Cops and Robbers

4

It was a hot sunny day, and they were both in Joe’s backyard. Where the barbecue was in Tom’s backyard, Joe had put in a pool; one of those above-the-ground pools, four foot high and ten foot across. They were both drinking beer, Joe was in a bathing suit and Tom was in slacks and shirt, and Joe was trying to fix the pool filter. The damn thing was always getting screwed up one way or another, it was about the most delicate machine ever made. It sometimes seemed as though Joe spent his entire summers fixing the pool filter.

They’d lived next door to one another for nine years now. Tom had bought his house first, eleven years ago, and when Joe wanted to move out of the city after Jackie was born it happened the house next door to Tom was just going on the market. Back then, they’d both been in uniform, and sometimes even partnered. They’d known each other for years, liked one another, it seemed they ought to make good neighbors. And they did.

The houses weren’t the greatest in the world, but they were livable. They were in a development put up right after the war, back when the notion of curving streets was still new. They had three bedrooms, all on one floor, and a smallish attic that a lot of the guys in the neighborhood had converted to a fourth bedroom. Fortunately, neither Tom nor Joe had families big enough to need that, and neither intended to have families any bigger than they already had, so they could keep their attics as attics, and fill them with all that junk everybody gradually collects through life, that nobody has any use for anymore, but that nobody wants to throw away.

The houses weren’t bad. They were old enough to have been built before plastics were really big, which meant they were constructed fairly well, mostly of wood. They had clapboard siding that had to be painted every few years, they had half-basements for the utilities, the backyards were a pretty good size, and there was a detached one-car garage at the rear of each and every property. Gravel driveways separated the houses and defined the property lines, and every house in three or four blocks in all directions looked exactly the same, except for color of paint job or any special additions or changes that anybody might have made. Neither Tom nor Joe had made any special changes, so they both had the original basic house, just the way it had come from the architect’s drawing board; only a little older.

Most people put up fences along the sides of their backyards, mostly to keep little kids inside, but Tom and Joe hadn’t done that. Between Tom and his neighbor on the right there was a basket-weave wooden fence put up by the neighbor, and between Joe and his neighbor on the left there was a chain-link fence covered with vines put up by that neighbor, but between their own two yards there was nothing but the remains of a hedge planted by some previous owner of one of their houses. The hedge had big gaps in it where they walked back and forth all the time, and they could never agree who was supposed to keep it trimmed, so nobody did, and it was gradually dying. And taking years to do it.

In every single house in the development that either of them had ever heard of, the kitchen linoleum was all cracked and buckled. In a lot of houses, including both of theirs, the basement leaked.

They hadn’t done any more talking about the robbery idea since that one time in the car, but they’d both been thinking about it. Not that it was real, not that they thought they would actually commit a major robbery somewhere, but just that it was nice to daydream about a possible way of getting themselves out of this grind.

Joe wasn’t thinking about the robbery idea at the moment, mostly because his mind was taken up with the problem of the pool filter, but Tom’s mind was ticking along on the subject, and all at once he said, “Hey.”

Joe was sitting cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by hoses and washers and nuts. He put a double handful of parts down, wiped his face with his hand, drank beer, looked over at Tom, and said, “What?”

“What do you think the Russians would pay for him,” Tom said, “if we kidnapped their ambassador?”

Joe squinted at him in the sunlight. “You serious?”

“Why not? Profitable and patriotic both.”

Joe thought about it for a couple of seconds, and then he looked all around the backyard and said, “Where the hell are we going to keep the Russian ambassador?”

Tom looked off toward his own yard next door. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s a problem.”

Joe shook his head and went back to the pool filter. Tom drank some more beer. They both thought their thoughts.