by Richard Ford
Bishop came around to the driver’s side of the police car. The older, bulky policeman got into the passenger’s side. My mother’s face was there in the rear side window. She was speaking angrily—it looked like—to our father on the seat beside her. She didn’t see me. The police car clanked down into gear and pulled off slowly toward the corner of the park. I stood on the front porch and watched it all take place. Let it take place. Let my parents be arrested and driven off as if it was all right with me. Sun was shining in separate streams through the elm leaves. Air was heavy and warm. Faint diesel aroma drifted from the freight yards. Out on Central, the police siren whooped once, the motor revved and sped up. Other cars in the street pulled out of the way. Then I went back inside rather than stand and watch and be a spectacle to our neighbors, who I didn’t know. I couldn’t really think what else to do. I couldn’t just stand there. Then that part of this was at an end.
Chapter 31
You’d think that to watch your parents be handcuffed, called bank robbers to their faces and driven away to jail, and for you to be left behind might make you lose your mind. It might make you run the rooms of your house in a frenzy and wail and abandon yourself to despair, and for nothing to be right again. And for someone that might be true. But you don’t know how you’ll act in such a situation until it happens. I can tell you most of that is not what took place, though, of course, life was changed forever.
When I came back in the house, Berner had gone in her room and shut the door. I stood alone in the middle of the living room and looked around, my heart beating fast and my feet full of bees. I surveyed the pictures on the wall—the ones that had come with the house and our few. The picture of President Roosevelt and my father’s discharge. There was my pillowcase with my belongings; my mother’s suitcase; Berner’s alligator overnight bag. I let my gaze inventory my mother’s small shelf of books, the Niagara Falls jigsaw on the card table, the scratched piano and the few pieces of Montgomery Ward furniture we’d brought to Great Falls when I was eleven. None of it amounted to anything. The stained Persian carpet on the floor. The television. My father’s record player. The wallpaper with its repeated pattern of a sailing vessel. The stained ceiling with the fruity light fixture and the medallion my father admired. I was in charge of it—for the moment, at least. I needed to assess things properly. Be calm and orderly.
I actually didn’t think of our parents at that moment—on their way across the river to jail. I didn’t wonder about the bank they’d supposedly robbed. On the one hand, it didn’t seem possible they hadn’t robbed one, since they’d been arrested for it and hadn’t said they were innocent. I lacked a developed idea about bank robbery and people who did it. Bonnie and Clyde didn’t seem like our parents. The Rosenbergs, who I knew about, were entirely different. Truly, when I thought about our parents in those first hours, it wasn’t about whether they’d robbed a bank or hadn’t; it was more that they’d gone behind a wall, or a boundary, and Berner and I were left on the other side. I wanted them to come back. Their life was still our real life, the big life. We still lived in between them. But they would have to come back across the wall for life to go on. For some reason, it seemed doubtful that they would. Possibly I was still in shock.
What I almost immediately thought of was the money under the car seat. I felt a panic that someone—the police—was going to find it. The Agricultural National Bank, which was printed on the sleeve around the bills, meant nothing to me. The big policeman had mentioned North Dakota, but my father had denied going there. He’d bought the Chevrolet not long ago—so the money could’ve been there all along and had nothing to do with him or any bank robbery. Still, I made the connection. Possibly there were other packets in the car. These needed to be removed—although I had no idea where to put them in case the police came back and looked through the house, which I knew they did when something had been stolen.
I went out the kitchen door and across the yard. I crawled in the warm back seat of the Bel Air, which wasn’t locked, and delved down between the cushions until I felt the packet, cool and tightly wrapped. I ran my hand all around up to the elbow, feeling the bolts and the molding of the chassis and dust and grime. I found an unopened package of clove gum and a button, and an empty envelope from a St. Patrick’s hospital—all of which I left there. I didn’t find another money packet there or under the front seat or in the glove box, and decided there weren’t any. I stuffed the one I found into my pants’ front the way I did before and crawled out and hurried back across the yard to the house, where I hoped the police wouldn’t be waiting. Once inside, I put the bills (I didn’t think of counting them, though the top one was a twenty) under the silverware tray in the kitchen drawer—which made the tray sit too high for the drawer to close. Though after I’d done that I took the packet out and tore off the wrapper and took the wrapper to the toilet and flushed it down. That was the correct thing to do. My parents would think it was a wise idea. I returned the packet to the drawer, made two stacks of the bills and put them side by side, which let the drawer close in a way no one would notice.
After that I simply went back in my room. (There was no noise from Berner’s room, and I didn’t want to talk to her.) I closed my door and pulled the shade. I turned off the overhead light and lay down with my clothes on—the way I’d done the day before. I lay still and watched my chest rise and fall, felt my heart beat inside it, observed my breathing and tried to regulate it by taking deep inhalations. That was how our mother had told me it was possible to go to sleep if you woke up at night with a teeming brain, which she said she often did. If I went to sleep, I believed it was possible that when I woke up, all these events would be over with. Or it might’ve been a dream, and I would wake up on the train to Seattle, and be with Berner and my mother headed to a new life where there would be another school and I’d know people. It was twelve thirty, noon. My Baby Ben was ten minutes slow. The Lutherans’ bell was ringing again. The dog a street away began howling. Outside was bright sunshine, but in my room was shadows and cool. Birds were singing. Somewhere I heard something dripping, dripping. As expected, I had no trouble going to sleep. I slept for a long time.
Chapter 32
A voice was alive in the house when I woke up. I assumed it was the police—talking to Berner, beginning to search for the money. My heart had quieted. But it immediately began pounding. The kitchen drawer would be the first place to look.
I opened my bedroom door abruptly, intending to startle whoever was there, possibly make them run away. But it was Berner, in the hallway speaking into the telephone receiver, standing by the little receptacle outside our parents’ bedroom. She was wearing her pajamas with blue elephants. She was barefoot, looping then unlooping the phone cord around her thumb, pushing a finger into her thick hair and smiling at something she was hearing. Her voice was deeper. She’d put on makeup again and lipstick. “Oh, yes,” she was saying. “I don’t know. That’s a good idea.” Her voice sounded like my mother’s. I didn’t know who she was talking to, but I assumed it was Rudy Patterson. He was the only person I knew she knew, and she had told me what they did.
I was relieved it wasn’t the police. I had a strong feeling, however, they’d soon be back. The older detective had said so. I went to the front window and looked out. Our street and the park were empty in the dappled sunlight. The Lutheran church was locked up. Shade fell across our lawn in a pretty way. In the park, the fat young deaf boy from up the street who I’d seen before was throwing a stick for a black Labrador dog. It ran, picked up the stick, then brought it back and dropped it at the boy’s feet. He petted the dog’s head and said something to it. No police cars were there. Occasionally the boy would turn almost secretly and look at our house.
I walked to the kitchen window and looked out to where our father’s car was. But it was gone. The space it had occupied beside the garage was like a box of air the Chevrolet had been in a moment before, then vanished from. I instantly opened the silverware drawer
and expected to find nothing. But there were the two stacks of twenties under the plastic tray, which let me know I wasn’t dreaming and these goings-on were really happening.
I picked up the pieces of the broken dish my mother had dropped earlier and put them in the trash under the sink. They were all large pieces and didn’t require a broom. In a little while Berner came in the kitchen. She seemed—in her elephant pajamas—unfazed, as if being in the house this way was better, and she’d been waiting for this time and intended to make the most of it.
“They pulled his car away. A big wrecker truck came,” she said and looked out the front window. “Nice big ole doggy.” She watched the boy throwing his stick in the park. I wanted to move the money. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. “I don’t think anybody’s coming,” Berner said. She scratched her behind below her pajama-bottom waist, while she stared out at the boy with his dog. Her hair was bushy and disheveled from sleeping on it. “That means we can do whatever we want to.”
“Why?” I said.
Her lips made a mean smile, and she squinted at me and breathed out the way she did when she was acting superior. “I’ll do whatever I want,” she said. “Whatever you do will be what you want.” She pointed her finger at her ear and made a circle, then pointed it at me. “You’re loony,” she said. She often said that.
“What’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” She opened the refrigerator door, looked inside and closed it back. “It won’t be nothing. I’ve done nothing enough. Rudy wants to get married.”
“You can’t,” I said. I knew you couldn’t do that. We were fifteen. She’d already told me she didn’t want to get married. She’d said it yesterday.
“Some places they’ll let you. We’ll go to Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s better than here. Though he’s not in the church now.”
I was disgusted to hear this. It made everything about me and everything I thought feel flimsy. Standing in our kitchen in her pajamas, talking about getting married to Rudy, she cast a shadow on me and whatever I thought—as if my fate had to be like hers, and you could tear my plans apart like wet tissue and watch them disappear.
Only, I didn’t feel that way about myself and my plans. I could feel my own outline now. I would be myself no matter what else happened. My heart went calm then, which I thought was a positive sign. If I’d really felt all was lost and my life was over because I was tied to my sister, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Except I’d have had very little chance of going on from that moment.
“I won’t be getting married right off the bat,” Berner said. She turned and peered out the window again. Suddenly she whipped around with a big distorted smile. “Mother told me I have to take care of you.” Tears all at once sprang from her eyes. It’s possible I was starting to cry, too. We both had reasons to. But she cut hers off. “I hate their goddamn guts,” she said.
“You don’t have to run away,” I said. It was an awful feeling we had.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I . . .” I wanted to put my arms around her. It seemed like the most natural thing to do if I was going to be in control of everything. The telephone started ringing in the hall—loud, jangling miserable rings that destroyed the quiet in the house. And that’s how the moment passed—Berner and me almost holding on to each other, the phone ringing, and nothing else taking notice of us.
Chapter 33
What was left of Sunday is a part that’s not very clear. I remember everything feeling free inside the house and the house feeling comfortable with just the two of us in it. We ate some food out of the refrigerator—cold spaghetti and an apple. We ate looking out the front window at the park in the late afternoon shade. Cars drove by. One or two slowed and people inside leaned into the windows and looked at Berner and me standing there. One person waved and we both waved back. I didn’t understand what anybody could possibly know about us. It was forward thinking of our mother to discourage us from assimilating, since if anybody—someone from the chess club—had come to gawk at us, I’d have been humiliated. And worse, because I hadn’t done anything personally to feel humiliated about except have parents.
Before it got dark, Berner and I took a walk around the block, against our mother’s instruction that we not leave the house. We did it because we could. No one noticed us. All the neighbors’ houses were silent and shut up looking on Sunday afternoon. The neighborhood seemed nicer than I’d always thought it was.
We came back and sat on the front steps and watched the sky turn purple and the moon come up and a few lights prickle on in our neighbors’ windows. I noticed a paper kite that had been caught high up in the tree limbs in the park. I wondered how you’d get it down. We expected any moment for a car to drive up and strangers to tell us we had to go with them someplace. But no one came.
We didn’t talk much about our parents. We both assumed, as we sat on the steps watching bats flit around the darkening trees in front of the humped moon, and pale stars showed up in the eastern sky, that they’d done what they were accused of doing. It had been too dramatic not to be true. They had gone away overnight—which they’d never done before. The pistol had disappeared. There was the money, and the Indians calling us and driving by. I may even have briefly wanted it to be true—whether I could’ve said so or not—as if by robbing a bank our father had supplied himself with something he’d been lacking. What it meant about our mother was a more difficult question. It could also be true that Berner and I, for that afternoon, may have lost the part of our minds that makes you fully aware of what’s happening to you when it’s happening. Why else would we have become calm, and taken a walk? Why else would I have thought my father was more substantial because he’d robbed a bank and broken our lives apart? It doesn’t make much sense. Neither one of us thought to ask why had they robbed a bank, why had that ever seemed like a good idea. To us, it had just become a fact of life.
When we finally went in, it was full dark. Mosquitoes were in the air. Moths fluttered at the windows, and the cicadas were humming. Sunday night traffic on Central had all but stopped. We locked the doors and pulled the curtains and turned off the porch light. No matter what Berner thought, I believed someone would come and get us—the police or the juvenile officials, and that the police would search the house. We decided we’d let no one in—as if we were the man and the wife who lived there.
I went to the kitchen and got the money and told Berner where it’d come from. I didn’t know if she’d seen it the day before, but she said she hadn’t. She said she thought it was money our parents had stolen and we should hide it or else put it down the toilet. We counted it out at the dining room table and it was five hundred dollars. Berner then changed her mind and said we should divide it and each decide what to do with our half. We’d be accused anyway, because we had it, so we should keep it. She said there might even be more hidden in the house, and we should find it before the police came. We went in our parents’ bedroom and looked in our mother’s purse, inside their drawers and under their mattresses, in their clothes closet, inside their shoes, and up on the closet shelves where there were older shoes and sweaters and my father’s Air Force hat. We found no more packets of money, though our mother had thirty dollars folded in her change purse. We also found what she had called her “Jewish book,” which I’d seen but didn’t know anything about. It was small and had what she’d said was Hebrew writing in it and was in her bottom dresser drawer with some baby pictures of us and a View-Master with a Taj Mahal card and her eyeglass prescriptions and some artists’ pencils and her poems and her journal, which we still wouldn’t have dared to read. The book had a name I couldn’t pronounce when she’d said it and began with an “H.” I’d never asked more about it. It occurred to me there was no place in a house a person could hide anything where no one would find it, and that the police were professional at finding things. Our house had no cellar, and again I was unwilling to go in the attic on account of it being hot and the home of snakes an
d hornets. We couldn’t guess where more money was, and we eventually stopped looking.
In our father’s monogrammed “P” leather jewelry case, however—which smelled like him—I found his high school ring, bulky and gold with a square blue stone and engraved with a tiny “D” for Demopolis, and two tiny rearing horses on each side, for the Mustangs. He’d said Demopolis meant “where the people lived” in Greek, and he liked it because it signified everyone there was equal. I put the ring on—it only fit my thumb—and decided I’d wear it, since now I wasn’t likely to have one of my own. His gold captain’s bars were in there and his wristwatch, and his blue-and-white Parsons name tag, and his metal dog tags and a paper box containing his war ribbons. Farther back in the closet was his heavy Air Force uniform, cleaned and pressed and ready to put on, though without the ribbons and bars. I put the jacket on. It was much too large for me and too hot to wear in the house. I’d had it on other times, and it was important feeling and I liked it. No money was in the pockets. When our father had put it on in the mornings and left the house for the base, he’d always been in a good humor. That had only been a few months ago. That time was gone now, no matter how not long ago it was.
Berner took out a pair of our mother’s dark wool trousers she only wore in the winter, and held these up for display in front of the door mirror as if they were funny. They were too small for her to put on, though she tried. So she found a pair of flat black cloth shoes our mother had sent away for and squeezed her large bony foot inside and clopped around their bedroom with them half on, heels slapping, saying our mother lacked a sense of style, which wasn’t true. She had a style of her own. We must’ve known our parents wouldn’t be back. We wouldn’t have put on their clothes and laughed and imitated them if life had a chance to be normal again.