The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (20 page)

“Drive north up Broadway,” ordered the Bandit. “Keep driving until I tell you to stop.”

“Where are we going?” asked Arnold.

“Staten Island,” said the Bandit.

“Staten Island?”

“You said our friend here has a thing for garbage. Well I figured he wouldn’t mind a trip out to see the municipal landfill.”

Ira Taylor didn’t dare turn his head, but his eyes darted nervously from the gun to the rear-view mirror. “You won’t get away with this,” he warned. “I’ll sue the pants off you, Brinkman. I’ll take you for every last dime.”

“What was that about pants?” asked the Bandit.

The bond trader’s cheeks and ears turned a fiery pink.

“I wouldn’t say you’re in a great position to be levelling threats, Ira,” observed the Bandit. “Besides, aren’t you the one who’s always telling people to lump it? What happened to all that community spirit? Taking one for the team? You’re not the sort of stickler who’d sue over a minor kidnapping, are you?”

“Fuck you,” snapped Taylor.

The Bandit tapped the man’s skull with the saber blade. Taylor winced.

“I think it’s time for a silent contest,” said the Bandit. “Just like when we were kids. Let’s see how long our friend Ira can stay quiet for. Do you know what the winning prize is, Arnold?”

“What’s the winning prize?”

“If he stays quiet long enough, I won’t scalp him.”

The Bandit’s threat betrayed absolutely no emotion—he could as easily have been speaking of filleting a fish. They continued driving up Broadway. It was already late in the evening, so traffic was light.

“Isn’t Staten Island south of here?” asked Arnold.

“It was last time I checked,” said the Bandit. “But we can’t risk crossing the Hudson in the city. Too many cops guarding the bridges and tunnels. What we’ll do is drive up to the Catskills on local roads and cross there, then we’ll come back down on the New Jersey side.”

“The Catskills!” shouted Taylor. “That could take hours.”

“You just earned yourself a scalping,” said the Bandit. “I’m afraid that will have to wait until we get there. But one more word and I’ll cut your testicles off on the spot.”

That silenced the naked man for the remainder of the four hour drive.

They crossed into the countryside, cutting through secondary growth forests of hickory and basswood. Orion’s bow grew visible in the night sky. Deer grazed on the grassy mounds at the roadside. While they drove, the Bandit spoke at great length on the potential benefits of castration and the historical contributions of castrati. He told of Cai Lun, the Chinese eunuch who’d invented writing paper, and the Byzantine general, Narses, who’d reconquered Italy for the Emperor Justinian. He also shared with them his expansive knowledge of the
self-castrating
skoptzy
of nineteenth century Russia. Listening to the lunatic’s eloquent soliloquy was almost enough to convince his audience that only a true fool would want to hold onto his testicles. But just when the Bandit’s words were actually starting to make sense—far too much
sense—the lunatic broke off his lesson and started singing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” at the top of his voice. Then he stopped as suddenly as he’d begun and gave Ira Taylor orders to turn down a narrow gravel road. By now they were already on Staten Island, near the municipal landfill, and a series of increasingly hostile signs warned them against trespassing.

The Mercedes pulled up in front of a gatehouse. It was a small, wooden structure with a mansard roof; moss covered one of the exterior walls. A bright orange control bar blocked their farther advance. Beyond the access point rose mounds of household garbage, some five stories high, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Coils of barbed wire rimmed the upper edge of the gates. A pair bulldozers and a backhoe stood lifeless on the opposite side. At the window of the gatehouse, a pot-bellied, grey-haired guard sat listening to a transistor radio. When they stopped, the guard looked up indifferently.

“You guys are lost, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Do you mean that in a physical sense or a moral sense?” retorted the Bandit.

That’s when the guard must have noticed that Taylor wasn’t wearing any clothing, because he reached for his phone, but by then it was too late. The Bandit was already outside the vehicle with his saber point resting against the guard’s flabby throat. Arnold kept his revolver trained on the bond trader.

“I’ll have to ask you to step outside and remove your clothes,” said the Bandit.

The guard looked as though he might weep. “Please, please don’t do anything to me,” he begged. “I have money. In my wallet….”

“We don’t need your money,” answered the Bandit. “We need your clothes.”

“Oh my God,” blubbered the guard. “Perverts. Like…
Deliverance
.”

The Bandit opened the gatehouse door and pushed the guard out onto the pavement. “
We’re
not perverts,” he said. “But the man driving that car is a very dangerous sexual predator. Aren’t you, Ira?”

The bond trader said nothing.

“Okay, pop him one, Arnold,” order the Bandit.

“—No!” cried Taylor. “I mean yes! I’m a famous sexual predator. A dangerous one too.”

The bond trader bared his teeth in an effort to look threatening.

“That’s the spirit, Ira,” said the Bandit. “Now if you don’t start removing your clothing by the time I count to three,” he warned the guard, “I’m going to hand you over to our naked friend. He prefers to work with children, you understand, particularly little boys, but he’ll take what he can get.”

“One,” counted the Bandit.

The guard’s entire body was shaking.

“Two.”

Now the guard reached for his shirt buttons and began undressing. He fumbled with them one at a time.

“Good job,” said the Bandit. “I thought you’d see it our way.”

The man continued blubbering while he undressed, but the Bandit ignored him. He took off his own trench coat and put on the guard’s overshirt.

“Wait a second,” said the guard. “That guy in the car. He’s the asshole from the baseball game.”

“That is
Mr
. Brinkman,” said the Bandit.

“You never think it will happen to you…” muttered the guard.

“Underwear too,” the Bandit demanded. “And socks.”

“Please,” pleaded the guard—but he didn’t stop undressing. “Okay, I’m naked,” he finally said. “Now will you let me go?”

“You don’t look naked to me,” observed the Bandit. “Say, Arnold, does he look naked to you?”

The guard did appear decidedly naked to Arnold. His hairy barrel of a belly hung forward over his flaccid, uncircumcised penis; a blotchy rash covered much of his chest. Even a lunatic should have been able to tell that the man had run out of clothing. “I can’t see from here,” said Arnold.

“Well, I
can
see from here,” answered the Bandit.
“What’s that?”

He poked at the guard’s throat with his saber.

“That’s my Saint Christopher’s medal. It brings me good luck.”

“Obviously, man,” answered the Bandit. “You’re clearly a very lucky guy.”

The guard gulped. Arnold watched his Adam’s apple moving.

“Next time, you’re better off with Saint Jude. He’s for desperate causes, right?”

The guard’s face had gone white; he looked as though he might vomit.

“I asked you a question,” barked the Bandit.

“St. Jude,” stammered the guard. “Desperate causes, yes. I think so.”

“You think? Or you know?”

“I know. Yes, I know. I know.”

“Aha!” declared the lunatic, lowering his sword. “You’re a religious man. Why didn’t you say so?”

“Oh, please,” begged the guard. “I’m very religious.”

“That changes everything. I’d never decapitate a religious Christian.”

The guard exhaled audibly. “You wouldn’t?”

“It’s much more fitting to crucify one,” said the Bandit.

Arnold hadn’t been prepared for this. But he’d exposed himself to the mercies of a lunatic, so now he
had to follow through. He waved the gun as a reminder to Taylor.

“Hand over the medal,” commanded the Bandit.

The guard unclasped the chain and gave it to him.

The Bandit handed the medal to Arnold. “Here’s a souvenir for you. St. Christopher’s the patron saint of gardeners.”

Arnold wrapped his fingers around the chain.

“Now up against that fence,” insisted the Bandit. “Arms above your head. Legs spread.” Then he ordered the bond trader out of the Mercedes and had him tie the naked guard to the fence in a giant X formation. “They should find you in the morning, man,” observed the Bandit. “This is a good lesson for you. Always wear sun block… even if you’re not headed out to the beach.” He tested the guard’s bonds. “But no screaming until then. Or we’ll have to come back and use nails.”

“I won’t scream,” promised the guard. “I swear I won’t scream.”

“That’s the spirit,” said the Bandit. “And now that leaves only you, Ira.”

The bond trader stood helpless on the macadam. It was a chilly night and he’d started to shiver.

“I think it’s into the garbage with you,” mused the Bandit. “How does that sound to you, Arnold?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“You heard him,” said the lunatic. “Into the
garbage. Now!”

Taylor looked from the saber to the gun and walked toward the nearest mound of household waste. The light from the guard house illuminated the millions of soiled packages, left-over wrappers, and undigested meals. It let off a truly noxious stench.

“Now!” shouted the Bandit. “Garbage or death!”

To emphasize this point, Arnold discharged the revolver. It actually bounced off the waste pile far closer to the bond trader than he’d intended, but that sent Taylor scurrying into the mounds of human refuse.

Arnold fired again and again and again. He was careful to keep his weapon pointed far from the bond trader, but he kept firing until the man disappeared into the dunes of rubbish. Then he started laughing. Terrorizing his enemies was far more enjoyable than he’d ever imagined.

The humiliation of Ira Taylor marked the beginning of the two weeks of widespread mayhem that would earn Arnold and the Bandit their places beside Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the annals of outlawdom. They targeted a number of the botanist’s adversaries. One night, they broke into the home of the father of nine who’d made a name for himself describing Arnold’s conduct at the baseball game, and they forced the man to call a local radio station and to confess on the air to harbouring sexual feelings for poultry. The following afternoon they showed up at the posh suburban residence of Arnold’s sister-
in-law
and surprised Walter the Republican Chiropractor on the toilet. They had read that Celeste’s husband, in an effort to distance himself from his unpopular relative, had put up his own reward for Arnold’s capture. The naked duo accompanied the man to a drive-thru automated teller machine at knifepoint, where they ordered him to empty out his bank account and to eat the bills one at a time. Celeste’s husband consumed nearly three hundred dollars in twenties before he threw up on his seersucker lapels. Even Arnold’s medal, draped around his neck, became the subject of media speculation. The
New York Times
reported, from an unnamed source, that its secret compartment held enough plutonium to build a dirty bomb.

When the
Daily Vanguard
ran Cassandra’s interview with Arnold—a highly-doctored transcript alongside an editorial that branded him a “bourgeois infiltrator intent upon discrediting the Left”—the naked pair corralled the editor at a branch library in Queens and had him perform five hundred jumping jacks in his birthday suit for the benefit of the other patrons. But the Bandit and Arnold also continued their practice of targeting total strangers. They crashed a Prospect Park wedding and carried off the bride’s gown. They hit a midtown bank, leaving all of the cash but making away with the tellers’ undergarments and stockings. In an act of unprecedented audacity, they bought tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, wore false beards to Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly
, and charged onto the stage in the middle of the spectacle to demand Cio-
cio-san’s
kimono. Within days, all gossip in the metropolitan area focused on the union of the Tongue Terrorist and the Bare-Ass Bandit. The city council speaker and the mayor squabbled over the merits of imposing a community-wide curfew. Street vendors began merchandizing clothing with kryptonite locks. The naked duo also spawned a host of copycat bandits, including the Bare-Breasted Burglar and the Loinclothed Gang, who swung down upon unsuspecting visitors at zoos and aquariums, but these amateurs were all apprehended rapidly.

Arnold was amazed at how easily he adjusted to his newfound life of delinquency. He had always thought of
himself as a highly moral person, despite Bonnie Card’s accusations, but now he relished a chance to thumb his nose at the law. He suspected there were limits to his newfound vice—he couldn’t imagine physically harming anybody, or inflicting abuse on children or the elderly—but embarrassing strangers and disrupting the workings of society didn’t trouble his conscience. After all, hadn’t they started this? He’d have been content to live out his days gardening and selling plant books, but they’d been all so quick to fall in line behind rabble-rousers like Spitford in calling for his head. The masses had taken an innocent man and insisted that he was a terrorist. So now he
was
a terrorist. And yet there were weekday afternoons when he lurked around the edges of the park, watching a
coal-skinned
Senegalese man in a beret instructing a half dozen middle-aged women in painting, their easels angled around the edges of the reservoir, their brushes immortalizing a great blue heron, when he felt a deep longing for Judith welling up inside him. He’d heard nothing of his wife since his flight from Cassandra’s. The morning papers, which catalogued the naked duo’s exploits, reported only that she remained under home detention and unavailable for comment. But he could easily conjure up the silky feel of her hair and the faint scent of turpentine that she carried on her fingers. It was enough to leave his eyes watering.

Late one night, after invading a gentleman’s club and forcing the patrons to strip and the nude dancers
to dress, the pair sat in their underground apartment playing cards. The Bandit continued to blindfold Arnold during his entrances and exits, but made less effort to conceal the general location of the hideaway. He dropped hints that they were north of the reservoir, south of the uptown woods. This may have been the lunatic’s way of expressing his trust in his new companion. But it was a confidence that had its limits. “You have every right to take your blindfold off,” explained the lunatic. “But that’s where Isaac Newton’s laws come into play. No action is without its consequences. If you do take your blindfold off, that will force me to poke your eyes out.” From experience, Arnold understood that the bandit
wasn’t
joking. He never joked. Or laughed. That was out of his M.O. Yet despite these occasional threats, Arnold found his companion to be an overall decent guy. He was also an astoundingly lucky card player. Arnold managed to lose two hundred straight games of gin rummy.

“Gin!” announced the Bandit.

“Can I ask you something?” asked Arnold.

“You think I’m cheating?” demanded the Bandit defensively.

“Oh, no. What would be the point?”

“Because I don’t cheat,” insisted the Bandit. “I just play the odds.”

Arnold slid his exposed cards to the centre of the table. “Do you ever miss your old life?” he asked.

The lunatic shook his head. “Nope, not really. What’s there to miss about getting up at six in the morning and working in a suit and tie all day?”

“You don’t miss
anything
?”

“Not family, if that’s what you’re driving at, man. My father died in the state asylum. And my mother was a first-class bitch. Still is, I imagine. She’s a professional hypochondriac. For real. She makes a living suing doctors for imaginary injuries and settling with their insurers. We had a major blow-up when I refused to keep doing her legal work.” The Bandit shuffled the cards nimbly in his hands. “So, no. I don’t miss my old life. I’m glad to be done with all that.”

“What about other stuff?” asked Arnold. “Do you ever miss the ordinary routine of things? Being able to walk into a store and buy a bag of dog food or a tube of toothpaste or a cheese sandwich?”

“I can have all the toothpaste I want, man,” answered the Bandit. “All I have to do is rob a dentist. And as for dog food…I don’t own a dog.”

The Bandit said nothing about the cheese sandwich—but after two weeks of the lunatic’s cooking, which for Arnold verged on the toxic, the botanist found himself thinking often of ready-made and processed foods. He didn’t share these feelings with his host, who believed himself a first-rate chef.

“So you really don’t miss being able to live among
other people?” Arnold asked.

“Life is about trade-offs,” said the lunatic. “You can have a steady paycheck or a job that doesn’t require clothing. You can stand for a song or you can stand for your principles. The difference between happy people and unhappy people is that happy people accept the trade-offs and unhappy people complain about them. Personally, I prefer to be happy.”

The Bandit turned over the deck of cards and spread it out. He’d managed to sort the cards by rank and suit without looking at their faces.

“Say, you’re not going soft on me, man?” asked the Bandit.

“No. I’m just thinking….You really do live by a philosophy, don’t you?”

“Not bad for a sociopath, is it?” quipped Arnold’s companion.

Not bad for anyone, thought Arnold. He felt actively jealous.

“Do you remember how you said you make a point to stay clear of celebrities?” asked Arnold. “Back when we were talking about Spitford….”

“It can’t be helped. Wait a few years. When he returns to obscurity—and they always do—then we’ll nail him.”

“What if I don’t have a few years?” persisted Arnold. “How would you feel if I…decided to hit Spitford
on my own?”

The Bandit frowned. “Without me?”

“I’d only be putting myself on the line.”

“You know how I feel.”

“Are you ordering me not to?” asked Arnold.

“I can’t order you to do anything. You’re a grown adult. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.” The Bandit stood up and pocketed his cards. “I was just offering a few words of friendly advice. Trust me, Arnold. If you take on a fish as big as Spitford, the last laugh will be on you.”

Arnold recognized the wisdom of the Bandit’s warning about attacking celebrities. The prisons were full of
small-time
felons who’d chosen the wrong targets: If Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan had bumped off Mexican day labourers, they’d likely have drawn sentences numbered in years rather than decades. But that just made the thought of getting even with Spitford all the more tempting. It was like an itch he might easily reach but had been warned not to scratch. Arnold had always wondered why the victims of violent crimes lobbied so strongly for the execution of their assailants, why life imprisonment wasn’t good enough for them. Now he understood. The knowledge that the minister was out there in the world—that the man might walk into a convenience store and purchase a sack of dog food—kept Arnold awake at night. Not that he intended
to kill Spitford. At least, not physically. But the prospect of breaking the minister psychologically, even for a few minutes, was enough to get Arnold through the day. The need for revenge overtook him with the same fervour as his love for Cassandra once had. It was almost as though one had replaced the other. By the end of his fourth week with the Bandit, Arnold was pacing the apartment and
chain-smoking
. He puffed the unfiltered cigarettes through a long meerschaum holder that his companion had stolen for him from a Greta Garbo impersonator, but the ferocity of Arnold’s habit concerned even his host.

“Are you okay, man?” asked the lunatic. “You seem jittery.”

“Too much cappuccino,” answered Arnold. “And I miss my wife.”

That was a lie, of sorts. He did miss Judith, but she’d been far from his thoughts at the moment. With this remark, he realized, he’d crossed into uncharted territory: If it was objectionable to lie
to
one’s spouse, wasn’t it also a mistake to lie
about her
—to use her like that for one’s own convenience.

“You could pay her a surprise visit,” offered the Bandit. “I have a couple of girlfriends I pop in on now and then—to break up the pace of things, you know.”

Arnold recognized that visiting Judith wouldn’t help. “Your girlfriends aren’t under house arrest and surrounded by a mob of protesters,” he observed. “They don’t have
Spotty Spitford camped on their front porches.”

“Maybe you can sneak in through a window or something,” suggested the Bandit. “It’s worth a shot, man. Better than coming down with an acute case of lung cancer.”

“I can’t spend all day here choking myself to death, can I?” muttered Arnold.

“You can. It’s a free country. But it isn’t how I’d want to live.”

“Okay, you’ve inspired me,” Arnold said. “Take me to the surface.”

He continued smoking while the lunatic blindfolded him—and it crossed his mind that he must have looked like a Hollywood prisoner facing a firing squad, although he’d seen very few film convicts enjoy their last smoke through a telescopic meerschaum tube. The Bandit led him up the stairs into the warm night and paraded him around the park for twenty minutes. They came to rest under a
lightning-scarred
hickory. This was their rendezvous point if they split-up during getaways. Arnold tucked the blindfold into his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette.

“You love your wife a lot, don’t you?” asked the Bandit.

“Is it that obvious?”

The Bandit picked up a long, jagged stick and poked at several knots in the hickory. “I’ve been thinking over what you were saying, man,” he said. “About missing the
ordinary life.”

Something in the lunatic’s tone made Arnold feel genuinely sorry for him. “I wish I hadn’t brought it up. It’s different when you’re married. If not for Judith, I think I could get used to life on the lam.”

“No, man. I’m glad you brought it up,” persisted the Bandit. “Because I’ve been thinking about what you said. About being able to walk into a store and buy a cheese sandwich or a tube of toothpaste or a bag of dog food. When I was a kid, what I wanted more than anything else in the world was a puppy….” Here the lunatic’s eyes took on a distant gloss, as though he were gazing through time as well as space. “But my bitch of a mother was afraid she might develop an allergy. Not that she actually had one, mind you. She didn’t let me have any pets because she could only see the downside. Veterinary bills, torn upholstery. Never once did it cross her mind that a dog might do us good.”

“You could have a dog here in the park,” suggested Arnold.

“It’s too late,” explained the Bandit. “The truth is I’m not fit to take care of anybody or anything, at this point. I’m hardly capable of looking after myself. But if I could do it again, do you know what I’d want?”

“A puppy?”

“Kids. Lots of them. Dozens. Hundreds. You know how you talked about walking into a store and buying a
cheese sandwich. Well I’d like to be able to walk into an adoption agency and take my pick of the litter. Because I’d raise them the right way. All for one and one for all. Like the five hundred musketeers. If anybody did me wrong, I’d have a ready-made army of followers to revenge me. That’s what children were all about hundreds of years ago, before this twenty-first century bullshit about teaching children to pursue their own dreams.” The Bandit looked up suddenly and snapped the stick over his knee. “All pipedreams, man,” he said. “It’s too late for that now. They don’t give babies to terrorists.”

Arnold had never had an interest in adopting children himself—that was Judith’s craze—but the suggestion that he too might be excluded actually stung him deep down. It seemed an injustice, a violation of his fundamental human rights. “Maybe if you apologized—”