Authors: Richard Ford
“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 Saturday 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 Cassidy, 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 shiny 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 shirt 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.
W
HAT 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.
W
HAT THEY DID WAS DRIVE EAST ON HIGHWAY
200, through the towns of Lewistown and Winnett, into the Musselshell drainage toward Jordan, Circle and Sidney, through the summer-hard, dry-grass 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 café 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 spaces 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 assumed 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.