“The people want to sleep,” Grigor said, and Kwan nodded emphatically at him.
“I don’t care about that stuff,” Frank said, unconsciously confirming Grigor’s point. “I just wanna make it through my life.”
Pami said, “So do I.”
Repeating what he’d said to Maria Elena the other day, Grigor nodded at the television set, which was now showing an anti-racist demonstration in Brooklyn at which four pickpockets had been arrested, and said, “I’d like to get into that plant, for just one day.”
Frank looked at him. “Why?”
“I’d play a joke,” Grigor answered, with the same cold smile as when he’d said the same thing to Maria Elena.
“Big deal,” Frank said, not really getting it. Nodding at the television set, as Grigor had, he said, “Easy to get in there, if that’s what you want.”
Grigor shook his head. “How could it be easy? They have such security. You saw it just now for yourself. Fences, and guards, and television monitors. And there must be other things as well.”
Frank grinned; they were on his subject now. “Grigor,” he said, “getting into places is what I do. That isn’t security there, that’s Swiss cheese.”
Maria Elena said, “It doesn’t seem that way to me.”
“There’s a dozen ways in,” Frank said. “You saw the school bus?”
They’d all seen the school bus.
“On day number one,” Frank explained, “you follow the school bus around. It’s picking up all those managers and whatever they are at their houses, bringing them in. You take the night shift, midnight or whenever, and you follow it around. Day number two, you go to the last house on the route and you wait. When the school bus comes by, you climb aboard, you show everybody your MAC-11s, you—”
Maria Elena said, “I’m sorry, your what?”
“It’s a gun,” Frank told her. “Not my kinda thing, I don’t use guns, but this is just a for-instance. So, for instance, you get on the bus, you show these guns, you say everybody just sit nice and quiet. You get to that plant there, the security guards wave you right through the gate. They protect your route into the place.” Frank grinned. “My kinda security,” he said. But then he shook his head and said to Grigor, “But what’s the point? You’re inside. You can play your joke, whatever that’s supposed to mean. But what’s in it for the rest of us? There’s nothing in there.”
“Plutonium,” Grigor said.
“Yeah? What’ll a fence give me for that?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid.” Then Grigor smiled and said, “And I must admit, even with a gun in my hand, I doubt I’d be very intimidating to all the people on that school bus.”
“So there you are,” Frank said. “Now, you find me a jewelry store where you wanna do a joke, could be we’re in business.”
Exhaustion settled on Grigor and Pami and Kwan after the news. Grigor would sleep on the living room sofa, as originally planned, with Kwan on the living room floor on a pallet made of cushions from the armchairs. Pami would sleep upstairs on the sofa in the den/sewing room. Maria Elena would sleep in her own bed, and Frank in the next room in Jack’s bed.
But not yet. Neither Maria Elena nor Frank was tired yet; for different reasons, both felt keyed up, needed more time to unwind and relax. They went into the kitchen, closing the swing door, and did the cleanup together while Maria Elena told him about her background in Brazil, and he gave her a capsule summary of his own useless and repetitive life. He also gave her a more full account of the East St. Louis heist and the change it had made in his life. “Now I can’t let myself get caught. No more little hits, little risks, three to five inside and back out again. This time, I go in, I’m done for.”
“So you must reform,” she said, as a kind of joke. She wasn’t sure why she was taking his biography with such moral neutrality, but somehow it seemed to her that he was more a good man who did bad things than a bad man. He’d never, for instance, poisoned any children.
Frank was amazed at the things he was telling this woman, and finally said so: “I never shoot my mouth off like this. I don’t know what’s with me tonight, I just put my life in your hands and I don’t even know you. One phone call, and you could blow me away.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I dunno,” Frank said. “Why do people do any of the shitty things they do?”
They had finished the kitchen work and were just standing there, she with her arms folded and her back against the sink, he leaning slouched against the refrigerator. Maria Elena said, “I would not do anything to hurt you, Frank.”
He shrugged and grinned, in a joke’s-on-me way: “I guess I must believe that,” he said.
She unfolded her arms and spread them, saying, “You are the first person to talk to me in five years.”
His grin widened. “Longer than that for me. Listen, you want to dance?”
Surprised, she said, “There isn’t any music.”
“You don’t hear the music?”
She lifted her face, and at last returned his grin with her own rueful smile. “Now I do,” she said.
He stepped away from the refrigerator, and she came into his arms. He was a miserable dancer, and knew it, so he just led them in a little slow-paced circular shuffle around the kitchen table. She felt heftier, more solid, than he’d guessed; but he liked that. She wasn’t a girl, she was a woman. Her hair smelled clean, her throat was soft and musky. Holding her, moving in that slow jailhouse shuffle, he cleared his throat, geared up his courage, suffered a couple of false starts, and finally murmured, “Could we uh, uh...”
“Yes, Frank,” she said, and patted his shoulder, and kissed the side of his neck.
32
In the morning, Kwan was weaker. He remained on the pallet on the living room floor, sitting up twice to force down small portions of purees Maria Elena had made for him. He was having trouble now even swallowing the melicrate (rhymes with consecrate, desecrate, execrate), and spent much of the day asleep.
But in the intervals when he was awake, Kwan burned with a new kind of desire. He had gone through the despair, and out the other side. He still wanted to die, he still wanted to throw away this failed self, but now, somehow, somehow, he wanted the world to know. The governments, the bureaucrats, the uncaring, unnoticing people who made it possible; he wanted them all to know.
Grigor also stayed mostly in the living room, seated on the sofa where he’d slept, looking out at the empty suburban road once Maria Elena had opened the drapes. He and Maria Elena were supposed to leave by ten-thirty, to get him back to the hospital before lunch, but when she came to tell him it was time, he admitted, awkward and hesitant, that he didn’t want to go. “There’s nothing for me there,” he said, speaking softly, because Kwan was asleep again across the room. “Not any more. There’s nothing they can do for me. I want to be... somewhere. Maria Elena? May I stay?”
“I don’t think the hospital will let you,” she said carefully, sitting down beside him.
“If you don’t want me—”
“Grigor, of course, I want you!”
“It would only be for a few days.”
He was trying so hard not to plead, to retain his dignity. She saw that and responded to it. “I could call the hospital, ask if it’s—”
“No,” Grigor said. Slyness did not come naturally to him, the expression sat oddly on his face. “Maria Elena, they don’t know where you live. They don’t even know what state you live in.”