Dana wasn’t afraid to just tell the officer the truth. After all, she hadn’t broken any laws, that he knew of.
“Look, I wanted to see a body. I wanted to know what it would be like.” She thought of that turkey in Elijah strolling through the woods one minute and still the next.
The officer said she could show herself out.
5.
At first everything goes perfectly at the Farmers & Mechanics Bank. They are all in their gorilla masks. Cora is pointing her gun at the tellers. Dana is aiming hers at the handful of customers who had the misfortune of being in the bank. They are crossed-legged on the floor; they have been ordered to sit on their hands, like elementary schoolers who can’t stop hitting each other. Dana tries to ignore the little girl with braided hair. Pinky is guarding the door. Jackie, the getaway driver, is idling around the corner. Dana watches one teller load bricks of money into a bag. He has red hair and a mustache. The other teller is a woman. She’s used so much hair spray, her hair doesn’t budge when she whips her head left then right. Her lips are slick with pink, her lashes clumped with mascara. There’s no sign of the fat, sluggish tellers Pinky described, but it looks like these two will do just fine.
It’s the woman who fucks everything up. They see her hand slide under the counter and know she’s going for the alarm. Cora shouts at her—Hands in the air—but the woman doesn’t listen. Pinky is pacing by the door and pawing his rubber face. Dana takes small, quick breaths behind her gorilla mask. Be cool, she whispers, but it sounds artificial and weak. Stronger words are needed. She just doesn’t know what they are.
The gunshot stops everyone. The mustached teller stops putting money in the bag. Pinky stops pacing. The customers stop squirming. The female teller is clutching her left eye. Blood seeps between her fingers. Cora’s gun is still raised. It takes Dana more time than it should to understand that one of the Gorillas has just shot a bank teller in the face.
Her hands are numb. She concentrates on not dropping her gun. She thinks she’s going to suffocate behind the mask.
“Give us our money.” Now Cora is aiming at the other teller. His shirtsleeves are drenched in sweat. He goes back to heaving cash into the bag.
A woman in cowboy boots raises her hand. Her mouth is open, but she’s not saying anything. She’s pointing at something by the door. Dana turns and there’s Pinky, slumped against the wall. He’s kneading his gorilla mask in his hands. The customers and the tellers and the security cameras are all taking in his face. They are memorizing it. They are branding it onto their brains like Dana did with the interior of that bank in Jackson City.
“He is in such deep shit.” Cora is waving her gun. She swivels toward Dana. “Can’t you do something?”
But Dana can’t. If she were a Go-Go Girl, then maybe she could, but she is just herself. The female teller is hunched over the counter and whimpering. She sounds like the wild dog Dana’s father once had to shoot in Elijah. He kept coming onto their property, frothy and snarling, but once he had a bullet in him, he was docile as a lamb. Blood is still squirting through her fingers, as though her hand is a dam that’s about to give. She’s blinded at best. In the distance, Dana hears a siren. She looks at Cora and her cousin nods. They run for the exit. She pauses only to yank Pinky up by his shirt collar. He drops his gorilla mask on the sidewalk, but right then it doesn’t matter. All that matters is diving into the waiting Impala. Of course Jackie wants to know what happened and where’s the money and why isn’t Pinky wearing his mask. Cora tells her to shut up and drive. They blast out of Galesburg. It’s nearly dusk. The sun looks like it’s setting the sky on fire.
They drive through the night. Pinky is up front, next to Jackie. Dana and Cora are in the back. The window is cracked and Jackie is chain-smoking. They are heading to a little town called Wapello. They think it will be a good place to lie low, but soon Pinky’s face will be all over the news and there will be no lying low from that.
“He can’t stay with us anymore,” Cora hisses in the backseat.
Dana just shakes her head. He could get plastic surgery, she thinks. A crazy idea. She gazes at her brother’s profile. They are on a dark, straight highway. A little slicing, a little rearranging. She thinks of how handsome he could be.
On the radio, they hear that one of the Go-Go Girls has been shot in the stomach. She fell behind during a getaway. The officer who shot her said that he meant to hit her shoulder. Turns out that she wasn’t an acrobat or Romanian. Just a girl from Minnesota.
“This is the problem with being famous,” Dana announces to the car. “It makes everyone want to kill you.”
No one says anything. Not even Cora. Dana leans her head against the window. As they’re passing signs for Kirkwood, she thinks of the girl at the morgue and her parents in Chicago. She wonders if the cop ever tells her story, about the woman who conned him into checking out a dead body. If anyone ever tells her story.
Tornadoes are still in the forecast. A few times Dana thinks she sees a big black funnel moving toward them in the night. She thinks she hears that locomotive sound and feels the ground shake. She imagines being swept away. But there is nothing coming for them. Not yet. There is only this highway and this car and this darkness. She leans forward and squeezes her brother’s elbow. He doesn’t move, doesn’t look at her. The remaining Gorilla masks are piled in his lap. He knows he’s in a world of trouble.
They stop for gas and Dana makes Jackie hand her the car keys. When she says she wants to be sure no one gets left behind, Cora gives her a look. Pinky needs to use the bathroom. Dana stands outside and jingles the keys. She can see her parents hearing about Pinky on the radio. She can see them turning up the volume and leaning in close. Maybe they are being kept company by a robot made of soup cans and chicken wire, or maybe they are alone. Through the bathroom door, she hears the toilet flush. Her brother takes his time washing his hands.
When they’re all back in the car, Cora passes her a note written on a paper napkin. We are leaving him at the next fucking gas station! it says in jagged black letters. Dana crumples the note and drops it on the floor. She slumps back and something crunches under her sneaker. She peers between her knees. It’s the robot. Pinky got one of the eyes glued back on. If she tilts her head the right away, the metal gleams and she can tell herself it’s their treasure, their loot. She thinks about rescuing the robot from the floor and giving it to her brother. She thinks about doing him that kindness. Instead she nudges the robot under the driver’s seat and then feels sad about it. Poor Donald. She has to remind herself that robots don’t have feelings. All these little choices that push her closer to something she’s not sure she wants.
They pass a billboard with the slogan WANT A BETTER WORLD? It’s too dark for Dana to see what’s being advertised, but she guesses it’s something religious. Of course she wants a better world. Who wouldn’t want that? A world where everyone was like Pinky, pure and soft and full of dreams. Or she could just do things differently when it came to those small choices. She could give her brother the robot. She could throw her gun in a river. These could be her lessons. It’s right there for her, that better world. She barely has to go looking.
Dana knows this, just as she knows that this is not the day she will find it.
ACROBAT
The day my husband left me, I followed a trio of acrobats around the city of Paris. The whole time my husband had been talking — telling me, presumably, why he was leaving — I was watching these acrobats do backflips and handstands in synchrony, an open violin case at their feet. They wore black masks over their eyes and white face paint. The little gold bells that hung from the sleeves of their red silk jumpsuits jingled like wind chimes. My husband and I were in the Jardin des Tuileries, sitting on a bench underneath a tree. We had come to Paris for the weekend, to revive our marriage. It was what the books and the couples counselor had recommended. The day he left was our last day there. We were, in fact, supposed to fly home that evening. We’d risen early to go to the Louvre and had gotten into a fight because he didn’t want to wait in line to see the Mona Lisa.