by Richard Ford
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.
Chapter 15
What 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.
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 potent
ially 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.
Chapter 16
The 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.