Shoot The Moon (and more)

by Max Allan Collins

  I considered going over and telling the patrolmen what was happening inside that bank, but how could I? I was in this up to here. I was an accessory to a bank robbery, and still would be, even if I helped stop it mid-stream.

  And suppose I did tell the patrolmen: there was liable to be shooting that way, too.

  See what I mean about the options at hand? Did you ever see such a bunch of lousy damn options in your life?

  Then it occurred to me that if I was not going to leave, if I was not going to turn my back on the bank and walk away, I at least had to warn Elam and Hopp. I had to tell them not to come out of there with that bag of money slung casually over their shoulders.

  So, with what I hoped was a nonchalant air, I walked back over and tried the door to the bank.

  Locked.

  Well. That was no surprise.

  I knocked. Softly. Not wanting to unduly disturb the patrolmen sitting drowsily in their vehicle nearby.

  No answer.

  That was no surprise, either.

  I kept at it. I knocked a bit louder. Just a bit.

  And finally Elam’s voice, in a friendly tone, said, “I’m sorry, we’re closed this morning.”

  “It’s me,” I said.

  Elam cracked the door open.

  “Take a look out front,” I whispered.

  Elam looked. There was an almost imperceptible tightening around his eyes, but that was all. He did not blow. He was too professional for that, I guess.

  “All right, kid. Turn around and face the street. Fine. Now lean against the building there. Good. I’m going to leave this door cracked open just a shade so I can keep talking to you. I’m gonna have to keep it low, kid, can ya hear me okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cover your mouth with your hand when you talk. Like you was yawning or coughing or something.”

  I nodded.

  There was a pause, and he said, “I guess you know what we’re doing in here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks for sticking around.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “I know how you must feel, kid. When you get a chance, think of it from our point of view and maybe you’ll understand. For right now just hang loose a second and leave me think about this. Well. We obviously can’t come sashshaying out of here with a bag of money over our arm, can we? So okay. We wait it out a while. We wait and see if the Highway Patrol is staying around for something, or just making a short stop to kill some time. If things stay the same for longer than fifteen minutes, knock on the door again, and I’ll tell ya where we go from there. Got that, kid?”

  “Listen, I’m leaving. The key’ll be in the ignition. I’m going to walk out and join Wheat at that farm and get out of here. You can’t say I ran out on you, ’cause I came up and warned you.”

  “Kid. Stick around.”

  I heard the door close.

  Chapter 21

  And then the concession wagon rolled in. I was still standing on the sidewalk, just getting ready to get back in the Mustang and “stick around,” like Elam suggested, when this dinosaur of a camper came rumbling down the street. The camper was white, but it was garishly painted with red, yellow and blue lettering that said, “El Tacomobile.”

  “Gooooooood Eats, Hombres.”

  “Burritos, Enchiladas and Tacos” and “Gringo Food, Too!” There were also bad paintings of little plump Mexicans wearing extravagant sombreros, sleeping under palm trees.

  The Tacomobile pulled in two inches from the back bumper of the Mustang.

  My mouth dropped open, and not from craving a taco. I walked unsteadily around the Mustang (there was a space of half a foot between it and the Highway Patrol car, so I could just squeeze through) and took a look at the front of the concession wagon, or rather the side of it, the part facing the street. There was more garish Tacomobile lettering on the bottom half, and more plump Mexicans taking siestas under palm trees; but the upper half was unpainted, as if they hadn’t gotten around to that yet, but then a panel dropped to reveal screened windows behind which food was cooked and served up and sold. The woman inside was a tiny middle-aged Chinese lady. Why was a Chinese lady running a Tacomobile, you ask? How should I know? I was busy wondering what a Tacomobile was doing pulled in behind the stolen Mustang, on an otherwise deserted street in Wynning, Iowa.

  I was still wondering when the second concession wagon rolled in. It was much the same as the Tacomobile, only it

  “Sno Cones,” and “Lemonade,” with poorly painted depictions of each. I mean, you had to sort of study it a while before deciding which picture went with which caption. I think the same artist did them as the Mexicans.

  Along about then a band started to play.

  From off in the distance. But not terribly far away, like from maybe two blocks. The song the band was playing was “Going Out of My Head,” performed in the style of John Phillip Sousa.

  A marching band.

  But what were they doing?

  They were marching. And playing. They marched and played their way from the cafe two blocks down and ended up right there, in their stiff blue uniforms, all twenty-some of them, high school kids and a skinny young director with a sissy mustache, standing in front of the Wynning bank, the Highway Patrol car, the stolen Mustang, the Tacomobile and the cotton candy wagon. And me.

  When they stopped playing, I asked the Chinese lady in the Tacomobile what was happening here.

  She answered me in Chinese.

  Then the director dismissed the band from what apparently had been a rehearsal, and they loosened their hot little collars and scattered around the street, chattering, shouting, mostly swarming around the two concession wagons. I backed away in horror. Some of these creatures were girls, but in those sexless uniforms it was hard to tell if anybody was human or not. A good-looking majorette with blond hair and a skimpy sparkly uniform was over talking to the director, but otherwise I felt engulfed by faceless, sexless blue uniforms.

  “I told you to move your car,” somebody said, “and you wouldn’t listen.”

  It was the Highway Patrolman with the dazzling badge, teeth and forehead.

  “Well if you weren’t here for the day before,” he said, smiling that ugly smile you only find in people with no sense of humor, “you are now.”

  And he walked away.

  Across the street things were starting to happen.

  I noticed the tent I’d seen those teenage boys starting to pitch was pitched. Some people were in the park. Not many, maybe half a dozen, men and women both, wearing clothes too formal and hot for the day, walking around in circles and looking official, carrying clipboards, wearing square plastic name badges.

  I heard a scraping noise. Like an eight hundred pound man scraping a hundred pounds of fingernails across a four hundred pound blackboard. But it was only the two Highway Patrolmen, lugging this thing out into the street, hauling this huge saw-horse thing, the type you use to seal a street off with.

  They were using it to seal off the street.

  “Oh brother,” I said.

  I glanced down in the other direction, to see if the street was sealed off that way, too.

  It wasn’t. It wasn’t sealed off with a saw-horse thing. There was a bus, however, two blocks down, by the cafe, parked sideways in the street. The school bus the band came in, of course.

  And over between the garage and the park, cars were parked in the street. Not along the street. In it. Cars belonging, apparently, to those official looking people wandering around the park with clipboards and plastic badges.

  Right now one of those official-looking people, a male, was supervising while two of the teenage boys hung a banner over the entrance of the big tent.

  The banner said:

  WYNNING FOUNDER’S DAY — CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION

  There was only one thing I could think of to do. I bought some cotton candy.

  Chapter 22

  When I was sure the two Highway Patrolmen weren’t looking,
I knocked on the door to the bank, then leaned against the building, eating my cotton candy.

  I heard Elam’s voice say, “Things are gettin’ worse ain’t they, kid?”

  “Well better isn’t the word.”

  The cotton candy made an excellent cover for my talking to Elam. And it tasted pretty good, too. Trouble was I was wolfing it down. I was nervous.

  Elam was saying, “What is this, some kind of celebration?”

  “Founder’s Day. Centennial.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I can just make out the banner over on that damn tent. Ain’t this a problem, though.”

  “Elam.”

  “Yeah, kid?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Not just yet, kid.”

  “What’s stopping me?”

  “Just a second. I’ll call Hopp over and let you ask him that.”

  “Never mind. You make your point. What do you have in mind?”

  “We’re comin’ out. Like I said before, we can’t exactly come outa here with a bag of money over our shoulder. Not at a time like this. So I figure we’ll leave the money inside for now.”

  “Inside?”

  “Right here in the bank. Can you think of a safer place? I’ll get the key to the front door from the manager, and we’ll just keep the bank locked up, for now.”

  And before I could question the logic of that move, the door had eased shut again and I was alone with my cotton candy... and the high school band, concession stands, Highway Patrol... .

  A minute or so later Elam and Hopp strolled casually out of the bank, shutting the door (with its closed sign hanging in the window) behind them. Elam looked very cool. Hopp was a little wild-eyed, but probably not enough so to alert any innocent bystanders to anything unusual in his character. I had finished my cotton candy and didn’t know what to do with the paper cone the stuff had come wrapped around. I certainly didn’t want to throw it on the sidewalk, not with the cleanliness fetish this town had: getting busted for littering right now would’ve been less than ideal.

  Elam gestured over toward the park, at the benches in front of the small bandshell. The only people in the park were the official types, their teenage helpers, and marching band members still taking five. Elam said, “Let’s go over there and sit down a minute and relax.”

  That was a good idea. Relaxing was a terrific idea. I figured in a year maybe I would be able to relax again, but why not start trying now?

  We picked our way through the marching band members who were standing and chatting and eating tacos and things in the street and sat on the bench in the first row in front of the bandshell, which was close enough to the edge of the street for the trees that surrounded the park to provide shade. So it was relatively cool there, in the shade, on those benches. Comfortable. Birdies were singing. Pretty shafts of sunlight came peeking through the shimmering green leaves of the trees. I thought I was going to barf.

  And it wasn’t the cotton candy, either.

  It was Elam and Hopp and this snowball that had caught me up on its way down the mountainside in the process of becoming an avalanche.

  “Ya look kinda pasty, kid,” Elam said.

  “Must be the cotton candy,” I said.

  Elam was on my right. Hopp on my left. They began talking through me.

  Hopp said, “So what’s the deal?”

  Elam said, “We got to leave the money behind. For now.”

  “For now?” Hopp asked.

  “Right. We can’t stay around here much longer. This damn celebration, Flounder’s Day or whatever, is gonna bring some people into this town, and unless we want to spend all day mingling with the crowd, we better get outa here.”

  “What about the money?” Hopp said.

  “We’ll come back for it. After dark. After this Centennial thing shoots its wad and the sidewalks of this Podunk get rolled up proper. We just pull up to the bank, use our key to get back in, grab the money and run.”

  “Can I say something?” I said.

  Elam nodded. “But make it fast, kid.”

  “Somebody’s going to miss those two bank employees. They’re bound to be missed. If you come back here later, there’ll be cops all over. Or a trap of some kind. That only makes sense. I think we should all get out and get away from here, while we can.”

  “No,” Elam said. “That angle’s took care of. Before we left, we had both of them bank employees call and say they wouldn’t be home till late tonight. The girl was from Iowa City, single, twenty-four, lives with another girl who’s gonna be gone the rest of the weekend, anyway. The man is from here, but he called his daughter and told her he was called out of town on business for the rest of the day.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What now?” Hopp asked.

  “We walk out to that farmhouse where Kitch’s goofy pal’s got that car waiting,” Elam said. “The important thing now is we do it before this celebration thing gets going full steam.”

  All during this conversation I had been playing with the sticky paper cone from the cotton candy, twisting it around my fingers like a dunce cap that was too small for me. Now, as Elam was talking, telling Hopp we had to get out of here, I spotted a trash receptacle by a tree nearby, and got up to get rid of the paper cone. I tossed it in the can and, as I turned to rejoin Elam and Hopp, I saw something.

  I saw that the park had filled up with people.

  Behind where we’d been sitting, the benches were full. People were sitting quietly. Quiet as church.

  I sat back down between Elam and Hopp, and said, “Uh, don’t look now, boys, but...”

  Chapter 23

  Hopp said, “We gotta get outa here.”

  Elam said, whispering, “Cool it. Leave me think a second.”

  Up on the bandshell one of the official types, a man, was fiddling with a centerstage microphone. He was tapping it, blowing into it, even talking into it, anything to try and see if it was on or not, while another official type, a woman, stood out front to see if anything was coming out of the speakers. Finally, in the middle of a sentence, the official type on the stage discovered the mike was now on. His embarrassment (the part of his sentence that came out over the mike was “... wrong with this silly thing?”) drew some titters from the crowd. Then the official type who’d been standing out front, the woman, hollered at one of the teenage helpers to adjust the amplifier, which apparently was off in the bushes somewhere. There followed some feedback and squeals and such until the microphone was adjusted properly.

  What this meant, obviously, was that something official... a ceremony or presentation of some kind... was about to take place.

  Elam, being no dummy, sensed this and said so.

  Hopp said, “Let’s just get up and leave before whatever this is gets started.”

  I said, “Good idea.”

  Elam’s whisper turned harsh. “We’re in the front row, you dummies...we got to be careful. We got to wait for just the right moment.”

  Hopp said, “The right moment is now.”

  I said, “I agree.”

  I figured the longer we waited, the more chance there was the show would get on the road before we could.

  But Elam had his reasons for staying put. He jerked his thumb over toward the place where the park and the street met: the two Highway Patrolmen were standing there, with arms crossed. There was nothing in their faces to suggest they suspected us, or anybody, of anything. They looked bored, actually. Still, I could understand Elam’s hesitation for calling attention to ourselves by getting up and leaving from these front row seats, with the entire town of Wynning sitting and standing behind us.

  Up on the stage, five men sat in five chairs. The microphone was in front of them. They were dressed in suits and looked official, but in a different way than the clipboard, plastic-badge hurry-scurry bunch who’d been ordering teenagers around all morning. These men had the look of say, a mayor and city council members. (Which is what they turned out to be.)

  And then th
e sound of sirens shattered the peace and quiet of the park, like crazy people let loose, screaming.

  They were police type sirens, and Hopp hopped to his feet the moment he heard them.

  So did just about everybody else.

  The five people on the stage jumped out of their five chairs. The townspeople sitting on the benches behind us got to their feet, too. Teenage kids who’d been sitting on the grass behind the benches and off to the sides also leapt to their feet, and those folks who’d already been standing, stood a little taller.

  And clapped.

  Brother, did they clap.

  Everyone was standing and applauding, and though Hopp hadn’t realized it at the time, when those sirens goosed him off that bench, he was leading a standing ovation.

  And so Hopp and Elam and me, we just stood there and clapped till our hands got red, not knowing why the hell we were clapping, but when you’re in the front row and a standing ovation is going on, you don’t ask questions: you just stand and clap and grin like everybody else.

  Over in the street, in front of the concession wagons and Highway Patrol car, in front of the stolen Mustang and the bank, in an open place vacated by the high school band members who had disappeared somewhere, two more Highway Patrol cars slid up and stopped, and behind them came a long black Cadillac, the sort of car you see in a funeral procession or gangster movie.

  The high school band reappeared, bringing up the rear of the black Cadillac. They were marching and playing “On Wisconsin.”

  (No, I do not know why a high school band in Wynning, Iowa, would be playing “On Wisconsin.” Why don’t you ask the Chinese lady in the Tacomobile?)

  And then the black car came to a stop, too, and the Highway Patrolmen were out of their cars and swarming all over everywhere. I never saw so many Highway Patrolmen in my life. I have to admit, thinking back, I can only count six of them, but at the time it seemed like there was a Highway Patrolman for every citizen in that park.

  A little man in a well-tailored conservative brown suit, with a nicely chosen yellow-and-white pattern tie, followed a pair of Highway Patrolmen from the black Cadillac to the stage. The pair of Highway Patrolmen cleared an imaginary path for him through a non-existent throng: the Wynning citizens were clapping wildly, but were a mild-mannered, mini-mob who stayed in their places while whoever this was made his grand entrance.