Canada: A Novel Part 2

"Do you want to make a family outing out of it?" my mother said. The water went on, then off. It was her more sarcastic voice.

"n.o.body would ever think," he said again. Then my name. "Dell."

"You're not. No," she said.

"Okay." Dried plates being stacked.

"So, are you happy?" Too loud for me not to hear.

"What's happy got to do with it?"

"Everything. Absolutely."

And this was my dream: running out in my pajamas into the kitchen light, where they were standing, looking at me. My tall father-his small eyes still gleaming. My tiny mother in her white pedal pushers and pretty green blouse with green b.u.t.tons. A face of grave concern. "I'm going," I say. Fists clenched. Face damp. Heart pounding. My parents begin to recede in my vision, as when you're sick and fever shrinks the world and distance lengthens. My parents grew smaller and smaller until I was in the harshly lit kitchen alone, and they were at the vanis.h.i.+ng point, just about to disappear.

Chapter 13.

I slept late on Thursday, from having been up and hearing them move around in the night. Our mother came in my room at eight-her gla.s.ses, her face soft and peering, close to my face, her small cool hand touching my bare shoulder. Her breath smelled sweet with Ipana and sour with tea. The door to my room stood open. Our father's figure pa.s.sed by it. He was wearing blue jeans and a plain white s.h.i.+rt and his Acmes.

"Your sister's had breakfast. There's Cream of Wheat for you." Her eyes were focused on my face, as if she saw something unexpected there. "We have to go away for a day. We'll be back tomorrow. It'll be a good experience for you two to look after things." Her face was calm. She'd made her mind up on something.

Our father stopped in the doorway, his hair combed and s.h.i.+ny. He was shaved. My room smelled like his talc.u.m. He was very tall in the empty door s.p.a.ce.

"You and your sister don't answer the phone," he said. "And don't go anywhere. We'll be back tomorrow evening. This'll be good experience for you."

"Where're you going?" I gazed up at the sunlight behind him in the living room, my eyes burning from too little sleep.

"I have some more business. I mentioned it," he said. "I need your mother's opinion." He was talking softly, but I could see a vein in his forehead was prominent.

She looked at him-as if she hadn't heard this before. She was kneeling beside my bed, her fingers lightly on my chest. "That's right," she said.

"Can we go with you?" I said.

"We'll take you next time," he said.

My dream pa.s.sed in my mind. I'm going. Shouting. Fists clenched.

"Look after your sister." He smiled knowingly. "She's under Colonel Parsons' jurisdiction here." He made a joke out of things if he could.

"Are you going to shoot somebody?"

"Oh my G.o.d," my mother said.

My father's large mouth, which had been smiling, fell open. He squinted-as if a glaring light had been switched on. "Why would you say that?"

"He knows," my mother said. She stood beside my bed and stared down at me, as if I was to blame for something. I didn't know anything.

"What do you think you know, Dell?" My father's smile resumed its activity across his face. He seemed understanding.

"You took your pistol last time."

He took a step forward into my room. "Oh. People carry guns out here. That's common. It's the Wild West. You don't ever shoot anybody."

My mother was looking at me steadily. Her small eyes were intent behind her spectacles, as if she was studying me for some sign. She was sweating under her blouse-I smelled it. It was already hot in the house.

"Are you afraid?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"He's not afraid," my father said, and stepped out of the doorway and looked toward the clock in the kitchen. "We need to go." He disappeared into the hall.

My mother continued to stare at me, as if I'd become a person she didn't completely know.

"Think of some wonderful place you'd like to go, why don't you?" she said. "I'll take you there. You and Berner."

The front screen slapped shut. "He's under Colonel Parsons' jurisdiction here," I heard him say. He was talking to Berner on the porch.

"Moscow," I said. I'd read in Chess Master that great players came from Russia. Mikhail Tal-who was famous for his sacrificing style and terrible stare. Alexander Alekhine-noted for his aggressiveness. I'd looked Moscow up in the Merriam-Webster, and then in the World Book, and finally on the globe on the dresser in my room. I didn't know what the Soviet Union was, or why it was different from Russia. Lenin, who my father said played chess, had played a part in it. And Stalin. Men he despised. He said Stalin had put Roosevelt in the grave the same as if he'd shot him.

"Moscow!" my mother said. "My poor father would have a heart attack. I was thinking of Seattle."

The Chevrolet horn honked in the street. I heard the screen door close again. Berner was coming back inside, ready to take care of me. "His pot's boiling over," I heard her say. My mother leaned forward, kissed me quickly on my forehead. "We can talk about it when I get back," she said. Then she left.

When we lived in Mississippi, in Biloxi-which was in 1955, when I was eleven-my father worked at the base there and stayed home on the weekends, the way he did in Great Falls. He liked Mississippi. It was close to where he'd grown up, and he liked the Gulf of Mexico. If he'd left the Air Force then and there, instead of when he did, things would've worked out better for him and for our mother. They could've gotten divorced and gone their separate ways. Children can make their adjustments if their parents love them. And ours did.

My father often took me to the movies on Sat.u.r.day mornings when there was something he wanted to see or had nothing else to do. There was an air-cooled theater called the Trixy, which was on the downtown main street that ended at the Gulf. The movies started at ten and lasted straight until four, with shorts and cartoons and features running continuously, all for a single admission, which was fifty cents. We would sit through everything, eating candy and popcorn and drinking Dr Peppers, enjoying Tarzan or Jungle Jim and Johnny McShane and Hopalong Ca.s.sidy, plus the Stooges and Laurel and Hardy and newsreels and old war footage, which my father liked. We'd emerge at four out of the cool, back into the hot, salty, breathless Gulf coast afternoon, sun-blind and queasy and speechless from wasting the day with nothing to show for it.

On one such morning, we were there in the dark side-by-side, and onto the screen had come a newsreel from the 1930s, relating to the criminals Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who'd terrorized (the announcer said) several states of the Southwest, robbing and killing and making an infamous name until they were killed in an ambush on a country road in Louisiana, by a posse of deputies who shot them from the bushes and brought their careers to an end. They were only in their twenties.

Later, when my father and I walked out into the steamy, sun-shot afternoon-it was June-our eyes hurting, our heads dull, we found that someone (the Trixy's operators) had parked a long flatbed truck in front of the theater. On the truck bed was an old gray Ford four-door from the '30s, and all over it were s.h.i.+ny holes, and its windows were busted out, its doors and hood perforated, its tires deflated. Up beside the car wheel was a painted sign that read: ACTUAL BONNIE & CLYDE DEATH CAR-WILL PAY $10,000 IF YOU PROVE IT'S NOT. The proprietors had placed a set of wooden steps up to the car, and the theater customers were invited to pay fifty cents to climb up and inspect it, as if Bonnie and Clyde were still inside dead, and everyone should see them.

My father stood on the hot hard concrete, peering up at the car and the customers-kids and grown-ups, women and men-filing past, gawking, making jokes and machine-gun noises and laughing. He didn't intend to pay. He said the car was a fakeroo, or it would never be there. The world didn't work that way. Plus it was fresh painted, and the bullet holes didn't look real. He'd seen bullet holes on plenty of airplanes, and they were bigger, more jagged. Not that this would stop anybody from throwing their money away.

But when we'd stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the car for a few minutes, he said, "Would you become a bank robber, Dell? It'd be exciting. Wouldn't that surprise your mother?"

"I wouldn't," I said, looking speculatingly up at the gleaming holes and all the country yokels peeping in the car windows and yowling and grinning.

"Are you sure?" he said. "I could give it a try. I'd be smarter than these two, though. You don't use your noggin, you end up a piece of Swiss cheese. Your mother'd take this wrong, of course. You don't need to relate it to her." He pulled me closer to him. His s.h.i.+rt smelled starchy in the sunlight. We walked on then into the afternoon.

I never told my mother, and never even thought of it until long after the day my sister and I stood on the front porch and watched our parents drive away to rob a bank. I didn't put those things together then, though later I did. It was a thing he'd always wanted to do. Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.

Chapter 14.

What I know of the actual bank robbery itself I mostly know from my mother's chronicle, and from issues of the Great Falls Tribune, which I've already said took the view that the event was a comic, cautionary tale it was the newspaper's duty to bring before the public eye. Though I have also constructed the robbery in my head-fascinated that it should've been our parents who committed it, so ridiculous and inexplicable as to make the reportable facts inadequate as an explanation.

Conceivably many of us think of robbing a bank the same way we lie in bed at night and dedicatedly plot to murder our life-long enemy; fitting together complicated parts of a plan, adjusting the details, reaching back to reconcile earlier calculations with late-occurring possibilities for being caught. Eventually, we find ourselves facing the one unerasable problem in logic that our cleverness can't work out all the way. After which we conclude that though it's satisfying to think we could murder our enemy in ambush (since it needs to be done), only a deranged or suicidal person would carry out such a plan. That is because the world is set against such acts. And in any case we're amateurs at the business of scheming and plotting and murdering, and don't have the concentration needed to defeat what the world is so set against. At which point we forget about our plan and go to sleep.

To succeed, my parents would've had to realize their car would be recognized immediately. My father's blue jumpsuit would be identified as Air Force issue-even minus its insignias. The unfaded mark of previous captain's bars would be easily noticed. My father's good looks and obliging southern accent and manners would be memorable to everyone in a North Dakota bank. The fact that he had mentioned his wish to rob a bank to several people at the base in Great Falls would be recollected (though he intended it as a joke). Our parents would've also had to realize that contrary to my father's intuition, people who rob banks don't blend into the population, but stand out because they've become something or someone different from who they were and from everybody else-even if they don't realize it. For all these reasons, discovering who robbed a bank quickly begins not to be difficult at all.

But for my parents, who drove away on Thursday morning completely innocent, with only a trivial debt owed to a small group of ineffectual Indians-something they could've ironed out successfully any number of ways-this kind of thinking didn't occur. Although most certainly it did occur to them, even as soon as they were driving home to Great Falls the next day-as felons; any thoughts of getting away with what they'd done rising away from them into the flat summer sky.

Chapter 15.

What they did was drive east on highway 200, through the towns of Lewistown and Winnett, into the Musselsh.e.l.l drainage toward Jordan, Circle and Sidney, through the summer-hard, dry-gra.s.s table-land that stretches from the mountains to Minnesota. They were where they knew no one and nothing, other than what my father had discovered on his "business trip," which probably seemed like a great deal in his mind, and helped create the sensation they were invisible.

In his two days of incessant driving, criss-crossing the border of North Dakota, he'd come to the town of Creekmore (population 600 then), and the North Dakota Agricultural National Bank. He'd had lunch in a cafe across Main Street. No one talked to him or seemed to pay attention to his jumpsuit. (There was an air base in Minot, not far away.) This made him believe people would be stunned into memoryless-ness if, dressed in that way, he walked into the bank the second it opened, brandished his .45, took what was in the tellers' drawers and whatever other money was lying around loose-made no effort to go in the vault, unless it happened to be standing open with money in view, and he could steal it easily-put it all into his canvas bag and be gone. In less than three minutes he could be driving west toward the Montana border, and back into fast-closing insignificance. My mother would be waiting but would not exit the car because of being so distinctive looking. She would have the motor idling the whole time he was inside doing the robbery, and would drive them away. Yes, it was a bold plan. But my father believed it was simple enough to work, and he had used his noggin to figure it out. It would be an advantage that he'd never been in the bank before. Most bank thieves would've felt the need to "case" the scene, and by doing so would implant unconscious memories in anyone's mind who saw them later-though my father didn't think anyone would see him later. What few people there'd be in the tiny Agricultural National at that early hour would be mesmerized by the sudden appearance of his menacing .45 and pay no attention whatsoever to him or what he might look like. That was all the gun was for-a distraction. He could get away with at least five or six or even the limit of ten thousand dollars. That was using his noggin, too.

The complicated part of his plan involved avoiding detection once the robbery was finished. Wide-open s.p.a.ces would be his chief ally. But to improve on that advantage, he'd driven on the previous Tuesday down to the Montana town of Wibaux, across the border and south from Creekmore. In his capacity as a land agent, he'd made inquiries at the Wibaux Bank and at an insurance office and at a bar about ranches in the area that might be for sale, and where the owners had already departed, and about how he could contact them on behalf of a customer in Great Falls. His view was that the territory was dotted with such empty places. No one paid any attention to them. No one else would be visible out there, horizon line to horizon line.

Armed with information from the town merchants, and a section map, he'd driven to several ranch sites until he found one that was clearly in disuse, where vehicles and equipment were in evidence but no one was present. He drove into the ranch yard, got out, and knocked on the door. He peered in windows to be sure no one was home. He intended to start one of the farm trucks without a key, but found the key was in the one he chose and that it started. He looked to see if a shed could be opened and if the house itself could be easily entered, and found both were possible.

His plan was that he and our mother would drive to this isolated ranch on Thursday night. They'd sleep in the car or in an outbuilding, or even in the house-without turning on any lights. They'd hide the Bel Air in one of the outbuildings. He would affix onto one of the farm trucks the North Dakota plates he'd stolen while he was in Creekmore and was carrying in his Air Force bag with his pistol and a cap (his only disguise). This ranch vehicle-a Ford truck-the two of them would drive the next morning the short distance across the North Dakota border to Creekmore. My mother would park it on the street near the front of the Agricultural Bank just at opening time. My father would exit the truck, walk in the bank, rob it, leave and get back in the truck. She would then drive back across the border to the Wibaux ranch where the Chevrolet was waiting. They would change clothes, throw the gun, the cap, the blue bag and the North Dakota plates-everything but the money-into the farm pond or into some creek, or down a well, then drive on to Great Falls, like two people who'd been on an outing but were now headed home. Berner and I would be there waiting for them.

My father elaborated this plan to my mother during their drive east on Thursday, through Lewistown, toward North Dakota. She had immediately disapproved. She knew nothing about robbing banks; but she was again a careful listener and was deliberate and believed my father's plan was too complicated and contained many opportunities to go wrong. For some reason she was committed to robbing a bank-the only truly reliable explanation for which is the simplest one: people do rob banks. If this seems illogical, then you are still judging events from the point of view of someone who's not robbing a bank and never would because he knows it's crazy.

What, my mother said, if the people who owned the ranch came home and found the two of them asleep in the car or in the house? (He had an answer there: they'd grown sleepy and gotten off the road to be safe. No one would prosecute them. They wouldn't have robbed a bank yet. They could go home.) But what if the old truck broke down halfway out of Creekmore? (For this he lacked an answer.) And what if someone was waiting when they got back to reclaim the Chevrolet? (He a.s.sumed that if the ranch was vacant when he found it, it would be vacant until he had no more use for it-which was his mind's habit.) His whole idea, my mother said, had too many moving parts. Too many places where it could break down. Simpler was better. She cited the over-elaborated structure of the scheme that had landed him in the middle between the Indians and Digby. He wasn't cautious enough, wasn't prudent, had seen too many gangster movies in Podunk, Alabama. She had never seen even one, didn't know about the Bonnie and Clyde car and what he'd told me about a taste for holdups. But she was now engaged.

A better plan-so simple-was to change the plates on their Chevrolet to North Dakota ones, drive it into Creekmore at the early hour he'd proposed, park behind the bank, not in front in full view; go in the bank, rob it, walk out and around the building, get in the car where she'd be waiting, lie down in the back seat, or even get in the trunk, after which she'd drive away like she'd driven in. Nothing rushed. Everything would look natural. This plan took advantage of people's human habit of finding most things to be unremarkable as long as they themselves weren't involved. This would include everybody on the street at nine o'clock on Friday morning in Creekmore, North Dakota-a town where nothing but unremarkable things took place.

My mother's chronicle doesn't say anything about arguments my father put forward against her simpler plan. It was a long drive-four hundred miles. They stopped for lunch, got gas in Winnett, had all those hours together in the car, plenty of time to express their views in full. My mother only says eventually she "persuaded him" that the best idea was to stay in the town of Glendive, Montana, to make themselves visible but unexceptional where they stayed and where they ate dinner. The next morning they would get up, drive the sixty miles to Creekmore, do what they planned to do, then drive straight home to my sister and me. She does say he should've worn a mask. But he refused because no one knew him in the town, and his own face was already a mask. A handsome mask.

In hindsight, it is a cruel irony that my mother's plan prevailed. For all its potentially unsound points, my father's plan might've worked better than hers. He'd spent some time (possibly years) devising and deliberating it, whereas her self-a.s.sured plan didn't get them caught immediately but got them caught just the same. The Bel Air was remembered from the time my father had lunch in the Town Diner in Creekmore the previous Tuesday. It was also double recognized when they'd driven it into town on Friday morning, parked behind the bank, then driven out of town after the robbery. It was made mental note of by both the room clerk at the Yellowstone Motel in Glendive and by the sheriff of Dawson County, who noticed the Great Falls plates and the sticker from the BX store on the winds.h.i.+eld. There was also my father's amusing Dixie accent and Sunday-dinner manners, his Air Force jumpsuit, and the service-issue .45. The bank guard even noticed the tiny, frayed pinholes on the jumpsuit shoulders. He'd been an Air Force staff sergeant and guessed accurately that the holes and the fabric discoloration had been left by captain's bars. My parents simply did not understand life in small prairie towns, where everyone notices everything. Though none of these last matters might've connected to them directly-at home by then, with us in Great Falls-without the Chevrolet being identified by people n.o.body thought would be noticing things or putting things together with other things they didn't even know they'd noticed but surprisingly had. As it turned out, my father wasn't all that memorable to anyone in Creekmore-until it was time to testify against him, when he became very memorable.

I have always wondered what they talked about-our mother and father-in the car together on their drive across the middle of Montana, the pistol in the satchel, speeding toward their fate with my sister's and mine trailing not far behind them. I've always a.s.sumed it was different from what you'd think-as many things turn out to be. In my (you could call it a) fantasy, they didn't argue, didn't seethe or dread or loathe. He didn't try to persuade her to commit robbery. (He didn't have to.) She didn't rehea.r.s.e the reasons a robbery wouldn't be necessary. (That was already settled.) He thought the money would set life up right, make him flush, keep us all together, let us settle into Great Falls and be a normal family. (He did say that.) Or else he'd concluded what a failure he was, what a paltry mess he'd made of things, and burned to accomplish something impressive (more than selling ranches or cars or stealing cows), something that would either put him and us all on easy street, or blow easy street to smithereens so nothing would ever be the way it had been again. Both or either could be true, given his mercurial, imprudent character. But it's clear he wanted more than any $2,000 to pay off Indians, since he could've settled that without robbing a bank. The more-whatever it was-was what the robbery was about for him.

For our mother, of course, it was different. She wasn't an obvious risk taker and had good sense. She was brought up to know things, to appreciate fine discriminations and could view an alternate future that was still realizable even at thirty-four. But because she'd agreed to do it-go with him, devise her simpler plan, sit in the car, wait, drive them away once the robbery was accomplished, and was even in a good humor the night before-it has to be accepted she did it, if not willingly, at least knowingly, with an idea about how things could be better for her once the robbery was over.

In her best brain, she would've seen it as a mistake; that they could've left the house and their few possessions right where they lay, and in the middle of the night driven away. Nothing was special about Great Falls now that he wasn't in the Air Force. They both hated acc.u.mulation and possessed little but the Chevrolet and two children. Her brain simply must not have tracked all the way out that far. Because if her brain had, the uncertainty would've been forbidding.

My guess is-fifty years gone past now-that with her newfound sense of freedom and relief, unexpectedly encountered while Bev was roaming the Dakota badlands, trying to pick a bank to rob, Neeva came to the remarkably mistaken conclusion that robbing a bank was a risk that would facilitate things she wanted. It was a miscalculation not very different from the one that had swayed her to marry Bev Parsons in the first place-giving up on the life she could've had, to lead what might've seemed a more adventurous and unexpected one, but wasn't. With half the money from a robbery she wouldn't have to go back to her miscalculated life-which had become a reproach. Robbery might've seemed better than driving off into the night, and waking up in some dusty, alien Cheyenne, Wyoming, or Omaha, Nebraska, followed by more of the same she'd already had enough of. In her chronicle she wrote that on their drive to Creekmore, she'd told my father that once the robbery was behind them, without even knowing how much they'd get, but supposing it'd be enough, she'd be taking half the money and us two children and leaving. She wrote that he'd laughed and said, "Well, wait and see how you feel."

To me, it's the edging closer to the point of no return that's fascinating: all along the trip, chatting, sharing confidences, exchanging endearments-since their life was officially still intact. They weren't felons. How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the st.i.tch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away, and all is lost. For reasons of our parents' disastrous choices, I believe I'm both distrustful of normal life and in equal parts desperate for it. It's hard to hold the idea of a normal life, and also the end they came to, in my mind at one time. But it's worth trying, since I repeat: otherwise very little of this story can be understood.

The last glimpse of them-before they became something else-tells me that in the Chevrolet headed east, side by side, free from their children for the first time, alone together, the two of them may have felt a last bit of the old affinity from the night before, could've tracked it all back. Like anyone's parents. A sense that one completed in the other something unique and likable and so basic as never to have been addressed or fully experienced-but once, at the beginning. Of course, had my mother not gotten pregnant, and had my father not done the right thing, it could've all been smiled away as a pa.s.sing attraction, marveled at later as having been something like love, something that had been present in both of them but ended without issue.

Chapter 16.

The drive to Glendive took them six and a half hours. They checked into the Yellowstone Motel. My father made a point of cheerfulness to the room clerk, while trying to say nothing memorable. He left my mother in the car while he signed them in so she wouldn't be noticed and make an impression. He and she took a nap in the hot, musty beaverboard cabin with the blinds pulled. At seven, when it was still full light-though the town was emptied and bridge swallows were swarming and diving at their images in the mirror surface of the Yellowstone-he drove into town, ate his dinner alone at the Jordan Hotel, and asked for a covered plate of beef and macaroni to take back to his wife, who was sick in the room.

How they pa.s.sed that night together-the last before they became felons-there's no way to know, since my mother doesn't say in any detail. There's no template for such a night. They were alone in their sweltering cabin. They'd talked out the subjects they needed to talk about or had any imagination for. Ordinary people would've waked up panicked at two A.M., slick with sweat, roused the person lying beside them, snapped on the table lamp and shouted, "No, wait! Wait! What is this we're doing? It's very well to threaten these things, hatch a plan, drive to here and fantasize it'll work out. But it's crazy! We have to go home to our children, figure this out another way." That's the way reasoning people think and speak and act when they have a reflective moment. But it's still not what our parents did. "I did not sleep well the hot night in Glendive," is what my mother wrote. "Had bad dreams of being in a boat-a s.h.i.+p-pa.s.sing through (it must've been) the Panama Ca.n.a.l, or maybe Suez, getting stuck, not being able to go forward or back. B. slept soundly, as always. Woke early. Was dressed and in the chair, doing something to his pistol when my eyes opened on him."

What they did next was rise at seven thirty, leave clothes scattered around their room, eat no breakfast, hang the DO NOT DISTURB card on the cabin door, and drive away from the motel. It was supposed to look as if they were staying on, sleeping late, then going someplace where they had business, with the expectation of returning.

They drove east through the tiny town of Wibaux, near where my father had formulated his original plan-the vacant ranch, the borrowed truck-before giving in to my mother's simpler one. Beyond Wibaux, they crossed the North Dakota border-only a small metal sign announcing another state was being entered. Not far beyond the state line they turned off onto a dirt farm road, drove a mile into the barley fields to where a creek ribboned past a clump of green cottonwoods with magpies up in the limbs. My father got out in the steaming morning light and exchanged license plates-the green-and-white Peace Garden State North Dakota ones he'd stolen three days ago replacing the black-lettered Treasure State ones he intended to put back on. He changed into his blue jumpsuit and tennis shoes, which he thought rendered him invisible, and folded his good clothes under some fallen tree limbs, along with his boots. My mother stayed in the car, fearing snakes. Then the two of them drove back up onto the highway, turned east and soon after rolled into Creekmore, which was the first town beyond the border-chosen for that reason.

The Agricultural National Bank was near the western end of Main Street in downtown Creekmore. My father was surprised the street was so populated at 8:58. Ranch trucks and wheat-mowing machinery and grain trucks were moving about and people were in town for shopping. It was a town of early risers. As per their plan, he didn't drive down the main street, but turned at the first corner where there was an insurance company, drove a half block to the back alley he knew was there-weedy and graveled with an automobile repair where you turned in, but no building behind the bank itself. He drove down the gravel alley to where he could pull in behind the bank, and where two other cars were parked-employees. He didn't intend this to take long. He wanted everything as unremarkable as possible, which is why he decided not to disguise himself or wear a mask-the thing my mother had advised. Even then he didn't believe he looked like a bank robber. He had clear, even features, a fresh haircut. He'd shaved. Nothing (but the jumpsuit) distinguished him as anything but a clear-faced, even-featured North Dakota adult.

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 bra.s.s and beveled-gla.s.s bank door. He had a thought that he should've worn sungla.s.ses, 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 bra.s.s-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 Bra.s.so-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 j.a.pan), 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sure 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 La.s.se 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-relis.h.i.+ng 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 bra.s.s 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.