Way Past Legal

by Norman Green

  It was not quite dark when I parked the U-Haul truck behind the warehouse. It hurt me to actually rent the thing, but it seemed the smart thing to do. The warehouse looked like it was built back in the twenties. It was an industrial building, but it had a certain elegance to it, a kind of a solid dignity. It was still a factory, but it was built back when they gave a shit about factories. You could have had pride that you worked there. There were vertical grooves cast into the concrete of the outside wall, the grooves led up to the tenth floor, where there was a terrace, a flat ledge about four feet wide, and then the building went up four more floors to the roof. I waited another half hour until it was dark enough. It was an easy climb, actually. The cam-lock tensioner locks securely into the vertical groove, you rope yourself in, reach up as high as you can with the other one, lock that one in, pull yourself up, and so on. I put on the climbing harness and went right up like a spider. It might sound scary, but it’s not. It’s a hell of a lot easier, and saner, than walking into a room full of desperadoes and taking their money. The only thing I needed to worry about was a couple of places where the concrete had gotten a little crumbly. I thought, while I climbed up, This is the kind of shit I should have stuck to. No partners, no scams, no guns. I popped a window on the tenth floor, took a stairwell up to the twelfth. It probably took more time to open the boxes and transfer the money into the duffel bags than it did to climb up. I thought about leaving a few bucks behind, just to fuck with Rosey’s head, but I didn’t do it. When I was finished I closed the door on all those empty cardboard cartons and humped the bags down to the tenth-floor ledge. Too bad the stuff wasn’t all in hundreds, it would have made for a much smaller package. As it was, it took me two trips. I counted the bundles as I was packing the money, and put it right at two million. About two hundred pounds per duffel. I lowered the bags down first, climbed down after them. I dumped the climbing gear in one of those used-clothing boxes in a strip mall somewhere in Brooklyn. It always bothered me to do that, but if a cop caught me with that stuff, he’d take one look at me and throw my ass in jail. Good thing I tossed it, too, because a cop pulled me over just as I crossed the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. The guy nearly gave me heart failure, but he just wanted to tell me that the truck had a taillight out. I showed him the rental papers, told him I had just picked the thing up, which I had. He looked at my license. The name on it was Emmanuel Williams. Manny is clean, he doesn’t have any convictions yet, no points on his license, he even has a good credit rating. I spent a lot of time and money setting him up. Call it an unofficial pardon. I always figured, I survive long enough to retire, I could be Manny. I guess it was my lucky night—the cop didn’t feel like writing me up, so he let me go.

  I stayed in a cheapo motel in Hackensack that night, took the duffel bags into the room with me. The next day I rented a storeroom of my own, stuck the bags inside. I paid the guy for six months up front. It was still hard for me to believe that I was actually gonna get something out of this, other than a bullet. The guy in the office of the storage place gave me a paper grocery bag, and I took a hundred thou with me when I left. I don’t know why, it wasn’t like I really needed it, I hadn’t even spent the twenty Rosey gave me. I guess I did it just to prove to myself that it had really happened. It was late in the afternoon when I got the truck back to the U-Haul guy.

  “Hey, buddy,” I told the guy. “Fix that taillight, will ya? You almost got me a ticket.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” the guy said. “You leave the key in the truck?”

  I dropped off the paper bag at the place where I was living, but I couldn’t stay there, I was too keyed up. I decided I had to go look at the Leonid thing that night. The paper said you had to get out of the city, go out where it’s dark, so I took the subway up to Brooklyn Heights to steal a car. I boosted a Volkswagen GTI, which is one of my favorite cars. Guy bought the four instead of the six, the cheap fuck, but at least he got the five-speed stick. I jumped on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and headed back for Jersey.

  If you cross the George Washington Bridge and head north on the Palisades Parkway, there’s a lookout up on the state line, up on the cliffs. It’s got to be a couple of thousand feet up above the Hudson. It’s a great place to go and look at the city at night, also great for watching migrating eagles, hawks, falcons, and so on. It was dark when I got there, maybe about one in the morning, but the parking lot was full, there were more cars than I had ever seen there before. I got out and laid on the car hood, and as the engine cooled off I started freezing. It was colder that night than I expected it to be, plus there’s usually a pretty good wind up on the bluffs.

  They came in bunches. You’d see two or three shooting stars together and the crowd of people up there in the dark would ooh and aah and then there would be nothing for a few minutes. In the crowd there was one example of the common tufted Jersey blowhard, this one was a male, and he’s going on in the stentorian bellow native to the species, “Orion is right over there, and that’s the Big Dipper, and if you follow the handle out you can see . . .” and like that. I listened to it for a while, but he just kept it up, they always do, and finally I felt obligated to point out to the guy that he should shut the fuck up before someone from Orion went over there and kicked his ass.

  I suppose I’ve been spoiled by video games and computer-generated dinosaur movies. They were just quick streaks in the sky, maybe three of them in the space of an hour and a half were what you’d call memorable, big enough to leave a sort of afterglow, a neon green streak that took thirty seconds or so to fade out, but it’s something, when you think about it. This stuff has been flying through space for six or seven billion years, if you believe what they tell you, and it’s dying tonight, burning up, and the only ones watching are a bunch of loonies from Jersey and one thief from Brooklyn. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, though. I was wondering how pissed off Rosario was gonna be when he opened up his rented storeroom, whether or not he was already trying to find me, also whether that chickenshit crested Jersey gasbag was looking around the parking lot, seeing if there were any cops in attendance. I didn’t need the attention, I was already a two-time loser. Next time I go away I’m gonna do serious time. And how stupid would that be, get away with two million bucks and then get busted for hassling some loudmouth asshole in a parking lot? I left while it was still dark.

  I really didn’t want to go back, and I drove down the parkway wondering what Leonid was really all about. In primitive societies they would probably know, the old men would probably stay up all night watching, they would probably attach some spiritual significance to the event, fast for a few days, start looking for a virgin to sacrifice. I paid the toll at the bridge, asked the guy if he had seen Leonid, but he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  I dumped the car back where I got it. Hey, I try to be a good guy when I can. By the time I got back, though, my head was all fucked up. Last thing in the world I wanted to do was get back on the train and go home. There was a little park a few blocks away from where I left the car; it runs over the top of the BQE behind some brownstones. I had done a few B&E’s in the neighborhood, but nothing recent, so I went over and sat on a park bench. You can’t watch the sunrise from there because it comes up behind you, but I stayed there while it got light. You can see the whole of Upper New York Bay from there. It made me wish I had brought my binoculars along. It ain’t much of a place to watch for birds, though, mostly what you see there are herring gulls, cormorants, and your basic assortment of ducks. There’s supposed to be a nesting pair of peregrine falcons that comes back to the Brooklyn Bridge every January, but I’ve never seen them. You wanna see birds, the best place to go is Central Park, as insane as that sounds. Think about it: New York City is right on the migration path, right, the bird’s doing his thing, he gets tired, okay, all he can see for miles around is fucking buildings, then all of a sudden he sees this big green park, got its own lake, trees up the ass. Stands to reason, right?

&nb
sp; Life is much less of a bitch if you can distract yourself with shit like that. Didn’t work for me that morning, though. I sat there and went through my whole sorry fucking history, feeling like shit. I don’t think I was looking for excuses, not really, I think I was just trying to understand what to do. History repeats itself, even when you ain’t got much history. I never knew my parents, some sanitation guys fished me out of the trash in front of a building in Williamsburg. I don’t remember that, naturally, but I heard the story often enough.

  One of my earliest memories is having the shit beat out of me by a gang of kids in the basement of some institutional building, some government place made of cinder-block walls painted yellow, fluorescent lights, gray asbestos tile floor, white panels in a suspended ceiling. To this day, I am uncomfortable in those places. I don’t remember if I cried or not. I might have, at that early age. It doesn’t work, though. You learn, early on, not to indulge in it. Anyway, when kids are left to their own devices, they seem to bunch themselves in gangs, and rival gangs take turns working you over until you join one or the other. I don’t know where that impulse comes from, maybe the gangs satisfy those shadowy cravings for family and acceptance, but that’s just supposition on my part, I have no real information on the subject. I was never a joiner, so I had no other option than to take it until I could build myself up into someone who would make them think twice, send them in search of softer prey. I remember seeing Jack LaLanne on some television talk show, it couldn’t have been too long after that first beating, and I only saw him that one time. He was wearing a fruity-looking blue jumpsuit and fucking ballerina shoes, but I remember thinking, I bet nobody fucks with him. From that age on I worked at getting bigger, getting stronger, getting faster. I sought out the gym rats and the iron heads, I attended the academies of the street, and I did my postgrad work at Rikers and Ossining. I didn’t do it out of nobility or virtue. It was just easier, for me, than subjecting myself to another set of rules, putting up with shit from another self-important authority figure. To me, the only difference between a gang and any other institution was the color of the uniforms.

  So make your left hand into a fist. Hold it out away from you, roll your shoulder and twist forward at your waist. Now hold your right up next to your jaw, somewhere about halfway between your chin and your right ear. I have kept you all at least that far away. That’s my comfort zone. If you get too close, it will cost you. Get past the left and I’ve got the right waiting. Once, I saw a tape of Teofilo Stevenson, the great Cuban boxer, fighting a succession of Romanians and Bulgarians during the Olympics. Three-round fights, right, and they all thought they could survive. They would dance around and throw pitty-pat punches, piling up points while they tried to avoid that left jab. Stevenson, like a giant praying mantis, would wait patiently until they forgot themselves and got too close, and then he would drop that right hand like the hammer of God, and that would be that.

  So now I’m two years shy of thirty, more or less. I can’t give you an exact birthday. I do know the day they found me in the garbage. I’m six foot one, I stay right around two-twenty. It’s a little heavy for a burglar, but it’s my best weight. My hair is jet black, when I let it grow in, and my skin fades to a yellowish olive when I’ve been out of the sun for a while. I’ve got tattoos from my wrists to my shoulders. They were not the smartest choices I ever made.

  I wasted a lot of time wondering where I came from. I don’t mean the curb in Williamsburg, I mean the people. Could have been anything, anybody, almost any ethnicity. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m not a pygmy, okay, but I’ve seen kids from black families whose skin was as light as mine, and there are a lot of Jews in Williamsburg, and a lot of Spanish, too. And who’s to say that my mother, whoever she was, didn’t take the subway so she could dump me a safe distance from wherever she lived? Genetically, I could be a part of any one of those groups, but in reality I lack the credentials for any of them.

  It’s funny, though, when you look at all this ethnic shit from the outside. All of these convenient categories, white, black, Hispanic, Oriental, they only have meaning when you are standing too far away to see any detail. Get up closer and all of those terms become worthless. Chinese guys get pissed off if you mistake them for Japanese, the Japanese look down on the Koreans, and nobody can figure out the Tibetans. The languages don’t even help much. The Mexicans can’t understand the Cubans and the Cubans can’t understand the Guatemalans and nobody can understand the Puerto Ricans. Get closer still, even those divisions break down into smaller subsets. You take two Mexicans, one guy from Mexico City and an Indio from Oaxaca, put them in the same room, they might kill each other. The same principle applies to white, black, and whatever other group you might care to name. I used to know a cracker from Alabama, okay, he got stationed in England when he was in the army. Pissed him off no end that everyone he met over there called him a Yankee.

  I suppose I have given up on the idea that I could figure out, somehow, whatever subspecies of human being to which I belong, that I could compare the shape of my fingers, say, or my ears, or that some clue to who I am lies buried in the unconscious patterns of my speech. And even if I knew, even if I did figure it out, I wonder if I would feel any different. When I hear the word “we,” I accept that it never includes me unless it is used in a limited and mercenary way by some guy like Rosey, with whom I may have formed a temporary alliance in order to better separate some fool from his money. I am the other guy. I suppose I should feel happy I didn’t get tossed into the garbage truck. Anyway, you can probably guess the rest of it, except for the part about my son.

  Little Nicky, I call him, five years old, he is the most beautiful fucking kid you ever saw. I know, everybody says that about their kids, right, but in my case it might be true. Little Nicky looks like Elvis and Sophia Loren had a baby. He’s got curly brown hair and this smile, Jesus, it could break your heart. I don’t generally make a great first impression on women, but when Nicky’s with me, they swoon, man, young, old, and in between, they just melt. Everybody wants to stop and say hello, and Nicky will talk to them all. The only woman I ever met that didn’t love Nicky is the Bitch who runs the foster home he’s in. I guess she is more in love with the money the state gives her to take care of him. “Poppy!” That’s what he calls me, and he yells it out every time he sees me, which isn’t all that often, “Poppy!” and he’ll come running, wrap himself around my leg. I’m not supposed to hang around where he lives. The Bitch doesn’t want me visiting, so she got an order of protection on me to keep me away.

  Nicky’s mother and I never married. I mean, we talked about it, went to the parenting classes and the whole bit, but that was when I got sent upstate for the second time. She got into crack while I was away, she was dead by the time I got out, the state had Nicky, and that was that.

  I’ll tell you what a supervised visit is like. Somebody’s office, right, another one of those government buildings, cinder-block walls, fluorescent lights, all of that. I’m uncomfortable, they bring Nicky in, he’s uncomfortable, we got this woman sitting there watching us, we can’t go anywhere or do anything. I can’t give him money, but I can bring a toy, or a T-shirt, something like that. Nicky isn’t really interested in presents, he just sits right up next to me as close as he can get, talks to me in a voice so quiet I have to lean down close to hear him. It’s fucking torture, I love this kid, man, but I hate seeing him like this, it puts me in a rage. I really want to kill the Bitch for doing this to me, and I know Nicky can sense that. The half hour blinks past and it’s gone, Nicky tries not to cry when they take him away, and so do I. I walk out of the place cursing the Bitch, God, Nicky’s mother, and everyone else who’s had a part in this, but I never once look at myself. I always want to skip these visits, but I can’t. I want to do the right thing, but I don’t know what it is.

  Once in a while you get one moment when you can see the future, it’s like a present from God, “Here, asshole, here’s how it’s gonna play, and what a
re you gonna do about it?” That morning on the park bench I could see it all. If Rosey didn’t get me the Russians would, either that or my luck would run out and I’d wind up back in Ossining, and this time they weren’t gonna let me back out until I was old and gray. And the worst of it was that Little Nicky was coming up the hard way, just like I did, and he was gonna turn out just the same, maybe worse. I did not want to sit in some fucking jail cell and think about that.

  That was when I decided I was gonna steal him and run.

  I didn’t have a fixed address. All I really had was two regular-sized duffel bags and a laptop. I paid my bills on-line, I carried a cell phone, and I lived in sublets. The way it worked, there are Web sites for people who want to rent their place out while they’re away, and I would log on to one of those and find something I liked, usually just for a month or two. Sometimes you could even work the whole thing out without ever meeting face-to-face—people’s faith in their fellow man can be astonishing. I used a variety of cover stories. Usually I would claim to be an artist or a musician or a college student, and if I had to meet someone to pick up a key or drop off a check I would wear a long-sleeved shirt to cover the tats, and maybe a beret, grow a little goatee. If I managed to look boho enough they almost always trusted me. Hard to figure. And anyway, I never robbed any of the places I stayed in, though a few times I would hit a different apartment in the same building. I always left the places I’d stayed in nice and clean, though, everything intact.