“Well, hold me close. Let’s think of some way.”
“You’re still shivering. Do you feel cold?”
“Cold and hot, full and empty—and tired.”
“I’ll try to think of something. I really will. Of course I love them but—”
“I know, and I could wear my bow tie—”
“Will they put them in jail?”
“I wish we could—”
“Those men?”
“No. It won’t be necessary. They can’t even appear before next Tuesday, and Thursday is election. That’s what it’s for.”
“Ethan, that’s cynical. You aren’t like that. We’ll have to go away if you’re getting cynical because—that wasn’t a joke, the way you said it. I know your jokes. You meant that.”
A fear struck me. I was showing through. I couldn’t let myself show through. “Oh say, Miss Mousie, will you marry me?”
And Mary said, “Oho! Oho!”
My sudden fear that I might be showing through was very great. I had made myself believe that the eyes are not the mirror of the soul. Some of the deadliest little female contraptions I ever saw had the faces and the eyes of angels. There is a breed that can read through skin and through bone right into the center, but they are rare. For the most part people are not curious except about themselves. Once a Canadian girl of Scottish blood told me a story that had bitten her and the telling bit me. She said that in the age of growing up when she felt that all eyes were on her and not favorably, so that she went from blushes to tears and back again, her Highland grandfather, observing her pain, said sharply, “Ye wouldna be sae worrit wi’ what folk think about ye if ye kenned how seldom they do.” It cured her and the telling reassured me of privacy, because it’s true. But Mary, who ordinarily lives in a house of flowers of her own growing, had heard a tone, or felt a cutting wind. This was a danger, until tomorrow should be over.
If my plan had leaped up full-grown and deadly I would have rejected it as nonsense. People don’t do such things, but people play secret games. Mine began with Joey’s rules for robbing a bank. Against the boredom of my job I played with it and everything along the way fell into it—Allen and his mouse mask, leaking toilet, rusty pistol, holiday coming up, Joey wadding paper in the lock of the alley door. As a game I timed the process, enacted it, tested it. But gunmen shooting it out with cops— aren’t they the little boys who practiced quick draws with cap pistols until they got so good they had to use the skill?
I don’t know when my game stopped being a game. Perhaps when I knew I might buy the store and would need money to run it. For one thing, it is hard to throw away a perfect structure without testing it. And as for the dishonesty, the crime—it was not a crime against men, only against money. No one would get hurt. Money is insured. The real crimes were against men, against Danny and against Marullo. If I could do what I had done, theft was nothing. And all of it was temporary. None of it would ever have to be repeated. Actually, before I knew it was not a game, my procedure and equipment and timing were as near perfection as possible. The cap-pistol boy found a .45 in his hand.
Of course an accident was possible but that is so in crossing the street or walking under a tree. I don’t think I had any fear. I had rehearsed that out of me, but I did have a breathlessness, like the stage fright of an actor standing in the wings on his opening night. And it was like a play in that every conceivable mischance had been inspected and eliminated.
In my worry that I would not sleep, I slept, deeply and as far as I know without dreams, and overslept. I had planned to use the dark pre-day for the calming medicine of contemplation. Instead, when my eyes jerked open, the tail of the cow in the lake had been visible at least half an hour. I awakened with a jar like the blow of driven air from high explosive. Sometimes such an awakening sprains muscles. Mine shook the bed so that Mary awakened, saying, “What’s the matter?”
“I’ve overslept.”
“Nonsense. It’s early.”
“No, my ablative absolute. This is a monster day for me. The world will be grocery-happy today. Don’t you get up.”
“You’ll need a good breakfast.”
“Know what I’ll do? I’ll get a carton of coffee at the Foremaster and I’ll raven Marullo’s shelves like a wolf.”
“You will?”
“Rest, little mouse of a mouseness, and try to find a way for us to escape from our darling children. We need that. I mean it.”
“I know we do. I’ll try to think.”
I was dressed and gone before she could suggest any of the seasonal things for my protection and comfort.
Joey was in the coffee shop and he patted the stool beside him.
“Can’t, Morph. I’m late. Annie, could you give me a quart of coffee in a carton?”
“It’ll have to be two pints, Eth.”
“Good. Even gooder.”
She filled and covered the little paper buckets and put them in a bag.
Joey finished and walked across with me.
“You’ll have to say mass without the bishop this morning.”
“Guess so. Say, how about that news?”
“I can’t take it in.”
“You remember I said I smelled something.”
“I thought about that when I heard it. You’ve got quite a nose.”
“It’s part of the trade. Baker can come back now. Wonder if he will.”
“Come back?”
“You get no smell there?”
I looked at him helplessly. “I’m missing something and I don’t even know what it is.”
“Jesus God.”
“You mean I should see something?”
“That’s what I mean. The law of the fang is not repealed.”
“Oh, Lord! There must be a whole world I miss. I was trying to remember whether it’s both lettuce and mayonnaise you like.”
“Both.” He stripped the cellophane cover from his pack of Camels and wadded it to push in the lock.
“Got to go,” I said. “We’ve got a special sale on tea. Send in a box top, you get a baby! Know any ladies?”
“I sure do, and that’s about the last prize they want. Don’t bother to bring them, I’ll come for the sandwiches.” He went in his door and there was no click of the spring lock. I did hope that Joey never discovered that he was the best teacher I had ever had. He not only informed, he demonstrated and, without knowing it, prepared a way for me.
Everyone who knew about such things, the experts, agreed that only money gets money. The best way is always the simplest. The shocking simplicity of the thing was its greatest strength. But I really believe it was only a detailed daydream until Marullo through none of his fault walked in his own darkness over a cliff. Once it seemed almost certain that I could get the store for my own, only then did the high-flown dreaming come down to earth. A good but ill-informed question might be: If I could get the store, why did I need money? Mr. Baker would understand, so would Joey—so, for that matter, would Marullo. The store without running capital was worse than no store at all. The Appian Way of bankruptcy is lined with the graves of unprotected ventures. I have one grave there already. The silliest soldier would not throw his whole strength at a break-through without mortars or reserves or replacements, but many a borning business does just that. Mary’s money in marked bills bulged against my bottom in my hip pocket, but Marullo would take as much of that as he could get. Then the first of the month. The wholesale houses are not openhanded with credit for unproved organizations. Therefore I would still need money, and that money was waiting for me behind ticking steel doors. The process of getting it, designed as daydreams, stood up remarkably when inspected. That robbery was unlawful troubled me very little. Marullo was no problem. If he were not the victim he might have planned it himself. Danny was troubling, even though I could with perfect truth assume that he was finished anyway. Mr. Baker’s ineffectual attempt to do the same thing to Danny gave me more justification than most men need. But Danny remained a burning in my guts and I had to accept that as one accepts a wound in successful combat. I had to live with that, but maybe it would heal in time or be walled off with forgetfulness the way a shell fragment gets walled off with cartilage.
The immediate was the money, and that move was as carefully prepared and timed as an electric circuit.
The Morphy laws stood up well and I remembered them and had even added one. First law: Have no past record. Well, I had none. Number two: No accomplices or confidants. I certainly had none. Number three: No dames. Well, Margie Young-Hunt was the only person I knew who could be called a dame, and I was not about to drink champagne out of her slipper. Number four: Don’t splurge. Well, I wouldn’t. Gradually I would use it to pay bills to wholesalers. I had a place for it. In my Knight Templar’s hatbox there was a support of velvet-covered cardboard, the size and shape of my head. This was already lifted free and the edges coated with contact cement so it could be restored in an instant.
Recognition—a Mickey Mouse mask. No one would see anything else. An old cotton raincoat of Marullo’s—all tan cotton raincoats look alike—and a pair of those tear-off cellophane gloves that come on a roll. The mask had been cut several days ago and the box and cereal flushed down the toilet, as the mask and gloves would be. The old silvered Iver Johnson pistol was smoked with lampblack and in the toilet was a can of crankcase oil to throw it in for delivery to Chief Stoney at the first opportunity.
I had added my own final law: Don’t be a pig. Don’t take too much and avoid large bills. If somewhere about six to ten thousand in tens and twenties were available, that would be enough and easy to handle and to hide. A cardboard cakebox on the cold counter would be the swap bag and when next seen it would have a cake in it. I had tried that terrible reedy ventriloquism thing to change my voice and had given it up for silence and gestures. Everything in place and ready.
I was almost sorry Mr. Baker wasn’t here. There would be only Morph and Harry Robbit and Edith Alden. It was planned to the split second. At five minutes to nine I would place the broom in the entrance. I’d practiced over and over. Apron tucked up, scale weight on the toilet chain to keep it flushing. Anyone who came in would hear the water and draw his own conclusion. Coat, mask, cakebox, gun, gloves. Cross the alley on the stroke of nine, shove open the back door, put on mask, enter just after timeclock buzzes and Joey swings open the door. Motion the three to lie down, with the gun. They’d give no trouble. As Joey said, the money was insured, he wasn’t. Pick up the money, put it in cakebox, cross alley, flush gloves and mask down toilet, put gun in can of oil, coat off. Apron down, money in hatbox, cake in cakebox, pick up broom, and go on sweeping sidewalk, available and visible when the alarm came. The whole thing one minute and forty seconds, timed, checked, and rechecked. But carefully as I had planned and timed, I still felt a little breathless and I swept out the store prior to opening the two front doors. I wore yesterday’s apron so that new wrinkles would not be noticeable.
And would you believe it, time stood still as though a Joshua in a wing collar had shot the sun in its course. The minute hand of my father’s big watch had set its heels and resisted morning.
It was long since I had addressed my flock aloud, but this morning I did, perhaps out of nervousness.
“My friends,” I said, “what you are about to witness is a mystery. I know I can depend on you to keep silent. If any of you have any feeling about the moral issue involved, I challenge you and will ask you to leave.” I paused. “No objections? Very well. If I ever hear of an oyster or a cabbage discussing this with strangers, the sentence is death by dinner fork.
“And I want to thank you all. We have been together, humble workers in the vineyard, and I a servant as you are. But now a change is coming. I will be master here henceforth, but I promise I will be a good and kind and understanding master. The time approaches, my friends, the curtain rises—farewell.” And as I moved to the front doors with the broom, I heard my own voice cry, “Danny—Danny! Get out of my guts.” A great shudder shook me so that I had to lean on the broom a moment before I opened up the doors.
My father’s watch said nine with its black, stumpy hour hand and minus six with its long, thin minute hand. I could feel its heart beat against my palm as I looked at it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever. It is the law in many states, certainly in ours, that it must rain on long holiday weekends, else how could the multitudes get drenched and miserable? The July sun fought off a multitude of little feathered clouds and drove them scuttling, but thunderheads looked over the western rim, the strong-arm rain-bearers from the Hudson River Valley, armed with lightning and already mumbling to themselves. If the law was properly obeyed, they would hold back until a maximum number of ant-happy humans were on the highways and the beaches, summer-dressed and summer-green.
Most of the other stores did not open until nine-thirty. It had been Marullo’s thought to catch a pinch of trade by having me jump the gun half an hour. I thought I would change that. It caused more ill feeling among the other stores than the profit justified. Marullo didn’t care about that, if he ever knew about it. He was a foreigner, a wop, a criminal, a tyrant, a squeezer of the poor, a bastard, and eight kinds of son of a bitch. I having destroyed him, it was only natural that his faults and crimes should become blindingly apparent to me.
I felt old long hand edging around on my father’s watch and I found I was sweeping viciously with tensed muscles, waiting for the moment of swift, smooth movement of my mission. I breathed through my mouth, and my stomach pushed against my lungs as I remember it did waiting for an attack.
For Saturday-morning-Fourth-of-July-weekend, there were few people about. A stranger—old man—went by, carrying a fishing rod and a green plastic tackle box. He was on his way to the town pier to sit all day dangling a limp strip of squid in the water. He didn’t even look up, but I forced his attention.