The Spot Read online

  Nebraska

  Where else to begin but beneath the dining room table, where she’s hiding, dazed and alone, tormented by fear and loneliness, lost to time (it seems), most certainly to be forgotten? The annals of history won’t record this lonely moment while the house cracks in the heat, aches high up in the rafters, snaps along the joists; the genuine linoleum in the kitchen glistens oily to the touch, the trees and grass sway in the wind off the river, and she hunches down beneath the table, where she at least feels safe, listening to the wind as it lifts through the trees to make a hushed sound and then depletes itself so that a dog’s bark, husky and dry, can arrive from far off, and then even farther away a soft hooting sound—someone calling—and then another dog, giving a sharper, more precise bark while she examines her knees, worn to white threads, and then extends her legs and says aloud as she touches her shins and ankles, You’ve got good long legs, fine, fine legs. She leans back and looks at the underside of the table, the battered legs and feet (Who left this grand artifact here?), and then, looking up, sees the words GRAND RAPIDS stenciled on the underside of one of the leaves.

  How much despair is inherent in lifeblood, to put a name to it and yet to avoid speaking of it; they were that deep underground—and the underground was ethereal, nonexistent, and supplanted by their own hopes. It was all vainglory. It was all desire to overcome some inner chink in the armor—or so they thought. Light seemed to seep through the cracks; that’s how it felt—as if they were able to read each other’s minds. She could look into Byron’s face; she could see it in his eyes, his wide brown eyes, nothing like doubt, nothing like that at all, but some immutable glint of fear. It is fear that will destroy us, he hinted: One wrong move and we’re doomed, and so when we approach, it must be with the utmost certainty and firmfootedness, not a bit of room to spare, not an inch one way or another. The line on the map indicated the route to the mall. The Brinks truck—heavy and swaying under its armored weight—followed the route weekly. In back rooms, monies were counted with great care, then poured into canvas sacks, sealed, tagged, and hefted out into the raw pure daylight and loaded. One could imagine the bags coming out beneath the broad blue sky and seeing the light of day for a moment before being borne up into the dark, cavernous hold, piled up against other bags, the weighty perplexity of cash compiled against cash; the sluggish movement of the truck as it eased out of the parking lot; the shielded windows, the portals for shotgun muzzles, the heavy-block weight, the reinforced tires—the imponderable protective bulkiness of the truck, so fragile and delicate as soon as it was open to air. That space between point and point, through which the bags had to travel; that in itself, of course, was the weak spot, open to human error; the guns belted into holsters, snapped tight, officious, square-handled; that moment when the money made its way through the morning was the caesura, the quest; the main goal, the main purpose of all the planning, was to find a way into that open air, to coordinate their place in time and space with that of the Brinks truck so that they might, with the simple prompting and the pointing of weapons, provoke the security men, the workers, the hired hacks, to peaceably hand over the bags of money without being shot. That was the original plan laid out; the proviso was that lives would be spared and that it would be a clean, neat operation that went from step to step with the swiftness of exacting precision, an almost mechanical process, but of course it was also brutally clear that one misstep and lives would, as they say, be taken; so it was imperative that they strike at the moment when the cash was nakedly open, when the bags were moving, exposed. The mall had been staked out. She parked there one afternoon, watching from a slouch: ladies moving in and out of the stores, bearing bags, a few men going into Sears for wrenches; one woman with sagging hose, pulling her child along with a stretched arm—overburdened with too many demands, her hair up in a beehive, looking threadbare—swatted the behind of her little boy to move; this woman was evidence, she thought, of what the system does; the system creates burnout, the stress of consumption; the system tears into the ankles; it puffs the ankles up and sends you wobbling along in high heels.

  Shooting out in the field in Nebraska, launching shots at a so-called range—really just a pile of old sandbags along one side of a trench—Byron extends his arms, holds his breath, and unleashes a shot that proves him to be the best marksman of them all (because in prep school—a military academy in Tennessee—shooting had been compulsory). When her turn comes she finds pleasure in the gun, solid and heavy with compressed energy as the hammer clicks into place; an enjoyable constriction (in the trigger spring, before the release) sends a bright charge up her arm, and then in answer the kick throws her back on her heels while the blue cloud hangs, reminding her of caps, of firecrackers. (She’ll enjoy this same smell later, sifting black powder from a rolled newspaper into galvanized pipes, tapping the wax into place before slipping the fuses through the softness.) Cans. Green glass insulators from old telegraph poles. Wine bottles. Pieces of fence post. She shoots them all and points the gun wildly into the sky and then down, waving the muzzle in Byron’s face and laughing until he slugs her hard and she falls back into darkness, only to wake in the trailer with a purple bruise on her brow and pain between her legs.

  In the evening the men sit in front of the fire, talking softly, conspiratorially, their words quiet, epigrammatic. When they’re planning the heist—as they call it—Byron and August (nicknamed after the month he joined) speak in dainty voices, as if the scheme were an egg to be held with the utmost care. They sketch diagrams on paper—of the mall, the parking lot, the positioning of the truck, the various routes in and out, escape plans and alternates—and then burn the papers ritualistically, poking them into the flames with a stick.

  Under the table an electric tingle spreads on her palms when she thinks about the guns and listens as the dogs stop barking, and there is only the rustling of trees, throwing mottled green shadows across the rooms upstairs. The oaks in front of the house have grown close to the screens, touching them, and with the breeze comes a smell from the Hudson that reminds her of summers at Lake George, when her father would come up from the city to visit for the weekends, relaxed, shedding his suit coat, his neck visible, loose-fleshed. Drinkable water, potable, her brother Hank liked to say, trying to get her to sip. You can see all the way to the bottom because it’s the purest lake water in the world. Now Hank’s in a grave, at Arlington, not far from the eternal flame over J.F.K. (I’m gonna blow it out, he had said, going up to pay his respects when they visited on a family trip.) Each summer, her father took them to the end of the lake to visit Fort Ticonderoga and told them how it had been conquered by a distant relative, Ethan Allen, and his Green Mountain Boys (the land of the dead, Hank had called it—hadn’t he?)—and then to a wooded area near the fort where the French had massacred the British, and then the British, a year later, massacred the French. The ghostly aftermath in the wind, the silent vestiges there amid the thin, second-growth forest of quaking aspen and ragged maple. The inaccurately reassembled buttresses. The placards that rang false against the weighty, blood-slicked solidity of history.

  Monies to finance the bomb-making! Monies to demolish the status quo! To fight the system you gotta go within and undermine it, kick the scaffolding away. Whatever falls, falls. Those left standing are standing. There are incongruities to any movement, man, errors of judgment, hypocrisies all around, but that’s just the way it is, just the way things are, Byron says. The day is brilliant and clear with beautiful thick clouds drawing themselves lazily across the sky. Heading south from the hideout—following Route 9W, the old post road from Albany to New York, to avoid the cops who hang around tollbooths, moving through the old river towns, each presenting itself as brutal proof of the system’s failure, with boarded windows and dusty shop fronts and sad men smoking cheap cigars—she listens to Byron, a soft lisp rounding his words as he speaks of the downfall of the system, of tort law, of simultaneous orbital spin reversal, of the Rolling Stones at Altamon
t, of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, of his cohorts and colleagues, those who had failed him and those who hadn’t; of the need to locate plain speech, to find a new vernacular, to absolve the transgressions; he speaks in Latin, quoting Horace—“Nay, Xanthias, feel unashamed / That your love is but a servant / Remember, lovers far more famed / Were just as fervent”—while the river through the trees widens and then narrows as they coast the steep grade around Storm King Mountain. (During all of this, August remains silent with his big, meaty hands atop the wheel. He’s a quiet man. His words—when he does speak—seem to be pulled from a well by the bucket of his jaw.) Then they’re heading down the Palisades Parkway, past the state park, driving carefully, sticking to the speed limit, until they exit to the mall, where they look at their watches and assure themselves—in the bright late-morning light—that the plan is hitchless, locked into simplicity: exploit the open space between the store and the armored truck, the one soft vulnerability in the transportation of great funds. (She imagines the guards on a coffee break, sipping inside the cab of the truck, ignoring the money in the back, bored with the tedium of security work, not so much hoping for a robbery as fully aware that it might be the only way out of the monotonously long days of picking up loot. Perhaps there is some pleasure in staring out the bulletproof glass, far above the fray, and at times peeking through the thick aperture of the arm ports at what seems to be the far-off light of day.) To rob someone takes a sense that certain borders can be violated, she thinks. In the crux of the act, of course, lies violence. One way or another, the space will be, when they get there, neatly clear of other vehicles. (It’s gotta be pure karma, man, Byron had explained. All of the elements have to be aligned. It’s as simple as that.) At that moment, a deep, robust smell will emerge from the willow trees that hang delicately over the chain-link fence at the back of the mall. Long, narrow leaves sweeping slightly in the breeze. Byron will point a gun. August will, too.

  The two men hauling sacks look up from behind their sunglasses; one of them has his pistol stuck between his big swing of belly and his belt. The other guy is lean, thin, boyish, nervous-looking, with his hand resting loosely on his gun, as if about to draw, when August says, Stop. Stop.

  They agreed, when they were driving east from Nebraska, that the best way to control someone was with one-word commands, the way you’d train a dog, not by shouting but rather by speaking softly, with complete authority.

  The thin one pauses, his lips parted slightly in a half smile, as if to say: This is the part of the job we expected. It was an eventuality, resting in the tedium of pickups, banks, Laundromats, furniture warehouses. The tedium of take-out coffee, of casual banter, of heavy traffic—gone. At some point along the line, I was going to come face-to-face with you. Then he lets his hand tighten down on his gun, taking one step forward, which causes August to say stop again. From the car, it all seems remote, as if on a stage. All four actors are forming a rhombus of tension points, a little toe dance from side to side. Then for a minute or so they rest in a frozen stasis. The fat one—from her view—seems wobbly, lifting his arms to reveal long dark stains below his armpits. Stop, Byron says. Step back to the wall. Step back and don’t make a move. Then August gives the signal, fluttering his hand behind his back, fluttering some more because:

  It is decided, passing over the Mississippi in St. Louis—seeing the arch glinting in the sun, cranking the Rolling Stones, talking about the plan—that the unavoidable cost will be two lives. It is the only way. The discussion that ensues will last all the way across Ohio and into Pennsylvania. The counterargument she puts forth is that it would be just as easy to tie the men up and gag them, and then take them into the culvert behind the mall, down into the weeds by the creek, hidden by the willow branches. But this might allow for a slip-up. A passerby might see us dragging the men (Byron argues); whereas if the men are simply shot against the doorway, they will slump down behind the cover of the parked truck and give us ample time to drive away, unnoticed. The gunshots will present a problem because even with the silencers there might be enough of a report to draw notice, so I think you should honk the car horn, a few sustained toots, and then, in the cover of that sound, we’ll shoot both men. August will signal you. He’ll wave his hand behind his back.

  Yeah, there are certain moral objections that can certainly be made, Byron admitted, sipping stale coffee at a truck stop in Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Out the windows, past the bright lights over the gas pumps, beyond the tractor trailers lined up along the curb, strip-mine rigs dug coal, their frames lit like constellations, their car-size maws scooping intergalactic darkness. In the wider moral drama lies the truth, man. The truth is in the wide view. We can’t look for it in the minutiae. We’ve got to keep the larger vision in mind. End of story. End, of the fucking, story. Byron sucked coffee from a spoon and looked out the tall windows. Bathed in a colorless carbon light, the trucks were mulling softly, their engines going while their drivers slept. The topic of death seemed perfectly suited to the truck stop, as it had been to the old shack, back in Nebraska. Death was just one of many objectionable qualities in a landscape littered with antelope horns, the whitewashed skulls of long-dead bison, old truck tires, and, scattered everywhere, fossilized remains so long gone as to be ensconced in meaninglessness. Back there—in the afternoons—huge clouds had ranged up into themselves, towering high until they darkened along the bottoms, flattened out by their own weight, and spit toy forks of lightning that produced audible thunder only if they were listening for it; otherwise, the distance, and the ceaseless wind, devoured everything. Byron put his coffee cup carefully in its saucer, stood up, and went outside to stand in the parking lot. She and August finished their breakfasts. I’m afraid, she said. I’m afraid. I don’t think we should kill. I don’t think it’s right at all. August looked at her and fiddled with his eggs. I want to agree with you, he finally said, nodding at the window, but I have to go with Byron. I can’t see leaving them bound and gagged in the ditch, where they might die anyway.

  Byron elaborates on the plan: You’ll give the horn a good threesecond toot to cover the shots (one-apple, two-apple, three-apple), and then another shorter one to make it sound as though you’re signaling someone inside to come out. We’re a great nation of horn blowers, he adds vis-à-vis the plan, so no one’s gonna notice so long as it sounds like a normal, audible transaction, like you’re calling to someone to come out, or giving someone a friendly warning. The passing of a signal. My sister’s boyfriend used to sound his horn outside our house all the time. Late at night he’d pull up in his car, tap the horn, and I’d look out my bedroom window and watch her sneak out. Then one night he drove up and gave a delicate little signal, just the lightest tap, you could barely call it a honk, and I watched as she skipped down the sidewalk, got in his car, and disappeared into the firmament never to be seen again. So a horn honk is perfectly apropos. No one’s gonna notice if you do it right. Later that afternoon, as they drive through eastern Pennsylvania, barreling down toward the Delaware Water Gap, she thinks about the apartment on Park Avenue and how as a young girl she had looked out at the evening traffic, counting the taxis and the buses, listening intently until the mull of noise that normally lay submerged beneath consciousness would dissolve to reveal the sounds of horns. She thought of the view—all the way down to Grand Central if she stuck her head out the window and arched to the right—and the sad elegance of the light, near nightfall in winter. The blueness of the vista, the glory in those lights.

  The parking lot is glazed with heat around the car, and near the doorway to the store the men are still stuck in the rhombus of tension, moving slightly in a congruence, a sidelong motion, while August crabs his hand behind his back, signaling away. There isn’t really fear inside her; there’s nothing except a bag of air inflating against her rib cage, and her fingers light on the metal horn band that makes a half circle around the steering wheel, unwilling to push—no, it’s not that simple. She conspired with herself to
avoid making a sound that would cover the shots, and she knows what she’ll do next, and she does it, backing the car up and then heading off across the parking lot, not too fast, but fast enough, naturally, focusing her eyes straight ahead and trying to picture Hank in her mind, his boyish face in his uniform, the collar tight up against his neck, and his smile, bright and hopeful, as he tells her not to worry, that he’ll be back in the summer and they’ll go to Lake George together just like the war never happened; trying to keep that vision in front of her and her hands steady, she drives onto the main road and heads east, while a wild posse of police cars—old ones with rounded fenders and single dome lights—roars west in a fury of rage and torment.