Max Collins - Scratch Fever

“What’s her name, anyway?” Jon said.

“Who?”

“Your girlfriend?”

“Who cares?”

They were at the van. Jon unlocked the side door and they got in. There were some blankets on the cold metal floor of the van, which were used as padding between the amplifiers and such when the van was loaded for travel, and were also used for occasions like this, with Jon and Darlene falling on top of each other in the back of the van.

“It’s a little cold,” Jon said, reaching over and locking the door they’d just come in. “Maybe I should turn on the heater.”

“It won’t be cold long,” Darlene said, pulling her T-shirt off. Her nipples were two red bumps in pink circles riding small, high breasts above a bony ribcage; Jon put his hands on the breasts, kissed the breasts, but his heart wasn’t in it. His hard-on wasn’t, either. It was, in fact, gone.

Because all he could think of what that dyke, whose name he couldn’t remember, not that it mattered. He wasn’t even thinking about Julie and that Hulk of hers, really, it was that goddamn dyke...

Then she was at his fly, and her head was in his lap again, and he was suddenly getting back into it when the side door of the van opened and Jon, angry, confused — I locked that! — said, “Shut that fucking thing!” and then saw who it was who opened it.

The dyke.

Terrific.

“Put your shirt on,” the dyke said to Darlene. A low, but not exactly masculine voice.

Darlene, still blasé, did so, saying, “I only did what you told me to.”

Like unlock the goddamn door when he wasn’t looking, Jon thought, as the dyke crawled inside the van and shut the door behind her. In a black leather jacket and dishwater blonde ducktail and Elvis sneer, she was a fifties parody. A fifties nightmare.

“You don’t scare me,” Jon said, zipping up, scared. “Now just get out of here. Take your friend with you.”

The dyke pulled at either side of her leather jacket, and the metal buttons popped open, and she took something out of her waistband. It was a gun. A revolver with a long barrel. Just like the one Nolan used.

“What is this?...” Jon started to say.

Just as the dyke was swinging the gun barrel around to hit him along the side of his head, the damnedest thing happened: he remembered her name.

Ron.

IT WAS a November afternoon that could have passed for September — not quite Indian summer, cooler than that, but with the sun visible in a blue, not quite cloudless sky. A nice day to be in Iowa City — if you liked Iowa City.

And Nolan didn’t, particularly. Maybe that was why he moved out of here, a few months ago. That had certainly been part of it. That and Jon leaving.

Not that he and Jon had been particularly close. They had been through a lot together, but basically they were just partners — in crime, in business, if there was a difference — and had shared that old antique shop as mutual living quarters for a year or so. That was about the extent of it.

But without Jon around, Iowa City stopped making sense to Nolan. It was as though the town had an excuse being this way, with a kid like Jon living in it; now Nolan felt out of place, out of step, and more than a little bored in a college town perched uneasily between Animal House and Woodstock.

This downtown, for instance.

He was seated on a slatted wood bench. A few years ago, if he’d been sitting here, he’d have been run over: he’d have been sitting in the middle of a street. Since then, the street had been closed off so these college children could wander among wooden benches and planters and abstract sculptures, like the one nearby, a tangle of black steel pipe on a pedestal, an ode to plumbing, Nolan guessed. Some grade-schoolers were climbing on a wooden structure that was apparently supposed to be a sort of jungle gym; very “natural,” organic as shit, he supposed, but the tykes seemed as confused by it as he was. A movie theater was playing something from Australia given four stars by a New York critic; people were lined up as if it was Star Wars 12 . A boy and girl in identical U of I warm-up jackets strolled into a deep-pan pizza place; another couple, dressed strictly army surplus, followed soon after and would no doubt opt for “whole wheat” crust. Nolan hadn’t seen so much khaki since he was in the service. One kid in khaki was playing the guitar and singing something folksy, as though he hadn’t heard about Vietnam ending. Like Nolan, he was seated on a wood bench, and people huddled around and listened, applauding now and then, perhaps to keep warm. Nolan burrowed into his corduroy jacket, waiting for Wagner, feeling old.

That was it. Sudden realization: these kids made him feel old. Jon hadn’t had that effect on him. Jon had, admittedly, looked up to him, in a way. But it hadn’t made him feel old. Not this kind of old, anyway.

He glanced over at the bank. The time/temperature sign said it was 3:35. Wagner had been in there an hour-and-a-half already. Nolan had been in there, too, but only long enough to sign the necessary papers. He didn’t feel comfortable in a bank unless he was casing or robbing it.

For nearly twenty years, Nolan had been a professional thief. His specialty was the institutional robbery: banks, jewelry stores, armored cars, mail trucks. He had gone into that line more or less as a matter of survival. He had been employed in Chicago, by the Family, in a noncriminal capacity, specifically managing a Rush Street nightclub; but a falling out with his bosses (which included killing one of them) had sent him into the underground world of armed robbery.

Not that he’d been a cheap stick-up man. No, he was a pro — big jobs, well planned, smoothly carried out. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody goes to jail.

It took almost the full twenty years for those Family difficulties to cool off — then, largely due to a change of regime — and it was during those last difficult days of his Family feud that Nolan teamed up with Jon. An unlikely pairing: a bank robber pushing fifty and a comic-collecting kid barely twenty. But Jon was the nephew of Planner, the old goat who pretended to be in the antique business when what he really was was the guy who sought out and engineered jobs for men like Nolan. It had been at Planner’s request that Nolan took the kid on.

And the kid had come through, these past couple of years — the two Port City jobs; the Family trouble that included Planner being murdered; the heisting of old Sam Comfort And more.

But Jon just wasn’t cut out for crime. Oh, he was a tough little character, and no coward. He’d saved Nolan’s life once. Nolan hadn’t forgotten. But the kid had a conscience, and a little of that went a long way in Nolan’s racket.

Fortunately, he and Jon had made enough good scores to retire, about a year ago. Or anyway, Nolan considered himself retired, knowing that his was a business you never got out of, not entirely; there were too many ties to the past for that.

Wagner was one of those ties: a boxman, a safecracker, who retired a few years ago and started up a restaurant in Iowa City, called the Pier. He’d made a real go of it but his health failed, and he invited Nolan to buy him out and Nolan had.

Only now Nolan was in the final stages of reversing that process: letting Wagner buy him out and take the Pier back over.

And there Wagner was — knifing through the crowd of window-shopping kids, moving way too fast for a guy in his fifties with a heart condition. But then, that was always Wagner’s problem: he moved too fast, was too goddamn intense, a thin little nervous tic of a man with short white hair, a prison-grey complexion, and a flat, featureless face made memorable only by a contagious smile.