Flagged Victor (32 page)

What? I croaked.

I need to tell you something, he said.

What more? I thought.

Susan knows.

What?

She knows.

Okay.

I suppose I figured she’d know eventually, but the way he was telling me felt conspiratorial and strange.

You want to join us for brunch? She’s eager to see you.

That got me up, but did nothing for my morning wood.

We
met at a diner in a portable trailer that served East Coast food like fish cakes made with salt cod. Have them with over-easy eggs. Nothing like it to cure a hangover.

Susan and Chris sat beside each other in the cramped booth. I sat across. Susan looked stern, disapproving, her mouth slightly pouty. It vibed like an act. It was strange to see her across the table and to know that she knew, and knew other things besides. I wondered how much she knew about my involvement, or how accurately or generously Chris had characterized it, but I suspected from her attitude that he had appropriately played up my role. Perhaps it served him to buttress my reputation and sidestep his own primacy of initiative.

I can’t believe you two, she said.

Chris only grinned.

I grinned back because I was such an inauthentic fuck.

All this time, she said.

Heh heh heh, we said.

You’re dangerous together, she said.

We arched eyebrows and looked pleased.

You’re meant to be together.

We tried to hold our grins despite this vaguely homosexual insinuation.

You’d do more for each other than you would for anyone else.

Easy now, Chris said.

Did you figure it out on your own? I asked. Or did he blurt it out in his sleep? Any way to change the subject.

Chris laughed, for no apparent reason.

Every time he came over to pick me up and he had wet hair, Susan said, he’d also have a pocket crammed full of cash.

Wet hair? I asked.

I always showered after a job, Chris said. Robbing banks makes me sweaty.

So you put two and two together? I asked.

Oh, and there was the time when he didn’t have pockets in his shorts so he asked me to hold a couple thousand dollars for him, she said. That added up too.

Yeah, I guess it would, I said.

And then there was the time he told me he was going to the gym and I checked his bag to see if he ever washed his gym clothes and saw the biggest gun I’d ever seen in my life.

It wasn’t that big, Chris said modestly.

And there was the trip you guys took to New York. And the trip to Australia. And the fact that I read about the movie theatre this morning and Chris asked me to go to that movie theatre about ten times in the last six months.

Our secret history got unfolded before us. Then our breakfast plates arrived.

We were on second cups of coffee when Chris brought the conversation to more practical matters.

About the whole movie-theatre thing, he said. His mouth was full of food, so he slowed down, chewed and swallowed. After I went home this morning for a change of clothes, there was a cop car in the driveway.

My fork in the air, halfway to my mouth.

Apparently, Mom was out in the backyard earlier in the morning, throwing away some compost, and she found the till I’d chucked in the woods, so she called the cops.

She fucking what?

Easy, big fellow, Chris said. You can’t blame her. She knew there’d been an arrest on the street last night, and she knew the movie theatre had been robbed, and she found a till in our backyard. What else was she supposed to do?

Holy shit, I said. If my heart beat any harder, Susan and Chris would go dim before my eyes.

Don’t worry. The cops figure whoever did the job probably ran through our yard on the way to the lake.

We leaned back as the waitress poured more coffee.

Actually, it makes total sense, Chris continued. Our house happens to be on a direct line between the mall and the lake as the crow flies.

Some crow, I said. I could not believe how calmly he was taking it. Nor Susan, either.

Chris went on.

So they found the till. It’s not worth worrying about. My clothes were washed. My car was clean. The cash was at the hotel. Everything’s A-okay.

Except for the gun, I said.

Yeah, he said. That part sucks.

What gun? Susan asked.

Nothing, Chris said.

Don’t nothing me, she said.

No one spoke. We waited for Chris.

I dropped it, Chris admitted. Somewhere in the woods.

Oh, shit, Susan said.

I could have let him spin. I could have provided Susan with some doubt about his sanity. But I did not have it in me to be so devious.

I found it, I said.

Really? Chris asked, more hopeful than I would have expected.

I took a walk through the woods this morning and found it under some leaves.

Wow, that’s awesome. He was relieved and started to laugh.

Jesus, Susan said. You guys are going to get caught, and then what am I going to do for a boyfriend?

Don’t worry, Chris said. I’ll never get caught.

I noticed that he didn’t say
we.

Susan
and Chris began to see even more of each other, as though removing the enormous lie between them brought them closer together. I didn’t mind. I think I’d finally resigned myself to their inevitability. I had also become more comfortable in my loneliness, and saw it as something that might propel me to other places, another life.

Our take from the movie theatre had not been that large, so I figured it would only be a matter of time before Chris approached me for another job. After two months went by, however, I wondered if his bank-robbing career might have ended. Perhaps the solidity of his relationship with Susan, the new honesty between them, had extinguished his strange urge to risk it all.

I used my own money to move out. I think my parents were just as relieved as me. My father was being treated for stomach ulcers, and this had reduced his activities outside of the house. He went to work only three days a week. Being around each other so much was more than either of us could take. I found a basement apartment in a nearby neighbourhood. It was not glamorous or exciting but it was my own place. Chris figured I’d get laid way more often now. I urged his words to hasten to God’s ears.

Between rent, food, and gas for the piece of shit car I’d bought, I did not have the money to go out much, however, so my opportunities to meet women became woefully rare. I felt lonelier still. I thought about Rivers often, and wondered what might have been different if I’d gone to Thailand with him, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

And
then Chris told me that the jobs had not stopped after all, they’d merely stopped for me.

We were in my basement apartment drinking beer and watching a hockey game on my black and white TV. The news floored me.

How many have you done?

Four, he said.

Four was a torrid pace. That meant a job every two to three weeks. I couldn’t believe it.

I need to read the newspaper more often, I said.

Chris shook his head. Nothing big time. We’re taking it slow. An IGA. A jewellery store. Smash and grab stuff. No banks. No Brinks. No glory.

Who’s we? I asked.

He shrugged, as though uncomfortable.

Me and Susan.

And this, as much as anything he’d ever told me, blew my mind.

You’re shitting me. I can’t believe you got her into this.

I felt like an old grandmother suddenly, but I was upset. It seemed unfair to involve her.

It was her idea. I told her no fifty times. She begged me.

I couldn’t believe that, either. It wasn’t the Susan I knew. Or was it?

Why?

I don’t know, he said. The thrill, I guess. The chance to be a bad girl?

So I was the only one who had misgivings? Everyone else in the world thought robbing a bank was the high of a lifetime?

How does she do? I asked. I suppose that was the next most relevant question when it came to destroying my dignity.

Actually, Chris said, she really sucks.

Don’t get personal, I said.

Ha ha. No, I mean it. She’s a wreck every time. One time, I was just about to go into a bank and I saw an off-duty cop go
inside, so I blew off the job. She rolled the window down and hurled.

I laughed.

Another time, a cashier chased me out of a store until I finally turned around and pointed the gun at her, and when I got into the car, I saw that Susan had wet herself.

Wow.

She said she’d spilled her Slurpee, but you could tell it was piss by the smell.

At least I never pissed myself, I said.

Man, you had some amazing moments, Chris said. Remember when you drove down the embankment onto the highway? That could have been in a movie.

I grinned.

Also, Chris continued, I have to admit celebrating with Susan hasn’t been as much fun.

Oh, come on, I said. There’s no way that’s true. You guys probably fuck like dogs afterwards.

Well, that’s true. But partying with your girlfriend just isn’t as much fun as partying with a friend.

Or with girls you don’t know.

Exactly. Although, if she wanted to party with her, me, and another girl, that would be all right.

Still working on that threesome?

Just need the dominoes to tip the right way.

So how good have the scores been? I asked, ever the practical number cruncher.

Only a couple thou each time. It’s hardly even worth it. Just lifestyle maintenance.

Are you kicking the habit?

I think so, he said, nodding. Can’t do this forever, right? Neither can Susan. I feel sort of over it. I want to go to cop school. She wants to go to law school. We’ll probably get married and have kids. Can’t exactly hire a babysitter and then go out and rob a bank, can we?

You know how fucked up that sounds? Law school and cop school, babysitters and bank robberies. You couldn’t write a better movie.

Maybe you should, he said.

That had always been part of the deal.

It’ll work its way into something, I said. I’ll just change the names to protect the guilty and add in a few shootouts and helicopter rides.

We clinked bottles.

Amen to that, brother. Never let the facts get in the way of the truth.

I need to explain how it came to be me who pushed for
one last job.

School ended at the beginning of May. It was a moderately successful semester for me. I did fine, but I had no life-transforming courses. There was no Rivers on the curriculum, only plodding and rote learning, a marking of time on a straightforward journey to a credential. At some point, I woke up to the death this represented.

I think it hit home when my father’s illness returned. He entered the hospital and got lodged in a bed. When I visited, he seemed unusually happy to see me but also gaunt and tired. I tried to get a grasp on his condition, and so, when visiting hours were over, I walked my mother to the parking lot and badgered her for answers. What did they know about his illness? What were they doing to treat the ulcers? My mother said, He doesn’t have ulcers, he has cirrhosis of the liver. It took me another minute to understand what she had told me. Had I misheard her before? Had I imagined ulcers?

Cirrhosis? I asked. She hugged me goodbye and got in her car.

Later that night, lying on the pullout couch in my basement apartment, I understood how artfully she’d lied to me, and what that implied about my entire life. Never any blatant falsehoods, but an atmosphere suffused in falseness. Was she saying my father was an alcoholic? He drank regularly after work, two and sometimes three drinks, but this seemed normal, a way of winding down. He did not thrash and roar. He merely grew quiet, sullen, removed, and went to bed early. Cirrhosis of the liver meant drinking yourself to death. The speckles of blood in the toilet. Had I done that or him? Was I my father’s son? If my father was an alcoholic, a secret, desperate, quiet one, what did that say about the way he lived his life? There must have been pressure and stress and dissatisfaction at a level I hadn’t understood. My father couldn’t stand that I’d wasted a summer pulling rickshaw. But he was drinking himself to death going to work at a bank. He was killing himself and offering me the same gun.

At some point that summer, as I worked my bank job and Chris pulled rickshaw and trained for police academy, I decided that the last thing in the world I wanted to do was go back to school. It wasn’t that I hated school, it was that I enjoyed it. If I didn’t guard myself against that enjoyment, I might be satisfied with the path that school made possible. I would get the sensible job. I would find the sensible wife. I wouldn’t write with the madness of Dostoevsky or the astonishing keenness of Hemingway. I needed to break wildly from this death march and do something bigger and life-altering. I needed to irrevocably wreck the life I was living and cut myself off from safe harbour.

I fixed on a life abroad. I’d find Rivers and get a hut near him, and write and write and write. I wrote him a letter, only the third
since his injury, and in it I described my plans. I laid out for him all my biggest fears. I told him about the kinds of books I wanted to write and the greatness I wanted to aspire toward and the fearlessness with which I would attempt it all. What did obscurity and failure and poverty and disregard and frustration and unhappiness matter to me? Even if no one ever learned my name, there would be more glory and honour in that than in whatever success could be achieved by taking the straight and narrow.

I must have passed some threshold or test, done enough to be forgiven for past transgressions, or said the right magic words, because this time, I got a message back.

A postcard of a beach, and on the other side a few words: See you whenever.

I read it as a promise of greatness. I just needed the money to pull it off.

So
I set about working my way back into Chris’s confidence as his getaway driver of choice for one last job.