The Getaway Man (2 page)

T
hat time, nobody said anything about joyriding. They put a
whole bunch of charges on me. The heaviest one was resisting arrest. The lawyer
who came to see me in the hospital told me that.

I never had a
lawyer before. Not a real one. The lawyers I had before, they were like people
who worked for the court. They would be standing behind tables when I was
brought out, with big stacks of paper in front of them. All they ever asked me
was my name, so they could check it on their papers.

This lawyer was a
little fat guy with a mustache. I told him what happened. He shook his head.
Like I was stupid, and he couldn’t understand what I did.

I
wasn’t stupid enough to try and explain it to him.

The lawyer
told me I had to plead guilty to everything. If I did that, they wouldn’t
be too hard on me.

When I got out of the hospital, we went to
court.

A couple of the cops were there. They told some lies and some
truth. I did what the lawyer said. The judge asked me some questions, and I
said either yes or no, depending on what he asked.

I answered the
questions about how my face got all banged up and my ribs broke by saying it
was from when the car crashed, even though I never hit anything.

The
lawyer had told me to say it that way. When I was answering that question, I
saw one of the cops looking at me. I could tell by his face that the lawyer had
been right.

The judge said a lot of things about me. By the time he let
the lady probation officer talk, there wasn’t much point in her saying
anything.

There wasn’t anything good to say about me, anyway.
Except that I was just a kid, and my lawyer said that a lot.

The lawyer
said I had panicked when I heard the siren. That made me real mad, but I
didn’t say anything. He was the lawyer.

Then the judge really
hauled off on me. He said I hadn’t panicked at all—I was a
cold-blooded felon and he didn’t want to hear any excuses for my
behavior. I really liked when he said that. It was like he canceled out what
the fat lawyer said. I was glad I had kept quiet.

The judge said he was
putting it in my record that I couldn’t have a license even when I got
old enough, because I was dangerous behind the wheel. I wished guys from the
last place I was locked up could have been in the courtroom when he said that:
“Dangerous behind the wheel.”

T
he place they put me in
after the Camaro was for the older kids. It was like a farm. We all slept in
dormitories, and we had to work in the daytime.

Every dorm has a
boss. A kid boss, I mean. The boss is either the toughest or the smartest, or
even both. Sometimes, there’s two different bosses in the same
dorm—like when there’s enough white guys in there to have their own
gang, they would have a white boss.

There was a kid named Hector who
was with us. He wasn’t white, but he wasn’t black either. A
Mexican, is what one of the other guys said about him, but I never heard him
speak Spanish. Hector said, where he was from, they called a gang a
“car.” So if a kid was going to join a gang, they would say he got
in the car.

That sounded cool to me, except that the boss got called
the driver. I didn’t want to be anybody’s boss, but I had to be the
driver.

I
t was on the farm that I first met guys who did jobs. Jobs
where they would need a driver, I mean. Stickup men. Those guys were in the
other places I got put before, but they never mixed with amateurs like me.
Joyriders. But, when I came in after the Camaro, I came in as a real thief. A
thief who made the cops chase him.

Everybody wanted to know about
that chase. By the time I got done telling the story, it got changed a bit. I
had it lasting a hour, with them shooting at me the whole time.

I
wasn’t worried about anyone checking on me. I had heard that some of the
kid bosses could get one of the guards to look at your records, but I knew mine
was good. When I first came in, the lady who asked me a lot of questions about
school and stuff also asked me about getting banged up.

“It says
you received all those injuries when the car you stole crashed, Eddie. Is that
true?”

The way she looked at me, I could tell she was ready to
believe me if I told her different. But I said, “No, ma’am, not
exactly.”

She leaned toward me a little, said, “Well, what
did
happen?”

“I was okay when I got out of the
car,” I told her. “But then, when the cops tried to put the cuffs
on me, I fought them.”

“You assaulted police
officers?” she said, leaning back from me, then.

“Yes,
ma’am,” I said.

I watched her write something on my
records. I was glad. She was a nice lady, but it didn’t matter what she
thought of me. It didn’t matter what the judge thought of me, or the
cops, or anyone. Just the guys I was locked up with.

F
ighting is
part of doing time when you’re a kid. It’s not so bad, but you have
to be sure to jump up when your name gets called, or they’ll end up
calling you “kid,” in the bad way.

It’s the same
word, “kid,” but you can always tell what it means by how people
say it. Sometimes, when people say, “He’s a kid,” it just
means he’s green—he doesn’t know the score. That isn’t
a good thing to be, but it’s not such a big deal. You can always get
schooled, and then you won’t be green, no matter how young you are.

But if they call you some other guy’s kid, that means you do things
for him. It would be better to be dead. Once in a while, that happens in there.
A kid makes that choice.

There’s other choices. If you’re
that kind of kid, I mean, if someone is trying to
make
you that kind
of kid, you can go for a fence parole—that’s what they call it when
a kid runs.

If you try that, all kinds of bad things happen. It
isn’t just the beating you get when they catch you. Or even when they put
you in a solitary cell and just leave you there. It’s that the guys who
chase you, they’re the same as you.

There’s a special squad
of kids like that. They don’t stay with us. They have their own dorm.
They don’t eat with us, either.

You have to be very tough to do
that job, being a kid guard. Because if the
real
guards drop you down,
make you go back to sleeping in the dorm with the rest of us, you’re
going to get hurt one night. That’s a guarantee.

If the place
scares you, but you’re too scared to run, you can ask the bosses to lock
you up in one of the solitary cells. It’s safe back there. But everybody
knows why you went, so you can never come out.

That’s just one of
the things that was so confusing when I first came in, being in solitary. If
they threw you in there, like for fighting, it made you bigger. But if you went
there because you wanted to, it made you smaller.

It was like driving,
I thought. Just knowing the car isn’t enough; you have to know the roads,
too.

E
ven if you come in with a real good charge on you, if you
don’t have friends Inside, you’ll probably have to fight a couple
of times. The charge doesn’t always tell the story, so people test
you.

You don’t have to win when you fight, but you have to
keep fighting until somebody stops it.

And if you come in without any
friends, everybody watches you. They want to see what kind of a person you are.
After they find out, different things happen, depending.

With me, one
of the crews saw I was okay, so I got to join up. Get in the car, like Hector
said. After that, the only time I had to fight was when my crew got into a beef
with a different one.

B
y the time they let me out,
I knew a lot of guys who did jobs that needed a driver.

I will
always remember the first one. It was one of those all-night stores that sell
everything. The guy who found me, Rodney was his name, he said he used to work
there, so he knew where everything was, even how to get into the safe in the
back. He said they kept a lot of money in there, because they had to pay the
delivery guys in cash when they came first thing in the morning, once a
week.

Rodney had it all planned out, he said. A three-man job. One guy
to hold the clerk, one guy to get the money, and one guy to drive.

But
the night we were supposed to do it, when I went over to where Rodney was
staying, him and Luther, the other guy, they were all pumped up on crystal;
buzzing around like wasps in a jar, talking so fast I couldn’t hardly
understand a word.

They both had pistols. Rodney was waving his around,
saying if the white trash motherfucker didn’t hand it over, there was
going to be hair all over the walls, stuff like that.

They didn’t
want me to steal a car. They wanted to use Rodney’s. “You can pull
around the back, bro,” he told me. “Out where the Dumpster is.
It’s as dark as a toothless nigger in a coal bin back there.
Nobody’ll see nothing. Besides, I put other plates on it.”

I wanted to tell them I wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t say the
words. It wasn’t that I was scared. I mean, I
was
scared, but
not about the robbery. I was scared, if I didn’t do it, word would get
around, and nobody would want me for a driver.

R
odney’s car
had something wrong with the mufflers. It was way too loud. You could hear the
sound bounce off the sides of parked cars as we went past them.

I
knew this wasn’t the way to do things.

We parked off to the side,
just past where the lights from the store reached.

“Let me wait
here,” I said. “This is better than going around back.”

“Not if we have to come
out
the back, asshole,” Rodney
said. “Just do it like we planned.”

I wanted to tell him
there wasn’t any plan, but it was too late for that.

“This
is the slowest time,” Rodney said. “Three-thirty in the morning,
you never see anybody in there.”

“Let’s go,”
Luther said.

I didn’t say anything. I knew who the boss was.

When Rodney told me, I pulled around the side of the store. Real slow, just
letting the car creep, so the muffler noise wouldn’t be so loud. They
both got out. I had to hold the seatback down for Luther—a Mustang
doesn’t have much room in the rear.

“I’ll be right
over there,” I told them, pointing to a big pool of shadow out past the
Dumpster. Rodney was right about how dark it was.

They pulled the
stockings down over their faces and looked at each other. Then they high-fived
and walked away.

I turned off the lights, then I let the Mustang idle
over to the spot. I backed in careful, made sure I had plenty of room. I opened
the passenger door, so they could get in quicker. The little light on the
ceiling went on. I popped off the cover and pulled out the bulb. Then I moved
the mirror so I could see behind me.

It was hard to see good, because
it was raining that night. I remember it because I was worried about the roads.
I wished I’d had more time to practice driving when it was wet.

It seemed like a long time, but I guess it wasn’t. I heard gravel
crunching, like people were running, then they came around the corner,
fast.

They both tried to jump in the car at the same time, then Luther
went in first and Rodney got in the seat next to me.

“Go!”
Rodney yelled.

I pulled out slow, because I didn’t know if anyone
inside even knew we were back there, and I didn’t want to give away what
direction we went off in.

We were only a short distance away when
Rodney started yelling. “Fuck fuck
fuck
!” He hit the
dashboard with the butt of his pistol. “God
damn
it.”

I was afraid they had killed someone, but I hadn’t heard any
shots.

Nobody chased us.

When we got back, I found out why
Rodney was so mad. “Not even two hundred lousy fucking dollars,” he
said, looking at the bills spread out on the kitchen table. “They changed
the deal with the safe. Dirty motherfuckers!”

Luther just kept
shaking his head. He was grinning, but a lot of guys do that when they’re
hyped up and nervous.

Rodney divided the money three ways. I got
sixty-something.

The next morning, the TV said two men had robbed the
store. And got away with a little more than thirty-five hundred dollars.

I
learned from that job. The more I thought about it, the better I
understood what really had happened. All the time I was thinking that Rodney
and Luther weren’t really pros, they were thinking the same thing about
me. If I was a professional driver, I never would have even gone along on that
job. I would have used another car. I would have practiced with it, to make
sure it was okay if the roads got slick. And I would have gotten it straight in
front how much my share was.

At first, what I thought was that they
didn’t have a plan. Using Rodney’s own car, with the bad mufflers
and all, was really stupid. And getting high before they went out, that was the
scariest part. I was afraid they might get so amped they would shoot someone.
But it turned out they did have a plan, all along.

I didn’t know
about the rest of the plan for quite a while. And I only found out by accident.
I was looking in the papers for an old car I could fix up, when I saw this
story.

ARREST IN McMARTIN STORE ROBBERY
Two More Men
Sought

The second I saw that big black type, it felt like my heart
was an engine going redline. I was sure either Rodney or Luther had got
themselves arrested, and whichever one it was, he had talked about the whole
thing.

I’m not a great reader, but I can do it pretty good, if I
go slow. Only thing, I couldn’t make myself go slow that time, and I had
to read the story a couple of times before I understood it.