Authors: Andrew Vachss
“I didn’t mean for him to—”
“You’re a no-good, lying bitch, Brenda,” Tim said. His
voice was as calm as if he was asking you if you wanted a beer. “You
think, because we’re kin, you get to play us over and over, don’t
you?”
“Tim, I swear—”
“
Don’t
fucking swear,” Tim said. “It
wasn’t the judge who sent my brother over that time, Brenda. It was
you.”
“I’m sorry. You know I never
would—”
“You never would what?” Virgil said.
His voice was soft and quiet, like Tim’s. “Get me some County time
for whipping that piece of shit Wallace? Yeah, you’d do that. You
did
that. But you know what, Brenda? That’s not why I’m
done with you, even if you are Mom’s baby sister. I didn’t mind
doing the time. I thought it was worth it. I figured that was it for Wallace;
he’d be afraid to show his mangy face around you. And then what
happens?”
“Virgil.…”
“You take
up with him again,” Virgil said, still quiet. “I’m on a
fucking road gang, and Wallace is back with his favorite piece of
ass.”
“There’s nothing for you here, Brenda,”
Tim said. “We never thought we’d see you again, and that’s
the way we wanted it. You may be a stupid slut, but you’re not
that
stupid, you didn’t know how we felt about you. If Mom was alive,
she’d spit on you for what you did to Virgil, so don’t come around
using her name like you did before.”
“It’s not for
me,” the woman said. Her face was all twisted up, like she was going to
cry, but she didn’t. “It’s about Janine.”
“I don’t know any Janine,” Tim said.
“She’s Wanda and Roy’s girl,” Brenda said.
“You know Wanda was killed by that drunk driver year before last. And
then Roy took with the cancer. He’s been in the hospital, just waiting to
die. So I took Janine to live with me. Since I’m a blood relative and
all.”
“Yeah, you’re a good-hearted woman, all
right,” Tim said. “How big a check’s the government giving
you for her?”
“That isn’t why I did it,” Brenda
said. “If I didn’t come through, Janine would have gone to a foster
home. And you know what they’re like.”
“Get to it,
Brenda,” Virgil told her. “I got meat waiting that’s more
important to me than you are.”
“Who’s this?”
Brenda said, looking at me.
“None of your business,” Tim
said. “
Nothing
around here is any of your business. This is a
man
we
trust. You don’t want to talk in front of him, tell your
story walking.”
“She’s in the car,” Brenda
said.
“Who?”
“Janine. I had to bring her
with me. She’s only twelve. I couldn’t leave her in the house
alone.”
“Brenda.…” Tim didn’t sound so
patient anymore.
“Wallace has been messing with her!” she
said. “I just found out, I swear. I don’t know what to do.
She’s scared of him. I can’t go to the police,
because—”
“You stay here,” Tim said, cutting
her off. “Stay here, and don’t say a fucking word. Nobody’s
listening to you, anyway.”
Tim walked down to where
Brenda’s car was sitting. I saw him tap on the window. In a minute or so,
the window came down. I could see someone was in there, but I couldn’t
make out anything about them.
“I’m sorry,” Brenda
said to Virgil.
He acted like she wasn’t there.
Tim
opened the car door. A little girl got out. All I could see was that she was
real skinny, with light brown hair, wearing a big yellow T-shirt that covered
her all the way down to her knees. She walked down the path with Tim until I
couldn’t see them anymore.
T
hey were gone a good while. Brenda
kept trying to say something to Virgil, but he never spoke to her.
“Eddie, would you do me a favor?” he asked me.
“Sure.”
“Go in the house and get my
pistol.”
“Which one?” I said.
“Any of
them’ll do,” Virgil told me.
“Virgil.…”
Brenda said.
By the time I got back with Virgil’s pistol, Tim and
the little girl were coming back up the path. Tim opened the door to the car,
and the little girl got in. Tim held out his hand, and she grabbed it for a
second. Then Tim came back up the rise toward us.
“
Y
ou filthy
whore,” Tim said to Brenda. His voice was so soft and quiet I almost
couldn’t hear it. “You didn’t just find out about Wallace
fucking that little girl. You also found out she was pregnant, huh? So now
you’re worried about your own ass. Like always.”
“She’s lying, Tim!”
“Lying about what?
Lying about when she came to you and told you Wallace was grabbing her, and you
slapped her face and told her Wallace was the man of the house? Lying about
when Wallace whipped her with his belt until she was bloody, and you
didn’t do nothing? Lying about the time you woke up in the night and
found Wallace in her bed?”
Tim moved closer to Brenda. She took a
step back.
“Tell me, Brenda,” he said. “I really want
to know.”
“I swear I—”
“I told
you about swearing, Brenda. Remember before, when I said if Mom was alive
she’d spit on you? Well, if Mom knew what you did to that little girl,
she’d fucking
kill
you, sister or no.”
“What
am I going to do?”
“
You,
huh? What
you’re
going to do, you’re going to drive Janine down to
the Welfare and tell them the truth. The
truth,
you dirty bitch. If I
find out you protected Wallace, I’ll come looking for you,
understand?”
“But if Janine tells,
Wallace’ll—”
“Here,” Tim said, handing
her some bills. “You don’t go back home, understand? You go to a
motel. There’s enough there for a couple of weeks, food and everything.
It may take a few days for the law to pick Wallace up, but he’s not
making bail once they do, and you’ll be able to go back home.”
“A motel’s no place for a—”
“Janine’s not going to be with you, Brenda. You leave her with
the Welfare.”
“But she’ll end up
in—”
“Wherever she ends up, it’ll be better
than being with you.”
Brenda started crying. “You
don’t understand, Tim,” she said. “You’re not a
woman.”
“Neither are you,” Tim said.
W
e
were at the kitchen table later that night, when Tim said, “We’ve
got a job, Eddie.”
“Okay.”
“Thing
is, there’s no shares this time. There won’t be any money. So
we’ll just pay you cash, like we hired you, fair enough?”
“Sure,” I said. I got up and walked outside. Quick, before
anything showed on my face.
I
was out there a long time. I never
felt so sad in my whole life.
I heard them come up behind me. I
didn’t turn around.
“You want some sausage?” Virgil
said. He knows it’s my favorite.
“No thanks,” I
said.
“I don’t blame him,” Tim said.
“Who’d want to eat a meal with a pair of stupid assholes like
us?”
I didn’t say anything. I knew my voice would shake if
I did.
Both of them came around so they were facing me.
“We apologize, Eddie,” Virgil said. “We never meant to
insult you.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“No, it isn’t,” Virgil said. “We never should have
offered you money. We should have just asked if you’d drive
us.”
I didn’t want to talk. I felt like crying, only I was
too sad.
“No, that’s not right,” Tim said.
“Eddie, we shouldn’t have
asked
you at all.”
I looked right in his eyes.
“You’re with us,” Tim
said. “We’re with you. Blood is bullshit. Brenda’s not our
kin, Eddie. You are.”
Right then was the best moment I ever spent
on earth.
I
stayed the next few days at the house. We all worked on
our piece of what we had to do.
“Janine’s with the
Welfare,” Tim said, when he got off the phone. “Nobody knows where
Brenda is.”
“They pick up Wallace?” Virgil asked.
“No. And they’re not going to.”
“How
come?” I said. “Once that little girl tells who—”
“Janine’s not
going
to tell,” Tim said.
“Why not?”
“We made a pact,” Tim said.
“A blood pact, between kin. If she told, you know what would
happen?”
“Wallace would go to prison?”
“Maybe. And even if he did, it’d be only for a couple of years.
What’s that?”
“He has to be worried, though,”
Virgil said. “Wondering if the hammer is going to drop.”
“He’s not worried about the law,” Tim said.
“He’s worried about us.”
“He doesn’t
know—”
“Sure, he knows, little brother. You think
that whore Brenda wasn’t on the phone to him first thing? Hell,
she’s probably with him right now. It’s for damn sure Wallace
hasn’t been sleeping at their place. He’s not going to give us a
chance to catch him alone. Specially not after dark.”
T
im had
a plan. We gave it a couple of weeks, then we went out to do the job.
“That’s him,” Tim said. “The fat fuck in the brown
jacket. But there’s a lot of traffic.…”
“It’s all right,” I told him, as we drove past the
poolroom on the other side of the street.
The poolroom was one of those
places where you could make a bet, or shoot dice, or buy different kinds of
things. Out front, they had some benches, and a bunch of little tables and
chairs. People played dominos and cribbage out there, or they could eat one of
the sandwiches they sold inside the place. They did a lot of business.
I made another pass, then I double-backed and came at it from
downwind.
Wallace was out front, at one of the tables, having a beer
with a couple of other guys. It wasn’t luck that we found him. Tim said
he was there regular—he spent most of his days at the poolroom, either
inside or out.
Virgil was in the backseat, with the window down. He had
a canvas sack filled with sand draped over the sill, to make a rest for his
rifle. Tim was up front, next to me. He had a pistol in each hand.
We
were all dressed in the same white jackets. Tim and Virgil pulled the black
stockings over their faces. We all had on black gloves. I was wearing a white
cowboy hat and sunglasses.
Cars were parked in front of the poolroom,
but there was space between them. I came to a stop.
Wallace never
looked our way.
“Back us up just a little,” Virgil said.
“I need a better angle … yeah!”
I pulled the lever
into low, held the brake down with my left foot and fed the car a little gas. I
watched the left mirror to make sure we weren’t going to get blocked when
we pulled out. Then I said, “Okay.”
A bomb went off just
behind my head. Then Tim opened up with both pistols, like he was spraying with
a pair of garden hoses. I moved my left foot off the brake as I stomped down on
the gas.
I slipped through traffic as smooth as I could, trying to
balance speed with not calling attention to us. I had to bust a red light at
one corner, but that wasn’t so unusual, the way people around there
drove.
A few blocks later, a squad car came right at us, siren
blasting. But he went on by, probably heading to the poolroom.
Once I
was sure nobody was chasing us, I pulled in behind the bus depot and Virgil
jumped out. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder. Inside was all three guns,
the stocking masks, my cowboy hat, and two pair of gloves—I kept mine,
because I was still handling the wheel.
After that, we were okay. I
drove Tim all the way across town, to where he was parked. He was going to pick
Virgil up from the bus depot, like he just came in from out of town.
That left me alone. I wasn’t worried about an APB on the car. It was
a grayish Toyota Camry; looked like a million other cars on the road. I just
drove it through the alleys until I found a nice quiet spot. Then I climbed
out, leaving the door open and the engine running, just like that guy in the
Camaro, a long time ago.
I
t came out just the way
Tim said it would. They had the chief of police on TV. He was a square-faced
guy, wearing a regular suit. The woman asking him questions had a lot of makeup
on. Her hair was blonde, stiff, like a helmet.
“The shooting
appears to have been gang-related,” the chief told her.
“We’ve been charting a significant increase in drug trafficking in
our area recently. We attribute this to an influx of gangs from major
metropolitan areas. This is typical of their pattern; they’re like
salesmen trying to establish new territories.”
“Is it true
that you already have suspects?” the woman said.
“I
don’t want to comment at this time,” he said. “We don’t
want to say anything that might compromise an ongoing
investigation.”
I thought maybe they were just trying to trick
us, make us think they didn’t know what really had happened. But then
they showed the TV woman talking to a couple of the people who had been there,
outside the poolroom. They both said it was black guys who had done the
shooting, a whole carful of them.
W
e probably would
have gone on forever, except for that little bank. Tim was the one who found
it. He studied up on things like that, and he was a real good planner.
The bank was about an hour’s drive away from where we were. It was an
old one, sitting on some high ground outside the town. Tim told us the bank was
there even before the town got built up, when the only thing around was the
mill.
“It was a company town,” Tim said.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“That’s
when the only work is for this one company, Eddie,” he said. “Like
when there’s a mine, and nothing else. So the mining company owns the
houses the workers live in, and it owns the stores they buy their goods in,
too.
“It’s like being in prison. If you have money on the
books, you can get stuff from the commissary, right? Candy bars, cigarettes
… even vitamins in some joints. And things for your cell, like a radio.
But the deal is, there’s only the one commissary, so you don’t have
a choice. If they want to sell Milky Way bars for five dollars, and you want a
Milky Way bar, you pay that five dollars.”