The Identity of Betty Rubble
Another installment from the Betty & Wilma series. This one serves as a followup to the previous piece. Hope you enjoy!
-J
__________________
The Identity of Betty Rubble
The robberies so far had been calculated risks and calculated successes. A dozen small miracles or feats of fate had transpired to get Wilma and Betty and Fred and Barney away cleanly each time—clean being a relative term. There were descriptions of them in a few newspapers and a little expose had run on television back in Bedrock, calling them the “Bedrock Bandits.” And now that they were four robberies deep maybe a few bastions of law and order here and there were beginning to catch wind of their spree, but the media, somehow, still seemed in the dark. Or maybe they just had bigger fish to fry. Dinosaurs were disappearing by the herdful of late and there seemed to be more theories than assholes and, thankfully, the assholes were good at taking up airtime and keeping little things like small town bank robberies to themselves.
Disappeared dinosaurs aside, Wilma & Betty and the boys were doing okay in Rock Vegas. They’d been laying low at the Bellagirock hotel for almost two weeks now. Admittedly, the Bellagirock was probably the last place a gang of bank robbers should have been staying, but Wilma’s thinking was just that. Of all the seedy, stone-walled dives in Vegas, nobody would ever think to look for a group of wanted felons at one of Rock Vegas’s most expensive and well-known hotels. Criminals were supposed to hide out in slums, not in thousand-dollar-a-night suites with catered meals and masseuse on hand.
*
There were banks a plenty in Rock Vegas but there were the casinos too. So Wilma was working on a strategy for taking her fair share of the Vegas limelight and the Vegas coin while Betty tried to look up an old acquaintance and Fred and Barney went about the business of developing healthy gambling addictions. Betty and Wilma had been here once before. A few years back, back when they first came to see that they didn’t owe their lives anything and, ultimately, every day was only a matter of what they wanted it to be. They’d come out here to Vegas and drank too much whiskey and maybe rode the white horse one time too many and spent too much time dancing with the men their husbands would never be and, now, sometimes, those memories came back to them.
Wilma was good enough about ignoring what this city was telling her. Her plate was full with thoughts on how to get into the Bellagirock vault and make off with a few million. But Betty, being better on the gun than on the planning table, Betty had nothing to do but remember. She’d met him here those years ago. And Barney wasn’t him and would never be him and, well, what if he was still here in Vegas?
So while Barney went to the Casinos with Fred, Betty went to a few of her old haunts looking for what haunted her. She wore a blonde wig and called herself Eliza because Wilma had told her that it was just a matter of time before the law dogs picked up the pattern and realized that maybe Vegas might be something the girls were into. “More than that,” Wilma had said, “if you’re in a town that you’re planning to rob, it doesn’t hurt to be somebody else.”
So Eliza hit the Vegas strip in her wig and slinky black dress and she kept away from the casinos where Barney and Fred liked to congregate and she drifted back to all the places she’d been before, and after three days of playing the lonesome ghost, she still hadn’t found what she’d been looking for, but she’d found that she liked her new identity.
She liked being Eliza.
That whole thing about blondes having more fun, well maybe it was true she thought, because she seemed to be garnering a lot more attention than she used. The city seemed to unfold around her. Crowds parted like the red sea as she slid through the nightlife of Vegas. More than a few men came sauntering up to her asking for a cheap lay or, in a couple of cases, offering a rather expensive lay.
Betty wasn’t the type to sell herself. But, just to prove a point, she’d responded to the advances of a certain well-dressed man she met one evening and she let him take her back to his hotel room and she let him feed her caviar and she let him pour her glasses of expensive champagne and she let him get good and comfortable and certain that she was about to give him everything he’d hoped for, then she gave him the business end of her pistol and cleaned more than a little bit of cash from his pockets and more than a few valuables he kept in the hotel room safe and, when it was all over, she wasn’t really sure what the point was she’d been trying to prove, but Eliza didn’t really care. It felt good.
*
“Who cares if it felt good?” Wilma said. “What happens the next time when your try that routine with somebody a little less stupid? And what’d you do it for? A few grand and a chance to waive your gun around? When I’m over here trying to work out a seven-figure retirement job?”
“I can’t be cooped up in this hotel all day,” Betty replied. “I gotta breathe. It’s been over two weeks now and I swear this room gets smaller every day.”
“If you want to get out, then go out scouting,” Wilma said. “This thing with the casino, even if it’s possible, is still at least a week away and there’s a shitload of things I need to know about security. You want to be Eliza, then fine, be Eliza and go spy on the casino.”
Betty waived her away. “That’ll all work out, Wilma. You’ll plan it out perfectly just like you always do and we’ll get away clean and we’ll move on to the next town, you and me and the boys and the kids and that damned Dino, we’ll all be fine.”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”
“Don’t you understand? This is our new life. This is our new status quo. And I’m not going to say it’s boring, but there’s already a routine to it, Wilma. There’s already a plan to our lives, you know.”
“There’s a plan to everyone’s life,” Wilma said. “That’s what life is. Wake, Hunt for food. Eat. Hunt for food. Eat. Hunt for food. Eat. Sleep. And, if you’re lucky, maybe you get to fuck somewhere in there. Anything else, anything other than that pattern, is just an illusion. Nothing more than academic.”
“That’s bullshit, Wilma, and you know it. Breaking the pattern is the whole reason we started this life. It’s the whole reason we’re out here. Don’t act like we’re not where we are. Don’t act like we’re not in Vegas. I’m not Fred. I was here with you the first time. When we first decided that, maybe, this isn’t a deterministic universe, maybe we don’t really have to live those lives of sitcom reruns. I was here when that happened, Wilma Flintstone. And I know that you, just like me, enjoy being another person.”
*
The argument rambled on for a while longer with little to no outcome of quality. So Wilma went back to planning and Betty donned her wig and slinky dress and called herself Eliza and took to Vegas again. It was warm out and there was wind everywhere and there was desert sand in the wind and it turned everything a drab brown color, the color of disappointment, the color of giving up.
Betty was terrified by the idea that maybe Wilma was right. That maybe all life was was a pattern of doing something over and over again and there wasn’t any escaping it. Whether it was living life as a housewife or robbing bank or rolling dumb, wealthy victims in hotel rooms and lightening their pockets of all manner of cash, what if it was all just one routine sliding into another routine. What if no matter how much things changed, all they ever did was stay the same?
*
Then she saw him.
He sat at a table drinking a glass of whiskey and rolling a five-dollar poker chip back and forth between his thin fingers. He looked just the way she’d remembered him. Tall and lithe. Like a cleft note pulled from a page of sheet music and sent out into the world.
Betty walked over, forgetting that she looked the way she looked, and he didn’t seem to notice when she sat down on the stool beside him.
“Why so glum?” Betty asked with her best “here I am” smile.
No response.
The bartender came and offered Betty a drink. “It’s on the house,” he said, and Betty realized then that she was still wearing the blonde wig, still a victim of all of Eliza’s perks. She waived the bartender away and removed her wig, feeling more embarrassed than she’d like but, luckily for her, he still hadn’t noticed her.
“It’s been a long time,” Betty said.
Still nothing.
Betty reached over and took the whiskey glass from his hand.
He recognized her immediately. His face said as much. Betty watched the memories spread over him as his eyes widened, the jar of remembrance opening in his mind.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he said. “What more do you want?”
Betty’s mouth went dry. She realized now that she didn’t know exactly what she wanted. She wasn’t here alone this time. This wasn’t some sudden getaway that she and Wilma had played out. She was here as a working mother and income-earning wife this time. Yes, a bank-robbing wife and mother, but that was beside the point.
“You broke me, you know?” he said.
Betty smiled as best she could. “I had to go back,” she said. “I had…I just had to go back is all.”
“I don’t understand you,” he said. “I thought there was something there. Thought there was something between the both of us.”
“There was,” Betty said. “There is. I came here, didn’t I? Don’t you understand? I’ve been trying to find you since I got here.”
He took a long, deep draught of his whiskey.
“You broke me,” he repeated.
Betty touched his arm.
“Why come back now?” he asked.
Betty thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “Was passing through town. For work. Thought I’d look you up.”
“Just wanted to look up the man who fell in love with you? Then thought you’d let him take you back to his hotel room and rob him?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was fun at first,” he said. “I thought you were playing some kind of game. Thought we both were. It’s not like I was trying to really buy sex from you. I mean, you were wearing a wig, calling yourself Eliza. Playing a game of your own. So I thought I’d play along. And then you get me back there, I treat you nice, wine, caviar, thinking that you were here to stay. Thinking that you’d actually come back for me. And then…well…then there was the gun and the lesson learned.”
He finished his whiskey and stood.
“It was like you didn’t even know me,” he said. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
*
On the walk back to the Bellagirock Betty threw her wig into a sewer drain. She slipped out of her dress and let the night air and the desert winds take it wherever they pleased. She walked the Vegas strip in her underwear, unnoticed because in Vegas, people were known to walk the street in their underwear. In fact, as she passed one of the larger hotels on her way back to the Bellagirock, a small army of showgirls were letting out of work in a tangled mass of tired, half-dressed bodies, as if they had no clothes of their own, as if their lives, even away from the casino, were nothing more than the parts they played on stage. The patterns they danced in.
As she walked, Betty began to notice other people like the dancers, dressed in the routines of their lives. Policemen in their dark blue costumes. Businessmen in their suits. Doctors in their scrubs. Construction workers in their hard hats. Teachers in their appropriately conservative collared shirts and khaki, or their tasteful blouses and skirts. There were poets dressed as poets and movie stars dressed as movie stars. It was all here in Vegas and Betty, for the first time in her life, could see it all for what it was. Could see them all for what they were, even as she stood there, very nearly naked, not dressed for anything, not for bank robbing or housewifeing or mothering or being a seductress. Nothing.
And she didn’t know what to do with that.
*
She found herself back in the hotel room, with Barney and Bam-Bam asleep. The television was mumbling. Something about the disappearing dinosaurs. About how they weren’t dying off. Weren’t falling victim to contagion or overhunting. It was as if they were all just flying off into outer space, one of the people on the television said, or just transforming into some other kind of life.
Then Betty understood.
Her problem wasn’t that she was afraid of her life becoming predictable. Her problem was that, like the dinosaurs, she had disappeared. Somewhere along the way, between being the perfect wife and being the perfect gunwoman, she had disappeared. And now, there was only a quiet wind that stood behind her eyes. A clean slate, of sorts.
*
When Barney awoke he rolled over in the bed, finding only a small slip of paper in the place where his wife should be sleeping. A note on the paper read, simply: Escape.
Barney took the note to Wilma who read it and cursed and threw a glass across the room.
“She’s gone,” Barney said. “She’s gone! Where’s is she gone? ‘Escape.’ What does it mean?” Barney asked.
“What do you think it means?” Wilma replied.
Follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.