Bob Cummings had been Robert in the movies. Ray Fraley had watched his movies at the Fox, in Detroit, when he was a boy. Not a pot to piss in then. If he’d had a way then to articulate his desires, they would have come out: IRA, life insurance, mortgage, etc. It is these financial instruments that give form to his dreams. His dreams wrap themselves in their legal names.
Impermeabile means raincoat in Italian. Ducking into Renascente on a rainy February day, “Vorrei un impermeabile.” Feeling like Gregory Peck, picturing himself in the future, telling the anecdote of this needful Roman purchase, the rain angling out of a slate sky onto the very history of Western civilization.
But it wasn’t Robert Cummings stalking those drafty halls he now owned. Bob Cummings hadn’t sat on his patio or poured an old-fashioned at his wet bar. Who?
And what else? He has a very exciting oral-genital relationship with a married middle-aged secretary in his office named Maureen. He has a teenage daughter with a canopy bed. An ex-wife whose wedding he will attend because they are “good friends.” When he pictures her mentally, he sees a figure sitting propped up in bed, wearing sunglasses, a hundred-millimeter filter cigarette burning in an ashtray at her bedside right next to her sweating tumbler. That aggrieved noontide voice.
This car purrs just like a kitten.
1466 East Fifty-fourth Street
This is the talk of the neighborhood. Over the fence while you hanging the wash and whatnot: Y’all hear what’s up at Sheila’s? What they coming in all bold like that unless they wanting people to know. Because they don’t know how dull it can get around here. They are the number one topic, mmmmm-hmm. They gonna kill the cops. They gonna start a revolution. Revolution? What we need a revolution for? Just open a supermarket around here we don’t be going to Sam’s for every damn thing. Ha-ha-ha.
Meanwhile …
At 1220 hours Metro Squad Castle-Bravo Six on routine patrol did observe two unattended vehicles at location rear of One Four Five One East Fifty-third Street matching APB descriptions on vehicles sought in Eight Three Three West Eighty-fourth Street incident. Per bulletin, dispatch informed but no further action taken.
EN ROUTE TO GRIFFITH PARK, the suitably remote location where they plan to release Ray Fraley with a stern warning and switch to the Corvair, Yolanda, following in the new car, misses the exit. Tania, who drives the Lincoln, watches helplessly in the rearview as the little blue car continues on the freeway, heading toward beautiful downtown Burbank. That was stupid. Teko curses.
Once in the vast park, is she a little surprised to find herself on Crystal Springs Road? She’d graduated from Crystal Springs School for Girls, where she’d met and commenced the seduction of Eric Stump.
She sees it now as an act of bourgeois self-annihilation. I mean, wanting to be a housewife at age sixteen?
But anyway, Crystal Springs, the reservoir itself, had been a long streak of glittering mercury in the sun that slanted over the coastal ranges, another of the Bay Area’s limitless ornamentations, fenced off from the public and viewed mainly from the viaducts she drove her MG across.
Teko leans close. He whispers, “We have to waste this guy. Yolanda’s not showing up.”
Tania’s eyes fill with tears.
“We’ll leave his body in the bushes. Nobody’ll find it for days. Now, you knock it the fuck off. The last thing I need is any of your rich bitch bullshit. Just shut up and do as you’re ordered.”
“We could wait a little longer. Please. Just a little while longer.”
They wait. The radio reports again on the useless raid on Eighty-fourth Street. The garbage-strewn house has been found to be unoccupied. Teko sneers. Tania reaches out to change the station, slaps away Teko’s hand when he moves to restrain her. It is an unpremeditated, unprecedented act, and they stare at each other in silent hiatus before Tania turns the knob, seeking music.
In the back, Ray Fraley hears the famous voice singing the grinding dirge: “If I ever get out of here, thought of giving it all away.” He says to himself, Oh Yes God Please.
Whispering again: “Fucking have to off him. It’s him or us.”
“Just wait. She’ll come.”
“You do what I tell you, or I swear it’ll be both of you rotting in the bushes.”
Tania has basically made up her mind that she isn’t going to allow Ray Fraley to be killed just because Yolanda can’t read road signs, or follow big white cars, or whatever her problem is. She works to convince herself that this mutinous plan is worth it on the basis of what seems like the distant memory of Ray Fraley’s not-so-bad smile as he leaned out of his car window to talk to two apparent hitchhikers in the early morning. The bright, mildly lecherous smile of a man taking time out of his busy day.
“We wait five more minutes.”
“I’m not fucking bargaining with you, Tania.”
“Five minutes, then you can kill him.”
“The fuck? Quiet the hell down, will you?”
“Just not yet. Don’t kill him yet. OK?”
“Just, like, shh! Shhhhh! Come on.”
Tania finds it easier to talk to Teko like this when she’s alone with him. Together he and Yolanda just wear her down. But separately they’re both little nothings. In the old days she wouldn’t have given either of them the time of day. She is amazed at how easily that old sense of class privilege resurfaces. On the other hand, she’s a little proud of how well she’s adapted; this is the very first time in her life she has had to associate, for a sustained period, with people she hasn’t chosen.
“OK. OK. I’m ready to move on to plan B.” Teko is holding a revolver and gesturing with his head toward the huddled prisoner in the back. He nervously cocks and uncocks the weapon’s hammer, the barrel aimed carelessly at his own femoral artery.
“Are you sure you want to do it in the car? Pretty messy.”
“Well, I guess not. But where’m I supposed to?”
“I don’t know. It’s your plan.”
“Well, I can’t just shoot him in plain sight.”
“Well, we can’t just go driving around with a bloody body in the back.” Tania slackens her face to demonstrate the stupidity of this prospect.
“You’re shouting again.”
“I’m not. I’m not shouting. This is talking.”
“Well, whisper.”
“I’m so sick of whispering. I don’t have a whispering voice. Some people were born to go mousing around whispering their whole lives and I’m not one of them. I’m so sick of whispering I could scream.”
“Don’t scream.”
“I’m not screaming. I’m not shouting. I’m just sitting here talking. You’re the one who puts us in these situations where we have to be going around talking in these little like whispery voices. Talk about something else and we don’t have to whisper. Just, like, change the subject.”
“You’re crazy. You’ll never be an urban guerrilla. You just don’t understand that this sort of work calls for instantaneous reactions to rapidly unfolding developments.”
“OK. Sure. I don’t understand. Let’s just shoot the guy. Mr. Fraley, will you please sit up?”
“Stop! Shouting!” screams Teko. “Fraley, you just lie there, man! Don’t listen to her! She is fucking around with us.”