'See you later,' Grofield said. He turned and walked toward the Javelin, his hands full of license plates and screwdrivers. Dogs were loping all around him. He found he was grinning at the car.
6
A match flared in the darkness – Ed Barnes, lighting a cigarette. In the yellow light, Grofield could see the three of them sitting on the floor of the empty truck, himself and Barnes and Steve Tebelman, and the big sheet of plywood leaning against the end wall, two lengths of clothesline stretching across it to keep it in place. 'That's really a nice job,' he said, looking at what was painted on the plywood.
'Thanks,' Tebelman said. Barnes shook the match out, and they were in darkness again. There was a faint redness when Barnes drew on the cigarette, but not enough to show more than vague outlines.
'You're a talented guy,' Grofield said. 'You ought to be able to make a living out of that.'
'Commercial art?' Tebelman's voice dripped with scorn.
'Oh,' Grofield said.
Barnes said, 'An artist.' He said it with no particular intonation, as though simply describing a condition of life.
'I understand that,' Grofield said. 'I'm into something like that myself.'
'You are?'
Grofield heard the interest in Tebelman's voice, and was tempted to go into a whole explanation about being an actor in a pre-technological sense – he had the feeling Tebelman's attitudes would be basically similar – but something about the presence of Barnes, his cigarette a red dot in the darkness, inhibited him. Barnes, he knew, was the more typical heister; a professional with only this one profession, who found all his satisfactions, financial and otherwise, within the one area. Tebelman was the only other person like himself Grofield had ever met in this business.
And Tebelman's question was hanging in the darkness, awaiting an answer. More conscious of Barnes' presence than he would have been in a lighted room where he could see the man, Grofield said, 'I'm an actor. I own a summer theater.'
'Isn't there money in that?'
'Hardly. Not with movies and television.'
'Ah.' There was a little silence, then, until Tebelman said, 'You know, there's a school of thought that says the artist and the criminal are variants on the same basic personality type. Did you know that?'
Grofield was sorry now the conversation had gotten started at all. 'No, I didn't,' he said.
'That art and crime are both antisocial acts,' Tebelman said. 'There's a whole theory about it. The artist and the criminal both divorce themselves from society by their life patterns, they both tend to be loners, they both tend to have brief periods of intense activity and then long periods of rest. There's a lot more.'
'Interesting,' Grofield said. He wished Hughes would start them moving; he held his left hand up near his face, pushed the sleeve back, read the radium dial of his watch. Ten minutes to eleven. He knew Hughes was waiting for the county sheriff's car to come by. The truck they were sitting in was parked in a closed-for-the-night gas station a quarter mile from the Food King store. Once the sheriff's department car went by, they'd have a minimum of twenty minutes before that car would come around again to the Food King parking lot. So Hughes was waiting for it, and once it was safely out of the way they would start to move.
Tebelman was saying, 'Of course, there've been a lot of artists who were criminals first, like Jean Genet. But you and I reverse that, don't we? You're an actor, and I'm a painter.'
'That's right,' Grofield said.
Barnes suddenly said, 'I'm quite a reader, you know.' The heavy voice, calm and uninflected, was a total surprise; it didn't seem to convey any emotion at all, nothing but the information contained in the words, the same as when he had earlier said that Tebelman was an artist.
Grofield stared at the red cigarette end. He had no idea how to take what Barnes had said. Maybe if he could see the man's face…
Tebelman had apparently decided to take it straight. 'Is that right?' he said.
'I started in Joliet,' Barnes said. 'You have a lot of time on your hands in a place like that.'
Under cover of darkness, Grofield permitted himself to grin.
Tebelman said, 'A lot of artists got started in prison, just for that reason. Like O. Henry.'
'I really took to it,' Barnes said. 'Now I read three, four books a week.'
'Is that right?'
'Westerns,' Barnes said. 'Ernest Haycox, Luke Short. Some of these newer ones, too, Brian Garfield, Elmer Kelton. Some parts of the country it's tough to find them.'
Tebelman said, 'Did you read
'Did I!'
The truck suddenly jerked into motion. 'We're off,' Grofield said. But Tebelman and Barnes were talking about Westerns.
7
In most supermarkets, the male clerks restock the shelves with merchandise after the close of business on Friday evening in preparation for the volume they expect to do on Saturday. In a large store, this restocking can take as much as six or seven hours, starting at a nine P.M. closing and continuing through most of
