by Dan Deweese
As soon as Annie touched the keyboard, the redwood on Catherine’s screen vanished, and in its place appeared one of the images of Mooncalf—the semiprofile from the right, in which his downward-directed gaze lent him a thoughtful appearance. “He doesn’t look like the usual bank robber,” she said. “I’ll just click through them quickly here.”
I sensed John’s eyes on me as Annie pulled up two similar photos of Mooncalf looking straight ahead, after which she displayed one I hadn’t seen before: a blurry shot of his back that must have been taken as he turned to leave.
“Anything?” John asked.
“No. They’re good photos, but I don’t recognize him.”
“You’re sure? Guys usually walk through a few times to case a place before they rob it. It’s likely he’s been in the branch before.”
“If he has, I was probably in my office,” I said. “I don’t see as many customers as the rest of the staff.”
John nodded, though there was something solicitous in his bearing that I didn’t like. Catherine had told me these two would have gone through my accounts by now and would ask me about them, but neither of them had mentioned it. What were they waiting for?
“Okey-doke,” John said. “I think that’s all we need right now.”
“That’s it?”
“We’ll probably have some follow-up stuff soon, but a look at the videotape is what we really needed from you. We’ll let you get back to your family.”
“And congratulations,” Annie added brightly. “I’m sure it’s an exciting day.”
“Yes,” I said, “but do I need to let you out? Or to lock up after you?”
“Oh, we have our own keys,” John said. He held up a ring thick with them, and jingled it as if taunting me—or maybe that was just my perception. How many branches did that ring of keys allow him access to? It didn’t seem like a particularly good idea to even have a ring of keys like that in existence, I thought—though probably I was just jealous of the degree to which the bank trusted these two young people, while Catherine and I were still following the letter of every security guideline, signing and countersigning forms every time we moved a bit of cash, spun a combination lock, or turned a lever. If young John and Annie were allowed to let themselves into and out of any branch they pleased, then what was the point of the care I had been taking to follow the rules all these years? It made me look ridiculous, I thought. Even if only to myself.
BY THE TIME I left the bank, the clouds had rolled east and the rain had moved on. Silver drops of rain hung from the trees, dripping at intervals onto the damp sidewalks below. Finches flitted and chirped somewhere overhead. A huge, leashed poodle pulled a middle-aged woman down the sidewalk, while the engine whine and warning beeps of heavy equipment a few blocks away were perfectly audible. John and Annie were behind me in the bank, and I was pleased to leave the investigation of Mooncalf’s escapade in their hands.
Two sedans were parked near the bank door: mine, and one I assumed belonged to Annie and John. At the far end of the lot, though, I noticed another vehicle: a beat-up white pickup a decade or two old, its body spotted with mud and rusted dents. More than one sign in the lot warned that parking was for bank customers only and violators would be towed, but those signs dated to the old days, when it was conceivable that the thirty spaces in our lot might actually be used. Computers and ATMs had long ago rendered our parking lot’s size an anachronism, and it wasn’t unusual for us to find mysterious vehicles parked there. I, personally, had never called a towing service—I didn’t even know which one we were supposed to alert—but something compelled me that day to walk out to the truck and take a look. Through the driver’s side window I saw a red vinyl bench seat cracked at various stress points, and the only things upon it a badly folded city map and a worn pair of leather work gloves. A metal toolbox ran the full width of the truck’s bed against the back of the cab, and two extension ladders filled most of the rest of the bed. All these things—the toolbox, the ladders, and the bed itself—were spattered with various-colored drips of paint, and though the truck seemed in no way related to anything I was involved in that day, I pulled a pen and a scrap of paper from my pocket and copied the vehicle’s license plate number anyway. I had just made it back to my own car when I heard someone say: “He took off about five minutes ago. Walking south.” My eye caught a bit of movement at the front corner of the bank, maybe thirty feet from me, and I realized a man was sitting there, his back against the side of the building. The sun was behind me, and the man was just far enough around the corner to be within the shade the front wall cast across the sidewalk. The movement I had noticed was his left hand wandering past the line of shade and into the light as he absentmindedly tapped a pebble against the sidewalk.
“Is that right?” I said.
“He parked and sat there for a while, then just got out and walked off. You find anything inside the truck? I saw you looking in there.” He lifted his face from the sidewalk in order to cast me an accusatory little glance—or maybe it was merely curious—and even though he was at a distance and in the shade, I could see the dark, wet crater above his mouth: This was our noseless gentleman, with whom I had already chatted once that day.
“Nothing unusual,” I said.
He returned his attention to the pebble. “Too bad. Thought maybe you’d find some kind of clue.”
“A clue?”
“About the robbery. Or did you already catch that guy?” He looked at me again, holding my gaze a bit longer that time. I suppose I thought he might be embarrassed of his wound, but there was actually something austere and almost cold about his glance.
“No,” I said. “I just looked at some video of it, and there are other people inside looking at it some more.”
“I hope you catch him. The ladies who work in there have always treated me nice. It’s too bad someone had to go and do that to them.”
“I think everyone’s okay. Though I’m glad to hear my staff treats you well.”
He seemed surprised. “You’re the boss?”
“Yes. The manager.”
“I thought it was the woman. Have you ever been robbed before?”
“A couple times.” There was a fair amount of the schoolyard in his maneuvers with the stone, as if he’d gotten in trouble and was passing time against the wall now, waiting for the teacher to let him back into the fray. “You were here earlier today,” I said. “Did you need anything?”
“Oh no,” he said, returning his attention to the pebble and his scraping of it against the sidewalk. “I’m in the shade here. I’m fine.”
“Have you had that wound looked at recently. It seems like it shouldn’t be exposed.”
“It doesn’t give me any trouble. The air’s good for it.”
“When was the last time a doctor looked at it? If you walk into an emergency room, they have to help you, you know. Even if you don’t have insurance.”
“The doctors can’t do anything,” he responded, and with a backhand motion tossed the pebble into the street. “Once it’s gone, all you can do is keep it clean. You probably need to work on catching that guy that robbed you, so you have a good day, now.” The pebble was still bounding erratically toward the opposite curb as he stood and moved along the side of the building, beyond my line of sight. And without thinking—it was a move as simple as any reflex—I stepped toward the sidewalk, so that I was able to look down the side of the bank and watch the man. Almost as soon as I had reached the point where I could see him, though, he turned and caught me. “Did you need something?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Then what are you looking at?” he yelled.
Even before I turned and moved back toward my car, I could see that he had reversed course and was heading back to the front of the bank. He came around the corner as I got into my car and closed the door, bellowing something indecipherable at me as I put the car in gear and backed away from him. And he continued to yell and gesture, even as I drove
out of the lot and into the neighborhood.
My pulse was racing as I wondered bitterly why I even tried to interact with other people. It was a courtesy that I even let that man come into the bank to turn in his change, I told myself—I could just as easily bar him from the branch and tell him he had to go somewhere else. And yet I also knew I would do no such thing. Why had I provoked him, anyway? It was while considering that question that I realized with a start that I was driving in the direction of Sandra’s house, when I actually needed to be headed in the opposite direction. A single individual had yelled at me, and I was as flustered as if I had been chased by an entire gang of thugs. I pulled into a driveway, backed out, and headed in the opposite direction, passing on the way a mustachioed man in dirty, paint-spattered coveralls, who stood on the sidewalk, studying a piece of paper and then looking up to the house before him. After only that brief glimpse, he slipped behind me, out of range, but immediately I thought: And that is the owner of the truck.
When I drove back past the bank, John and Annie were in front of the main doors, from where they appeared to be addressing the noseless man. He stood in the parking spot my car had occupied, still gesturing angrily. Of the three of them, only Annie turned as my car passed. I thought about how every minute the two of them spent arguing there with the man, or returning to the branch to enter the tellers’ statements into the bank security database, to gaze again into the photos of Mooncalf’s eyes and speculate about his identity, to make telephone calls to the public relations department to coordinate the release of information and photos to the media—while they were busy with all that, Mooncalf could only be getting further away.
ONLY A FEW DAYS after the evening on which I first met Miranda’s friend Ira, Sandra and I hosted a barbecue for her tennis team. Most of the team members had suffered their final losses of the season, of course, so rather than being a sendoff for the three players going on, the occasion actually felt as if it were a celebration of the end of things: another summer tennis season, the regular gatherings the season had provided, and, at some level, the end of summer itself. The tournament-qualifying singles player—his name escapes me, but I recall that he was younger, and had a propensity for swearing audibly during his matches—floated around the party displaying an ostentatious modesty that only underscored the pride he took in his achievement. Grant and Sandra had played two practice sets against another doubles team just before the party, and Grant had showered at our house afterward so that he didn’t have to go home and then return—the result was that he now wandered the party in a pair of my old jeans and one of my bank T-shirts emblazoned with a pithy slogan regarding interest and convenience. He made polite but brief conversation when approached by fellow teammates or their family members, but seemed not particularly invested in the occasion. He spent considerable time fascinating a guest’s schnauzer by hiding, throwing, and hiding again a short length of knotted rope. Sandra, however, seemed in her social element. She responded with a smile and laugh to almost anything said to her, and listened to others with her head tilted in an attitude of enthusiastic interest. I was impressed by the degree of mastery and even lightheartedness she brought to these social interactions, since in our private life we were already moving through what I would later recognize as the final stages of our marriage.
It had been just a few months earlier that she had walked into my office one evening with a look on her face that made me think she had just gotten awful news. “I don’t know how to say this,” she had said. “But I’m unhappy. And I want to talk about it. About our life.” I knew that by “our life,” Sandra couldn’t have been referring to anything about Miranda, a bright and funny girl who earned excellent grades and seemed to have plenty of friends. And I knew Sandra wasn’t unhappy with her work life, either—the interior decorators she had started working for back when we were first married had switched to calling themselves an interior design firm. Sandra, after taking classes on evenings and weekends for a couple years, had earned a professional certification in interior design, and shifted from the front desk to a position as one of the company’s design consultants. She carried fabric swatches, picture books, and paint samples from work to home and back every week, and seemed entirely absorbed in solving the problems of placement and decor—it was “decor,” she had taught me, not “decoration”—for the firm’s clients. When expressing unhappiness with our life, then, Sandra could only have meant with me, a fact it took her only a few minutes to acknowledge as she sat perched on the arm of a chair in the opposite corner of the room. When I asked her what she wanted that I wasn’t providing, though, she couldn’t give a definitive answer. She said but hadn’t I ever felt like there were other things to do in life, and that spending our whole lives just doing the same thing over and over wasn’t a good idea, that it was a waste of us as people? There were other potentials out there, she said, other things we could do. When I tried to argue that we weren’t doing the same things over and over—Miranda was in high school now, for instance, and I had just become a branch manager, and Sandra was working with new clients all the time—her face fell. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said.
“Obviously not,” I said. “You’re talking about me, and being tired of being married to me.” “I just think we’ve become different people over the years. Don’t you think we’ve become different people?” Though I wasn’t, at the time, sure what she was working toward, I knew enough to realize I needed to dispute her narrative. “We’ve gotten older,” I said, “But I think we’ve grown in ways that are good.” “But are we still in love?” she said, “Do you still love me? Are you still in love with me?” “Of course,” I said—though yes, it felt like a lie. Because what, after all, did it mean to be in love? That I couldn’t bear to be away from her? That I counted the hours until I could see her again, shuddering through paroxysms of anticipatory anxiety? I felt nothing like that, and doubted that any adult actually did. Why would anyone even want to? We were married. Sandra was my wife. I loved her. These were simple facts. They had been well established. I thought. “Do you still love me?” I asked. “I’ll always love you,” she said, “I’m just not sure that I’m in love with you anymore.” “I don’t know what that means. What does that mean?” “I don’t know how to explain it, but you know what I’m talking about.” Though lost in thought, she held her hands demurely in her lap, as if at a formal occasion. “It’s the difference between a brother and a lover—that’s what it is,” she said. “So you’re not attracted to me anymore.” “We’ve been together since we were in our early twenties! How could things not grow stale after sixteen years?” “So you’re leaving. Is that what you’re saying?” “I’m just trying to tell you what I’m feeling.” “But how am I supposed to take this? You’re telling me you’re unhappy, and unhappy with me, specifically, and there’s nothing I can do about it—because you’re just not in love with me anymore.” “I’m trying to sort through some things—things about myself and my life. And I want to be able to talk to you about them.” “And when you were planning on talking to me about this, how did you imagine I would react?” “I don’t know. I guess I hoped we would have an honest conversation.” She looked at me as if I were some kind of captor she was imploring for mercy. And I hated that look. I had no intention of being her captor. I was not her captor. “We never seem to talk about anything anymore,” she said, “I feel like it’s been years since we’ve had any kind of heart-to-heart talk at all.” “But how can we have a heart-to-heart talk when you’re telling me you’re leaving me because you’re bored with me? It’s like you’re saying you’re dumping me, but you were hoping it would be a really touching moment between us.” “I’m not saying that!” she said angrily, and then, in a controlled tone: “I haven’t said that. But maybe you’re right. Maybe this was a bad idea.” “So what are you going to do? Am I on some kind of probation now? You’re going to be evaluating me to see if you can stand being a part of this marriage anymore?” “I’m
not going to be evaluating you. I’m going to be evaluating myself.” “I see,” I said, “Well, let me know when you’ve finished your evaluation.” She shook her head in apparent anguish. “My inability to talk to you about this in any kind of productive way is part of the entire problem.” “But it sounds like in your mind, you hoped you could deliver a monologue to me, and I wouldn’t respond. Maybe you even thought I would be moved by it? But the reality of talking, if that’s what you feel like you can’t do, is that I am allowed to talk back. Which I guess ruins your fantasy.” “Yes,” she said quietly, “I guess it does.” And then she stood and walked out of the room.
And then for the next three months, Sandra did not raise the subject of our marriage even once. The conversation just hung there, coloring every interaction between us. When she’d said she hoped I hadn’t been uptight about Ira smoking cigarettes on our porch, for instance, what had she meant? Had I lost points with her, and was I moving ever closer, with my uptightness, to being disqualified from being her husband? It seemed clear she was, in some secret part of herself, mulling over whether she could continue to stand to be with me. If she was evaluating me, then, I felt it was only fair to let her see my truest self.
Which was, to be honest, fairly liberating.
And so at our little tennis team party, I felt no compunction to be outgoing and social, and neither did I try to hide the fact that I cared nothing about the adults at the party, and that my attention was directed primarily toward my daughter—because not more than half an hour into the event, I had noticed that her friend Ira had shown up. He and Miranda had walked to where Sandra stood on the opposite side of the yard, but I could see him match Sandra’s social effervescence by smiling widely as he greeted her, and I saw Sandra gesture toward the rest of the yard—probably telling Ira to feel free to get some food from the grill I was tending—and then trade a laugh with the two of them before turning back to the guests she had been chatting with before. Miranda and Ira remained at that end of the yard, though, and I was still trying to monitor them when Grant, who had wandered past more than once, finally stepped behind the grill with me and said, apropos of nothing: “So I want you to go to Los Angeles with me.”
