“This guy is clean! No record, no unsavory associates, no nothing.”
“And you want to walk in some place with him and do bad stuff? I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you get it?” James was annoyed with his brother now, and kicked the side of the car and shook his head “He just ain’t been caught, man, because he’s good.”
“That’s what he says, huh? That what he tells you, James?”
“Hey — he’s got at least two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds, which he is currently in the process of fencing.”
“You seen them?”
“I seen them. And at least he knows fences. He ain’t a choirboy.”
“It’s just — well,” Bill Houston said. “I just don’t know.”
“This person is a scholar of armed robbery, is what I’m saying. He reads about all this shit. He’s done it, and he’s talked to the people who’ve done it, and I’m telling you he knows, all, about it.” James leaned back against the Ford. “Hey, you ought to see them diamonds. Little rainbows, man. You hold them in your hand, feels like you’re getting your dick sucked.” He looked carefully at his brother’s face. “I thought you were looking for some shit to get into, Bill Junior.”
“Well, I am.”
“Well, I’m vouching for this man and I’m vouching for this situation. If it sounds like there’s a few hazards in it, then welcome to the West, Big Bro.”
Bill Houston looked off into the shimmering distance, in which a DC-10, the slow lumbering picture of world-weariness, was taking off into the sky. “It’s still hot,” he said.
“You wanna make some money. Bill Junior? Because I am. And so is Burris.”
“Burris?”
“Burris is all grown up now.”
“Burris?” Bill Houston felt the day’s last heat getting to him. Though his perspiration dried on leaving his pores, he knew he was sweating because his eyes burned with its salt. He shook his head, but it only made him feel dizzier. “Burris can’t really handle something like this, can he?”
“He’s all grown up now, Bill Junior. If I got to work partners, I’d like to keep it in the family as much as I can.”
“Well well,” Bill Houston said. “Hm.”
“You want to make some money?” His brother clasped his arm. “Money right or wrong?”
Bill Houston had always liked the sound of it. “Yeah,” he said. “Money right or wrong.”
They both looked over in the direction of the house. Although they’d never been comrades in youth, separated as they were by several years, there was something like the guilt of childhood conspiracies in the way they stood together. “Mom’s different,” James said suddenly. “I don’t like the way she talks. She talks like there’s nobody there listening.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You know what I’m saying? I wish she’d quit.”
“Why don’t you tell her?” Bill Houston said.
“I want to tell her, but then all of a sudden I just don’t. Very weird.”
“I don’t get it,” Bill Houston said. “Why don’t you just walk up and tell her she looks the wrong direction when she talks?”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“Because — I don’t know,” Bill Houston said. His stomach felt tight, and he wished he hadn’t eaten so much. “It’s hard to explain that shit to your own mother,” he said.
Dwight Snow and James and Bill Houston sat in frayed lounge chairs out back, shaded by a green corrugated plastic awning of which James was quite proud. They drank coffee, looking off the patio into the back yard like people waiting for a show of entertainment to start. But it was just a lawn of overgrown brown weeds, and up against the fence, beside the back gate, a stack of assorted scraps of decomposing lumber.
Before long, Dwight commanded the drift of talk. What had begun as a general description of their plans for the Central Avenue First State Bank turned into a display of his knowledge. “I picked up that pistol when I was twenty-one,” lie said. “In six years I have never heard a siren, never heard an alarm go off, never seen an officer of the law on my tail. I have been, and intend to remain, one hundred percent successful as a bandit.” His eyes did not once flicker from Bill Houston’s face.
“You do any B-and-E’s?” Bill Houston asked. The morning was getting hot and the coffee was making his stomach ache and he was irritated all out of proportion by Dwight Snow. But he wondered how Dwight had come by his diamonds.
“Burglary is insanity,” Dwight said. “I should know, I’ve done enough of it. You walk around on tiptoe and you have absolutely no control over your environment, no idea what’s waiting for you in there. You could walk your face right up some vigilante’s twelve-gauge. Some psycho who’s been sitting by his bed fully loaded and paranoid every night of his life. I feel much more comfortable doing business in the daytime with my neighborhood savings and loan association, or my local jeweler’s. I know who has the firepower—me—and I know exactly who’s there, where they’re located, and what they’re doing, before I ever make a move. The environment is one hundred percent mine — or I go home. I can always come back tomorrow, right? I can just say ‘pass’ on any situation where I’m not sure of outmaneuvering the opposing forces.
“Now, a bank — okay, you’ve never done a bank, either of you. Fine. You’re in for a pleasant surprise. Ten seconds after you’re in session, it no longer feels like a robbery. It feels more like your average daily simple transaction. Because these people are trained to cash checks, and they’re trained to make loans and various transactions — traveller’s checks, etcetera—and, these people are trained to be robbed. They’re briefed on that, see — it’s no fucking skin off their ass if they give you the best of service here, the money’s all insured — they want it to go smooth. They’re instructed to put up no resistance, obey orders, and minimize risk all around. I tell them I don’t want to take home any funny money, I don’t want to hear any alarms or have to deal with any police — I demand and I expect full cooperation from all employees present. And I get it. I go to pick up a stack of bills, they say, ‘Uh-uh, excuse me, sir, that’s wired to trip an alarm, excuse me, sir, these bills are marked, that drawer trips a silent call’—I mean to tell you, gentlemen. In this venture profit outweighs risk a hundred to one or better.”
With this last statement he settled back lightly in his chair and removed his hat, a red baseball cap of plastic mesh bearing a patch on the front. What irritated Bill Houston about him was the efficiency of his gestures and the precision of his speech: in his own mind Houston linked these qualities with homosexuals, schoolteachers, and chicken military officers. Dwight took off his glasses — Bill Houston noticed that he lacked an index finger — and his eyes were revealed to be enormous, as blue as the sea and as liquid, with long lashes like a woman’s or a child’s, yet hooded by their lids like a reptile’s. He seemed lost in his vision of illegal transactions now, wiping his face carefully with a folded white hankie. Houston noticed that his red cap was lined with what appeared to be tin foil, shining in the morning sun.
When they were done talking it was nearly noon. Dwight left by the back gate, the way he’d arrived.
Bill and James lingered on the patio, stupefied by a mounting humidity and mesmerized by the doings of a gargantuan truck in the alley behind James’s home. Bill Houston couldn’t shake a sense of identification with its hunger as it closed with, uplifted, and showered itself with the contents of a green rubbish dumpster. A rapid changing in the timbre of the atmosphere, as clouds formed out of nothing overhead and oppressed the light, gave to these few moments the unreal quality of an animated cartoon. As the big truck moved down the alley, stopping every hundred feet or so to devour more stinking debris, lightning passed from cloud to land at the horizon, and great drops of water started falling all around them. The smell of it on the asphalt streets left them breathless. “I never mind this kind of a storm,” James said. Its clatter on the awning over their heads was deafening. “It’s gonna flood,” James announced, “and I’m gonna get drunk real slow.”