The rough turf and the wooden sign stopped us more than my frantic pounding on the brake, and the coup de grace was the ditch beside the main road, which ate our front wheels and left us angled steeply downward with our headlights glaring at the weedy opposite slope a scant three inches away.
I appeared to be wearing the steering wheel on my chest. Removing it, I looked around and discovered I was still inhabiting the planet Earth. So it was likely I was still alive.
“Nicely done, Harry,” Eddie said.
I gaped at him. He had tossed his officer’s cap away into the ditch and was giving me his flinty smile. He was also in the process of disentangling himself from the jeep. “Time to move out,” he said.
Move out. Could I move at all? I hunched up and back, pushing against the windshield frame and the back of the seat until I could catch my heels on the seat itself. Sitting briefly atop the seatback, woozy and dazed, I looked around some more and saw the black Buick roaring backwards toward the intersection from the side road. Eddie was out of the jeep by now and climbing out of the ditch, leaving clothing in his wake. Uniform blouse off, tie now sailing away behind him. And also words: “Bring the carton, Harry!”
He was calling me Harry. Was the craziness over? The Buick, braking sharply to a stop just shy of the intersection, suddenly disgorged Phil, who popped out on the passenger side and yelled, “Come on! Come on!”
I went on. I finished separating myself from the jeep’s loving embrace, then picked up the carton and went staggering off across the uneven ground toward the Buick. Eddie was already there, sliding into the back seat.
I followed, pushing the carton ahead of me. Phil climbed back in, we slammed all the doors, and Jerry, at the wheel, backed up in a smart half-circle out onto the main road, shifted, and we tore off toward town.
There was civilian clothing for both of us in the back seat and we both hurriedly began to change. Phil, half-turned so he could talk to us, said, “How’d you get out?” “Eddie blew up the gate,” I said. “It was terrific. I thought we were doomed, I thought we were goddam doomed, and he just blew up the gate and commandeered a jeep and son of a bitch!” Relief was making me giddy; it was only with the greatest effort that I managed to stop talking.
Phil said, bitterly, “We had a surprise shakedown, the whole fucking prison. Thank God we had Muttgood in the gym, he helped us cover for you two. I gave him the idea you were off screwing each other on some roof.” “Fast thinking,” Eddie said. My own comment I left unvoiced.
“But we couldn’t get away for fucking hours ” Phil said. “I really thought you people had bought the farm.”
“So did I,” I said. “Eddie, you’re a genius.”
“The first principle of military endeavor,” he said. “Always keep the mission in mind. If you know what you want to do, you’ll know how to do it.”
“Anything you say,” I told him, and put on my civilian pants.
Phil said, “How’d you blow up the gate?”
“With a hand grenade,” Eddie told him. “I took several, thinking they might be useful.”
“Hand grenades?” Phil seemed startled, almost frightened. “In this car here?”
“They’re perfectly safe,” Eddie said, and patted the carton.
“The hell they are,” Phil said. “We don’t want them. Throw them the fuck out.”
Eddie cocked his head to one side. “Are you sure, Phil?” “The laser’s all we need,” Phil told him. “We start cocking around with hand grenades, all we’ll do is blow our own asses off. Throw them out.”
Eddie shrugged. “You’re the team leader,” he said, opened the carton, and took one of the grenades out. He rolled the side window down, pulled the pin, and tossed the grenade out into the weeds beside the road.
“Not like that!” Phil yelled, and when Jerry slammed on the brakes Phil screamed at him, “Don’t stop, for Christ’s sake!” So Jerry accelerated again, and a piece of black night behind us went boom.
Jerry ducked his head down into his heavy shoulders. “What the hell was that?”
“Just drive,” Phil told him, and said to Eddie, “Throw them out nice. Don’t blow things up.”
Eddie had the other grenades in his hands, holding them casually, like a juggler just before doing his act. “I didn’t want a child to find one and hurt himself,” he said.
Jerry said, over his shoulder, “There’s a bridge up ahead. Throw them in the river.”
“Fine,” Phil said. “But don’t pull any pins.”
“Right,” Eddie said.
We rode along then in silence. Eddie kept playing with the grenades, tossing them from hand to hand. We couldn’t get to that river too soon for me.
22
THE LYING AWAKE was bad enough, but the nightmares were worse. I spent the rest of that night in the gym, on a cot in a room also occupied by Eddie and Phil and Jerry, and every time terror drove me up out of dreams into consciousness I could only stare in wonder at those three, sleeping soggily-and in Jerry’s case noisily- through all the bombs and fires of my imagination. In sleep I was chased by long-nosed tanks with lives and minds of their own, I was captured by soldiers who turned into policemen who turned into Joy Boys on some black roof somewhere, I was shot, blown up, set fire to, set on by dogs, set every way but loose.
At seven I was up, completely unrefreshed; I’d never been so exhausted in my life. I went through breakfast like a mule who's been hit on the back of the head with a rock, and then staggered away to my own sweet cell, far from the gym, far from the cares of the world, and there slept until one in the afternoon, deep, dreamless sleep from which I emerged in sudden brand-new terror, thinking, We rob the bank today!
Today; good God. We had the laser. Max Nolan and Joe Maslocki had found the spot right out on the street where the Twin Cities Typewriter man parked his truck every day, never later than five minutes past five, and they now had a key to fit its ignition. The typewriter had been obtained, a guard uniform for Eddie Troyn was on tap, there were more than enough guns for the whole gang, and the names and addresses and home phone numbers of the principal bank employees were all written down in a notebook in Phil’s hip pocket. A surprise prison inspection, or “shakedown” as they called it, would definitely not happen today to throw a crimp in the plans, not right afer one had been performed last night. There was nothing at all to stop the robbery from happening. Today.
At five-thirty this afternoon. Four and a half hours from now. I jittered out of bed, shaking and quaking, and scurried off to the gym.
Bob Dombey was there. He and Max would be staying in the gym, minding the store as it were, while the rest of us went out to commit our double felony. If I could somehow have wangled that assignment for myself I maybe wouldn't have minded it all as much. It was the thought of actually being in the bank, a gun in my hand, terrified customers cowering before me, that turned my knees to jelly. And my stomach to jelly. And my brain to jelly.
Bob, looking as shifty-eyed and weaselish as ever, was actually in a pretty good mood. “You haven’t met my wife yet, have you?” he said.
“Eh?” In my condition, I could hardly remember that he was married. “Oh. Wife. No.”
“She’d like to meet you,” he said. “You two ought to get along, Alice is a real reader.”
My image around the prison, I think I may have mentioned, was that of educated hood. To the illiterate, all readers share a bond, a commoness that assures they will ‘get along’ with one another, regardless of the particular thing they happen to read. It’s similar to the belief among some whites that all black people know each other. To Bob’s statement, therefore, I merely said something along the lines of, “That’s nice.” While the major portion of my brain continued desperately to chew its nails.
“We’ve been thinking of having a little get-together around Christmas,” Bob told me. “Alice loves to cook for a gang, and she doesn’t have much chance since she moved up here.”