by Jack Finney
She turned to me, nodding her head, staring at my face. Then she said, Me too, Al, and began to cry.
I couldn't do anything but look at her stupidly; and Tina, not even trying to turn her face away, stood crying soundlessly. Then I stepped toward her and put my arms around her, holding her close; I felt helpless, wilted. Tina, I murmured, Tina, darling, baby — I felt like crying myself — I'll do anything. Anything you want me to. I love you; what do you want?
Oh — she buried her face on my chest again — I don't know, I don't know.
For a time she stood motionless, clinging to me for comfort; she might almost have been asleep, though I knew she wasn't. It was then I knew what I had to do if it was true that I loved her. I had to get out of there and stay out. You can laugh at anyone's ideas of morality; whatever they are, they'll never stand up to logic. But when you've finished tearing them to shreds, you haven't even touched them. Because what people feel is always infinitely stronger than what they think or believe they think. Tina just couldn't do this, and I knew that if I didn't leave now, she'd be badly hurt.
This sounds ridiculous, and is; it's absurd. I tried to pull loose, and the most exciting woman I'd ever known was actually holding my arms with both hands, trying with all her strength to hold me back. Then — I don't want to sound noble, or like a fool, either — I yanked away, actually staggering a step. I stood, out of breath, glaring at Tina in a blind rage, so mad I couldn't talk.
Then the anger stopped; it was gone, and I knew something. I had the absolute power in what I did and said to Tina from now on to hurt her beyond repair. It came to me, the full realization, that each of us had utterly entrusted ourselves to another human being. Tina held me in the palm of her hand; she could destroy me, turn me into nothing, by betraying the trust that gave her that power; and I could do the same to her. And it was an elating thing to know I never would, nor would she.
Standing there staring at Tina, I knew that the human being who has never had what I felt then has missed the greatest thing life can give you. This girl standing before me was exciting in reality beyond anything I'd ever imagined, and I'd imagined a lot. But now I knew that loving her no longer had much to do with how beautiful she was. Maybe it began that way; I guess it did. But now it was far beyond that.
Just words; it can't be explained. But when I stepped forward and took Tina in my arms again, things were different, and we both knew it. After a few moments we sat down and talked about being married the very next day, or just as soon as the law would let us. But we didn't actually decide to do it. The whole thing had become unreal again, and I guess we both knew that somehow we had to go ahead with what we had planned in Reno before anything could really begin for us.
After a while I left and walked back to the house and upstairs to my cot. Tina and I hadn't said anything about it, but I knew I'd be moving my things back next day. If we sound like fools who didn't know what they were doing or wanted, all I can say is, Who ever really does? But I knew this, in my bed that night and when I woke up next morning: I was going to do what I had to do in Reno or die trying.
Good Housekeeping, July 1953, 137(1):49-51, 159-194
5 Against the House, Part Two
Brick was back from Chicago at two the next day, with three thousand dollars in used ten- and twenty-dollar bills. We all stood looking at them in his suitcase lying open on his desk: three thick packages of green currency tightly bound with brown paper bands. Guy reached out, took one of the packets, snapped the paper band, and began walking around the room, scattering the bills on the rug. Seed, he said lovingly, bending low over the floor, strewing Brick's money all around the room. May each one grow and produce a hundred more like it. It was startling, seeing those green bills fluttering onto Brick's gray rug; they looked so real lying there, and there was such a lot of them, and the notion of thousands and thousands more like them made my heart start to pound, not faster but stronger, in a slow, powerful rhythm.
In the days that followed, an impossible number of things happened, and when I think about them they seem telescoped together like a rapid series of abbreviated scenes in a movie. That same night we bought the car and trailer; Brick and Jerry made the buying trip. They drove to Indianapolis in Brick's car, arriving after dark as planned. Then they cruised around till they spotted a used-car lot that also sold trailers.
There was only one salesman on duty, and Brick parked half a block away, where he could sit and watch. while Jerry, wearing a plain gray suit and leather gloves, walked ahead to the lot. It was an ordinary used-car lot, just out of the main business district, with one of those painted wooden archways and a string of light bulbs across the front.
Jerry was a fair amateur mechanic; that's why this was his job; he knew enough, at least, not to be too badly gypped. He walked straight to the Chevrolet '49 coupe and 12-foot trailer combination they'd spotted from Brick's car. The salesman wandered over; Jerry inspected the Chevy; then they drove it around town for twenty minutes, came back, and Jerry looked over the trailer. Then he dickered a while, and finally said okay. He'd rather have bought the thing and been off the lot with it in three minutes flat; but this way, he said, the salesman would be a lot less likely to remember him than if he'd been in too big a hurry.
He had to argue a little about taking the outfit right then and there, with no plates or registration. But money talks, and Jerry had it and showed it, telling the guy he lived only a few blocks away and was willing to risk driving it that far. So the man shrugged; they signed the papers; and Jerry drove the rig, as the salesman called it, off the lot, down the street, and around the corner, Brick following in his car not too close behind.
On a quiet residential street they parked in front of the first unlighted houses they found and put Brick's front plate on the front of the Chevy. Before they'd left school, they'd oiled and loosened the bolts holding the plate to Brick's car, and they had screwdriver and pliers ready. Working in the dark they changed that plate in less than a minute by Jerry's watch. Driving out of town Brick kept as close to the rear of the trailer as he could without being conspicuous, to hide the fact that there was no rear tag on the trailer, no front tag on his car. On the highway he kept a length or two behind Jerry, and no car ever got between them. Nobody stopped them.
Around two in the morning Jerry drove into Guy's barn, cutting the motor so that he coasted most of the length of the driveway and into the barn; Guy had opened the doors wide before he went to bed. Jerry snapped on the padlock, walked quietly down the cinders to Brick's car, and they were back at the house and in bed within fifteen minutes. Trailer and car cost nineteen hundred and fifty dollars.
Next morning, a Friday, Guy spent a free hour between classes in a phone booth, with a classified directory and two dollars' worth of dimes, phoning hardware stores, garages, drugstores, and then every other place he could think of that might possibly sell empty five-gallon cans. Nobody had any, or knew where he could buy them; most of them wanted to know what he wanted them for. Guy told them he was shipping some maple syrup, which was ridiculous; but no one seemed to doubt him, and one of the drugstores suggested glass jugs instead, and that's what we ended up with.
Jerry said they were a better idea than cans, because we could smash them when emptied and scatter them off the road a lot easier than we could crush and bury metal cans. Next morning, in Davenport, Iowa, fifty miles away, he bought twenty used jugs from a junk dealer for a quarter apiece, and came back with an Iowa license plate he'd found stuck up on a phone pole beside the road.
While Jerry was making that trip Saturday morning in Brick's car, the rest of us were out buying canned goods: beans, corned beef, prepared meat, fruit, sardines, canned bread, fruit juice, and so on, a few cans at each store. I bought breakfast food, a big carton of paper cups, three good can openers, half a dozen cheap spoons, and five dozen pairs of cheap cotton gloves in various sizes. Jerry got back around eleven and filled the gas tank at the edge of town, and in Guy's barn we siph
oned off fifteen gallons into three of the jugs. We felt wonderful working away, tying newspapers securely around the jugs so they'd travel, packing canned goods into cartons; and wearing gloves, we made a good start on ripping out the trailer bed and bunk, breakfast table and benches, wardrobe, the little refrigerator, sink, and butane stove, stripping the trailer to a shell. There's something fascinating about working hard in close co-operation with others on something that means a lot to all of you; it was fun like nothing I'd ever done before.
Yet that weekend it looked as though we'd have to abandon the whole project, because we ran up against a solid stone wall. It was absurd. I felt like an idiot, and it scared me to realize we could go as far as we had without even thinking about a huge, obvious flaw in the plan.
In Brick's room Saturday afternoon we went over our whole method for getting to Reno, and it looked good. That led us into talking about the escape, and the very difficulty of getting out of Reno solved the problem it created. Reno lies on a flat plain, a valley ringed on three sides by mountains and leading off into a desert on the fourth. There are only a few highways out of Reno; or you can go Southern Pacific or United Air Lines. Within minutes after a major robbery, it was a cinch that depot and airport would be guarded and the mountain passes and long desert road to Las Vegas blocked, so the answer was — not to leave.
We decided that we'd have to separate, and that Guy, Jerry, and I would look for jobs anywhere we could find them: college boys again, working for the summer. Brick would stay at one of the guest ranches around Reno — he had the money to do that — as though he were establishing residence to get a divorce, actually going through the motions of retaining a lawyer. We knew the procedure. You arrive in Reno, pick a place to live for six weeks, and retain a lawyer; then there's not much for either of you to do till your six weeks are up and you go into court. You pay him a retaining fee right away, which Brick would do, and pay the rest just before the court action, which Brick wouldn't do. After a month, maybe, he'd announce that he'd talked to his wife by phone and that they were reconciled; that happens often enough in Reno. Then he'd leave.
None of the four of us would see each other in Reno unless we had to, and we worked out a simple foolproof plan of making contact in that case. We felt good about the whole scheme; it was perfectly possible — even likely, we realized — that we'd be questioned by the police, along with the scores or hundreds of other people who arrive in Reno to live or work each summer. But we were certain we could take that, all right.
Then we reached the question, How do you rob Harold's Club? We stayed with that problem the rest of that day and evening and all the next — and got nowhere. It stunned us, realizing as the hours passed that we couldn't even begin to think of an answer. It was ridiculous, and couldn't be true; yet the fact grew plainer and plainer that there simply wasn't any way to rob Harold's Club. And only the fact that we'd gone too far to stop kept us hopelessly talking and thinking around and around the same closed circle.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars come into Harold's Club in a busy summer weekend; and in Rodeo Week money pours in, but they don't keep it sitting out on the floor in bushel baskets. Late Sunday morning in Brick's room Jerry did the same thing he'd already done two dozen times. He had a big loose-leaf notebook of math graph paper — we were all sitting around Brick's desk — and now, once more, he said, Here it is, and began to sketch with a soft-lead pencil.
Carefully he drew a large square. That's the ground floor of Harold's Club, he told us. He drew a much smaller square in the center of the first one. And that's the cashroom. We sat in a trance, staring at Jerry's pencil point as though we hadn't seen all this before. Beside the top of the small square Jerry's pencil made an X. That wall is solid. It's plaster with heavy masonry, probably, or even steel netting, underneath. He made a second and a third X. And so are those walls. Now Jerry reversed his pencil, and with the eraser made a little opening in the bottom of the small square. There's the only doorway, the only possible entrance into the cashroom for us or anyone else. Carefully he drew a dotted line across the little doorway. And the door is made of heavy steel rods from floor to ceiling.
From the little barred door in his diagram Jerry sketched a short hallway extending straight out into the main room. There's the little corridor that leads from the main room in to the door of the cashroom. One wall of that corridor is the back wall of a bar. Jerry sketched in a bar complete with bar stools; it ran right along one wall of the little corridor, on back the length of the little cashroom, and extended past that clear to the wall of the big main room of Jerry's diagram.
The other wall of that corridor — Jerry began to sketch again — is a wall of the ladies' room. He completed his sketch by drawing a little square. The square fitted into the angle made by the cashroom and the short corridor leading up to it. Now, then — Jerry drew one more dotted line, across the mouth of the little corridor — there's a second barred door. You have to go through that door to get into the corridor from the main room. And when you're in the corridor, you have to get through the next barred door before you're in the cashroom. Any of you ever notice how those doors work?
Brick nodded that he had, but neither Guy nor I said anything. We knew how the doors worked, because Jerry had told us now, thousands of times it seemed. But we hadn't known before.
Well, said Jerry patiently, those two barred doors work automatically. You can't open one door, that is, unless the other one is closed and locked. Now here's what that means. He leaned back in his chair. When we were in Reno last summer, I often sat at the end of that bar, right next to the cashroom corridor, drinking Coke. They wouldn't sell me anything else, because I'm not twenty-one. I'd long since noticed that when Jerry explained anything he omitted nothing. Here's what happens. An employe who's authorized to go into the cashroom walks up to that first barred door. He presses a little button on the wall beside the door. You can see the button if you stand at the end of the bar there; it looks like an ordinary little doorbell. The bell rings in the cashroom, and whoever is in there looks out through the two barred doors. If he sees it's someone who has a right to come in, he pushes a button inside the cashroom. Then automatic machinery takes over, and the outside door opens slowly. It works by compressed air; you can hear it hiss. When the door is open, the guy steps through, and now he's standing in the little corridor. But the second door, the one into the cashroom, isn't open yet. And it won't open, it can't open, until the first door closes and locks. That means the guy is trapped in that little corridor until the person in the cashroom presses the button once again. Now suppose you'd forced your way into the little corridor with him? The person in the cashroom simply wouldn't open the next door. You couldn't shove a pistol through the bars, either, and make him open it, because the door to the cashroom is covered, floor to ceiling, with heavy steel netting too small for any gun barrel. But if everything's okay, if the authorized employe is just standing there waiting, the person inside presses the button. Then the second door opens, and the guy walks on into the cashroom.
Jerry yawned, and Guy turned to stare out the window beside Brick's desk. To get out of the cashroom, Jerry's voice droned on, it's the same business; it reminds me of the locks on the Panama Canal. You go through the cashroom door and you're in the corridor. The door closes behind you, and the lock snaps shut. Then the next door opens, and you walk out into the main room again. Jerry tossed his pencil onto the desk and slouched in his chair. Now, please tell me, fellow holdup men, just how do we rob Harold's Club?
Guy said, We've got a way to get into Reno as though we were invisible. And we've got a way to hide afterward. It looks to me as though we've discovered the perfect method of entering Reno and leaving again so that no one will know we've even been there. Or care. I don't know how the devil we rob Harold's Club; those selfish dogs have got it fixed so we can't!
Brick slowly stood up, walked across the room, then turned to a window and stood staring out at the str
eet; two blocks away the Methodist Church bell began chiming. We can assume, Brick said, that the inside of the ladies' room is one place that is not observed through one-way-vision glass. Eventually that would be bound to become known around town, and I don't think the ladies would approve. So the only thing I can think of — he shrugged hopelessly — is to get into the ladies' room, somehow, and then drill through the wall into the cashroom. And that's just plain ridiculous.
Yeah, Jerry said, and nodded slowly. Harold's Club is unique as a place to rob. Why, any bank would be easier. Jerry smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. What drives me nuts is that those double barred doors are actually a fairly simple kind of protection. The local bank right here in town has a far more complicated system. But banks close, occasionally. He stood up. So does any other kind of business in the world, except Harold's Club, or another place like it. Why, in a bank, once you take care of the watchman and the alarm system. you can work all night or all weekend with drills or acetylene torches or whatever they use, and cut your way into the vault. He began pacing the room, his hands tightly clasped behind his back. But Harold's Club's best protection, its unique protection, is the simple fact that it never closes. The club's always open, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year. So you can't drill through a wall, and it's idiotic even to think about it. You've got to walk in through those doors, in full sight of dozens of people and all the guards sitting behind one-way-vision glass in the walls and even the ceiling. And you've got to walk out the same way. And if you can tell me how anyone in the world can do that, I'll be eternally grateful! He was practically shouting.
After a moment Brick said, Let's face it then; you can't get into that cashroom. No one could. But the money doesn't stay there forever; it's got to come out sometime. There's our best angle.
