It was a long walk to Cushing’s. I smoked three cigarettes on the way.
With no nearby streetlight, and no cars washing their headlight beams over the place, Cushing’s house was lost in shadow. There was only a quarter moon and a few stars bright above the flat fallen cornfield.
I went up to the front door. I had expected to find it securely locked and it was. I also expected to find the side door securely locked and, you guessed it, it was, too.
I went around back where against the left side of the small, enclosed back porch there was a latticework ensnarled with dead, spiky vines of some kind.
I was a good climber. At Scout camp I took merit badges in climbing — of course I also took merit badges, of the unofficial sort, in leading the most snipe hunts, using the most unique dirty words (a lot of which, to be honest, I more or less made up) and armpit farting, which is not necessarily something I’m proud of these days but I sure was at the time.
I went right up the latticework. I stood on the porch roof which was high enough so I could walk right over to the second-story window. I gave it a try. It was unlocked. I raised the bottom pane with no trouble at all.
One minute later, I stood in Cushing’s bedroom.
It smelled of: gas heat, sleep, cigarette smoke, minty aftershave, Wildroot hair oil and the same kind of bunion medicine Clarence used.
What I saw was: a well-made double bed, a large crucifix hanging above the headboard, a five-drawer bureau, two framed photographs of Cushing 1) in his marine uniform 2) in his Somerton police uniform. There was a shaggy throw rug on the floor, a tightly packed closet that smelled of mothballs, and a box filled with magazines and paperbacks, the former mostly Cavalier and the latter running to Gold Medals by people like David Goodis and Peter Rabe. It was tough to admit but Cushing and I liked the same kind of reading material.
I saw all these things in the narrow beam of my flashlight.
I spent twenty minutes in the room and found nothing spectacular except an extra handgun he kept in one drawer of the bureau and a can of lighter fluid and some underwear and socks and things in another. I then proceeded to go through the rest of the house.
I was there about an hour and a half. I learned that Cushing a) kept a tidy house b) was the proud owner of six fifths of Old Grandad bourbon c) used Trojans.
What I didn’t learn was where he kept the money he’d stolen from Roy. I looked in all the obvious places — cupboards, closets, the bottom of his clothes hamper — and then in all the not-so-obvious places... behind the couch... and under the three throw rugs on the living-room floor (in the Hardy Boys books, there were always lots of trapdoors sitting around).
And — nothing.
I stood in his dark living room, my beam off. I’d been going at it hard enough to work up a sweat. My heart pounded.
I still had the dream of taking the money to the chief and throwing it on his desk and—
The phone rang and scared the hell out of me.
I stood there trembling and feeling foolish for jumping up the way I had. It was loud and alien-sounding in the darkness of somebody else’s house...
It rang ten times and then was quiet. I decided now was the time to go. Maybe I hadn’t found the money but I hadn’t been caught, either.
I went back upstairs and out the window. Half a minute later, I stood on the porch roof looking at the barn out back. Talk about a perfect place to hide bank robbery loot.
Next time, I’d concentrate on the barn.
I climbed down the latticework and started around the side of the house and ran straight into Barney.
“What the hell’re you doing here?” I said.
“I followed you.”
“Followed me? For what?”
“I walk by your place just about every night after dinner but I’m always scared to come up to the door.”
“I shouldn’t have hit you that time, Barney. I’m sorry.”
“No, you should’ve hit me. You should’ve beat the shit out of me. The way I let Roy down, I mean. I’m the one who should be sorry.”
We didn’t say anything then, just stood in shadow and moonlight and kind of slugged each other on the arm. Good old Barney. He was a pain in the ass sometimes but he was the only kid in town who knew who Ed Emsh the magazine cover artist was — so how could you turn your back on him?
I took out a cigarette and lit it and Barney looked at the lighter and said, “Roy’s lighter, huh?”
He took it and held it up to the moonlight. “Pretty cool. Those little red jewels for eyes and all.” He handed it back. “I spent my hundred bucks already. Did you?”
The governor had given us both one-hundred-dollar U.S. savings bonds last summer.
“Nah. I gave mine to Debbie. I didn’t feel right about spending it—” I knew this would make Barney feel bad and I wanted it to — then I thought about how poor his family was and how Barney always wore pretty old clothes and how Clarence always called Barney’s father “luckless” and I said, “But I don’t blame you for spending yours, Barney.”
“You really don’t?”
“No, Barney, I really don’t.” I socked him on the arm a few more times, like it was some kind of Olympic event I was training for, good old all-American arm-socking, and then we left.
We took a back road home, one that ran along the tracks, one that wouldn’t get us seen by any wandering cop cars, one that shone with frost.
“You didn’t find the money, huh?” he said.
“Huh-uh.”
“You going back?”
“Yeah. Tomorrow I’m gonna try the barn.”
“You mind if I come?”
“I’ll be pissed if you don’t.”
The next afternoon I got chewed out when the teacher found out that I had Halo for Satan by John Evans, which is a very good mystery, tucked down behind my history textbook.
Mrs. Morrissey, hoping to humiliate me, said, “And just what does Mr. Evans have to say about Napoleon?”
I just sat there and squirmed, the way she wanted me to. “Or what does Mr. Evans have to say about Mozart?”
More squirming.
“Or Woodrow Wilson?”
You get the point. She threw out several more historical names and asked me what Mr. Evans had to say about each one of them and all I could do was sit there and take it, all the while wanting to tell her that he was actually a good writer and that she should try reading him sometime but of course you don’t talk to teachers that way.
Finally the bell rang and when I went up to the door, she said, “Tom, come here, please, and bring that so-called book of yours.”
That’s what she always called paperbacks: so-called books.
I went over to her desk. Five years ago, I would have known what to do. Put my hands out, palms down, so she could beat them with a ruler. But we were both too old for that.
“This is the third time this semester I’ve caught you reading these so-called books in class. They’re trash.”
I knew I was getting red and hot, the way I do when I get mad and can’t do anything about it.
She grabbed the book from my hands and tore it in two and then dropped the two halves in her wastebasket. “Just where it belongs.”
Last year, she’d taught us George Orwell’s 1984, and how the thought police worked. Mrs. Morrissey apparently didn’t know that she’d become one of them.
I told Barney about this at lunch. Barney looked sort of depressed today, the way he usually does when something bad happened at home, usually meaning that George had quit going to his AA meetings and was drinking again.
On the way home, a gray and frozen afternoon, Barney said, “You scared?”
“About tonight?”