3
Golden dust motes
rolled in the sunlight angling through a hat-sized hole in the roof
of the barn. Griff was always meaning to fix it but that would
happen only if the Rochester Wagon Works opened its doors again and
rehired the eighty-six men they had laid off four and a half years
ago. Griff was a big man, blond and open, and in the old days had
always been laughing. He had a wife who’d loved him since they’d
been kids on adjoining farms, and two little girls who never seemed
to tire of running up to him with their arms spread wide, having
him pick them up and pretend he was dancing with them.
But one day Mr.
Rochester himself had come to the plant and said, with genuine
dismay, “Men, the bank won’t loan me no more money and our bills
are just too far backed up; I’m gonna have to lay you all off. I’m
sorry, men.” There had been real tears in Mr. Rochester’s eyes, and
the men knew the tears were not fake because Mr. Rochester was just
like them, a workingman who’d got lucky with his invention for
building surreys a certain way, and who then, like most workingmen,
got unlucky, too. He knew a hell of a lot about surreys, did Mr.
Rochester, but he didn’t know a damn about money; his pride and
fear were such that he wouldn’t listen to anybody either, even the
well-intentioned bankers who’d meant to help him. So he’d gone bust
with a bad hand, and his eighty-odd employees had gone bust right
along with him.
There followed those
events that always seem to follow men losing good jobs. Drink
turned some of them mean and they beat then-loving wives, and some
even beat their children. At workingmen’s taverns blood spilled all
the time now, not just during the occasional Saturday brawl. The
best of the men, the ones who didn’t turn to drink and violence,
tried to get other jobs; but, prosperous as the town was, there
were no other jobs, not good ones anyway, not ones that could
replace what they’d earned (and the kind of self-esteem they’d
felt) as employees of the Rochester Wagon Works. These men took to
serving the gentry, for there was a large class of rich people in
the town. They became gardeners and handymen and drivers and
housepainters; they learned how to say yes
ma’m and yessir so sweet you almost
couldn’t hear the contempt in their voices for the spoiled, pushy,
inconsiderate rich folks who employed them. They had no choice.
They had families to feed.
It was sometime
during this period when the happy Griff became the sorrowful Griff.
He worked half a dozen jobs that first year after Rochester closed
down, the worst of them being as a helper to one of the town’s
three morticians. He had hated seeing how the blood ran in the
gutters of the undertaker’s table and he had hated the white
fishbelly look to the flesh of corpses and most especially the high
fetid smell of the dead that he could never quite get clean of his
nostrils. He tried getting back to farming somehow, but this was a
time of many bank failures in the midwest, currency shaky as hell,
and so he could find nobody to stake him.
It was then that he
evolved the idea of robbing banks. It would be simple enough. He
would take two of the men he had worked with at
Rochester-Kittredge, because he had good nerves and was
intelligent; Carlyle, because he had the kind of Saturday night
beery courage you needed in tight spots-and together they would
travel in a three-hundred-mile semicircular radius (he had this
drawn out on a map) and hold up banks three times a year. Kittredge
and Carlyle were happy to be invited in. They had agreed to two
inviolate propositions: Griff had the final say in any dispute, and
there was to be no violence. No violence whatsoever. It was in the
course of their very first robbery that either Kittredge or Carlyle
(Griff could never be sure) panicked and the little girl got
killed. It had been purely an accident-my God, nobody would shoot a
little girl-but that didn’t make her any less dead. The three men
had been so sickened by the sight of the little girl lying in blood
and dead on the floor that they forgot to grab the money. They left
with guns blazing, empty-handed. They were lucky to escape.
***
So now he stood in
the dusty sunlight of the long July afternoon in a barn that
smelled of wood and tarpaper and hay and dogshit from the girls’
collie. It smelled most especially of the grease and oil he used to
work on his top grade surrey, the one expensive thing he’d ever
bought in his forty-one years, bought at a forty-percent employee
discount from Rochester back in the good working days. The surrey
was fringed and built on elliptic end springs, and had axles of
fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, wheels of seven-eighths of an inch
and quarter-inch steel tires. The gear was made of second-growth
timber ironed with genuine Norway iron and the upholstery was Evans
leather. How nice it had been to take this spanking new surrey out
for a Sunday drive behind a powerful dun, the girls sitting between
Griff and his wife, the neighbors smiling and waving. Down Main
Street they’d go every sunny Sunday, church done and a beef roast
on the stove, past the Southern Hotel and the big stone bank
building, the telegraph office and the telephone office, and
McDougall the dentist’s. Even a workingman could feel respectable
in such circumstances.
Griff was just oiling
the axle when he heard the collie, standing in the sunlight just
outside the shade of the barn, start to bark. He looked over his
shoulder and saw Carlyle. Carlyle looked upset. He also looked
drunk. Ever since the little girl had died, Carlyle had spent most
of his time on whores and whiskey. Griff no longer liked the man.
“Told you I’d just as soon not have you come on my property.”
“Don’t give a good
god damn what you told me.”
Griff put down the
oil can and turned around. He made fists of his hands. Because he
was big and blond and fair, most people mistook him for a Swede,
but he was Irish and had an Irish temper. “Don’t appreciate you
talking to me that way on my own property.”
Carlyle didn’t seem
to hear. “He’s here.”
“Who’s here?”
“Right in
town.”
Griff could see that
Carlyle was caught up in his fear and his drunkenness. He reached
out and took the gawky man by the shoulder. Carlyle smelled of
sweat and heat and soured beer. Griff turned his face away as he
said, “I want you to get hold of yourself.”
“I got hold of
myself.”
“No, you
don’t.”
“I’m tryin’ to tell
you, Griff, he’s god damn here.”
“And I’m tryin’ to
ask you, Carlyle, who’s god damn here.”
“Her father.”
“Whose father?”
“The little
girl’s.”
“Jesus Christ,” Griff
said. He almost never took the Lord’s name in vain. To him that was
a significant sin-even a mortal sin that had to be confessed as
such to Father Malloy-but right now he didn’t care. “How do you
know it’s him?”
“We’ve seen his
picture, ain’t we, a hunnerd times.”
“You’re sure?”
“Griff, I’m
positive.”
“Maybe it’s just a
coincidence.”
“Could be, but I
doubt it.”
Griff wiped sweat
from his brow with his forearm. “How the hell could he have found
us?”
“Maybe he never quit
lookin’.”
Griff came out from
the cool shadows of the barn to stand in the sunlight with Carlyle.
Carlyle looked old now. He had a couple of days’ worth of beard and
some of his hairs were black and some of them were white. His nose
was kind of running and he hadn’t cleaned the morning dirt from the
corners of his eyes.
“What we gonna do?”
Carlyle said.
“Nothing we can do.
Not right now. Not till we see what he wants.”
“Oh, I can tell you
quick and proper what he wants, Griff.”
“And what would that
be?” Griff said. He felt calmer now, more in control of himself,
the way he usually did.
“He wants us dead.
All three of us.”
“Can you blame him?
We killed his little girl.”
“Not on
purpose.”
“That don’t bring her
back to life.”
Carlyle looked as if
he were about to cry. “What the hell we gonna do, Griff? You’re
supposed to be the boss. You tell me.”
“You go back to the
hotel and relax.”
“Yeah, sure, Griff. I
sure can relax knowin’ some sonofabitch is lookin’ for me.”
“Get ahold of
Kittredge.”
“And tell him
what?”
“Tell him to meet us
at nine tonight at the west end of the Second Avenue bridge.”
“You know what he’s
like, Griff. He won’t be able to handle this.”
Griff stared at him
hard. “He won’t have much choice, Carlyle. None of us do.” He
nodded to the street. “Now go tell him and then stay in your room
till you go to the bridge.”
“You sure like givin’
orders, don’t you?”
Griff smiled without
much humor. “If you want me to play boss then you better get used
to me givin’ orders. You understand me?”
Carlyle looked sulky.
“I don’t like none of this.”
“Get going. And get
going now.”
Carlyle shook his
head, wiped some sweat from his face, and then set off down the
driveway to the street.
***
Griff watched the man
go. Then his girls came up and jumped up and down around him in
their faded gingham dresses. If good times ever rolled around
again, the first thing Griff planned to do was buy the girls some
new clothes. Now they wore hand-me-downs from in-laws and Griff, a
proud man, just hated to see it.
Kneeling on his
haunches, he drew the two girls close to him and hugged them tight
with his eyes closed.
“Boy, it sure is hot,
Daddy,” Eloise said.
“It sure is,” Tess
agreed.
But that was the
funny thing to Griff. Hot as it was-the afternoon ablaze now at
three o’clock-he felt so cold he was shivering.
He hugged the girls
even tighter, and tried not to think of how the little girl in the
bank had looked that morning, bloody and dead on the linoleum
floor.