“We got to get outta this place...”
Louis stopped throwing rocks.
“We should,” he said. “No plan, no goodbyes, just scot-free ass-haulin’.” He dusted his hands and started grinning. “That’d be hilarious.”
“Where should we go?” I said.
I threw another rock.
“You name it, baby,” Louis said, and when I didn’t answer him right away he said, “Seriously.”
I was serious. I had another rock in my hand, and I turned to the knee-deep field of soybeans that began at the edge of Mitch’s parking lot and threw the rock far as I could through the dead space out over the field. The rock pattered on the leaves not far away.
“L.A.,” I said.
Louis’s lean, sunburnt face had broken into a big smile. He nodded toward his car and started across the gravel. Louis was not one to be outdone for spontaneous.
“We can take the Buick,” he said, and for a second I thought he was warning to leave right then. I got nervous. The loud whine of the locusts went suddenly electric in my head.
But when Louis got his door open and one leg inside he looked back at me and said, “Dark-thirty, baby. Have your shit packed.”
That’s all he said, and he was smiling the whole time. But that evening he pulled up in the road out front of my aunt’s house. And j my shit was packed. We laughed and laughed.
When we hit a liquor store in New Mexico I didn’t even have a gun. Like Louis said once, all you need is one gun and it doesn’t even have to work. We probably hit six or eight places in those months out west, and I found out, it ain’t that big a deal really. Cashiers and tellers are trained to come off the money with no fuss. Anybody can take it. Long as you don’t monkey with the ones behind glass. And then the other tricky thing is when some of these places have a cop inside. That had happened to us once, at this quickie store out in California. But, you know, when you get to the door and see there’s a damn cop standing in there, there’s no law says you got to go on in and make a mess. So that night when I got up to the glass doors and saw this woman cop inside, I said, “Oh shit,” and tried to turn around. But Louis was behind me and he plowed us both on in. The woman cop was sipping coffee at the end of the counter. Louis walked right at her. He had an expression I’d never seen on his face before, all flushed and serious. In one smooth move he whipped his snubnose .38 out of his streetcoat and put that joker right in her face, and he backed the hammer. Then he just stood there with his arm leveled at her eyes. It was not a pleasant thing to be around, with the hammer on that .38 ready to drop and having no idea what was going on in Louis’s head, but I went on and did the talking and everything went fine. Later we laughed at his new theory: If you let them study you from a distance they could identify you again no problem, but if you stuck your face right up in theirs they wouldn’t remember shit. Which is funny, but like I said, by the time we were riding back into Shardale, laughing at this kind of thing had long since gotten old for me.
When we got into Shardale that morning, we pulled into the bank’s customer parking lot, and there were no other cars there. We parked up near the glass doors and sat with the car idling. We were in no hurry and weren’t worried about folks seeing us, because best we knew nobody out west had started looking for us by name. Louis checked the cylinder on his .38 one last time and snapped it shut I’d checked my piece several times coming into town and I wasn’t checking it again.
“Well,” Louis said, and he sighed like he was tired, “game time.”
We left the car idling and stepped up onto the sidewalk. My spine was starting to jump from the cold and from being geared up. I had my empty duffel bag in my hand. We entered the bank, Louis in front.
The bank was small, just one large room, and inside it was warm and soft and quiet, with carpet and lots of plants. In the middle of the room there was an expensive-looking sofa and a nice coffee table. It was just a bank, but I couldn’t get over how cozy and civilized it felt, and paused there inside the glass doors beside Louis, I was suddenly embarrassed to be doing this.
There were no customers in the room and no teller at the counter, but across the lobby there was a cop. He was a big old boy, standing with his butt against the wall and his hands in his pockets.
Louis started across the lobby toward him.
I looked at the cop just enough to see that he was watching us. I let Louis get a little closer to him and I went up to the counter.
The only girl working was standing back near the drive-through window and had not noticed me yet. She was talking softly on the telephone. Beyond her, out the teller window, there were the two drive-through lanes and then a bare, black pecan tree at the edge of an empty field. The tint in the window made the sky over the field look darker, like it might rain. I took a deep breath of the dry, warm lobby air.
That’s when I heard a cheerful voice say, “Louis Day,” and I turned to see the cop smiling at Louis.
My first thought was that the guy might have played baseball for Shardale — we used to play them all the time. But then his red hair and his big ears registered, and I knew who it was. The cop was damn Yancy Purvis, this guy from Silas that went to school with me and Louis.
Louis’s face had turned dark red. He did not answer Yancy. He just walked up in front of him.
Yancy had stopped smiling. “Louis,” he said.
Louis raised his pistol into Yancy’s face. He thumbed the hammer back.
“My God,” said the girl. She had come to the counter. We looked each other in the face, and I unzipped my coat to show the grip of my pistol. I laid the duffel bag up on the counter.
As I watched the girl stack money over into the bag, it was hard for me to concentrate. Louis’s leather coat kept creaking, but the one time I looked back, neither Louis nor Yancy had moved. Yancy’s butt was still against the wall, his hands still in his pockets.
Yancy had graduated a year ahead of us, and sometime afterward we all started seeing him around Silas in his police outfit. Everybody used to joke about it. But I never did think it was that funny. I mean, nobody could deny that Yancy Purvis was a retard, and here they were letting him walk around Silas, and then Shardale too I guess, with a loaded gun and the right to arrest people. They must let anybody do it. Though I’ll confess, I couldn’t do it. Because when you think about it, if a guy’s going to step up and claim a spot as the law, he better know down deep that the good of society and what-have-you is an absolutely worthwhile thing. Or at least better be pretty damn hopeful about it.