The Soak

by Patrick E. McLean

  He waited on the threshold for a few minutes, waiting to hear her breathing change, or for her to roll over in bed. When she didn’t, he sighed. It would be easier to say fuck you than goodbye. This way he could just get what he’d come for and leave.

  It was in the closet.

  Even Alan knew that the closet was a stupid place to hide something valuable. It was the first place a smart thief would look. But people hid things there anyway. His mom had probably forgotten she had put it there.

  He walked through the bathroom and stepped onto the thick pile carpet of the walk-in closet. He pulled the door shut before he turned on the lights. On either side, all the way back, were dresses. Tommats had bought them for Alan’s mother. They were beautiful, but she never wore them anymore. She never did much of anything, except swallow pills and go to sleep.

  Uncle Tommats used to come around to visit. Checkin’ up on his nephew, he would say. But then he would take his nephew’s mother into the bedroom. Alan knew what was going on. One of those times, Tommats had been drunk. And he’d left it behind.

  Alan found it in a shoebox in the far back corner of the closet, under a pile of hangers.

  It was heavy and black and ugly. It had a snub nose and a huge cylinder. The bullets were so big there were only five of them. He cocked the hammer back with his thumb. Then he worked the pistol with both hands, pulling the trigger and letting the hammer down slowly. The force with which that hammer wanted to snap back into place scared him. The hammer felt eager, hungry. What if he let it slip?

  He put the pistol into his waistband as he had seen people do in the movies and on TV. Before he could even get out of the closet, it fell out on the carpet, landing with a muffled thud. He put it in his pocket, shut off the light, and opened the door.

  Alan was certain that he hadn’t made a sound. But as he crossed the bedroom, his mother moaned and tossed in the bed. He saw her open her bloodshot eyes. She blinked hard and opened her eyes wide, struggling to see. It was her, thought Alan. It was his mom. She was going to ask him what he was doing. She was going to tell him not to go, because she loved him.

  But when she spoke, she asked, “Tommy, is that you? Did you bring the pills?”

  Alan left without answering.

  FOUR

  The next day Alan went to visit his dad. It was just as it had always been. A plexiglass window between them. An ancient Bakelite phone on a metal cord to connect them. Some kids played catch. Alan talked to his dad on the prison phone.

  “Lookie there, I must be somebody special. Everybody wants to see me today. I thought you were my lawyer,” said his dad, disappointed to see him.

  “Jimmy, I’m looking for a guy,” said Alan.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Son, although that would make you very popular in here.”

  “Fuck you, Dad. You want to help me or not? Based on our track record, I’d go with no, but I thought I might give you a chance to get a few checks out of the shitheel column.”

  “Is that any way to greet your father?”

  “You want me to hug this plexiglass? Kiss the phone? You know the deal, old man.”

  Jimmy, his dodge and bravado spent, slumped in weariness and looked like the caged animal he was. He asked, “OK, flash, what the fuck can I do for you in here?”

  “I got a job of work. And I need a very specialized contractor.”

  A look of disappointment and sadness crossed the older man’s face. “No, Al, you don’t want to go into that line.”

  “Oh, really, Jimmy? What would your advice be? Plastics? Maybe I should sell tires? Those things sure worked out for you.”

  “I made mistakes.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Son…I…”

  “Stop with that bullshit. That son bullshit. You know what a father does? A father is there. You, you were never there.” Alan paused, held the phone away from his mouth, and wrestled with his emotions. He hated to show weakness in front of his father.

  On the other side of the thick plastic, marred by the scratches and deformed by the curve in the material, Jimmy waited.

  “I was trying to be cool about this,” continued Alan, after a time, “but that’s not working. Are you gonna help me or not?”

  Jimmy sighed and asked, “You’re gonna do this anyway?”

  “I need a guy to put it together and run it. I’ll probably just sell the whole thing to him. But it’s big. It needs the best. Just gimme a name. A phone number. I’ll cut you in.”

  Jimmy shook his head violently. “I don’t want a cut. Not from you. And it doesn’t work that way.”

  “What? The guy doesn’t have a name? Doesn’t have a phone number?”

  “No,” he said. Then he told his son how it worked. That is, if enough people who had been involved were still alive and working. “The guy you want was called Hobbs.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Or in prison. But if he’s not, he probably doesn’t use the same name anymore.”

  “What?”

  “When you take things, people get angry.”

  “Right, so how do I find him?”

  “You go to a bar in Philly. You ask for him. If they think you’re right, they’ll get in contact with him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Alan, “You been in here for a while. You know there’s this thing called e-mail, right? You know about e-mail?”

  “They can’t catch a guy they can’t find a trace of.”

  “Was that your mistake?” Alan asked.

  Jimmy looked away and said, quietly, “I made a lotta mistakes.”

  “How about you make up for one or two of them by giving me the name of that bar.”

  “Call me Dad,” said Jimmy.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me with that shit,” said Alan.

  “I’m sorry, Alan.”

  “Well, that’s nice for you, what’s the name of the bar?”

  “You say it.”

  “What do you want?” asked Alan.

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “No, what do you really want? You want a house in the country, with a white picket fence? Slippers and pipe? You want to be Dad, is that it?”

  Feeling foolish, Jimmy nodded.

  “Well, it ain’t gonna happen. You fucked it up. And nothing I can do can make it right.”

  “We could try,” said Jimmy, “I mean, I don’t know how to do it, but we could try. Would you want to try? Would you, Al?”

  “Sure, you could push me on the swing and throw the ball around and we’d go get ice cream,” said Alan, sticking the knife in and feeling around for Jimmy’s liver.

  “Hey, I’m tryin’ here.”

  “Sorry, old man, (a) you’re never getting out of this hole and (b) I ain’t got time for this father-son reunion bullshit.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m tryin’ to better myself. I just don’t know how to do it. I know, I know…”

  “I’ll tell you what I know, Jimmy. I’m pretty sure blackmailing your kid into calling you Dad isn’t a good start.”

  Jimmy was quiet a long while. When he accepted defeat, he said, “Smeagles.”

  “Sméagols?”

  “Yeah, Smeagles,” Jimmy said.

  “Thank you.” Alan hung up the phone. His dad sat there and watched his son leave, staring at the wavy plexiglass until the guard told him it was time to go.

  FIVE

  Grace sat in the breakfast nook and watched him through the bay window. There was movement in the tree, but he remained perfectly still, waiting for the perfect shot. Patience was, when she reflected upon it, the reason he had been such a good thief. The ability to hold his nerve in check.

  Why couldn’t he retire? Recognize that the best of the game was up? Not that his nerve was shot, or his will had weakened. He was just old. Everybody loses a step. Why couldn’t he see that?

  When she had asked him about it, he had growled at her. But every time he came back from a job he would shake his head and say, �
�That’s it. I’m off it. Too many cameras. Too many amateurs. The take’s always too small.”

  It had been nearly six months since the last one. And he had grown grumpier and grumpier, more and more insufferable as the machinery inside him ground away at him. This morning he hadn’t even sat down to breakfast. He’d gotten a .22 rifle from the garage and set up on the tree.

  He watched the tree with patience, so she watched him with patience and hope. Was this it? The turning of the wheel? The moment when he would finally come home to her to stay?

  If not this moment, it would come. It would have to. And soon, she thought. The wisdom in her old bones whispered to her, “At this age, honey, change only goes in one direction.”

  Through the window she watched Hobbs, the man who was and was not her husband. Of course he had not married her. There had been no ring, no exchange of vows, no signatures on marriage licenses. What name would a man without firm identification use? But all the same, she was his and he was hers, as surely as one person could be another’s. And so it had been for nearly thirty years now.

  He, of course, denied this fact. All men who imagine themselves red-blooded deny their domesticity. Why, just look at him, sitting in a lawn chair with that rifle laid across his lap. He stared intently at the bird feeder hanging amid the branches of the willow tree. He was waiting for squirrels—damn thieves, he called them. Why he cared at all about the squirrels, Grace could never know. They had plenty of bird food and money enough not only for all their needs, but to feed all the squirrels around this entire lake.

  If nothing else, Grace thought, he should have professional courtesy toward the squirrels. Perhaps it was the pettiness, she thought. Perhaps he would have been more tolerant if he had caught the squirrels in the act of breaking into the garage and dragging a twenty-five-pound bag of seed away. Or, even more impossibly, trying to drive away with it in the pickup. A seed at a time had never been Hobbs’s style. Small jobs were beneath him. He was a thief, but anything but petty.

  When he had spoken to her of his work (which was almost never) he’d referred to himself and his now-dwindling band of associates as “heavy heisters.” Men who used courage and daring to steal large sums all at once. Men who were good behind the wheel and steady on the trigger. Hobbs provided the planning and the whip hand. She had seen him work only once, that first time.

  She had been on the grift in those days. She was on the arm of a precious metals dealer whom she had convinced to betray his partners. With her prodding he had fingered the job, and a second man, Bill Presque, had brought Hobbs in to run it. She’d thought she had a taste for it—the danger, the rough games of take and double cross—but when that job had gone wrong, when her grift was lying on the floor at her feet trying to stop up the bullet holes in his chest with his fat fingers, she realized she wasn’t who she had thought she was.

  For years she had not been able to think about it. Let alone speak of it. But after they had bought the house on the lake, the passage of time, quiet seasons, had caused the horror of those days to fade. Hobbs had rescued her from that. And she had rescued him, or was trying. She had knit a careful, patient net around him, one he couldn’t see and didn’t realize he was struggling against.

  With patience she watched him from the windows. Waiting for his restlessness to fade away. Waiting for her man to come home to her for good.

  With a fluid motion he brought the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Down by the water a squirrel fell dead from the willow tree.

  She watched him get up and go to the boathouse. He came back out with a sack, filled it with the squirrels, and threw them off the end of the dock.

  She jumped when the kitchen phone rang. The metal hammer vibrating between metal bells was an angry noise. She looked at it without getting up. It rang again. It was ugly on the wall. The only thing in the kitchen that was still harvest gold. She did not want to answer it. She knew what it would be.

  She said hello, listened, hung up the phone, and went to Hobbs.

  SIX

  Hobbs had sat there and killed seven of those damned tree rats, and it hadn’t made him feel a bit better about anything. Stupid, stupid squirrels. Blindsided by an obvious trap. After the first couple, they should have gotten wise to the game. Didn’t they see the pile of bodies beneath the tree? They had to see them. They just weren’t smart enough to stay away. Hunger got the best of them. Dead for birdseed they didn’t even need. They just wanted it.

  Sick of killing squirrels, he got up and hooked the .22 under his arm. In the boathouse he found an old sack. He filled the bottom with fist-size stones from the riprap. His hands looked like weathered claws seeking among the rocks.

  He gathered the squirrel corpses in the sack and tied the top in a knot. Then he threw them off the end of the dock and watched them sink where he liked to drop a line. Little thieves could bring the catfish. Maybe later he’d catch the catfish. If he lasted that long.

  He looked up toward the house. A fixed address, by God. He’d never thought he’d have that. That was Grace’s doing. She had wanted the house, said they needed it for a write-off. She was a good woman, but she hadn’t been when he’d met her. Beautiful, sure, but salty, and working her ass for all it was worth. He’d been through a string just like her. And even now, nearly thirty years later, he couldn’t figure out what was different about her.

  He’d taken her from a weak-chinned finger who was already betraying his partners. He’d never fooled around on the job much, but the man’s lack of loyalty offended him. And, well, the obvious, low cleavage and long legs that she paraded around in front of him like it was on sale, made it easy to make an exception. Now, even at fifty, she was hot enough to melt the ice on the front walk. That joke had made her smile for the last fifteen years.

  The lake house was the perfect backdrop for that joke. In the beginning they had come here only during the winter months, when the lake was abandoned. The rest of the time they’d lived in hotels and on room service. Once or twice a year, he’d pull a job. But here, Grace said, they could be themselves. And perhaps they were. Sometimes Hobbs had trouble remembering what his real name was, especially up here in the snow. And his self? He honestly had no idea.

  He was the job. And when he wasn’t on the job, he was antsy. As he was now. He didn’t know how much longer he could hang around here. Nothing had come together in a while. Everything seemed harder now. As if the world had changed. But maybe he was just older.

  Once Grace had teased him about retiring. It had started harmlessly enough. She was stroking her fingers through his closely cropped gray hair. She told him how the years looked good on him. And that this gray was a sign that it was time for Hobbs to retire so they could grow old together.

  He had stiffened and turned, gotten up from in front of the fireplace, and fixed himself a drink. She had followed, missing the signal, still teasing. Telling the old man to pack it in. The times were moving too fast for him. It was one of the only times he had hit her, and he had immediately regretted it.

  She had turned away and held her hand to her face for a long time. Then she had turned back, looking at the blood from her lip. She had reached down with her bloody hand and grabbed a few cubes of ice. She’d brought them to her lips, trying to be tough girl about it, but Hobbs could see the tears in her eyes.

  He had shaken his head and almost apologized. She had thrown the ice in his face and kissed him, warm and salty and tasting of blood. They’d made love, right there, as they had the first time—when they had cheated death and the law and had made it out alive. When they were done, that’s when Hobbs had realized there was something wrong with him. A hole in the water of his soul that he just couldn’t fill.

  They had gotten away with it. She once. He many times. They had escaped death and betrayal and jail. This was supposed to be it. This life with this beautiful woman, not rich, but beyond the cares of money, this was the prize. How many had he seen go down to the grave or up to the pen? And as they brea
thed their last or as the cellblock clanged shut behind them, this—this very moment that Hobbs had—wasn’t this what they had prayed for?

  For Hobbs, it was not enough.

  He rubbed his eyes. In the darkness behind his lids he saw the glassy-eyed squirrels in a pile below the tree, saw them disappearing into the sack. Saw the sack sinking into the blackness of the lake water.

  From the house he heard the phone ring. Not a shitty electronic warble, but the honest sound that was made when one piece of metal slammed into another, bell-shaped piece of metal.

  Grace waved him up to the house. The bell tolled for him.

  As he walked to the house, he thought maybe the thing that drove him was the same thing that caused the squirrels to climb over a pile of dead bodies for a chance at the feeder.

  In the kitchen he picked up the phone and said, “Hobbs.”

  On the other end of the line was a gruff voice, the kind that sounded as if it ate cigars for lunch. The voice said, “I’m closing the place down. If you want to pay ya tab or ya respects, come ahead. If you don’t, then the hell wit’ cha.” Then the voice hung up.

  “Who was it?” asked Grace.

  Hobbs replaced the phone on its hanger and said, “I gotta go see a guy.”

  “When?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “But it’s your birthday!” she said.

  Hobbs went back outside.

  SEVEN

  Smeagles had been an old-fashioned kind of neighborhood bar in an old-fashioned kind of neighborhood. It was the kind of dive you could depend on. One that would lend money, store luggage, and, most importantly for Hobbs, take messages. It was owned and operated by Sean Cleary, a former associate of Hobbs’s who had decided that for his “retirement” he would open a sports bar.

  Cleary had gotten the money to buy the joint from working a bank job with Hobbs back in the salad days. They had knocked off the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Altoona by firing a stolen howitzer through the lock mechanism. They hadn’t wasted time on that job, they’d backed a dump truck right through the brick wall and fired the gun right from the bed.