Whereupon the stooped old man straightened, magically broadened, and waved a hand across his face very much as she herself had, in the road, to erase her thoughts. Only he erased his character. He removed his glasses and from beneath his robe drew a snub-nosed pistol, which he pointed straight at Miss DeWitt’s forehead.
“Righto,” he said.
There was no other perceptible signal, but all of a sudden another male customer held a gun out as well, first at the chin of a florid redheaded woman teller and then at the broad chest of the other teller, a young dark-haired bristling man. This young former baseball star’s heart filled immediately, then swelled. He wanted to be a hero, but was struggling with the how of it. Foolish! Foolish! Miss DeWitt wanted to tell him. But it was clear from the beginning that he had just the right amount of stubborn stuff in him to be killed. Which he was. When he fell down dead behind his cage of iron, mouth open to catch the punch line of a joke, the money was harder to get. The red-haired woman was handed a canvas bag, called upon to open his drawer, and instructed not to trip the alarm. When she did anyway, the eighteen customers, including Agnes, were all instructed to gather in one corner behind the velvet rope. Exactly, Miss DeWitt thought, like a flock of blank-eyed sheep. There was a shout outside. It was the sheriff, Slow Johnny Mercier, who really was slow and clumsy, and his deputy with him, pistols drawn. They stood just outside the door yelling for the robbers to come out.
It was clear, then, to Miss DeWitt and probably to the others that their sheriff was an amateur and that the professional involved was inside the bank. For the Actor continued gesturing to the red-haired teller to add to the bills, add more and add more. Then, in his dull black robe with its give-away wrinkles, creases that no self-respecting Catholic lay or nun housekeeper would have allowed him to don, and his ridiculous brown Episcopalian shoes, he sprang to the bunched people swift and graceful as a wolf, chose from just behind the rope Miss DeWitt.
He chose her as though choosing a dancing partner. He did everything but bow — walked up to her and took her hand with a polite but peremptory firmness, so that it would not have been out of character with his manner for the two of them to step out onto the dance floor and begin a slow waltz. And it was as though they were engaged in some sort of dance as they walked out the door. Only she was held the wrong way. When she stumbled, perhaps purposely, not following his lead, he wrenched her closer. As he pulled her against the door of the car he’d entered, as she balanced on the running board, he called out, “Come after me and I will blow her head off, Mister Sheriff.”
Then the ragged bum who had sat with arms neatly crossed at the side of the street accelerated the car with a roar. Slow Johnny the sheriff, solid in his tracks, raised his pistol, sighted carefully along the barrel, pulled the trigger, and shot Miss DeWitt. She took the bullet in the hip. So much was happening all at once — more shots fired, mad swerving to avoid an ice truck, two children diving into the roots of a lilac bush, sheer speed — that she felt the impact as a blow that rang her bones, but did not pain her, until the car hit a great freak of earth that nearly threw Miss DeWitt halfway into the open window on the driver’s side. Immediately, she was cast into an almost mystical state of agony. The heavens seemed to open. Black stars rang down. She heard the motor and then, later, more gunshots as from a great, muted distance. Thick strains of music looped through her mental hearing, all jumbled and spectacular. Held on the running board by an arm that seemed strung of pitiless wire, proceeding at a dreamlike pace down the smoothly tamped and rolled roadbeds that led out of town, in a state of clarity and focused keenness she told herself, I am being kidnapped. I have been shot.
As the auto jounced her along she began to lose certainty. In her pain she imagined herself back at the convent in her tiny closet of a room. She closed the door, crawled doglike into the wet bush of unconsciousness, lay huddled small and unknowing. From time to time, she experienced a moment of reprieve. She was capable of standing upright. Gravely, she surveyed the country she passed through and found in the faint spring clouds of green a raw sweetness. The robber’s arm gripped her waist. She gripped the luggage rack. Her hair, unpinned and flying backward, made a short banner in the wet, fresh wind.
The Actor took the old Patterson road, by which she knew he understood the lay of the land, and by which, too, she knew if he took the turnoff he would pass by one of Berndt’s fields, their fields, where Berndt was likely to be working. Her heart pounded in hope. But the driver dressed in rags did not turn and she then thought instantly in great relief that Berndt wouldn’t be put in danger now. Just as she did so, the car sped first past the hired man and then farther on, Berndt, on his big slow horse, plodding. He was dragging along a harrow to be repaired. She tried to hide herself when he came by, but she was still balanced on the running board. So it was, he saw her approach from down the road like a figurehead on the prow of a ship. She stood at grand attention, her one leg a flare of blood. He stopped. His face went slack with uncomprehending shock. She rushed by close enough for their hands to meet and then she was gone, swallowed into the distance.
BERNDT VOGEL
Berndt followed the car not because he saw fear in her eyes — there was none, only a dreamy concentration — but because he grasped the whole scenario. Unhitching the harrow, then turning on his horse, he had no precise notion of her danger or any thought of how to rescue her but acted on instinct and absurdity. He was not afraid for her. Having met her in the first place nearly naked within the smoky radiance of his own barn, he knew she would survive the ordeal. There was always a side to her he could not touch. He felt indeed that she was a woman created of impossibility.
Although he sent his horse along at a smart pace, the car was soon out of sight. He had to keep an eye on the road to know from the tire marks at each turnoff that they had, in fact, stayed on the main road. And they did, moving farther from him at every moment. He moved, following them, wondering in useless desperation the location of Slow Johnny. On the chase?
No, not quite. The sheriff and the deputy, in trying to commandeer a car, met resistance not so much from the owner’s lack of agreement about the need for it, but because Slow Johnny was a notoriously poor driver. Beyond that, the two or three citizens whom he approached thought he would do more harm than good chasing down the Actor and probably get Miss DeWitt completely killed, if not himself, the deputy, and any bystander in a stone’s throw radius.
Berndt was far ahead, then, of any other form of help. As he traveled along behind the Actor’s car, he put his mind to the subject. By the process of recalling certain news items about local robberies, he had pretty well figured out what was happening. His equilibrium failed, and he experienced a wave of terror for Agnes so intense that he whipped the poor horse to a momentary froth. As soon as the Percheron rocked into a huge gallop, Berndt realized that he would kill his horse if he continued. Speed now was useless, and besides, with each mile covered he gained a distinct advantage. The car would eventually run out of gas. The horse, if Berndt was careful to conserve its energy, would last. And then, too, Berndt had the advantage of terrible road conditions. Since it was spring, it would be surprising if any car could get through the big washout Berndt knew of six miles up the road.