How to Rob an Armored Car (2 page)

Sutherland turned to leave, either not smelling it or not sure of what it was, or perhaps just anxious to go. Mitch had developed the distinct feeling that Sutherland would leave almost any conversation when an hourly employee showed up, especially one who didn’t speak English as a first language. He really didn’t like being around them. He babbled for a few seconds on his way out about how Mitch should make the distributors work for him, not the other way around, and Mitch nodded dutifully, as if he was learning something of great import from an extremely competent man. Then thankfully, mercifully, he left.

Mitch turned to Charles. “Damn, that was nearly very ugly,” he said. “Did you hookup?”

Charles nodded, his eyes so red they looked like he had suffered a brain hemorrhage. He smiled broadly. “It’s gooooooood,” he said.

KEVIN WOKE UP still remembering the dream. It was the most undramatic of dreams, embarrassing in its banality, but as with so many of his other dreams, he knew that because of it, he would spend the day with a vague sense of unease, of personal disappointment and dissatisfaction. Lately he had begun to wonder if this was the only emotion he ever felt.

In the dream, he had been standing in line in a coffee shop with his six-year-old daughter, Ellie. All the other people in line were young couples with children, and they were glowing with delight at parenthood, at family, at their place in the community. They seemed to sense Kevin’s unease, and they regarded him with suspicion because of it. He saw young couples sitting on the plush coffee shop couches, looking at him and asking each other, in whispers, who he thought he was fooling, hanging around in a coffee shop with middle-class normal people, trying to pass himself off as one of them. When Kevin blinked himself awake and stared at the ceiling, he wasn’t sure if it actually had been a dream, or if it was a memory of the last time he and Linda and Ellie had gone to Starbuck’s.

As he felt Linda stir next to him, he reached over and gently grabbed her ass, not as an overture of sex but more to see what she would do. Her hand shot down and pushed him away. She had never been a morning person, but the abruptness and finality of her movements surprised him.

“Ellie’s up,” Linda murmured angrily, her face partly under the covers. “Could you get her breakfast started?”

Kevin hated it when Linda gave him orders disguised as suggestions, especially when he had just been about to do the thing she was ordering him to do. It was as if she thought he was a small child, like Ellie. And worse, she knew it annoyed him, so frequently she would know he was about to do something and suggest it anyway, just to piss him off. What was she expecting him to do? Just lie there and let his kid go to school hungry? A deaf man would know Ellie was up, and didn’t he get her breakfast ready every day of the week?

As he got up, he pulled the covers aside quickly enough to send a cold blast of air against Linda’s back. She slapped the covers back down. Kevin shivered as he groped around in the near darkness for his hooded sweatshirt. He could almost see his breath in his own bedroom.

“We can’t keep the thermostat this low,” he said. “I know it saves, like, a dollar a month, and that’s really important, but I’d rather Ellie didn’t catch pneumonia.” Linda remained quiet. Kevin knew he could bait her in the mornings, get away with sarcasm and the odd dig here and there, simply because he woke up quicker than she did. The arguing part of her brain, which Kevin felt was most of it, warmed up slowly. It wasn’t usually until her second cup of coffee that she started grinding away at his soul with her complaints and observations and outright orders.

“Hey,” he said to the lump under the covers. “Doug’s coming over this morning. I told him he could have some of those double-A batteries we got in bulk from Accu-mart.”

“Goddammit,” said Linda, sitting up and smacking the pillow. “Why can’t you just let me sleep for ten more minutes? This is my one morning to sleep in . . .”

“I’m just telling you that Doug might come over,” Kevin yelled back. “I didn’t want you to be weird if he came to the door.” He tried storming out to end yet another conversation with his wife by slamming a door, but one of Ellie’s toys got caught in the doorway; he heard it cracking as he yanked the door back open. He cursed, not out of concern for the door, or the toy, but because the momentum of his dramatic exit had been made laughable.

“Why do your idiot friends have to come over here?” Linda asked as she slumped back into the pillows, almost whining. “I don’t want them here. You spend enough time with them in that rat hole they call an apartment.”

“It’s just Doug,” Kevin said, measured and patient, holding the bedroom door open. He was suddenly overcome by the urge to be nice. He wanted to go walk dogs today feeling positive and pleasant, not worn down, with the residue of yet another Linda argument circling around in his brain. “He’s only coming over for a minute.”

“Why don’t you just move in with them?” Linda said, now fully awake, eyes blazing with anger, directed straight up at the ceiling. “You could all live together like a bunch of animals and smoke pot all day long. That way your daughter wouldn’t be asking me where you were all the time—”

SLAM. There might have been more but Kevin didn’t get a chance to hear it.

So much for having a positive and pleasant day.

“I DON’T WANT to be married to Kevin anymore,” said Linda, as if she were mentioning that she was thinking about changing her brand of fabric softener. Nice weather we’re having. I have to take the car in for an oil change. I think I’ll get rid of my husband.

She was rooting around through her junk drawer for a pack of AA batteries, which Kevin had promised Doug he could have if he came over. Doug had come late, and Kevin had already gone to walk dogs. Linda had answered the door and let Doug in, gone to get the batteries, and then offhandedly mentioned that she was thinking about divorcing his friend.

This was the last thing that Doug wanted to hear. He had just smoked a fattie and was really enjoying his day off from the restaurant. He had just come over to get the batteries so he could fire up his remote control and spend the day baked on his couch. Though he had known Linda for years, he thought of her as sketchy and moody and hadn’t been pleased when she had answered the door.

He said nothing, which Linda took as a signal to continue. “We just don’t communicate anymore.”

Doug knew that they didn’t communicate but wasn’t sure that they ever had. Linda didn’t usually communicate with him either, which was why it was a surprise that she was suddenly trying to. He had been around Kevin and Linda for four years and didn’t recall ever seeing them have a conversation which didn’t escalate into hostility within a few seconds, though he had noticed that lately the yelling had stopped and the conversations had gotten shorter, the endings now quiet snorts of disgust. He had never seen them kiss or touch each other or say anything nice, and he occasionally wondered to himself how Ellie, their daughter, had ever gotten made. He had just assumed that things were different when he wasn’t around.

“That sucks,” said Doug.

“Why does it suck?” asked Linda, lighting a cigarette, staring at him.

He wasn’t anticipating a question, and Linda seemed almost confrontational when she asked it. She also appeared to have stopped looking for the batteries, which was a bad sign. The exit was being cut off.

“Because . . . you and Kevin . . . are good people.” He had the feeling he was being tested, and while not actually acing the test, he wasn’t failing disastrously either. He didn’t really know if Linda was a good person. Often when he came over to get high with Kevin, he was glad if she wasn’t around, because it meant you could dump the bong water into the potted plants and put your feet up on stuff without having someone stare at you reproachfully. He thought of her as a neat freak and a nag and was fairly sure that this was Kevin’s opinion too.

“I think I make him unhappy,” she said. “He’s just unhappy all the time.”

“Oh, no,” said Doug. “He’d be unhappy anyway.” The comment slipped out. It wasn’t the supportive, wrap-everything-up kind of sentence he was looking for, but it was true. Ever since they had met four years ago, when Kevin had been a waiter at the restaurant where Doug was a cook, Doug had thought of him as a grouch. It was only because Doug had shown an interest in selling off the weed that Kevin was growing that they had even struck up a conversation. Kevin, though an excellent grower, lacked the social skills and contacts for dealing and had managed to stockpile about four pounds of high-grade White Widow in his basement. During a typical after-work half-drunk conversation, they had hammered out a deal, and a friendship was forged.

Since then, the frequency of their get-togethers had resulted in a bond forming, a familiarity which had expanded into all kinds of other activities, like drinking and playing pool and painting Kevin’s house and helping each other move. Linda, though usually around, had never really become a part of these activities.

“Why is he so unhappy?” Linda asked. She looked around and threw up her hands. “We’ve got a nice house, a beautiful daughter. Money’s tight always, but we get by. I mean, why? It has to be me.”

Doug shook his head. “Some people are just unhappy,” he said.

“Oh, bullshit,” she said, going behind the kitchen counter and running water into the kettle. “Do you want some coffee or tea?”

Decision time. If he said yes, the conversation could eat up half the day. Women could talk forever. He knew that much from hearing the waiters at the restaurant complain. Put two of them at a table with two cups of warm liquid in front of them, and that table was shot for the shift. But the novelty of this situation was enough to keep it interesting. In four years, Linda had never wanted to talk to him before about anything, and who knew? Maybe she wasn’t so bad.

“I’m not forcing you,” she said, forcing him.

“Uhhh, coffee. No, tea. Tea. I’d definitely like a cup of tea.”

“Have a seat.” Linda went back and forth behind the counter, putting the kettle on the stove and opening and closing cabinets. It suddenly occurred to Doug that the prospect of going home and watching TV all afternoon was familiar, but had not really been exciting him, and this might not be such a bad idea after all. Hell, he thought, it might be fun to sit and shoot the shit with Linda.

“I think he changed after he got out of jail,” she said. “It’s like he’s been depressed. That was, what, two years ago now? I’ve been putting up with his moods for two years.” She put an ashtray out and carefully placed her cigarette in it, then said, almost conspiratorially, “You know, he still thinks you had something to do with that.”

“I know he does,” said Doug. “No matter how many times I deny it. I mean, if you’re accused of something you didn’t do and you can’t really prove you didn’t do it . . .”

He trailed off, hurt just thinking about it. About two and a half years ago, when Kevin had been growing a field of marijuana plants in his basement and Doug had been selling the harvest for him, it had all ended suddenly. One day, cops had come in and seized the whole lot, thousands of dollars worth of lights and fans and fertilizer, and thrown Kevin in jail for ninety days. Kevin’s theory was that Doug had been busted for possession and had told the cops who was growing the plants as a condition for immunity. Doug had, in fact, never been busted, and the whole thing was a hurtful and miserable episode he was always hoping was behind them but which never actually seemed to be. Kevin would often claim it was over, that he believed him, and then the next time they were out drinking, after a shot of tequila or two, Kevin would put his arm around him and say something like, “Really, man. I won’t get mad. Just tell me what happened.”

Linda was looking at Doug, studying him, and for a paranoid second he thought that Kevin had put Linda up to this—have him over, make him tea, and see if he confesses. Then he decided that the paranoia was probably just the joint he had fired up on his way over. He doubted Kevin and Linda ever spoke to each other long enough to hatch a plan. But just to make sure, he added, “I didn’t do it. I never got busted.”