Flagged Victor (30 page)

And then I read on about Augustine’s closest friend.

He was my companion in error, Augustine wrote, and I was utterly lost without him.

I knew what it meant to have a companion in error.

A lump in my throat, I learned that Augustine’s friend fell mortally ill with a fever. After all hope was lost, the friend was baptized. But instead of dying, the friend recovered and woke.

When Augustine, who had never left his friend’s side (oh, how this comparison pained me), was finally able to exchange words with his friend, he teased him about the baptism. But
the friend, who weeks before would have shared the cynicism, looked aghast and admonished Augustine never to treat the miracle of faith so lightly again. Otherwise, Augustine should leave, no friend worthy of the name.

Augustine took the rebuke, mystified by the intensity of his friend’s reaction. His guilt compounded a hundred times over when the fever returned and the friend died a few days later.

I lived in a fever, he wrote, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. But if I tried to stem my tears, a heavy load of misery weighed me down. The god I worshipped was my own delusion, and if I tried to find in it a place to rest my burden, there was nothing there to uphold it. It only fell and weighed me down once more, so that I was still my own unhappy prisoner, unable to live in such a state yet powerless to escape from it. Where could I go, yet leave myself behind? I left my native town. So from Thagaste I went to Carthage.

For years I searched for Carthage, and only occasionally did I understand what I was doing, where I was going. Finally I moved to Brooklyn, the Carthage of New York.

I
wrote that after the Brinks job I left him, because in some ways I had. Unfortunately, such endings never happen as neatly as they should. Poetically clean breaks are the way storytellers dramatize the truth. In my case, the mind was willing but the heart was weak.

I had returned to school in January, but I was a shadow. I attended classes, studied for exams, wrote papers, and drank and partied like a champ, but I had nothing inside. I was no longer among the living.

Or, you could say that I was completely the opposite. That I was invigorated, angry, forceful, wilful, charming, deceitful, curious, and inclined toward extreme experiences.

A hollow shell or a shit disturber extraordinaire. Take your pick. Such is youth, the myriad state.

The
Brinks job was our bad mood, our seasonal affective disorder. With that trolley of coins, like some cursed treasure in a fairy tale, the skies darkened and our luck turned.

Simultaneously, and by no means coincidentally, I became more active as Chris’s partner in crime, at least in the planning of it, which was a great step forward toward total complicity. The failure of the Brinks job, and the slight but ever-so-nagging lack of faith I now had in Chris’s thought processes, prompted me to step up, as it were, and start pulling my load.

I had one predominant motivation. I did not want him to do a Brinks job again. To me, the risk was incalculable and, therefore, should be avoided at any cost. Accordingly, I betrayed my father and offered up a bank instead. I convinced Chris the score would be sizable. I’d worked long enough in a bank to understand its operational weaknesses. The most cash-inundated times. Why rob a Brinks delivery, with those guns and sprayed bullets, when you could intimidate unarmed clerks? Bank employees were not paid to thwart a robbery, they were instructed to be obsequious
and helpful. I hinted that my father was motivation for further revenge. I was sick of him. I was tired of his authoritarian rule. I wanted to storm, like Carlos the Jackal, into the boardroom of his corporate universe, take hostages, demand ransom, fly to Cuba.

This was my desperate play, the ace card I had been holding back.

The first month of the new year always seems longer than the other months, as though it is the most mature month, the most sober, the getting-down-to-business month. And yet, Chris did not get down to business. He failed to return to school, as he had vowed to do. He abandoned his workouts, listless about the effort required to heave and clank. He did not seem particularly into Susan, nor particularly driven to cheat on her. He came across as tired and emotionally depleted.

Still, when we were out for drinks on the last Thursday night of the month, he surprised me by announcing that tomorrow would be the day. The day of what? I asked. The day we rob the bank, he answered. He seemed almost belligerent in tone, as though looking to pick a fight. I had no choice but to agree.

The next day, we parked in the same area where we had parked for the aborted Brinks job. I waited once again. Amazingly, I did not feel any paralyzing nervousness. Whatever happened, getting caught or getting rich, would be done without bloodshed. I was grateful at least for that.

But when Chris returned from the bank, running at high speed, those long strides gracefully covering the distance, I saw no money in his grip.

Go, he shouted.

So go I did.

I spun out of the lot. I had forgotten about the adage to be calm and normal. Chris put a hand on the steering wheel to wake me up.

Slow down, he said.

Sirens converged as I eased into traffic. Cops from three directions at once. We sat behind a Volvo at a red light. The light turned green, a few cars jerked forward but then stopped as a police car burned through the intersection on its way to the mall.

Police car gone, the green light turned to red. We waited some more. We could not help but see police cars everywhere. Then, mercifully, green came again, and we moved forward in the flow of others.

Always late, Chris said. Cops are such stupid motherfuckers.

I found out soon the stupidest motherfucker was me. In an icy voice, Chris told me what had gone wrong. The bank kept all its money in a central safe, not in the tills. Chris had stormed over the counter, but the clerk only looked confused and said he had no money. So Chris moved on to the next clerk and told that motherfucker to empty his till, and that motherfucker in turn said he had no money. The money, the second motherfucker explained, was kept in the central till behind the cage.

We did not have a cage at my bank. I had assumed that every bank would be like mine. I felt the heat rushing to my face.

Was the cage difficult to get into? I asked. I scowled to make it seem as though I was pissed off.

I never tried, Chris said.

Why not? I asked, talking as though pissed off—my money too, that sort of thing.

Because it wasn’t in the plan, Chris said.

And that was that.

The plan, however much it might alter according to the dictates of circumstance, was the Ten Commandments, the Constitution, and the NHL Rulebook rolled into one.

We
were never able to stay mad at each other for long. We got drunk that night. There may have been a dozen beautiful women in the bar, but all we did was huddle over our drinks and argue philosophical problems.

Is it better to be lucky or good?

I’d say good. Luck is random. Nice to have but you can’t rely on it.

If a hot chick was willing to do one incredible thing with you and one thing only, what would you do?

I’d say threesome. Still stuck on that idea. Got to get it out of my system.

Who’d win in a fight, Kirk or Sulu?

Much as I like Sulu, I’d have to go with Kirk. Unless we’re talking Sulu with the virus.

Yeah, Sulu with the virus could beat pretty much anyone.

Except Spock.

No one could beat Spock.

Except maybe evil Spock with the goatee.

If a hot chick offered you a chance for a threesome and the other girl had a great body but the ugliest face you’d ever seen, would you do it?

Probably.

If you had to choose between getting caught and living as a fugitive for the rest of your life, what would you do?

I wouldn’t get caught.

That’s not what I asked.

Then the question is too theoretical to be relevant.

As opposed to Spock with the goatee fighting normal Spock?

That’s at least conceivable.

Come on, man. Which would you do?

Life as a fugitive.

Never see your family and friends again.

No biggie.

Never see Susan.

Let’s not get personal. What about you?

Me too.

Then you see it is a stupid question, isn’t it.

I guess so. It seemed profound in the moment.

That’s because you’re on your seventh rum and coke.

Could be.

Actually, the whole fugitive lifestyle could be kind of fun.

Don’t get started on the Butch-and-Sundance-still-alive thing.

Don’t know if I’d be into riding a horse every day though. Bonnie and Clyde would be more my style. Except with a faster car.

They’re dead too, you stupid motherfucker.

You’ll believe pretty much anything you see on TV, won’t you?

Hours
later, when Chris finally dropped me at my home, I stumbled inside. I tried to sleep and couldn’t. The bed did spins.
Occasionally, I rose from bed and stumbled into the bathroom to throw up, retching horribly. A few times I got up just to urinate or drink another glass of water. I dreamt of Bonnie and Clyde all night. Those rustling bushes. That hail of bullets. The shattered glass and blood-splattered love. The long last look. Then torn full of holes.

The next morning when I stood over the toilet to piss, I noticed speckles of blood in the bowl. I got down on my hands and knees to look more closely. Was it really blood?

That evening, without a word, my mother gave me a pamphlet on alcoholism. It reminded me of the stack of pamphlets she had handed me a week or so after my first wet dream, when I was fourteen. Those pamphlets were short paragraphs with simple graphics about birth control, the mechanisms of impregnation, masturbation, and sexually transmitted disease. So silently offered, they’d seemed to rebuke the wonder of whatever had happened to me in that dream a few nights before. Had I shouted out, Hallelujah! in my sleep? The lightness of newly discovered pleasure became the weight of guilt. Despite the secret shame, I brought them to school the next day to show my friends, with all the bravado I could muster. Now, years later, another pamphlet. How To Know When You Are Drinking Too Much. I saw it as an ode to obviousness. My first argument was the very premise: Define
too much.
For each circumstance, each different night, the quantity Too Much was just a spin of the roulette wheel. The numbers rarely coordinated exactly with the results. I also argued with the general idea that alcoholism is a disease and not a response to mood or moment. Clearly, the author had never been in
the bank-robbing business, nor been a college student for that matter. There were simply too many instances I could think of when drinking yourself into oblivion was not only sensible, it was the right thing to do.

I put the pamphlet on the stack of bills on the counter in the kitchen. It remained there for several days, an unspoken, unresolved argument among us, and then it disappeared.

I did know, however, that I needed to get my own fucking place.

Two
weeks later, we decided to go again. We were, by this point, so broke we felt like rock stars who had once been worth millions and now desperately needed a comeback album.

Once again, it was my idea. The movie theatre. The blockbuster payoff. The bank alternative.

Let’s do it, Chris said.

My only hesitation was that it might be better to wait for big-time movies. In February, the movies weren’t hits. They did not draw lineups. In the summer, the take would be much bigger.

Fuck summer, Chris said. If it works, we’ll do it then too. Call it a sequel.

On go night, we went out for drinks. It seemed smart to have a few before we did the job. It was raining and cold. The world’s shittiest weather combination. I was on my fourth or fifth rum and coke when Chris said I’d had enough.

Because of the rain, Chris had a yellow raincoat. Because of the cold, Chris had a hat with a ski mask. He carried a smaller
pistol because there was little chance of armed adversaries at the theatre. A black Ruger loaded with .22 calibre bullets. You could almost call it a chick gun if the damn thing didn’t look so James Bond.

I parked in the cul-de-sac, near the swamp where we’d built the coolest fort ever, all those years ago. The rain pelted the windshield and steam rose from the hood of the car. The swamp was a Scottish-moors kind of spooky.

When Chris walked into the lobby, the last movies had already started, and all movie-goers were inside. He saw, however, that there was only one cashier at the ticket counter, and that made him wonder whether he’d blown the timing. He could have turned away, saved the job for another night, but he was frustrated, so he walked up to the cashier, pulled the Ruger out of his gym bag, and angled it toward her. Sandra was her name, according to the tag.

You know why I’m here, he said.

Maybe Sandra knew, maybe she didn’t. Her eyes went wide, like a deer in the headlights. Then she was gone. She bolted from the back of the booth before Chris could repeat the order.

Standing there all alone, he thought: Fuck. Now what do I do?

The problem was getting into the tills. He’d never operated one before. Never paid attention at the Canadian Tire. He saw two ushers in their usher jackets standing at the rope line that separated the ticket lobby from the theatre lobby. They were staring at him as if he were a madman. He lifted his gun and pointed it at them as he strode over.

Bobby and Arnold, according to their name tags. He grabbed Bobby, the least quivery of the two, and dragged him over to the
cashier booth. Later, the police would call this physical contact a dangerous escalation.

Open it, he said.