Cutting Loose, page 1
CUTTING LOOSE
JAMES VAUGHAN
Copyright © 2021 James Vaughan
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
For my parents
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
PART TWO
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEn
PART ONE
ONE
She checked the Remington pump shotgun again, breathing slowly to stay calm. This would be the third time. The first two had been wild, adrenalin-soaked trips into a crazy new world in which the rules were suspended, the onrush of it taking her over the edge of Niagara into free fall.
“Okay?” said Max.
“Sure.”
He turned to Sol.
“Okay? Cool?”
“Cool.”
The engine turned over, and Max let the Chevy onto the suburban street. Carey, on the backseat, laid her shotgun along the floor.
“So,” said Max.
A boy was cycling on the sidewalk. A retiree was washing his car. A flag fluttered on a pole. The three of them had been there for two days. Now their bags were in the trunk; they would not be going back.
“The trash,” said Sol.
“Yeah,” said Max. “We see somewhere right, we’ll dump it.”
He kept to thirty mph in the quiet streets. Most people had already commuted, and there was little traffic. The engine was quiet, and they could hear the slight flip-flip of the tires passing over the concrete slabs.
“You owe me ten bucks,” said Sol.
Carey laughed: they had played poker the night before. “Sure, Sol.”
“Just saying.”
Carey was looking at the back of Max’s head and the scalp showing through the hair. He still wanted to be the young buck, though time was nibbling at him. They had met two years ago at Billy’s place, and when Billy said, “This is Carey,” Max held her eyes with a steady look that she came to know well. When she kept looking back with a calm, neutral manner, she noted the flicker of hostility—just a slight movement of the head—that told her he was the cock of the walk.
“Maybe there,” said Sol after a couple of miles.
A bin was close to a deserted sidewalk. Max braked, and Sol got out and tossed the black bag into it. He was short and slim, dressed in black pants and a gray zip-up jacket he had bought two months before in another state.
There were thirty miles ahead of them. Beyond the suburb, they came to open country. Max stopped at a decrepit gas station that had ads from another era in the windows and filled the tank. He paid the old guy running the place in cash.
“Have a good’n, sir.”
“You bet,” said Max.
This was cattle country, gently rolling with grass burned brown. Max turned on the radio and got Perry Como singing Magic Moments. Sol snickered.
“Gonna be magic,” said Max. “Better believe.”
Carey had grown up twenty miles south of here; she knew this country well. It was strange to be back and so close to her parents, who would be reading the papers now over a pot of coffee. They would be talking about President Nixon’s tax cuts and thanking their lucky stars they still had a President who knew which way was up. “Hubert Humphrey,” her dad would be saying. “What a waste of space. Thank God we were spared him.” Maybe that was the only thing she could agree with him about: the vacuity of the Democrats. At least with Nixon, you knew who your enemy was.
Was it her father’s certainty about everything that had eventually proved too much—the unending laying-down of the law? Such-and-such a performer on Ed Sullivan’s Show was hopeless; his bank manager knew nothing about investment; Chuck the carpenter wouldn’t know a miter from a bishop’s hat; Lenny Bruce was a depraved pervert; and all the rest of it. Year after year of it could wear you down.
He was the highly-educated second son of a Wall Street commodities trader and always spoke in whole sentences. One of his sayings was, “If there isn’t a verb there, it’s meaningless.” His was not the anger of a failure: he had done well in life. It came from his core, and it meant that nothing his children did would ever be right. Her older brother, Philip, had read the situation and left early, spending his vacations from his prep boarding school with his grandparents. Allen, the middle sibling, one year older than she, answered the problem with silence and lived his secret life behind those unblinking eyes. He was a handsome boy and always had a cute girlfriend. Carey hoped that there was a route for him there. Both brothers prospered with time, Allen as a doctor and Philip as a realtor. Any bruises they carried remained hidden.
Then there was the youngest one, her very own self. The Chevy passed a ranch house. Ted, a boy she dated, had lived there. The top right window marked his room. She bent forward to keep looking as they went by. He had felt her tits up there when his parents were out. What became of him? Perhaps he was still there, running the spread.
She had said nothing to Max and Sol about any of it; her past was not open to discussion. A barrier would always be there, walling off her other life. That barrier was strengthened by the complexity of her feelings: her rejection of so much, combined with her acknowledgment of its gravitational pull.
Her father’s name was James Paul Astaire. “And no, I’m not related to Fred,” he would say. “Bugger’s real name is Austerlitz.” He ran a legal practice in San Antonio after moving from New York to work with, and then succeed, his Uncle Silas. Silas had managed the business well enough but without passion. Her father introduced some reforms, though he waited until Silas died, in harness, before shaking the business by the scruff of its neck. The result of his labors was that the family grew up wanting for nothing. She experienced the tail end of the culture of deference that was swept away by the Sixties. In the Age of Aquarius, the notion of knowing one’s place seemed quaint, but not when she was seven or eight. At that time, she accepted without question being treated as belonging to another tribe.
When change came, her father never seemed to bend with the wind. Colleagues might grow their hair and wear wider ties but not James Paul. His sureness of his own being meant the idea would never occur to him. The cut of his suits, his choice of ties, and his hand-made shoes, retained the elegance of former years. She would see the contempt in his eyes as he looked at young people in sneakers and T-shirts. All of that—the way people dressed—was superficial. It was what lay below, his belief in how life should be lived, that was his bedrock. That sureness made him intimidating to many people, and she had long since confessed to herself that she, too, was intimidated.
At puberty, the shy, retiring girl named Paula left through one door and a wild girl named Carey entered through another. That was her mother’s maiden name and her own middle name, and she liked the sound of it. Her father continued to call her Paula, and she refused to give him satisfaction by grousing about it. She would just adopt her expressionless look, as though the name had not registered.
Was it just hormones that made her behave the way she did? Sometimes she thought she would like to strangle her father with one of his damned silk paisley ties. The rules of how to live were there like a sword of Damocles, and now people were saying the rules had gone. This was a long time before Woodstock. That happened in 1969, when she was twenty four. She was a teenager in the age of Elvis, but the tectonic plates had already started to move. The hormones were there, though, playing their part.
A boy named Phil had been hanging around and showing interest. Finally, she decided he was attractive enough to get her past that unavoidable milestone. She would have sex with him in his parents’ bed, a convenient two hundred yards from her own front door. First times, she knew, could be hit or miss, but he turned in a good performance, and, for a while, they kept seeing each other. A sense of discontent, though, ran through her and she knew that Phil would be in her slipstream soon enough. She saw herself as someone who was in charge of her life. Being a receptacle for semen offended something deep inside her. How could you find a way around that? How could you be an equal? She knew it was not possible: that all the strength and self-possession in the world—all the arrogance she could summon—would change nothing. For all that, when the affair with Phil was over, she kept sleeping with different boys as though reality could be rewired.
Was her sense of discontent something she had inherited from her father? Was it no more than that: a genetic trait reinterpreted by the times she lived in? In spite of her father’s cutting, perceptive comments, she had the insight that he loved her, but still they played their lethal game, neither of them giving an inch. Perhaps that
A week later, she turned seventeen and in that year began to discover the beat culture that was already mutating into the era of wholesale rejection. She sucked it up like a whale swallowing kelp—the music, the clothes, and the attitudes. Those tits and the long legs made their contribution to the mixture. A year later, she had left home and was flying solo.
A police car drove past, and all three of them kept their eyes forward.
“Ten miles, maybe,” said Sol.
Country gave way to ramshackle buildings. A black guy sitting on a stoop was drinking from a plastic bottle. His dog lay nearby, its head on its paws. On the end wall of a row of deserted stores was a peeling ad for Pepto-Bismol. A housewife was holding a spoonful of the stuff with a look that suggested her life was about to be rearranged.
“That hollow-point ammo,” said Max. “Maybe we should get into that. Try it on the range.”
“Hey, a bullet is a bullet,” said Sol.
“Sol, that’s where you’re wrong as can be. Hollow point does all the damage you need, and then some, without going on through.”
“Going on through? When did you give a hoot about that?”
Max laughed. “What I’m saying, hollow point will fuck up anything it hits. It expands. Bullets that go on through, that’s wasted energy. You’re shooting a wall or whatever.”
“Hey, I thought for a moment you were an altruist. Not hitting Joe Citizen.”
“There’s that, too.”
Carey knew that Sol had touched a nerve with that reference to Max’s wild style with a firearm. Sol was the quiet one whom Max was unable to treat with the contempt he clearly wished to deploy. Something about Sol restrained him: a certain inscrutability perhaps, a quality of some sort beyond easy analysis. It placed him beyond Max’s grasp and beyond hers also, creating an area of unknowability that she thought of as their personal Bermuda Triangle.
Sol was not given to extravagant statements about modern society. Rhetoric was not for him. He had lived his life and formed his views, which Carey knew had a lot to do with his background as the son of a coalminer. He was neither handsome nor sexually attractive—at least, to her—and yet he possessed that unostentatious inner strength. His colorless hair and lack of height gave him the look of the kind of guy who gets hazed in high school, but Carey knew instinctively that Sol had never been hazed.
His presence among them and their associates seemed to be a contradiction. He was surely too well-balanced and conventional to have taken this route. The flaws in most of their crowd were out on display; Sol was the only one of them who could have walked into a legitimate job and prospered.
He caught her looking at him and made that odd ducking motion with his chin, a gesture she had never seen him use to anyone else.
“Won’t be long now, guys,” said Max.
Her heart beating faster, she touched the shotgun for reassurance. It had four shells in the magazine and one in the barrel, and there were twenty more in a bag slung round her neck. The 870 was a standard law-enforcement weapon, found in a thousand police cruisers across the country. The first time she used it, in a bank in Bakersfield, she felt a rush of power she had never experienced before, a kind of exultation. After that, the Remington was her new best friend, the one she could always rely on.
Those first two times had both been in California, but soon enough they had to leave, with the FBI getting close. Life there had been easy and seductive, if you could forget the rest of it. The people were beautiful, and the fins on the cars gleamed in the sunlight. It was a vision of plenitude, and she was in its embrace in spite of herself. Reluctant to share with the guys, she found an apartment of her own, in Carmel, off San Antonio Avenue and close to the beach, far away from those two banks. She would rise early, go for a swim and then make herself breakfast. In the afternoons, she liked to walk in the hills and read. A couple of times a week, she would dine at one of the restaurants on Seventh Avenue. A guy in his sixties she had seen in a flea market would sometimes nod at her. He sent her a drink over, one evening when they were in the same restaurant, then, later, asked if he could join her for coffee. They fell into a relaxed friendship. His name was Rick Lafitte, and he had a few fishing vessels based in Monterey. Once, he invited her out for a jaunt, showing her the sights along the coast and behaving like an easy-going uncle.
Max and Sol had a place four miles north, and the three of them would meet at one of several bars off Munras Avenue to talk and plan. Two years later, sitting behind Max in the Chevy, she knew that all the planning in the world would never be enough; she had learned that lesson in California. They had left two people dead there, and the world was changed forever.
One evening, toward the end, she had taken a phone call from Rick.
“Hon, I’ve been trying to reach you. Turn on the news.”
“Why?”
“Just do it. NBC.”
He hung up.
“. . . go back now to this breaking story. Phil, talk us through this.”
“Thanks, Linda. Yes, two banks have been robbed in the last month, both in the Bakersfield area. In the second incident, a teller and a customer died. These graphic scenes show the aftermath—broken glass, bullet cases and a wrecked car. Now, the FBI believes it has information on the perpetrators. Earlier I spoke with an FBI investigator.”
Carey, standing next to the couch, saw an overweight man with thinning hair and rimless eyeglasses. A strapline identified him as Special Agent Gus Esposito.
“Agent Esposito, you’ve released some data on this case.”
“That’s right. We believe both banks were robbed by the same three people. It’s possible they’re acting from political motives. After the last robbery, they changed cars a mile north of the bank. An eyewitness saw three people, dressed in black, putting shotguns in the trunk of the second vehicle. That witness has worked with a police artist, and the results have now been released to news organizations.”
As he continued to talk, images appeared of two males and a female. The phone rang again; it was Sol.
“Yeah, I know. I’m watching.” She sat, keeping the phone to her ear.
“Agent Esposito, do you have a hit yet on who they are?”
“We have some thoughts, but we need the cooperation of the public. If anyone knows, or think they know, who these three are, please contact any law-enforcement agency. Do not approach them.”
The images of Max and Sol had a generic look. It was the one of her that took her breath away. Though crude, it had uncannily caught the look of her. It was accurate enough for Rick to make the connection and, if he had, others would too.
“We’ll need to pull out pretty soon,” said Sol.
“Pretty soon?” said Carey. “Fuck that. I’m gone.”
She hung up and went to a closet for her emergency bag.
Max was parked next to a farmer’s truck outside a pharmacy in Medina. The Mutual and General Bank was a few yards down, and a few women with shopping bags were talking in front of it.
Carey, waiting, her body charged with the power of the moment, was suddenly, for no reason, in the back yard of her parents’ home, wearing that swim suit with the scalloped edges. She had torn it six months after her mother bought it for her, so that meant she was nine years old. Her father, dressed in tan pants and a light blue shirt, was tossing a ball to Allen, and her mother was lounging in a deckchair, wearing that polka-dot dress, blue spots on white, a glass of wine held in that particular way of hers, as though she were a guest who would soon depart. She was present but not present, a visitor who was content to sip her drink and make polite conversation. Carey, lying on a tartan rug, saw her mother look at her husband with an air of detached interest, and understood, with the wisdom of childhood, that their relationship was provisional. Like her sons, Lou had left the field of battle, leaving only Carey and her father.
Lying there on that rug, sweating lightly, she watched Allen, twelve years old, dressed in shorts and a T shirt, throw the ball back harder. Her father gave a hint of a smile.
