“Yep. I didn’t get caught when I was young. Just luck, no other reason. I fell in with some guys and we knocked off filling stations all over East Texas. Carried water pistols that looked like guns and we’d split the take. Even then I felt it was just something I was doing until I found what it was I was supposed to do. The thing that would take that part of me that was empty and fill it up.”
Russel raised his beer very deliberately and took a long, slow sip from it.
“To shorten this story up,” Russel said, “I didn’t stop doing it, and I did a little stretch later on for a grocery store robbery. I went in with my water pistol and the owner had a pistol under the counter, and his didn’t shoot water. He just held the gun on me while one of the clerks called the police. I did some time. Not much. I was young and the judge was lenient, and they didn’t know how long I’d been robbing places. To them it was my first offense.
“Anyway, I graduated to the big time when I got out. I went to Florida and got in with this professional hotel robber named Mick. He had a perfect scam. He had bellboys and elevator operators on his payroll, and when a good mark checked in, they’d call him.”
“Just business to them.”
“Exactly. Then he and I would come over at the right time, go to the mark’s room, beat the lock, which is something I got good at-”
“I know.”
“That guy g y pped you. Those locks and bars he gave you might keep a twelve-year-old kid out, but any burglar could go through that stuff like a worm through shit. You ought to get your money back.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What about the Florida stuff?”
“We’d go into a room and take what we wanted, put it in the mark’s suitcase to add insult to injury, and just walk out. We knew all the back routes and we had the inside help. It was nothing. Got so we were making big bucks.”
“But you weren’t satisfied?”
“Nope. Same old story. I couldn’t see beyond what I was doing. I always wanted to, but couldn’t. It was like the moment was it, and once I realized that, everything just sort of closed in on me. Robbing beat the hell out of factories, but after a while it just didn’t do it. And I could never get over the guilt. I wasn’t really a born criminal. I couldn’t rationalize it the way Mick and others could. I always saw it as wrong. My upbringing, I guess. I mean I knew I was a crook and a sleaze. I didn’t feel like a debonair cat burglar, I felt like a scumbag. One time we were robbing this hotel room, and on the way out I saw myself carrying the suitcase full of loot in one of those full-length mirrors, and it hit me. It was like a picture of my life and I didn’t care for it.”
“So you tried to reform.”
“Yes, I did. I came back to East Texas. I met Jane and we got married. I started working at a plywood plant, and for a while there, the work didn’t bother me. I had someone to come home to and something to expect. Then when Freddy was born, things began to fall apart. I wanted things for the little guy and I couldn’t see it happening at the plywood plant. I got a little promotion, but it was so piddling it just made me mad. Like I said, I’ve got no patience. I want everything now. Thinking back on it, I was doing pretty good there and the promotion came pretty quick, and the next one would have too. I’d have been off the line completely and I’d have been the redneck telling the other poor bastards what to do. But I got empty again and started fucking up. I stayed mad all the time and it showed at home and work, and I got demoted and I quarreled with Jane and yelled at Freddy enough that I felt guilty. And that’s when I started doing the little jobs. I’d take weekends and go case places outside of town and I’d steal little piddling things. I mean, it wasn’t helping my income much, but it gave me some kind of purpose. Damned if I can explain it. It’s like that guy that keeps rolling the rock up the hill in hell. Gets it to the top and almost over, then the bastard rolls back on him. My life was like that. I’d almost have it whipped, then it would roll back on me.”
“Did your wife know?”
“She suspected something. Me going off on the weekends, saying I was hunting or fishing. I never came back with nothing. I didn’t even go to the fucking fish market and buy fish to bring home and fake it. It was like I wanted to be stupid. If I had gone to the fish market, I’d probably have bought fish sticks just so I could look even more stupid.
“Finally I robbed the payroll at the plant. It came in late one evening and I knew all about where it was kept by then, so I came back that night, beat the lock and the safe and stole it. One of the bosses just happened to come back for something and he saw me going out of the building. Next day it didn’t take them long to putem ed a two and two together. They let me off with giving the money back and firing me. They didn’t want any stink.”
“Sounds to me as if you were lucky.”
“That’s a way of looking at it. Anyway, you know the rest. I finally got in with some guys and did a job on a liquor store and that one cost me about twenty years. Jane tried to stay in touch, and for a while I answered her letters, but I wouldn’t let her come visit. I didn’t want her and Freddy to see me in prison. I still didn’t feel like a convict. I felt persecuted. Can you beat that? I kept thinking they’d come to their senses and let me out.”
“She sent me pictures of Freddy and kept me informed about what he was doing. Said he did well in school and played football and was a quarterback. Seemed to be good at everything. I was proud in one way, but in another I felt like the shit at the bottom of a dog pile. I even burned her letters and some of Freddy’s pictures. Decided to just let them go so they could build a life that was worth something. It was like I had gotten worse than empty. It was like the bottom had come out of me and there wasn’t anything on the other side of me, just a hole to nowhere.”
“What about your wife?”
“She hung in there for a long time. She loved me. I quit answering her letters and for a time she still wrote, but finally she quit. With the last she sent that picture of Freddy as a young man. I never heard from her again. I learned later that she died drunk in a motel in Dallas. I don’t know anything else about it.”
“Freddy?”
“No idea. But I made up my mind when I got out I was going to find him and make it up to him. I was going to mend the hole in me and fill it up with something. Then when I got out I was told he was killed, burglarizing your house no less, and there wasn’t just a hole in me, Dane, there was a vacuum that sucked out my soul.”
“And now that you know I didn’t kill him?”
“Maybe the hole’s closing up. I’ve got some hope. I don’t know who that sucker is in the ground out at the graveyard, but it isn’t Freddy. That means there’s a good chance he’s out there somewhere, and I want to find him and be some kind of father to him. Convince him that loving me is worth something. And convince myself that my life hasn’t been just a waltz of shadows, that it has purpose. Or can have.”
“I hope it works out, Russel. I really do.”
“I know you do.”
I ordered coffee, and we drank that and had another cup. I said, “You talked to Jim Bob?”
“Tried to, a couple of times. He’s not saying much. He told me to put my faith in the Lord and Radio Shack.”
“Radio Shack?”
“That’s what he said. He’s not going to say anything until he’s ready. I’ve known him a long time. He’s a lot smarter than you think he is. Don’t let that hick front and all those corny good-old-boy sayings fool you. Back when I was doing the robberies, he knew. He tried to straighten me out, give me some good advice. But-”
“You didn’t listen.”
“I knew he was making sense, and I still couldn’t listen. Same old story. Know better, but can’t do better.”
I looked at the clock on the wall.
“Damn,” I said. “We need to get back to work. I doubt James and Valerie would like the idea of me taking the hired help out to lunch and beers and chitchat while they’re building frames.”
I put down the tip and paid the check and we got out of there. Back at work I sat behind the counter and thought about Russel back there sweeping up; thought about what he told me about having a hole in him that made a vacuum that sucked out his soul.
