Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [7]
“Stop,” he said.
We had come to a dingy little place with a neon sign sizzling in the window: BENJAMIN’S. A red wooden door so thickly painted I could have scratched my name on it with a fingernail. He pulled it open and we went inside. A TV set turned the air blue and dusty; rows of bottles topped with silver globes glittered before a mirror. We felt our way to the bar and sat down. I unbuttoned my raincoat. A man in an apron turned his cheek to us, while his eyes stayed fixed on the television.
“What’ll you have?” the robber asked me.
At our house, nobody drinks; but I didn’t want to seem unfriendly. “Pabst Blue Ribbon,” I said at random.
“One Pabst, one Jack Daniel’s neat,” said the robber.
The bartender poured Jack Daniel’s blindly, while watching a commercial for potato chips. But he had to turn away to hunt a glass for my beer. Then the news began and he gave up, passed me a stark tall can unopened and held out his palm for whatever money the robber put into it.
Various politicians were traveling around the countryside. We saw them getting off airplanes, setting right in to shake hand after hand like people hauling rope. We saw a man who’d been acquitted by a jury. He believed in the American system of justice, he said. There was a commercial for Alka-Seltzer.
“Hit me again,” the robber told the bartender, holding out his glass. I opened and took a sip of my beer. The good thing about sitting at a counter was that I didn’t have to look at him. We could each pretend the other wasn’t there.
My eyes were used to the dark by now and I could see that this place was hardly better than a barn—barren, dirty, cold. It would have been cold even in July; no sunlight ever reached it, surely. I wondered what the restrooms were like. I needed to go to one but I wasn’t certain of the procedure.
They had never covered this problem on those cops-and-robbers shows.
In the local news, there was a school board meeting. A policeman’s funeral. A drug arrest. A five-car accident in Pearl Bay. A bank robbery in Clarion.
The announcer’s face gave way to film of a different quality, blurred and shadowy. On this film a small group of people stumbled in line, like dominoes. The foremost person, a squat man in a business suit, tore something from his chest. An arm loomed out. Another man backed jerkily away, half hidden by a tall, thin woman in a light-colored raincoat. The man and woman disappeared. Several faces swam forward, and someone put a white scarf or handkerchief to his or her eyes. I was fascinated. I’d never before been able to observe a room after I had left it.
The announcer returned, a little blank of face as if he’d been caught unawares. “So,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Well, that was … and remember you saw it here first, folks, a genuine bank robbery in progress. Police have identified the suspect as Jake Simms, Jr., a recent escapee from the Clarion County Jail, but so far no one has stepped forward to name his hostage. However, roadblocks have been set up and Clarion’s police chief Andrews feels confident that the suspect is still in the area.”
“Come on,” said Jake Simms.
We slid off our stools and left. In the doorway I glanced back at the bartender, but his eyes were still on the screen.
“I knew it would work out like this,” the robber told me.
“But you’re past all the roadblocks.”
“They’re looking for me by name.”
We threaded our way through even larger crowds than before, none of them apparently going anywhere at all. As far as I could tell, the gun wasn’t jammed in my back any more. Was I free? I stood still.
“Keep moving,” he told me.
“I want to find the bus station.”
“What for?”
“I’m leaving.”
“No, you’re not.”
We stood square in the middle