Authors: Richard Ford
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-assured 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 windshield. 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 nobody 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 assumed 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 rehearse 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 accumulation 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 stitch 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 passing attraction, marveled at later as having been something like love, something that had been present in both of them but ended without issue.
T
HE 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 passed 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 ship—passing through (it must’ve been) the Panama Canal, 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 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.)