Bank Robbers Page 6

  Ten-fifteen.

  It was Wednesday, and every Wednesday was like this. It seemed so slow, as if the hands of his watch were weighted down, so for every minute it registered, it seemed he actually had to live through an hour. Or maybe Wednesday signaled that he’d made it halfway through another week of this misery.

  In all his years, he never thought he’d end up like this.

  Bored to death in some dark, dank little hole he called an office.

  He looked at his watch.

  Ten-seventeen.

  Great.

  Time was just whizzing right by.

  He went back to the ledger and added in a receipt for solder, and another one for coaxial cables. He tapped the numbers into a small calculator on the desk.

  Maybe he’d do something this weekend. Actually leave his house. Maybe he’d take a ride downtown to Manhattan. Maybe find some of his old haunts, just to blow off steam.

  Blow off steam. With whom? Everyone he knew was either dead, in Florida, or in jail.

  When he’d first gotten out of jail this last time, he’d traveled down to Florida, to Sarasota, thinking he might just buy himself a condo and retire there.

  It looked like a wheelchair-testing division. So Arthur figured maybe it was just not the right part of Florida, up north, so he traveled deep into the state almost to the tip, till he got to Miami.

  He was shot at on the first day.

  It reminded him of what they said Chicago had been like during the twenties.

  So Florida was either depressing or dangerous.

  And at this point he had a theory that Florida had become a prison without bars. They were keeping it a secret, so you didn’t know that an entire peninsula of the United States was actually a penitentiary.

  And the crime you were sent there for?

  Being old.

  And Jesus, the nuts down there. His first day in Miami he’d watched all these people sitting on the beaches in the beautiful sunshine, wrapped up like mummies or lepers.

  He’d sat next to this man who was covered in a sheet, a golf cap, and a blanket. And the one piece of the man still sticking out was his nose, which was spread with this white gunk. Under all the blankets, Arthur assessed that the man was probably near ninety.

  “Say, pal,” he’d asked, “why is everybody covered up down here?”

  “Because the sun is bad for you and you might get skin cancer.”

  And Arthur’d looked at this guy, who was telling him this through his sheets, and two thoughts occurred to Arthur.

  Number one, if you’re so afraid of the sun, why the hell would you move to Florida, “Sunshine Capital of the World,” and two, if he was eighty-eight or ninety, he would not be worried about skin cancer, for Christ’s sake, he’d be happy just breathing.

  Arthur looked at his watch.

  Ten-eighteen.

  Yup, his life was just whizzing by.

  * * *

  ALL RIGHT, Dottie thought, so he has a braid and green hair. So what? Look at how she’d mistaken the kid in the park. She couldn’t go around prejudging people.

  No.

  She couldn’t.

  And besides, the sign on the door read “Haircuts $10.” That was her price range.

  She had temporarily given up on clothing, since none of the stores seemed open at this hour of the day in Greenwich Village.

  She forced her eyes to look back up into the mirror at the young man standing behind the barber’s chair. She smiled as broadly as she could at him.

  He was picking up strands of hair and frowning and shaking his head. He put both hands, one of them holding a pair of scissors, on his hips. He shook his head so his braid swung out from side to side and the light bounced off the ten small hoop earrings which adorned one ear lobe, and Dottie wondered if there was an actual name for that part of the outer ear.

  “I really prefer, um, a conservative cut and color…” she said shakily.

  “Well, I ain’t gonna give you a Mohawk.” His voice had a heavy workingman’s Queens accent.

  “Oh, that’s good, I’m more of a page-boy type,” Dottie said half-sarcastically. “Can you do something to make it soft, and color it?”

  He stepped back, frowned, moving his head from side to side.

  “Not for ten bucks … fifty.”

  Dottie stared hard at him in the mirror. Every time she turned around it cost her fifty dollars. She watched his face looking at her hair. He was just so scary-looking.

  “You do know what a page boy is?”

  He grimaced at her, and put his hands on his hips.

  “I am a professional.”

  Professional what? was what was going through Dottie’s mind.

  “So?” he said, after a moment.

  She closed her eyes, exhaled loudly and said, “Okay, do it.” She felt as if she were about to be operated on.

  * * *

  ELEVEN-TWELVE.

  Too early to have lunch. Arthur sighed, shifted in his chair, stretched one leg and lifted it onto the corner of his desk, swung his other leg up and crossed it over the first one. He took his unlit cigar out of the ashtray and held it between his teeth. He opened the book and leafed through it until he got to the first page.

  “Chapter One, I Am Born,” he read.

  Aw, Jeez, he thought, and placed the book back down onto his lap. His eyes scanned the bookcase and the piles of books on the floor. If only he had something exciting to read.

  He supposed he could reread Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the fourth time this month, but it made him so … lonely.

  Eleven-thirteen.

  * * *

  TERESA stared over at the nurse, and took the lid off her cup of coffee. She sipped and winced. Coffee-shop coffee was the worst, but it was the only thing between her and falling asleep in the damn waiting room.

  She still didn’t understand why they made these appointments so early in the morning. Jeez, eleven was the crack of dawn as far as Teresa was concerned. She’d never been an early riser; hell, there were some years she and Fred didn’t make it to bed until almost eleven in the morning.

  And, it seemed to her, that once they saw you coming, and you were over a certain age, they tried to get you up earlier and earlier. Some jedrool actually told her that all old people are up early.

  Hah! Fred would’ve belted him.

  She took another sip of the terrible coffee.

  This was the second time in two weeks they wanted her in for tests.

  She felt a flutter of nervousness go through her, and then dismissed it. Tracy and that jerk of a husband, Brian, had left almost an hour ago, but she was still having a fight with them in her head.

  So they were going to move her down to Florida to Fred, Jr., and his wife, a woman she’d met maybe once.

  Pains in the ass.

  Teresa DeNunzio Newhouse leave East Harlem? Leave New York? The city she’d grown up in? The neighborhood she’d grown up in?

  They had to be kidding.

  They wouldn’t be pulling this crap on her if Fred were still alive. No. Fred would straighten them out, fast.

  Fred. She felt her eyes begin to dribble again. What were they in such a rush for? Fred’s body was barely cold and already they wanted to ship her off down to some hellhole with sand and water—to do what? They knew she didn’t like the beach.

  No. Fred would’ve let them have it.

  She felt a tear spill hot down her cheek, and immediately wiped it off.

  Maybe it didn’t matter anymore. Maybe it didn’t matter where she was anymore. She’d had a good long life with Fred. God, she’d loved him. So what did it matter where she lived? It was over.

  Teresa took another sip of coffee, and frowned at the wall.

  Feeling sorry for herself? Over what? Whenever she started feeling sorry for herself she always thought of one person she knew who was worse off …

  Dottie Weist.

  Teresa at least had good things to look back on, not like crazy Do
ttie Weist, who had nothing and was now running all over New York like a stunadze looking for a gun. Teresa was grateful she wasn’t Dottie.

  Dottie’s marriage had been bad, her health wasn’t so good … And her boy dying in the army, trying to take over some island somewhere, that had been just tragic.

  She remembered Nathan, Jr. He’d looked just like Nathan, same skinny little thing, running all around Joe’s. And he’d been smart, not Nathan-smart, Dottie-smart, always reading all them books.

  From the time he was seven, Teresa hadn’t been able to understand a thing that kid had said, he’d been so smart.

  She remembered his funeral, when they finally got his body back from Grenada.

  She knew then it was going to end badly for Dottie.

  So, she should be grateful. Grateful to have a good marriage to look back on, grateful her kids were alive and well …

  The hell she was! The little bastards were planning on shipping her down to Florida like some suitcase. Leave New York? Where she’d been with Fred her whole life?

  Naw. That wasn’t right. And she’d be damned if she’d have a mess of kids she’d diapered, and whose noses she’d wiped, order her around. No. This they could not do.

  She felt her heart sink as she thought of the showdown—she didn’t care that they were calling it a meeting, it was a showdown—with all her children next Wednesday.

  Because the truth was that they paid her rent and they paid for the electric and the gas and the phone, and had ever since Fred had gotten sick last year and all their savings had gone to the hospital before Medicaid would pick any of it up. And the fact was that if they decided to move her down to Florida, then that was it.

  She had to think of something, fast. Otherwise she was going to be some permanent guest living in another woman’s house and having no control over her own life.

  The image of Dottie Weist sitting up in her kitchen the previous afternoon came into her head. She gave a wry chuckle into her coffee cup.

  Now that would call off the kids. Holding up a bank, she thought, amused. She could see the look on Tracy’s face at having to go and bail her mother out. Hell, smoking cigarettes would look like a deal if it was either that or bank robbery.

  Teresa gave a little chuckle and felt the corners of her mouth droop.

  Naw, she wasn’t that desperate or lonely.

  “Mrs. Newhouse?” The nurse behind the desk motioned to Teresa and she got up.

  “Yeah?”

  “The doctor wants a sonogram of your breast done.”

  “Whatever,” Teresa grumbled.

  The woman handed her a piece of paper. “This is the address; it’s right across the avenue and two blocks down.”

  “All right,” Teresa said and took the paper. She stared at the woman “Eh, this isn’t the thing that hurts, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God for small favors,” Teresa grumbled and walked away.

  * * *

  ARTHUR had lingered over lunch an extra forty minutes. Just walking back into the dark hole at the back of the store made his chest hard and tense.

  Christ, he’d seen mushroom farms with more light and less dampness than his office, so he’d opted to sit up front for a while. He answered some phone calls; then his mind went back to the hang-up the night before.

  He looked at his watch. It was two-thirty.

  If it was someone interested in buying under the table, he’d bet he’d call back at around the same time of day. In just about two hours.

  And if he didn’t get a call then, it was the Feds, tapping his line again, and he was going to be ticked off.

  * * *

  PLANNING to rob a bank was getting expensive.

  Dottie’d already laid out over a hundred dollars, and she didn’t even have a gun yet.

  At least her hair looked good. Yes, the kid had been scary-looking, but he had really worked hard, and her hair was still not baby-soft, but it was softer than it had been, and light red, and cut to her chin with soft bangs.

  She walked slowly across Third Street, to the one store where she knew she could buy a cheap dress. She didn’t want to go there, but she’d already spent way too much money.

  As she got to the door of the shop she wavered. Maybe she could alter one of the size-fourteen dresses into something presentable? Maybe if she bought a nice belt? No, that wasn’t going to work, and she knew it. All she felt she could reasonably spend on a dress was sixty dollars, and that was thirty more than she felt she ought to, what with the fifty dollars she’d given to Teresa plus the fifty for the haircut, and she still owed Teresa twenty dollars.

  Dottie stood in front of the tiny thrift shop. Reduced to this—buying used clothes. She opened the door and unenthusiastically went to the racks of suits and dresses.

  In twenty minutes, Dottie was standing in front of a full-length mirror at the back of the store, staring hard at herself.

  It was shocking.

  She was wearing a pink Chanel-type suit that fit as if it had been made for her. It didn’t look as though it had been worn before. She turned sideways, staring at her hips and her waist, how the skirt slimmed her stomach and emphasized her long legs. How the color made her face almost glow.

  She looked pretty. She really looked pretty, she thought, stunned. She just stood still, staring at the reflection of a woman she hadn’t seen in at least ten years. A small smile began to draw across her lips as she looked at the suit, and herself all fixed up, the way she had liked to look. She’d always taken pains with her appearance. She’d forgotten what it was like to take care of herself like this. After all the ugliness of the past year, she never thought she’d stand in front of a mirror again and like the person who was staring back at her.

  Jesus, did she need this.

  “Are you going to take that?” a voice sounded behind her, and without taking her eyes off her reflection Dottie watched herself nod.

  * * *

  TERESA finished dressing and took her bag and walked into the waiting room.

  She’d wasted the whole damn day on this nonsense. It was almost five o’clock. This clinic was really soaking Medicaid, she thought. This was the third time in two weeks they’d given her a mammogram, taken X rays, taken blood, and poked and prodded, and now this crap of a sonogram.

  At least the sonogram didn’t hurt, she was thankful for that. It was humiliating, having her breast treated like a slab of meat, that was true, but at least there were no needles involved. She turned and was walking out to the elevator.

  “Mrs. Newhouse, oh, Mrs. Newhouse, wait!” a woman’s voice called out, and Teresa turned around.

  “I can’t have nothin’ more poked into me today, capisce? I had enough a this crap!” Teresa shot off at the scrawny woman in a white lab coat who had given her the sonogram.

  “No, no, Mrs. Newhouse, no more tests today,” the woman said gently.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Teresa barked at her and turned for the elevator.

  “Are you planing to go back and talk to your doctor now?”

  “Which one? The Arab or the one I don’t know where he comes from?”

  “Uh, which one sent you here?”

  “A nurse at Metropolitan Hospital sent me here; I don’t know which one.”

  “All right.” The scrawny woman looked upset. “I’ll find out who your physician is and have them give you a call. It’s important that you talk to a doctor.”

  “Yeah? Somebody finally gonna explain what the hell you’ve been poking around so much for the last two weeks?” Teresa began. “I mean, you wanna soak Medicaid, youse go right ahead, just so long as I can go home”—Teresa looked at her fiercely—“unless you know something I don’t?”

  “We’re not at liberty to divulge results. But when you talk to your doctor…” The woman was talking at her and looking jittery.

  Teresa suddenly felt a chill go through her and she grabbed the little woman and nearly lifted her off the floor.


  “What the hell’s going on here?” she said, her voice loud and panicky.

  “I really can’t say—”

  “Look, you know something, you spit it out! You don’t just run after someone and be all mysterious and scare the hell out of them.” Teresa’s voice was beginning to rise loudly. She could feel the woman shaking inside her white coat.

  “Look,” the woman said, lowering her voice, “we saw something on the mammogram and then on the sonogram we don’t like. I urge you to call your doctor immediately.”

  “Don’t give me this crap, I been around hospitals plenty recently, I just buried my husband five weeks ago. I know when you doctors aren’t saying something. Now what is it?”

  “You have a—a density—”

  “Speak English, goddammit!”

  “You have a lump. I think it’s cancerous. I think you may have breast cancer. I don’t know what stage it’s in.”

  Teresa went numb, and her eyes darted wildly all over the woman’s face. She suddenly felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the hallway and she was going to pass out.

  “I’m sorry,” the scrawny woman said fearfully.

  Teresa let go of her and took a step backward. She was pale and her mouth was moving without a sound, and her eyes just kept moving from the woman to the walls, to the lights, to the chairs; she couldn’t focus in on anything. And deep inside her head, images of the hospital and Fred and the way he had died in such pain from cancer was rerunning itself mercilessly.

  “WHAT? I HAVE WHAT?” she screamed out and her voice echoed off the walls.

  * * *

  DOTTIE walked up the stairs of her building and noticed a spring in her step. She went to the mailbox. Her smile dropped as she pulled out the only envelope. It was a bill from Con Ed with the words FINAL NOTICE stamped on it in red. Oh, Christ. It would be in two weeks. And this was it, the beginning of the end, Dottie thought. The phone was going to be cut off by the middle of next week.

  Now, heavily, she trudged up the stairs to her apartment. She took the key out and let herself into the apartment. She dropped the keys down on the table and stared at the phone. She had to pull herself together.

  Determined, she opened the bag, carefully laid out the suit and went into her bedroom. She opened the armoire and took out a cream-colored silk blouse, walked back into the kitchen and pulled the jacket of the suit over it. It would be perfect. She carefully hung the hanger from the bedroom doorknob.