Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

16

THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, at four-thirty in the afternoon, one week to the day before the scheduled robbery, I myself showed the boys how to get into the bank.

I was on surveillance duty with Billy Glinn this time, the two of us sitting in the usual luncheonette, drinking the usual rotten coffee brought by the usual sleepwalking high school boy, watching nothing happen across the street. I was doing the watching and Billy was telling me a story about a time when he’d found a fellow having intercourse with a girl friend of Billy’s in the back seat of a car out behind a country roadhouse. “He run off into the woods,” Billy was saying, “but I didn’t take out after him right off.”

“You didn’t?"

“First,” he said, “I figured to settle that little girl down a bit, so I pick her up and whump her on the side of the chest. Under the arm, you know, I don’t want to hurt her titties, just bust a couple ribs to slow her down. I figure if she’s in the hospital I’ll know where she is. Then I went after the fella’s car, I pulled off the doors and the fenders and pulled the steering wheel out and messed up the engine a little bit and took and threw the hood up in a tree. Then I went off after the fella himself out through the woods. So when I caught up with him it turn out he took off so fast he left his pants behind-he’s bare-ass naked out there in the woods. Well, I was almighty angry at that fella, so-”

“Uh!” I said. “Typewriter repairman going in.’’

“What say?”

“Typewriter repairman,” I repeated; and immediately could have bit my tongue. I’d made the announcement without thinking, partly because it was so rare for anything at all to happen over there at the bank, but mostly because I really didn’t want to know what Billy had done to the naked man in the woods. I was identifying too completely.

“Typewriter repairman,” he said, finally understanding, and when I glanced at him he was laboriously printing the information in the notebook in his large childlike hand, misspelling magnificently and concentrating on every curve and every straight line. A pink tongue-tip protruded from a corner of his mouth, like a flower on a slag-heap.

It was too late. I knew at once the typewriter repairman was our route into the bank, and I also knew there was no way now to stop the information from getting back to Joe Maslocki and the rest. If only I’d kept my mouth shut Billy, absorbed in the story he was telling, would never have noticed the typewriter repairman at all. But I’d told him about it, and he was writing it down, and in the fullness of time the rest of the group would also know. My last hope was gone, and I’d done it to myself.

If only he wouldn’t think to write down the name of the company.

He said, “What’s the name on the fella’s truck?”

Shit fuck. I looked at the Ford Econoline van out in front of the bank, reading the company name emblazoned there. Did I dare lie? No, I did not dare lie. “Twin Cities Typewriter,” I said.

“Twin,” he said, and wrote it with all the grace and speed of someone etching his initials on cast iron with a rock. “Ci-” he said. “tieeeees,” he said.

While he was working his way through typewriter, the last nail was hammered into my coffin. “Here he comes out,” I said, despairing, all hope gone. “He’s carrying a typewriter.”

“Hee hee,” Billy said. Even he knew what it meant. “Wait till the boys hear about this.”

I was willing to wait forever. I watched the repairman put the typewriter away in the back of his truck, then get behind the wheel and drive away. Billy kept hee-heeing.

I felt so miserable that I forgot and took a sip of the coffee.