The Spot: Stories

How much despair is inherent in lifeblood, to put a name to it and yet to avoid speaking of it; they were that deep underground — and the underground was ethereal, nonexistent, and supplanted by their own hopes. It was all vainglory. It was all desire to overcome some inner chink in the armor — or so they thought. Light seemed to seep through the cracks; that’s how it felt — as if they were able to read each other’s minds. She could look into Byron’s face; she could see it in his eyes, his wide brown eyes, nothing like doubt, nothing like that at all, but some immutable glint of fear. It is fear that will destroy us, he hinted: One wrong move and we’re doomed, and so when we approach, it must be with the utmost certainty and firmfootedness, not a bit of room to spare, not an inch one way or another. The line on the map indicated the route to the mall. The Brinks truck — heavy and swaying under its armored weight — followed the route weekly. In back rooms, monies were counted with great care, then poured into canvas sacks, sealed, tagged, and hefted out into the raw pure daylight and loaded. One could imagine the bags coming out beneath the broad blue sky and seeing the light of day for a moment before being borne up into the dark, cavernous hold, piled up against other bags, the weighty perplexity of cash compiled against cash; the sluggish movement of the truck as it eased out of the parking lot; the shielded windows, the portals for shotgun muzzles, the heavy-block weight, the reinforced tires — the imponderable protective bulkiness of the truck, so fragile and delicate as soon as it was open to air. That space between point and point, through which the bags had to travel; that in itself, of course, was the weak spot, open to human error; the guns belted into holsters, snapped tight, officious, square-handled; that moment when the money made its way through the morning was the caesura, the quest; the main goal, the main purpose of all the planning, was to find a way into that open air, to coordinate their place in time and space with that of the Brinks truck so that they might, with the simple prompting and the pointing of weapons, provoke the security men, the workers, the hired hacks, to peaceably hand over the bags of money without being shot. That was the original plan laid out; the proviso was that lives would be spared and that it would be a clean, neat operation that went from step to step with the swiftness of exacting precision, an almost mechanical process, but of course it was also brutally clear that one misstep and lives would, as they say, be taken; so it was imperative that they strike at the moment when the cash was nakedly open, when the bags were moving, exposed. The mall had been staked out. She parked there one afternoon, watching from a slouch: ladies moving in and out of the stores, bearing bags, a few men going into Sears for wrenches; one woman with sagging hose, pulling her child along with a stretched arm — overburdened with too many demands, her hair up in a beehive, looking threadbare — swatted the behind of her little boy to move; this woman was evidence, she thought, of what the system does; the system creates burnout, the stress of consumption; the system tears into the ankles; it puffs the ankles up and sends you wobbling along in high heels.

Shooting out in the field in Nebraska, launching shots at a so-called range — really just a pile of old sandbags along one side of a trench — Byron extends his arms, holds his breath, and unleashes a shot that proves him to be the best marksman of them all (because in prep school — a military academy in Tennessee — shooting had been compulsory). When her turn comes she finds pleasure in the gun, solid and heavy with compressed energy as the hammer clicks into place; an enjoyable constriction (in the trigger spring, before the release) sends a bright charge up her arm, and then in answer the kick throws her back on her heels while the blue cloud hangs, reminding her of caps, of firecrackers. (She’ll enjoy this same smell later, sifting black powder from a rolled newspaper into galvanized pipes, tapping the wax into place before slipping the fuses through the softness.) Cans. Green glass insulators from old telegraph poles. Wine bottles. Pieces of fence post. She shoots them all and points the gun wildly into the sky and then down, waving the muzzle in Byron’s face and laughing until he slugs her hard and she falls back into darkness, only to wake in the trailer with a purple bruise on her brow and pain between her legs.