It was three minutes after nine when they arrived behind the bank. Our father got immediately out wearing a brown cloth cap, and with his loaded gun in his jumpsuit pocket. The two of them had not spoken. He walked straight up the shadowy, half-paved side alley that separated the bank from a jewelry store and emerged out onto the Main Street sidewalk. The sun was much brighter and the sky bluer, higher, than he expected. He saw spots from the sun—he reported this to our mother. For a frightening moment he didn’t know which way he was supposed to turn. Plus, there was so much more activity at street level, even more than five minutes ago. Our mother wrote that he nearly turned around and walked back down the alley—which he still could’ve done. But on the spur of the moment he decided that all this activity would be a diversion when he walked out of the bank—which would be in no more than three minutes, carrying a full bag of money. He wouldn’t stand out and could disappear back down the alley unnoticed.
He walked the few steps along the hot pavement to the big brass and beveled-glass bank door. He had a thought that he should’ve worn sunglasses, which would’ve made a good disguise in addition to shading his eyes. He walked straight into the bank, but immediately paused as the door closed behind him. It was so cool inside, so shadowy and quiet and still. Outside had been bustling and hot and noisy. And he was shocked at how small the bank was. Again, he’d never gone inside on the chance someone would remember him. A single customer stood at one of three brass-barred tellers’ windows, chatting through the grate—a small thin, blond woman. She was watching the teller count out bills to put into a cloth pouch to be the till for the jewelry store next door. It smelled clean—like Brasso—in the bank, he told my mother, or like the inside of a new refrigerator.
At this point our father snapped to attention, drew his .45 caliber from his pocket and stepped toward the occupied teller’s window—two others were unattended. He proclaimed to the room that the bank was now being robbed. By him. He announced that the jeweler customer and the two bank officers—men in suits, staring up at him in surprise from their desks behind the metal fence enclosure where bank business was conducted—as well as the elderly uniformed bank guard seated at one of the vacant officers’ desks, should all lie face down on the marble floor and do nothing except what he said. If anybody activated an alarm, made a noise, tried to get up, run, or did anything sudden or unexpected, he said he’d shoot them. (This he later denied saying.)
This moment—the moment of proclamation, the gun revealed, the stagy commands of “don’t move or I’ll shoot”—may have been the moment when our father most truly enjoyed and realized himself (since he’d dropped a sky full of bombs on Japan), when he felt the exhilaration to be finally doing what he’d so long wanted to do, feeling not only that he’d earned the chance, due to circumstances going unfairly against him (the Indians, the jobs, the Air Force, my mother), but also that an armed robbery was a satisfactory solution and compensation, since he wasn’t really stealing from depositors but from the government, for whom he’d sacrificed much, killed thousands, been a patriot, and which had infinite resources to assure that no innocent person lost a penny, while he solved all our family’s problems in one deft swoop.
It’s not likely this exhilaration lasted long. With one eye on the bank officers and the guard, and paying little attention to the jeweler’s clerk, who painfully kneeled down and moved out of the way by slithering like a snake over the hard floor, my father put his canvas bag up onto the marble counter under the teller’s bars, and instructed the teller to empty all three cash drawers, plus what the jeweler had yet to receive but which was counted out there, into the mouth of the bag—and do it in a hurry and without talking. It was at this point, as the teller was handing the bill packets into the bag, which was big enough to hold a bowling ball, that one of the two officers, a dapper vice president named Lasse Clausen, who later testified against my father in court—raised his head off the floor, looked up at my father and said, “Where are you from, son?” (He had detected my father’s Alabama accent.) “Because you don’t have to do this, you know. This is the wrong way to go about things.” This caused the jeweler’s clerk, flat on the cold floor, to say, “And you won’t get away with it. Somebody’ll shoot you before you get out of town. You’re not the only one with a gun around here.”
Our father told our mother that when he heard these words it was a very deflating experience and caused him to feel a “great wave of resentment” toward all the people in the bank. He was tempted to shoot them, one by one, removing any chance he’d be caught, and serving them right for being unluckier than he was. The reason he didn’t—he told her—was that he hadn’t planned to shoot them. During the years when he’d possibly harbored thoughts of robbing a bank—relishing the idea—no one had gotten killed in his plan. He intended to keep to that plan—which was what a smart person did. But he could’ve killed them, he said—having already done so much worse in his life. It’s possible he was only bragging after the fact, since killing them would’ve been a different thing to do personally, not like dropping bombs out of an airplane.
When the cash drawers were emptied into the bag, the young woman teller stood behind her window and looked straight at my father. She said later she looked at him the same as if she knew him. He, too, knew they’d all taken a good look at him, that they hadn’t been shocked by his pistol or even by a robbery. Their bank had been robbed not long before, just not by him. They were already in the process of catching him. He was probably more shocked than they were. He said later to my mother that this was the first time the idea of being caught came seriously into his thinking. It made him want to abandon the robbery right then. Only that wasn’t possible. He looked up at the big clock over the open bank vault. 9:09. The brass and silver and steel vault tunneled back temptingly into the rear wall. Thousands more dollars were there. But he’d determined he couldn’t carry that much money in his bag—plus he didn’t need that much. He’d been in the Agricultural National four minutes. Everyone had looked at him. Everyone had heard his mellow voice and his Dixie accent. Everyone would see him in their mind’s eye for the rest of their lives when they told about being in the bank the day it was robbed. He knew all of this. He might even have liked it. He could smell sweat on himself—sweat they could smell, too. There was nothing left for him to do but take the bag of money—which held $2,500—and leave. Which he did. Without saying another word. It already felt very much like robbing a bank was the wrong thing to have done.
Chapter 17
My mother had shoved over into the driver’s seat after my father had parked behind the bank. She’d pushed the seat far forward so her feet would reach. She was waiting with the engine started when he came out the alley with his canvas bag. He got straight into the back seat, crouched under a blanket, and she pulled slowly away so nothing that had gone on in the bank would seem to have anything to do with a white-and-red Chevrolet Bel Air with North Dakota plates, idling out of town toward the west.
She wrote that when she pulled to the corner of Main Street, ready to turn left, she saw nothing she didn’t expect to see down the block at the bank. A woman was just walking in. No alarms were going, no sheriffs or state police arriving, or people running out shouting “robbery!” They would get away with it, she thought. She’d soon be looking at a new life that didn’t include our father or Great Falls, Montana.
According to their plan, she drove back toward the Montana line, with my father hiding in the back, and onto the bumpy farm track through the barley fields, to the cottonwoods and the stream where they’d stopped less than an hour before. My father got out in the dust and heat, shucked off his jumpsuit and tennis shoes and, in his undershorts, stuffed the money (he already knew there was less than he’d intended to steal) into the space behind the back seat. He crammed the jumpsuit, shoes, his gun, the cap and the blanket, and the green-and-white North Dakota license plates into the blue bag, along with several dusty rocks, and put it in the stream. The bag di
dn’t sink, only eddied off in a tuft of yellow foam and disappeared. But he believed this was as good as sinking it, since nobody would be out there to see it. He then put his jeans back on, his white shirt and boots, reattached his Montana plates. My mother drove them back up to the highway, and turned left in the direction of the border, and they put it all behind them.
In Glendive they stopped in at the Yellowstone Motel. Our father went inside their room, collected the clothing they’d left. He walked up to the motel office, spoke to the room clerk—who was not the clerk who’d checked him in the evening before. When he paid—in cash—he joked about the sky now being full of satellites and soon everybody would know everything everybody did—which later struck the room clerk as a strange thing to say. My father walked back down to the cabin, carried my mother’s little suitcase to the Chevrolet, where she was waiting. He got in the driver’s seat and drove them away toward Great Falls. Everything had gone according to my mother’s simple plan. If they’d entertained conscious thoughts about being caught—and they should’ve—it’s possible those thoughts might’ve left their minds as they drove home, rendering them relieved and happy, while they thought about Berner and me waiting for them, and for a better life to commence for all of us.
Chapter 18
Three things I’ve thought about—having to do with the aftermath of their armed robbery and with our parents becoming criminals headed very soon to jail.
One was that they’d always been very different from each other. My sister and I acknowledged this over the years we were growing up. These stark differences—in personality, appearance, outlook, temperament (I’ve described them)—made up opposite ends of the continuum that measured out my and Berner’s lives. We were both composed of these human traits that made them different—some represented in me, some in Berner—though that didn’t make us any more similar. I was optimistic, but not as optimistic as our father. I was cautious, but not as adamant and skeptical as our mother could be. Berner looked like my mother but was taller, even at fifteen—five foot eight. She had a sweet side, like our father, but she guarded it and mostly acted as if it wasn’t there, which I’d say was like our mother. We were both reasonably smart like our mother. But Berner was practical, which wasn’t true of either of our parents. She was also moody and defeatable, as both of them could be, and at some point she tended to accept defeat and destiny, which I have never done.
But when our parents came back from robbing the North Dakota bank, and we were all once again in our house—before the police detectives came—my sister and I noticed almost immediately how our mother and father seemed less different from each other. They were much more in agreement, much less given to sighing or bickering with each other, or being each other’s adversary or opposite—something that had never been true until they left and came back that way. I decided this newfound bond had formed even before they left, on the night they were in such high spirits—as if, as I said, it had been remembered, an old affinity rising again and holding them, so that they were less like ends of a continuum and more just two people who’d once gotten married because they liked each other.
God knows what could’ve been going on in their brains in the days immediately after the robbery. Stolen money was somewhere in our house. They must’ve felt conspicuous, and that they were now in a hostile world (whereas a day before they’d been invisible). Previous life, which they’d grown impatient with for their private reasons, must’ve seemed bewilderingly and abruptly out of reach—the raft having drifted out too far, the balloon ascended. The past was cruelly ended, the future jeopardized. Though this may also be what joined them: an unexpected mutual awareness of consequence. Neither of them had been richly imbued with that. Lacking an awareness of consequence might’ve been their greatest flaw. Though each of them had reasons to know that acts had results.
The second subject didn’t come into my thinking until I’d read my mother’s chronicle—decades after she’d taken her life in prison—when I learned my father wanted me, not her, to be his accomplice. I wanted to know then: Would he have explained to me that he intended to hold up a bank and wanted me to help him? What words would he have chosen to bring this matter up to a fifteen-year-old? Would he have come in my room where I was waking up on Thursday morning and asked to have a private talk and imparted it then? Would he have waited until we were in the car heading east through the Musselshell and brought this outlandish subject up then? Would he have told me just as we were driving into Creekmore? Or would he have never told me, just used me as camouflage, left me sitting in the car behind the bank, waiting for him to reappear, knowing nothing?
And if he had told me, what could I have answered? No? Would no have been possible? (In theory it would’ve.) Of course, I’d have said yes, or at least would’ve said nothing and gone with him. I was not rebellious or mouthy like my sister. I loved him and wanted to see things his way. And if I’d become his accomplice, what would’ve changed between us after that? Everything, most likely. Would I have grown up all in one day? Would my life have been ruined? Would we have been more like brothers than father and son? Would I be a criminal now instead of a school teacher? All possible.
Which begs another question: what would’ve happened if we’d been caught together—captured and put in jail; or set upon by police like Bonnie and Clyde, shot to death and laid out for pictures? “Man and son commit bank robbery. Both are killed.” This is a line of thinking he didn’t treat himself to, and a fate my mother saved me from.
And if the two of them hadn’t gotten caught, would that have spelled the end of it for them as bank robbers? Which is the third thing I’ve wondered about. For our mother, definitely yes—as far as you can know such matters. She had her purpose for doing it once—at least by my reasoning: to leave her unsatisfactory life behind. If that purpose had been achieved, there’s no doubt she’d have begun her new life (with Berner and me) somewhere else. She was only thirty-four. It’s not far-fetched to think of her as a teacher in a small college somewhere—less alienated, probably unmarried, in basic agreement with her lot—her bank robbery left far behind.
For my father, it’s much less possible to be sure. He had a taste for bank robbery, or believed he did. If the robbery had worked out, his nature—as I said—was to think it would always work out and could probably be improved on. At least one more time. He also always believed—although proof mounted that he was mistaken—that he didn’t seem like the sort of man to rob a bank. This was, of course, his great misunderstanding.
Chapter 19
When they arrived home, It was after seven on Friday night. They seemed tired and distracted but relieved to be home. I was excited and began to tell them how Berner and I’d passed the two days—what had happened, what we’d seen, what we thought about. The Indians had made several more trips past our house. The telephone had rung numerous times but we hadn’t answered it. Berner and I had eaten leftover spaghetti and boiled eggs and made toast. We’d played chess, watched The Untouchables, Ernie Kovacs, the news. I’d mowed the lawn and observed the bees working on the zinnias beside the garage. We’d sat on the porch swing at night and watched the sky-glow. I’d heard noises from the State Fair, then going on not far from our house—the announcer’s loudspeaker voice at the Wild West Rodeo and the chuck wagon race, the cheering crowd. A calliope. A man’s amplified voice laughing.
Our parents had things on their minds and were preoccupied with each other. It was as if they were taking care not to make the other irritated. Our mother took a bath, then went in the kitchen and cooked French toast and sliced ham. Our father liked breakfast for supper and believed it was good for digestion. He went out to the street and drove the car around to the alley in back of the house—a thing he didn’t often do, since he was proud of the Bel Air the way he’d been of the demonstrators he’d tried and failed to sell. He also locked it and brought the key inside instead of leaving it in the ignition as usual.
When we sat down at the
dinner table, our father announced that the business deal they’d gone away to investigate was something a person would be crazy to get involved in. Oil wells, he said, profoundly—then smiled and shook his head as if it had been a pathetic idea. Our mother had pointed this out, he said. It had been wise to take her. She had a sharp business mind. He said he now intended to throw himself full-time into learning the farm and ranch sales game. It was steady. Opportunity would soon come along by which we could own land of our own. We were staying in Great Falls. Berner and I could plan on school in two weeks. He intended to make Bargamian an offer for our house. It was a “Craftsman house,” and they weren’t made anymore, he said. It needed painting a new color and new wallpaper, and he wished it had a front “foy-yay” and a fireplace. But it had other elegant touches—the medallion in the living room ceiling being one. He admired the house’s symmetry and solid lines. The outside light was nice through the living room windows—which was true—and it was cool in summer. It reminded him of “the dog-trot” he’d grown up in in Alabama. But there’d be no more thought of moving. Which made me relieved, though it may not have affected Berner, since she’d already decided to run away with Rudy Patterson and put everything she knew of life behind her.