Flagged Victor (33 page)

I did not expect this to be very difficult. I was surprised, therefore, when he did not respond as enthusiastically as I was hoping. The first time I asked him, we were out drinking, and maybe I was a little boisterous about it, throwing my arm over his shoulder. He laughed a little at my proclamations that we were fearless daredevils and peerless badasses, that Butch and Sundance were our genetic ancestors, that every woman in the room should volunteer for our harem, and that we ought to do one more job. He apologized to the waitress for my lack of manners and later, when we were outside after closing, he stood by
watchfully as I tried to wrench a park bench from the ground and then pissed in a fountain filled with pennies and nickels. As he drove me home, I recited Leonard Cohen.

On another occasion, I tried a more sober approach. We met over coffee on a Sunday afternoon. It was a rainy day and he was taking the weekend off from pulling rickshaw, suffering from a tweaked knee. I asked him how things were going with the police academy application, and he expressed frustration with himself for not being more disciplined about studying. I commiserated, but I’d never heard Chris acknowledge a weakness before.

Then kick it into gear, I said, encouraging him to get serious. The summer’s not even one-third over.

I will, he promised.

I asked him about Susan. He told me she was great. She was working out—something he’d always nagged her about—and she was making bundles of cash cocktail waitressing, and they had never been so close.

So you’re not banging anyone else? I asked.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far, he said.

There were a few. The dog-collar schoolteacher was a semi-regular event. He’d had a potentially great but ultimately dissatisfying one-nighter with an incredibly hot eighteen-year-old before sneaking out her window, carrying his clothes and his hard-on, as the mother banged on the locked bedroom door. A couple others not really worth mentioning.

Nothing serious, he said.

I wondered if Susan had any idea. He did not think of them as serious, so he did not carry the weight in an obvious way. Same went for the robberies. Who would suspect him?

I asked him again about one last job, and he became more evasive. He agreed with me that it would be a good idea to do a big one, and that we should get it set up. But he failed to follow through on that notion with any concrete plans and even snapped at me once. In this, he reminded me of my old passive-aggressive self.

Another month went by. I got darker and became more frustrated with my life. My father was back to work, doing better on his carrot juice and roughage diet. I felt as though I were being strangled by my work as a teller. I tried to explain my woes to Chris on an afternoon when we went swimming. We were at Oathill Lake, where we’d met Susan and Leah a million years before. We had a dozen beers with us and discovered it was not easy to swim out to the floating dock, laden in such a way. But the attempt reminded us of other crazy things we’d done, and seemed worth the effort. We drank in the sun, standing up to piss into the lake whenever needed, then lying back down.

I’m fucked, I said. Chris asked why. I wanted to tell him. But I couldn’t. I shrugged instead. Too drunk to get back to shore, I explained.

I got an idea for another job, he said.

I listened. I needed it. I tried not to show how much.

There
was a new store near the old Canadian Tire doing amazing business. It was called The Real Atlantic Superstore and it was eating Canadian Tire’s lunch. Chris had screwed a girl who worked cashier there and she was amazed at how much money
they kept in the tills. It seemed like a no-sweat way to make forty or fifty thousand without going through the hassle of actually robbing a bank or shooting any Brinks guards. I was good with all that.

It took us another month to get our act together. My will never wavered, though I sensed that Chris’s did. He hemmed and hawed about a go date, and even when we set one, on a Tuesday evening the second week in August, he cancelled two days before, citing a bronchial infection.

Can’t do the forty-yard dash if I’m wheezing like my grandfather, he said, and coughed for good measure.

A week after that, I called him and laid down the law. I didn’t want to go back to school. I needed to go to Thailand, but I’d just registered for school because I had no other fucking choice, and the reason I had no choice was because he wouldn’t commit to doing one fucking job, after all the times I’d done what he asked. It was time to do right by me.

His voice went cold in response.

This has got to be a mutual decision, don’t you think?

Our decisions had never seemed very mutual before. But was that his fault or mine? I could not win for losing.

But Chris, who was also my friend, relented. We’ll go tomorrow, he said.

He showed up at my place late. It was not too late to do the job, but it was late for my nerves. I asked him where he’d been. He told me he and Susan had been in bed together.

I think it was the best sex we ever had, he admitted.

It was not the kind of thing I wanted to hear.

We cracked a few beers to work up our courage and discuss
some last-minute details, but Chris was still marvelling about their sex session.

Actually, it wasn’t the sex, he said, it was the after-sex. We lay in each other’s arms for over an hour. Maybe cuddling and affection isn’t full of shit after all.

Spoken like someone who gets enough sex, I said.

He laughed, but before we were done drinking, he mentioned again how amazing it had been to be entangled with her.

I almost couldn’t force myself to leave, he said.

Then he stood up.

Let’s get this shit over with so I can get back to Susan.

I gave a last glance around my shitty apartment with the shitty sofa bed and the shitty black and white TV and followed him out the door. I didn’t even bother to lock up.

We
took my car instead of his. Chris had a feeling the black Fiero might have been spotted on a previous job, and he didn’t want to use it. I didn’t want to use my car because it tightened my own complicity, but I could hardly say no. We drove the half mile or so to the Superstore and parked near the entrance. We had about fifteen minutes until closing and there was suddenly no reason to hurry. Chris didn’t fidget. He just sat. I sat too. Although we’d done these jobs a million times before, there was a sense of ending. We’d never do it again.

I’ve got an idea, I said. We’ll go to Australia and start all over. They’ve got great banks loaded with money. They’ve got more hot chicks than they know what to do with. Plus they speak English.

I was summoning Butch Cassidy. I meant that we were a duo, and we’d been through a lot together, robbed some banks and trains, loved the same woman, jumped from cliffs, travelled to New York, and that it was our last job.

I don’t think I can do it, Chris said, which wasn’t in the script.

Australia’s not so bad, I said.

I mean I don’t think I can do this job, Chris said.

A panic fluttered through my chest.

You’ve got to do it, I said.

I’m not sure I can.

It was unsettling to see Chris waver. He’d never wavered before.

It’s easy, I said. You’ve done it a hundred times.

Doesn’t feel right, he said.

Just because it doesn’t feel right doesn’t mean it won’t go right.

He looked at me, a little more determination in his eyes.

You’re probably right, he said.

I know I’m right, I said.

Same as always, he said.

Easy as pie, I said.

You’ll be here, he said.

Always am, I said.

Then let’s get her done, he said.

And he left the car.

I watched him walk across the parking lot and into the store.

Now, knowing what the years brought, I’d have given anything for a Butch and Sundance ending. Gut shot, a last look, a last joke, running out into the daylight together to face all those rifles.

Chris insisted they got away. I knew better. Which of us was right? The evidence is on my side. The moving picture stopped moving. The frame froze. Butch and Sundance, guns blazing, got nailed to the crucifix of consequence.

But I also know that, dead or not, Butch and Sundance got off easy.

The real crucifix is time itself, and the way life keeps moving on, and the way you can’t undo anything you’ve done, no matter how heavy that time weighs on you.

Drip rip tock tick.

He
came out running. I was late turning the corner of the parking lot, so I probably left him standing all alone on the curb for ten or twenty seconds. For this I will be eternally sorry.

When he was in the car, I gunned out of the parking lot, and then slowed to the speed limit on the street. I glanced over at him. He looked fine. I asked him how it went. He said it went fine. I drove. He started rooting through the money, then said we should just get rid of it. I asked him what the hell he was talking about. He told me something wasn’t right. I insisted that everything was just fine, he’d said so himself. He told me we should drive to the harbour or the lake and dump the money. I told him he was out of his fucking mind. He calmed down by the time we got home.

It
was a pleasant August evening, and we stood on the grass of the house where I had my apartment. We congratulated
ourselves on a job well done. We didn’t feel the urge to celebrate, or at least he didn’t. He had better things to do than count money together and drink from a mini-bar, or maybe he just wanted time away from me. It hurt a little, but I had what I wanted, a bag full of freedom. I could quit my job, quit school, and head out for Asia. I could finally leave Chris and Susan behind.

We shook hands. He said that he would see me later. He got into his black Fiero. He was heading back to Susan’s. I had my complicated feelings about this. As I watched him go, I was warmed by the late sun, the perfect calm. I felt free, finally, in a way I’d never known before. He drove slowly around the corner, up the hill, and out of sight. It was over. What was over? His life. It ended on the highway. And part of my life ended too.

They stopped him on the highway for speeding. They
asked him what was in the bag and pressed the muzzle of a gun against his temple. They yanked him out of the car and handcuffed him, a dozen officers on him at once. They drove him in a squad car to the police station. The cuffs were tight on his wrists. The steel cut into his skin and bent his hands back in a bad way, so he leaned forward and rested the top of his head on the Plexiglas. He stared at his knees and couldn’t believe what was happening.

They took him to the processing room and strip-searched him. They took away his belt and his shoelaces so he wouldn’t hang himself. They led him down a short corridor lined with empty cells. They gave him the larger corner cell and left him alone for the next four and a half hours.

He figured the endless wait was one of their mind games. He figured there would be more mind games coming, and that he’d be so tired and out of sorts as they arrived that he’d only understand them to be mind games in retrospect. His dad had told him enough stories like that to fill a book.

He finally heard keys in the door. He did not recognize the officer standing in the entrance. Politely, the officer asked Chris to come this way. The tone of voice—helpful, friendly, even warm—inspired an unlikely hope. Was he going to be released? He knew this was not even remotely possible. He thought about it anyway.

He was led up the stairs to the second floor, through a large office with a maze of desks and file cabinets, and into a room that was walled with white perforated foam board, the kind that muffles sound. Officer Drury, our friendly neighbourhood cop, sat behind the table in the middle of the room.

Drury greeted Chris. Chris nodded. He knew Drury was a robbery and homicide detective now, no longer just a patrolman, but it still surprised him to see such a familiar face. Drury represented the neighbourhood and people they knew in common, including his parents. Those were connections that brought home the consequences of what was happening to him. But Drury’s presence also gave him hope. He’d seen Drury four or five times over the past year, once at a backyard barbecue, and never did he get the sense that Drury had been on to him. Chris reminded himself that he’d been caught on only one job. They didn’t have him on the others. And he’d had no bullets in his gun. He’d taken out the clip and would never need to admit the gun had been loaded. No bullets. A first and only offence. Even if they stomped on him with both feet, he wouldn’t get a heavy sentence for one job, no more than three years, likely less. This was disastrous and tragic but less awful than it could have been. It was a deal with God he was willing to strike. That optimism gave him just enough strength to still the tremble in his hand.

As if reading Chris’s mind, Drury turned in his chair, motioned behind him, and asked Chris to look. Over Drury’s shoulder, Chris saw that the back wall was covered in sheets of paper, pinned there like a kid’s science project display.

Go ahead, Drury said. Feel free to get up.

He did not want to look, but he walked over to the wall anyway. Mentally, he was sluggish, and taking extra time to process even the simplest things.

He saw his life pinned to the wall.

Every job he’d ever done was described in great detail. Maps, dates, amounts, times. Photographs. Eyewitness quotes. He saw pictures of himself pulling rickshaw. He saw pictures of himself sitting in the Fiero, drinking coffee. He read the dates and flight numbers when he had left the country, and the dates and flight numbers when he returned. He saw coloured dots marking his hangouts, and geometric lines tracing his frequent routes. There was a Polaroid of a shoe print on a muddy hill. There was a still from a security camera as he walked out of a bank. There were Polaroids of a mud-encrusted deposit bag pulled from the bottom of the lake, held aloft by a scuba diver in one shot, spread out on the dock for several others. There was a scribbled note of a partial licence-plate number and an arrow drawn from that note to a document stapled directly to the board. He flipped the pages and saw that it was a transcript of an interview of the cashier who’d chased him across the parking lot. The partial, he read, had been obtained under hypnosis.