The Hanged Man's Song

happened. I didn’t know who’d been designated to go. Somebody closer to Bobby than I was.
    To keep the cops from breaking the ring, if one of us should be caught, we knew only the online names of two members of the ring. I didn’t know until that day that romeoblue, whoever he was, was a member of the ring, or that he had one of my blind addresses. The guys I called, pr48stl9 and trilbee, didn’t know that I was part of it; and I had no idea who their guys were, further around the ring.
    Nobody, except Bobby, knew how many ring members there were, or their real names—all we knew is that each guy had two names. Two, in case somebody should be out of touch, or even dead, when the ring was turned on.
    And the ring on thing—if one of us was caught by the cops, and extorted into contacting the ring, a warning could be sent alongwith the extorted message. If the message didn’t end with ring on, you’d assume that things were going to hell in a handbasket.
    All of this might sound overblown, but several of us were wanted by the feds. We hadn’t been charged with any crimes, you understand. They didn’t even know who we were. They just wanted to get us down in a basement, somewhere, with maybe an electric motor and a coil of wire, to chat for a while.
    >>> “YOU think he’s dead? Bobby?” LuEllen asked. We’d been visiting a particular ice-cream parlor, named Robbie’s, about three times a week. The place was designed to look like a railroad dining car, but had good sundaes, anyway. We’d just pulled into the parking lot, to the final thumps of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” on the radio, when she asked her question.
    I nodded. “Yeah. Or maybe unconscious, lying on the floor,” I said. That made me sad. I’d never actually met him, but he was a friend, and I could feel that hypothetical loneliness. “Or . . . hell, it could be a lot of things, but I think he’s probably dead or dying.”
    “What’ll you guys do? He’s always been there.”
    “Be more careful. Take fewer jobs. Maybe get out of it.”
    “I’ve been thinking about getting out,” she said suddenly. “Maybe stop stealing.”
    I looked at her and shook my head. “You never said.”
    She shrugged. “I’m getting old.”
    “Pressing your mid-thirties, I’d say.”
    She patted me on the thigh and said, “Let’s go. We’re gonna get wet.”
    >>> THE guy who ran the ice-cream parlor wore a name tag that said “Jim” and a distant look, as though he was wishing for mountains. A paper hat perched on his balding head, and he always had a toothpick tucked in one corner of his mouth. He nodded at us, said, “The regular?” and we said, “Yeah,” and watched him dish it up. Lots of hot chocolate. The sundaes cost five dollars each, and I’d been leaving another five on the table when we left. Jim was now taking care of us, chocolate-wise.
    In the booth, over the sundaes, LuEllen asked, “You think you could really quit?”
    “I don’t need the money.”
    She looked out at the rain, hammering down on the street. A veterans convention was in town, and a guy wearing a plastic-straw boater, with a convention tag, wandered by. He’d poked a hole in the bottom of a green garbage bag and had pulled it over himself as a raincoat.
    We watched him go, and LuEllen said, “Drunk.”
    “Seeing your old war buddies’ll do that,” I said. “World War Two guys are dropping like flies now.”
    “Wonder if Bobby . . .” Her spoon dragged around the rim of the tulip glass; she didn’t finish the sentence.
    >>> BOBBY had a degenerative disease, although I had no clear idea of what it was. The ring had been set up to take care of things should he die or suffer a catastrophic decline. If he went slowly, the ring wouldn’t know until the very end. At the lastextreme, we would have all gotten files of information that he thought we might individually want—a kind of inheritance—and he would have erased everything else.
    I had hoped that he’d go that way, in peace. Quietly. He apparently had not.
    Of course, it was also possible that the feds had landed in a silent black helicopter, kicked in the door, and slid down his chimney and seized him before he could enter his destruct code, and that they were now waiting for us in an elaborate trap, armed to the teeth with all that shit that they spend the billions on—the secret hammers and high-tech toilet seats.
    But I didn’t think so. I thought Bobby was dead.
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