No Beast So Fierce (25 page)

In the background of my own thoughts had been the idea to leave the United States, though definite plans—even the decision—had to wait until I had enough money to live comfortably. As a destination I was inclined toward Spain or somewhere else in the Mediterranean, preferably a country too poor to have a superefficient police force, or which was less than zealous in investigating foreigners with money.

Even now, as Aaron recounted his plans, mine were fuzzy about tomorrow. The Big Score was the dream, and who thinks beyond a dream?

At 3:00
A.M
., fifty miles north of Bakersfield, I started to doze at the wheel. Aaron took over while I slept in the back seat.

In San Fernando, sun and morning traffic rising simultaneously, I was thrown off the seat when Aaron slammed on the brakes and swerved to miss a milk truck. He hadn't driven an automobile in a decade and needed practice before trying the Los Angeles freeways.

We found him a furnished room in a large Victorian house. The room was quite spacious, on the second floor. A huge window over-looked the front lawn and tree-shaded street. It was on the north-western fringe of the black ghetto. And it was a ghetto only in the sense that all who lived there were black. It was middle-class. The homes were old, but had been fashionable less than a decade earlier. Aaron would be inconspicuous in the neighborhood, and it was ten minutes driving time from Hollywood. I wouldn't have to drive through hostile country to visit him.

I'd planned to spend the day with him, getting a photo for a false driver's license, buying clothes. But driving a thousand miles in thirty hours, and the pell-mell pace, including the robbery, suddenly caught up with me. Absolute exhaustion came all at once, as if some giant suction force drained me. I was staggering with the need for sleep.

“Take a nap here,” Aaron said. “I can call my mother at work, let her know I'm all right. They've probably contacted her already and she thinks I'm wandering around the Sierras with rattlesnakes and bears.”

“No, brother. I've got a broad. I'll go sleep at her place. A highborn southern gal.”

“I'd like to stick my dick into something wet, but there's more important things first.”

I gave him the telephone numbers to Abe's club and Allison's apartment. I was leaving the motel, so that number was unnecessary. “If anything comes up, call me. There's a shopping center three blocks from here. You can walk there and get yourself some rags.” I left him three hundred dollars and the .38. I promised to come back for him in the evening; then we could make some decisions.

He walked me out to the car. The landlady, a chunky black woman whose husband was retired from the services and working at Hughes Aircraft, was watering a flower bed beside the house. Each plant had different-colored blossoms—yellows and reds as bright as I'd ever seen, eye-penetrating. Aaron had already charmed the woman when we looked at the room, for his education, his manners, his intelligence were obvious. Now he commented on the zinnias, complimenting her touch with them, and the woman was captivated—so much so that I doubted if she would call the police even if she knew the truth.

“Get me that robin down from the tree,” I whispered when we went on to the car. We shook hands before I got in.

“Thanks, brother,” he said. “I appreciate what you're doing.”

“Man, fuck you! You got your issue. Friends are to be used, though not misused, so everybody gets stronger. Nobody can stand alone. I need you too.”

“Quit running at the jaws like you're on speed. Get going.”

“I'll be back around nine. I might bring my partner so you can get to know each other.”

As I drove away, I hoped Jerry and Aaron would get along, respect each other as I respected both of them. If I could bind them together—as a cohesive factor, not as a leader—no score was too big to think about.

It was false to tell Aaron that a woman was “waiting”. Allison was at work when I parked on the hill road, my clothes piled in the rear of the automobile. I was too tired to go any further. I broke a window, unlatched it, and climbed in. When she came home I was sleeping in her bed, wearing only shorts. She was surprised, but not angry. On the contrary, my unshaven jaws and general haggardness aroused feminine solicitude. I mumbled a story of having driven a thousand miles back and forth in Mexico. She didn't question me; I liked that.

It was getting dark outside. She was seated on the edge of the bed. It was time for us to make love. I knew it both from the yearning in her body and the silent waiting in her eyes. I reached for her.

Minutes later, already disheveled, blouse unfastened, skirt twisted, she got up and slowly took off her clothes. When she was naked, her body dappled by the dying sunlight filtered through a tree outside the window, she stood posing, breasts in profile. She was suntanned and they were strikingly light compared to her belly and shoulders and legs. “I like to make it delicious and slow,” she said, coming onto the bed with one knee, reaching a hand between my legs, bringing her mouth to my belly button, darting her tongue into it.

We took a long, long time, sometimes becoming clumsy because we were unaccustomed to each other, and we did all the things with mouth and hands that uninhibited lovers do. We began gently, worked up to ferocity, and rested in between, delaying exhaustion. She delighted in being alternately coy and vulgar, and liked having me whisper crudisms into her ear. Her skin had a velvet texture, and she was lithe; at one point her legs were wrapped around me and she stroked my thighs with her soles. As we made love, now in darkness, I felt her warmth and caresses and all the splintered, harried facets of my days were drawn in and given repose.

Afterward, I went to sleep. When I woke up two hours later she was grilling hamburgers, wearing only sheer blue panties and slippers.

“How was I?” she asked.

“I thought you were going to suck my brains out for a minute.”

She laughed, blushed—not used to such crudeness but liking it.

“I live here now, huh?”

“Sure do. That's what you had in mind, wasn't it?”

“Precisely. But we're going someplace, so get some clothes on.”

“Where are we going.”

“To pick up a friend of mine, take him to eat.”

“Are we going anywhere special?”

“Put on anything … Jeans are okay. But we're supposed to be there now, so hurry.”

Aaron was gone when we arrived. He'd left a note with the land-lady saying that he was meeting his mother, that he'd tried to telephone me but had been unable to get through. He'd be back at midnight and, if I had to be somewhere else then, would call me in the morning.

“Your friend's a Negro?” Allison asked when we were driving away.

“Didn't I mention it?”

“No.”

“Does it make any difference?”

“None whatsoever. I just asked a question.”

“He's a man—by anybody's standards.”

“Don't get defensive.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't intend to sound that way.”

She moved closer to me, rested a hand on my knee. We drove that way, and I didn't mind that Aaron had been gone. “What should we do?”

“Let's go back to bed and fuck,” she said.

“Brilliant idea, baby. First, let's stop by the club. I want to see Manny January.”

Before we were seated, Manny came through the crowd and excitedly beckoned me aside. The M16 was in the trunk of his car; that, and four hundred rounds of ammunition for it. The automatic rifle was precisely what I'd wanted to see him about, never believing there was a possibility he'd already have it. He'd even paid for it from his own money and said I could repay him when I tore something off—not knowing I had already made a move. I gave him back what he'd invested, and put my arm around his shoulder to show he'd made full amends for his earlier failure. It was what he wanted and he glowed in response.

When it was time to leave (one drink), I drove around to the alley, Manny went out the back, and when I braked he put a long flower box into the back seat.

“What's that?” Allison asked.

“None of your business,” I said, but patted her cheek to soften the rebuke.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'll learn. I'm just a curious bitch.”

“Remember what happened to Pandora.”

“Whatever you're doing, please be careful.” She wrapped her hands around my biceps in possessive affection.

We were in bed before midnight. A television set at the foot of the bed was showing the late movie; we were too busy to watch. The second lovemaking was even better than the first, less awkward, and again the chaos of my life was washed away in lovemaking. There was only the hour of joy, the room, her body, and hands.

“Come for me, daddy … come for me,” she chanted, her breath hot in my ear.

In the morning I found that I had $407.00 left from the market robbery. The pressure wouldn't let up for very long. Now, however, I had what it took to get money: two good crime partners and an automatic weapon.

12

C
HRONOLOGICALLY,
the events of the next ten days are difficult to recall. They were hectic, but no more than is usual in a thief's unregulated life. I know what happened, but not in precisely what sequence, nor do I remember many details. The utter clarity of memory that existed when I was first released now disappeared in the warp of life. Jerry and Aaron sniffed warily at each other during the first two meetings, but respect grew between them. Neither of them became as close with each other as each was with me. I was not the “leader” of the gang, but I was the unifying factor, the cohesion.

Aaron never met Carol, for Jerry wanted to avoid flaunting anything that might upset her. Allison and Carol, however, met during an afternoon visit and immediately became friends. They began phoning each other daily, and Allison visited her at least two or three times a week, taking her shopping or to the beauty parlor. Allison thought Carol looked only slightly ill, but Allison had never known her before onslaught of the disease. To me, Carol looked frightening. Her face had become dreadfully sallow, bloated from fluids, especially around the eyes. This was from the medicine rather than the disease, according to Jerry.

Once we tried going out to dinner together, but the night out was unsuccessful because Carol became totally exhausted. Her weekly transfusion of blood—and energy—had been given five days before. The disease had already consumed it and she had no strength. “It makes me feel like Dracula's daughter,” Carol said, but the levity fell like lead; she was the only one who managed to chuckle.

Allison had given two weeks' notice to her employer, but was still going to work in the morning, so Jerry, Aaron, and I usually met at the hillside apartment. Aaron was usually there anyway, especially during the day. The furnished room, though much nicer than usual for the genre, was still unbearably confining and dreary. Aaron had good identification, identifying him as a dentist. It was his policy to be indoors before midnight, but other than that he moved freely, using my car as if it was his own, especially in the evenings when Allison's was available to me. He'd go off into the world of blackness. He met his family, but in out-of-the-way places. He knew the police would concentrate on watching the family and known associates of any seriously wanted fugitive. He'd found an exgirlfriend—though time had atrophied whatever romance might have existed. She was merely a receptacle for sexual hunger. He mentioned her, gave me her telephone number in case I needed to contact him, but he foreclosed any meeting, and vetoed Allison's idea of a double date. The veto, I sensed, had something to do with race; maybe on the girl's part. No matter how sincere our friendship, something would inevitably stir up the issue of race. It was an ineradicable fact.

And while these things were going on, we were looking for a bank to rob. It would appear at first glance that finding a bank would be a simple matter, considering that Southern California has several hundred of them in its sprawl. We were interested entirely in Bank of America branches because in prison I'd been given information about their security procedures. The information was of untested reliability, but it was something to start with. The first fact proved true: there were no armed security guards. Not that a security guard, per se, makes any difference. He's generally an old man, and even if he's Wyatt Earp, what can he do with a holstered revolver when an automatic rifle is pointed at his chest?

Bank of America's main defense was the movie camera, which brought havoc to barefaced bandits who handed notes to tellers and appeared in living color on television that evening. Cameras would be harmless to men with hoods and high gloves. According to my information, employees were not supposed to try setting off an alarm until it was absolutely safe. The bank frowned on a gun battle. True or not, we worked on the assumption that an alarm would be sounding the moment we started the robbery. Speed was our counter weapon—get in and out within a matter of minutes. We wouldn't have time to get the vault. That left the tellers and what was lying around loose. The bad part was that the average teller has no more than a thousand dollars or so, hardly worthwhile, especially when some of it would be “bait” money, bills with recorded numbers kept specifically for being mixed with other money when a bandit called.

Some branches, however, had a special teller for commercial accounts. This teller was usually in a semiprivate location, but with no more real protection than any other—and commercial tellers have between fifteen and twenty thousand minimum, a nice cornerstone for a robbery. It was what we were looking for, the problem being that most branches with such tellers were in metropolitan areas unsuitable for a robbery—too crowded on the getaway.

I looked for such a bank every day, but not with an unrelenting diligence. Rather, I was like a tourist exploring Southern California—and looking at banks incidental to lounging in dim cocktail lounges, bullshitting with ex-convicts and whores, or wandering through parks in outlying communities. Sometimes Aaron went with me. Jerry was doing the same in the northern and western regions of the megalopolis.