Help I Am Being Held Prisoner Read online

  The question was, whether or not my new comrades would go ahead and try it anyway. And if they did, would I be with them when they were caught.

  A virus, I thought. I’ll catch a virus two days before the robbery, I’ll be bedridden but noble. “That’s all right,” I’ll say. “Go on without me. Split up my share among the rest of you, I don’t mind.”

  Did I see me getting away with that? I did not.

  As I stood there looking at the two banks, a car pulled up over there, a maroon Chevrolet, and a man in a gray overcoat got out. He was carrying something soft and black in his hand, a small black bag. He went up to the front of Western National, just to the left of the door, then walked back to his car without the bag, got in, and drove away.

  Hm.

  Watching the car depart, I saw that a block or so away a movie theater was letting out after the final show of the evening. Perhaps thirty people were emptying out onto the sidewalk, turning their coat collars up, talking together, spreading out and away in various directions. Looking at them, I suddenly realized I was cold. I was still in the borrowed civilian clothing, with only the reversible jacket, and up till now I’d been too worried and distracted to think about the fact that it was colder out now than yesterday afternoon, and that this jacket was nowhere near enough protection.

  God damn, I was cold! I didn’t even have a coat collar to turn up, like those people walking in my direction.

  I had a sudden frightening thought. I’m a suspicious character, I thought, visualizing myself as I must look to those people coming toward me: a loner, shabbily dressed, scuffling around in the middle of the night with no apparent destination in mind. And in a town dominated by a state penitentiary. They’ll think I’m an escaped prisoner, I thought. (It was only later it occurred to me that technically I was an escaped prisoner.)

  There were perhaps a dozen people coming my way along the sidewalk. I dithered, trying to decide whether to walk boldly toward them or to turn tail and run, and in the end did neither. The people approached, mostly couples, mostly young, and all at once I knew how to keep them from thinking I was an escapee; I would disguise myself as a bum.

  The first couple approached. I shambled up to them, my head down, my hands in my jacket pockets. “Buddy,” I mumbled, “you got a dime for a cuppa coffee?”

  He already had a quarter in his hand. He was embarrassed at being tapped in the presence of his girlfriend, and he already had the quarter in his hand, the quicker to get rid of me. “Here,” he said, brusque but falsetto, shoved the quarter into the palm I hastily pulled from my pocket, and hurried on, his arm around his girl’s shoulders.

  I was astounded. He’d already had the quarter in his hand! He’d known I was a panhandler before I did!

  The next couple ignored me. An older couple gave me a dime. A pair of middle-aged ladies hurried past. A fortyish man in a leather jacket grumblingly told me to go fuck myself. The next couple gave me a quarter. The final couple, mid-twenties, full of high good spirits, stopped to chat. “You want to be careful in this neighborhood,” the male said, reaching into his pocket. “The cops can get tough around here.”

  What a thought; first time out on my own and get picked up for begging. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll move on.”

  The girl, sympathetic but too cheerful in her own life to really give much of a damn, said, “You ought to go to the Salvation Army or somewhere. Ask people to help you.”

  Advice, Ambrose Bierce said, is the smallest current coin. “I’ll do that,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  The man had finally come up with some coins, which he pressed into my hand as though they were a message to be taken through the lines. “Good luck, fella,” he said.

  I was beginning to hate them. My misfortune was merely capping their perfect day. (“And,” I could hear them telling one another later, in bed, after a perfect copulation, “we helped a bum.”) “Thanks,” I said, for the third time, and after they walked on I opened my hand to look at a dime and two nickels. I’d been given a lot of valuable advice, and twenty cents.

  Which meant a total of eighty cents. I was both elated and depressed, as I walked off with the coins jingling in my jacket pocket. Half a minute ago I’d had nothing, and now I had enough to call my mother and have a cup of coffee and have a pastry or something with it. On the other hand, eighty cents was still a far cry from the kind of money the boys back in the gym were expecting to see. (It was also depressing that my bum imitation had been so thoroughly effective.)

  As I walked along, it seemed to me the advice I’d been given had probably been worthwhile. Business streets would tend to be more thoroughly patrolled by the police after dark, and loitering strangers in such areas would be more likely to be picked up for questioning. Since I couldn’t think of a single question I could possibly be asked that I would be willing or able to answer, I made a right turn at the next intersection, and moved away into a residential area again.

  But this wasn’t doing me any good. I was cold and moneyless, and I wanted to solve both problems, rapidly, without getting into worse trouble than I already had.

  Not too many years ago I could have solved both problems by sending a telegram to my mother asking her to wire me some money, and I could have waited in the warm all-night Western Union office for the couple of hours until the money arrived. But that was back in the days when there was such a thing as a telegram. I know there’s still a company around called Western Union, but God knows how they make their money these days—not with telegraphy.

  I walked two blocks in semi-darkness, traveling from street-light to streetlight, looking at the small houses on either side. It was a weeknight, and most of the windows were dark, the good citizens already in bed, resting mind and body for the honest labor of tomorrow. I could have been like them, asleep now in a conjugal bed in Rye, next to a practical and faithful yet extremely attractive wife. With a sense of wistful envy I looked at the lawns, the driveways, the slanted roofs, the curtained windows. On the open porches were toys, chairs, milk boxes, bicycles. I might steal a bicycle; I could travel faster, and the pedaling would warm me. But I wasn’t a thief, I had never stolen anything in my life.

  At the second intersection, I saw some sort of open business establishment at some distance down to my left. Walking that way, I finally saw that it was a diner on a corner, with three cars parked out front. I started to enter, then noticed that one of the three was a police prowl car. I hesitated, almost left, and decided the hell with it. I could enter, couldn’t I? I had money, didn’t I?

  Two uniformed cops were sitting at the counter chatting with a heavyset blonde waitress. At the other end of the counter a man in a shabby brown suit was eating a full meal; a salesman, probably, passing through. A young couple in a booth were having an intense, impassioned, embittered, nearly silent argument; whispering and muttering at one another, making constricted hand gestures, eyes blazing as each one tried to hammer a point across.

  I took a booth far from the cops and the quarrelers, picked up the menu from between the sugar and the napkin dispenser, and looked to see what my eighty cents would buy me. And abruptly into my mind came the memory of a newspaper report I’d read years ago, a stunt a fellow had pulled that I had approved of completely. It had been very much in the practical joker line, but since it had been done for money I had never tried the same thing myself. Could I make it work? Was it already too late at night?

  The waitress came over: huge-busted, dressed in white. She had been chipper and carefree with the cops, but was noncommittal with me. “You ready to order?”

  “Oh. Ah…” Another quick look at the menu, a typewritten sheet of paper in a clear plastic holder. “Coffee,” I said. “And the clam chowder.”

  “Manhattan or New England?”

  “Uh…New England.”

  “Cup or bowl?”

  All these decisions. I looked at the menu again, at the comparative prices for a cup or bowl of chowder, and the cost decided me. “
Cup,” I said. That would leave me with fifteen cents; I might even have a doughnut for dessert.

  She was about to leave. I said, “Would you have a felt-tip pen I could borrow?”

  “A what?”

  “You know; the kind of pen with the soft tip.”

  “Oh, those damn things,” she said. “They don’t go through the carbon paper.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yeah, I think there’s one in the cash register.”

  “Thanks.”

  She went away, came back with my coffee and a black felt-tip pen, and went away again. The table had already been set for two, facing one another, so I reached across to the other setting, pushed the silverware out of the way, and took the paper place mat. I folded it in half with the diner name inside, and carefully lettered my sign on the white back:

  CLOSED

  FOR REPAIRS

  USE BOX

  Below that I drew an arrow pointing straight down. I made the letters as thick and even and official-looking as possible, and drew the arrow blunt and solid, for that no-nonsense effect.

  The waitress brought my clam chowder while I was still printing. She pursed her lips when she saw what had been done to the other place mat, and wordlessly gathered up the extra silverware before I did something terrible to that. She marched it away to safety, and when she came back a third time, with a plate of crackers, I gave her the pen and once more tonight said, “Thank you.”

  “Any time,” she said, though without much conviction, and went off to be chummy with the cops again.

  Hot food. It was delicious. While I ate I thought about this scheme and tried to decide what I would do if it didn’t work, which it probably wouldn’t. I had planned on calling my mother, but what did I have to say to her? I still had no way for her to send me money, and even if I did it wasn’t a solution to the problem of tonight.

  The salesman walked slowly by, burping, popping Tums into his mouth. He paid the waitress and I heard him say to the cops, “What’s the weather up north?”

  “Cold,” one of them said.

  The salesman expressed gratitude for that news, and left.

  When I finished eating I carefully reversed the contents of the sugar canister and salt shaker. Then, just as carefully, I rolled my homemade note to keep it from creasing, and put it in my shirt pocket, where it stuck up almost as high as my collar. I kept it in place by zipping up my jacket, took my eighty cents out of my pocket, and left the excess fifteen cents as a tip, mostly because of the place mat. Then I walked down to the group at the other end of the counter, gave the sixty-five cents to the waitress under the incurious glances of the two cops, and left.

  It was a brisk walk back, retracing my steps through the residential area. Half a block from the business street I tiptoed silently up onto a front porch, opened the milk box there, and took out the four empties I found inside. Then I carried the box away with me, and hurried on downtown.

  The banks were two blocks to the left, on the other side. There was no traffic at all now, which for my purposes was both good and bad. I wanted privacy, but I also needed customers, who might not be forthcoming at eleven-thirty at night in a small town in the middle of the week.

  I considered both banks, and the gray stone monolith of Western National seemed somehow better suited architecturally to my milk box, which was a steel-colored metal cube with a lidded top plus thick sides for insulation. I put it on the sidewalk under the night deposit slot, took the note from my pocket, unrolled it, and tried to find some way to attach it to the building. I should have asked the waitress for some Scotch tape.

  Then the simple solution came to me: I opened the night deposit slot, slid the back half of the place mat into it, and closed the slot again with the note hanging out. Stepping back near the curb, I surveyed my handiwork and decided it wouldn’t fool anybody.

  But it was all I had; and in any case I shouldn’t hang around here, admiring my work. Checking both ways, still seeing no traffic and no pedestrians. I hurried off, and had gone nearly a block before I began wondering where I was going.

  Nowhere. With no more money, I couldn’t go back to the diner. The air was getting steadily colder, so I couldn’t stay outside. There was nobody around for me to try with my panhandler imitation. I did see an open bar up ahead, but I was afraid to go in there with no cash to spend.

  So I went back to the Dombey house. The lights were out, so Bob and Alice had gone to bed. Vaguely, to distract myself, I tried to work up some prurient thoughts about that, an inmate outside the prison and in bed with a woman, but it was impossible. I hadn’t met Alice Dombey, but I’d met her husband, the first man I’d seen passing the laundry-room door, the hunch-shouldered skinny one with the shifty weasel expression, and there was just no way to fantasize him married to a sex symbol.

  I went through the side door and downstairs to the corridor Vasacapa had constructed. The twenty-five watt bulb burned dimly in the ceiling. There was no radiator in here, but some heat did seep through from the rest of the house. I sat down on the carpeting, leaned my head against the paneled wall, and gave myself over to brooding thoughts.

  And sleep. I don’t quite know how it happened, but the next thing I knew I was lying on my side, all curled up, and I’d been sound asleep. Cold had awakened me, and when I moved I was as stiff as a motel towel. I creaked and cracked, moaned and groaned, and slowly made it to my feet, where I hopped up and down and flapped my arms around in an effort to get warm.

  Christ, but it was cold; the Dombeys must be the thrifty type who turn the heat down during the night. I’d been in prison a month and a half and this was the worst night I’d ever spent anywhere, and I was outside the goddam jail.

  Well, there was no point in it. A warm bunk awaited me in the gym, so I might as well get to it. Awkwardly I lowered myself to my knees again and entered the tunnel.

  I was about halfway back when I remembered the note and the milk box, and realized I ought to go back and see if I’d caught anything.

  I really didn’t want to. There wouldn’t be anything in the milk box, I was sure of it, and I was cold enough already without another long useless walk. I also wanted to go back to sleep.

  But I had to check, didn’t I? Facing Phil and Joe and the others tomorrow with no money to show them—no, not if there was any alternative at all. So I had to go back.

  Did you ever try to turn around in a three-foot-wide concrete pipe? Don’t. At one point I was wedged in so completely, with my head between my knees and my shoulders stacked up together somewhere behind me, that I was convinced I’d never be able to move again; I could see Phil, tomorrow afternoon, sending Billy Glinn down to dismantle me in order to clear the blockage.

  Finally, though, I did get myself facing the other way, and by then the exercise had made me warmer, more limber and very nearly awake. Except for a splitting headache and a total sense of despair I was in pretty good shape as I crawled back through the tunnel and hurried through the still-dark streets toward the bank. A clock in a barbershop window told me it was twenty minutes to four.

  There was a gray canvas bag in the milk box. I stared at it, refusing to believe it, then stared suspiciously all around, expecting a trick. Practical jokers, of course, always have to believe that someone else is going to return the favor in kind.

  There was no one in sight. The parked cars in the general vicinity all seemed to be empty. When I hesitantly reached into the milk box and prodded the gray canvas bag, no alarm bells jangled, no spotlights flashed on. But I did hear the clink of coins.

  Well I’ll be damned, I thought.

  I took the bag out of the milk box. I could feel coins in there, and wads of paper.

  Son of a bitch, I thought.

  I stuffed the bag inside my jacket, grabbed my note from the night deposit slot and jammed it into a pocket, and walked briskly away, leaving the milk box as mute testimony to the gullibility of man.

  I had just committed my first true felony.
We have all read the statements of prison reformers claiming that jail creates more criminals than it rehabilitates, and by golly it turns out to be true!

  11

  The damn bag didn’t want to open. I stood in the Vasacapa corridor in the Dombey basement, wrestling with the gray canvas bag full of money, and gradually my new self-image as a master criminal crumbled into ashes at my feet. Some crook; I couldn’t steal my way into a canvas bag.

  In my defense, I must say it was a tough bag to crack. Made of heavy canvas, it had a reinforced mouth that closed with a zipper, which in turn was attached by a small gleaming metal lock that would only open with a key. I fussed and fidgeted with the damn thing, listening to the coins clinking and the paper rustling in there, until finally I noticed a nail tip jutting through the side wall of the corridor, where Vasacapa had put up his paneling. Since this side of the wall hadn’t been finished, it was the back of the paneling I was looking at. Something had been fastened to the wall over there, with a nail that poked all the way through, extending a full inch into the corridor.

  So I gashed the bag to death. I kept scraping it against the nail until I’d gnawed a hole in it, and then forced and pried and gouged until the hole was big enough for me to shake the contents out onto the carpet.

  Coins came tumbling out first, quarters and dimes and nickels bounding around like playful fish on the silent carpet, and then a thick wad of paper held together with a red rubber band.

  The paper was money: bills, half a dozen checks, and a deposit slip. The checks were made out to Turk’s Bar & Grill, and it was likely that Turk, or his representative, had been treating himself to a few on the house tonight, which was why he’d fallen for my sign-and-milk-box routine. Although as I remembered it, that fellow I’d read about in the paper several years ago had caught all sorts of citizens when he’d done the same thing. A businessman late at night, tired, impatient to be home, distracted by the events of his day, sees a note and something that looks vaguely like a strongbox, and just drops in the day’s receipts. In fact, the only reason that former practitioner of this dodge had gotten himself arrested was because he’d kept doing it too often. A mistake I wouldn’t repeat; this had been my first felony, and would be my last.