Crumbtown

by Joe Connelly

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  An Introduction

  ACT I - Fifteen years later

  One

  SCENE I

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Two

  SCENE 7

  8

  Three

  SCENE 9

  10

  Four

  SCENE 11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  ACT II

  Five

  SCENE 16

  17

  18

  Six

  SCENE 19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Seven

  SCENE 27

  28

  29

  30

  Eight

  SCENE 31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  ACT III

  Nine

  SCENE 36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  Ten

  SCENE 50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  ACT IV

  Eleven

  SCENE 58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  Twelve

  SCENE 71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  Thirteen

  SCENE 81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  ACT V

  Fourteen

  SCENE 93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  101

  102

  103

  104

  105

  106

  107

  108

  109

  110

  111

  112

  113

  114

  115

  116

  About the Author

  Books by Joe Connelly

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction, about a fictional man named Don Reedy, who for several years robbed banks in and around the fictional city of Dodgeport, specifically in that imaginary section known as Crumbtown. It tells the stories that grew from those events, how those stories became legends, and those legends became television. Any nonfictional relationship between the characters in this book and other persons, living or dead, fictional or not, is completely coincidental.

  An Introduction

  Don Reedy was a boy so briefly he often forgot it happened, no more time, it seemed, than it took a person to be run over in the street, but he remembered how proud he’d been, the mornings his mother sent him out for cigarettes, five years old and all the questions he owned: What do your hands sing? he sang to the men standing in front of the betting parlor; Why don’t we fly? he flew to the old women elbowing in lines for buses. He cried when people tried to answer, because every answer took something away. His teachers in school were the worst thieves of all, who not only took what he asked but asked for his answers as well. By the time he was sixteen, he had only one question left—why should I go to school to be called stupid when I can be called stupid at home?

  His mother called him much worse when he dropped out. “Is this some dummy I delivered?” she begged. “Now that I’m dying, I have to look at this?” He was dummy when he fed her, and when he walked her to the bathroom door. She had been calling him dummy for so long, what was she supposed to do, because she was sick she should be saying, Oh Don, oh my dear son?

  Not in Crumbtown, where dummies like Don were a dime a dozen. They traced a long history, their missteps chronicled with pride, passed from one generation to another. Some of their brightest sons worked overtime at being dumb, on the streets after school, or in front of televisions sometimes late into the night, fractioning their vocabulary, multiplying their division—a period to end every question. All Don’s friends except Lee, who sat in the front of class and said he was going to be a doctor, and who was eventually killed by a doctor, were quick to learn that no amount of facts would change the truth. Their luck had been bad before they knew what luck was. They’d grown up in a place where everyone was known to be stupid, and nothing they studied would ever get them born again in a smarter part of the city. Don’s teachers had proven this with geographical algebra. His parents proved it by working themselves to death paying for a house made entirely of cancer-causing materials, a house that was sinking, like all the houses and people there, one and a half inches a year, into the river delta that had created Crumbtown ten centuries earlier, and was slowly taking it back.

  At Don’s mother’s funeral, Uncle Joe the locksmith, who all day said nothing in his suit, burst out in big brown tears, and rubbed his arms on Don’s, and offered him a job installing car alarms. In the following weeks, his uncle taught him the quiet beauty of keyless entry, the soft words every alarm system needs to hear. When Don got off the job at seven, he would go to work for himself. Two nights a week he’d take the bus to another part of town, a rose-lined driveway on Padlocked Hill, a spotlighted carriage path in Snob Gardens, where he would deftly part cars from their sleeping owners, without a note of protest from either. He took the biggest ones he could find, the silver and leather twenty-footers, drove them through the suburbs, the blackened landscapes beyond, then back to Crumbtown, where he dumped them among the ghost piers lining the river.

  One night Don picked up a glistening Eldiablo, only three thousand miles on it. He should have loved driving that car, but the forty-seven-position seats saddened him, the Aerosonic climate control left him lukewarm. Don could imagine the owner’s face in the morning, finding the driveway empty, but what about later, waiting for the car to be found, or for a new one to be delivered. How would the man feel? He’d be waiting, looking ahead. Having your car stolen was bad luck, but it could happen to anyone, a throw-your-hands-in-the-air accident of fate. Don wanted the man to feel more chosen, the way Don felt every morning when he looked out his uncle’s window.

  He drove the Eldiablo to the shadowed end of Felony Street and he got out and stood at the edge and glared at the circling river, the bags of trash rising in the wake like rotting seals. Garbage. The smell was everywhere after a rain, in his hair, his hands. He fished out one of the bags and threw it in the back of the car and drove over to his cousin’s garage on Marginal. Carefully he disassembled the dashboard and placed one empty sardine can behind the radio, then he opened the back of the rear seat and poured in a cup of old milk. He put the parts back together and drove the car up through the blossom-strewn streets of Padlocked Hill, cutting the engine and lights just before turning in the drive.

  He found realarming the cars more difficult than disalarming, and returning them made the work three times as dangerous. Don didn’t
care. He felt so good that at first he thought he might be sick, some new kind of flu. Then it hit him. This was happy. A bit of Crumbtown in every part of the city. He had a breakthrough day when he installed loose marbles behind a glove compartment. He consulted other cousins, learned how to add miles to the odometer, how to interfere with radio reception by running the antennae wire through the engine block. Working five hours or more on every car, sometimes racing to get it back before dawn, leaving there to go to his uncle’s locksmith job. While road-testing a burgundy Fort Worth to get the rattle in the vents just right, he fell asleep at the wheel. Next morning he awoke handcuffed to a stretcher. The nurse, who looked like Walter Cronkite, smiled while explaining how Don had crashed into the back of a police car, whose only occupant was taking his nightly nap. Don was lucky, she said, the cop was lying down when the Fort Worth struck. He’d have been charged with murder if the cop had been sitting up.

  One year. Uncle Joe welcomed him home with a party of warm beer and some spilled mustard. You beautiful sweet idiot, he said. You dumb bird. They wanted to hear the stories Don didn’t know, stories they’d constructed in his absence: how he managed to get the hamster into the mayor’s air conditioner; the fish heads he’d left in the bishop’s miter. He’d become a Crumbtown celebrity, nearly as popular as Tom Ramsey, who was doing a life term for shooting his mailman, and they cursed Don and laughed at everything he said. After all the chairs were broken, Maury Threetoes punched him in the arm and offered him a job stealing cars.

  Within six months the little room at the top floor of his uncle’s house had become a maze of new shoes and suits, so many colors he had to write them down to remember. Before he left for a job, he’d pick a suit that matched the color of the car he was about to steal, and before dropping it off in one of Maury’s chop shops on Drywell, he’d take the car out to the clubs on St. Chevre. There he’d park and sit on the front fender, his shoes on the bumper, his pants raised just enough for the ladies to see, how his socks matched the upholstery. He kept a suede-covered book in the front pocket of his double-knit jacket, the names and numbers of fourteen business managers’ daughters. Don told them he worked in a car dealership for a top secret government agency. This is happy, he thought, this couldn’t be happier, until the night he met Tina Semple, who looked so much like her father, Judge Semple, the man who’d handed Don his first prison sentence, like it was a thing the judge cherished, something he wanted only Don to have.

  Judge Semple’s daughter, his dearest Tina, about to be number fifteen in Don’s book, bent over the eight-track holder and giggled while she unzipped Don’s canary-colored Robert Hall’s. As he turned the car onto Washington, she lifted out Don’s johnson, her fingers dripping down his leg, over the gas pedal. Don jumped the sidewalk and rammed the front doors of the precinct.

  Two years. In his absence, Crumbtown sank another three inches, causing two more roads to become dead ends. Cancer rates, already the highest in the state, had risen ten percent, surpassing that of mice forced to live in similar surroundings. Duggin’s plastics factory closed, and was demolished and replaced by a garbage storage facility. The last working port had been shut down and dismantled and sold to Tripoli. Ten Chinese restaurant workers were rumored to be living in the old Sanguina house, behind the Pig in Jelly.

  Don rented a studio apartment over the welfare offices on Van Blunt. In the mornings he sat by the window and read the paper, the sports pages, comics, and eviction lists, the want ads for envelope salesmen and wig makers. The rest of the day he sat by the window and watched the men standing with their backs stuck to the liquor store window across the street, the old women waiting in groups of twenty or more at the bus stop on the corner. Uncle Joe the locksmith had moved up to Devon and taken most of his cousins with him, and Don spent the nights drinking beer with the few friends who weren’t in prison, the half twins, Tim and Tom, Happy the Butcher, Iron Heinz, and Father Sunshine. He tried not to think about stealing, and thought about it all the time.

  A month after his release Don was given a job driving deliveries for one of Maury Threetoes’ four trucking companies. Every day before dawn Don would leave a warehouse on Lemon Street for the shopping districts on the northern side of the city. Three or four times a year, it had been agreed, he would stop at a certain diner and leave behind the keys. Later, on the phone with the police, he’d say he’d seen a Russian man driving away, or two Cubans, or three Chinese men dressed like restaurant workers. It wasn’t stealing, Don told himself. He calculated that in twenty-five years he’d have been robbed as much as he’d robbed.

  When his truck had been stolen for the second time, Don sat at the table by the window and ordered coffee, waiting for the police to arrive. He hadn’t noticed the waitress setting down the cup, but when she returned for a refill, her hips blacked out all light from the window. Don looked up as her eyes turned blue, her lips and teeth white and red. He watched her walk away, then he raised his hands to where his heart had been, realizing he’d just been robbed again. The truck was gone, and now this waitress had taken everything in his chest. He tried to stand and speak, to tell her to bring them back. When the police came, he forgot the story he’d rehearsed. Instead of Chinese restaurant workers, he described the thieves as one young female, about twenty-two, wearing a white shirt and a white apron tied over tight black pants that showed the bursting seams of her underwear. Her face was a ticking time bomb, Don said, her brown hair waiting to explode out of her cap the moment she took off her shirt to take a bath. He warned the police not to look directly at her. The officer taking the report followed Don’s eyes to the young woman behind the counter. He shook his head and, in his lined pad, wrote: three Chinese males, mid-twenties, medium height, dressed as waiters, last seen heading north on Delinquency.

  Don returned to the diner the day after, with just enough strength to point to the coffeepot and groan as she poured from it. The next time he saw her, things didn’t go as well, a shattered cup, a scorched foot, a clogged toilet, but on the third day Don finally asked for something to eat. “I’ll have the leggs,” he gasped, “over easy.”

  “I like your nose,” she said, and wrote her phone number on the check.

  Don never had trouble talking to women. He lied to them; he made up stories. His years in prison only made the lies easier. In fact, since his first sentence, the only times that Don could remember feeling comfortable was when he was lying to women. Along with everything else, she had taken that as well. How her eyes kept looking behind his, as if she knew the words before he could make them up. There was nothing left for Don to do. If he was going to say anything, it would have to be the truth, and the thought of that scared him more than any crime he’d committed. If she didn’t run away, he’d consider himself engaged.

  He picked her up the next day, in Happy the Butcher’s rusting Beverly, and said little on the drive to the river. The way she looked at the car, at him, like he was made out of tin. He should have lifted that Manarey he’d seen three nights straight under the expressway, and put on one of those red suits that were just sitting in a truck in back of Maury’s lot, waiting for the Brothers of Judgment to pay up.

  For five miles she didn’t say anything, through the long ramp up to the bridge and all the way across until they reached the other side, and then she didn’t stop, how she’d noticed him the moment he first walked into the diner—he looked so sweaty and dangerous, she said, like he’d just stolen a car or robbed a bank. They took in a movie over in Haute Landing, and afterward she talked about the people they’d just seen shot on the screen. Together they walked past the car and into the park and sat on one of the benches facing the shore. Don was ready. He breathed in deep and clasped his hands, and began to tell her about his father, who was run over by a hook and ladder. His mother who never got better. His problems finishing secondary school, and the subsequent habit of driving new cars that belonged to graduates. When he reached the part about his first term in prison, Don hesitated a min
ute, and with the dismal constellation of Crumbtown flickering in the distance, he explained how the FBI had recruited him to help break up a sophisticated dollhouse of an auto-parts-trading pyramid scheme. For six months he was the youngest federal agent in the country. He worked as a cowboy to bust a ring of modern art rustlers, and was currently investigating a sneaker shipper selling smack to schoolteachers.

  He finished the tale with his back to his date; his arms open to the collapsing tide. He lifted his head and felt a warm breeze near his neck, her fingers touching his. “Why is it,” she said, “that all the guys I like are either cops or just out of prison?”

  Don had known about jealousy; jealousy had left him sick, stupid, and imprisoned on more than one occasion, but it was different with a woman involved, more like a jagged lid you kept slicing yourself upon. He stopped going to the diner; the way she smiled at other men; the way she’d smiled at him. She couldn’t see him on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. She couldn’t say why. He’d get too upset, she said. He’d take it all wrong. For two months he carried the diamond he’d bought from his cousin’s dentist. Don was determined to give it to her on one of the nights she couldn’t see him. Mondays they fought with knives, Wednesdays with forks. Fridays she cooked him moussaka while he fingered the ring in his pocket.

  When it came time for Don to be robbed again, he asked Maury Threetoes if he could have his truck stolen anyplace besides the diner. Maury said the diner was a charm. A businessman had to know a charm when he had one, and not be afraid to stick with it. Don drove his truck to the diner and sat three tables away from the guy who was supposed to steal it. He watched her bend over the guy’s shoulder as she poured another cup. She hadn’t seen Don come in. The guy kept saying things that made her laugh, and bring more coffee, though Don could see the guy wasn’t drinking. Fifteen minutes he wasn’t drinking. Don would steal the truck himself if he had to. He walked out to the parking lot and hit the horn three times. As long as the thief doesn’t touch her, Don thought, he’d talk to him later, maybe on a Saturday, maybe he’d find them together. So that’s why she couldn’t see him. A woman who’d rather date a thief than a federal agent.

  She saw Don come back in, and quickly she stepped away from the table, pulling her friend from his seat—the guy’s hand still buried in her apron. Don walked into the kitchen and asked the cook if he could borrow a knife. He met her at the door, and placed the knife against her arm, and walked her behind the counter, and told her to give him all the money in the register.