Tempted by Trouble (14 page)

I never asked my father to explain himself. No man should have to explain who he is. But what stuck with me all these years was his Sunday-morning ritual, seeing his face slathered with shaving cream. The minty smell of his shaving cream, the sound of the straightedge razor against his stubbly chin. Zibba always prepared our suits on Saturday evenings; that was her way of telling us there would be church the next morning. And on Sunday mornings after my father was dressed, he always stood in the mirror, eased on his fedora, and smiled. He smiled at the reflection of the man he always wanted to become. Not a man with deep pockets or smooth hands, but a man whom other men respected.

He’d see me studying him, then his eyes would meet mine, and he would tender a small smile. He would adjust his necktie and look at me, his nose slightly crooked from the years of boxing, and once he was perfectly dressed he would nod twice. I’d nod twice in return. Message transmitted. Message received. Real men wore fedoras.

My wife came and stood behind me, wrapped her arms around me. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing you need to know, Cora. Nothing you need to know.”

“Tell me, Dmytryk.”

“My mother was there for my dad. She washed his clothes and cooked his meals and cleaned our house and gave him a son and my father worked and put a roof over our heads and made sure food was on the table and did laundry and washed dishes and helped my mother cook and painted and repaired and fixed what needed to be fixed and my parents were there for each other from the start to the end and no one complained because it was a marriage from the heart and not just a marriage of convenience. They loved each other. Not fantasy love, not the crap that’s in dime-store books and in movies, not the fantasy that Hollywood and television sells and no one can live up to, but they had a real love. They understood commitment and teamwork. Even if they didn’t love each other that way at the start, they learned what love was about long before the end. We are supposed to fight together. We are supposed to starve together. And in the end we are supposed to come out the winners. That’s what a marriage is about. Anybody can be married when things are easy. Anybody can be married when there is plenty of money.”

“I’m still here.”

“But I have to know you’re going to stay here. I’m not going to be here alone.”

“I’m your wife, Dmytryk.”

“Are you? I mean, are you really? If you are, then I need you to start acting like you’re my wife.”

I’d seen two people killed and I was afraid. I was afraid of what I had seen and what I had become. It looked like she was getting choked up. It looked like she wanted to scream. Or cry. Either way, it looked like she finally felt my pain. I accepted that Pyrrhic victory, because that was all it was.

She kissed my neck and my face.

She whispered, “Come to bed. Let’s start the year right.”

I undressed and crawled into the bed; I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, a changed man. Cora came and snuggled up next to me, wrapped her body around mine, gave me her heat. She cuddled up next to me and ran her fingers up and down my skin, then she kissed my neck, my chin, eased her tongue inside my mouth, her hand moving between my legs. She whispered that she loved me. She told me that she would always love me. She said she was sorry for the things that she had said earlier.

I said, “You know I’d live underneath a bridge with you if I had to. I’d take two sticks and make a fire to keep you warm. You’re my wife, Cora. You’re my wife and I take that commitment seriously.”

“I know, Dmytryk.”

“But you’re not the type of woman who would live underneath a bridge.”

She laughed.

Cora pulled off my undershirt, ran her tongue down my chest, then tugged away my boxers. My wife positioned herself and took me inside her mouth and did her best to calm my frustrations. I held her hair, rubbed her face, released bits of anger, and moaned the start of my reluctant surrender.

I looked at her face and saw tears in her eyes. “Cora, what’s the matter?”

“I see your pain. I see how deep it is. I see how much you love me, that’s all.”

“I’m doing what you asked. Right or wrong, I’m doing what I have to do.”

She whispered, “You’re going to go work with Eddie Coyle.”

“That’s what you wanted.”

“I know. But—”

“It’s too late for buts, Cora.”

“Dmytryk—”

I shushed her. “It’s done. I met him and . . . it’s done.”

She pulled her lips in. “Dmytryk—”

“Whatever happens, Cora, remember who made this night possible.”

I touched her eyes, let her tears stain my fingers, then I licked my fingers, tasted her frustration.

She touched my eyes before she put her fingers in her mouth, tasted my salty frustration.

She whispered, “Baby, come be my husband.”

“I’ve always been your husband. I was your husband before we ever married.”

She climbed on top of me and whispered, “Then let me be your wife.”

And while she did, all I could see was what the devil had done on the side of I-94.

She whispered, “Dmytryk?”

I closed my eyes so tight my headache spread from temple to temple.

She said, “I don’t excite you anymore?”

I stopped her and pushed her away from me, unable to be a husband to her.

She asked, “What’s wrong, Dmytryk?”

“Stop.”

“Let me make you feel good, baby.”

“An orgasm is not the answer. An orgasm is not the goddamn answer.”

Silence covered us.

I said, “I never should have . . .”

She whispered, “What? You never should have what?”

“Nothing.”

“Married me?”

That was when I told her what I had seen and done with her friend Eddie Coyle. It was too heavy to keep inside. There was no one else I could talk to about what I had seen, no one else I could tell. I wanted her to know the size of the sinkhole she had pulled us into.

Her voice trembled. “He’s not my friend, Dmytryk.”

“What is he then?”

“A fool with money.”

Again I asked her where the fur coat was. She resigned, moved away from me, and put her back to me before she told me that she had hidden it underneath the bed. I pulled on pants and a sweater, pulled on shoes, and took that fur coat and dragged it into the backyard. She didn’t fight me. She knew fighting me wasn’t an ideal move. I doused the fur coat with low-grade gasoline, then I threw a match on that beast. The flame roared and threw heat in my face.

My wife was standing in the kitchen window, watching me.

She was angry. I didn’t care. I felt violent, exiled from the life I deserved. Hostile toward the life I had at the moment, the new life my wife had coerced me into. My wife’s hair was down and she looked like a riled vixen. Meeting with Eddie Coyle had changed my life and sealed my fate. Witnessing a murder, being part of a murder, then watching a woman being carried to the slaughter like she was an animal, that had made me nervous and careless.

I stepped to the side of the garage, stood there in the cold, feeling nauseated.

While the fur burned, I went back inside the house that had been my parents’ dream home, the house I had taken a second mortgage on to keep us afloat, the house I refused to lose and for which I was willing to rob a bank to keep from sliding into that failure called foreclosure, and I took the hand of my wife, gripped her wrist as panic rose in her eyes, panic that caused her to yell and try to pull away. But there was no pulling away. I was willing to sell my soul to the devil to protect her, and I had sold my soul to a man named Eddie Coyle, and now, as she was still my wife, I took her back to our bed, the same bed we had made love in since the day we married, and I put her on her back, held her down, kissed her with fervor, and I entered her with anger and greed and passion. I entered her with an obsession and a love and jealousy from which I could not escape. I had expected her to fight me, but she welcomed me, wrapped her legs around my body, and put her fingernails deep into my skin while I held her backside and pulled her into me over and over. Tomorrow I might relive the moments spent on the side of I-94 and wake up screaming like a man trapped in nightmare alley, tomorrow I might have my first panic attack, but tonight my wife would comfort me in carnal ways. She moaned like she was falling, set free a spiraling moan that echoed like a damaged angel who had lost her wings and was plunging from the only heaven she knew.

Outside our window, that fur coat burned like it was the gateway to hell.

It felt as if that fire, that flaming demon, was inside of me.

That burning fur threw flames and created shadows on our bedroom wall, shadows that gave form to dark desires during a connection of love that had been tainted.

That coat burned like desire.

But no fire could burn forever. Even the brightest star, one day, would die.

I left the next
afternoon and ten days later I was back home. I had seen two people murdered and I had gone in with Eddie Coyle and his friends and robbed a bank, then I’d driven back home and walked in the front door holding roses and chocolates like I was coming home from a corporate business trip. Robbing a bank, when it went as planned, was one of the easiest crimes. Eddie Coyle had been reimbursed and I had ten thousand dollars in nonsequential, unmarked bills inside a black bag. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was money, and financial relief was what we needed to keep our world from crumbling. We had spread the ten thousand across the bed and stared at the money with nervous expressions. I convinced myself that my wife was right and what I had done wasn’t wrong. The world had robbed us, and we were only responding in kind.

It was amazing the power money had over people. Its seduction was a force to be reckoned with.

The next job had left me with another twenty thousand. We kept to the necessities at first. I put some money into the Buick, brought it back to near-mint condition. We needed a reliable car, and buying a new car would raise flags, especially if we paid cash. Cora and I fell back into our normal routines. We woke up at dawn and searched for jobs during the week, clipped coupons on Friday, had dates on Saturdays, made love on Saturday nights, and held hands and went to church on Sundays. We always went to the first service. Church had always been her thing, not mine. She prayed and cried, but I could only imagine what she prayed for or what her tears meant. Guilt. Shame. Anger. People around us thought those tears meant that she was closer to the CEO upstairs. But we had signed a contract with one of His former employees.

My wife wanted to go to Vancouver, so we went to Vancouver and stayed at the best hotel we could afford, came home for a week, found our world too gloomy, then we flew down to Nashville and spent another week at the Vanderbilt Hotel. We had shut out the world, had hidden from our problems, taken baths and laughed and made love and ate room service like a king and a queen.

My wife mounted me and while she moved and moaned she looked down on me. Her stare was unreadable. It was like staring in the face of a woman I’d never seen before.

It was like gazing into the eyes of extreme danger.

She whispered in a voice that was as sultry as it was dark, “Dmytryk.”

“Yes, Cora?”

“Tell me about robbing banks.”

“No. The less you know, the better.”

“I’m your wife. I’m your confidante. Tell me.”

“That excites you?”

“Yes, it excites me.”

“I’ll tell you when we’re done.”

“No, tell me now.”

“Now?”

“Yes, baby. Tell me right now.”

She rose and fell, moved against me, and I whispered the stories that Rick and Sammy had told me. Rick and Sammy had worked together all over the U.S.

My wife moved and shivered while I held her hips and moaned out my words.

She said, “Baby, I want to do it.”

“Do what?”

“A job, baby. I want to pull my weight. I want to do a job.”

“You want to be a wheelman?”

“I want to dress up, put on a business suit and shades, designer shades, then carry my attaché case and sashay inside and smile and tell them it’s a stickup, tell them to not try anything funny, like they do in the movies you watch. I want to make them respect me and I want to feel the rush while they do.”

“You’re serious.”

“We don’t have to wait on Eddie Coyle.”

“Cora.”

“You need to be your own boss. You’ve spent your life working for other people. And I’ve done the same. And see where that has gotten us? Dmytryk, we could be a team . . . we could do everything together. Teach me what Eddie Coyle has taught you and we can be better than his crew.”

“That fantasy can get you twenty years in jail.”

“But you know how to do it. You can show me how to do it. We can do it together.”