NOBODY GETS OUTTA HERE ALIVE

A short story by Miles Archer

No short stories.  That was the rule.  But when I read Miles Archer's classic noir tale I changed my mind.  Nobody Gets Outta Here Alive is a near-perfect example of the modern noir short story.

Day turned to twilight. Fog haloed the street lights. Freddy Jones turned a heavy key in a well-oiled lock. The bolt snicked home, reassuring him. Abelson would not take kindly to his failing to lock up properly.

He needed the job, but then, in October of ‘73, everybody needed their job. The hours were long and Abelson a jerk but Freddy wouldn’t dream of complaining. That’s not true. He would dream about it. He was just one more member of the diaspora of undereducated young men, scattered like impoverished seeds on the barren concrete of American cities.

San Francisco’s famous fog dampened the streets. Freddy stepped carefully when he encountered those sections of sidewalk with circles of glass embedded in the concrete, his soles worn slick. A folded newspaper in the left one started to draw moisture into his sock.

Everything around him seemed washed-out, faded from wear, age and lack of maintenance. He remembered being thrilled by his first sight of bright lights, streets crowded with busy people, his first days in a big city. The lights were turned out now to save energy- and money- and people weren’t busy anymore.

He felt in his right hand trouser pocket again, verifying the two crumpled bills and odd change there. He would buy a package of cigarette tobacco. It was his one extravagance in a life that was otherwise constricted on every side by responsibility, anxiety and need.

He walked three blocks to the store that bore a sign reading "News". He sidled past two men gazing longingly at the magazine rack. A hand lettered sign sternly warned: "Read at the library!"

A gray man in gray clothes with a gray stubble of beard perched on a stool behind the counter in the back of the store. All around him a riot of colors uselessly begged for the patron’s attention. Freddy laid his money on the counter.

He spoke to the gray man with the colors all around him. "Sailor, please." Remaining seated on the stool, the man turned with a grace born of unconscious repetition, took a bright blue package from the shelf, deftly laid it on the counter, swept the payment into his hand, punched the keys on the register and apportioned the money into it. He might have been a machine, each motion sufficient to its task and no more.

Freddy started to turn away and stopped, suddenly aware that someone had approached while he was transacting his business and now stood next to him. He would have to step around him. The man opened his coat, a casual gesture. Freddy watched as he withdrew a short-barrel shotgun from the waistband of his trousers. For a moment his mind and eyes had trouble sorting out what was real and what was not.

The great black hole that now faced him was real enough. He was only inches away and he had never in his life seen so clearly into the void. He froze, waiting for instructions he knew were coming.

"Get down." The voice contained no emotion . The man almost sounded friendly. Freddy started to back up, so that he would not lay down so close to the robber. Before he could take more than a step, the robber gestured with the gun, a deadly exclamation point. Freddy dropped at once to his knees, then lay prone on the grimy wood, his face turned toward the counter. He could now see nothing more than the man’s shoes and cuffs, and debris collected under the display cases.

The robber spoke again, in a clear voice that carried through the store, but was not a shout. "If any of you screw up, nobody gets outta here alive!"

Freddy twisted his face as much as he dared toward the front of the store. Another man stood near the entrance, his weapon directed at the two other customers, similarly prone.

From the exchanges he heard between robber and cashier he understood that a demand had been made and readily met. There seemed to be a moment of confusion in opening the register and he heard the gray cashier gasp, accompanied by the robber saying, rather calmly, "Hurry." Then he saw one of the robber’s hands holding a bag, the feet turned and the two men backed out without another word.

There was a long moment when no one moved. What thoughts ran through each mind during that brief period of reflection? Freddy could not say. He could not quite summarize his own thoughts. He suddenly felt elated. If he had to apply a word to it, that word would be ‘free’.

Then he stood up and looked first to the cashier. The man’s skin was gray now, to match his clothes and whiskers. He pulled a telephone from under the counter, peered at a note pasted to the counter and dialed. Freddy noticed that one of the other men in the shop had sidled to the open door and disappeared down the sidewalk. The other man stood expectantly, as though knowing the events to come and relishing their entertainment value. A couple walked in and started looking at magazines.

"Hey, guess what? The joint just got robbed!" The man stood tall, a hero surviving cutthroats.

The woman gave her partner a white-faced glance. The two spun about and left.

The cashier called out. "Hey, Mac! Gimme a break, willya? Don’ go tellin’ customers about it. You’re scarin’ away the trade. Save it for the cops, okay?"

The hero was chastened for the moment. "You oughta give us somethin’," he decided. "How ‘bout a Coke, onna house? On account of the strain." He folded his arms, now the injured innocent.

"I ain’t givin’ ya nuttin’ fer free, ya bum!" The victim stalked out, now playing the oppressed masses yearning for liberation. The cashier looked over at Freddy. "Whadda you want fer stayin’ an’ talkin’ to the cops? You got a good look at the one guy. Wow! When he pulled that alley sweeper I’d about to shit my pants!"

Freddy smiled. "I’ll stay. That guy," indicating with a nod the empty doorway, "got a better look at the other one."

"Yeah, but he’s a jerk." The cashier paused. "Hey, if ya want a Coke, go ahead and take one outta the machine. If the boss pitches a bitch I’ll square it myself." Freddy suddenly realized that he felt lightheaded and weak in the knees. He sat on a stack of bundled newspapers. The cashier slid off his stool, flipped up the counter to pass through and took two Cokes from the chest. He popped the caps and handed one to Freddy.

"Come to think of it, I could use a pick-me-up." He took a swig. "Too bad we ain’t got a bottle around here to sweeten it." He winked at Freddy. Freddy felt disappointed as well. He took a swig from the glistening bottle that fit his hand so comfortably, then took another. He rolled a cigarette with awkward, frightened fingers, and smoked it. He felt better.

It seemed to him that the police took a long time to arrive. Two patrolmen finally entered twenty minutes after the robbers had fled. Freddy reflected that by now the two men were long gone.

The police wrote in their notebooks, got an estimate of the take from the cashier, spoke to Freddy for a few minutes and left. He felt incomplete afterward, as though the forces of order in his world had not met his expectations. They had not seemed to care that he had been threatened with death, casually, simply because he had decided to buy tobacco at that particular time and that particular place. Death! The realization was starting to sink into his thoughts, a black rock of finality to shipwreck his existence.

He walked home mechanically, not seeing the worn shops, the broken streets, the doorways filling with sleepers. He climbed the stairs to his room. Only a room, with bath down the hall, a bed, a sink, a small closet to hold his one suit, one pair of shoes, a tiny dresser for two shirts, two undershirts, two shorts, two pair of socks. A library book lay on the top of the dresser, along with his hairbrush, toothbrush and paste, shaving cream, razor and soap. A limp towel hung from the towel rack loosely clinging to the wall, threatening at any moment to fail once and for all.

He lay on the bed with his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He quickly opened them again. The blackness was a reminder of that blackness he had just seen, that maw of infinity he had stared into, full of the promise of death.

He studied the cracks in the ceiling, a lunar landscape illuminated by floodlights reflecting from a billboard across the street. He usually pulled the shade but tonight he welcomed the reassuring light. He started to think about light, how light and life were linked so inextricably in the human heart. If you saw light you knew you were alive. To die was to be lost in the dark.

He wondered if what they said was true: you saw a tunnel leading to the light when you died. That’s what his mother told him once, when he was a boy, first coming to grips with the knowledge of mortality. He had wondered, cursed with a logic that would not be silenced by faith, how could she know it to be true without having died? It disturbed his thoughts even now. He swung his thin legs over the bedside and sat on the edge of the bed. The old springs sang a chorus of squeaks and moans to accompany the movement.

His heart felt caged in his chest and his brain felt packed too tightly into his skull. He stood suddenly, his legs thrusting him upward as though filled with the power of his thoughts. He paced the tiny space exactly like a caged predator.

The whole idea burst into his head complete and stopped his pacing. There are those who take what they need and those who accept what they are given. The confidence, the self-sufficiency required to walk up to strangers, threaten them, demand what you needed and then walk away, replete.

Freddy was blinded by the thought. It seemed to him that the light in the room became brighter, that he was floodlit in this cell of his own making, this trap that he locked himself into each night and then tamely walked to his next trap, Abelson’s Golden West Loan Company, each morning. He opened and closed his own cage each day compelled by habit, by custom, by fear.

He wondered what it would be like to live as a predator. Never knowing one moment to the next how your needs would be fulfilled or what disaster might await. You were a predator among predators. The lion surrounded by jackals- armed shopkeepers, police, other predators jealous of your claim.

He burst out of his room then, the energy no longer bearable. For hours he prowled the streets, past places catering to night people- the exotic mixture of the nocturnal by habit or trade: policemen and thieves; whores and nurses; the lonely and the horny; addicts and drug dealers; ambulance and taxi drivers; short order cooks and waitresses; watchmen and burglars - men and women driven by predilection or circumstance to wander the dark hours. They clustered to the light like moths or hid in its shadows like feral beasts, but they were there, all around him.

Where was ‘his’ robber now? Enjoying the proceeds in some seedy room with a purchased woman? Sleeping peacefully, his conscience clear as a child’s? Why was he, Freddy Jones, stalking these unknown hours, restless and afraid, while the man with the gun did not? Or did he? Freddy wanted desperately to know the man’s mind but could not guess what he might think or feel. Can a sheep know the mind of a wolf?

The fit of intolerable energy finally relented about three AM. He returned to his room and his creaking bed, slid into a hard sleep where his dreams came one after another with such rapidity that when he awoke at six he felt that he had not slept at all. What the Melanesians would call his mana, that his mother called his soul, had been prowling the dark behind his eyelids.

*

Abelson was there in the morning, already at his cluttered desk in the back, drinking tea from a glass, holding the sugar cube between his teeth, Russian style. A bagel with cream cheese and the salty salmon Abelson called ‘lox’, lay on a piece of grease-shined wax paper. He nodded to Freddy, his mouth fully occupied with bagel. Freddy nodded back.

He wanted to speak about the previous night, but not to the man he worked with everyday. A man who was not a friend but an employer. Whose concern would only be related to his own possibility of suffering the misfortune as the newsstand owner, not the black hole of speculation the experience had plunged Freddy into, deep restless currents of thought and feeling. Abelson wasn’t much for ‘feelings’. Freddy knew the man well enough to know that. How many times had he said, "In this business, you can’t get too sympathetic. Everybody’s got a story, ya know? Everybody’s got trouble. I can’t solve their problems. All I can do is loan them money. It’s what I’m here for. I ain’t some rabbi or priest, ya know?"

Freddy knew. He too was uncomfortable hearing the tales that sometimes accompanied a patron’s surrender of their valuables. The narratives they hoped would add some monetary value to the detritus of their lives, brought to Golden West Loan in exchange for another few day’s existence. After a time the stories were no more unique than the people who told them. Even the cheap jewelry and useless bric-a-brac they offered seemed to vary only in the smallest details. Freddy wondered if everyone owned the same stuff, varying only in color or condition. He was sure that some of the pieces bought one day were recycled through the shop the next.

One item that Abelson welcomed was guns. They bought and sold a lot of them and one of the first things he had taught Freddy was how to evaluate a firearm’s condition.

"You get some of these old-timers dragging in grandpa’s Winchester, an’ it’s so rusty you can hardly work the lever. They think it’s worth something but it ain’t worth nothin’." He showed him how to examine the barrel in the light; to work the action and how to field strip the most common guns. Like most country boys, Freddy knew a little about them. He hadn’t fired one in years, since moving to the city. He couldn’t very well go squirrel hunting in Golden Gate Park, although he heard that some vagrants living there trapped them. He’d eaten fried squirrel and thought it did not taste bad, if you were hungry enough.

The day began its simple, tired routine; a rhythm that played him over and over, like a record. Dusting, arranging, shifting stock from here to there, moving items no longer in pawn from the safe into the cases, setting out trays of jewelry. He refilled the gun display, as he did every morning, taking them out of the fat, squat safe in the back and laying them on velvet-covered shelves, wiping his prints from each one and holding it with the cloth as he lay it at just the right angle. Abelson was a perfectionist about the gun display.

The last pistol was a fairly new .45 caliber Colt semiautomatic. It was heavy in his hand as he carried it to the case. He glanced over his shoulder to locate Abelson, but he was not in sight. Freddy quickly lifted the gun and sighted it against the light coming through the window, the bright daylight peering its way through a clutter of goods, everything from fishing rods to band instruments neatly ranked in the display windows.

A feeling surged through his arm as he raised the gun. It was heavy and black, a lumpy, blunt statement of deadly power. Freddy lay the gun in its place, then, on a whim, removed a .45 cartridge from a box under the counter. It squatted in his palm, a senseless, brutish killing thing. It felt good. It felt like power.

From time to time during the day, when the opportunity presented itself, he went over to the gun case and let his glance fall upon the pistol. Each time he did so an image came into his mind: the backlit gun sight, focused upon a person- a submissive face, the face of fear. The face he had worn last night.

He hated the thought of his face in the robber’s eyes, the certain confidence of the other man in his ability to command, to order, simply because he could show you the dark tunnel of death and you were afraid of that lightless hole and you knew that this man could put you in that hole forever. It was simultaneously a promise and a threat: "Do as I say and live. Thwart me and die." It was clarity, simplicity, cleanliness. No seesaw for power or respect. Even Abelson would occasionally convey some token of empathy, some simple acknowledgment that Freddy was human. The robber had not shared even that with him, had not acknowledged his humanity in even the simplest way, only its fragility, its vulnerability.

It was Friday and on Friday Abelson left for Temple well before sunset. Freddy stayed until closing alone. Abelson turned at the door, pulling his coat on as he spoke his routine instructions, delivered consistently, if needlessly.

"...and remember! A robber comes in, give him what he wants!" The coat now in place, Abelson’s arm was free to rise and shake a finger at Freddy. "But don’t give from the back, remember? Give only what’s in the cases or the cash box!" He smiled, as if to excuse the crassness of speaking of money when life was at stake. "No point in giving away the store when all they want is what they can grab." With this ambivalent advice he nodded, "Good evening. See you Monday." Freddy would have the responsibility for running the store on Saturday, for Abelson did not break the Lord’s sabbath- at least, not in view of Freddy Jones.

The late afternoon ground its way down to evening. Freddy locked the heavy, steel-barred glass door, pulled the shade and started putting valuable items into the safe. He saved the .45 for last. He felt the thrill of it again as soon as his fingers wrapped around the solid waist of the hand grips. His finger slid naturally to the trigger. Glancing instinctively over his shoulder, he took it into the back room where the safe sat patiently, to be sealed until morning.

A large, gilt-framed mirror leaned against the wall, waiting for its owner’s fortune to improve. Freddy stood in front of it and brought the gun up slowly, watching the foreign hand move from his side. When his arm reached full extension, he faced the black hole again. He peered at it with interest instead of fear.

"So, this is what it looks like from the other side," he whispered to himself. He dropped the arm back to his side and brought it up again, more quickly this time. "Give me all the money!" He didn’t say it very loud. He was embarrassed by the way he sounded, as though his voice was not made for delivering those words. He tried again. "Get down on the floor!" He commanded his reflection, gesturing impatiently with the gun, the way the robber had done. Yes, it was intimidating, to be sure. He wondered how the man behind the gun had felt. Perhaps he had been as unsure of himself as Freddy was now. One doesn’t listen too closely when the black hole of infinity is pointing your direction, he reasoned, half aloud. Abelson would have thought him mad, standing there with the gun, muttering, gesturing, shrugging, then posing again, arm extended, voice stronger now. "Get on the floor! Gimme the money!" His voice rang with a real confidence now. He had the power, he commanded the black hole!

The gun slipped into his pocket. It weighed down his worn overcoat like a brick. Freddy felt that he had to put his hand in his pocket and hold it, to keep its weight from showing what he carried. He pocketed a box of shells. They counterbalanced the gun to some degree. Down the street and into his room he held the gun loosely inside his pocket, feeling like everyone could see through the gray fabric and know what illicit power resided there.

He slept well that night. The dreams did not leave him breathless as they had the previous day. Instead he felt serene, secure. At first, the pistol lay on the dresser but he could not sleep until he had placed it under his pillow. If he woke during the night, he had only to touch it in order to fall asleep peacefully once more.

The next day he carried the gun with him, tucked into his waistband, concealed by his suit coat. He was particularly solicitous of the customers that day. He felt he owed them that courtesy, being the possessor of such power. He convinced a doubtful, elderly woman to purchase a console radio that Abelson had despaired of ever selling. She paid full price for it and Freddy smiled quietly when her son carried it out to their car. He had controlled her, persuaded her, made her do what he wanted. He suddenly realized that he had confidence, power. It was magic.

The seeds of a plan formed in his imagination as he sat through the quiet part of the day. He would close a little early. If Abelson found out...who cares what Abelson said? He would take the streetcar up Mission Street, out to the Italian neighborhood where he was not known, had only visited once or twice. Once there, he would find a grocery or a newsstand like the one he frequented, and he would rob it. Yes, he would walk in there and command people with the power of eternal night. "Do as I say or die."

He felt his pocket. Yes, he had carfare. Then he smiled to himself. After this, he would not have to check his pockets for money. It would be there, at his desire, for the asking. He no longer worried about the weight of the gun in his coat. When he reached the area where the streets were lined with shops, he exited from the rear door of the streetcar, then walked to one side of the street. He leaned against a building, took time to roll himself a cigarette while he surveyed the street.

Unlike the other man, he would not have a confederate to assist him. That meant that he would have to choose a small place that might have no customers for a time. He worried that if he had to control too many people someone might get crazy and then...then...what? Would he shoot? He didn’t want to do that. It seemed, well, it seemed to place too much importance on the money. What is the value of a human life? Then again, what was the point in waving a gun around if in the end you couldn’t use it? He set aside the dilemma as being fraught with too many variables to solve.

He became concerned that he had spent too much time in one place. Someone might remember the young man in the worn gray coat who kept sliding one hand into his pocket. He thought he had spotted his target. An ice cream shop that, at this hour, was ready to close and stood empty. It was a narrow shop, squeezed into a corner location that would allow him to quickly disappear up a side street. A bystander would have to stand in a direct line with the door to see into it, to see a gray man pointing a gun at the lone clerk who was carrying tubs of ice cream into the freezer.

He crossed the street quickly, walking from one shadowy pool to the other, avoiding the street lamps’ glow. He glanced up and down, then turned toward the ice cream shop and resumed his brisk pace. Only a man walking to corner, on his way home, an observer might conclude. If he was really lucky, no one would even see him enter the shop.

When he drew parallel with the doorway he turned suddenly, breathing deeply, although his breath seemed not to fill his lungs adequately. Another glance left and right. No one close. As though plunging into a pool of black water whose depths he did not know he stepped up and crossed the threshold of the shop, into a new life, a new Freddy Jones.

The clerk glanced at him and his face spoke clearly his disappointment with this last minute customer. He spoke quickly. "I hope you want vanilla or chocolate, ‘cause I put everything else away." He was wiping his hands on a towel, rainbow-stained with the many flavors he scooped.

Freddy said nothing but walked close to the counter, directly across from the clerk. He wasn’t sure his voice would carry and he was afraid to shout. His right hand quivered, but he mastered it and forced the arm to withdraw the gun. Slowly he raised it. It felt very heavy, hanging from the end of his outstretched arm. The ice cream man’s eyes slowly widened. His hands slid upward automatically with no need for instruction from Freddy. Freddy thought he would never be able to speak, but finally he ground out of his clenched throat, "The money. Gimme the money."

His vision had tunneled and he could see nothing but the pale face, white as the uniform coat. Their eyes were connected by a white-hot strand and all else about him was dark. Had someone walked into the shop just then he would not have been able to see them.

The clerk opened the till with one hand, removed the cash drawer and slid it over the counter to Freddy. He glanced down to watch his left hand reach out, seemingly of its own accord. The fingers seized the bills, crumpled them into a wad and thrust them deep into his coat pocket. The hand was cool enough to return and grab two rolls of quarters and pocket them as well.

Freddy turned then and glanced at the doorway. No one there. He waved with the gun. "Get down on the floor." The ice cream man complied faster than Freddy had done when so ordered. He started to walk toward the door, realized he still held the gun in his hand, slid it into his pocket at the last moment and was out the door, around the corner and into the night.

His heart was pounding so hard it drowned out his hearing, the bass throb of it filled his chest and echoed in his head. He gasped for breath but kept walking. His legs belonged to someone else. Two blocks up and three over, then two down and two over, until he caught the streetcar and rattled away into the night. It was well past dinner hour and only a few weary workers rode. The motorman seemed half asleep. For Freddy, every light was inordinately bright and every sound too loud. The streetcar bell was an agony for his raw nerves. He exited four blocks away from his hotel and stalked, an automaton, back to his room and back to Freddy Jones, clerk.

He could never recall how he arrived at his room, quietly closing his door. No one took any notice, just as they always took no notice. Strangers in close quarters learn to mind their own business.

He turned the latch softly, then emptied his pockets on the bed. He had become possessed with the irrational fear that someone would hear the sound of the gun or money if he laid them on the dresser. The wad of bills he took up and separated one by one, counting them. His take totaled two hundred and thirty five dollars. The white floodlights outside the window shadowed the crumpled pile. He jerked, realizing he had not pulled down the window shade. He seized it and yanked it down. It fluttered and threatened to retract. He held the bottom for a moment, as though settling a nervous animal.

He earned six hundred a month at the Abelson’s. Out of that he paid two fifty for the room and another twenty for maid and laundry service. He ate simply, varying among the cheap restaurants where he lived. He managed to send half of what was left back to his family, faded people wearing faded clothes, living on what they still called a farm, now mostly dry grasses, weeds and dead trees; two dried up old people with no money, no future, no hope other than that they not die alone.

He calculated slowly. If he did this just once a week, even if he got only what he had this time, he would have more money than he had ever imagined, plus more to send home. For only a few minutes of terror. Somewhere inside him a tiny worm of fear twisted. Some accident of fortune was inevitable, he could be arrested- or shot. But the feeling of power over his destiny, that he had taken action to heal the betrayal of his future, thrilled him more than the fear. He had seen the black hole and he knew it now for what it was- an illusion. It was not death. Death could just as easily be a sunny day, swimming in the ocean, carried away by the rip tide, slipping into the salty water, coughing and gagging until it dragged you down. It might be anything, it might even be the despair of old age, a failed life.

Freddy took up the gun and looked at it for a long time. He spoke very softly, but the words roared inside his head.

"Nobody gets outta here alive."

©2002 Content Factory

***

Nobody Gets Outta Here Alive first appeared in Hardluck Stories.

MILES ARCHER is the pen name of a Pacific Northwest mystery writer. He has accumulated a long list of job titles over the years, mostly because he gets fired a lot (something about his 'attitude'.) He has published short stories in several ezines and occasionally in print, about half of which feature his series private eye, Doug McCool. The second novel in The Adventures of Doug McCool series, The Emerald Triangle, is scheduled for publication in June, '03, by NovelBooks, Inc. Readers' comments regarding this story are appreciated. (Well, the good ones, anyway).
Contact Miles

Read an extract form Miles Archer's The Emerald Triangle