The opportunity presented itself

What would you or I do if we were walking down an empty street alone in the middle of the day and we saw an unguarded armored car idling by the side of the road? Would we even look twice? Examine it, try to find the driver, if only for our own curiosity? Would we even register the site, or would it pass through the preconscious and out? Would we do anything? No, I don't think so. We would walk past, perhaps, not even breaking stride. But James is not you or I; he is a man destined for greatness, though he may never get there. I have this theory, that every schemer, every crook, every dope who ends up on the wrong side of the law or society was the kind who was destined for greatness, except that thing that was going to make him great and was also going to become his Tragic Flaw kicked in a bit too early and sunk him before he got the chance.

James is one of those people. You or I--the common folk--we would have walked past and not even realized what we had turned our backs to. James stepped up to the armored car, peeked in the door, looked around the back, checked up and down the street, saw the keys in the ignition, found the front door open, and he drove off.

It didn't take him long--a couple blocks, tops--before he realized that he had done something wrong, probably, rationally speaking.

At this point, he began to freak out. Everyone on the street was potentially the driver or a cop or just a loudmouth concerned citizen who was bound to blab to someone in authority that there was an armored car driving around with a sweaty guy at the wheel who clearly didn't belong there. In the passenger's seat, there was a gray shirt with a little logo on it that matched the logo on the side of the truck, and at the next red light, he put it on, but he still felt exposed, like he was walking around with his dick hanging out of his pants or something, and everyone who wasn't looking at it was only pretending they didn't see it and it would only be a matter of time before--well, whatever happens to a person walking around with their dick hanging out of their pants.

James is not just the guy who acts first and thinks second. He's the guy who acts first and thinks second and watches it pay off. In high school he broke into his math teacher's classroom to try to steal some answers for an upcoming test (they weren't for him, but for a friend who was failing and too smart to try anything so bold as a classroom break-in). What he found was a lot of heroin. He sold half and used the other half to blackmail the teacher in question, who was suddenly a lot less picky when it came to grading the accuracy of this friend's asymptotic curves or whatever. Then at the end of the year he sold half of the remaining half, planted the remaining quarter in the math teacher's room and ratted him out. Which would have been dumb, because the math teacher could have pointed the finger at him, except James--completely oblivious, of course--had just managed to sell exactly enough so that the math teacher's five-year sentenced would have turned into a forty-year one had even one more gram been found in his possession, and so the guy kept his mouth shut and went on to serve his time, even though the thirty-five years of freedom sometimes didn't seem worth being unable to wipe the dumb smirk of James's face sometimes.

The point being, James had some pretty destructive tendencies, maybe, which had been fortified by years and years of just unbelievable good luck. So when he stole that armored car, getting shot wasn't really on his mind; he was just wondering what was in the back.

He parked it in front of his apartment building and went upstairs. His roommate Dan was home. He told Dan that he needed to show him something downstairs because he had stolen an armored car and it was sitting outside and he didn't really know what to do with it.

"OK," said Dan.

"Really." And James opened the shades and pointed to the armored car by the curb.

"I don't believe you," Dan said. James pushed a little button on the remote keychain; the armored car's lights flashed and the horn beeped.

"Are you out of your mind?" Dan whisper-screamed.

"I don't know, man," James said. "What should I do with it?"

"You shouldn't have stolen it, you fucking idiot! The police are probably looking for it right now!"

Downstairs, a postman considered the armored car. They shivered (it wasn't a cop, of course, but it was still a public servant). The postman went on his way, preoccupied with his task at hand, which was to go home and shoot himself.

"That's why I need your help."

"What were you even thinking? That's what I don't understand--why would you even do this?"

"The opportunity presented itself. Now you can scold me for things that have already happened, or you can use that brain of yours to help me think of a way out of this mess."

"This is your mess, I want nothing to do with it. I wish you had never told me in the first place."

"There's a cut in it for you if you help."

"What cut?"

"A 30% cut of whatever's in the back of that truck."

"You didn't even look in the back of the truck? What if it's empty? Then you went and stole an armored car for nothing."

They decided that the first thing they should do was go downstairs and check to see what was in the back of the armored car. What they found was a piano. And not a very nice piano either, but a kind of beat up upright that had seen better days and was out of tune (James knew how to play "Linus and Lucy," although it had been years since he had practiced, so it was kind of clompy and awkward).

They decided to drive the armored car down to the dock and leave it there. "Should we take the piano at least?" James asked. Dan ignored the question, which may have been a joke.

They got to the dock and got out of the armored car. It was at this point that Dan pulled the gun.

"Whoa," said James.

"Now you're going to do what I say," Dan said. "You're going to go home and you're not going to tell anyone about this armored car thing, got it?"

"That's what I was going to do anyway, before the gun."

"No, it isn't. What you were going to do is tell that idiot girlfriend of yours or some dolt on the subway or something and then someone was going to find out and we'd both get in trouble. Well I can't get in trouble anymore, do you understand? You've brought me into this and I can't get in trouble anymore." Dan was on probation after being convicted of abusing a corpse. He broke into the graveyard and dug up a corpse and did some pretty awful things with it. My take on it is, the guy was dead, right? So he's not going to be hurt anymore. He probably doesn't exist anymore in any form, and even if he is in hell or heaven or something stupid like that, he's probably got a lot of other things on his mind either way and doesn't really care what's going on with his inanimate corpse back down on earth. So what Dan did was a victimless crime, besides for the family of the corpse, who took it pretty hard, because they couldn't see it my way. I mean, it was fucked up, sure. For Dan's part, he was having a pretty bad week drug-wise and has been real remorseful about the whole thing since he sobered up (though there on the docks, he was pretty messed up again, having justified his relapse in the bathroom just before the two of them headed downstairs as necessary for calming his nerves).

Dan wasn't going to shoot James, of course. James, though, thinking second, dived on Dan's arm, and the gun fired itself, and the bullet sort of melted into James's thigh. They both fell backwards and just kind of sat there for a second, equally stunned. James's eyes filled with tears and so did Dan's. He knew he was done. He staggered to a pay phone while James lay bleeding on the asphalt (losing probably not enough blood to be mortally wounded but losing it pretty quickly) and called 911. He knew he was done.

He returned to James and stood over him. The gun was gone. James looked up with his mouth open, his right hand sticky with blood. Dan opened the back of the truck, sat down at the piano and played a ragtime tune, bawling to himself as he pounded the keys until the cops and the ambulance came.