After lunch we had a couple more beers and Russel said, “I’m going to ask this straight out. You feel any different about me, Dane? I guess I’m saying, do you forgive me?”
“Does it matter to you?”
“It matters.”
I thought a moment. “I don’t know exactly how I feel. Obviously part of me likes you, or I wouldn’t be here with you buying you lunch and shooting the breeze with you.”
“Part of you.”
“I feel guilty liking you. Maybe I like you because you remind me of my father, or the way I remember my father. He killed himself when I was very young. Then, there are times when I think about that night you had hold of Jordan with one hand and had a knife in the other. You didn’t use it, but I still think about it. It’s like a snapshot in my head.”
“You know what I saw when I was holding your son’s shirt that night, Dane?”
“No.”
“My son. For some reason I saw Freddy, or the way I remember Freddy. I haven’t seen him since he was a boy, except that picture of him older that his mother sent me in prison. I don’t know if I really remember that much about him, or if I made it up in prison. But that’s what I thought of that night. Freddy.”
“Tell me about Freddy,” I said.
“I don’t know if there’s any more to tell. His memory is more like a parasite than anything else. It eats at me. He had little hands, blond hair, the same freckles on the back of his hand that I have.”
“And blue eyes.”
“Yeah, and blue eyes. I remember noticing that he had such little hands. Not just little for a baby, little hands. Not deformed, just small. My mother had hands like that. She also had the freckles on the back of one, just like me and Freddy. You know, the last thing I really remember about him is sort of sappy. It was Christmas and I bought him a red truck and I remember him on the floor playing with it. Even now, when I think of him, that’s the first thing that comes to mind. I have to look at the older picture of him and concentrate real hard to imagine him any older than five, and then I don’t do it so well.”
“What was the fly in the ointment, Russel? What happened?”
“I was the fly. I think from the day I was born I’ve been damaged goods. No bad cracks, but some hairline fissures. My dad was a night watchman at a factory and my mother took in sewing, later she had her own shop. They made a decent living and they were decent people. I can’t blame them for a thing. They did everything they could to encourage me, put me off in the right direction.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“Nope. I just couldn’t stick with anything. I got bored. I wanted everything now, not l ater.”
“We all think we’re smarter than the other guy,” I said.
“I thought it more than others. I know better in a way, but hell, I still think that deep down. There’s a part of me that just can’t understand why I’ve got to go the slow route like the Philistines.”
He drank some of his beer and smiled at me. “I’m a case, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, but you don’t sound so different from a lot of others. That still doesn’t explain what happened.”
“Maybe it’s just a lazy streak Dane, I don’t know. But I’d be working in some factory, making some machine mash aluminum pipe into lawn furniture, and I just couldn’t see beyond that. It was like whatever it was I was looking for was hiding and it could hide real good. I felt like I had been sent to hell. You know what hell would be to me, Dane? Working in an aluminum chair factory, mashing that goddamn monotonous aluminum pipe into chairs, the sound of those fucking machines going, cachump, cachump, and some redneck standing over me telling me to do it faster. That’s hell to me.”
“Lot of people have done shit jobs,” I said. “Me included. You don’t have to do them all your life.”
“I don’t doubt that, but for me I could never see beyond them. No future window, I guess. As time went on I started feeling empty, and then I got into the quick money.”
“Stealing?”
“Yep. I didn’t get caught when I was young. Just luck, no other reason. I fell in with some guys and we knocked off filling stations all over East Texas. Carried water pistols that looked like guns and we’d split the take. Even then I felt it was just something I was doing until I found what it was I was supposed to do. The thing that would take that part of me that was empty and fill it up.”
Russel raised his beer very deliberately and took a long, slow sip from it.
“To shorten this story up,” Russel said, “I didn’t stop doing it, and I did a little stretch later on for a grocery store robbery. I went in with my water pistol and the owner had a pistol under the counter, and his didn’t shoot water. He just held the gun on me while one of the clerks called the police. I did some time. Not much. I was young and the judge was lenient, and they didn’t know how long I’d been robbing places. To them it was my first offense.
“Anyway, I graduated to the big time when I got out. I went to Florida and got in with this professional hotel robber named Mick. He had a perfect scam. He had bellboys and elevator operators on his payroll, and when a good mark checked in, they’d call him.”
“Just business to them.”
“Exactly. Then he and I would come over at the right time, go to the mark’s room, beat the lock, which is something I got good at-”
“I know.”
“That guy g y pped you. Those locks and bars he gave you might keep a twelve-year-old kid out, but any burglar could go through that stuff like a worm through shit. You ought to get your money back.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What about the Florida stuff?”
“We’d go into a room and take what we wanted, put it in the mark’s suitcase to add insult to injury, and just walk out. We knew all the back routes and we had the inside help. It was nothing. Got so we were making big bucks.”
“But you weren’t satisfied?”
“Nope. Same old story. I couldn’t see beyond what I was doing. I always wanted to, but couldn’t. It was like the moment was it, and once I realized that, everything just sort of closed in on me. Robbing beat the hell out of factories, but after a while it just didn’t do it. And I could never get over the guilt. I wasn’t really a born criminal. I couldn’t rationalize it the way Mick and others could. I always saw it as wrong. My upbringing, I guess. I mean I knew I was a crook and a sleaze. I didn’t feel like a debonair cat burglar, I felt like a scumbag. One time we were robbing this hotel room, and on the way out I saw myself carrying the suitcase full of loot in one of those full-length mirrors, and it hit me. It was like a picture of my life and I didn’t care for it.”
“So you tried to reform.”
“Yes, I did. I came back to East Texas. I met Jane and we got married. I started working at a plywood plant, and for a while there, the work didn’t bother me. I had someone to come home to and something to expect. Then when Freddy was born, things began to fall apart. I wanted things for the little guy and I couldn’t see it happening at the plywood plant. I got a little promotion, but it was so piddling it just made me mad. Like I said, I’ve got no patience. I want everything now. Thinking back on it, I was doing pretty good there and the promotion came pretty quick, and the next one would have too. I’d have been off the line completely and I’d have been the redneck telling the other poor bastards what to do. But I got empty again and started fucking up. I stayed mad all the time and it showed at home and work, and I got demoted and I quarreled with Jane and yelled at Freddy enough that I felt guilty. And that’s when I started doing the little jobs. I’d take weekends and go case places outside of town and I’d steal little piddling things. I mean, it wasn’t helping my income much, but it gave me some kind of purpose. Damned if I can explain it. It’s like that guy that keeps rolling the rock up the hill in hell. Gets it to the top and almost over, then the bastard rolls back on him. My life was like that. I’d almost have it whipped, then it would roll back on me.”