Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [48]
Jack had never thought of it that way. Of course it was shitty, having to go through the bleeding and cramps, and have the babies or worry about having them; but that was the nature of things, and he could not, even with this small insight, really feel sorry for her. But he said, “No, now listen, don’t worry.” But she did have a right to worry, because all that was holding them together was their need to use each other. Her period was the same as if he ran out of money. So she had a right to some reassurance, because he did not really want to be rid of her. This surprised him a little. He was very nice to her all day, but as if to test him, she was moody, spiteful, and sullen. That night she had a sick headache and bad cramps, and the others went out without her. They went to a movie, and afterward, Sue went back to her room alone. Jack and Denny stopped in a small bar.
“Listen, I’m running out of bread,” Denny told him. “I got about twenty-five left. I don’t know where it goes.”
“I’m getting a little short myself,” Jack said.
Denny drank a shot of whiskey and followed it with half a glass of beer. He wiped his mouth. “Why don’t we dump the chicks and go over to the East Bay? I know a liquor store we can score off of, down in the spade part of town. The cat has about fifteen hundred in a floor safe in the back, where there’s a little desk in a hallway between the front of the store and the place he keeps his cases. The clerks all know the combination. All we got to do is go in there late when the clerk’s sittin at the desk eatin, scare hell out of him, and get him to open the safe.”
“I haven’t done anything like that in a long time,” Jack said.
“We got to get money someplace,” Denny said. “Lissen. Tommy cased this one himself before he went to Mexico; we were gonna knock the place over just the two of us, because you know there wasn’t enough for everybody, and it’d only take a couple guys to pull off. Tommy went into the joint to pick up a pint or something, and there wasn’t anybody in the store, and like he was gonna just go around the counter and tap out the till, when he sees this curtain at the back, so he goes back there and pulls the curtain back, and there’s this sandwich and thermos jug on a table, and this guy comin up from way in the back, and Tommy hears a toilet back there flushin, and the guy comes runnin up with a magazine in his hand, but not quick enough, cause Tommy sees under the table the open door to the safe, one of those round countersunk jobs. So he gets his pint and cuts out. But we never did get around to it. He had to take off for Mexico. But we could do it. It’s a lockup.”
Jack was on the verge of saying, “All right, let’s do it,” but something stopped him; not fear, certainly not the illegality—he had done much worse things—but perhaps the very cheapness of it. Robbing a liquor store, was that what he was cut out for? He had come to the city to think, and now he was being offered a proposition that again would make thinking unnecessary—but it all seemed so endlessly dull; an infinite series of holdups, parties, girls, bad dinners, and worse hotel rooms—he could not see any difference between this and working for a living, and with working there was not that nagging anxiety about being braced by the police. Jack had known a lot of people who stole for a living because they were bitter, and many who stole almost sexually, getting a secret charge out of the act. And Denny. He did not know why Denny was a thief, unless it was just habit.
“Why don’t you get a job?” he asked.
Denny looked at him strangely. “Fuck that shit,” he said. “Is that what you’re worryin about?”
“Not really,” Jack said.
“Lissen, man, I seen enough fuggin shit to last me the rest of my fuggin life. I seen guys get killed for nothin, I mean nothin, man. Fuck that shit.”
“Were you in the Korean war?”
“I was in the Third Marines, man, me and Dale. Remember Dale Phipps? He’s still in. He’s a staff sergeant