Dog Day Afternoon (3 page)

Joe wasn’t going to his own home tonight, but to his mother’s. He’d miss Larry and Lori, but that was the breaks. First, though, after the humiliation of yet another job gone wrong, he needed a bit of class. He needed to hole up in a quiet, dark, cool place where classy people gathered. He needed to reward himself.

He walked west toward Sheridan Square and beyond, moving slowly along the shady side of the street. A clock showed the time to be five thirty. The bar where Lana hung out would be empty at this hour. Classy people didn’t fall right into a bar after work. They cooled it. Delayed the moment. He loosened his tie and took off his seersucker jacket. Hot.

He hated wearing this square drag in the Village. He hated ties and jackets. But there was no other way to dress when you went for a job in a goddamned bank. At least his trousers were tight enough up top, and flared at the cuffs. At least he had that going for him.

Village people moved past listlessly. The same giant hand pressed down on all of them. By the time Joe entered the bar, his shirt was soaked. The cool darkness was God’s blessing, laid upon his forehead with the smoothness of the priest on Ash Wednesday, a light, powdery touch.

Joe sighed as he sat down on a bar stool. He nodded to the bartender, whom he knew only slightly. “Draw one,” he said.

“Michelob?”

“Whatever’s cold.”

Joe’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the gloom. “Lana come in yet?”

The bartender shook his head. “Kind of early.”

Joe nodded in agreement and took the mug of beer. He sipped it in long, slow swallows. He liked delaying such pleasures, but by the time he ended his first taste half the stein was empty.

“Hits the spot, Littlejoe,” a voice said from the far end of the bar. Joe peered into the darkness and made out the face of a man he’d seen in here before, called Don, mid-thirties, plumpish, always dressed very square, the way Joe was dressed today for a bank interview. Come to think of it, Don worked for a bank, didn’t he? Didn’t Lana tell him once this guy . . . ?

“You’re overdrawn, baby,” he told the man. “Insufficient funds.”

“What?”

“Forget it. I’m pissed off at banks.”

Don got up and carried his gin-and-tonic around the bar to sit beside Joe. “What did the bastards do now?”

“Forget it. Which one d’you work for?”

The other man watched Joe empty his beer. “Chase. Give him another,” he told the bartender.

“How did we get to be such good friends?” Joe asked.

“Any friend of Lana’s is a friend of mine.” The chubby man giggled. “Anybody hates the banks is a bosom buddy. If the public only knew.”

“Huh?”

The man watched the bartender deliver a new mug of beer and a fresh gin-and-tonic. “If the public only knew how the banks take them. If the dumb mouth-breathing bastards in the street only understood about loans. Christ, if the hoods only realized how easy it is to knock off a bank.”

Joe nodded. “That I know about.”

“Robbing banks?”

“On that subject”—Joe stopped to take a mighty swallow of the fresh, cold beer—“I happen to be an expert.”

Don nodded politely, falling in with the fantasy. “How many you knock over, Littlejoe?”

“Recently or altogether?”

The chubby man shrugged lightly. “Either.”

“Recently,” Joe said slowly, as if trying to remember with great accuracy, “I been thinking about heisting a certain bank that just turned me down for a systems job. Your bank, I think.”

“Got a plan?”

Joe nodded solemnly. “Everything. Even accomplices.”

It was the other man’s turn to nod. “That’s important,” he said sagely. “You can’t heist a bank without you got accomplices. It’s like, uh, when they make like some new detergent. They got ingredients. Nobody can make a new detergent without they got ingredients. It’s the same with accomplices. Am I right?”

Joe stared into his beer. “I’m not kidding, baby,” he said then. His glance darted toward the bartender, who was at the far end of the bar, taking an order from a youngish, slim man in tight jeans and a batik shirt open to the navel. “I’m serious. It could happen any time.”

The chubby man’s glance followed along the bar for a moment. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Oh.”

Don shook his head pityingly. “Amateurs are all the same,” he said then. “You watch a heist job on the TV and you think, what the hell, I can do it as easy as they did it. But you can’t.” He sipped his fresh gin-and-tonic. “You don’t have the right ingredients, Littlejoe. An amateur don’t even know what he’s missing. For instance, what kind of info have you got?”

“Info?”

“Info,” Don repeated loudly. “You think you just walk into some crummy branch bank and they’ll have more than a few grand lying around? You gotta have info. You gotta know when they’re loaded, like when they have cash for the local payroll checks or whatever. That’s one ingredient, info. And the other is follow-through. That you don’t have either.”

He fell silent, sitting there with an accusatory look on his pudgy face, as if Joe had somehow let him down very badly. “How come you know so much about what I haven’t got?” Joe demanded.

Don flapped his hand at him in a don’t-kid-me gesture. “Because you’re an amateur is why. An amateur can start a heist, but it takes a pro to follow through. There’s a hell of a lot more goes on between the time you yell ‘Hey, this is a stickup’ and the time you split the joint holding heavy bread. Don’t even talk to me about amateurs. They’re all alike.”

Neither man spoke for a while. Whether this was because the bartender had come back into their area or not, Joe didn’t know. Normally Joe reacted badly to fat creeps with superior airs. But for some reason he didn’t now to Don. Instead he pulled some change from his pocket and fed two quarters into the jukebox. He punched up records at random and returned to the bar. Dietrich’s toneless rasp filled the place, chanting some German refrain against a tinny orchestra.

“Ich bin von kopf bis fus . . .”

Joe sat quietly for a moment, judging whether the jukebox noise made his conversation with Don more secure from eavesdropping. Then: “Maybe you’re the guy with info.”

The chubby man blinked. “Me? What for?”

“For a cut.”

“. . . das ist meine welt . . .”

They sat quietly for a while. “Not for a cut,” Don said then. “For plain ordinary bitchiness.” He started to giggle again and grew almost instantly breathless. “Eleven years an assistant chief teller,” he gasped after a moment. “Fifteen years all told. They open branch after branch after branch, and not once do I make head teller, not even in some suburban nowhere branch. Not even there.”

The two men listened to Dietrich’s moan for a long time, sipping their drinks and saying nothing. Finally Joe motioned to the bartender for refills, pulling a five-dollar bill from his wallet. It was the last of his money.

“Lana won’t love you tonight,” the chubby man murmured.

“Shit she won’t.”

“She likes a lotta green, baby, and that ain’t it.”

“She likes a stiff one, too.”

Don’s glance moved sideways slightly, as if observing Joe without wanting to be caught. “Regular stud, huh?” He giggled softly. “Regular top man on the old totem pole, Littlejoe?”

“You better believe it.” They watched the fresh drinks arrive.

“You married?” Don asked then.

“Yeah.”

He giggled again. “Me too.”

The giggle was beginning to get on Joe’s nerves. He didn’t mind freaks. After all, this was supposed to be one of those Village gay bars, wasn’t it? But creep freaks he didn’t need. “Tell me about some branch in Queens,” he said then. “Tell me about a nice neighborhood branch, small, where they put together a payroll the afternoon before payday. You got one, or are you full of shit?”

“Got kids?” Don persisted.

“Yeah, I got kids. I asked you something.”

The chubby man nodded. He lifted his gin-and-tonic in Joe’s direction. “Here’s cheers,” he said. “I got a branch for you, baby, but you better never bring my name into it. That’s why I don’t want no cut, no way. If I don’t get a cut, I can deny it and the cops have nothing to go on.”

“. . . und sonnst garnicht.”

“Then why tell me anything?” Joe asked. “If you’re not in it for loot, what’s it all about?”

The chubby man pursed his lips into a cupid’s bow. The Dietrich record ended and a Garland song began. “I got my reasons.”

“. . . where, over the rainbow, way up . . .”

“No good,” Joe told him. “I get the loot. You get nothing. It don’t figure. When something don’t figure, I don’t like it.”

“. . . a place that I dreamed of, once . . .”

Don’s mouth pressed together so tightly that his lips went white. After a moment he glanced at Joe. “Revenge, baby.”

“Ah, come on.”

“You better believe it. Re-fucking-venge.”

“On the bank?”

“A little of my own back, after fifteen years, that’s all.”

Joe laughed. “You’d pass up a cut, in cash, for that?”

The chubby man’s head began to nod. After a moment it seemed as if he couldn’t stop the motion. “Right,” he said. “Right. Right.”

“Working for them did that to you?”

“Right.”

“Jesus.” Joe sipped his fresh beer. “I heard of lousy jobs. I had most of them myself, one time or another, for the shittiest bosses in the world.”

“Not for fifteen years,” Don reminded him. “That’s what makes the difference between you and me, baby. Fifteen years gives you a hate that nothing can make you forget.”

“Except fingering a heist? That’ll make you happy?”

Neither man spoke for a long time. The bar was beginning to fill up now with young men in tight, open clothes. The odor of sweat and perfume began to fill the room.

“. . . if bluebirds fly, then why can’t I?”

3

I
t was not a special night. Joe knew that in some families there was a special night when the married kids came over to eat dinner with their mother. Went back to their mothers’ homes to eat their mothers’ food. He had never wondered at all that no one ever returned to, say, his father’s home to eat his father’s food. Joe knew, without having bothered his head over it, that if you called it home and you came for food, it all was your mother’s.

Flo was not that bad a cook. You had to hand her that. Not that Tina ever admitted for a moment that her mother-in-law’s cooking could even be eaten. Thinking about this as he rode the IND subway out to Queens, Joe smiled crookedly at Tina’s ideas about cooking. A five-buck barrel of fried chicken from Colonel Sanders was her idea of a family feast, with French fries and buttered buns, plus a jumbo pizza, a six-pack of Rheingold, potato chips, and Hostess Twinkies or Devil Dogs for dessert.

At age twenty-four, with a shape on her like a Mack truck made of lard, Tina was still eating like a pimple-pussed teen-ager. She still had a cute, kewpie-doll mug on her, though. Not that hard to look at if you draped a flag over the rest of her. And she was the mother of his kids. The Queen of the Take-Out Dinner.

Joe had folded his jacket and laid it on his lap. He’d been lucky to find a seat. At this hour, well after seven in the evening, the hot, tired mobs of people were still going home, still clogging the subway with sweating flesh. He watched a man his age, but gross with fat the way Tina was, hanging from a strap like a sack of pus that dripped on the floor.

It was a wonder, with an Italian mother and an Italian wife, that he hadn’t bloated up himself, Joe thought as he swayed damply with the onward rush of the F train. As it rounded a curve, a shriek of steel numbed his ears for a moment.

But, as Joe told himself, he’d always watched his weight. A guy his size, light, fast on his feet, slim-hipped and flat-bellied, had to watch out for even a pound of extra weight. Not that he had a weight problem. At five-five, Joe barely weighed a hundred and twenty, all of it muscle, sinew, and sheer nerve, fast reflexes—a goddamned tiger you’d better not mess around with.

He got off in Corona and slogged tiredly up the stairs to the still-baking streets, his clog heels clattering. What a change from Greenwich Village, he told himself, looking around at the bars with their television sets flaring turquoise and cerise through the tightly shut doors, small islands of air-conditioned chill.

He almost walked into one of them for a quick shot before facing up to Flo, or, rather, to “her” home and dinner. But as his fingers grasped the handle of the door, he looked through the glass and saw two more of those sad-sack Corona asses draped over bar stools, fat cheeks drooping down on each side of the hard cushion, as if the stools had been rammed up into the rear ends of these two Corona battleaxes, mothers of fled sons, of sons clawing at ass-fat that smothered them, clawing their way up and out of Corona and into the fresh air.

Joe’s stomach turned over warningly, the caged beast under his lungs shifting uneasily in sleep. It was true, he told himself as he turned away in disgust from the bar and began walking slowly along the hot, dark street toward his mother’s home. It was true that he was drowning in cunt meat, Tina’s and his mother’s, waves of it flopping all over his face, flabby, raw meat that stank softly of secret juices. But what guy wasn’t? They tried to drown you inside them, shove you back up where you came from and encase you in a prison of meat where you screamed for air, twisting, blue-faced, dead.