Cherry

by Nico Walker

  I’m only kidding around. And I think everybody knows as much. But this is nevertheless a holdup, and I’ll need some money before I’ll leave.

  I walk to the counter, with the gun down now so it’s pointed at the floor. There’s no sense in making a big deal out of this. One thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be rude. About 80% of the time, so long as you’re not rude, the women don’t mind when you hold up the bank; probably it breaks up the monotony for them. Of course there are exceptions; about 20% have a bad outlook. Like there was one lady, looked like Janet Reno, wouldn’t come off a cent more than $1800; she’d have seen everybody dead before she’d have come off another cent. She actually thought the bank was right. But this was a fanatic. Usually the tellers are pretty cool: you give them a note or tell them you’re there to do a robbery, and they go in the cash drawers and lay the money on the counter, and you take it and you leave and that’s all there is to it. Really it’s very civilized. It’s like a quiet joke you’ve shared with them. I say joke because in my case I don’t imagine there was ever one to believe I’d do anything serious if push came to shove, though I do make it a point to try and at least look a little deranged because I don’t want anyone getting in trouble on account of me. I have a lot of sadness in the face to make up for, so I have to make faces like I’m crazy or else people will think I’m a pussy. The risk you run is that sometimes people think you’re a crazy pussy. But I have to do what I can; otherwise her manager might say to her, “Why’d you give that pussy the money? You’re fired!” And she goes home and tells the kids there isn’t going to be any Christmas.

  It doesn’t matter. Here is a teller. I say to her, “It’s nothing personal.”

  And do you know we recognize each other! There was another robbery, on the West Side, Lakewood, maybe a month ago (the days run together). I robbed the other teller, but she was there too. It was funny how it happened. The other teller laid $1400 on the counter and said it was all she had. I remember the lie in her voice and thinking, This poor woman thinks I’m retarded. But then what did I care? She was pretty and it wasn’t like I wanted everything, I only ever wanted what was enough for now.

  So now I’m robbing this teller and we’ve recognized each other and it isn’t a big deal. I don’t think she’s against me. I think maybe we’re the same age. She’s pale as I am. And her hair is dark. Her eyes are blue with flecks of gold in them, and I could be in love with her if things had been different. And then maybe we are somewhere.

  I say, “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Vanessa.”

  “I’m sorry, Vanessa.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You’re funny, Vanessa.”

  She empties out the cash drawers quickly, which is good as I’m not trying to hang out—there’s a police station not a quarter mile from here. I take the stacks of money off the counter and shove them into my pockets. It looked alright: it doesn’t matter, it isn’t ever very much. It’s like smash and grab, like hit and run: the important thing is to get away.

  The important thing is to run fast.

  I slam through the doors going out and round the corner, go past the ATMs. But I don’t run back up the street; I turn and run behind the bank, past the dumpster, past the place where I used to live upstairs, then down the steps in back of the almost vegetarian restaurant, to the chain-link fence. And the parking lot is there, but I don’t see Black. And I’m not at all surprised as this is typical fucking dope boy behavior.

  The important thing is don’t run.

  My car is a block away and I think I can make it. So this isn’t the end of the world. The parking lot’s three sides where it’s walls and the walls full of windows looking down on me. I take my hat off and put the gun in my hat. The gun’s heavy on account of it’s full of bullets. It’s full of bullets because I can’t imagine it being anything else. It’s really too heavy to go carrying in a hat, but this arrangement will have to work as I have a ways to go and I don’t want the gun trying to de-pants me in the getaway.

  I walk down more steps that go into the parking lot, carrying my hat, with the gun in my hat, with my hat in my left hand. There’s no one else in the parking lot when I cross it. The gun in my hat still isn’t well hidden. I take my scarf off while I’m walking and I ball it up some and place it on top of the gun in my hat and it’s a little better. Still there’s the money sticking out of my pockets; I’ll need to be careful that none falls out. I go left when I get to the sidewalk, and I’m walking up Hampshire. They’ll be coming up Mayfield, and if they catch me I’m fucked.

  Sometimes I wonder if youth wasn’t wasted on me. It’s not that I’m dumb to the beauty of things. I take all the beautiful things to heart, and they fuck my heart till I about die from it. So it isn’t that. It’s just that something in me’s always drawn me away, and it’s the singular part of me, and I can’t explain it.

  There’s nobody out here except me and one other guy; he’s on the same sidewalk as I am, coming toward me from the other end of the block. We will meet eventually. I see he’s dressed like an old-timer, and that’s good: if he’s old then I doubt he gives a fuck about what I’m up to. The important thing is don’t act like you robbed a bank.

  Act like you have places to go and people to see.

  Act like you love the police.

  Act like you never did drugs.

  Act like you love America so much it’s retarded.

  But don’t act like you robbed a bank.

  And don’t run.

  The important thing is don’t run.

  The sirens coming up Mayfield now, and the grass is like a teenage girl. And the stoops!—the stoops are fucking wondrous! There’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage—look at them go! The big swinging dick starling’s got all the other starlings scared. He’ll be the one who gets the choicest garbage!

  This is the beauty of things fucking my heart. I wish I could lie down in the grass and chill for a while, but of course this is impossible, the gun in my hat could be a little obvious, the money sticking out of all my pockets too. And the sirens telling everyone I’m a fucking scumbag. I bet they hope I’ll try something so they can drink my blood and tell their women about it.

  I say good morning to the old-timer. He says good morning. And if he suspects me of wrongdoing, he is good enough not to mention it. We go about our business.

  I’m three quarters there now.

  So maybe I get away.

  And here come the sirens.

  Here come their fucking gangsters.

  The sirens screaming now, now turning.

  And I feel peaceful.

  PART ONE

  WHEN LIFE WAS JUST BEGINNING, I SAW YOU

  You don’t know how afraid I was you’d go away and leave me. And now I’ll tell you what happened at the zoo.

  —EDWARD ALBEE, THE ZOO STORY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Emily used to wear a white ribbon around her throat and talk in breaths and murmurs, being nice, as she was, in a way so as you didn’t know if she were a slut or just real down-to-earth. And from the start I was dying to find out, but I thought I had a girlfriend and I was shy.

  We were 18. We met at school. She worried about money and I smoked $7 worth of cigarettes every day. She said she liked my sweater, said that’s what she had noticed first, why she had wanted to talk to me. A grey cardigan—wool, three buttons, from the Gap—she called it an old sad bastard sweater. Which was fine.

  She liked Modest Mouse and she played Night on the Sun for me. She had me read two plays by Edward Albee. I thought Albee was a kinky fucker. And I wondered about her. Her eyes—green—were bright, merciful, sometimes given to melancholy, not entirely guileless. And
I’d listen to her tell me about the abandoned factories and the cemetery where she’d grown up, the places where she’d skinned her knees. And her voice took me over.

  This is how you find the one to break your heart.

  * * *

  —

  IN THOSE days I didn’t know anything, I was going through a blotters phase, and Madison Kowalski thought I was a bitch. I did it to myself, but she was still a cunt for it since she was supposed to be my girl. And she gave head to Mark Fuller in the Woodmere Olive Garden parking lot. It fucked me up when I found out, but I forgave her.

  “Because I love you,” I said.

  “I love you as well,” she said.

  Mark Fuller was good at lacrosse, that’s what he was known for. And he had hair highlights. Maybe I should have had hair highlights too, but I didn’t. And there were other girls who wanted to be with Mark Fuller, so he could afford to force Madison Kowalski’s head down on his dick till she choked on it. That’s why she said to me, “I appreciate that you don’t force my head down.”

  And it fucked me up when I thought about it, but I thought about it anyway. I often fucked myself up thinking, like how I used to think you were always supposed to be in love with the girl. I’d got a lot of bad advice. It was 2003. All indications were that things were coming to an end.

  * * *

  —

  MADISON HAD gone out of town for school, gone to New Jersey, to Rutgers. I didn’t know why she had chosen the school she had; I didn’t follow schools. But she was smart or she had got good grades anyway. With me it was different. I stayed on in the suburbs east of Cleveland, Ohio, where I had lived since I was 10. I was attending one of the local universities, the one with the Jesuits and a lot of kids who were fucks, a good school. I shouldn’t have been there. Just my folks had enough money so that it was expected. It wasn’t like we were especially fancy people or I was a legacy or whatever you’re guessing at, more like with them it was one of those vicarious sorts of things that can set a kid up for failure, how they were saying they’d have liked to have gone to college and fucked around reading about Sir Francis Bacon and all that shit so why wasn’t I happy? I didn’t know. All I’d figured was the world was wrong and I was in it. So I went to school because people’d said go to school. Which was a mistake. Still you don’t ever get to choose.

  I sold drugs but it wasn’t like I was bad or anything. I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat. I had a job at the shoe store. Another mistake I made. No interest whatsoever in shoes. I was marked for failure. But allow that I had tried. I went to work most days, in the afternoons, when I could have been doing better things, such as anything (we are talking $6 an hour). I had a well-cultivated sense of shame, what kept me going; didn’t ever call in sick.

  I went to classes in the mornings, sometimes missed classes. It was my shame again; my shame would keep me out of classes sometimes. I didn’t ever miss English though. Emily was in my English class. The class was shit, but I always went because Emily’d be there. And we’d sit next to one another; that’s how we first got to talking.

  She was from Elba, New York, which was the same lake as Cleveland, the same kind of town, only a little shittier. She was impressed that I had a job at the shoe store, impressed that I sold drugs. She said she’d been educated by nuns and hadn’t ever gone to school with boys. She made it seem as if she knew nothing of boys to speak of. Turned out this wasn’t so much true, but it’s whatever. She was good and I liked her. I liked her better than I liked Madison Kowalski. But I was still fucked up about Madison. I even showed Emily a picture of her.

  “That’s Madison,” I said.

  She said, “She’s so pretty.”

  Madison was pretty.

  * * *

  —

  THERE ARE countless women in the world. At times it’s more than I can bear to think about: that there should be so many and they all start out the way they do, with all the brightness and their own invisible worlds and secret languages and what else they have, and that we ruin everything. And I have been mangled by vicious killers in my time, but I haven’t ever doubted it was only that someone had killed them first. Someone like me.

  I don’t want to tell lies, not any more than I have to anyway. The first thing I ever thought of Emily was I’d like to fuck that girl. So I was shit. But it was a matter of fate, or something to that effect, what would bring us together, regardless if I ever deserved her. And if my life got fucked it wasn’t her fault. I should say that now.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I took the Greyhound to go see Madison at Rutgers. She was staying in the dorms and her bed was small for two people, so it was uncomfortable. But at least her roommate had gone home for the weekend. Madison didn’t like her roommate. She said she was snotty. I asked why her roommate had gone home. She said the girl’s grandmother had died. I said that was too bad. She said, “Screw her.”

  I was to stay two nights. Madison took me to parties. But it was more like I followed her to parties. We went out with all her new girlfriends from the dorm. All the girls were best friends already. They clattered out into the night. They shouted at cars. Madison shouted at all the cars.

  The parties were shit. The kids didn’t do drugs; they just drank beer. Random dudes knew Madison. She had been at Rutgers only a month and they knew her. It was on account of Madison could dance like a real bad-assed slut. That was one thing about her, and that was fine and whatever, just it got a little awkward when you were the one who was there at the party with the girl who was on top of the bar, fucking a spirit. It got so you were at a loss for things to do in the meantime.

  We had come to a frat house, to a basement done out in plywood, some kind of beer-pong sex dungeon, everything dismal as murder. They were playing a song that was popular then. It was a song about making all the females crawl on the floor and jizzing on the females and stuff. Madison couldn’t help herself. I lost her somewhere. I went and stood off to the side of the room to wait for this to be over.

  All I had was a pitcher of Natural Ice, but it was cold and I was low enough on money so that it tasted really good. Then Jessie came by. Jessie was one of Madison’s girlfriends from the dorm. I will remember Jessie: Jessie had amazing tits and she was nice to me. She looked at me all sad for a second; and then she said, “Bad news, kid. Madison’s playing you.”

  * * *

  —

  THE MORNING I was supposed to go back to Cleveland we didn’t have any condoms, and Madison was big on using them even though she was on the pill. I don’t know what her problem was. I said to her, “We don’t really need stupid fucking condoms, do we?”

  She said we did. She said there was a machine in the bathroom. That was good since all I had was change. But it was a girls’ dorm, so it was a girls’ bathroom.

  I said, “Can’t you get it?”

  She said, “Go get it.”

  I was half-dressed and I found the machine, but it was all sold out except for some shit called Black Velvets. I just wanted to get out of the girls’ bathroom so I bought one of those and I went back to Madison’s little bed, where we started up again.

  It was time to put on the condom.

  The condom was black as licorice jelly beans. My thighs were pale. The condom was made out of the same stuff they use to make galoshes. It looked like I had a fake dick on.

  I didn’t care if I fucked her or not. I was tired of fucking her. It was always a big production: she needed condoms, mix CDs, an overnight bag. One time I had gone over to her house; she’d said she was going to blow me, and she did, but she made me eat a bag of popcorn and watch an entire baseball game first.

  This can’t be love, I thought.

  I ate her out for the last time.

  I rode the bus back to Cleveland, starving.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The shoe store was at the end of
Promenade 3, next to the Dillard’s. My boss was giving me a hard time because I’d worn flip-flops.

  “This is a shoe store,” he said.

  I knew he knew I was on acid.

  Then Johnny Carson walked in. He said, “Kid, I need your help.”

  He needed a pair of white tennis shoes.

  “All white. And none of the jazzy designs on them either. Nine and a half wide. I have a wide foot.”

  I said I’d do what I could. “But most all the shoes have the jazzy designs on them nowadays.”

  He said he understood.

  “Just do the best you can,” he said.

  It took two hours but I came through for him. I’d had trouble reading the boxes. That, and I wasn’t any good at colors. I kept grabbing my crotch real fast because I thought I’d pissed myself.

  I sensed an uneasiness in this customer.

  I wanted to tell him everything.

  I wanted to be clean.

  By the time it was over it had been an ordeal. There were shoe boxes everywhere. Tissue paper was everywhere. The remnants of despair and hesitation. He had almost walked away, not once, not twice, but I had begged him not to go: “I understand perfectly,” I’d said. “I am like you.”

  Now he was glad he’d stayed. He had the shoes he’d wanted, or something close to them. He was more complete. He said to me, “Let me tell you something, kid….You’re going places….You stuck to the sale….You’re going places.”

  When work was over I took the 32X, and got off at South Belvoir and walked. It had been a warm day. Now the sun was setting. I saw the shadows of the birds in the hedges. I guessed sparrows. Lights were coming on in the houses, and I was slithering in the post-peak euphoria. I had a Rubella song in my head, one of the William Whales, “The Great Pink Hope.” I said to myself I’d sing a little.