by Christian Amaral

Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal? – Jean Renoir

Dusk started creeping into the prison, when Walker plopped his slop next to mine and sat down along with it.

“Awful hungry, eh sailor?” he prodded, his lackeys jeering along softly from the far table. “Don’t you know it’s rude to eat while somebody’s supposin’ to talk to ya?” he asked, pushing and spilling my dinner as I ate it, then dumping the rest over my head.

“Ain’t no sailor,” I said, barely audible over the snickering laughter of Walker’s fans.

“You’re right,” he said, silencing the crowd. “No sailor worth shit goes and sleeps with the fishes like you’re gonna,” he taunted, inciting the inmates to laughter once again.

Ignoring this typical jail-bent abuse, I rose to return to my cell to clean up, but he forced me down with an arm around my shoulder and a nasty smile.

“Don’t worry; the nickname still fits – Little Rowe Boat – s’long as yer a singin’ sailor,” he prodded.

“Don’t sing neither,” I sighed. “But I do got some fine entertainment for ya, if you’ll have an ear,” I said. “Tomorrow mayhaps?” I added quietly enough for only Walker to hear, as I slid him a cigarette, while pulling his arm off my neck.

The next day was the same as any other, unless you looked real close.

Walker came over to my table to start our, albeit more-civilized-this-time conversation. “So let’s hear it, huh?” he said. “You wanna talk. I’m listenin’.”

“You said you want to be entertained, and I got a story.” “A story? ‘Bout what?”

“Only one story a dead man wanna tell…” I trailed off, giving him a knowing look.

“His own,” Walker grunted, and I nodded back. “Alright, let’s hear it then.” His voice quivered as though he wasn’t certain he needed to hear.

“You see, it started a few months back when I was lodging with my old army pal, Russell Bechard. See, both our homelives were less than kind. We both had a desperate need for cash -him so he could get out of his fucked-up marriage in Toronto, and me to get back into my own. So, Ole Russ came up with the great idea that we do some less than up-and-up work to get said cash, specifically by jackin’ some automatics and a pistol he knew this unsuspecting lady had in her Windsor home. I was uneasy, but desperate times and all. So that’s what we went and did.”

I stopped to put the events straight in my mind. Then, “Comin’ up on that lady’s place, I was feeling all sorts of terrible. I waited on the main floor performin’ my duties as a lookout of sorts, tryin’ to act less scared shitless than I really was. I heard some muffled yellin’ and pleading downstairs, then silence, and before I knew it, Russ was back up, and we was headin’ off to sell the arms at a local pool room nearby as planned.”

“You weren’t worried about bein’ pursued?”

“Nope. Russ tied her up quiet and all, then cut the phone wires. But when the time came, we left that pool room without dumpin’ the guns, and that took me from scared shitless to downright desperate. I told Russ to call the whole thing off, and that we’d be best dumpin’ them somewhere else, cash or no, but he wasn’t havin’ a lick of it. After thinking a bit, he agreed to dump ’em farther away and said it would make it harder to track us down.”

“So what did you do?”

“We headed off to London to dump ‘em at a pool room there instead. The lady had seen Russ, so he told me it was my job to sell ’em off and also to keep our unsuspecting driver on a leash. In London the cabby made a second stop at a gas station, and I knew something was up by his twitchy walk as he ambled up to the grease pit. I was caught up thinkin’ for a second or two, about the wife and all the good I would do with my new-found cash and wasn’t watchin’ the driver carefully enough, when suddenly I saw what he was doin’.” “What did he do?” asked Walker, leaning closer.

“He got to the phone. I heard who he was on the line with, and I panicked like a dumbass. Waving a gun, I turned to the others in the grease-pit. “This is a stick up! Everybody in the back room!” was the first thing that came to mind. Two onlookers scurried into the room and shut the door. I had hoped to deal with the cabby without any intervention from the rest and told him to stay where he was.

We stared at each other, and he started moving away, like all slow at first, but when I called him to stop, he made a quick break for the room, opened the door and ran in with the others. On instinct, I aimed my gun, but when I tried pressing down the trigger, it felt heavy as a man’s life, which is to say pretty damn heavy, and I couldn’t pull it.

Russ screamed at me, ‘You can’t let him go now, you idiot!’ Suddenly he was beside me. He took my hand, gun already pointed, and squeezed. His panicked look matched mine, and we both froze for a second, unsure what came next. Of course we bolted, and well, the rest, I’m sure you know already,” I said.

“Don’t fuck around now,” Walter said. “You murdered that woman. That bullet passed right through that door, and from what I been hearin’ that ain’t at all how it went down,” he said. “I heard that you were saying you pulled that trigger, while you slipped on some grease,” he ventured.

“That’s what the King himself heard, no doubt. You see, therein lies the issue,” I said now, leaning in close. “See, Russ, ever the bastard, begged me to take the fall. He said, ‘If you claim it as a slip-up, I can set you up with real good lawyers and good cash, once we get you outta there.” A strange change took hold of Walker as he watched the regret surface in me.

“Oh, so, he really set you up then, eh?” Walker asked with more sympathy than I expected, and I just nodded back. “So why are you tellin’ me all this?”

“Well,” I said, rising back up in my seat with a wicked smile. “I hear you can get letters out of this shit pit.” I handed him the rest of the cigarettes from my carton and a letter for an old friend.

I couldn’t help smiling, as I likely would do when that rope tugged around my neck. Cause as sure as my sentence was set, so would Ole Russ’s. I only hoped I’d get to see my old friend teach him the same lesson he taught me – everything costs somethin’, whether you pay for it in cash or blood.

Betrayal was no exception.