by Dan Deweese
“Friday evening?” Grant said.
I found myself completely unable to recall whether I had plans, or even which day of the week Friday was, so I said it sounded fine. Grant nodded happily and thanked me twice for my service, the second thanks a subtle suggestion that I pass him the deposit receipt the printer had disgorged and which I held stupidly in my hand. I handed him the slip of paper, he and Gina walked out the door, and I helped the next customer. My mind spun. I helped perhaps twenty minutes’ worth of customers without being at all conscious of what I was doing, so absorbed was I by thoughts of Gina as I had known her in the past and of Gina as she had walked into the bank that day, and how she had changed, and how I had changed. I speculated on Grant and who he might be, and on what kinds of activities he and Gina could possibly pursue together, and I thought of Bristol’s, and of movie stars and scotch, and Grant and Gina, and of many things. And then I was pistol-whipped and robbed of roughly two thousand dollars.
My memory of the rest of that day is hazy—the images I carry were constructed primarily from the reports of coworkers. I remember standing at my teller station musing on my encounter with Gina and Grant and, in all honesty, attempting to discern the odds of my ever having sex with Gina again. This involved mentally rehearsing conversations in which I convinced her we should indulge ourselves one more time. I wasn’t requesting that she break up with Grant—in my fantasy life I am always courteous—because the two of them seemed well matched, really. I was just talking about one more time, what did she think? And I was practicing this conversation not only between customers, but between each step of helping each customer, as in, Good afternoon, how can I help you? I’d just like to withdraw fifty dollars, but you’re out of withdrawal slips at the counter. I’m sorry about that, let me get you one, there you go, because you have to admit that it was pretty good, wasn’t it, I mean I think about it fairly often, I think we both enjoyed ourselves quite a bit. I’m not talking about getting back into the emotional depth of a full relationship, I’m just talking about finding out if that chemistry’s still there, and if it is, enjoying it one more time from a different perspective, right? There you go. Thank you. How did you want that? Could I get two twenties and a roll of quarters? It’s laundry day. You bet, and if you don’t ever want to see me again after that, I think that’s fine, I’d totally understand if you’re uncomfortable, and I might be, too, so maybe we’ll just have drinks this one time and then get together separately the one time for ourselves, and then we can go our separate ways. Thanks. You’re welcome.
And so forth.
I recall three details of that day’s final customer: eyes the pale blue of a frozen winter sky, dark stubble bristling from a pointed chin, and a black T-shirt featuring the image of a slobbering, monstrous creature beneath stylized gothic lettering that read “Mooncalf.” I was fairly familiar with popular music in those years, and at least vaguely aware of the goofy “heavy metal” music characterized by satanic prancing and the miming of animal cruelty, but I had never heard of this “Mooncalf.” So the mutant on the T-shirt’s front, in concert with the pale blue eyes and dark stubble of the shirt’s owner, served as the man’s distinguishing characteristics when he looked into my own eyes and, speaking slowly and quietly, told me to give him all the money in my drawer. The words that had been running through my head before he spoke were something on the order of, Now don’t you think this was a good idea, don’t you, don’t you?, so because the man’s directive was completely irregular to my experience of transaction-opening sentences and, strangely, slipped fairly unobtrusively into the imaginative situation I was absorbed in, it failed to register with me. My response was simply to look up from my computer screen, apologize, and ask if he could repeat himself. He looked into my eyes and said even more quietly, “I want all of the money in your drawer, right now. This is a robbery.”
That was when it finally stopped: the scene in my head, its soundtrack, and the autopilot consciousness that was completing transactions for me. I felt the muscles of my cheeks tighten as my vacuous work grin froze upon my face. What my coworkers told me happened next is that the man pulled out a pistol and, swinging it high in the air, brought it down on the crown of my head. I fell backward, the back of my head struck the floor—there was probably no pad at all beneath that thin carpet—and the world went out. The man leaped over the counter and, waving the gun in the general direction of the other employees, took the cash from my drawer, stuffed it into a canvas bag he pulled from the back of his pants, leaped back over the counter, and ran.
After he was gone, one of my coworkers attempted to rouse me. She told me she felt my hair was damp, and then noticed the scarlet corona of blood-soaked carpet expanding from beneath my skull. When I regained consciousness a few minutes before the police and medical personnel arrived, it was only in order to turn my head to the side and vomit.
CATHERINE WAS THE FIRST to greet me when I entered the bank. Her diminutive stature and boyishly short hair lent her a pixie quality enhanced that day by the immaculately pressed beige pantsuit she wore as she crossed the lobby to where I stood just inside the door. “You don’t need to be here,” she said in a stage whisper.
“But I don’t need to be anywhere else,” I said. “So tell me what happened.”
“It was standard,” she said, as if disappointed. “A middle-aged white guy in a gray suit came in right after we opened. He passed a note to Amber that said he wanted twenties and larger, no devices, so she gave him what was in her drawer. Then he apparently told her he wanted the cash in her safe, too, which she didn’t even have to unlock, because she’d just come from the dispenser and was still putting her straps away.”
I was surprised to note a healthy number of freckles scattered across Catherine’s cheeks. She’d been working as a service manager in my branch for ten years, but that was the first I’d seen of freckles, and they further confirmed my belief that she was rarely more than a costume change away from Peter Pan. And had she really hidden her freckles beneath makeup every weekday for a decade? The thought was unsettling. “How much did he take?” I asked.
“A little over six thousand. Amber’s still shaky, but she’s toughing it out. Charlotte and Tina are thrilled, I think. They’re telling their versions right now, but neither of them even has a hair out of place from the thing.”
Across the branch, two uniformed police officers stood with Charlotte and Tina, the two other tellers who had been working that morning. The first officer listened as Tina gestured excitedly while Charlotte nodded in agreement. The second officer took notes on a small pad.
“Did you see it happen?” I asked.
“Not really,” Catherine said. “I was sorting the mail. I just saw there was a man at Amber’s window, and then he left and she started crying.”
“Where is she?”
“In your office.”
From the bank’s front door to my office was a walk across a vast, yellow-carpeted space. The building was a rectangular box the size of a gymnasium, constructed in the golden banking days of the 1960s, when the location supported a staff of more than thirty. The vaulted ceiling was twenty feet overhead, and leafy trees outside brushed massive plate-glass windows that lined the upper half of the main wall. In the old days, smokers lit up at their desks without a second thought, and half of the managers, all of whom were men, ate lunch at the steakhouse down the street, trying to keep their ties clean while they enjoyed red meat and martinis before returning for the abbreviated banking afternoon. Those days are mere legend now, of course—the scrivening of daily credits and debits has shifted to centralized processing locations where documents and figures are run twenty-four hours a day by employees who have no contact with the public. The staff I managed in that building numbered only eight, more than half of whom were college students working less than twenty hours a week, and who didn’t particularly care if their cash drawers balanced at the end of the day. If they lost their job at the bank, they could get a jo
b that paid just as much at any number of mall stores. And banker’s hours had disappeared years ago. Normal operating hours at my branch were nine to six Monday through Friday, and ten to three on Saturday. That the place was open at all on Saturdays struck me as absurd, an overt corporate strike against the sanctity of the weekend, but I never complained. Because to whom? These decisions are handed down from Valhalla.
When I stepped into my office, I found Amber seated on the cranberry-colored love seat against the wall. She straightened as if caught in some indiscretion. Her eyes were red and swollen, there were damp spots on the front of her navy blue company-issued polo shirt, and balled-up tissue lay next to her on the sofa. “I’m so, so sorry,” she said, fighting the return of tears.
“Don’t be,” I said. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head miserably. “I screwed up. My safe wasn’t locked. My straps shouldn’t have been out, and I didn’t hit the button. I didn’t even look at the guy who did it. A guy robbed me, but I have no idea what he looked like, so now I can’t even help the police.”
Amber was an undergraduate pursuing a degree in psychology, and was the best natural cash handler I had ever employed. I assume she was aware of this talent, because she began painting her nails bright red not long after starting as a teller. We had a number of male customers who came into the branch even for simple transactions, apparently hoping to stand before Amber and her mane of blond corkscrew curls as she counted out their cash. I had heard odd denomination requests from these men, too—they asked for sixty dollars in fives, or twenty in ones, or anything, I suspected, that might increase the number of bills and thereby the glamour, cousin perhaps to the allures of Vegas, in Amber’s fanning of the things across the counter. Once I even heard a customer, after Amber was done counting out his cash, say, “Can I touch the money now?”
I sat on the front edge of my desk. “Do you think you should have refused to give the guy the straps of hundreds from your safe?”
“No,” she said. “But they shouldn’t have been out.”
“If your safe had been locked and he had asked you to open it and give him everything in it, should you have refused?”
“No. You’re not supposed to get in a conversation with them.”
“When he passed the note across the counter, should you have passed it back and told him he wasn’t allowed to rob you, but you wouldn’t be able to explain why, because you’re not supposed to get in a conversation with him?”
“Are you making a joke?” she said angrily.
“No,” I said. “I’m just reminding you that a teller’s job is to give a robber whatever he wants so that he leaves the bank as quickly as possible. And it sounds like your guy couldn’t have been here much more than a minute.”
“But he got a lot.”
“No.”
“I’m not supposed to have more than two thousand out.”
“The bank doesn’t care about six thousand dollars,” I said. “The bank spills more than six thousand dollars in the streets every day.”
She looked suspiciously at me. “That’s not really true,” she said. “But fine. I still think I’m just going to try and forget the whole thing. I’m going to pretend it never happened.”
“Do you think you can do that?” I asked, surprised.
“Repression can be a useful coping mechanism,” she said, warming to a topic in her area of study. “I’ll have to tell my mom, though. I won’t be able to keep it from her.”
“Won’t she tell other people?”
“Yeah,” she said, annoyed. “She’ll probably tell my sisters right away, because my mom thinks everyone needs to know everything about everybody else. And I’m going out with my three best friends tonight, and I’ll probably want to tell them, I guess.”
“And the problem with talking about it in public is that other people might hear it, too,” I said.
“Do I have to keep it a secret?” she said, alarmed. “It’s not like some security deal or something, is it?”
“I just mean if you’re trying to repress it.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “I have the order backwards. People repress first, then acknowledge later. I would have to not tell anybody about it right now, and then later remember it or whatever. I know this stuff, I’m just a little rattled right now is all. I’m kind of rambling. Look at my hand.” She held it up so I could see she was still shaking. She didn’t know what she was saying, and probably wouldn’t remember any of it. She was actually smiling at the sight of her trembling hand, amazed by it.
“I think you should call your mom,” I said. “You can use the phone right here.”
“Is that okay?”
“Of course,” I said.
I left the office as Amber dialed, and made sure to close the door behind me.
“THE POLICE want to talk to you,” Catherine said. She had headed for me as soon as she saw me emerge from my office, and executed the little pirouette necessary to turn and fall in step with me as I continued across the branch.
“I’m surprised they know I’m here,” I said. “They haven’t so much as looked at me.”
“Well you didn’t exactly introduce yourself.” A lapel pin she was wearing caught the light—it was a little golden bouquet no larger than a thumbnail, in which a few tiny gemstones sparkled in place of flowers. Catherine was a lover of nature, and kept little items of sylvan inspiration about her at all times. As we passed her desk, a photo of curled clouds floating across her computer screen dissolved into the image of a giant redwood, and I carefully avoided entanglement in a passel of willow branches stretching from the ceramic vase on her desk’s corner. “I’ve already told them your daughter’s getting married today and you can only stay a few minutes,” she said.
“Did you tell them it’s at six, or are they under the impression it’s any minute?”
“I didn’t tell them when. I just said ‘today.’”
“Good. But you don’t have to sacrifice yourself, either. Don’t you have your own plans between now and then? Hiking, or communing with nature in some other way?” Catherine was invited to the wedding, of course, and knew many of the wedding plans and details because she had asked me about them over the months of planning, but I wanted to be clear that she didn’t owe me anything beyond her time at the bank.
“Please,” she said. “My day isn’t even a concern.”
As we continued across the lobby, I noticed a white-haired and slightly stooped older man standing before Amber’s teller station. He wore a powder blue oxford tucked into navy blue slacks, and held in the palm of his left hand a flat tin tray, while in his right he wielded a black-bristled brush. The man lowered his brush to the tray, made a few deft back-and-forth swipes with it, and then raised it again so that he could address the countertop with painterly consideration. “Who is that?” I said.
“Fingerprints, I assume,” Catherine said.
The uniformed officers headed toward us then. The badge of the first one read “Martinez,” and the gray mixed within his closely cropped dark hair marked him as the senior member of the pair. His stocky build was furthered by the bulk of his uniform, and especially by the bulletproof vest he wore, which gave him the physique of a refrigerator box. He smiled widely and shook my hand with a formidable grip. “I know you’ve got bigger fish to fry today,” he said. “I have a daughter myself, and I’ve married her off twice now, actually. And we should be happy here, since it looks like everyone’s fine. I’ve seen plenty of robberies, and it’s hard to find one as quick and clean as this one.”
“We’ll need to get a statement from you,” the second officer told me, frowning down at a small notepad in his palm. He was taller, thinner, and younger than his partner, with ginger hair, red cheeks, and a badge that read “O’Brien.”
“Statement about what?” Martinez said. “He wasn’t present, so there’s nothing for him to state. Miss L’Esprit has been very helpful.” He nodded
toward Catherine, and she ducked her head with a little dash of Gallic pride upon hearing her last name correctly pronounced to rhyme with unfree. “Everyone’s statements agree, and we’ve got the description from your teller,” Martinez continued. “Middle-aged men in suits don’t rob banks on the spur of the moment, so we’re probably dealing with a professional, which is good. Amateurs get nervous and hurt people, but pros are just passing through.”
O’Brien peered at his notepad. “Too bad he took his note with him. It would be fun to see it. This is a robery. Hah. I’m impressed your teller noticed the mistake in such a stressful moment.”
Martinez frowned, though it was unclear whether it was the misspelling or O’Brien’s delight in it that he disliked. “She didn’t know it was a stressful moment until she’d already read the note, so you’ve got the cart before the horse there,” he said. “No offense to the young lady.”
“Analyzing the handwriting would have been nice, though,” O’Brien said.
“So we could know if the guy was romantic or creative?” Martinez said. “Come on, we’re just lucky his spelling wasn’t worse, or she might not have understood the guy’s intentions at all. I’ve seen that in other situations, and it can spin the whole incident in a bad direction.”
The officers argued over whether spelling errors revealed anything significant about a robber, O’Brien claiming yes, Martinez, no. Some preexisting rift between them had clearly translated itself into aggressive conversational cross-checking, and though I could have shared my own robbery experience, it would only have been grist for the mill between them. There was something off-putting about the fact that they felt they were experts on an experience they had never actually had. I understood police officers investigated robberies, and had no doubt Officer Martinez had probably investigated hundreds of them. But cops themselves are not robbed, and I very much doubted whether either of these men had ever been held up off duty, either. And because I had been robbed before, I couldn’t help but feel they were stepping on my toes when it came to theorizing about bank robbers. One thing I have noticed, however—and I will try to say this with as little self-pity as possible—is that no one particularly cares about the thoughts of bank managers. We are numbers men, people feel, and small-numbers men, at that. But I wished these cops would just, for the love of God, shut up. I maintained a neutral expression and said nothing, though, and it wasn’t until Martinez said he’d rather read a man by his face than by his spelling that Catherine finally stopped their inanities by saying, “Oh! But we can. The photos should be e-mailed by now.”