Flagged Victor (29 page)

I should have driven away. Left him behind. But when you are half paralyzed by fear and laden with assorted weights—the weight of friendship most of all, the weight of obligation conjoined to that, the weight of shame not to be overlooked as a contributing force—the easiest alternative is to do nothing.

I raise a glass to nothing. I acknowledge my sympathy with this monster, Mr. Silent Death. I blow a kiss in the direction of its sweet centrifugal darkness. Someday, I know, I will join it, my private weight emulsifying into the density of this densest of black holes. Where all our weight goes. To be redistributed to the next poor sucker in the cosmic karmic lottery.

Knowing that matter can be neither created nor destroyed.

But weight can do whatever the fuck it wants.

I checked my periphery. The strip of parking spots behind the mall was still empty, except for me in Chris’s black Fiero. I saw an abandoned bicycle, pretzelled and rusted, next to an industrial trash bin overflowing with cardboard. A path led up the grass berm behind the trash bin, and then along the ridge of it, the kind of path a kid would take. I thought of the kids
Chris met on the path in the woods after the last job. They were us, Chris insisted, and I did not doubt that they had been, and I wished I could see them now, standing on the ridge, looking down at me, wondering what the fuck I was doing.

When Chris entered the mall, he walked in with the tinted visor down. This was winter. Shouldn’t that have caused alarm? Nah, a few crazy bastards rode motorcycles whenever the roads were clear. And besides, Chris did not worry about plausibility. He understood that gestures only seem out of sorts when you are uncomfortable making them. If a novelist flinches, you know he’s faking it. If a bank robber hesitates, his gun looks smaller.

The entrance was an elaborate arch, Hindu-like in its gaudy splendour, a temple devoted to cheap convenience.

A long, wide hallway. The ceiling low, the steel roof beams exposed, generous skylights up above, blotched with snow so that the light within was dim. Everywhere tile. The floors were tile. The pillars were tile. The walls were tile. The ocean of tile was marked by several islands of wood-framed boxes overfilled with wild, waxy-leafed, exotic jungle plants. Surrounding the boxes were benches propped on stubby wooden pillars. Chris sat, oblique to the bank machine, and pretended to look through his wallet.

Seven minutes and counting. He was checking his wallet as if searching for a receipt. Mostly old people in the mall that morning. White-haired women. Old men wearing ball caps and leaning on canes. But some high school kids too. What were they doing here? Skipping school. On recess. He noticed only the girls. Feathered hair and blush. Short T-shirts. Grime-hemmed winter jackets tied around their waists. Mouths working, chewing gum or talking. Jeans dragging ratty along the floor beneath a sneaker. He did
not look directly at the bank, except to note that it was open. He felt the door open at the end of the mall, experiencing a slight change in air pressure, and knew it was the Brinks delivery. He heard the cart rattling across the tile floor. He stood and walked to the window of the store next to the cash machine and looked within, as though deciding whether he needed to shop there.

It was a card store. There were aisles of cards. There were plush teddy bears on top of each aisle. There was a pregnant woman in jean bib overalls standing in the aisle closest to him, looking for just the right happy birthday message. She glanced his way and there was something in the glance, enough of a sudden tightening of her lips, to make him dead certain he could do her. He’d had sex with two pregnant women already, both of them happily married. They couldn’t seem to control themselves. They came and came and came.

He touched the handgun tucked into the waist of his pants, just to make sure it was there. It occurred to him that he would feel very foolish if it fired at that moment and blew his cock off. Perhaps the noise and subsequent screaming, followed by a second shot as he fired into his own temple, would be enough to make the pregnant woman go into labour. He angled the butt of the pistol a little to the left. Better to sever his femoral artery and bleed out in a minute or so, the pregnant woman hovering overtop of him, bathing him in tears of regret.

He knew they were coming and knew what that meant, and yet he did not register the awareness physically. His breathing stayed normal. His heart rate stayed normal. He was surprised, as ever, by this calmness. It did not seem quite right. But he didn’t give a fuck.

He stepped over to the cash machine, as if making a withdrawal.

This was his one spontaneous moment, and it was a reminder never to do anything unscripted. Without thinking, without the brake of deliberately running through a scenario, he almost put his bank card into the cash machine slot. He stopped himself just in time. How nice it would have been to leave an electronic record of his presence. This near mistake rattled him slightly, pushed his heartbeat up a tick. He took another breath and tried to concentrate on making the bank machine transaction look real. But like a debut actor, he hesitated, almost forgetting his lines. How many buttons do you press? How long do you wait before cursing and pressing them again? Fuck it. He focused on the Brinks guards walking by, watching their reflection in the metal mirror. They did not look over at him. He put his wallet in his back pocket and pulled the handgun from the waist of his pants, holding it low against his thigh.

They didn’t react when he turned around. They were intent only on reaching their destination, one pushing the cart, one striding after.

He shot the first one, the man following the cart, through the side of the thigh. The man’s leg kicked out from under him as if he had been yanked by a rope lassoed around his ankles. Chris was so surprised by the swiftness of the fall that he hesitated a moment too long before turning to the second man.

The second man was on his way into a crouch when Chris shot him. But because of the sudden change in height, the man’s thigh was twenty or thirty inches lower now, and Chris accidentally shot him through the chest instead. The bullet flung him back.

At some level, Chris could not believe what he had done.

At another level, Chris was very pleased with what he had done.

Quick Draw McGraw.

The motorcycle helmet muffled the noise. Nevertheless, he was amazed at the loudness of the cannon blasts. He felt as though birds from every waxy jungle plant must have flocked heavenward as a result. He vaguely saw that the birds were old people and teenage girls running away.

Like a vampire rising from a coffin, the chest-shot man sat up and fired. Chris only registered the movement after the glass behind him shattered. He was almost too stunned to understand how it had happened.

And then he realized, Motherfucker’s wearing a vest.

He straightened his arm and stared down the barrel of the gun. He fired once and the man was tossed away. He fired again and the man slid along the floor. He fired again and the man wrenched terrifically, twisting his arm behind his back to scratch at the unreachable place where the bullet went in. He fired again and the chamber clicked empty. He turned to the leg-shot man and saw him fumbling to lift his weapon. Chris ran straight for him, leaped over the cart, and kicked out with his size-eleven sneaker, as though he were trying to launch a soccer ball over a fence.

I
will always be grateful that I did not leave, no matter what awful things might have been happening inside.

I stayed, and in retrospect, I looked brave.

I saw Chris walking toward the car. His motorcycle helmet
dangled from one hand. He walked casually, without urgency. I gripped the steering wheel so tightly I could have ripped it from the driveshaft. I did not know whether to gun the car forward or remain still. I remained still. He barely glanced my way. There was no money in his hands, and I knew that meant something. He reached the car, opened the passenger door, flung his helmet to the floor, and sat down.

There was still no urgency. No command to flee. No reason to move.

What? I asked.

I didn’t do it, he said. His voice was calm and filled with weight.

We
parked at another mall, because parking at a mall was easy to do, and he told me what happened.

It was all coins, he said. No cash. A trolley full of coins.

He was angry. He was struggling with his emotions.

Not in twelve or fourteen times did I see them deliver anything but cash. It boggles the fucking mind.

It all boggled. It boggles still.

I had just pulled my gun out and I saw the stacks of coins, so I twisted around, stuffed the gun back in my pants, and walked right by them.

I pictured the graceful pirouette, the delicate avoidance of death.

We sat in silence. Minutes went by.

Fuck! Chris screamed. He lifted a fist to his mouth and then stopped, halfway to the destination, and lowered it again. He put his head back and closed his eyes.

What were you going to do without the mace? I asked.

It was the kind of question you do not ask.

He tilted his head toward me. I had a plan.

Would you really have shot them? I asked.

Not in the head or anything. In the leg.

In the leg?

I loaded the .357 with .38 target rounds. I didn’t want to use big ammo because I knew they’d bleed out all over the place. So I went with smaller bullets. Way less kick, far less lethal.

I’m going to grab an Orange Julius, I said, and opened the door.

I need a nap, he answered, closing his eyes again.

I didn’t come back to the car. I wandered the mall for a couple hours, then snuck out a different exit and caught a bus home.

And
that was the end for me. I had reached my moral limit. We parted there. We went our separate ways. I went back to school. He went on with what he did. And what happened to him later happened because of his own agency. I was—at least at some judicial level—an innocent bystander. I saw and reacted with horror like everyone else. The kind of horror that’s different in the aftermath of consequence. Before consequence, before the weight gets piled on, we’re all drawn to lightness. We look up and marvel at the birds and the clouds. Afterwards, we cluck in disapproval and wonder how someone could ever do such a thing.

Tsk tsk, rip, drip.

Except, of course, I did not abandon him, not even at the
mall parking lot after he told me he’d intended to shoot two guards. I did not wander the mall for hours, merely minutes. I stepped into a bookstore and bought a collection of Hemingway journalism pieces, stuff he wrote before he became a novelist. (I was very curious about what kind of life the great writer had lived before he was great.) There were two other books I would have bought, if money hadn’t been so tight, and I exited the store in a funk of defeat. The lack of money was due to the failure of the robbery, I knew, but I also suspected that the failure of the robbery was somehow due to me. I bought two Orange Juliuses (Julii?) with the seven dollars remaining in my pocket, one for me and one for Chris. I sat at a table and sipped from mine, and the sweetness unfurled in the back of my throat like the taste of rotten fruit and with the sudden cough came vomit. I vomited between my legs, as people around me stared or tried not to stare, and when I could see straight again, I abandoned my cup of Orange Julius and walked away with the other cup. When I got back to the car, Chris had repositioned himself to the driver’s seat
and was looking impatient about my delay. Did they make you make that yourself? he asked, as I handed him the cup. He took a few slurps from the straw to lower the level and then put the cup between his thighs and we drove away. I noted, as we reached the rotary, that the sky was looking like snow.

When
I was passing through Kuala Lumpur, during my travels in Southeast Asia, I found a guest house in the Chinese district where I could sit on the narrow balcony off my room and drink tea and look out on the street below. The balcony rails were painted robin’s egg blue, with decorative touches of yellow, green, or pink. It was soothing on the eyes and the conscience. The room next to mine had a bamboo birdcage, like a hanging plant, on its balcony. I loved to watch the small yellow bird hop from perch to perch, twitching its head impulsively at any sound or sight.

Checking out a few mornings later, I saw a paperback on the shelf, leaning against the container of complimentary biscuits. Travellers were always leaving books behind as they travelled, and I never failed to check what some other wanderer had thought I might like to read. So I stepped over to the shelf to examine the title. When I turned it over, I saw that I was holding St. Augustine’s
Confessions.

Flinching a little, I put the book back, and finished paying my bill. After we were done, and the old Chinese woman had nodded her thanks, I swam upward through my anxiety to the light above, and asked her if I could have the book.

She looked confused. I picked up the book and gestured with it, pulling it toward me, pushing it back to the shelf. May I?

Take, take, she said, in an irritated frustration, shooing it off her shelf like it was a fly.

On
the train south to Malacca, I started
Confessions
and found some of the things I was looking for inside.

I knew, because I had read about this memoir, that there would be a story within of a man who had done many wrong things in his youth and then turned to God. I did not want to turn to God. I was terrified of turning to God. But I read anyway because a little bird had chirped in the balcony next to mine.

I expected accusations. I expected to be called out.

I was not disappointed.

Like Augustine, I carried my thoughts back to the abominable things I did in those days. Like Augustine, I loved my own perdition and my own faults. Like Augustine, I swam in a sea of fornication. Like Augustine, I stole pears, not because of hunger, but for the sin that gave them flavour, and the thrill of having partners in that sin.