Authors: Andrew Vachss
Vonda was real
quiet for a minute. Like she was thinking over what I said.
“That’s what I want,” she said. “A chance. A real
chance.”
“
Y
ou know what’s wrong with that
movie?” Vonda said to me in the morning. “He was all alone. He
should have had a girl with him;
then
it would be
perfect.”
I’d never thought about that.
“He might have made it, then,” Vonda said.
She reached
over and held my hand.
E
very time J.C. came back with Gus, they
would go over the job again. J.C. is real careful. That’s why we never
got caught, I know.
“You want to hear the whole plan,
Eddie?” J.C. asked me one day.
“Sure,” I said.
When J.C. and Gus explained it to me, I was real impressed. It was so good
a plan, the cops would never even figure out what happened.
The reason
they told me the whole plan was, this time, I had to do more than drive. I had
another job. Scouting, J.C. called it.
“
Y
ou want a woman to
fall in love with you, you have to know what to do,” Vonda told me.
“You have to have some techniques.”
“What do you
mean?”
“You have girlfriends, right, Eddie?”
“Well, I’ve
had
girlfriends. I mean, you know, girls
who.…”
“Sure. Did any of them really love
you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I
don’t guess they did.”
“You’re the nicest guy I
ever met, Eddie,” she said. “But if you want a girl to fall deep in
love with you, that’s not enough.”
“What do you
mean?”
“There’s little … tricks. Ways to act.
I’ll tell you one,” she said, in that secret voice she has,
sometimes. “You want to get a girl to treat you special, take her
shopping for shoes.”
“Huh?”
“Take her
to the fanciest shoe store in town; tell her to pick out whatever she wants. I
promise you, she’ll wet her panties right there in the store.”
“Did anyone ever—?”
“J.C. did, once,”
she said, like she knew what I was going to ask her. “But he hasn’t
in a long time. He’s not what I need, now.”
I wondered what
would have happened if I had taken Bonnie shopping for shoes. If I hadn’t
gotten lost with Daphne.
“What
do
you need,
Vonda?” I asked her.
Her eyes held me. I watched them turn a
darker green. “I need a getaway man, Eddie,” she said.
“
T
ake her with you,” J.C. told me.
“Vonda?”
“You see any other broads around here? A
cop spots you driving around, doing nothing, he could decide he wants to stick
his nose in. But he sees you with a woman, he’ll think you’re
looking for a good spot to pull over and get some.”
“If
it’s okay with Vonda.…”
“It’ll be okay
with her,” J.C. said.
“
I
t’s the only place I can
get what I need,” Gus said to J.C. “Ordnance like that, it
doesn’t fall off a truck. And I’m not dealing with some fucking
clerk off the base. These are people I did business with before.”
“We’ll be back in a few days,” J.C. said to Vonda.
“Keep your eye on Eddie.”
He gave her a hard smack on the
bottom. I could see Vonda’s face over his shoulder; she didn’t like
it.
T
he days got filled, then. When I wasn’t doing my
scouting, I was working on the cars. The truck and the hearse, I mean. Once in
a while, on my Thunderbird.
Vonda was with me almost all the time.
Telling me about how to be with girls. Or watching movies with me.
One
time, she even cleaned the Thunderbird. Real close cleaning, like it was a pot
she was scrubbing.
It took her a few hours, working hard. “That
was my workout for today,” she said.
I told her the Thunderbird
looked new inside.
“See,” she said, “I’m good
for
some
things.”
“Vonda,
you’re—”
She put two fingers on my lips to keep me
quiet. Then she ran off, back to the cabin.
T
hat night, she asked me
to bring my VCR into the cabin, so we could watch the movies there.
I liked it better in the barn, but she looked like it would mean a lot to
her, and I didn’t want to disappoint her.
When the movie was
over, she went into the bathroom. When she came out, all she had on were a pair
of her high heels. Red ones.
I couldn’t say anything.
“Eddie,” she said, real soft. “Remember when I showed you
my scar? From the cigarette? Remember when you kissed it? That was a sweet
thing to do. It’s a sweet place to kiss. If I asked you
real
nice, would you do it again?”
From then on, Vonda was my girl. My
secret girl.
“
Y
ou sure it’ll all go up?” J.C.
asked Gus, after they had been back for a couple of days.
“A
drop like that? Guaranteed,” Gus told him. “Be nothing left but
some bone fragments, if that.”
“It’s
all
got
to burn. Otherwise, they’ll keep looking.”
“It’s a hundred to one, with a full tank of gas, that
it’ll happen just from the impact,” Gus said. “But what we
picked up makes it a sure thing. Even if they find traces, they’ll figure
we brought the stuff with us to blow the box, in case the drivers didn’t
give over when we threw down on them.”
He looked sideways at me
and winked. “Yeah,” he said. “I finally get some use out of
what they taught me.”
Gus meant the army. He talks about that a
lot. He hadn’t liked it there; that’s where something happened to
one side of his face. His right eyebrow is split in half, like he has two of
them over just the one eye.
But even though Gus says he hated the army,
it never sounded so bad to me, when he talked about it.
I wanted to ask
him questions, but I never did. I’m always afraid of sounding stupid, but
that wasn’t it. With a man like Gus, it’s better if he
doesn’t think you’re too interested in anything about him.
I
t was great riding with Vonda, even if I
couldn’t show her how good a driver I was. J.C. said to be extra careful
not to attract any attention. Mostly, I just went over the different routes,
and Vonda wrote down the mileage and kept time.
One day, Vonda slid
next to me on the seat. She put her left hand on the inside of my right thigh.
Not grabbing me or anything, just holding it there.
Right then, I
thought about us just taking off. Just go from there. Drive.
But I
didn’t have a real plan. And Vonda deserved a better chance than just
trying to run a roadblock.
W
hen they told me how we were going to
make the plan work—“selling the scam,” J.C. called it—I
got a little spooked.
Gus could see it in my face, and he laughed at
me. “They don’t bite, Eddie,” he said.
Getting the
bodies turned out to be easy. It was the first time we used the hearse. I was
the driver. Late one night, we went to this cemetery J.C. knew about. It was a
long drive, because he said we couldn’t do it close to our base.
After we put the dirt and sod back, it still didn’t look that good,
even in the dark, I didn’t think. But J.C. said it was a cemetery for
people who died broke, and nobody would be visiting their graves.
That’s when I figured out why J.C. and Gus had brought back that
giant freezer from one of their trips away. After we put the bodies inside, I
helped chop up the coffins. Then we burned everything.
“
H
ow
come I never see you with a gun, Eddie?” Vonda asked me one day.
“I don’t know anything about guns,” I said.
“Anyway, that’s not what I do, guns. I’m the
driver.”
“J.C. and Gus always have guns on them,”
Vonda said.
“Sure.”
“Don’t you ever
worry … ? I mean, if something happened. If you got into trouble and you
needed
a gun, what would you do?”
“I’d
drive,” I told her. “I’d drive everyone out of
trouble.”
I didn’t see Vonda for all the rest of that day.
At night, I went out to the barn to watch my movies, but she didn’t
come.
I
was polishing the Cadillac the next morning when Vonda came
up to me. She was wearing her exercise clothes, but she hadn’t started
yet.
“What difference does it make if it’s so
shiny?” she asked me.
“It’s supposed to look like
it’s out on business,” I said. “J.C. says, in this part of
the country, folks sometimes have their funerals at dawn, soon as it gets
light. So if anyone sees a hearse driving at four in the morning, they’ll
think it’s on its way to a graveyard, somewhere.”
“J.C. thinks of everything,” Vonda said.
I could tell
from her voice something was wrong. It was just a little tone laid over the top
of what she was saying, but I knew Vonda real well, and I picked up on things
like that.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her.
“J.C. thinks of every
thing,
” she said. “But he
doesn’t think of every
one
. Do you understand, Eddie?”
I could tell this wasn’t any time to be saying I did when I
didn’t, the way I do, sometimes. “No,” I said.
Vonda
looked over her shoulder, back at where the cabin was. Then she looked at me,
like she was waiting for me to say something more.
After a little bit,
she reached around me to where my pack of cigarettes was, and took one for
herself.
“Don’t light that here,” I told her.
“Why not?
You
smoke in here.”
“Not this
close to where I’m working. You see that carburetor over there?
It’s the old one off my T-bird. I’m soaking it in stuff that would
go right up if a spark hit it.”
“I thought you said you put
a new one in it.”
“Well, I did. And it works fine. But that
one there is the original, and I thought I’d like to save it. So
I’m getting all the gunk out before I rebuild it.”
She made
a little noise.
“You can smoke over by where I watch movies,
Vonda. I’ll come over and have one with you, okay?”
“Not now,” she said. “If J.C. wanders on out here, I want
it to look like you were working on the car and I just stopped to say hello. If
he sees us over by your couch, he’s going to get ideas. And when J.C.
gets ideas, I get hurt.”
“All right. I can just go back
to—”
“Eddie, listen to me. What I said before? About
J.C. looking out for everything? I want you to think about that.”
“I don’t have to think about it,” I said. “J.C.
looks out for everyone with his plans. And I look out for everyone when I
drive. That’s the way it is.”
J
.C. and Gus took off
again just after supper. Vonda went into the room she shared with J.C., and
closed the door.
I went out to the barn. Not to watch my movies. I
wanted to see if this idea I had for the Cadillac was going to work, and I
needed to weld something up to try it out.
When I saw someone come into
the barn, I took off the goggles I was wearing.
It was Vonda. She had
on a pair of jeans and a pink top, one of those tube things you can just pull
off.
She came over to where I was working. Her hair was in a ponytail,
tied with a pink ribbon. She had a lot of lipstick on. Long silver earrings.
“Let’s go to the movies,” she said.
I stood up.
“Which one would you like to—”
“Not
those
movies, Eddie. I know where there’s a better one playing.
Come on.”
V
onda got in the front seat of the hearse. Up there,
it was just like a regular car, a big Cadillac. She slid over, so I could get
behind the wheel.
“This is our own private movie, Eddie.
Special.”
“I don’t—”
“If
you trust me, you’ll get a reward,” she said. “Just trust me,
Eddie. Close your eyes, and you’ll see a movie in your mind. Just like we
were at the drive-in.”
She moved in close to me. I put my arm
around her and looked through the windshield. It was so dark there that I
didn’t have to close my eyes. But I did, because I had promised.
I tried to see one of my movies, but, instead, I saw my dream. The black
car pulling up. I knew there was no driver. I knew it was me who was supposed
to be behind the wheel.
Vonda made a little humming noise. I felt her
pull my zipper down. Felt her hand.
Vonda took me in her mouth. Not a
kiss, like she had done before, but real deep this time. I closed my eyes
tighter. She made that humming noise again, louder. I put my hand in her hair,
but I didn’t hold her head down.
When I let go, Vonda made a
different noise.
S
he stayed there, with her head in my lap. Licking
me dry, the way a cat does.
Her hair felt like ribbons of silk in my
hand.
I kept my eyes closed.
Vonda pulled her mouth away from
me. “You think I’m dirty, don’t you, Eddie?”
“Nobody would ever think that about you, Vonda,” I told
her.
“J.C. does,” she said. “J.C. thinks I’m a
dirty little whore. He calls me that, plenty of times. And he’s right,
too.”
“Vonda.…”
“He
is
right, Eddie. J.C. makes me go with other guys, sometimes. When he wants
something.”
“You mean, like a pimp?”
“No. That’s not J.C. A hooker could never make enough money for
a man like him. J.C.’s not a pimp. He’s a man who
plans
.
And when he needs information for one of his
plans,
sometimes, he
makes me be the one who gets it for him.”
“I don’t
under—”
“One time, J.C. and Gus wanted to hijack a
shipment of computers. A whole truckload of them. But they couldn’t be
sure about the routes. Where the driver would stop off for a break, stuff like
that. So he sent me in.”
“Sent you in to the
factory?”
“No, Eddie,” she said, in a sad voice.
“Sent me in to work on one of the drivers for that company. He used to
come into this club where I danced. J.C. made me play up to him, so I could get
him talking.”