Hard Cash

3

Two weeks ago, after the first real snowfall, Jon had gone out and bought a Christmas tree. An artificial one, a two-foot-high affair that was an aluminum tube with holes you stuck plastic piney branches in, but a Christmas tree. Then, when he got home, he got embarrassed thinking about how Nolan would react to any such deck-the-halls bullshit, and he tossed the thing, still packed away in its cardboard box, unassembled, into a closet and forgot about it.

But today it had snowed again, and it was beautiful snow. He had looked out the window, and the world was a damn Christmas card. It had snowed yesterday too, but that was slushy, messy stuff. Today was colder, the snow dry, like a fine white powder, and he had gone straight for his sketch pad and grabbed his winter coat and gotten in the car and driven out into a wooded area and began drawing. At dusk he headed back, with half a dozen detailed sketches under his arm (some in the styles of cartoonists whose winter scenes Jon admired — Milton Caniff, George Wunder, Stan Lynde) and stopped downtown at the Airliner to warm up over something alcoholic. By the time he got back to the antique shop and inside and upstairs in the living quarters that had been his uncle Planner’s and were presently being shared by Nolan and himself, Jon was full of Christmas cheer, and soon he was hauling the artificial tree out of the closet and putting it together pine by plastic pine.

Jon was twenty-one, short but powerfully built, with a headful of curly brown hair and the sort of pleasant, boyish blue-eyed features that made girls want to cuddle him. Which was an asset, of course, but Jon himself didn’t much like the way he looked, and didn’t much care, either, his wardrobe running to sweatshirts with comics characters on the front and old worn-out jeans with patches on the ass.

He was a cartoonist, or anyway wanted to be. He’d loved comic books since he was a kid, and had been trying to write and draw them himself as long as he could remember. He’d kicked around from relative to relative and from school to school while his mother (a third-rate nightclub “chanteuse”) was on the road, and fought the trauma of his fatherless, all but motherless childhood by escaping into the four-color, ten-cent fantasy world of the comics. It was a hobby that grew into a way of life, and would, hopefully, one day become a livelihood.

So far he was unpublished, but he was getting pretty good, so it shouldn’t be long now. But drawing comics was a risky field to try to go into. Right now, with comic books suffering because of distribution problems, and underground comics having run out of steam after the goddamn Supreme Court’s obscenity ruling, and newspaper comics being shrunk down to the size of postage stamps, he’d do better going into blacksmithing.

But what the hell — he loved the comics. He would stay with it.

He put the assembled tree on top of the television set. It looked naked. Pretty girls, Jon thought, still full of Christmas spirit, look good naked; plastic trees do not. He had neglected to buy any decorations or tinsel, but guessed he would get around to that tomorrow. Maybe some gifts under the tree would improve things.

“Yeah, gifts,” he said out loud, tinning on the television. (Some cop show was on — he couldn’t tell which, as they all looked pretty much the same to him, especially the ones with helicopters flying around constantly.) He flopped onto the couch by the wall and watched without watching.

The artificial tree, barren of gifts, made him think how absurd it was of him to decorate the living quarters of a man like Nolan with the sentimental ornamentation of the season. It was equally absurd to think of buying gifts to put under the tree. What did you buy a tough guy for Christmas, anyway? Maybe wrap up a box of .38 slugs in a bright red bow and put it in his stocking mask?

Yes, it was a real problem, buying a bank robber a gift.

And then Jon remembered.

Hey, he thought. Those days are over.

It hit him, perhaps for the first time, and he had the strangest damn feeling: a mingling of glad and sad, loss and gain.

Nolan was retired.

Nolan wasn’t a thief anymore. Nolan had put his long-barrel .38 Colt and shoulder holster away in moth balls, hadn’t he? To help an old buddy run a restaurant. Retired.

Which meant Jon, too, was retired. From that particular precarious life-style, anyway. Heists and guns and bullets and blood were back in the paperbacks where they belonged, back in the movies and comic books, back on the tube, like that mindless cop show he wasn’t paying attention to, and Jon was relieved. The game was over, and he was relieved.

And vaguely sorry.

But mostly relieved, shit, when he thought back on it, on two years of breaking the law and having people shooting at you and, Christ, sometimes shooting back. He shuddered, wondering how he’d ever let himself get mixed up with somebody like Nolan in the first place.

He liked Nolan. He admired him. But he did not worship the man, even if at one time he’d come close to doing so; in the very beginning, he’d seen Nolan as a living personification of the strong, silent heroes of popular mythology — the supermen of the comics, the gunfighters and private eyes of the movies. Nolan was like somebody who’d walked right out of Jon’s fantasy world, and it had been exciting.

Now, however, Jon knew there was a fuck of a lot of difference between fantasy and fact; now he knew the reality of seeing people he cared about — Planner, for instance, and Shelly, a girl Jon’d made love to — die, brutally, cruelly, with hands cupping their own blood, as if they were trying to catch and hold onto the life that was gushing out of them and dripping through their fingers. Jon had known the terror of having the police after you, and he had known what it was like having people far worse than police after you, trying to kill you. And you trying to kill them back.

It wasn’t that he’d grown moral all of a sudden. He still felt being a thief wasn’t any worse than being a politician or a business executive, although he felt thieves were generally more honest. And insurance companies were dens of damn thieves, dealing with customers, trying to screw them like thieves, and who were at least partially dependent on the self-admitted thieves like Nolan to keep in business. No, all of the old rationalizations held up for him. In a corrupt society, his uncle Planner had once told him, a thief at least has a chance to be an individual, to be honorably corrupt. The idea of being a thief didn’t bother Jon.

The idea of killing did. Jon valued human life. He had respect for it, did not believe in hurting people. He did not enjoy seeing people suffer, could hardly bear to see someone suffer.

On the heist in Detroit, two months ago, he had killed a man.

A crazy old man named Sam Comfort, who was pointing a shotgun at Nolan, getting ready to let loose that shotgun straight into Nolan’s guts.

And Jon had shot Sam Comfort.

A man who was a double-crossing, probably psychopathic and wholly corrupt thief, in the worst sense of that word, who had betrayed his compatriots time and time again. Killed time and again. A man who, in the opinion of many, deserved to die anyway.

In this case, however, Jon couldn’t make the rationalizations work for him. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Detroit.

And Detroit wasn’t all He would lie awake and think back to the earlier heist the very first one, the Port City bank job, and realize that that time the same thing could have happened: guns could have started going off. He and Nolan had been holding guns on innocent people at that bank, innocent people who could have gotten in the way of guns going off and been killed.

It was hard enough living with the thought of killing a Sam Comfort. But the thought of even the possibility of causing the death of an innocent person, a “civilian,” as Nolan would put it, was something Jon could not bear.

So he was glad the game was over. He would miss the positive side of it, the excitement, the heady rush brought on by the presence of danger, the satisfaction of working well under pressure, and of meeting Nolan’s high professional standards; but as for the dark side, the blood and killing and all of that, good riddance.

The cop show on the tube seemed to be ending, a shootout in progress. People were dying in that sterile, bloodless way people die on television. He got up and switched the channel and the same thing was going on, but with slightly different faces. He turned it off, got his sketch pad, and began to doodle, finally roughing out a graphic story idea he’d had in the back of his head a while. He lost himself in the drawing, and the upsetting thoughts of death and violence left him.

Around nine he heard Nolan coming up the steps.

“How come back so early?” he asked Nolan as he came in, not looking up from the sketch pad.

“Here,” Nolan said, and Jon looked up.

Nolan was tossing something at him.

“You’re maybe going to need that,” Nolan said.

Jon looked down at what he’d caught: a gun.

Nolan disappeared into the bedroom.

Jon stared at the snubnose .38 as if he couldn’t remember what it was for. In a moment Nolan was coming out of the bedroom, getting into his shoulder holster.

“I had a visitor at the Pier tonight, lad,” Nolan was saying. “George Rigley.”

“Uh, George who?”

“Rigley.” He was loading slugs into the long-barrel .38 now. “President of the Port City bank.”

“Port City... Jesus. Did he...?”

“Recognize me? Like a long-lost identical twin brother.”

Jon didn’t say anything. He was having trouble just thinking. Talking was out of the question.

“He wants us to rob the Port City bank again,” Nolan said

Jon felt his mouth drop open, but nothing came out

“We got two choices, kid. The guy’s evidently been doing some book-juggling, and wants us to rob his bank for him so he can cover, and we can do that. That’s one choice. The other choice is obvious.”

The other choice was to kill the bank president.

“Well, Jon,” Nolan said, shoving the gun down snug in the underarm holster. “What’s your preference? Choice A or B?”

“How... how about ‘none of the above.’”

“That’d be my choice too... if it was a choice.”

“Then... then I suppose we rob his fucking bank. Christ.”

Nolan sat on the edge of the couch. Jon was sitting up now; it wasn’t the land of news you took lying down. Nolan said, “There are some things we have to do tonight. Kid? You listening?”

Jon let out the breath he’d drawn in and had been holding for forty seconds or so. “Yeah. I’m okay. Go ahead with what you were saying, Nolan. Shoot.”