“Wake up, man,” Larry shouts. They are standing in Dwight’s apartment. It’s a mess. Roaches scurry on the counter around dirty dishes, more dishes in the sink, leaking faucet, filthy windows, and when you can look out, all you see is bird shit on all the outside windowsills, peeling paint everywhere. A fan on the ceiling going around and around, covered in dust and spiderwebs. A smell Larry can’t identify. “You said you were coming in with me, remember. Jesus, Dwight. Which is it? You’ll be behind me or you’ll come in with me? Get this right, man. You got to get this right.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let me think.” Dwight is wearing stained long johns and a T-shirt that says Northern Church is #1 on it. It’s from a church-league baseball team, Little League, and is too small. His large stomach shows at the bottom, and he’s cut the sleeves off because his arms are too big. “I’m tired, man. I need to get some sleep. Late night last night. You should’ve come. All these chicks, man –”
“But we have to go over this together. We have to get it right.”
“Larry, chill.” Dwight plops down on his ratty couch. “Why do we have to do this now? What about tomorrow?”
“It’s my birthday, that’s why. Today. I want to give myself a present.”
Dwight looks up at Larry. “Your birthday?”
Larry sits down. “Yeah, my birthday.”
“Fuck.”
Dwight sniffs a bit. Scratches at his crotch. Yawns. Larry watches a roach scurry across the floor towards the kitchen.
“Well, that settles it, then. We rob a bank today. Let’s go.”
The bank is small. It stands by itself on the outskirts of a strip mall two towns over. It is Tuesday, mid-morning. Not crowded. A few elderly people are lined up waiting for tellers. The ATM machine is around the side of the bank. Anyone taking cash out won’t be able to see what is going on inside. There is no security guard. Only three bank tellers. A security camera. A man in an office in the back. Dwight has been watching for two hours. Waiting. Larry has gone to the bank machine once, made sure his face was covered. Sunglasses and hood. Checked out the security camera. Noticed the light wasn’t blinking – not working.
“Scoped it out,” Larry says, climbing into Dwight’s rusted Chevy. “The camera isn’t working. They’re so fucking stupid. They deserve to be robbed. We’re set.”
“You sure, man? This gets you time. Lots of time. Especially with the gun. More time with the gun. I know. Frank, you know him, tall guy, star tattoo on his neck? He got twenty years for using a gun.”
“I’m sure. I want to do this.”
Larry doesn’t know why he wants to do this. Convenience stores are too easy, perhaps? His adrenalin highs aren’t as high anymore? Except for the first fuck-up, each robbery has been easier than the last. They go in, they show the gun, they take the money, they leave. Boring. Larry shakes his head, readjusts his baseball hat, pulls up his hood. His head hurts. All this thinking.
“Maybe we should go back to doing B and Es,” Dwight says. “Get some more prescription drugs. Not just money. Things to sell. I don’t know.” Dwight rubs at his eyes. “I’m so fucking tired all the time.”
“I can do this without you, you know,” Larry says. “In fact, why don’t I do this without you?”
Dwight looks at him. Looks hard at Larry’s face. “No way, man. No. I’m in.”
When did this happen? Dwight, the tough guy, is old and tired and getting fat. Larry is taking over now, ordering Dwight around, planning, doing, needing, wanting, working. He’s skinny, Larry is, but he’s tall and mean and he’s growing into himself. Soon he’ll be thick and pumped. He’s the tough guy now.
“You’ve changed, you know,” Dwight says. “Used to be –”
Larry gets out of the car. Slams the door. Heads across the street and into the bank. Dwight watches him go. Doesn’t move to follow. Larry adjusts his hood, his sunglasses on. A gun shoved down his pants, his coat wrapped tight around him.
“Fuck,” Dwight says to himself. He waits. Watches. His hands on the key, ready to start the ignition when Larry comes running.
Which he does. So fast he’s a blur. Dwight starts the car and Larry jumps in and they peel out across the street and away.
Larry counts the money. “Ten thousand, I think, something around there,” Larry shouts. He’s freaking out. Giddy. Can’t stop talking. “Fucking right on, man. Oh God, that was amazing.” He can still hear the alarm ringing in his ears – he got out fast enough, before the cops came. “On the edge, man. Just crazy.” Larry shouts out the window of the car, the air cool and wild, flipping his hair, his hood off his head. “Shit,” he screams.
The adrenalin. The fear. The excitement. The craziness of it. Larry can’t get enough. His coffee tins are full of money he doesn’t even want. Dwight is stoned and high all the time, spending more money on drugs than he is stealing. But Larry hoards his money away and uses his gun and goes wild. High on fear. High on the job.
One of Larry’s coffee cans holds the figurine from the first B and E, the little boy with the fishing pole. Every so often, Larry pulls it out and looks at it. The pole is broken now, the string trailing down. There is a chip on the boy’s hat. But Larry’s heart beats fast whenever he looks at it.
Larry’s head hurts all the time now. Pulsing headaches. He shakes his head a lot as if trying to get rid of the pain, trying to rattle it out. He hasn’t had headaches like this since his first concussion, since Jack pulled the chair out on him and he crashed to the floor. Every concussion, until Jack left, the headaches were intense and wicked, but the pain would eventually stop. And then Jack left and the concussions stopped and the pain ended for good. His head hurt after the 24-Hour Variety murder, when the clerk smashed him and he kind of blacked out, but it went away quickly, like they all do. Until this year. Until he turned seventeen. The headaches are numbing and black and full of fire and ice. Piercing. Larry has to close his eyes when they happen. He can feel the pulsing. He can hear the blood flow through his head. He can feel his heart beat in his temples. Sometimes he blacks out. Sometimes he can’t remember anything and wakes up and things around him have changed. As if sleepwalking. As if someone pulled the curtain on his eyes but left his body in the light.
Except when he has the gun and is in the middle of something. Then the headaches stop. Completely. He feels nothing then, a beautiful calm serenity – robbing a bank, sticking up a convenience store guy, breaking and entering, beating up an asshole on the street – nothing. The headaches disappear.
Dwight is high on drugs. Larry is high on adrenalin. Same thing.
Soon Larry is doing everything on his own. He’s taken Dwight’s Chevy. He’s taken Dwight’s gun. Occasionally Larry gives Dwight some spending money, keeps him in drugs, but more often than not, Larry forgets about Dwight and carries on in his own way on his own time.
There’s a girl. His first serious one. Samantha.
God, there’s a girl. A hot girl. She hangs out at Dwight’s house – does drugs – but has no interest in the older man. She’s interested in Larry and his money, which he starts to throw around. She’s interested in his gun and his mysteriousness – he comes and goes, makes money, brings money, supplies Dwight with drug money. She doesn’t know what he does and doesn’t care. As long as there’s no blood on him. As long as he doesn’t beat her, like her last boyfriend did. As long as he brings her what she needs and as long as he does what she needs.
Larry can’t get over his luck. Samantha is something else. He brings her home to meet Susan and even Susan thinks she’s hot. Kids screaming around her, Susan says, “Holy shit, Larry, why does she like you?”
Larry wonders this, but soon forgets to worry about it because he’s getting bigger and tougher and angrier and more in control these days. His arms are covered in tattoos. He’s lifting weights when he’s not busy. He has dropped out of school and doesn’t need to work with his dad anymore. But he does. Because if Larry doesn’t go into Gallo’s Precision Repair every da
y and open the store, the store will go out of business. Larry’s father is passed out behind the counter most days. Doesn’t even notice Larry is there.
Just after Larry hooks up with Samantha, he moves out of his house. Away from Susan and her shitload of kids, away from his drunk dad, away from the memories of Jack and his mother. Away, especially, from his dark blue walls and the solar system. The stars on the walls don’t glow anymore, anyway. They stopped glowing years ago and are peeling off, half-hanging. Depressing.
Seventeen years old and in a trashy studio apartment above a store on Davis Street. A mattress on the floor. A hot plate. A microwave. A beer fridge. One chair in the corner and a big-ass screen. Alarms and firetrucks and ambulances keeping him awake at night. Bedbugs. Samantha tries to spruce the place up – pictures taped to the walls, venetian blinds, even coasters for the folding table she finds in the garbage and drags over one night.
Years later, Larry realizes that his first apartment is a lot like prison – the room is almost the same size.
“All we need now are chairs,” Samantha says. “We could even have dinner here. Sit on the chairs, at the table. No more eating on the mattress.”
“Whatever,” Larry says. Now that he has to pay rent, he’s scared to spend too much of his coffee tin money. The tins he took from under the floorboards in the attic and brought here to this studio apartment and hid under the floorboards in the closet. Having the money is not about spending it anyway. It’s about having it. Larry needs nothing, wants nothing. Just the big-ass screen to watch. A good cellphone or two. Food. Beer. Rent money for the place. Occasionally he buys things for Samantha – necklaces, earrings, wine. Once he bought her flowers, but she laughed at him. Mocked him. Ruined his image for a while. Now he says, “Whatever,” and doesn’t give her anything much. Enough to keep her interested and coming back, but not enough to make her complacent.
They fuck like rabbits. He’s seventeen. She’s twenty. She’s always high on drugs. He’s clean and sober but wants her badly all the time. Two, three times a day sometimes. Whenever he can get it. It’s the best time of his life. His headaches dim and taper off. She’s on top. Below. Behind. Sucking him off. It’s a fucking orgy. His seventeen-year-old brain is going to explode.
Susan is in his apartment when he comes home from work one day. With Samantha. They are curled up on the mattress together doing coke. Sniffing from broken glass. Rolled five-dollar bill.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Susan shrugs.
“Where are your kids?”
Susan shrugs. After the third kid, she got her tubes tied – Larry isn’t sure if the doctor did it without telling her or if she asked for it. They must have been sick of seeing her in the hospital, another C-section, another drugged out baby – fetal alcohol syndrome or worse. Low birth weights, all of them. Susan smoking up a storm all through pregnancy. Drinking. Drugs.
“Hey, Larry, hey. If she’d stayed,” Susan says now. “If she’d stayed with us, do you think we’d be like we are now?”
“Who?” But Larry knows exactly who she is talking about. Their mother. “What are we now, Susan?” Larry asks, leaning back on the folding table. Crossing his arms over his chest. “What do you think we are now?”
“Look around,” Susan says and waves her arms expansively. They all turn and watch a bug skitter across the floor.
Samantha laughs lazily. Her breasts are falling out of her tank top. She’s wearing his boxer shorts.
“I think we’d be even more fucked if she had stayed.” Larry says this but doesn’t believe it. He thinks about it. He’d probably be in grade twelve, graduating this year. He’d be working at his father’s store (same as he is now), but maybe his father wouldn’t be so far gone, maybe he would have kept his drinking in check. He did when she lived with them. Kept it quieter, at least. Maybe his mother would have painted his room over, made it more for a teenager, less for a kid. Got rid of the planets and stars. Unstuck the stars. Susan certainly wouldn’t have three kids with three different fathers. She wouldn’t be here, on his mattress, next to his girl, doing drugs.
“Get out of here, Susan. You’re pissing me off.”
Samantha says, “Let her stay, baby. She’s tired.”
They laugh at him. Drugged out. Lolling on the mattress. Mouths open.
Larry wants to get laid so badly. He is aching. His head hurts. All day he’s been dealing with his father’s clients – old people with watches and grandfather clocks. Needing batteries or adjusting or rotating or winding. Needing things from him. Paying him little. Larry wanted to get home, fuck Samantha, maybe order in Chinese. Go to bed early.
He leaves now. Slams the door on his way out. Hears their giggles from the mattress on the floor. Goes to Dwight’s. Finds him passed out on his floor. The door open, music blaring. Larry turns off the music, bundles Dwight into his bed, closes his door and leaves. Where to go? Larry finds himself walking past his father’s house. A light is on in the front room and Larry can see in. His father is there, eating something from a tray – microwave dinner. He is sitting in front of the screen, which glows throughout the room, the walls blue and flashing. He looks sad and lonely and Larry feels sick a bit. Seeing him from afar like this, not hearing his wrath, not taking his bullying, just seeing him there. An old man. Grey and tired. He knows nothing about him. He almost feels sorry for him. Larry’s head aches. When he got the tattoos, his father said nothing to him. When he moved into his own apartment, his father said nothing to him. Didn’t tell him not to, didn’t ask him to stay, just put his hat on and went to work. Nothing was said between them about any of it. Not even at the store.
Suddenly Larry sees one of Susan’s brood looking out the window on the second floor. She waves at Larry, her hair ratty from sleep. He can’t remember her name. He waves back and then turns and continues on down the street alone.
3:01 a.m.
“I didn’t mean to say ‘fuck like rabbits,’” the Prisoner says. “Sorry about that. I get carried away thinking about Sam. She was hot. And it’s been a long time.” He shakes his head.
“Don’t worry about it,” the Chaplain says, leaning back in his chair. “I’ve heard much worse since I’ve been here.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“Can I ask you a question?” the Chaplain says.
The Prisoner shrugs. He rolls to his side on the cot and holds his head up with his hand.
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Why not?”
“It’s just. I don’t know,” the Chaplain says. “I wonder what the point of it is.”
The Prisoner rolls onto his back again. The Chaplain wishes he could lie on the cot for a bit, wishes the Prisoner would take the chair.
“I have twelve hours. What the fuck else should I talk about?”
“Nine.”
“What?”
“Nine hours left.”
The Prisoner laughs. “Timekeeper, eh?”
“It’s just that it’s all you have. Nine hours. I thought you might want to talk about other things. About the crime that got you in here, perhaps, about your remorse, guilt, feelings in general. Maybe you want to talk about what you want done with your body when this is over, if you want to be cremated or buried. What do you want done with your things? Do you have any money you need distributed? A house? Any letters you want to give to anyone? Do you –”
“Shut up,” the Prisoner says coldly. “Can’t you just shut up?”
The Chaplain immediately shuts up. He wants to say sorry but knows that if he utters a single word, the Prisoner will snap. He can feel it in the air. The Prisoner is tense. An animal about to attack. Nine hours.
The Prisoner gets up from the cot and walks over to the toilet. The Chaplain cringes when he passes, expecting to get punched. He pisses in it without once glancing over at the Chaplain, who turns from him to give him some privacy. The Chaplain breathes a sigh of relief. When he is done, the Prisoner returns t
o the cot.
“Don’t you have to go?”
The Chaplain realizes yes, he does have to go. He doesn’t want to leave the Prisoner for even a minute, though. Steeling himself, he walks up to the toilet and stands there, awkwardly, trying to urinate. The Prisoner laughs. The flow comes. He’s fine.
“No way you can be self-conscious in this hellhole,” the Prisoner says. “You get used to it quickly. Guys always watching.”
The Chaplain washes his hands – no soap – uses a paper towel to dry them, sits back in his chair.
“I’m sorry about what I said –”
“I said shut up. Just cause I’m joking with you doesn’t mean you haven’t made me mad.”
“Sorry.”
The Prisoner sighs.
A knock on the door. CO6 pops his head in.
“You want your last meal now?”
“Now? It’s only three, right? Is it three? Not now,” the Prisoner says.
“I don’t know. I just thought you might be getting hungry.”
“I could use another cookie. You want a cookie, Chaplain?”
The Chaplain nods. CO6 leaves the room and comes back with four cookies. The Prisoner wolfs down two and the Chaplain nibbles at his.
“These are good cookies.”
“Yes, I guess.” The Chaplain thinks about cookies. About Miranda’s cookies. She learned all her baking from their mother and used to spend weekends as a teenager cooking the best chocolate chip cookies he has ever tasted. Until their mother got sick, she would bake with Miranda, and the Chaplain would pass by the kitchen hearing them laughing and whispering and talking. They were friends before mother and daughter. Comrades. He wanted that. With his father. Or his mother. Or even Miranda. But no one in the house talked to him like Miranda and his mother talked. They were close. Identical, his father would say, snapping back his newspaper, sitting in the big chair by the fire. Like twins. Exactly what the Prisoner’s mother said about Jack and his father.
The Prisoner and the Chaplain Page 8