Tempted by Trouble (15 page)

“Cora.”

“Just think about it.”

She leaned forward and kissed me for a while. My hand moved over her skin while we tasted each other. We stopped and she moved up and down until I moaned like I was dying a slow death.

She whispered, “God, I love making love to you.”

“I love making love to you too.”

“I was born to make love to you.”

I moaned.

“Dmytryk.”

“Cora.”

“What if that . . . that day I said that I was in Detroit with Eddie Coyle, what if he had flown me down here to Nashville? What if I walked into a SunTrust bank in Nashville that afternoon? What if I had on a business dress and dark glasses? And what if I had a gun? What if I demanded money and they complied?”

“Did you?”

She asked, “If I had robbed a bank, would that excite you?”

My words caught in my throat. “Did you?”

“Would that excite you as much as knowing what you do excites me?”

“Cora.”

“Yes.”

“I’m coming. . . .”

My wife moaned, moved up and down, and I saw white lights, heard fallen angels singing.

 

 

 

 

Days turned into weeks
and stolen money was spent. As the money ran low, the tension rose like water in a sealed room. Tension was fear with a softer name. We had gone downtown and parked, then walked along the Detroit River, the Ren Center behind us and Windsor on the other side.

Cora said, “Have you given any thought to it?”

“To what?”

“Us doing it together, without Eddie Coyle.”

“My answer stands. You’re not getting into the business.”

“You like that, don’t you?”

“Like what?”

“Telling me what I can and can’t do.”

“I’m doing what I stood in front of the minister and promised to do, protect you.”

“You’re controlling me, Dmytryk.”

“Don’t become one of them, Cora.”

“One of who?”

I shook my head. “One of those women who are so busy trying to be a man that they have forgotten how to be a woman. One of those lost women. You can’t have yours and claim mine. You can’t have it all, then throw it away when you realize how hard it is on my side of the fence. Stay on your side of the fence, Cora. Be a woman. Be my wife. One day become the mother of our children. Be a woman and I’ll be a man. We’ll work together as a team. We’ll make decisions as a team.”

“You’re controlling me, Dmytryk.”

“If I am, then who or what is controlling me? Stop talking crazy.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“Maybe I was born forty years too late.”

“Maybe you were.”

“Maybe.”

“All I know is this: I had a mother who had to do everything. My mother wasn’t like your mother. You mother could afford to wait for your father to find solutions. My mother had to make things happen. Your mother stayed at home and played housewife while mine worked three jobs at a time.”

Not much was said after that, not until we had made it back home.

I said, “Cora?”

Her lips turned downward. “What, Dmytryk?”

“Maybe you should go back to school. It’s time for you to think about going to college, start a new career. It’ll give you something to do other than looking at these four walls.”

“What good did going to college do you, Dmytryk?”

“That’s not the point. You’re smart. But you could do better. Then we would’ve had options. All you know is working the line. If I made it back to grad school, I could do better. We both could do better. That’s the type of team we should focus on trying to be. If you had a degree in something, anything, you’d have options.”

“Why are you always pushing college on me?”

“Why are you so comfortable being . . . never mind.”

“No, say it.”

“Let it go.”

“Why am I so comfortable being ignorant? Is that what you were going to say?”

“Let’s not go down that muddy road.”

“When I was working the line and making money hand over fist, my education wasn’t a problem.”

She went to the wall and looked at my degree.

“Maybe it’s you, Dmytryk.” She shook her head and frowned. “Maybe you’ve been my bad luck.”

“I guess you’ve been thinking that for a while.”

“My life was fine before you came into my world. I was doing just fine.”

“You haven’t exactly been a pot of gold underneath a rainbow. If you were as ambitious about things legal as you are about things illegal, my luck would be better too. Yeah, if you see robbing banks as a good thing, then I guess I’m as rich as you are smart, so I guess we’re a match made in heaven.”

She pulled my framed diplomas off the wall and threw them across the room. She faced me and waited for an equal and opposite reaction. When there was none, she folded her arms, went inside the bedroom, and slammed the door. I walked out of the house before another argument erupted. I walked down Baylis Street. I walked down Normandy Street.

Shaking my head, I looked around. There weren’t any penthouses or mansions. This was the zip code of the workingman, the steel-toed workingman who labored hard to send his kids to college. The workingman who worked long hours so the next generation would have a better chance. This was where I was born, had been the zip of my parents for four decades. Again I examined my callused hands, an oxymoron with the degree I had on the wall. There was nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing at all. I’d been part of the backbone of society. Without the workingman, there would be no castles, and there would be no kings.

I went back inside my house and stood in the bedroom door.

My wife was lying across the bed, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

We had become prisoners trapped inside a shrinking jail and willing to do anything to get free.

I said, “One bank. That’s our compromise. One bank.”

She sat up and gave me a nervous-yet-excited half smile. “When can we do it?”

“We’ll have to find a bank that’s at least one state and ten to twelve hours from here. We can drive that long without having to stop for anything but gas. We can’t chance walking in and seeing someone we went to high school with working as a security guard or as a teller. We’ll have to pay cash for everything along the way. And if the weather’s bad, we’ll have to sleep in the car. That’s how it goes. It’s not pretty and it’s not first-class. Don’t forget what happens if it goes wrong, Cora.”

“How much do you think we can get?”

“We won’t know until we have it.”

“When can we leave?”

I took a deep breath. “After we have a plan. We’ll need a stolen car on the other end.”

“Outside of a wig and a note, how much of a plan do you need to rob a bank?”

“This isn’t a game. You need an exit strategy.”

“If you can do it, how hard can it be?”

Once again, she challenged me, put a sharp blade inside my ego and turned it slowly. My hands opened and closed. I smiled an angry smile and let that insult go by unanswered. It had gotten to the point that whenever I asked a question, or whenever she yielded an answer, all words seemed like an attack. Six years after I had taken my vows, I realized the type of woman I loved and had married.

She said, “When we leave, let’s just keep going and never come back.”

“I can’t do that. We can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“We live here.”

She fell quiet for a while. “Let’s go in the kitchen and talk about finding a bank.”

 

 

 

 

Weeks later, Eddie Coyle
called again. There was another job. I wanted to pass on it, but I was already in too deep. I had become a team player, habit from working in corporate America, habit from working in the union, habit from playing sports. Eddie Coyle didn’t have to hold that gun over my head or remind me of that night we’d stood on the side of I-94 with the Uniroyal tire at our backs. I needed what he offered because the money was running low and my marriage was once again coming apart at the vows. Trips to Vancouver and Nashville and staying at the Townsend and paying bills and stress shopping had been like a quick trip around the Monopoly board, but there was only one way to collect another bonus for passing Go.

Eddie Coyle.

It felt as if the world had nailed me to a financial cross and he had become my savior.

Every time I left Detroit, every time I walked through the door, it felt like it might be the last time I saw the Motor City. Or Cora. That was why I kissed my wife the way I did, with a combination of love and fear. I knew right from wrong. But I had become swept up in the current and quick profits that came from wrongdoing. Part of me lived on the high, and another part of me reminded me of the inevitable. I’d told Cora that if I was caught, she was to disavow any knowledge and not say anything that would cause her to be incarcerated as well. The same if I was killed along the way.

In my mind I was being a man, protecting the kingdom and the queen, while the queen risked nothing in return.

At times I felt like a king was nothing more than a slave with benefits.

Responsibility
was only a euphemism for the burdens of man.

Then there was the job in Pasadena, Texas, the job that changed everything. I packed my duffel bag and kissed my wife good-bye, hugged her and looked in her eyes and told her everything would be okay, then left and came back two weeks later with another fifteen thousand.

When I returned from Pasadena, when I entered my house carrying roses and chocolates, I walked inside a home that reeked of cruelty. It felt as if I had been robbed, but at first glance I couldn’t tell what had been stolen. The television was there and the furniture remained, but I rushed from room to room calling out for my wife, terrified that someone had broken in and attacked her, afraid I’d find her body beaten, bloodied, violated, and without life, until the truth grabbed me and shook me. I opened her closets and saw they were all barren. Cora had packed everything she owned and left. I stood in front of an empty closet like a mourner standing in front of a casket. Fear changed to panic and I searched our bedroom, took my dread from room to room, saw all of her belongings had been removed from the home. The carpet had been vacuumed and the bed left made. The house was so clean it looked like a model home. Everything I owned was in its place, as if she had never lived there.

A yellow Post-it was left on the side of the bed, placed on the pillow where she used to sleep. I already knew that it wasn’t a billetdoux. The days of Cora writing me love letters had come and gone.

The note told me not to look for her. She wanted her freedom. She wanted a new life.

She’d had enough of being married.

I’d never tell anyone she left a note. She was gone. That was all anyone needed to know.

I’d lost my parents. I had been shoved out of my white-collar career and I had been severed from my blue-collar job. Now I had lost my wife. I wondered how many times a man could die in one lifetime.

I was okay. For a few moments I was okay. For a few moments I felt as if a burden had been lifted. For a few moments I felt free. I went to the bathroom and emptied my bladder, then as I walked back into the living room, I saw what she had left behind. Our wedding photo stared at me from the wall. I pulled it from the wall and sent it flying across the room, wanted it to break into a thousand lies. The fifteen thousand dollars I had brought home, I pulled it from my pockets, threw it all at an unseen foe.

Moments later, I sat at the kitchen table and laughed until I came unglued. I laughed until my laughter changed to screams and howls of frustration. When madness had abated, I cleaned up my home, the home that my parents had lived in and loved in for decades, picked up the glass and put the picture from our wedding back on the mantel above the fireplace, and for the first time in six years, I took out pots and pans and cooked dinner for one.

Those demons danced inside my mind as pain enveloped me.

I coughed, tasted blood, then coughed for a few more moments.

“
You’re in pain? Good, so now you know how I feel on the inside.
”

The windshield wipers on my Wildcat worked overtime as I struggled to flee east on I-10. The wipers battled to throw water from the glass the same way I fought to throw memories from the surface of my mind. Another sharp pain hit and for a moment it was hard to keep my car between the white lines. Global warming had sent snow to most of the fifty states, as well as dumped an inch of rain on the frigid desert, and with the drop in temperature there was enough chill for me to continue running the heater on low. Joshua Tree National Park and Eagle Mountain were north, but El Centro and Calexico were south, maybe an hour away. Part of me wanted to drive in that direction, run from my problems before they caught up with me, cross into Mexicali, and find a hideout in Xochimilco or Lázaro Cárdenas.

“
All I wanted to do was kill you
.”

“I saved your life.” I coughed again. “I saved your damn life.”

Eighteen-wheelers passed me and threw gallons of water across my windshield. When visibility was better, I looked up and expected to see helicopters circling in the dismal sky. Expected to see a cavalry of cars following me like in the final moments of the movie
Thelma and Louise.
They weren’t there. Nothing was up there but rain clouds hovering and spitting rain down on my paranoia.

Jackie moved around in the backseat, shifted and moaned.

The pain remained and outside of making me feel loopy, the Vicodin wasn’t helping much.

A car passed by and I swear I saw Sammy riding in the backseat. The car changed lanes and exited the freeway, and Sammy looked back at me.