says.
He nods one time too many, and Evelyn suddenly realizes it isn’t a game, that he’s been serious the whole time.
They’re fourteen miles outside of Prescott.
Jimmy looks over at her and then digs a penny out of the pocket of his jeans and tosses it on the dash. It catches the sun in a bright coppery flash. He then reaches over and gently touches her right temple with his index finger.
“Okay,” Evelyn says, letting out her breath. Her chest is tight. “Is what we have so bad? What’s wrong with keeping things like they are?”
Jimmy rubs his cheek. “I need to get out of Phoenix. Too much past and too much looking over the shoulder.”
He says something else that Evelyn doesn’t catch.
“I said I don’t like having to share you either, okay?” Jimmy repeats and looks away.
“Fair enough,” Evelyn says quietly.
The road widens to five lanes, and they leave the high-chaparral country and start the final leg to Prescott. The scrub pines disappear, replaced by stands that are thicker and deeper in color and sweep the hillsides, and it’s not long before Evelyn can see the sandstone-red lines of the Sheraton sitting atop one of the buttes overlooking the city.
She knows she should be thinking of practicalities and consequences, the price tag on desire, the long reach of her wedding vows, and the life she and Richard have made, a good durable life by anyone’s standards, and of the folly of doing anything that would threaten to dismantle it completely.
But she’s not.
Instead she’s thinking about the moment it all started, her reaching over and pulling down Jimmy’s mask in the middle of the robbery of the Tempe branch of Frontier Cleaners, and she’s thinking that sometimes folly is all we have, the only thing that matters or that we can truly call our own.
TWENTY-THREE
The Cascade Diner on Van Buren is your basic Crisco Palace, a grease-sheathed throwback to the ‘50s, a sputtering constellation of neon spelling its name on the sign out front, and inside, cracked leather seats mended with electrical tape, yellowed Formica, slow-motion ceiling fans, heel-worn red-and-white checked linoleum, and large, wide windows slanted like car windshields.
And lots of flies making wing music.
Jimmy and Don Ruger take a window seat. Don had insisted on the Cascade since he’s pals with the owner, Walt, who at the conclusion of a meal invariably tells Don his money’s no good and makes a show of tearing the tab in half and dropping it in the trash.
Walt’s the double-o—owner and operator—of the Cascade and is a short, stocky guy with a black shoe-polish pompadour and a face like an old catcher’s mitt and a tattoo with BATAAN AND BACK on his right forearm. He and Don are grayhound fiends and hit the tracks a couple times a week.
Walt comes over to discuss last night’s trifecta and lament the legs of Silver Lining in the final stretch and then takes their orders, Don going with the double-cheeseburger combo and Jimmy sticking to coffee and a glass of ice water.
“How much the trifecta set you back?” Jimmy asks after Walt leaves.
“Three hundred and change,” Don says. He’s got a fresh bandage on the meaty part of his hand at the base of his thumb, a future scar that will join the others, the raised white lines on either hand from running the blades for going on fifteen years at Renzler’s Meats.
“You can’t ever tell about the legs,” Don adds. “When they’ll start to go. Silver Lining looked good.”
“About tonight,” Jimmy says.
Don holds up his index finger and then reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a thin crumpled magazine. He tries smoothening out the pages but finally gives up and slides the thing over to Jimmy.
“You didn’t believe me,” Don says, “so now you can see for yourself.”
Jimmy’s about to open the magazine when Walt co
mes over with their order. He’s got a plastic fly swatter attached to one of his belt loops. Jimmy figures you survive the Bataan Death March, you’re not going to let a few health code violations get in your way when you’re frying burgers.
Or making coffee for that matter. Jimmy had ordered straight black, figuring that was the safest bet, but the cup Walt’s poured him has a faint greenish cast even after some vigorous stirring.
Don attacks his double cheeseburger and gives Walt a thumbs-up. Walt, satisfied, nods and heads back to the kitchen. Don pours ketchup next to a mound of fries that look like they’ve been shellacked.
He picks one up and points with it at the magazine. “Go on and see for yourself,” he says and smiles.
It’s the same smile Jimmy remembers from the third grade, when he first met Don and they became buddies. The same smile when Don married Teresa, both of them sixteen. The same smile when the kids started, a boy, two girls, and the twins. The same smile when they’ve had a few rounds at the Chute. The same smile when Don’s laid down another of his bets. The same smile when Jimmy had told Don about his plans to run off with Evelyn.
Jimmy looking at the smile, but it’s suddenly hard to recognize the rest of the man around it. He’s a guy who’s saddle-bagged at the waist and jowls and wearing a new pair of bifocals. He’s a guy with fine streaks of gray in his hair and whose eyes don’t quite match the smile anymore.
And Jimmy’s suddenly wondering who Don sees when he looks across the table.
Jimmy almost takes a sip of coffee, stops himself, and starts flipping through the magazine.
The figures match, just like Don said.
If the inventory’s there, Jimmy’s share will be enough scratch to get him to Helena. He doesn’t want Evelyn paying his way. That’s not how he wants to start things off. Leon’s buddy came through with the bartending job. He’s expecting Jimmy in a week to ten days.
Jimmy’s the one smiling now. Thinking of the job, Evelyn and him in Helena.
His brother can have the farmhouse and the Dobbins parcel. The dry-cleaning chain. The house in Scottsdale. He can have it all. But not Evelyn. She’s going with Jimmy.
“Check out page nineteen,” Don says. “Brownie the Brown Bear, first generation and hang tags.”
What the hell, Jimmy thinks. Knocking over a toy store for a Beanie Baby collection makes as much sense as boosting a Lexus for a chop shop. Same principle. People will put down green for anything.
That’s why breaking and entering was invented.
Jimmy figures his teachers, Mom, and Richard had been right all along. There must be something missing in him. He’s never wanted things bad enough to work for them. He knows he’s supposed to want them, but it never worked out that way. The idea of accumulating a bunch of things just never held any juice for him. That’s why it was so easy to take them. Most people had more than they needed anyway, and they always wanted more, and Jimmy basically filled the gap between the attic and the yard sale.
Anything else you had your insurance.
Don finishes his burger and fries and then takes one of his napkins and starts cleaning his glasses.
“What do you think?” he asks Jimmy.
“I’m thinking any time you can ask and get forty-three hundred dollars for Brownie or twenty-four hundred dollars for Humphrey the Camel, you’re begging to be taken.”
Don nods, smiles, and tells Jimmy that Pete Samoa can fence out the Beanies at top dollar to a collector in San Diego.
“He’s also got someone interested in Furbys,” Don says.
When Don and Jimmy get to the register, Walt, true to form, takes the tab and rips it in half and tells Don his money’s no good. He and Don make plans to hit the track Friday. Walt says he’s been hearing some good things about two grays, Aces High and About Time.
Jimmy and Don get in the white Renzler’s Meats delivery truck and head for Scottsdale. The place they’re going to hit is called The Toy Box and is one of the stores in a small upscale strip mall on Indian School Road.
The strip’s anchored by a Mexican restaurant called Manny’s, and Don’s wife’s cousin works there. Don’s arranged for him to let them in the rear entrance and into the restaurant’s storeroom whose west wall contains the main access to the ductwork for the strip mall’s heating and cooling system.
“I was over there earlier in the day,” Don says. “The crew came in and ripped out and carted off all the old ductwork. They’re going to start installing the new stuff tomorrow.”
Don turns his head and winks. “Nothing in that crawl space to get in our way tonight. You cut through the ceiling, drop into the Toy Box, and start filling bags. I got all the tools we need in the back of the truck.”
“What’s Pete’s cut on this?”
“He wanted twenty-five percent, but settled for twenty.”
“And Teresa’s cousin?”
“Fifty bucks,” Don says. “All he’s got to do is open a door and walk away.”
Don catches a traffic light on the yellow. “You can take out Happy the Hippo, Derby the Horse, Bronty the Brontosaurus, and Bones the Dog from my end when we split. They’re the ones I promised I’d get Gabriel and Gabriella.”
Jimmy waves that one off and lights a cigarette. He tells Don the Beanies will be his going-away gift to the twins.
“And my going away will be Teresa’s present,” Jimmy says. It’s going on decades of ducking Teresa’s wrath whenever he’s in the vicinity.
“You never were real good at figuring out Teresa,” Don says. “She gets mad when she gets worried, and she only gets worried when she cares about someone.” Don thumps the wheel and laughs. “She’s been lighting a candle for you, the Wednesday night Mass, going on ten years now.”
“You’re shitting me,” Jimmy says.
“Every Wednesday,” Don says. “No lie.”
“What’s she going to say when you come home with these Beanie things and the cash?”
“She’ll go ballistic for a while,” Don says, “but the thing is, with Teresa, she’ll only ask questions so far, and that’s it. The rest she takes to Father Domínguez. She’ll cool off in a day or two.”
Don slows as they approach the strip mall. It’s got a fancy central facade just below the roofline holding the name of the place, East End, and below that the names of the six shops. There’s a row of beavertail cacti in a bed of white luckystones along the street and brick planters full of hibiscus fronting the stores. There’s a hair salon, a boutique, a computer outlet, a pet accessories shop, then the toy store, and the Mexican restaurant. The restaurant’s the only place open.
Don drives around back and parks along the rear wall. There’s a small parking lot for employees and one halogen light. Beyond it is an empty lot that eventually runs into the back of a convenience store fronting the next north-south street. Everything’s nice and quiet.
Don checks his watch and says Teresa’s cousin goes on break in about five minutes. He gets out and unlocks the rear doors of the truck. He’s got an extension ladder, an electric saw, two flashlights, some extension cords, and a couple of boxes of jumbo plastic bags stashed there.
Jimmy lights a cigarette and looks around. “What about the noise when we start cutting?”
“Roberto says they got fans going all over the restaurant until the air’s fixed. That ought to help cover the worst of the noise. Besides, it shouldn’t take long with the saw anyway.”
A minute later, just as Jimmy’s flicking the cigarette away, the door opens, and Roberto pokes his head out and spots Don. Roberto opens the door wider and disengages the deadbolt. He gives Don a hug. Jimmy figures Roberto for early twenties. He’s tall and thin and working mightily on a mustache.
When Don takes out the fifty, Roberto tells him it’s not necessary for such a small favor, but Don sticks the bill in the breast pocket of Roberto’s white shirt and tells him a young guy can always use some walking-around money.
Don and Jimmy gather the tools, and onc
e they’re inside the door, the storeroom’s off to their right through another door that’s left unlocked until closing. Above the west corner of the storeroom is the open hole that normally would hold a grated ceiling panel. The air-conditioning crew hadn’t bothered to replace it. Jimmy sets up the extension ladder and climbs up with the saw and flashlights into the crawl space running the length of the strip mall and then leans over and takes the rest of the stuff Don’s carrying.
Don’s already red-faced and winded by the time he clears the lip of the hole. He squeezes past Jimmy, and Jimmy reaches down and snags the ladder. It’s a tight fit, but he drops the extension, shortening it, and is just able to angle it through the opening.
The crawl space is three and a half feet high, and the flooring is new plywood, which hasn’t been nailed down yet. The air’s close and hot, and Jimmy’s pretty much soaked through his shirt by the time they’re above the toy store.
Don locates an outlet along the wall with his flashlight and plugs in the saw.
Jimmy pulls back the plywood, exposing the rafters, then takes the saw and crawls out and begins cutting a long rectangular hole in the three feet of space between each rafter. Within the confines of the crawl space, the saw roars like a plane engine, and Jimmy’s breathing sawdust and plaster.
Don slides the ladder between the rafters, and Jimmy again worries the angle, and when he has enough of it through, he opens the extension and pulls up while the lower half falls and then locks into place.
Don tosses over the two boxes of trash bags, and Jimmy tucks the flashlight under his arm and climbs down into the Toy Box.
The front blinds are drawn, so Jimmy fires up the flashlight right away. The toys are laid out on a combination of shelves and tables. Near the cash register is a large aquarium full of small yellow fish with black vertical stripes darting and swarming like sparks from a welding gun.
The collection of retired Beanie Babies are along one wall in a large glass-enclosed case six shelves high. The lock’s strictly for show. Jimmy’s able to tap it out with a toy hammer. Beanie Bucks, Jimmy thinks. It takes five trash bags to empty the shelves. Jimmy carries them over to the ladder and passes them up to Don.