The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

by Jacob M. Appel

  Arnold wrapped his fingers around the chain.

  “Now up against that fence,” insisted the Bandit. “Arms above your head. Legs spread.” Then he ordered the bond trader out of the Mercedes and had him tie the naked guard to the fence in a giant X formation. “They should find you in the morning, man,” observed the Bandit. “This is a good lesson for you. Always wear sun block… even if you’re not headed out to the beach.” He tested the guard’s bonds. “But no screaming until then. Or we’ll have to come back and use nails.”

  “I won’t scream,” promised the guard. “I swear I won’t scream.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said the Bandit. “And now that leaves only you, Ira.”

  The bond trader stood helpless on the macadam. It was a chilly night and he’d started to shiver.

  “I think it’s into the garbage with you,” mused the Bandit. “How does that sound to you, Arnold?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “You heard him,” said the lunatic. “Into the garbage. Now!”

  Taylor looked from the saber to the gun and walked toward the nearest mound of household waste. The light from the guard house illuminated the millions of soiled packages, left-over wrappers, and undigested meals. It let off a truly noxious stench.

  “Now!” shouted the Bandit. “Garbage or death!”

  To emphasize this point, Arnold discharged the revolver. It actually bounced off the waste pile far closer to the bond trader than he’d intended, but that sent Taylor scurrying into the mounds of human refuse.

  Arnold fired again and again and again. He was careful to keep his weapon pointed far from the bond trader, but he kept firing until the man disappeared into the dunes of rubbish. Then he started laughing. Terrorizing his enemies was far more enjoyable than he’d ever imagined.

  CHAPTER 12

  The humiliation of Ira Taylor marked the beginning of the two weeks of widespread mayhem that would earn Arnold and the Bandit their places beside Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the annals of outlawdom. They targeted a number of the botanist’s adversaries. One night, they broke into the home of the father of nine who’d made a name for himself describing Arnold’s conduct at the baseball game, and they forced the man to call a local radio station and to confess on the air to harbouring sexual feelings for poultry. The following afternoon they showed up at the posh suburban residence of Arnold’s sister-in-law and surprised Walter the Republican Chiropractor on the toilet. They had read that Celeste’s husband, in an effort to distance himself from his unpopular relative, had put up his own reward for Arnold’s capture. The naked duo accompanied the man to a drive-thru automated teller machine at knifepoint, where they ordered him to empty out his bank account and to eat the bills one at a time. Celeste’s husband consumed nearly three hundred dollars in twenties before he threw up on his seersucker lapels. Even Arnold’s medal, draped around his neck, became the subject of media speculation. The New York Times reported, from an unnamed source, that its secret compartment held enough plutonium to build a dirty bomb.

  When the Daily Vanguard ran Cassandra’s interview with Arnold—a highly-doctored transcript alongside an editorial that branded him a “bourgeois infiltrator intent upon discrediting the Left”—the naked pair corralled the editor at a branch library in Queens and had him perform five hundred jumping jacks in his birthday suit for the benefit of the other patrons. But the Bandit and Arnold also continued their practice of targeting total strangers. They crashed a Prospect Park wedding and carried off the bride’s gown. They hit a midtown bank, leaving all of the cash but making away with the tellers’ undergarments and stockings. In an act of unprecedented audacity, they bought tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, wore false beards to Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and charged onto the stage in the middle of the spectacle to demand Cio-cio-san’s kimono. Within days, all gossip in the metropolitan area focused on the union of the Tongue Terrorist and the Bare-Ass Bandit. The city council speaker and the mayor squabbled over the merits of imposing a community-wide curfew. Street vendors began merchandizing clothing with kryptonite locks. The naked duo also spawned a host of copycat bandits, including the Bare-Breasted Burglar and the Loinclothed Gang, who swung down upon unsuspecting visitors at zoos and aquariums, but these amateurs were all apprehended rapidly.

  Arnold was amazed at how easily he adjusted to his newfound life of delinquency. He had always thought of himself as a highly moral person, despite Bonnie Card’s accusations, but now he relished a chance to thumb his nose at the law. He suspected there were limits to his newfound vice—he couldn’t imagine physically harming anybody, or inflicting abuse on children or the elderly—but embarrassing strangers and disrupting the workings of society didn’t trouble his conscience. After all, hadn’t they started this? He’d have been content to live out his days gardening and selling plant books, but they’d been all so quick to fall in line behind rabble-rousers like Spitford in calling for his head. The masses had taken an innocent man and insisted that he was a terrorist. So now he was a terrorist. And yet there were weekday afternoons when he lurked around the edges of the park, watching a coal-skinned Senegalese man in a beret instructing a half dozen middle-aged women in painting, their easels angled around the edges of the reservoir, their brushes immortalizing a great blue heron, when he felt a deep longing for Judith welling up inside him. He’d heard nothing of his wife since his flight from Cassandra’s. The morning papers, which catalogued the naked duo’s exploits, reported only that she remained under home detention and unavailable for comment. But he could easily conjure up the silky feel of her hair and the faint scent of turpentine that she carried on her fingers. It was enough to leave his eyes watering.

  Late one night, after invading a gentleman’s club and forcing the patrons to strip and the nude dancers to dress, the pair sat in their underground apartment playing cards. The Bandit continued to blindfold Arnold during his entrances and exits, but made less effort to conceal the general location of the hideaway. He dropped hints that they were north of the reservoir, south of the uptown woods. This may have been the lunatic’s way of expressing his trust in his new companion. But it was a confidence that had its limits. “You have every right to take your blindfold off,” explained the lunatic. “But that’s where Isaac Newton’s laws come into play. No action is without its consequences. If you do take your blindfold off, that will force me to poke your eyes out.” From experience, Arnold understood that the bandit wasn’t joking. He never joked. Or laughed. That was out of his M.O. Yet despite these occasional threats, Arnold found his companion to be an overall decent guy. He was also an astoundingly lucky card player. Arnold managed to lose two hundred straight games of gin rummy.

  “Gin!” announced the Bandit.

  “Can I ask you something?” asked Arnold.

  “You think I’m cheating?” demanded the Bandit defensively.

  “Oh, no. What would be the point?”

  “Because I don’t cheat,” insisted the Bandit. “I just play the odds.”

  Arnold slid his exposed cards to the centre of the table. “Do you ever miss your old life?” he asked.

  The lunatic shook his head. “Nope, not really. What’s there to miss about getting up at six in the morning and working in a suit and tie all day?”

  “You don’t miss anything?”

  “Not family, if that’s what you’re driving at, man. My father died in the state asylum. And my mother was a first-class bitch. Still is, I imagine. She’s a professional hypochondriac. For real. She makes a living suing doctors for imaginary injuries and settling with their insurers. We had a major blow-up when I refused to keep doing her legal work.” The Bandit shuffled the cards nimbly in his hands. “So, no. I don’t miss my old life. I’m glad to be done with all that.”

  “What about other stuff?” asked Arnold. “Do you ever miss the ordinary routine of things? Being able to walk into a store and buy a bag of dog food or a tube of toothpaste or a cheese sandwich?”
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br />   “I can have all the toothpaste I want, man,” answered the Bandit. “All I have to do is rob a dentist. And as for dog food…I don’t own a dog.”

  The Bandit said nothing about the cheese sandwich—but after two weeks of the lunatic’s cooking, which for Arnold verged on the toxic, the botanist found himself thinking often of ready-made and processed foods. He didn’t share these feelings with his host, who believed himself a first-rate chef.

  “So you really don’t miss being able to live among other people?” Arnold asked.

  “Life is about trade-offs,” said the lunatic. “You can have a steady paycheck or a job that doesn’t require clothing. You can stand for a song or you can stand for your principles. The difference between happy people and unhappy people is that happy people accept the trade-offs and unhappy people complain about them. Personally, I prefer to be happy.”

  The Bandit turned over the deck of cards and spread it out. He’d managed to sort the cards by rank and suit without looking at their faces.

  “Say, you’re not going soft on me, man?” asked the Bandit.

  “No. I’m just thinking….You really do live by a philosophy, don’t you?”

  “Not bad for a sociopath, is it?” quipped Arnold’s companion.

  Not bad for anyone, thought Arnold. He felt actively jealous.

  “Do you remember how you said you make a point to stay clear of celebrities?” asked Arnold. “Back when we were talking about Spitford….”

  “It can’t be helped. Wait a few years. When he returns to obscurity—and they always do—then we’ll nail him.”

  “What if I don’t have a few years?” persisted Arnold. “How would you feel if I…decided to hit Spitford on my own?”

  The Bandit frowned. “Without me?”

  “I’d only be putting myself on the line.”

  “You know how I feel.”

  “Are you ordering me not to?” asked Arnold.

  “I can’t order you to do anything. You’re a grown adult. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.” The Bandit stood up and pocketed his cards. “I was just offering a few words of friendly advice. Trust me, Arnold. If you take on a fish as big as Spitford, the last laugh will be on you.”

  Arnold recognized the wisdom of the Bandit’s warning about attacking celebrities. The prisons were full of small-time felons who’d chosen the wrong targets: If Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan had bumped off Mexican day labourers, they’d likely have drawn sentences numbered in years rather than decades. But that just made the thought of getting even with Spitford all the more tempting. It was like an itch he might easily reach but had been warned not to scratch. Arnold had always wondered why the victims of violent crimes lobbied so strongly for the execution of their assailants, why life imprisonment wasn’t good enough for them. Now he understood. The knowledge that the minister was out there in the world—that the man might walk into a convenience store and purchase a sack of dog food—kept Arnold awake at night. Not that he intended to kill Spitford. At least, not physically. But the prospect of breaking the minister psychologically, even for a few minutes, was enough to get Arnold through the day. The need for revenge overtook him with the same fervour as his love for Cassandra once had. It was almost as though one had replaced the other. By the end of his fourth week with the Bandit, Arnold was pacing the apartment and chain-smoking. He puffed the unfiltered cigarettes through a long meerschaum holder that his companion had stolen for him from a Greta Garbo impersonator, but the ferocity of Arnold’s habit concerned even his host.

  “Are you okay, man?” asked the lunatic. “You seem jittery.”

  “Too much cappuccino,” answered Arnold. “And I miss my wife.”

  That was a lie, of sorts. He did miss Judith, but she’d been far from his thoughts at the moment. With this remark, he realized, he’d crossed into uncharted territory: If it was objectionable to lie to one’s spouse, wasn’t it also a mistake to lie about her—to use her like that for one’s own convenience.

  “You could pay her a surprise visit,” offered the Bandit. “I have a couple of girlfriends I pop in on now and then—to break up the pace of things, you know.”

  Arnold recognized that visiting Judith wouldn’t help. “Your girlfriends aren’t under house arrest and surrounded by a mob of protesters,” he observed. “They don’t have Spotty Spitford camped on their front porches.”

  “Maybe you can sneak in through a window or something,” suggested the Bandit. “It’s worth a shot, man. Better than coming down with an acute case of lung cancer.”

  “I can’t spend all day here choking myself to death, can I?” muttered Arnold.

  “You can. It’s a free country. But it isn’t how I’d want to live.”

  “Okay, you’ve inspired me,” Arnold said. “Take me to the surface.”

  He continued smoking while the lunatic blindfolded him—and it crossed his mind that he must have looked like a Hollywood prisoner facing a firing squad, although he’d seen very few film convicts enjoy their last smoke through a telescopic meerschaum tube. The Bandit led him up the stairs into the warm night and paraded him around the park for twenty minutes. They came to rest under a lightning-scarred hickory. This was their rendezvous point if they split-up during getaways. Arnold tucked the blindfold into his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette.

  “You love your wife a lot, don’t you?” asked the Bandit.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  The Bandit picked up a long, jagged stick and poked at several knots in the hickory. “I’ve been thinking over what you were saying, man,” he said. “About missing the ordinary life.”

  Something in the lunatic’s tone made Arnold feel genuinely sorry for him. “I wish I hadn’t brought it up. It’s different when you’re married. If not for Judith, I think I could get used to life on the lam.”

  “No, man. I’m glad you brought it up,” persisted the Bandit. “Because I’ve been thinking about what you said. About being able to walk into a store and buy a cheese sandwich or a tube of toothpaste or a bag of dog food. When I was a kid, what I wanted more than anything else in the world was a puppy….” Here the lunatic’s eyes took on a distant gloss, as though he were gazing through time as well as space. “But my bitch of a mother was afraid she might develop an allergy. Not that she actually had one, mind you. She didn’t let me have any pets because she could only see the downside. Veterinary bills, torn upholstery. Never once did it cross her mind that a dog might do us good.”

  “You could have a dog here in the park,” suggested Arnold.

  “It’s too late,” explained the Bandit. “The truth is I’m not fit to take care of anybody or anything, at this point. I’m hardly capable of looking after myself. But if I could do it again, do you know what I’d want?”

  “A puppy?”

  “Kids. Lots of them. Dozens. Hundreds. You know how you talked about walking into a store and buying a cheese sandwich. Well I’d like to be able to walk into an adoption agency and take my pick of the litter. Because I’d raise them the right way. All for one and one for all. Like the five hundred musketeers. If anybody did me wrong, I’d have a ready-made army of followers to revenge me. That’s what children were all about hundreds of years ago, before this twenty-first century bullshit about teaching children to pursue their own dreams.” The Bandit looked up suddenly and snapped the stick over his knee. “All pipedreams, man,” he said. “It’s too late for that now. They don’t give babies to terrorists.”

  Arnold had never had an interest in adopting children himself—that was Judith’s craze—but the suggestion that he too might be excluded actually stung him deep down. It seemed an injustice, a violation of his fundamental human rights. “Maybe if you apologized—”

  “Don’t be a fool, man. Some things are unforgivable,” said the Bandit. “Now back to business. How long do you need?”

  “I don’t know.” Arnold glanced at his wrist instinctively, although he’d stopped wearing a watch. “How d
oes four hours sound?”

  “Depends what you have in mind,” answered the Bandit. He slapped Arnold on the back. “Good luck, man. And don’t get caught, dammit. I don’t want to have to go back to playing solitaire.”

  Arnold sensed that the Bandit was trying to be affectionate, so he hugged the lunatic to his chest. The man’s body remained stiff and uncomfortable.

  “Four hours,” said Arnold.

  “I’ll be waiting,” agreed the Bandit.

  Arnold started walking south, keeping to the edge of the path. The botanist ducked onto the grass whenever he passed a streetlamp. He looked over his shoulder several times, and the Bandit gave him a thumbs up. But then he passed through a dense thicket of maple saplings and climbed over a steep rise, taking him out of the lunatic’s line of sight. That’s when he changed direction—first hiking several hundred yards to the east, then retracing his steps northward toward Upper Manhattan.

  The return journey to Spitford’s residence was complicated by Arnold’s status as a fugitive. Although it was already past midnight, the streets of Harlem were teeming with late-night club-goers and revellers. Teenage boys lounged on the stoops, listening to cacophonous music. A pair of street preachers chanted Hallelujah on opposing corners. Every few blocks, a multigenerational conclave was locked in a fierce bout of dominos. Arnold walked rapidly, holding his hands over his face and faking a severe cough. People gave him a wide berth. Only one time was he recognized—by a homeless guy selling paperback novels on the sidewalk—and then the fugitive ran down a series of alleyways until he’d lost both his pursuers and himself. When Arnold finally reached the wrought-iron gates that protected Spitford’s block, his feet were two large blisters and his underpants had chafed his sweaty thighs raw. He sensed liquid squishing between his toes, but he wasn’t sure whether it was puddle water, sweat or blood. A closer examination under a streetlamp revealed it to be a combination of all three.