A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden (3 page)

We back off the elf 's bumper and fishtail out onto the narrow street nearly sideswiping a line of parked cars. The
thunk
of the bullet never comes. I'm still expecting the shot as we hit the T-section at the end of the block and turn left, out of the line of fire. Lintball accelerates and we tear up two more blocks then lean into a hard right. A very short street, then a left puts us on the perimeter road of Beacon Hill Park.

I'm twisted around and watching the rear window. There is a three-way intersection coming up, a right will put us on a shortcut through the park. Make that without the cops spotting us and we've got a win. I can hear sirens but there is nothing with us yet. We make the turn but before I can even twist back around Lintball hits the brakes so hard I pitch forward into the dash. We are forced into a moving crawl, trapped behind a horse-drawn tourist carriage. Before I can stop him, Lintball cranks the wheel and speeds off down a paved pedestrian and bicycle path. The entrance is marked by a yellow, No Vehicles sign but that seems the least of our worries.

I'm kneeling in the front seat facing back. A cruiser stops broadside at the yellow sign, spots us, and turns in. Fuck, Fuck, Fuck! I snatch the shotgun, wrangle my body halfway out the window and take aim across the roof. It's only bird shot but the blast and the yellow flame spitting from the barrel should be enough to knock a couple of rookies off our tail. Sure enough, the cruiser brakes but before I can say yahoo, a motorcycle cop steers round the cruiser and comes roaring down the lane. I raise the shotgun and fire again. He swerves, re-guns the throttle and keeps coming.

We fly over a narrow stone bridge, pass the duck pond, and the petting zoo. Lintball is again braking hard. My focus shifts. Behind us the motorcycle, lights flashing, crosses the bridge. Ahead are steel posts sunk into the pavement, the space between them too narrow for the car to pass through.

Lintball halts the car just in front of the posts. He has the look of someone who is about to throw in the towel. I put my foot over his and push the gas pedal hard to the floor — all he can do is steer. The metal posts rip both sides of the car and we pop free into a four wheel slide right across a busy intersection. We get righted, find an opening and barrel our way straight down into the heart of the James Bay neighbourhood.

I begin to think that maybe we have lost the motorcycle cop but then I see it, the white bug shield, emergency lights still pulsing from side to side. We start a long dance, us and that lone ranger on his motorbike. We're racing down the street and he's keeping up a calculated pursuit, staying just out of shotgun range but maintaining an unblinking visual. We're flat out, doing eighty maybe ninety clicks an hour, almost flying velocity on a residential street. I'm wedged out the window, the wind whipping my hair, and for one glorious moment, when that shotgun bucks against my shoulder and all four tires lift free of the ground, I am no longer bound to this earth. But we bounce right back down and the motorcycle is still coming on like a bad consequence.

I think of the Beijing howitzer — but killing's not on my agenda. I come up with another plan as we near a sharp, almost ninety degree, curve on Dallas Road. “Round this corner and stop!”

I'm straddling the middle of the road, standing there, shotgun raised in full lock and load. The motorcycle cop accelerates into the curve before he spots me and when he does, he spills. The bike slides out, the front wheel bounces off a concrete barrier and the white-helmeted cop tumbles ass over teakettle down the grass embankment. I get back in the car. Lintball is jumping out of his skin. “You did it, You did it!”

Now we are clear to backtrack to where we planted a fresh car. But right then Lintball turns back into the chase, right towards a posse of cruisers that have been trying desperately to catch up to the action. Before I can get him turned around, an unmarked but unmistakable squad car comes off a side street and he's got our tail. A hundred yards ahead a black and white pulls into a sideways slide, stops: suddenly there's a cop leaning across the hood pointing his pistol straight between my eyes. Lintball brakes, wheels into a driveway. I bail.

I struggle over a high wooden fence and start through someone's backyard, but my body's betraying me, I'm already zigzagging with fatigue, I'm too run down from the months of abuse. I lean against the rough bark of a tree and throw up a pool of phlegm. I see an apartment building, and stagger towards it, the cries of “there he is, there he is,” reaching my ears. I'm expecting to catch one between the shoulder blades any second now but I'm so worn out I feel more resignation then terror.

I make the lobby of the apartment building, push through and start knocking, trying door handles all the way, desperate to get inside one of the back-facing apartments. A laundry room, no exit. I open the stairwell door and through the plate glass window I see a cop, revolver drawn, in a crouched run along the side of the building. I'm trapped. All I can think of is an old Victor Mature movie where he plays an animal trainer helping to chase down an escaped circus tiger. He turns to the city cop and says, “When a big cat is trapped, he will climb,” and they cut to the tiger bounding up flights of stairs. I start to climb.

I knock on doors on the second floor; 208 opens and I push my way inside. The futility of my predicament floods through me; I slide the shotgun under the couch and find the bathroom so I can wash my face. The bedroom door is open and I see the elderly woman who had answered the door holding the hand of an elderly man under the bed covers. I imagine they are praying.

I return to the living room and sit slumped with the knowledge that my life is over. The couple emerge from the bedroom and introduce themselves as John and Kathy, as if I were some kind of queer guest. Kathy fetches me water — I must have looked thirsty — and John, an old Serbian freedom fighter, rolls me a cigarette.

We could have sat like that forever as far as I was concerned, but
we were interrupted by a pounding on the door. Loud voices ordered
everyone to vacate the premises.

Kathy and John did as they were told but I stayed put. The police
didn't enter, they simply left the door open and lit up the hallway
with klieg lights. An hour went by. I could hear them emptying out
the apartments all through the building. I knew they were removing
any witnesses first. At least I wasn't going to have to suck on my own
shotgun.

Waiting for death, I must have nodded off. They were all over me
before I could rub the sleep out of my eyes

The metal food slot on the cell door drops open with a bang and the hollow flushing of stainless steel toilets echoes up and down the hallway, the gut-wrenching sounds of city cells in the morning. I lay my arm across my eyes and try to shut it all out. I am coming down like a Boeing 747.

Late in the morning a phalanx of seasoned officers escort me into a courtroom. I am barefoot and wearing only paper coveralls and forty pounds of chains. They are laughing at me and congratulating one another over the morning's headlines. They are right, I am a clown. I learn I had spent four and a half minutes in the bank, long enough to apply for a loan.

Weeks pass. More court appearances. My wife hires a good lawyer but we both know I can't beat this beef with a bazooka. I plead out and although the judge listens to my junkie alibi he knows what everyone else, including me, knows — that we live in the arena of choices and now I'll have to live with this one.

I found myself stripped bare, beaten back from hope, and all out of illusions in yet another prison cell like every other prison cell I had lived in.

The media vilified me as the man who had won redemption, then trashed it. The mayor of the city passed out hardware at the cop Oscars. I lay on my bunk, stared at the ceiling and began to think up ways to take myself off the count.

I studied that ceiling until the first snowfall. I had two months until sentencing. That day I swung my feet to the floor and began to pace, hesitantly at first, seven steps in one direction, seven steps back.

A M
AN
T
HEY
L
OVED

M
Y HANDS ARE BROKEN, MY RIBS ARE BROKEN
, and I'm dope sick beyond belief, but I know the real pain is in the mail, deeper than broken bones. It's about broken promises, broken hearts, and broken lives. The headlines in the newspapers are as black and bold as gunpowder.
The Jackrabbit Stumbles
: after thirteen years of freedom, thirteen years of a publicly redeemed life, I have gotten myself wired, robbed a bank, shot at policemen, and held two people hostage. A nightmare I can't imagine away or hide from in sleep.

I collapse on my bunk and try to shut out the glare of the twenty-four hour light. Behind my eyelids life has become everything I can't get back.

I'm forty-nine years old, married to one of the most interesting and beautiful women on the planet, and parent to two incredible pieces of magic, Sophie, who is ten, and Charlotte, seventeen. The forfeiture is unbearable. I see a clear plastic laundry bag lying in one corner of my cell. If I could only get it over my head, wind it tight, airtight, at the neck.

I keep the garbage bag clutched in my hand for five days, as I lie fetal, curled around that cavity that others call the centre of their being. I lie down with the pain and I sweat and I weep. Every five minutes I gather enough strength to do it, to place that bag over my head, and every five minutes and one second I gather enough strength not to do it.

By the weekend I can sit up. Another inmate brings me a plate of congealed stew with a biscuit. I manage to swallow a few plastic forkfuls of the stew, but I don't manage for long. I charge for the toilet bowel and sell a Buick all over the corner of my cell.

The guy who brought me my dinner also helps me change clothes and clean up. That evening I sit on the edge of my bunk, sip a cup of water, and this time keep the biscuit down. I glance over at the plastic bag, now filled with sweaty socks and underwear. Who'd want to be sticking their head into that?

Susan visits. She's been here on previous days but this is our first contact; I couldn't get up to see her the other times. I measure the two guards assigned to escort me to the visiting area. The top of my head comes level with the epaulets on their cannon ball shoulders. I step carefully. I know I am in ‘roid country; nobody grows that big eating homemade bread.

They place me in a security booth and it is all Susan and I can do just to sit there, so numb and so saddened, and watch each other weep through that scratched-up sheet of plexiglass. And when we pick up those black forty-five pound telephones and hold them to our ears, all we can do is listen to that weeping until the hour has passed and the guards come for me.

Susan begins to visit every day. Our words come slowly, the trembling of my face, of my hands, lessens. Soon thereafter my lawyer, a good and kind friend, begins to show up for a series of consultations. Each time he comes I am led out to the interview room, and he is waiting, yellow legal pad in one hand, pen in the other, poised to take notes. Just the facts, ma'am. With my bones back in my body, my will to live barely restored, it is already time for me to help him to form a narrative of the crime, to gain an understanding of the facts. Good luck.

As I walk through it with him, recollecting the carnage, it is the faces that emerge most clearly. Bank employees, unfortunate customers, the innocent bystander, the elderly couple in their apartment: the fright in their eyes, the bewildered expressions. And finally, the masked and goggled Emergency Response Team. I didn't ever see the actual faces of the ERT officers, but their feet left a lasting impression.