Two for the Money (24 page)

Did it matter that Nolan was a thief? Not really, Jon thought, his opinion shaded by the fact that he, too, was a thief of major proportions, since that bank job a year and a half ago. It wasn’t
what
the heroes stood for, it was the
way
they stood for it that mattered. Jon remembered seeing the film
White Heat,
where the so-called good guy Edmund O’Brien double-crossed Jimmy Cagney. Cagney was a psychopathic murderer, but he had style. When they showed
White Heat
at the U of I student union last month, every-body
in the house had booed that son of a bitch Edmund O’Brien.

He was picking out one of the “Vault of Horror” issues to read when he heard the phone ringing out in the store. He had the urge to jump off the bed and run out there and see if it was Nolan calling, but he repressed the urge. He’d made up his mind that he was not going to jump up and down like a spastic puppy for the chance to talk to Nolan. Besides, Jon had nothing to say, really, and Nolan just about never had anything to say.

No. This was business between Nolan and Planner (even though Jon was up to his ass involved in that business) and Jon would stay cool, the way Nolan would expect him to.

“Hey, Jon boy!”

The sound of Planner’s rough voice made Jon’s heart leap. Nolan had asked to talk to him! Imagine that.

Jon joined Planner out in the store and Planner said, “It’s for you . . . it’s that woman.”

Jon didn’t let the disappointment show in his voice. “Karen,” he said, “Good morning, honey.”

“Morning my ass, Jonny. It’s two-thirty. Did you just wake up?”

“Yeah, ’bout half an hour ago.”

“Me, too. I’m hung over as hell.”

“Me, too. Did we have a good time last night, Kare? I can’t remember it too clear.”

“We had a couple good times. You had breakfast?”

“I slept through it, just like you did.”

“We missed lunch, too, you know. Come on over to the apartment and I’ll fix you some eggs.”

“And sausage?”

“You drive a hard bargain. And sausage.”

“That sounds good.”

“Then maybe a little later I can refresh your memory about last night.”

“That sounds better.”

“Get your cute little ass over here, Jonny.”

“Will do.”

Jon hung up and noticed Planner’s reproving gaze. Jon grinned and said, “I know, I know, she’s too old for me.”

“She’s old enough to be your mother.”

“Oh, bull. You’re old enough to be my grandmother. And I don’t hold it against you, do I?”

“No, but I’ll bet you hold it against her,” and now Planner, too, was grinning.

“What would you do in my place?”

“The same damn thing, nephew. The same damn thing.”

“Thought so. All this time you’ve just been jealous.”

“Sure, kid. That broad’s just about the right age for me.”

Jon walked over to the row of penny candy Planner kept along the counter for the school kids from across the street. He took a piece of bubble gum from one of the glass bowls and unwrapped the gum and tossed the pink square into his mouth. He chewed it up good and walked back to Planner and blew a healthy bubble and popped it at his uncle.

“Smartass kid,” Planner said, trying not to smile.

“See you later, Unc,” Jon said, and went out the back way.

The older man took his time eating the ice cream cone. It irritated Walter that his father could be so calm, just sitting there eating that goddamn ice cream as if they were at the beach or something. He was irritated enough to speak, and in a tone more harsh than he generally dared use when he spoke to his father. He said, “How can you just sit there and eat that goddamn stuff?”

The older man said, “What?”

“I said . . . nothing. Nothing, Dad.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Now what did I tell you? I told you don’t be nervous. We’re going in and do it and we’ll be out and done in nothing flat. So don’t be nervous, understand?”

“I’m not nervous.”

The older man studied his son’s face carefully. The boy was naturally pale, but he seemed to be even whiter than usual. But aside from shaking his foot on the leg crossed over one knee, the boy was showing no overt signs of tension.

“It’s not going to be hard,” the older man said. “I’ll handle all the hard stuff. All you have to do is back me up and keep your damn wits about you.”

“I know, Dad.”

“But I won’t lie to you. It won’t be pleasant in there.”

“You told me.”

“It won’t be pleasant in there because that’s the way it has to be.”

“You told me a hundred times, Dad.”

“Don’t smart-mouth me.”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t. And I’m just telling you this because I look at you right now and you know what I see? I see a kid, I see a goddamn college kid who’s liable to go in there and crap his pants, and I can’t afford that, understand, and you can’t afford it either.”

“Dad . . .”

“You didn’t have to be part of this. I didn’t want you to be part of this, remember. But you wanted to help. You begged me to help. Fine, that’s fine talk, but this is now, this is right now and we’re about to go across that street and do the kind of thing they don’t teach you in school, understand, so if you want out now, say so, for Christ’s sake.”

“Dad . . .”

“I’ll drive you back to the lodge. Right now. I’ll drive you back to the goddamn lodge and come back down here tomorrow and do it alone.”

“Dad, you couldn’t do it alone . . .”

“I could. It wouldn’t be no goddamn picnic, but I could.”

“I’m not nervous, Dad.”

He looked at his son and saw resolve in the young face. He smiled briefly and squeezed his son’s arm, reaching over the box with the newspapers and guns in it to do so.

He felt better now, now that he could have confidence in his son again. But that ice cream, which had gone down so smooth, so easy, so cool and refreshing, the damn stuff was churning in his stomach, making him feel queasy. All of a sudden
he
was nervous, and it almost made him laugh. Worrying about his son being nervous had got him that way.

Funny, Walter thought, where the hell did
that
outburst come from? His father had been sitting there for an hour, looking so calm it was unnatural, as though he were on pot or something. And then out of nowhere the old man had let go with this practically hysterical lecture. Walter was stunned; he never would have suspected that his father’s placid surface was hiding such turbulent undercurrents.

Not that he hadn’t had the notion that something was (how should he put it?)
wrong
with his father. Right now he was wishing he could summon courage to look at his father, to study him, observe his behavior. (Walter was a business major, but he’d taken several psychology courses as electives.) He wondered now, as he’d wondered more than once in the past few weeks, if his father was, well, sane.

Up until this uncharacteristic outburst of a moment ago, the old man seemed normal enough to Walter: quiet, self-sufficient, a hard but not unaffectionate man. But Walter knew these were superficial judgments, biased judgments from a child who desperately wanted to love and respect a father. He had never known his father all that well, really. Dad had been gone so much of the time, the business had been so demanding. Walter had felt much closer to his mother, and if she were still alive today, the situation would most certainly be different, to say the least.

The distance between Walter and his father had been
shortened only these past months, these last several weeks especially. The old guy was no longer the aloof, godlike, benevolent family dictator, but a human being, a
man
willing to meet his son as an equal . . . or at least as a peer.

Walter liked that. It was a new experience and he liked it, even now, even sitting in this car waiting to . . . to do what they were going to.

This last week, at the lodge at Eagle’s Roost, had been wonderful and terrible. The memories the place aroused were double-edged, pleasant this moment and painful the next. Like a fire, nice to look at until you got too close. He at times felt he and his father were ghosts haunting the empty old lodge, perhaps in search of other ghosts who could share remembrances of other, better times. He could hear the voices, his mother, his sister, his father, too, and once he heard himself, a high-pitched voice, prepuberty, and he laughed; he heard all these voices, especially late at night and early in the morning, he really heard them, but then of course he was trying to hear them.

He sat in the main room downstairs, that huge open-beamed, high-ceilinged room, dark wooded, dominated by the black brick fireplace and the elk head above it. There were three brown leather sofas arranged in a block C that opened onto the fireplace, forming a room within the room, an area before the hearth where throw rugs and pillows were scattered for lounging. But the pillows and throw rugs were gone now, and when he and his father arrived, the sofas, like all the other furniture, were covered with sheets. Walter had uncovered the center sofa, where he sat and stared at the fireplace, as though it were warm and roaring rather than cold and barren. They uncovered the long table in the dining area to the left of the sofas, and he and his father sat alone together at the table, eating TV dinners and canned food and other survival rations that didn’t jibe with the memories of sumptuous feasts at this same table. On the other side of the room, where Mother’s sewing table still stood, covered of course, and faded areas on the wood floor
where card tables had been, for playing Clue with his sister, and, later, Monopoly, was the window seat, the same plaid cushions he remembered. Once again he sat and watched the trees bend slightly in the breeze, their needles shimmering, and if he leaned close to the window, he could still get that same good view of the lake, blue and sparkling where the sun hit it, pink, bobbing swimmers close to shore, the sails of skiffs white along the horizon.

And sitting there in that window seat, his mind flooded with memories, he could not keep himself from wondering what this stranger who was his father, this stranger and guns and robbery, had to do with his life.

He’d known for a long time, of course, what his father’s “business” was. No one had told him, exactly, but he’d gotten it a piece at a time, and the knowledge had been gradual, there’d been no great revelation. But the lodge seemed such an odd setting for preparing for today’s possible violence. High up on that hill, overlooking the two lakes, the lodge had been the one place where his father had allowed no contact from the “business” world. Their home, in a suburb of Chicago, had seen occasionally the hard-faced men who associated with his father “at work.” But the lodge was different.

He remembered the time his Uncle Harry had shown up at the lodge, with two men who wore trench coats and slouch hats and had faces like the Boogie Man. Walter had been eight at the time and had found the two men with Uncle Harry frightening, but no more so than Uncle Harry, who was himself no beauty contest winner, and Walter’s sister called him Uncle Scarey behind his back. Uncle Harry had told their father there was important business at Lake Geneva that he ought to tend to personally, and to come along. Dad had been furious with Uncle Harry for bringing the two men with him, and into the lodge. Walter could still hear his father’s voice: “I told you never to bring any of your goddamn goons around here! This place is for my family and myself and I don’t want you or anybody contaminating it!
Now wait outside, Harry.” And Dad had shoved the two Boogie Men out the door as if they were a couple of sissies.

“Are you ready?” the older man said.

“Yes,” Walter said.

“One last thing,” he said. “Don’t be surprised at anything I do. I might have to do some things that make you sick. I might have to do some things that make you not so goddamn proud of your old man. Well, that’s too bad. You’re in it all the way now, and you got to go along with everything I do, and don’t you flinch in there, don’t you panic, don’t show a thing in your face, either. Or we’re liable to die. Now. Do you understand, Walter?”

He’d heard all this before, too. His father had gone over all of this, many times, during the past week at the lodge, though there he’d always seemed calm and now Walter wasn’t sure. And he’d told Walter how they would go about the robbery, though he’d been vague about certain aspects. But when Walter asked him what was the purpose of the robbery, was it just money? Would they be going to Mexico or Canada or South America or something to start a new life on this money? This isn’t about money, his father had said, this is a matter of blood. And that was all he would say.

“Do you understand, Walter?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Here we go then,” and the older man turned the key in the ignition of the car and pulled across the street, up to the side door of the antique shop.

A bell was ringing. Planner sat up suddenly straight in the soft old easy chair behind the counter; he’d been dozing. The bell kept ringing. Is that the phone? Planner got up. Is that you, Nolan? Is that your call? The bell rang on and Planner said, silently, no. Somebody at the side door.

He took time out to light himself a fresh Garcia y Vega before answering the door. He had to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth. He wondered how his mouth could taste so foul from sleeping, why, not more than fifteen minutes, a half hour. You’d think he’d slept for twelve hours, as bad as the taste was. He puffed the cigar until he felt he could live with his mouth and then slowly moved toward the side door, the bell still going.

“All right, all right,” Planner muttered, “hold your damn horses, Jesus almighty.”

He unlocked the side door and looked through the screen at the two men standing out on the cement stoop. One of them was old, maybe fifty-five, maybe more; the other was much younger, maybe twenty, twenty-five at the most. Both of them looked like tourists, probably staying at Lake McBride. They had on bright swirling-colored shirts that almost hurt to look at; be better off looking into the sun dead on. Father and his kid, most likely. Both of them had the same dark eyes, set close together, and the same general frame.