She returned with my food and an odd look on her face.
“Here ya go,” she sat the plates in front of me, “you need anything else?”
I was about to say ‘the answer to my problems” but I opened and shut my mouth in the same second,
She knew what I was thinking and said, “Don’t worry hon. I’m working on it.”
I guess the odd thing is that I was actually feeling much better. Had violence solved my problem? Was I going to have to beat the shit out of inanimate objects to get my rocks off? I wonder if other people were in my position. These were probably the guys you see on TV that run the demolition car circuits. There was a movie a few years back with that guy from “Anchor Watt.” He played a demolition car driver and after each race he’d be so charged with sexual energy he’d have to fuck someone or he’d just pass out. He’d wake up with his pants filled with cum cause he just couldn’t hold it in. Fuck, I don’t want to end up like that.
I ate my food and signaled the waitress that I was ready to pay. There were only two other customers in the diner so she sat down across from me.
“Seven fifty.”
I reached into my wallet and pulled out two fives.
“Here ya go, I don’t need any change.”
“I’ve been thinking…” she looked at me prompting me to say my name.
“Wallace.”
“I’ve been thinking Wallace. This girl of yours, does she know about what happened to you?”
“No, I don’t know if I love her enough to trust her with that kind of information.”
“But you’ll trust me?”
“Who are you gonna tell?”
“Don’t you know that the local town waitress knows everyone’s dirty business?”
“I do, and I also know that you know so much that you wont tell anyone.”
“Fair enough. How long you been with this girl?”
“A month.”
“Well if she is anywhere decent looking a day would have been too long for you not to get into her pants. Girls don’t exactly have to wait if they don’t want to.”
“That is what she keeps telling me.”
“Well, by this time she knows something is amiss and she is most likely jumping to conclusions which are far worse that what has actually happened. And I am not trying to belittle your situation.”
“No, no… you are right. She accused me of being molested and gay tonight. Which lead me here.”
“Oh hon, she got in a fight with you about it? Just walk away. If she isn’t compassionate enough to keep her goodies locked down for a night she doesn’t deserve you.”
We kept talking with her doing most of the conversation. I was thinking about what she said. I gave her an extra ten for the advice and left.
I wish now that I had taken her suggestion.
What I did instead was get home and wake Maria up. She seemed startled but quickly realized what was going on once I kissed her. She could barely contain her excitement. I thought about Glory the whole time but at least I had broken the seal.
The next day I told Maria everything over breakfast. Up to and including last nights activities. She was now my accomplice. I figured that would make her more loyal to me and I guess it worked. This also meant I couldn’t get rid of her either.
“I can’t believe your mom would do that to you. Didn’t she know how Glory was?”
“Absolutely not. My mom was as naïve as a blonde in a beauty shop. Glory had most people in the neighborhood fooled. Ninety percent of the people though she was Golden Glory opening her house up to these wayward young men… and women. She was a regular YMCA for lost souls. The other ten percent of people just naturally think everyone is up to no good. In this case they were right. I’ll bet tomorrow Glory and her new beau will be standing out on the lawn with the housewives in their robes bemoaning their misfortune.”
“I know those sorts. One will most likely say ‘it could have happened to any of us!”
“Exactly.”
This was the dark cynicism I loved about Maria. This was what made me love her; she thought like me. That should have meant that I should know better than trust her but I was an idiot.
I was working construction for the LeMac family. The LeMac son in charge of my site was Johhny. He was the middle son and a pretty fair foreman. You meet a motley sort of people working construction and this job was no different. This is where I met Tony the Itch and Rolondo. These two ex-cons were scheming a bank robbery that they would never pull off. I earned their trust by not ratting them out to Johnny when they took off in the middle of the day to smoke weed. We went out one Thursday night to Vick’s Viking, a neighborhood bar close to the jobsite.
Tony picked a booth near the dance floor so he could watch the drunk gals. I had his weakness pegged within a minute of meeting him. Every female that passed the site got his attention up. I could use this against him if need be. Rolando’s weakness, on the other hand, seemed to be relying on Tony. They ended up in the clink after Tony concocted a plot to rob the grocery store the two stocked shelves for. Rolando explained the scene to me while Tony staired blankly toward the three girls giggling and dancing with each other.
“We had it all planned out didn’t we?”
“Yeah, top plots.”
“It was awesome, something you would have seen on a fucking movie or a TV show man. It was the tits.”
I didn’t understand how Rolando could be so excited about an activity that gotten him no richer but actually thrown into jail. It seemed to me that I would never want to talk about the incident and I sure as fuck would not want anything to do with Tony if the whole thing was his idea.
He giddily continued to tell me about their plan to steal a safe (which in my mind could have carried no more than a thousand dollars in cash).
“Tony thought about this for months, see, it was a small grocery store and some nights our boss would leave us there alone to go screw his girlfriend so we had plenty of time to check out the lay of the land.”
“Did this place have video cameras?”
“Ha! Think smaller Wally. This was a suburb in the middle of Texas, people left their fucking front doors open.”
Tony leaned into the conversation.
“They didn’t need cameras to catch us.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. It was awesome. So we had staked out the place just like the crooks do on a TV show…”
The way Rolando kept mentioning TV shows and movies gave me a clear picture that his grasp on reality was quite skewed, This would be another thing I could use against him in a pinch to get him to go along with any hair-brained idea I had. Getting Tony to go along wouldn’t be so easy. I’d almost have to promise him some women. I’d have to think about how to get that done.
Rolando continued.
“…there was a construction site next to work. They were putting up a new strip mall. The first one in Columbus so there were all these heavy equipment vehicles all over the place. Tony…” he slaps Tony on the back, “…had the foresight to snag some reall thick wire on a trip to visit his parents in Morgan City.”
Tony chimed in, “My folks, they live right off the shipping lanes in Morgan City. I used to break into the shipyards when I was a kid. I had been thinking about this idea so when I was home for my aunts funeral I snuck out and ganked a spool of wire they used to real a ship in to the dry dock to work on it. Some real thick shit. Weak ass here could barely lift it up. This shit was like this thick…”
Tony held his fingers an inch apart.
“It took me two hours to roll the spool to my folks house. I drove an old Imapla and it looked like I was carrying a fucking ton of bricks in the trunk with that weight in there. That drive back to Texas was so hairy. I felt every little bump. It was like a roller coaster.”
When Rolando mentioned the wire I kinda figured out where this was going and I almost laughed. I had visions of these two dragging a safe down Main street in the middle of the night with sparks flying and Rolando whooping it up as Tony drove. My impression was pretty close to the truth.
“So Tony came back with this wire. I remember it, man, like it was yesterday. We got off work one morning and we go to Tony’s uncles diner for breakfast like we did most mornings before school…”
School? How long ago was this? Did these two try to pull this off in high school?
“School? When did you guys do this?”
“Yeah, we’d work over night and go to school in the morning. I guess I was a junior and Tony was a senior. We never got to graduate after this but we both got our G.E.D.s in the joint.”
“Uh, some of us never went to the joint, junior. Rolando here got sent to juvenile detention for three years until he turned eighteen and they popped him out like an abortion. Me, I was eighteen already so I got sent to Bartlett for four years.”
“Yeah, and who came pick you up when you got out, man?”
They were like an old married couple. I think Rolando may have actually been in love with Tony but just didn’t know how to express it so he just did so by having unfailing loyalty to him regardless of the positions Tony got him into. I guess that is a lot like a regular relationship. I kinda wished I had a Rolando in my life, you know, except not a moron and definitely female. He went on telling me about the caper.
“So Tony and me are walking up to the diner and he says ‘Hey come check this out.’ Which was funny cause ever since he’d gotten back from Morgan City I knew something was up. He seemed different. I thought he had gotten laid or something so I didn’t really think about it but, boy, when he opened that trunk I knew.
Shit, it was awesomne. That spool of wire was about as big as that table over there.”
Rolando pointed to a table about twenty-five inches in diameter where two bikers were standing.
“…I seriously don’t think I have ever seen anything so beautiful. It was perfect. It was right there that our lives changed. That thing sitting in his trunk was the beginning of a great adventure that has gone on till this very day, right Tony?”
Up until this point I had not seen any of Rolando’s affection (and that is a good word for it) for Tony reciprocated. But at that point Tony turned and put his arm around Rolando and gave him a squeeze. It didn’t last long but I could see then that the feeling was mutual. These two were inseparable but I would end up doing just that in order to protect my ass.
“That is right Rolando, my man. Me and this guy here have been in some scrapes together. We are like dudes in a war movie who flew together. ‘Pilot’ and ‘Gunner’ always barely making it out of situations and scenarios by the skin of the ir teeth.”
“Dude, ‘Pilot’ and ‘Gunner,’ Those are killer fucking nicknames man. Why hadn’t we thought of that before? Seriously… those would look killer on fucking jackets.”
“YEAH. No shit… nooo shit. Dude after this score we are totally gonna have to do that. I mean it.”
Tony and Rolando carried on like this for a while as I sat back and watched. They drank some more beers and talked about the band they were going to start when they got their money.
