Flagged Victor (20 page)

I was not, however, feeling any ease. My respite from the anxiety over the Canadian Tire robbery had ended, and I read the newspaper and listened to the radio with the kind of fear and dread that comes when you know capture is imminent and life is about to end. The cops would be bashing in our front door at any moment, and I was too paralyzed to do anything about it.

When the doorbell rang, I died a small death. When I saw that it was Chris, I rose to live again.

Strangely, it wasn’t the robbery that flashed to my mind when I opened the door, but the fact that Leah and I had fucked. I felt oddly guilty about that, although Chris and her were over, as though I’d stabbed him in the back. Maybe it was because I had other, future stabbings in mind.

The afternoon was over, and dusk had arrived, but Chris was wearing dark Wayfarer sunglasses, grinning like Tom Cruise.

Sorry, he said.

He did not look sorry.

For what? I asked, assuming the worst.

For counting the money without you.

That was the last thing I was worried about, but I reacted indignantly all the same.

Asshole, I said.

Shoot me, he offered.

And you got new shades, I said, finally figuring it out, remembering the ones I’d crushed.

A hundred and fifty smackeroos, he said. Don’t worry. I paid for them out of your cut.

It was an incredible, almost incalculable amount of money to us then.

Holy shit, I said.

Wanna go get wasted? he asked.

I didn’t even mention to my parents that I was going out, just grabbed my jacket and left.

Fairy
tales are filled with idiots who make lucky fortunes. They trade a cow for three beans and end up with a giant’s treasure,
they get trapped in a gingerbread house and live happily ever after, despite whatever fate they actually deserve.

We got drunk that night, foolishly, gloriously drunk. We hit on chicks. Twice I remember Chris warning me to shut my fucking mouth, in a good-natured and generous kind of way, and I’m not sure if it was because I blurted out something about robberies (a possibility) or merely expounded on the length and durability of my erection. I did, however, recognize a trend in myself, though I ignored the reasons or the consequences: I was becoming a bad drunk.

Chris, almost apologetically, told me he’d intended to wait until we were together to count the money, but then he figured that would be another twenty-four hours minimum, and he made an executive decision instead. After his parents went out for a dinner with friends, he pulled the deposit bag from behind the washing machine, cut it open along the zipper, poured out the innards and started sorting and counting.

His first reaction had been disappointment. After sorting the piles of bills and credit card receipts and checking the deposit slip, he realized the bulk of the money, seventy thousand dollars or so, was not cash. This filled him with anger. He was not remorseful about the job itself but about the lack of payoff. He’d wanted something glorious, something remarkable and noteworthy to begin his new and better life, and this smalltime payout just didn’t cut it.

But once he counted the bills for himself and sat on the number for a while, he began to feel better. Slowly, the reality of the bounty sank in. There was $21,892.18 on the table before him. It was, all in all, not bad for an hour’s work.

Knowing I was busy, he scooped the money back into the deposit bag, except for a handful of C-notes, and rushed to the mall. He celebrated by himself, with a pure and magical kind of self-satisfaction, splurging on an extra-large Orange Julius and two pairs of Wayfarers. He delivered the second pair to Susan that night, after she finished her waitressing shift, explaining that he’d bought her a present with a little unexpected bonus money for his years of service at the store. In return, Susan blew him in the front seat of his car below her parent’s bedroom window.

Maybe she’s a little more materialistic than I realized, he said. He sounded mildly disappointed.

I told him never to question a blow job, and we decided those were words to live by.

Chris bought our drinks, and a few drinks for others at my insistence, all night long. I didn’t even think about the money owed to me. Instead, I kept remembering Leah. I felt the heaviness of guilt and tried to heave it off.

Ah, shit man, I gotta tell you something, I said.

What? he asked.

I sensed a danger and didn’t want to continue.

What? he asked again, less patiently.

It was with a certain perverse satisfaction that I told him.

I fucked Leah last night. I’m sorry, man. I feel bad as shit about it.

He looked surprised. He arched an eyebrow. He eyed me for what seemed like a long time, absorbing the hit, weighing the transgression.

No biggie, he said.

But I kept pushing it over the course of the next hour or so. I think I wanted forgiveness and I think I wanted to heap weight on Chris in turn. I wanted him to feel the remorse and the uncertainty that I knew so well.

Many drinks later, Chris told me to stop. Look, man, the reason I’m giving you a total free pass with Leah is because I guess I have my own confession to make.

My world, which had been spinning, screeched to a halt.

I accidentally fucked Radha.

Accidentally?

Like he slipped and his cock ended up in her vagina.

Unintentionally, he said.

I pressed for details. He told me it happened the weekend I was writing my beach story. The weekend, in fact, when Radha telephoned to say she would do unspeakable things to me once I finished.

I guess, Chris explained, she got worked up by that. You know.

I did not know. No unspeakable things had been done to me in the end. I’d asked her what she’d had in mind, considering the promise to be on the order of a blood oath, but she got expertly elusive when the payoff moment came and all I got was the usual.

Now I understood: she’d expended her warped energy on Chris.

Fuck it, I said. Well, I guess we’re even.

We did not feel even.

You got the better end of that deal, he said.

And this, too, was painful truth.

When he dropped me off at my house, hours later, he reached under the car seat. I tensed. For some drunk and numb reason, I expected a handgun to appear. I was, of course, the weak link in our operation. It would only make sense for Chris to off me now, tie up my loose ends. Part of me even wished for it. Put me out of my misery and yours, Chris. Neither of us needed the weight. In every heist movie it is the same. You coddle the weak one at your peril. Your downfall is friendship.

But then I saw he had an envelope in his hand, not a gun.

Thought it best to give this to you at the end of the night, he said.

Probably a good idea, I mumbled.

I started to look inside but realized the futility and just looked at Chris instead.

Six thousand for being the man behind the wheel, he said. Then added, Sort of.

We both laughed about the sort of way I’d helped, the sort of way I’d been a man. But even more than the Radha business, I never quite forgave him for his little shot about my incompetence. It wasn’t just a wisecrack but a betrayal of our jointly held illusion. It indicated he actually knew my failings acutely and always had and always would, even when he pretended to be oblivious.

No doubt, Judas would have understood my resentment.

My
father grilled me the next night about rickshaw, and whether I was serious about it, and whether I was still intending to not work at the bank.

My successive nights of debauchery must have been too much for him to stand, but he couldn’t have raised the topic at a worse time. I was flush with money and freedom. What need did I have of a bank? Besides, I still feared any ideas Chris might come up with if I did time as an inside man.

He asked me for specifics. He wanted to know how much the rickshaw cost to rent each week, how many rides were required to earn that sum, how many rides there were in a day, what the average per day was, and how many days a week were lost to rain on average. I made up numbers out of vague, plausible bits recalled from conversations with Chris. There was nothing convincing about my argument, even to me. I could not insert into the calculations the other factors that would have balanced the ledger: the suntan, the frequent flirtation, the random sexual encounters, the beer, the laughs, and so on.

I don’t see how your numbers add up, my father said. How are you going to afford school in the fall?

I told him I’d get by. Meaning I had six thousand dollars currently stuffed into a pair of hockey skates below the stairs.

Your mother and I aren’t your personal bank.

I told him I had no expectations of receiving any supplementary funds. I could take care of myself.

It went on and on. I did not move in my position, and he did not move in his. My mother was sick of us talking about it. She told us to let it go for the night, to talk about it more tomorrow, and I knew, in a way, that this was an acknowledgement of my victory, because banks and rickshaw rental services were not vague concepts; they did, in fact, require commitments, and my plan was to not work for the bank, and to commit on Sunday to
Dan the Rickshaw Guy, who owned the storage shed and rented the gear. My father must have also understood that by withstanding his barrage, I had achieved a win, because he could not resist a last dire warning.

I hope you’ll make good choices.

He added that he didn’t care if I became a truck driver so long as I drove to the utmost of my abilities. The problem was, he didn’t want me to be a truck driver and I didn’t want to be one either; I wanted experiences, the kind that sailed right over morality, that garnered higher insights that would be considered crimes, and so on.

I suppose he was asking me to be mature.

I understand maturity better now. I see it less as wisdom than an acceptance of weight. Children can treat life heavy, too, but the passage toward adulthood involves an accumulation of increasingly weighty concerns, a reluctant acceptance of burdens and responsibilities, until you’re so heavy and tired, no one can deny your sombre maturity. There are people, rare beings, who seem to bear weight with lightness, who live life lightly while understanding its weight. I’m thinking of a few yoga teachers I’ve known, the Dalai Lama, a giddy philosopher or two, a few dementia-stricken seniors. But for most of us, maturity equals weight, and immaturity equals lightness. Think about your own moments of immaturity—at games or sporting events, during drunken nights or reckless fucks, while hanging out with childhood friends. For a time, you feel light and outside your weary self.

My argument with my father came down to that. He was afraid for me, and afraid of the world. He wanted me to be
happy and to achieve my dreams, but he wanted me to be safe first. And if being safe meant forgoing happiness and dreams, so be it. Those would have to wait for some other life, a life of lightness.

I wanted a summer of lightness before it was too late.

I
got an unexpected call, a few days later, from Leah. I had thought little about her since our tangle on the weekend, so much had happened in the interim. I had not called her because I did not think of her as the kind of girl who needed post-intimacy consideration. The sound of her voice, however, brought with it a rush of guilt and awkwardness. I did not want to seem withdrawn, since we had been friends, and had vowed to continue to be friends. I did not want to seem ungrateful or sullen, since we had done things together that had been wondrous in the moment and were still pleasing to remember. But I did not want to seem too happy or eager, either, because I feared being drawn into a relationship with her. This was not the time, and I had no space in my heart.

Relax, she said. I’m calling on Delmore’s behalf.

Huh?

It turned out she was doing some secretarial work for Rivers, on the side, and he’d asked her to arrange a lunch date with me. Would today work?

Today? I asked.

Yeah. I told him there wasn’t much chance you’d actually be doing anything with yourself yet, so I’ve got you down for 12:30 at the Shipyard.

Oh, like in two hours?

Yeah, like in two hours. I could have called earlier, but I didn’t want to wake you up. Don’t you love me?

Huh?

That’s a joke.

Oh.

What are we going to call the baby?

What?

Another joke. You’re hilarious. Don’t be late for lunch.

I didn’t even have the clarity of mind to ask her what it was about.

I
wore my white jeans, suede boat shoes, and a relatively wrinkle-free lime-green golf shirt. My mom dropped me off at the ferry terminal, and I crossed over to Halifax with time to kill, so I hit a second-hand bookstore. A dusty hardback copy of Herman Wouk’s
Youngblood Hawke
caught my eye, and by the time I’d read the jacket copy, I knew it was a fortuitous find. Youngblood Hawke was a writer of crude, rugged, and unpredictable personality, overladen with talent for language and story, who rode the New York publishing world as though it were a bucking bronco, taking from it everything any writer could ever want—fame, critical acclaim, wealth, sex—until he fucked it all up and died of excess. I felt as though I had discovered my autobiography, in a prophetic tome. Seven bucks was a lot to shell out for a used book, but I did it anyway, and strode off to the Shipyard to meet Rivers, well armed.

Rivers occupied the crow’s nest table, a beer and a Reuben
sandwich with fries before him, his crutches to the side. I greeted him and laid the book on the table. He did not hold his hand out but looked at me with stern disapproval. Had Leah told him about our encounter?

I couldn’t wait any longer, Rivers said. Why don’t you order something from the bar.

It was only 12:35. Had Leah told me 12:00? Or had she sabotaged my meeting? I didn’t know what to think. At the bar, I ordered fries with gravy, a local delicacy, and a Coke. For some reason, I didn’t feel right ordering a beer in front of Rivers.