Crumbtown

by Joe Connelly

  Little Eddy was a block ahead, running as fast as when he began, but he was no match for the loose Cantor, which covered the ground between them in seconds, still picking up speed when it hit him. Eddy lying on the hood, the bag sitting by his arm.

  Don crawled to the roof, reaching down, grabbing the handle as Eddy rolled over, pulling it under his chest.

  “Give me the bag,” Don said.

  Eddy looked up to the masked man above. “Don?” he asked. “It’s you, right?”

  “Just give me the bag Eddy and we can let you off.”

  “Tell me something Don, if I were you, would I give the bag to me?”

  Don didn’t answer. He was looking ahead, something in the road, Eddy turning over to see, at least a dozen police cars blocking the street. “That’s it, baby,” said Little Eddy, “you’re done.”

  66

  Dyan Swaine waited in the doorway, a plastic assault rifle pressed in her ear, a man in a turban pressing behind, breathing his lunch in her hair. “I’ve been waiting for this a long time, Dyan.”

  “Shut up before I smack you,” she said. Three scenes left and then she could go home. First, from the front, of her breaking away, running across the street, and being shot, then of her from behind and being shot, and finally of her dying in the arms of Lieutenant Gates. The prop master had attached multiple explosives to her back and chest, each connected to a silicone vial of fake blood and set to go off from a transmitter in his pocket. He said the force of the blasts would kill her if not for the bulletproof vest.

  “Action,” the director said, and she elbowed the turban in the ribs, pushing the rifle up, then running toward the cops, their guns firing at the terrorists. As always in these moments, she was terrified that someone had mistakenly loaded real bullets instead of blanks. Then from behind her came the trill of the assault rifle, and with it she felt the first wave of explosives firing in her back.

  67

  Dyan was lying on her stomach in the street, the cops in front of her, the set of Ten Thirteen. She was aware of that, and of the sound of a car skidding close, Dyan rolling away as it stopped. There was the sky, and a masked man flying through it, landing at her feet. More masked men appeared, one of them kneeling next to her, “Dyan, it’s me, Tim,” his hand gently on her forehead. “How could they do this to you.” Tim put his arms under and lifted her up, fake blood over his hands and chest. “It’s okay,” Tim whispered, “you’re gonna be okay.”

  She just wanted the day to end, for all of it to be over. She wrapped her arms around his neck as he carried her to the car.

  68

  Walter Yoshi, the director of Ten Thirteen, stood in the middle of the street and watched the Cantor driving away with Dyan Swaine. He looked down into his little TV, pushed a few buttons and watched the scene again, and turned to the prop master behind. “The hell with Dyan. We’ll use the stand-in. Hit her in the back and skip the front shot and go right to Gates. And this time I think more bullet holes, don’t you. And more blood.”

  “I don’t know,” said the prop master in his Belgian accent, “the stand-in is not so strong as Dyan.” But the director had already moved on, the next set of orders. The prop master stared at the empty street, sounds of cameramen resetting the scene. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the little transmitter, the red button on the right connected to a receiver in Dyan’s chest, the blood charges set to explode in the front of her shirt. “Good-bye, Dyan,” he said, and pushed the button.

  69

  Brian Halo and Rob stood side by side watching the ambulance crew fit the body of the mayor into a stretcher. One of the paramedics punched the mayor’s chest with his hands, the other punching air through a tube in the mayor’s mouth.

  “How’s he doing?” Rob asked.

  “How does it look like he’s doing?” one of them said as they lifted the stretcher and sent it careening into the back of the ambulance.

  Brian Halo stepped between, “He means to say do you think the mayor’s going to make it?”

  “Do I think he’s going to make it? Hey Larry,” the paramedic shouted at his partner, “do I think he’s going to make it?”

  “The fucking mayor for Christ sake,” Larry said, the doors of the ambulance closing.

  Brian Halo watched it clatter away. “I guess we can’t pay him back the money then.”

  A second ambulance arrived and Renaldo was detached from the backseat of the Dahlia. Several of the bank customers collected at the windows, rubbing their necks as they looked on, as if the injuries to the actor might be contagious.

  Anthony King and Arnold, who had escaped with minor head wounds, walked from the car to stand beside Rob. A solitary figure was approaching them, a man not much larger than a child.

  “Where’s the bag Eddy?” Halo said.

  Eddy lifted his shirt, showing his bleached middle. “Don’s got it.”

  King stepped forward, “I can get that bag for you, Mr. Halo.”

  “He’s got Dyan Swaine too,” Little Eddy said. “Kidnapped her from the set of Ten Thirteen. She had blood all over.”

  Brian Halo reached out for the shoulders of Arnold and Rob. He closed his eyes and performed a simple rapid-breathing exercise.

  “I can take care of Don, too,” said King.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Halo said between breaths. He was looking the other way, back to the bridge, the cameraman limping toward them, his camera under his arm, using his tripod as a crutch.

  “How’s the camera?” Halo said, words taken away by the notes of a loud bass guitar, which turned out to be a broken muffler, the black Cantor coming around the block, flying up Marginal, actors and extras running for the curb, Don holding the bag out the window as they passed.

  “The shot, get the shot,” Halo grabbed the cameraman with two hands, shoving the lens at the Cantor. “Shoot them.”

  King and Arnold pulled their guns as one and began firing at the car, the bullets bouncing off parked cars and telephone poles, an abandoned welfare office.

  70

  Tom tried to make the left on Lemmings, the buses backed up to the bridge, forcing him east, past Low Street, locked up with garbage trucks, and Sodden shut for some kind of Chinese holiday. The rest of the roads out of Crumbtown had sunk too far and were blocked off with construction barriers and detour signs, promises of bridges that would never be built. Even Leaven Street, which Tom was sure was still open, had been chained and padlocked, a hand-painted sign in the middle, “No Way Out,” leaving him no choice but to drive to the water, the weather-beaten fencing to the bottom of town, all the way around to Marginal from where they’d come. Everyone but Don ducking down as they passed the armored car and the broken Dahlia, ambulance sirens and gunshots, and when they were through, the Cantor’s other four occupants raised their heads: Tom and Tim and Dyan in the front, Don and Rita in the back. “Is everyone okay?” Don asked.

  “I’m all right,” Dyan said. Then she exploded.

  Fake blood burst from her chest like grapes out of a cannon, splattering the windshield, covering it red. “She’s hit,” Tim cried, and burrowed his face in her chest. Tom smeared at the glass with his hand while Don checked the windows for holes, the doors. “Strange,” he said.

  Tim raised his head, “It’s sweet,” licking the fake blood from his chin.

  “Wow that hurts,” said Dyan, unbuttoning her shirt. “Oh my God,” said Tim.

  Tom wiped at the fake blood until there was nothing to be seen of the street. “Hey Don, how much is in the bag.”

  “It looks like it’s all here,” Don said, “fifty thousand.”

  “Fifty G’s,” said Tim.

  Dyan finished taking off her uniform shirt and unfastened the bulletproof vest, a white T-shirt underneath. “What’s going on?” she asked, her speech slurred, still reeling from the last concussion.

  “We just robbed a bank,” said Tim.

  Dyan smiled, “I’m going to rob banks too.”

  Don kept che
cking the rear window. “We need to get another car, one without blood all over it. And she has to leave.”

  “Why does she have to leave?” said Tim.

  Dyan rolled up her bloodied police shirt and leaned over Tim, holding it out the window, “To Captain Palmer,” she shouted, throwing it in the wind.

  “Fifty G’s,” said Tom. “Hey Don, who’s better than us?” He turned on the radio, a guitar rising in, the Cantor crossing over the bridge, into Old Dodgeport, then quickly left and left, through narrow streets along the river, under the canted shadows of concrete pillars, the packed roar of the expressway over their heads, that crumbled Crumbtown from the rest of the city. “Who’s better than us?”

  Twelve

  SCENE 71

  Tom knew a good parking lot by the train station, unguarded, the row of cars in the back never seen by the sun. He let Don out and drove over to Herman’s, the other side of the river, where the four of them finished six Michigans and a double bucket of hard-boiled potatoes. Don pulled up twenty minutes later, a red Bollinger in near perfect condition. He said he wasn’t going to take it, that it would attract too much attention. “You had to do it,” said Tom, who loved Bollingers as much as Don.

  They took Sunset out of town, past new roads made out of billboard and block, the flat earth between laced with quick malls and Internet outlets. They stopped at the farmers’ market just before Hokum, and bought frozen apples and T-shirts that said “Property of Creosote Correctional” on the front. Dyan signed autographs on matchbooks, milk cartons, the backs of credit cards. Tom and Tim stood beside her and were treated like royal bodyguards, and given free sports drinks and postcards.

  Don took over behind the wheel, steering with one hand on Rita’s knee, the other over the radio, all the songs about girls and cars, and girls and cars. The Bollinger didn’t need much attention; just keep the hood pointed at the front end, the highway on the horizon. The cars around him were like toys in comparison, the shapes of peeled vegetables.

  “Where are we going?” asked Tom.

  “Let’s have a party,” Dyan said.

  “Dyan and me are going to Mexico,” said Tim. “I saw it on TV, they have a town that’s all bank robbers, from all over the world. They charge the tourists five dollars just to take their pictures.”

  “Let’s go there,” Dyan said.

  Don had only planned for the robbery, not where they would go after. He’d been away so long, only a few days to relearn the world. It used to be the cars were square and the earth was round, and if you drove straight you could die several times before finding yourself again. Now it seemed like the country was all right angles, one leading to another, right back to the same nobody you left, same old lousy housing with a new name on the door. He didn’t want to go to New York. He didn’t want to know how to sail or speak Spanish or tell the difference between a maple and an elm. He didn’t want to go anywhere except straight ahead with the music on and his hand in Rita’s skirt, her hair blowing over his face.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

  “Something with not so many red lights,” she said.

  “I know the place.” He left Sunset near New Blunder and passed through two housing developments ridged around an acre of water called Seven Lake. A mile later the road narrowed and jumped quickly back and forth over a stream, the houses getting smaller until they were gone. “What’re you looking for?” said Tom. “The Willow? I think it fell down.”

  “It fell down a few times,” said Tim, “and then the town was going to knock it down after Billy’s son tried to make it topless. And then that Indian guy was going to turn it into a water park, that guy who used to drink in there all the time. What was his name?”

  “He wasn’t really Indian,” Tom said. “He told me he was adopted.”

  “Well it doesn’t matter because it fell down again, and it used to be right here; it’s not here anymore.”

  “It was never here,” said Tom. “I think we passed it.”

  “No look. The dead trees; it’s down there.”

  Don almost lost control on the steep curve, the dry wheels calling out to the bare trees killed by the bumpers of men staggering out of the bar. At the bottom of the turn the old Willow leaned over them just the same as he remembered, like it had rolled there from the top of the hill, neon script leaking out of the cracks in the walls. The place was always more an idea anyway, which somebody had about where the world should end and start again. They used to drive out there after jobs, sleep upstairs with Mother Time and her dogs. Even then, when he’d be drunk two or three days at once, he couldn’t say for certain that the place existed.

  He pulled the Bollinger into the rocky drive and turned off the car radio; all of them waiting as the pitying words of Hank Williams slowly made their way across the lot, into the open windows of the car.

  “It’s wonderful,” said Dyan.

  Tom and Tim each grabbed a handful of bills from the bag and wrestled Dyan to the top of the stairs, where she twisted off a part of the front door. “It’s so real I love it,” she said.

  “Just don’t touch anything inside,” Tim put his arm in her elbow, “except me.”

  72

  Walking into the Willow with Dyan Swaine at his side, and more money in his hand than he could spend, was for Tim the end of every dream he’d ever had. Of course he might have changed a few details, added a limousine, and a large crowd inside, and a bartender who wasn’t a wrecked Costa Rican prostitute named Ingrid who’d once threatened to bite off his ear, but these were only the dream’s accessories. The two essential elements, the girl and the money, were what mattered most, and this night Tim had the best of both. It was almost as if he were already at the bar, watching himself walk through the doors, a beautiful actress on his arm, Tim thinking, Here was the man he’d always imagined himself to be, despite so many years of evidence to the contrary. He wished Loretta could see this.

  Tom slammed the door behind them, forcing a lit beer sign to the floor. The men at the bar cocked their heads to the sound, finally opening their eyes when they saw Dyan. The bartender refused to look. People had been calling her Ingrid for over forty years and she never forgot a debt. “You better be holding twenty-seven bucks, Tim Dwight,” she said without noticeably moving her lips, “or you and Tom can take the gas.”

  Tim dragged Dyan toward the bar and floated down a single bill. “Sorry Ingrid, but all I’ve got is hundreds. Get yourself something, and for my friends here.” He pulled out another. “And I’ll give one of these Franklins to anybody who can take a picture of me and my girl here. We’re getting married next week.”

  Everyone remained silent while Ingrid examined the bill, holding it under three different lights before wedging it into her girdle, the men suddenly talking at once, Tim’s voice yelling above the rest. “Drinks on me, cabrones.”

  It was one of Tim’s finest performances. He ordered beer in German, and tequila in Mexican. He sang three verses of “Your Cheating Heart” and then asked Ingrid to raise her skirt. When the men had effectively surrounded Dyan, he pulled her free, whirling through a free-associating series of dance moves, the cha-cha, flamenco, and rumba, the mooch and the sugarfoot, and then he sat down, exhausted, Dyan pulling at his arms, trying to get him to stand. “Give us a minute, baby,” he said, “to have a few cigarettes.” He looked around the room, realizing nobody was listening, that he’d been invisible for some time.

  They’d seen nothing but her since he walked in the door— each man taking a different part, watching with half breaths, like they were unable to look at the whole and would put the pieces together later, over the years to come. “Who wants to dance?” she shouted, and waited while their eyes disappeared under a collective brow, like they were trying to answer a riddle. Dyan shrugged and looked over to Don and Rita, who for several minutes had been stuck in the corner. Then she climbed a stool to the bar and shook her hands and clapped her hips. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t dan
ce. “Come on guys, let’s party.”

  Warner Hotel was the de facto leader of the group. He’d worked as a box cutter in Alaska and had once been hit by lightning, and so with great fanfare he stepped up to the rail and batted all bottles and glasses to the floor. Then he pulled himself to a seat on the bar and stretched to his back, looking up, Dyan dancing over him. He smiled and the rest of the men cheered.

  “What’s wrong with you guys,” she waved her arms. “Get up and dance with me. Come on. Life is short.”

  “Oh no baby,” Ingrid corrected. “Life is no short. Life is tall.” She leaned over and dropped a fistful of bourbon into Warner Hotel’s mouth, closing it with her hand, shaking it down.

  Tim stuffed his cigarette into the floor and shouted, “I’ll dance with you.” He climbed the stool to the bar and grabbed her hand. “I’d eat the moon for you, Dyan,” and twirled her around his glass.

  “Go, go, go,” Warner banged his elbows on the bar. He’d never seen Dyan Swaine from this angle before, and wondered if maybe he was the first person to do so. She wasn’t as beautiful this way, but man was she big. He couldn’t wait to tell his wife, who was always complaining about him wasting his time at the bar.

  73

  Rita felt Don’s arm cross under her, his hands growing on her hip as they walked across the lot, climbing the nail-filled stairs to the top. When Don closed the bar door the lights went off, the frazzled guitar getting louder in the dark, turning them into each other, three steps past the jukebox, the pool table, breathing in the corner, “I can’t leave you anymore,” she said.

  “Okay,” he mumbled, and they agreed that was enough talking. Their lips came together briefly. “If you could go anywhere,” Don asked, “where would you be?” He moved his hands under her shirt, spreading the muscles down her back. Hank Williams began another song about divorce.