“Naw,” Paul said. “He died.” He was still scratching through the covers.
“That must have been fun.”
“Middle of the night.” He stopped scratching, and yawned. “He fell right out of bed,” he said. “Woke me up. Scared the crap out of me.”
“Nice little vacation for you,” I said. And I thought, Nice little conversation we’re having.
“Oh, it’s great,” he said.
I didn’t have anything else I wanted to say about an old man falling out of bed and dropping dead, so the silence came back again for a while. I looked up at the television set, and it showed a guy in a rowboat floating around in a toilet tank. Television is fucking incredible sometimes.
Paul shifted around in the bed, kicking his legs out this way and that, and a couple of his magazines slid off onto the floor. Like the old man, I thought. “Boy, my ass gets to hurting,” he said. He couldn’t seem to decide what position he wanted to be in. “Pins and needles, you know?”
“I know,” I said. I picked the magazines up and tossed them on the bed again. “You ought to roll over on your other side,” I told him. “Lie on a nurse, that’ll help.”
“Have you seen the beasts around here?”
“I’ve seen them.”
And so much for that conversation. I looked at the television set again, and the commercial was over — I hope that was a commercial — and what was up there on the screen? A hospital room, one guy in the bed and one guy walking around the room, talking to him. “We’re on television,” I said.
Paul said, “The guy in the bed has amnesia.”
I looked at him. “Where’d you get it?”
He grinned at me. “I forgot.”
No place to go from there either. Christ, conversation is impossible in the hospital, it really is.
Paul glanced over at the empty bed. He had a thoughtful look on his face, and he said, “You know what used to get me about him?”
“What, the old guy?”
“He was always saying he hadn’t done anything yet.” Paul gave me a look, with this strange-looking kind of crooked smile on his face. He said, “He’d wasted his life, that’s what he thought, he hadn’t done anything with himself. He was older’n hell, but all he wanted was to get healthy and get out of here, so he could start doing something.”
“Like what?”
“He didn’t know, the poor old fart.” Paul shrugged. “Just something different, I guess.”
I looked at the other bed. I could almost see the old man falling out of it onto the floor. I wondered what he’d done for a living.
9
They both had that Saturday off, so they took the families to Jones Beach, using both cars. The beach was hot and crowded, the way it always is, but the kids liked the chance to run around in the sand sometimes instead of just jumping in and out of the pool in the backyard, and the wives liked any excuse at all that would get them out of the house. And Tom and Joe liked to look at women in bathing suits.
After a while, the two men were the only ones left on the blankets, spread out well back from the ocean. Mary and Grace were both down by the water’s edge with the smallest kids, and the other kids were all off running around somewhere, pestering people. Tom was sprawled on his stomach on the blanket with his chin propped on his forearms so he could look at the girls in bikinis, and Joe was sitting cross-legged on the next blanket over, reading the News.
The planning of the robbery had settled into a sort of hobby they had, like two guys who operate a model railroad set together. Tom had been casing the brokerages and the general Wall Street area, checking out possible getaway routes, collecting maps of the financial district and writing out long descriptions of the security arrangements at various brokerages. Joe had been raiding the Police Department files downtown for information on burglar alarms and any special police surveillance arrangements there might be in that area. The two of them had maps and charts and memos and lists enough to choke a whale, a huge growing pile of paperwork they kept locked away in the liquor closet in the game room in Tom’s basement. They’d thought it over and decided that was the best place to keep it all because nobody ever went down into the game room, and Tom was the only one with a key to that closet. Mary had had a key at one time, but she’d lost it a couple of years ago and hadn’t ever replaced it because she didn’t have any need for it.
In a way, the planning of the robbery had by now become an end in itself. When they’d first started talking about it there hadn’t been any reality in the plans at all, it had just been a funny and interesting thing to talk about on the way to work. But gradually it had become more real to both of them, and the way it had become real was that now they were really doing the preliminaries. They would go out and talk to the Mafia, they would study different brokerages, they would make lists and keep records, they would talk over various plans for the robbery; they would do everything except the robbery itself. Although they never acknowledged that to themselves, not consciously.
The thought of the robbery was never very far from either of their minds these days; it gave them an interest in life. Including while they were at the beach.
“Well, here’s one thing,” Joe said, tapping the newspaper. “We don’t do it the seventeenth.”
Idle, unalert, still looking at girls in bikinis but automatically knowing what Joe was talking about, Tom said, “How come?”
“Parade for the astronauts.”
A vision came into Tom’s head; narrow streets, filled with crowds and bands. “Oh, yeah,” he said.
Joe folded the paper and put it down. He was feeling vaguely irritable, as though some of the sand here had gotten into his brain. He said, “When the hell are we gonna do it?”
Tom shrugged one shoulder, and kept on watching the bodies all around him. “When we figure out how,” he said. “Look at that one with the volley ball.”
“Fuck the one with the volley ball,” Joe said. He didn’t feel like listening to a lot of horseshit.
“Gladly,” Tom said.
Joe said, “Listen, I’m serious.” He said it low-voiced and tense, and held his newspaper tight in his right fist.
Tom rolled over onto his side and gave Joe a look. He was vaguely surprised, and still feeling lazy and at peace with the world. He said, “What happened to you all of a sudden?”
What had happened to Joe, he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind the vision of the old man in the hospital, dying and falling out of bed. It seemed to him when he thought about it that the old man had been making one last desperate leap toward life, and had fallen, and it had been all over for him; too late. Usually, Joe was more interested even than Tom in looking at girls in bikinis, but for the last few days it seemed that all he could think about was time going by.
But he couldn’t very well talk about all of that, Tom would think he was crazy. Or turning into a weak sister. He shrugged, irritable and angry and frustrated, and said, “Nothing happened to me. We just keep fucking around on the fringes, that’s all.”
Tom frowned. Joe was talking very tough and mean, and Tom wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted to take offense or not. Holding that issue in abeyance for a second, he said, “So what do you want to do?”
“The robbery,” Joe said. “Or at least get moving on it.” He slapped the newspaper down onto the blanket with a disgusted gesture.
“Fine,” Tom said. He was beginning to get a little irritated himself. “Like how?” he said.
“You’ve been checking out the brokerages. What’s the story?”