Listening to all this, George brought his hands up to his face and held them there. But only for a minute. There was an outbreak of noise downstairs. Somebody had come into the club. A voice yelling, “Bo! You up there, Bo? It’s Joseph, your favorite brother!”
Closet Man started hammering on the door again.
Moonlight gleamed on the chute of the incinerator, press-braked metal that dropped straight down the wall in a shaft at the rear of the building. Heading out the back way, they now found themselves outside on a structure that was like a long iron porch bolted to the brick like some sort of a fire escape, only it was being used more as a storage area, the main aisle practically choked with junk. Zeke going, “I just can’t figure it out. He must have some kinda secret hiding place for his dough in there. You know, like it could be he stashes it under a floorboard...”
“I’d like to stash you under a floorboard,” Ma said. “Nail you in there good.”
“Can we be quiet?” George was fed up with them. “There’s somebody in the building, for God’s sake. We aren’t out of the woods yet, and—”
There was a clunk from behind, then a gasp of pain. Ma stumbling into something. And then Ma cussing and grunting, and then brief silence followed by a tremendous crash in the alley below them.
“Goddamn barbecue,” Ma said. “You can’t have them things on a balcony, it’s against the fire regulations.”
It was too much. Ma hurling barbecues off balconies while George and Zeke were going out of their way to be quiet. Zeke whirled and tried to go for her. He tried to get past George, but George blocked him, George holding him back, Zeke yelling, “Lemme go! Are you gonna let me go?” And then Zeke stiffened in George’s arms, saying “Hey! Wait! Look! She brought that bag with her after all, damn it!” Turning, George saw it was true. Ma had her loot bag with her, ignoring their warnings. She’d been last to come out of the room, and they hadn’t seen what she was up to. “Gimme that!” Zeke yelled, lunging.
Zeke got a piece of the bag, jerked the whole thing out of Ma’s hands, and blundered away with it, kicking junk out of his path, oblivious to the noise — an old bike, a stack of Pepsi cases — it all went flying, Zeke pressing closer to the wall of the building and the yawning maw of the incinerator chute.
“See this, Ma? See this?” he hollered.
He slung the bag into the chute.
They heard it drop. Muffled thumpings, then far below a bang. And then silence.
They stood there a minute.
“You weasels owe me a lamp,” Ma told them.
“So there I was,” Ma was saying, “trapped in the goddamn can, I coulda been locked in there for weeks, I coulda starved to death for all you weasels cared. First they turned the light off on me! You never told me that! How they’d turn the light off on me? I must of panicked. Grabbed for the latch an’ that tiny little knob what locks the door broke off, an’ I goes, okay. This is it. Those two yahoos have really done it to me this time. If I get outa here alive, I’m gonna go straight to church an’ thank God for sparing me, then go home an’ strangle those nogood weasels—”
They were safe at home now, in Ma’s kitchen.
“So how’d you get out?” George asked, cutting her off right there.
“How’d I get out? How’d I get out? How d’you think I got out, for the love of all that’s holy. I hadda climb out, that’s how I got out! Just like I said might happen. Go over the wall. An’ I’m panicking, right? I got a stocking pulled over my face in case the Rottweiler man shows up, an’ if that ain’t bad enough, it’s so dark in there you can’t see your hand in front of your face—”
“Why would you want to, Ma? See your hand in front of your face?”
“It’s an expression! An expression! Don’t you even know a civilized expression when you hear one?”
“I guess I never understood that particular one, that’s all.” Then George said, “So what you were saying, before you got locked in the can, you had to leave the other room early because they wouldn’t serve you. They said they were closing up. So what happened to my twenty dollars then, Ma?”
Ma looked away.
“What twenny dollars?”
“Ma,” George said, “you know what twenty dollars. The twenty I gave you so you could buy yourself an appetizer.”
“You didn’t give me no twenny, you bum.”
“But, Ma, I did, I—”
Ma raising her voice at him now.
“You sure as hell did not! What’re you tryin’ to pull on me anyway?”
At the time George had been trying to get Ma to cooperate, but he’d known Ma would try something like this, Ma never remembering when you gave her money, only remembering when you didn’t give her money. Her own weird form of selective memory or something.
He looked to Zeke for support, but Zeke wasn’t saying much. The minute they’d walked into the house, the guy making a beeline for the kitchen and Ma’s Beefeater forty-ouncer, helping himself to two strong quick ones which he tossed back right there on the spot, then pouring a taller, settling-in-for-a-period-of-grief sort of drink and dropping down into a chair and letting his head sag forward. He’d been sitting there like that for a while, and now he finally spoke out loud.
“Goddamn, it coulda worked.”
“Only it didn’t,” Ma reminded him.
“It coulda worked perfectly,” Zeke said, ignoring her, “If the Big Guy — and Closet Man — if they hadn’t decided to mix it up. An’ if the money’d been there where it was s’posed to be. An’ if somebody hadn’t of come in the front door that Ma was supposed to be watching. An’ if George hadda listened to me in the first place.”
“And if pigs could fly,” Ma said, “we could get bacon with shotguns.”
“Maybe,” George said, “what the real problem was, you should of scoped the place out properly like you said you were going to do.”
“I did scope it out. I scoped it out plenty. How was I s’posed to know all that other stuff was gonna happen? I don’t have a crystal ball, you know. I don’t have a psychic mind.”
“You don’t have any kind of a mind,” Ma said. “All you got is a soft squishy spot where your brain used to be.”
There was one saving grace from George’s perspective — at least the gin was working. Zeke letting Ma reach in past his guard and take her shots, and not responding or coming on the counterattack right away. But George had to agree with Ma this time. She was right about Zeke’s mind. It was still back at the Gas Station. Part of it, anyway. Which didn’t leave him a whole lot to work with.
“A bit of luck’s all I needed. The money was there. I know it was there. Where else would it be? But I’m not psychic. I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t seem to find that goddamn bag.”
“If you’d looked everywhere,” Ma pointed out to him, “you’d of found it, wouldn’t you?” She squinched up her eyes at him. “What’d the thing look like?”
“Canvas, Ma,” George told her. “Most likely a canvas sack with lettering on the sides and some kind of a lock on the thing.”
“Oh,” Ma said, nodding. “That.”
There was a silence. Zeke slowly lifted his head and fixed his eyes on her.
“Whaddya mean ‘that’?”
“Well,” Ma answered, “there was a bag looked like that. I seen it.”
“What?”
Zeke coming to full attention there in his chair.
“Sure. You’d of seen it, too, if you’d looked. It was after I found that nice lamp, some nice coasters, a clock. Then, when I was feelin’ down the cushions to try an’ pick out the loose change, that’s when I seen it. A canvas bag. It was under the guy on the couch. Partway scrunched. I guess he fell on it.”