“He’ll know you,” he said.
“Not if we tie these shop rags over our faces, way they do in cowboy movies.”
We got out of the truck, and Arnold tied a rag around my face and another around his. We got the key from the pipe, and Arnold unlocked the door, quiet like. We slid inside, moved through the stock room, pushed open the swinging door that went into the store itself. There at the counter, sitting on a stool, bent over the register, a little gooseneck lamp beside him, was Ben, scrawny and birdlike with a nose the size of a hammer handle. He was rolling pennies into paper rollers. When he heard us come in, he looked up.
Arnold pointed the gun, said, “Give it up.”
Ben looked at Arnold and said, “Arnold Small. I know you. That mask don’t do you no good. You don’t want to do this. You go on now, I’ll forget this.”
Arnold jerked his mask down and said, “You owe me money. You owe me money.” Then Arnold said to me: “Git what’s in the register, up to a hundred-and-twenty-five.”
I moved toward the register as if in a dream. Arnold went around front of the counter, pointed the gun at Ben. Then the old man moved. He pushed ced. ist me back with one hand and with the other pulled a pistol from under the counter, thumbed back the hammer, pointed it at Arnold. I grabbed a bottle of whisky off the shelf and brought it down hard on his gun arm. The gun went down and hit the register drawer, went off. Bills flew up like butterflies.
I swung the bottle again, hit Ben solid across the forehead. The bottle broke this time, and down he went, unconscious, me standing there looking at whisky and blood flowing over his head and onto the floor.
Arnold got hold of me, grabbed a roll of pennies from the counter, and we were out of there, in the pickup, roaring away before Arnold realized he’d left his pistol on the counter, like an offering.
Arnold took me to the skating rink and parked out back. From where we sat we could see the skaters in the open rink, and the lights flashing out from the spinning bulbs didn’t seem like lights at all, but strips of brightly colored foil, and the skaters were musicbox figures, wound up tight, going round and round to a grating noise that was supposed to be music. The shrieks and laughter of the skaters mocked us.
Arnold said, “Git out, squirt. Don’t say you been with me. You came here to skate, but stayed out here and watched before going in. Let some people see you. Ben didn’t know you. Your face was covered.”
I untied the shop rag, which was pulled down around my neck, and tried to fold it, but my fingers wouldn’t do the job. Arnold snatched the rag from me, reached across and opened the door. I got out of the truck, and Arnold drove off slow and easy. Gradually, the world slowed down. The music in the skating rink became defined, the lights flashed as lights are supposed to flash, and the shrieks and laughter from the rink no longer seemed directed at me.
It was all over.
Mostly.
Arnold took the rap. The old man recovered with nothing more than a scar, and he couldn’t name Arnold’s accomplice, and Arnold wouldn’t name me. The judge liked the way Arnold had thrown the football in high school, liked the way he had run with the ball on his powerful legs, and he liked Arnold’s loyalty to his unnamed partner. The gun Arnold left on the counter turned out not to have been loaded, and the roll of pennies was worth fifty cents, not exactly big money. Arnold got six months on the county farm instead of a few years in prison.
I went my way, free and easy, and when I saw old Ben on the street from then on, I crossed away from him to keep us from passing, least he recognize the eyes that had looked at him over the top of a shop rag mask. I was secretly glad when he passed on some years later, attacked by another robber, but this time one with a loaded gun and a more severe design.
When Arnold’s time was up, I couldn’t face him. I couldn’t thank him for being silent, because I had come to believe that was exactly as it should have been. That he owed me because I wouldn’t have been in on the deal had he not taken advantage of my age, got me drunk and drove me over there. I came to believe I was better than Arnold. That I always had been, and had only been slumming. I put the knife he gave me in a Prince Albert tobacco can and buried it out back of our house and dismissed him from my life.
I have felt that way since, except on dark nights when it’s three a.m., an chren a d I view myself in a different light. A light that shows me to be less than the man I pretend to be. A man who has never quite taken responsibility for his own actions.
If the thing with Arnold was bad, there was another whammy to come. My father began to sleep less, drink and brood and argue with my mother. But Dad’s guilt and dissatisfaction didn’t last long. One afternoon on his way home from work at a construction site, he stopped off for a beer in his favorite bar on the other side of the county line. While he was having his beer, a drunk pulled a gun on the bartender for some reason, and my Dad lost his temper because the bartender was a friend of his.
He jumped the drunk and took the gun away from him and beat him to the ground with it. He threw the gun behind the bar and the bartender poured Dad one on the house and Dad drank it. The drunk dozed on the floor while the bartender called the cops. The drunk’s girlfriend, who had been sitting calmly in a booth watching the action, took a. 22 pistol out of her purse and popped it at my father.
The shot caught Dad in the right eye and it was all over. She got a year because she was pretty, the drunk got six months because he was the sheriff’s cousin.
After all these times of driving out, just parking and looking at the mobile home, was this going to be the time I actually walked up to his door and knocked?
What was I going to say? Hey, Arnold, how’s the old hammer hanging? Haven’t seen you in ten years, and haven’t ever invited you over or called you or even sent you a Christmas card, and the knife you gave me those years ago I buried in a tin can along with you being my brother, and I know I owe you a debt I can never pay and I resent it, but our stupid nephew has his balls tacked to a board, and since it’s something illegal and dangerous, I thought of you immediately.
He’d probably have punched my lights out, and I wouldn’t have blamed him.
A big yellow dog came out from under the mobile home, squeezed past the lawn mower handle and looked in my direction and barked. I got in the pickup and pulled around in a tight half-circle, backed some, straightened the truck on the road, and started away from there.
As I went, I glanced in my rearview mirror. Through a parting in the trees, I saw the door of the trailer open and a huge, bearded man step out, then I was going around a curve and couldn’t see him anymore.
7
Before I reached home the sky grew death black and the rain slammed the truck and the wind rocked it. I drove along carefully through town and passed the city limits sign and made the subdivision called Black Oak just as the sky went strangely absent of rain and there was a split in the clouds, and the dying sun dripped off the pines and oaks and trickled over the ground as if being absorbed.
Black Oak isn’t really much of a subdivision. It’s practically in the country, and everyone out here owns anywhere from one to three acres. The residents are mostly quiet and like to pretend they’re in the suburbs, which is damn funny. A creek runs alongside our house, and behind us is a thick woods where curious deer stick their heads out now and then and cranes wade in the creek and spear minnows with their long, sharp bills.
I nosed the truck up our long drive to the garage, pressed the garage door opener, drove inside and closed up. I sat in the truck and felt warm and comfortable for a while, but the feeling passed.
I plucked the photo album off the seat of the truck and held it in my hand, but didn’t open it. I got the coat off the floorboard and wrapped it around the album and put the coat and what it contained on the floorboard on top of my guns.