Authors: Richard Ford
“That’s not any of your business either,” my mother said.
“Now there’s where you’re wrong,” Bishop said.
Someone was speaking on the other side of the front door. Heavy footsteps bumped the porch boards. My mother stayed where she was at the dining room table. My heart had begun slamming in my chest. I wanted her to announce that no one here was a bank robber. Instead, she just stared at me. “You two don’t go anywhere. Just stay in this house,” she said to both Berner and me. “Do you understand? Don’t leave here with anybody unless it’s Miss Remlinger. Is that clear?” Her hands shifted from her left holding her right, to her right holding her left.
The front door opened—it seemed sudden—and the big policeman came striding right in. He had his straw snap-brim in his hand. His head was nearly bald and round and had red blotches on it. I could see our father outside on the lawn with his hands behind his back. He was grinning toward the front door and shaking his head and shouting something. I thought he was shouting at me, but I couldn’t understand him.
“Aren’t we going to Seattle?” Berner said. She was still sitting on the couch in her polka-dot dress. She couldn’t see out the door.
“Just do what I say,” our mother said.
“I’m going to have to ask you to stand up now, Mrs. Parsons,” the big policeman said. Calling her “Mrs. Parsons” was unexpected and shocking.
There was a lot of movement in the room then, a lot of commotion—shoes and chairs scraping the floor, material rubbing against material, breathing and leather squeezing together. Bishop produced a pair of silver handcuffs, and he and the bald policeman moved around the dining room table and put their hands on my mother’s shoulders. “Come on and stand up for me, Neeva,” the big policeman said. He set his hat on the table. Our mother didn’t stand up or move, but became rigid and did not speak—though her lips were parted. The two policemen on either side raised her by her arms and turned them back and pulled her hands together behind her. She didn’t resist, but her hands had been trembling, and she kept blinking behind her glasses, then looking upward. The big policeman took the handcuffs and clicked them carefully onto my mother’s wrists. “Don’t make ’em too tight for the ladies.” He smiled when he said it.
Our father had gone on talking where he was, outside by himself. “This could be a lot worse now,” I heard him say. Some of the Lutherans had come out of their church building and were watching. One man in a cowboy hat said something that I couldn’t hear. “All right, all right,” my father shouted out. “The fair’s left town. The fair’s left town.”
“I have two children here,” our mother said to the policemen, who’d begun moving her awkwardly around the dining room table, her hands behind her. Because she was small, her arms didn’t reach easily around to her back. It is not simple to describe what I saw. The big policeman’s cigar odor was all inside the room, as if he’d been smoking. He was breathing stiffly. My mother’s feet didn’t move willingly, but she didn’t struggle or say anything other than to say she had two children. Her eyes became fixed in front of her—not on me—as if what she was doing was difficult to perform.
“Oh, yes, I know you do,” the big policeman said, moving her forward almost daintily. “I know that.”
“Tell us where you’re going,” Berner said. She looked calm, but she was in shock the way I was. We had no idea what to say or do. “We’ll be here when you come back,” she said. The police were leading our mother through the front door. Our father was on the sidewalk, talking like a crazy man. My sister and I watched it all. It’s not an occurrence that you could imagine happening.
I stood up from the piano bench then. Standing seemed to be what I should do. My heart was still pounding, but I felt calm at the same time, as if there was nothing around me.
“Remember what I said.” Our mother was talking, but not looking around. They were on the porch, and she was staring at her feet, taking care going down the front steps, both policemen holding her arms so she seemed even smaller. “Don’t go anywhere until Mildred comes to get you.”
The big bulky policeman turned back at the bottom step and said, “Get me my hat, sonny.” His hat was still on the dining room table.
I went across the room, picked up the little straw hat—it was amazingly light and smelled like sweat and cigars. I walked onto the porch and handed it to him. He flipped it up onto his bald head with the hand that wasn’t holding my mother’s arm.
“Somebody’ll come look after you kids,” he said.
Our mother’s face flashed around at me. Berner had come to the door. In my memory’s eye, our mother’s face was surrounded by darkness. “You leave them strictly alone,” she said in an angry voice. “I’ve made arrangements for them.” She was addressing me.
“It’s a juvenile matter,” the big policeman said and took a harsher grip of her arm. “You’re not involved in it now.”
“They’re my children.” She glared at him.
“You might’ve considered that,” he said. “They belong to the State of Montana today.”
The two of them moved my mother along down the concrete walk where my father was, hands trussed behind him, laughing and gawking. Bits of white confetti were stuck to the concrete walk from yesterday.
“Do I get to see a lawyer?” my father said. He seemed in high spirits. “I don’t think I know one.”
The policeman, Bishop, began leading him toward the police car and getting the back door open. “You won’t need one, Bev,” he said.
“You know you don’t have to do this, I don’t gauge.” My father was looking around back toward me. I don’t
gauge
, he said. I’d never heard him say that before.
“You’re wrong there,” Bishop said.
As she was being put into the back seat of the police car, our mother’s glasses slipped off one side of her face and ear. The big policeman, who had her arm, delicately replaced them so they were where they belonged. She looked around at me again from the open car door. “Just stay in the house, Dell,” she called out. “Don’t leave with anybody but Mildred. Run if you have to.”
“I won’t,” I said. I thought she had tears in her eyes.
Our father was on the far side of the car, in the street. He was being forced down inside the door. He suddenly looked up over the car roof. His wild eyes found me, and he shouted out, “I told you. Nothing distinctive about these monkeys.” The policeman Bishop set his hand more firmly on top of our father’s head and pushed him hard down into the back seat, where our mother already was. Our father said something else, but I couldn’t understand it. Bishop slammed the door. More people were watching from the steps of the church where they’d come out to see. It was a spectacle, the worst possible thing that could happen, happening in the worst possible way.
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.
Y
OU’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.
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.