Canada

  The next morning—Sunday—Mouse, or Williams, arrived at our house, stood in the yard with my father, and said what he’d said about killing us, a threat our father took very seriously. Williams also stated that he and his associates had incurred greater risk by stealing four cows instead of one, and had gone to much more perilous difficulty in butchering them and transporting them, and had been laughed at by the Negro Digby when they delivered the meat and demanded they be paid $600 instead of the $400 they were originally owed. Williams further told our father that one of his associates was under surveillance by the reservation police specifically due to the cow-stealing scheme, and needed money to make a trip to Wyoming to hide for several months. For which reasons, Williams said, he and his friends were now owed $2,000, and not $600 or the $400 they’d agreed to. Where the $2,000 amount came from he didn’t offer to explain.

  Our father wasn’t a man accustomed to being threatened. He was accustomed to getting along well with people, amusing them, being admired for his looks, his nice manners, his southern accent, and for his valiant bombardier’s service in the war. Being threatened with murder exerted a big impact on him. He immediately began to brood and fester about how he could get the money, and quickly came to the extraordinary idea of finding a bank to rob. At that moment, it must’ve seemed better than having the Indians kill him and my mother and Berner and me, better than gathering us all three up, loading us into the Bel Air and abandoning everything in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Other ways of getting the money—borrowing it (he had no credit, his in-laws disliked him, he had no salary and nothing to borrow against), or of coping with the situation, such as by going to the Great Falls police or reasoning with Williams—either didn’t occur to him or, he might’ve felt, would only lead to worse problems. Later, when it might have occurred to him to go to the police and throw himself on their mercy, he’d already decided robbing a bank was a good idea, and that was that.

  When my mother was in the North Dakota Women’s Penitentiary in Bismarck, where she was imprisoned after her and my father’s trial, she wrote about the next days and the ones preceding them in her chronicle—an account that goes into great detail about what she and my father did. She’d had aspirations to be a poet when she was in college at Walla Walla, and possibly she thought a well-written version of their story would offer a future for her when she got out of prison—which she never did. In her chronicle she is extremely critical of our father and his flaws. She doesn’t excuse herself or plead she was crazy or forced into participating, or even try to explain how she was talked into it. (She does express sorrow about what happened to my sister and me.) In her writing she says she believed she was the person she’d always thought herself to be—reflective, smart, imaginative, possibly alienated and skeptical, conserving, mirthful. (She wasn’t that.) These were the values that caused her never to want Berner and me to assimilate in the places my father’s Air Force job took us. Those places, she felt, would dilute and corrupt what was good and important about us and render us stale and ordinary in terms specific to Mississippi, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, places she had low regard for and considered unenlightened. She uses these words in the chronicle: dilute, conserving, alienated, stale, corrupt. She believed she and my father should never have married—she should’ve seen ahead that they both would’ve been happier if they hadn’t. This was where she wrote about marrying a college professor and having a life as a poet and other such things. She says she definitely should’ve left him the minute the subject of a robbery came up, since she was already considering leaving him. Except what she found out about herself—she wrote—was that while all the ways she knew herself to be (when she looked in the mirror and saw the unusual person she was) were accurate and true, she was also weak. Which she’d never thought before, but was the reason, she believed, she’d married smiling, good-looking, romantic Bev Parsons. (She was pregnant, but she could’ve taken care of that, something even college girls in the ’40s knew how to do.) Being weak was why she hadn’t long ago left Bev and taken us away. These facts now confirmed to her that she was just like anybody else, which led her inexorably (by her demented logic) to robbing a bank. Not that she believed she was a criminal. She never thought that. Her parents hadn’t raised her to be capable of believing such a thing (which may have had to do with being Jewish where there were no Jews, and with preserving a feeling of specialness that didn’t allow adopting other people’s views and cautions, as reasonable as they might’ve been).

  But what I thought—and I thought it when Berner and I were inside our house alone and our parents were in their cells in the Cascade County jail—was how young our parents were then. Only thirty-seven and thirty-four. And that they were not the people to rob a bank. Yet because very few people do rob banks, it only makes sense that the few who do it are destined for it, no matter what they believe about themselves or how they were raised. I find it impossible not to think this way, because the sense of tragedy would otherwise be overpowering to me.

  Though it’s an odd thing to believe about your parents—that all along they’ve been the kind of people criminals come from. It’s like a miracle in reverse. I’m sure it’s what my mother meant when she said she was “weak.” To her, the two words—criminal and weak—may have meant the same thing.

  Chapter 9

  By Monday morning something had changed in the house. Large occurrences were going on—larger than my father beginning a new job, or leaving the Air Force, or packing up and moving to a new town. Our parents had stayed in their room with the door closed until late the night before, and I knew they’d argued. I made out he was determined to do something she disagreed with. I heard their closet door slam a few times, and my mother say, “This is the last time . . .” and, “You will not get him . . .” and, “This is the craziest. . . .” Each time her voice started loud and quickly fell away so I couldn’t hear the last. Three different times my father walked out of their bedroom and went out onto the front porch. (I heard his boots on the boards.) He came back inside each time and their door closed, and they began talking again. “So what choice do you see?” he said. And “You’re always timid in these things.” And “That’s not how you get caught, anyway.” After a while they said only a few words to each other. Then that tapered off. I left my room and went to the kitchen, where the light was on, and drank a glass of water. A bead of orange light shone under their door. When I climbed back in bed, Berner was there. She didn’t say anything. She just lay breathing and chilled, her face to the wall that had my college pennants on it. This was not something we’d done since we lived in Great Falls—though we’d slept together in smaller houses when we were children. I wasn’t comfortable with her in bed. But I knew she wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been important, and that she’d been listening the way I had. She smelled of cigarettes and hard candy, and all her clothes were on. We went to sleep after our parents stopped talking. Though in the morning when I woke up, both my fists were clenched and ached, and Berner was gone, and we didn’t talk about it when I saw her again. It was as if it hadn’t happened.

  My father was generally in a good humor in the mornings. But that Monday morning he acted grave about something. My mother seemed to stay out of his way. She fixed our breakfast, and we all sat down and ate. Over his eggs, my father asked Berner and me what we thought we could do that would be useful to the Republic, which was a thing he said when he wanted to know what plans we had. I reminded him that the State Fair was starting that day, and I had my interest in the bee demonstration—which would be useful. He didn’t comment on this and seemed to forget he’d asked. He didn’t joke about anything or smile. His eyes were reddened. He didn’t thank our mother for breakfast. He hadn’t shaved, which he always did when he went to the base, and took care about. His unshaven skin had a gaunt bluish cast. What was wrong with him became the only issue at the table, but nobody asked. I saw our mother look at him irritably from behind her glasses. Her lips
were tightened and hard, as if he’d behaved toward her in a way she didn’t like.

  It was also noticeable to me that our father wasn’t wearing his new trousers or his black tooled boots or one of his arrow-pocket shirts, which was how he’d been dressing when he went to work at the farm and ranch sales company. Instead, he’d put on his old blue Air Force jumpsuit and a pair of paint-stained low-cut white tennis shoes, clothes he wore when he mowed the grass or watered. He’d scissored off the insignias when he’d taken his discharge, including the patch that said “PARSONS.” He looked like someone, I thought, who didn’t want to be recognized by anyone who knew him.

  After breakfast there was even less talking. Berner went in her room and closed the door and played a record on her record player. My mother cleaned the kitchen, then went out on the front porch in the morning sun and drank tea and did her crossword book and read a novel for her class with the nuns. I followed our father around the house. He seemed to be going someplace, and I wanted to find out where and if I could go. He took his leather toiletries kit out of the bathroom cupboard and put various items in. He put socks and underwear into his old Air Force canvas bag while I stood in the bedroom door watching. We were a family who didn’t travel unless we were moving to a new town. Staying put was a luxury, my father always said. His fondest wish was to live in one place like everybody else. A person was free to settle anywhere in our country, he believed. Where you were born meant little. That was the beauty of America, and wasn’t true of those countries we’d liberated in the war, where life was confined and provincial. What I feared was that he and our mother had decided to go apart. His behavior seemed to me how things would be if that was happening. Silence. Tension. Anger. Though they’d never talked about going apart that I’d ever heard.

  When I saw him zip up his blue bag (I’d seen him put his pistol in it—his big black .45 caliber he left the Air Force owning), I said:

  “Where are you going?”

  He looked up at me where he sat on the side of his bed. (Our parents slept in two beds.) It was hot in the house, the way it got in the morning. We didn’t turn on the attic fan until afternoon. It was only nine. He smiled at me, as if he hadn’t heard me, which happened sometimes. But the way he’d looked at breakfast—gaunt and sleepless—left his features, and his color came back.

  “Are you a private detective on a case?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I am.” I didn’t want to say, Are you and Mother going to go apart? I didn’t want to hear that.

  “I’m leaving on a business trip,” he said and went on fiddling with his bag.

  “Are you coming back?”

  “Well, certainly,” he said. “Why? Would you like to go with me?”

  Our mother was suddenly beside me in the doorway, clutching her book. She set her hand on my shoulder and gripped it. She wasn’t tall but could take a hard grip. “He’s not going with you,” she said. “I have uses for him here that’ll benefit the country.” She pushed me right out of the doorway and stepped into their bedroom and closed the door. I heard heated talk then, though they were whispering because they knew I was listening. “You can’t . . . you can not under any circumstances . . .” she said. And he said, “Oh, for Christ fucking sake. We’ll talk about it later.” He rarely ever cursed, and neither did she. Berner did. She’d learned it from Rudy. It was shocking to hear him say that to our mother.

  I thought our mother might open the door suddenly and be angry at me for listening, so I went back to my room and sat down in front of my green-and-white chess board. I felt calm behind the rows of white pieces established in their specific purposes, waiting to walk into battle at my command.

  In a little while, my father went out the front door, carrying his canvas bag with the pistol inside, and got in his car. He never told me what the business was or even said good-bye. I suspected his business had nothing to do with selling farms and ranches, but with the Indian who’d been at our house. In any case, I knew it was important or he wouldn’t be leaving in a rush. It felt to me that something was in our life now that had never been in it before.

  Chapter 10

  What my father did during the next days was drive around eastern Montana and western North Dakota (places he’d never been), searching for a bank he could rob. His plan was not to rob a bank right away but to choose a town and a bank, based on criteria he’d developed in his head, then go back to Great Falls, briefly re-enter family life, then come back and rob the chosen bank a couple of days later. This plan seemed less hasty and more thought out, more susceptible to recalculation and even abandonment—wiser, as a way to go about bank robbing. The opposite of that was how people’s actions lurched off wrong and they landed in jail.

  It’s odd to imagine, of course: you pass a car on a lonely rural highway; you sit beside a man in a diner and share views with him; you wait behind a customer checking into a motel, a friendly man with a winning smile and twinkling hazel eyes, who’s happy to fill you in on his life’s story and wants you to like him—odd to think this man is cruising around with a loaded pistol, making up his mind about which bank he’ll soon rob.

  I think that even though my father was frightened by the Indians—and by what calamity Williams-Mouse had promised would befall us if the money wasn’t forthcoming—by the time he’d driven the long way east into the vast, voided parts of Montana stretching all the way to North Dakota, had sized up banks and towns, thought about places to hide, noticed the number of state troopers and deputies he passed, determined how far from the state line a bank would be (being southern meant state borders signified something to him that they didn’t mean to people in other places we’d lived)—by the time he’d done all that, the idea of a robbery had begun to seem if not reasonable, at least acceptable, and an idea that provoked surprisingly little worry. I judge this by how he acted when he got home, two days later, which was confident and ebullient, once again in high spirits—as if he’d had a large problem when he left but it had turned out to be the simplest thing in the world to solve. Which was typical of how he minimized his problems. I also judge his unburdened frame of mind by the fact that he gave some thought that I go with him to commit the robbery. Not that he reached the point at which a robbery was proposed to me. I only found it out later, in my mother’s chronicle, though I heard through closed doors words actually spoken about it between them, but didn’t fully understand: that in his view I could’ve been a persuasive accomplice. My mother (his other choice) would, he felt, be immediately recognizable because of her foreign appearance and small stature and because she was unfriendly to most people—a liability, he believed. He wanted robbing a bank to be congenial. (I’m sure wanting me to be his accomplice was part of what finally made her go herself—and do the most foreign thing she could ever do.)

  I already knew from things he’d said that my father entertained longstanding thoughts about robbing a bank—although I never took any of it as serious. My mother’s chronicle makes clear he never gave any specific thought to being caught—because he was too clever. He also felt that robbing a “national bank” was “a crime without any victims,” since as long as a person made sure to steal less than $10,000 (he got much less than that), the federal government, he believed, would make sure none of the depositors lost their money. As I’ve said, he had a strong reliance on the government, going back to the New Deal days and the REA, extending through his years in the Air Force, where everything was taken care of because much was owed to him for his service. You would say now he was a life-long Democrat.

  As for getting caught—once he’d seen what eastern Montana and the western Dakotas looked like (blank, empty, unsociable, poor)—he couldn’t imagine anyone would ever notice him, especially if my mother wasn’t there to stand out. He would be a friendly, inconspicuous man dressed unmemorably, driving an unmemorable car with a son. (He intended to steal North Dakota license plates so his Chevrolet wouldn’t be noticeable either.) He knew he looked like no one who’d e
ver rob a bank. So he could rob one without even resorting to a mask or a disguise. He would do it quickly, then drive back into the baked, engulfing landscape and be back to Great Falls by evening. No one would be the wiser.

  Which makes a kind of sense—to the right kind of person. The sheriff of Cascade County, where Great Falls is located, told the Tribune, later, after our parents were caught, that many people think Montana is an easy place to commit a robbery and not be caught—which is why so many robberies occurred there (something else my father didn’t know). People think, the sheriff said, that once they commit the robbery they then become swallowed up by empty space, and no one notices them because there are so few people there to notice anything. The truth was, he said, a bank robber always stands out in Montana. After all, he’s typically the only one who’s committed that crime—which is why he’s out there by himself. Whereas most everybody else knows fairly well that they haven’t committed a crime. Plus, in my father’s case, everyone would notice a friendly face because there were very few of those out there on the best of days.

  My mother must’ve recognized everything clearly. When my father drove away Monday morning in his blue jumpsuit and carrying his loaded pistol, and feeling so terrified people were going to murder us that he had to rob a bank to get money, our mother immediately began to act like our lives were in the grip of a great change. She instantly set all three of us to cleaning our house—something she’d never paid much attention to, since our houses were always rentals with plumbing and gas seepage odors and were never clean when we arrived. She tied a red kerchief on her head that bushed her hair out, put on an old pair of cotton trousers she rolled the cuffs up on, found a pair of black rubber gloves to save her fingernails, and began scrubbing the kitchen floor and the bathroom tiles, sweeping out the closets and washing the windows, taking the dishes out of the cupboards and cleaning the shelves with Bab-O. Berner and I were assigned to wash the floors and doors and woodwork and closet corners and window moldings in our rooms with soap cakes and rags, and to clean our window glass with vinegar—which turned my hands dry and sour smelling. She told us to make a selection of our clothes to give away to St. Vincent de Paul, and to pile these on the enclosed back porch beside my bicycle, to be taken away. I was dispatched up the disappearing stairs to the attic—in case we’d forgotten things to throw away up there. It was overheated and dark and smelled of mothballs and rot and was full of dust and soot, and I was conscious of rattlesnakes and poisonous spiders and hornets nesting in the rafters, and came down quickly without bringing anything with me.