The Getaway Man (7 page)

“It’s like Eddie’s just a kid,” he said, shaking
his head. “A simple, dumb kid.”

T
he jury found me guilty
of something, some charge I never heard of. I wasn’t guilty of the
killing, or even of the robbery. I guess it probably had something to do with
the car I was in.

My lawyer was really happy. He said the most the
judge could give me would be five years, and I probably wouldn’t get even
that much.

“I guess you heard how Tim made out,” he
said.

I just shook my head.

“Capital murder,” the
lawyer said. “And the jury found special circumstances. Do you know what
that means?”

I shook my head again.

“It means the
death penalty,” the lawyer said. “If he hadn’t come across
like such an outlaw when he testified, they might have cut him some slack, I
think. It wasn’t an intentional murder. I would have thought a life
sentence would be more appropriate, myself.”

“Yeah,”
I said.

The lawyer looked at me hard, like he could stare through to
the truth. I think he was mad because he knew I would never trust him.

W
hen you first come into prison, they keep you separate from everyone
for a few weeks. They have to make sure you don’t have a disease, I
guess. Once in a while, they bring you out of your cell to see a doctor or to
talk to different people. Everybody asks you a lot of questions.

One
man, I guess he wasn’t a guard, because he didn’t have a uniform,
it was his job to tell new guys what prison is like. I know that because he
started to tell me stuff like don’t borrow money from anyone. He was
reading through a bunch of papers while he was talking to me, moving his finger
down the pages.

“Oh, you’ve been in the system for a long
time,” he said.

“I guess,” I told him.

“Well, then you already know the score,” he said.

I
t
was in prison that I first learned what I was. I mean, what to call myself: a
getaway man.

I learned that from J.C. He was an older guy, maybe
forty or something. He was a heist man. You don’t get called that if you
just stuck up a bunch of 7-Elevens, or even if you broke into places. You had
to be doing big jobs, like banks. The way Tim wanted.

J.C. had so much
respect in there that the blacks left him alone, even though he wasn’t
with any of the gangs. That’s really hard, to do time by yourself, no
matter how much you might want to. Even the guards treated him good.

I
never thought a man like him would ever talk to me.

O
ne day, a guard came around to my cell. He told me I
was being discharged into population. I went with him into the main part of the
prison.

They gave me a cell. I could see right away it wasn’t
a good one. Too close to where they have to rack the bars to let you off the
block, so it would be noisy all the time. But at least I was the only one in
it.

The first thing I did when I got to go out into the yard was to
look around for guys I’d been with in the kiddie camps. We all knew
we’d go to prison someday, and some of us made promises, to stick
together and everything, when we met up again. But I didn’t see any of
the guys I knew from before.

Except for one—Toby. When I first
spotted him, he was walking with the boss of one of the white power gangs. I
watched until he went off by himself. I figured Toby could talk me up with the
gang; get me in, too.

But when I came up to him on the yard, Toby
wouldn’t talk to me. He acted like he didn’t know me at all. His
eyes had colored stuff on the lids, like a girl’s. And when he walked
away, I could see someone had cut the back pockets off his jeans.

Where
we were before, Toby had never been anybody’s kid. I could see the state
prison was different. That made me nervous, but I knew I could never show that
to anyone.

T
hat was the same day I met J.C. I was standing by
myself, watching Toby walk away, wondering what I was going to do. I
didn’t know that much about prison, but I knew I couldn’t make it
in there all by myself.

J.C. just walked up to me, and asked me how
I got there.

You’re not supposed to do that, I know. Not when
you’re in a real prison, for grownups. But J.C. was bigger than the
rules. I had to answer him. His voice was like the stuff they put in air
conditioners. That stuff is so cold you can’t touch it or you’ll
get burned. J.C. had a couple of guys with him. Older guys. Their eyes
didn’t have anything in them at all.

“I was the
driver,” I told him.

“Yeah, I know that,” J.C. said.
I wondered how he could know, but I didn’t say anything.

I guess
a couple of minutes went by before J.C. realized I wasn’t going to say
anything else, not unless he asked me to.

“How come you
didn’t get in the wind when you first heard the shots inside the
bank?” he asked me.

“Tim and Virgil were still
there,” I said.

“You heard the sirens, right? You knew the
cops were rolling?”

“They were still inside,” I told
him.

He looked at one of the guys with him. I’d seen that look
before.

“That was solid,” J.C. said. “That’s
the first thing a real getaway man has to have. Balls. No nerves, and balls of
steel. Am I right?”

One of the other guys said he was. I
didn’t think he was asking me.

A
few nights later, I went off
the block. I knew I couldn’t just stay in my cell all the time, or people
would get ideas about me.

I didn’t know when the test would
come, but I wanted it to be where there would be guards close by.

I
went over to the rec room, to watch the TV. There were plenty of empty
chairs.

In just a minute, a black guy came over and sat down next to
me. He was my height, but much wider. He had huge muscles all over him, like
armor. He was smiling, friendly. His teeth were very white. I didn’t look
in his eyes. He smelled clean and bitter, like laundry soap.

This was
the test. I knew what would come next. If I talked to him, he’d see if my
voice was under control. If I sounded scared, then he’d be nice. Tell me
what a bad place the prison was if you didn’t have a friend. Maybe offer
to protect me from certain people in there, pat my arm to make me feel better.
Then he’d ask me to go someplace with him. Someplace where we could
talk.

But if I didn’t answer him, he’d pretend to get mad.
He’d say I had disrespected him, or something like that.

It
didn’t matter how he was going to get it started, it was always going to
end the same way.

I knew I’d have to try and hurt him bad, if I
ever wanted to be left alone. My best bet was to jump him first, but I was,
like, paralyzed, trying to make myself move.

There was only one guard
in the rec room. He was watching the TV.

I was looking at the floor,
trying to see if there was anything I could use on the black guy. I wished I
had a knife. I didn’t know how to use one—I mean, sure I knew how
to use one, but I’m not a pro at it, like some guys you hear about when
you’re locked up—but I know, some people, if you just show them a
blade, they’ll back off.

I didn’t think that black guy
would back off, even if I had a knife. I could tell he’d done this
before.

I wished Toby hadn’t done what he did.

The black
guy was talking to me. I couldn’t make out any words—just the
sound, like my ears were full of water.

I knew it had to happen
soon.

And then another black guy came up to us. He was older than the
one who was trying to bulldog me; he even had gray in his hair.

I snuck
a peek around the room, but everybody was looking away from us.

The
older guy didn’t say anything. He just shook his head at the one sitting
next to me—side to side, like he was saying no.

The guy with all
the muscles got up, like he just remembered something he forgot to do.

The two black guys walked off together. Nobody else came over. I sat by
myself for the whole rest of TV time.

A
couple of
days later, J.C. and his men found me again. They stood around me, but I
didn’t feel all hemmed in; I felt safe.

“At the trial,
Tim took all the weight, didn’t he?” J.C. said. “Told the
jury you didn’t even know what was going on. Just a dumb kid he and his
brother talked into driving them to the bank. That’s why you’re
only doing a nickel, not sitting up in the death house with Tim.”

“I never said anything,” I told him.

“At the
trial? Why should you? Tim was putting it all on him and his brother. And his
brother, he didn’t make it. All you had to do was sit there.”

“I didn’t say anything even before that. When the cops had
me.”

“Why not? They must have wanted you to roll over,
testify against the others. Offered you a deal.”

“I would
never do that,” I said.

He looked at the guys with him again. But
it was a different look, that time.

A
fter that, I was with J.C.
Everybody knew it.

J.C. was short—near the end of his
sentence—when I met him. He got out almost two years before me. But, by
that time, it was okay—I could live there by myself. It was like J.C. had
left his protection on me.

One night, before he left, J.C. told me I
didn’t want a parole.

I nodded okay.

“That
doesn’t sound crazy to you, Eddie? What I just said?”

“Not if you say it,” I told him.

Then J.C. explained:
If I was going to be a getaway man, I couldn’t have some parole officer
checking on me all the time. A good getaway man is responsible for everyone who
goes out on the job. He has to get them home safe.

“What if your
P.O. just dropped in the same day you were working?” J.C. said.
“You’re not home, that isn’t going to stop him. Those
motherfuckers don’t need a warrant to search your house if you’re
on parole. You see what that could do?”

“Yeah,” I
said.

“For you, parole is a chump play,” J.C. said.
“With good time and all, you’ll max out only a few months later,
anyway. If you were doing thirty years, and they offered you a parole after
ten, well, you’d
have
to take that. But with the time
you’ve got, it doesn’t make any sense to expose
yourself.”

T
he parole board was easier than I thought. J.C.
had told me a few tricks I could use to mess things up, but I didn’t need
any of them.

The parole people asked me if I felt any remorse for
the man who was killed inside the bank. I knew they didn’t mean Virgil. I
told them I had nothing to do with what happened, like J.C. told me to. One
lady on the board said I had to learn to take responsibility. She said that a
lot. I told her I didn’t do anything.

They all started yelling at
me, then. I didn’t answer them back. And I didn’t get the
parole.

W
hen I’d paid everything they said I owed, they let me
out. J.C. was right—it wasn’t much longer than if I’d gotten
that parole.

Prison’s full of guys who have gotten out before,
and come back. They always complain that your clothes get old while
you’re locked up. So when you make it out, the first thing you need to do
is get some clothes that are in style.

I guess the good thing about the
kind of clothes I wear is that they don’t get old. I was glad of that,
because I only had the fifty dollars gate money they give you, plus sixteen
dollars on the books from my job on the cleaning crew in Four Block.

They pay your bus fare back to your hometown. If you don’t have a
hometown, you can go anyplace in the state you want, one-way.

I took
the bus west, just like J.C. said. At the end of the line, I walked over to the
highway and thumbed a ride. It didn’t matter to me where the guy was
going, but I remembered not to say that. All I really needed was to get to
another town, so I could get on another bus, and go back east, away from the
flatlands.

I did everything in order. First, I got a room. J.C. told me
how to find the place. It was in a part of town where everybody writes on the
walls. A four-story house, all busted up into tiny little rooms, not much
bigger than my cell.

The walls were gray, and the shade over the window
was the yellow things get from cigarettes after a long time. The shade was
taped in a lot of places. The bed had a big drop in the middle. The sheet was
the same color as the walls. There was a wire strung across the room on one
side, so you could hang your clothes. A little lightbulb swung down from the
ceiling—you had to reach up to turn it on or off.

I
couldn’t see a place in the wall to plug in a radio, if I had a radio.
The toilet was down the hall. Some of the people who used it must have been
drunk.

I asked the man downstairs if there was a phone. He said no. I
just walked around until I found one, outside a store. I called the number J.C.
gave me. It rang three times, then a girl’s voice came on.

“Hi. We’re out having fun. If you know how we can have some
more, leave us a message. Bye!”

I wasn’t surprised by this.
J.C. had told me it would be a machine.

“This is Eddie,” I
said. “I just got—”

“Are you staying where
you’re supposed to be?” a voice cut in. A man’s voice, but
not J.C.’s.

“Yes. I went right to—”

“Stay there,” the voice said. Then it hung up.

T
hat
was almost four years ago. I’m a getaway man now. Seven jobs, every one
correct. We never got caught. Only got really chased once. And that was by a
city cop’s car—it didn’t have a chance. All I had to do was
to put a couple of corners between us, and we were gone.

We
don’t stay together, except just before a job and for a little while
after. The cops always expect us to run far, but we never do. That’s what
I mean about a couple of corners. We have other cars—switch cars,
they’re called—stashed.