HEIST
Expectations sophisticated the run of sun across almond-blossomed fields. Roads were only two lanes back then and safety instruction videos with cartoon frog mascots warned against drowning in canals. Now we wished that the frogs had warned us against nuclear earthquake tsunamis and other romantic entanglements. The fields surrendered themselves up to rolling hills of dust. There would be thunderstorming, castles and patricide, throughout the county. I wore a black North Face jacket to repel the wind, and black jeans, and black leather shoes. Tapped out rhythms belonging to the drone and thrall of radio talk-show hosts on the steering wheel. I was kept in peace.
New connections appropriated electric feathers and fiberoptic cables to bring me to wherever. I used Yelp to verify my location; used Google Street View to case. The proof in progress morphisized between the lens and nerve. The sun had gone. Black leather gloves; never a hat, too distinct. Others had chosen other ways to arrive but I was a tyrant in a fashion. I could not do what they did, could not mimic the pace or gait; disremembered faces and names after the fact, after happenstance meetings in shapeless warehouse stores, sometimes the home improvement aisle, sometimes condiments.
I retrieved the handgun, also black. Left the car running so that its engine’s guttural whispers, like lions in colonial Africa, could remind me of what it meant to be soothed. Walked around back behind the house, toe first then heel after with every step. Of course there was a lock on the back door and of course I had the key. Locksmiths asked fewer questions than they ought to and so did I, back then and still now.
People resembled dogs more than either people or dogs can know. Gave them food, gave them safety; received trust, smiles, wagging tails, widened irises. There was a cast of light from the splintered moon and that was all right with me. Few things in the world were more visceral than the unlocking of a lock, the opening of a door. Not explosions; not gunfire; not even ice cream parlors after high school dances trying to remember the decades prior. Everything was constructed more than either people or dogs can know.
Caution flooded more than mud in Spain or coal in Chile. I could not recall physics lessons but the voice of Carl Sagan was like lions in colonial Africa. Gun out. The clench of a fist required less muscle usage than a smile. The natural perspective was always the critical one. Everything ever: downhill after the unlocking of a lock. When the master of the house walked into the living room I shot him three times in the chest and he fell without grace or command. There was a safe in the bedroom in the nightstand along with books I had expected to see: The Prince alongside The Velveteen Rabbit.
The sum I received held little consequence in comparison to what remained under the house. The basement was padlocked. Our real treasures were never secured as well as they ought to be. I found the key for this behind a framed picture of the man and his dog. The astringency was at the cusp of excess. This was not a Shake-’n-Bake operation. Very much the picture of professionalism. Almost a shame.
The almond blossoms coated the fields like snow, or like fire extinguisher foam. I found it difficult to determine which was preferable. Fire alarm drills echoed inside my head as events that were not entirely unpleasant. We stood in crowds outside, commiserated, coimagined morbid scenarios of utmost destruction. What would you have taken with you, she asked me, back then. Well, I said. Either you or the money.
