Two armed thugs with crooked ways had taken the manager of the Columbia Grocery Store hostage. They also had $1,492 dollars in a large dark grocery bag, thinking that the bag would be inconspicuous. Invisible in fact, would be closer to what they were thinking. But the police were tipped off and waiting for them when they came out. The thieves scurried like you-know-what when the lights come on in a cheap motel. The two ran back inside the store, where the manager waited for them, having been tied up earlier with stolen duct tape. The Mexican standoff began. Everyone waited, and waited (as if they were in San Felipe).
The thugs inside ate free ham sandwiches, free candy, and with a touch of constraint, drank Coke Classic (they could’ve had champagne). County police, city police, the next-city-over police, the sheriff deputies, state police, and the quick-to-respond auxiliary police in their pick-up trucks were outside, waiting, weapons drawn, anxious to shoot somebody, and wondering what to do next. The Sheriff had ordered pizza.
Everyone concerned was a bit foggy when it came to Mexican standoffs. After all, there were only three Latino families in East St. Louis at the time. What the police did know however, was that there was a loss of order here. And loss of order, as everyone knows, could very well be followed by doubt, loss of confidence, revolution, and generalized anarchy if it became widespread.
It was turning into an all-nighter. The stand-off began in darkness, at 10:00 p.m. and nothing of consequence happened until 3:27 a.m. At that time (Latino time) one of the kidnappers came out of the store carrying a white T-shirt masquerading as a white flag. He also had a note tied around a stolen tennis ball, which he rolled to the middle of the police cars. After running, waiting, inching back, and finally ascertaining that the tennis ball was not a nuclear smart bomb, the cops read the note. The note, on stolen paper would be a good guess, was a demand. The robbers wanted a car, so the cops gave them a Chevy Impala (it was a returned lemon) with almost no gas (their usual ploy).
This was just the sort of thing the shark-eyed used car dealer was looking for. Get rid of the lemon, he kept thinking, get rid of the lemon, get the insurance.
The crooks drove off (windows up) with their loot in a gray paper bag. They also took the manager-hostage, who was very tall. The manager was lying down in a rather informal position in the stained back seat.
Twenty-one cop cars followed, sirens blasting simultaneously in the early morning hours. Six police agencies were not going to pass up the rare opportunity to blare their sirens, fortissimo. It was even noisier than the cannon in the 1812 Overture. But that was okay. No one should be sleeping at a time like this anyway. It was a chase. The criminal (accused, or rather presumed criminal since he wasn’t yet formally accused) driver wasn’t much of a driver though. He skidded out of control in less than four miles, and the car smashed into a tree. It was a big oak tree which refused to budge; the tree seeming to quote Rodney Dangerfield’s instructor of mechanics, whose answer to every problem was, “You ain’t driving this car today.”
They tried to restart the poor car, but the Impala was dead. The ploy had worked. The insurance would now have to pay the shark-eyed car dealer the full price for his lemon.
The hostage, as alert and unhurt as Brer Rabbit in the Briar Patch, was playing possum, lying in the back seat pretending to be knocked out, hoping the two thugs would think he was dead or otherwise incapacitated and unable to move. They yelled at him to get out. His eyes were shut, and he didn’t move. They pulled on his arm and he moaned, “Uh, uh.”
Of course he was so tall, they knew he was faking, but they didn’t care, since now they had to run. So the two thugs took off running towards 55th Street where James and Sharona lived – at the far end of the street, next to the railroad tracks.
The police sirens were in a rare form. A whole chorus of sirens screamed through the frosted air, harmonizing, as if competing against the chorus in a play by Euripides at the Parthenon. Each officer of the law (especially the auxiliary police) felt as if the sirens were a royal herald of trumpets announcing their procession. The army of twenty-one screeching squad cars and auxiliary pick-up trucks woke James from his dream about Foxy Brown. It was the same recurring dream; the one where Foxy grabs James in a headlock and throws him to the floor, then puts her spike heel in his chest while she reads Sophocles, and laughs like a banshee. Foxy apparently didn’t care for Oedipus.
James rose from his bed and walked to the window where he stood scratching his large, naked belly, framed by the window like a portrait by some unknown not-so-good somebody. He had that blank I’m-not-awake-yet look, as he stared out of the window. The sirens stopped on a dime, as they tritely say, with the eerie precision of a line of Rockettes (and aren’t they something!). Twenty or so shots rang out the half hour.
It was 5:30 in the morning, and James’s wife Sharona, rolled over, gave the wall one of her I-can-see-right-through-you looks, and asked in a harsh voice, “Was that shots?”
Sharona didn’t like being awakened in the morning by shots, or for that matter, by sirens, or for that matter, by anything. She took it personally that James would allow someone to disturb her slumber. She was definitely a night-person, didn’t like daylight at all. If she didn’t have a husband to see off to work, and children to get ready for school, she would prefer to never look upon the sun.
James answered her brusque inquiry with a bitter sigh. “Yes. I think they got the poor sucker. There was enough shooting to wipe out the Golden Horde.”
“The what?”
“The Golden Horde.”
“James, it’s too early for that mess. Don’t be starting with me this early. Even your old Greek perverts understood the need for a good night’s sleep.”
James turned from the window, feeling sorry for whoever got shot, thinking out loud, mumbling like Agamemnon, “No one on earth has yet been free from sorrow.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” said James. “We might as well get ready for work.”
“Speak for yourself. I got thirty minutes before I have to get up.” And she smiled the smile that gave James the shivers. It was a smile that said, “Get any closer and I’ll give you cancer.” It was the kind of smile that Madame Lafarge had as she sat by the big basket, knitting at the head of the guillotine. James called that smile (to himself) her vampire smile.
Two men were running through the yards on 55th Street as if the whole of the Mississippi River had burst the dam and was flooding, was chasing them. Of course there is no damn on the Mississippi River at East St. Louis, but just imagine if there were and if it did. The two crooks ran and leapt over fences like Jesse Owens in bloom.
The bright winter stars began to fade as the constellation Andromache was lost in the early shafts of Nazi-like (according to Sharona) sunlight. But Venus yet shown, alone in the sky, like a lonely child of a Christian Scientist at Christmas. And Sharona’s chubby husband James was a Christian Scientist. He didn’t believe in Christmas because he was a Christian Scientist, you see, and so Sharona never once bought him a Christmas present, not anything. Furthermore, she never ever took James to any of the Christmas parties where she drank a little too much and frequently came home tipsy. But James better not make that sin of omission. He better buy her Christmas presents, and not just one either, Christian Scientist or not, he just better.
James was in the kitchen, almost dressed, lights on, breakfast started, and finishing pronging the crispy bacon. Sharona’s coffee was perking away when somebody did what no one’s ever done before. Somebody knocked, in a loud and urgent manner too, on the back door at 5:48 a.m. in the dead of winter. The constellation Medea had just slipped away.
James looked through the door curtain and noticed the following things one at a time. It was a man. It was a man in a white T-shirt. It was a man who was standing in the mid-winter cold and sweating, and the man was breathing as hard as the wind that launched a thousand ships. The sweating man spoke. “My car broke down. Can I use your phone?”
James knew exactly what Euripides would say about this. “Visits of strangers lead to a world of trouble.” Now James, who wasn’t raised in East St. Louis for nothing, said, “Wait a minute,” as he held up his index finger. He let the curtain fall on the locked back door, ran to the bedroom, got his 38 Police Special, which was a Saturday Night Special, and yelled in a whisper, “Sharona! We got trouble.”
James ran back to the back door in the back of the house, as Sharona leapt out of the bed quick as a morning person, teeth bared. She grabbed her 22 pistol. It was also a Saturday Night Special, smaller, but much prettier than James’ 38. There were two notches on the handle. James moved quickly for a chubby-boy, trying not to think about notch number three.
Upon his sudden arrival at the curtained door, James flung the back door open, pointed his loaded 38 through the screen door at Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar, and calmly said, “You’re under arrest. Don’t move.”
The T-shirted liar with those wobbly eyes said, “Brother, don’t shoot.” He had waited as he was told, followed instructions well, but now he started his hands-up-back- up-outa-the-backyard routine. And James thought about Euripides, “It’s a terrible thing when brothers join in conflict.” James was always thinking something about Euripides, and even James had no idea why. How Euripides fit into his East St. Louis life was a mystery to him, but somehow, don’t ask, it did.
Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar in a sweaty T-shirt was saying, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” as he backed up. At the same time, James was saying, “Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move.”
The moving crook turned and ran. James opened the screen door, using less wisdom than he should’ve, stepped outside to his right to see if he could see where Sweaty T-shirt had gone. The guy, who leapt over the back fence like an Olympian gazelle on graceful steroids, was nowhere in sight. James turned around and was about to go back in the house when he saw another guy in the backyard next door. This would be the left side, but James had turned around, so it was his right side, but of course this right side where the new guy was, was opposite the right side of the gazelle in a T-shirt. The point of view here gets confusing.
The new guy was in James’ mother’s yard next door (how’s that). And James yelled at him, “Hey! What are you doin’ over there? Put your hands up. Don’t move.”
James pointed his Saturday Night Special at the guy in the yard next door. But the brother who seemed to be lacking Best Dressed aspirations, did not follow directions well, and would have been marked down for that on any performance review. He ran towards the street and out of view. James ran over to his mother’s back yard to make sure the guy was no threat to his mom (I’ll not develop the obvious Oedipal reference which some folks may be anticipating). James’s mom was most likely sleeping through the whole thing anyway. This run would still be the right if you were facing the back of the house, but left if you were looking from the street, or out of the screen door backdoor into the back yard. The guy was gone, vanished, disappeared, vamoosed; so James turned to go back to his house – the back door of course, and was now even with the grapes in his little backyard garden.
The vines were heavy with those big, sweet Concord grapes and were ready to pick (how this occurred in the dead of a freezing Midwestern winter is one of life’s many mysteries which we shall not go into – for obvious religious reasons). There had been a problem with the grapes a year before. Some inconsiderate person (nameless and of doubtful character) had put six beehives in the field behind the house, and the bees ate most of the grapes. Sharona had smiled her vampire smile and said at the time, “They’ll pay for that.”
James and Sharona waited, then in December, on a freezing clear day, the bees were made to pay. James and Sharona got ready for the Great Beehive Raid. They wrapped their necks and arms, put on galoshes, gloves, swimming facemasks (the green ones), tucked in their pants, and braved the cold, crawling bees. They took all the Bee’s honey. The inconsiderate beekeeper moved his bees, and the grapes were safe again.
James walked past the grapes, and, surprise, surprise. Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar in a sweaty T-shirt was back at the back door, acting as if he had received a formal backdoor invitation. He was reaching for the back door handle of the backdoor screen door. He had come around from the left where he had run to the right; that is James’s right, when James first opened the door, and hadn’t yet stepped outside or turned around. The thug wasn’t giving up so easy. James put his 38 on him and advanced rapidly, thinking, “What is noble is always clear” (more Euripides crap, as Sharona would say).
Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar in a sweaty T-shirt saw James advancing like an American tank in Iraq. he immediately went into his successful and less than innocent hands-up-don’t-shoot-backing- up routine, as James said, “Don’t move. You’re under arrest.” Of course James would have said something more original and dramatic if he’d thought of it. Now, unknown to James, who was facing his back door in his back yard, the partner of Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar was back in James’ mom’s backyard with a 38 pointed at James’ back. So there you have it.
James had his 38 (with expensive dum-dum bullets) pointed at Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar in a sweaty T-shirt, while the partner, looking like a TV cop with legs spread and both hands holding his 38 (with those cheap, regular bullets probably) had his gun on James’ back. Then the Police-Stance partner yelled at James, “Drop it!” He wasn’t very original either. Most folks tend to triteness in a crises.
Now James was thinking should he drop it, or should he not. He had his gun on Sweaty Guy and he froze. His mind was blank as a 1492 map of Las Vegas. Euripides wasn’t helping any.
Sharona, who had been watching from the back door, quiet as a ninja master, wasn’t sleeping. She opened the screen door – just a ninja-smidge – and put her sweet little 22, with its charming pearl handle, on the partner – who wasn’t a cop, even though he stood like one. And she said with an angry sneer and all the authority of a night person who has been rudely woken, “Oh no you don’t!”
The sun was breaking through the far horizon, brazen as a Russian assassin (I’m thinking of the Bungler who assassinated Trotsky here). Even Venus was gone. An angry woman, who didn’t like anybody in the morning was ready to shoot. Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar in a sweaty T-shirt was standing on the back concrete step three feet from the back door, with his hands raised. James faced him with his 38, pointed at him, but not cocked. The guy’s partner was in James’ mom’s backyard pointing his 38 (with inferior bullets – probably) at James’ back. Nobody anywhere was blinking. The angry heroine Sharona had her lovely 22, now gleaming in a clear shaft of bright sunlight, pointed straight at the Police-Stance partner’s heart. It is noteworthy that Sharona’s bullets were hollow-points into which she had placed arsenic powder. In her morning, don’t-talk-to-me-till-I’ve-had-my-coffee voice,
Sharona said, “James. You get in this house, and I mean right now.”
James felt as if he’d just won first prize at the Parthenon – against Sophocles too. He said, one syllable at a time, “Okay. I’m coming in the house, right now. Don’t nobody shoot.” And he eased forward, past Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar in a sweaty T-shirt, and squeezed his rather excessive body through the screen door. Meanwhile, Sharona had gone to the back window, which was unexplainably wide open in the dead of winter, and had her gleaming 22 cocked and pointed at the Police-Stance partner (in mom’s yard remember – and that would be to Sharona’s left). James pulled the screen door shut behind him.
But then, a most curious thing happened, a thing that James thought about again and again for the rest of his life, but never understood. It wasn’t logical. It made no sense.
It was, if it’s okay to be politically incorrect, the stupidest thing he ever saw – aside from the coach in Jr. High School making John Weezer jump on the trampoline against John’s wishes, and after John told the coach he was going to break a leg if he got on the trampoline and the coach saying, “Get up there,” and John breaking his left leg in two jumps.
It was plain-as-a-painted-strumpet-in-a-doorway stupid. Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar in a sweaty T-shirt came up to the screen door and reached for the handle. He was as persistent as the bees had been. Well that be stupid (aren’t Ebonics great). James cocked his 38. The sound of the cock carried forever. James thought people in France, where the women wear no pants, must be aware of that cock. Everyone’s eyes inflated as if they all were suddenly struck with an iodine deficiency by a jealous, buckeyed god. James shot a shot through the screen door, shooting over the stupid T-shirt’s head. That was not as easy as it sounds because the guy was pretty tall (but not as tall as the possum–playing hostage, though of course, James did not have that frame of reference).
The T-shirt ran off to the right; that is James’s right because James was in the house, looking out. T-shirt ran round the house, doing his graceful leap over the fence. The Police-Stance partner, on James’s left now, shot at James. This started the shootout. Sharona assumed Dustin Hoffman’s look of snake-eyed concentration (from Little Big Man). James then dropped to one knee, like an English gentleman under attack by the Madi at Khartoum might have done (I’m thinking of Gordon here). James fired rapidly. Police-Stance shot back.
Sharona opened up with her 22, getting off six shots in what must have been a Guinness world’s record for heroines who were in the rather dangerous business of saving their husband’s ass (that would be asses for matriarchal polygamists). Everyone, James, the partner, and Sharona, all shot all their bullets, and no one hit anyone.
After the partner spent his bullets, he ran like a grammarian with a red pen runs after run-on sentences, and he ran to the front of James’ house, ostensibly to meet up with his partner and somehow, in some fashion, make a get-away, while James closed and locked the back door, with one of those little hooks that really (face it, please) are no barrier to thieves or other rascals, and Sharona surreptitiously looked out of the windows, while she reloaded her sexy, lucky, and very attractive 22, which is something that President Gerald Ford couldn’t do if he was paid for it, although Ford, aside from being a republican, wasn’t actually an evil person.
James shut and locked the back door. He then ran to the phone and called the cops, who came pretty quickly, as Sharona switched the front porch lights off and on in a rapid manner. James was hoping the flickering, 40 watt bulb would shine like a beacon in the sky, guiding the police like the Star of Bethlehem guided you know who. Sharona’s secret flashing code worked. The police arrived.
There were two of them. One of the cops was almost normal, although he had that furrowed forehead look that said, if only my mind could grasp what you’re saying. The other cop was remarkable if only because of an enormous wart where his third eye is – according to Buddha.
After they had just finished making the report to the police, they were informed by cop radio (walkie-talkie) that Car-broke-down-wanna-use-your-phone-liar in a sweaty T-shirt and his Police-Stance partner had been caught, and would have to be identified in a line-up. “And by the way,” they told James and Sharona, between chuckles, “you might want to get those pistols registered.”
“You know” said the skinny cop with the hairy wart, as he looked at Sharona, “You could’ve been killed.”
Sharona looked at Third-Eye-Wartface, and said, “You think I don’t know that? I’m not stupid. Do you think I would live to see my James killed? This is my husband, and I would give my life for him. In – a – New – York – min-ute.”
She stood, still carrying her charming little 22. “You mess with James, and I will be a ‘cloud of grief’ (Euripides) on your life, whoever you are.”
Then Sharona smiled that vampire smile of hers. Her smile frightened the two cops so much, they stumbled out of the house. They nearly fell over each other in their haste to get out of the house before Sharona’s illegal 22 exploded – in their face.
James and Sharona then went into the kitchen for breakfast. It was a simple breakfast, with coffee, toast, a little (very little) talk of Euripides, and lots and lots of honey.