Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

blue shadows under her eyes from running makeup.

“You don’t like talking about women?” he asked.

“I just don’t think she’s pretty.”

He laughed. “Of course she’s pretty. Look at her. Either a girl’s pretty or not pretty. She’s pretty. Maybe you’re too young to know.”

He didn’t speak for a moment, and I said, “I want to hear about the banks.”

My voice ended in a croak, as if these were my dying words.

“What?” he asked.

“The robberies. You know, Bonnie tried to make it sound bad—”

He slid his place mat back and forth, staring at it, breathing through his mouth, his lips slightly parted and his jaw pushed forward. I knew, but didn’t recall when I’d learned, that he did this because his nose had been broken so many times. As a boy I’d occasionally imitated him, hoping for the sculpted chin, the furrow below the bottom lip like the mark of a finger pressed into clay.

“I’m proud,” I told him with a confidence that surprised me. “I’m proud to have a father who’s done incredible things.”

“I don’t know why in the fuck she ever told you,” he said. With his fingertips, he continued to slide the place mat back and forth.

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“Robbing banks.”

He appeared briefly sad but said nothing, just shook his head.

“I don’t care about all this other stuff,” I told him. “I want to hear about that.”

“What other stuff?”

“The market. It’s boring. I want to hear about your crimes.”

I moved my hand dismissively, and he stopped fidgeting. He thrust his jaw forward, narrowing his eyes.

“You want to hear those stories?”

“Yes,” I said. “More than anything. They’re what matter.”

His jaw had gone a bit crooked, and he was squinting one eye, working something out.

“I don’t talk about it anymore.”

“But it’s amazing.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“A lot of people. I know why you want to hear about it. You’re like me. You have that in you. Some people are just like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’d be good at it. Not everyone is. It takes something. You have to be a little crazy. You have to want that kind of life and the way it feels. It’s scary, but it’s a rush too. You have to like that. I think you probably would.”

“I want to hear about it,” I told him, softly, as if coaxing.

Very faintly, he nodded. “What do you want to hear?”

“Just a story. A good one.”

“A good one?” He considered. “There was this one bank job in particular. In the pen, that’s all the guys talked about. The big job. The last crime. Once you did it, you’d never have to work again. Everyone had ideas. Everyone was a fucking genius of crime. I didn’t know anything until I went to prison. I was just a kid. It was like going to school, and there were all these men talking about the big job. I didn’t go in with plans, but once I was there I learned fast. The big job was all that mattered to me. I imagined one perfect crime. It’s like I’d have been famous if I did it. It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” I said, thrilled that he was talking to me like this, like a man. “Did you do it?”

“Yeah. I did a perfect one, but someone else fucked it up. It was the biggest one. It was the craziest. The best aren’t always the craziest. But this one was. I planned it for a long time.”

“Could it still be done?” I asked.

He shrugged and then stared off, composing himself or remembering or simply accepting that he was going to tell me something he hadn’t spoken of in years.

“There were three of us—me, my partner, and his girlfriend. I set the whole thing up. I knew more than they did. It was in 1967, in Hollywood. I rented a surveillance apartment across the street from the bank. I planned the job for the night LBJ was in town. He was giving a speech, and I knew that all the police would be looking after him.”

His words confused me. I’d seen him as careless in his risks. This calculation was new, and it felt dangerous.

“For a week before I broke in, I parked a box truck in an alley by the bank. I parked it right next to a window with bars in it. The night LBJ was giving his speech, I backed the truck up to the window and went into the box and cut the bars. No one could see me because I was inside and the window was hidden by the back of the truck. And if anyone did come by, they didn’t think anything because the truck had been parked there all week.”

As he spoke, he reminded me of someone doing math, first considering an equation, staring off blankly, trying to work it out in his head, and then seeing how it could be done, confidence returning to his gaze.

“I used a jackhammer to blow a hole through the vault. My friend was with me, and his girlfriend watched from the apartment across the street. They had walkie-talkies, and whenever she saw someone, I stopped jackhammering.

“The hole I made wasn’t very big because the concrete had bars running through it. I could blow out only what was between them. Then I pulled myself in. I threw all the money out. But when I went to leave, I couldn’t. It’s hard to explain, but the jackhammering made a grain in the concrete that pointed inward. When I tried to crawl out, it hooked on my clothes. I didn’t want to tell my friend, because with half a million in the truck, I was worried. I took off my clothes and put them through the hole. Then I pulled myself out. I had scrapes everywhere. I was covered in blood …”

He looked down, as if struggling to connect his life now to his past.

“Right before we left, we smashed open all the safe-deposit boxes. That was probably the only dumb thing we did. We