The windshield wipers bump across runnels of ice forming on the glass, and he knows he should get out there with a scraper and clear the ice, but decides to let the defroster heat the glass from inside and melt it. He can’t linger. Too easy to run into someone he knows, even this far from home. He sets the emergency brake, grabs the green gym bag off the floor beside him, and steps from the truck, leaving the motor running and the defroster and heater on high. He walks around the truck, making sure that both license plates are covered in hardened road-slush. When he gets to the bank entrance, he turns away for a second and yanks down his fleece balaclava, transforming it into a ski mask, a not unusual sight on a snowy day in a ski town like Lake Placid. Then he pulls open the heavy glass door and enters the bank.
There are two slender young tellers behind the chest-high counter, girls in their early twenties who appear to be counting money back there, and a middle-aged bank officer standing at the open door of her glassed-in cubicle. All three offer him a welcoming gaze when he comes through the door—the first customer of the day. The bank officer holds a notary stamp press in her hands as if it’s a precious gift. She’s a redheaded, round-faced woman wearing a two-piece green wool suit and tangerine-colored blouse. To Connie she looks like a social worker, the kind who interviewed him for Medicaid and food stamps. That humpbacked Pontiac is probably hers. The tellers are dressed more casually, in matching gray pleated skirts, black tights, long-sleeved button-down shirts, and fleece vests. They both have mud-colored shoulder-length hair and rosy cheeks. Connie thinks they must be twins and dress alike on purpose. Buzz and Chip, who are twins, used to do that in high school. Just to confuse people, he remembers. These girls are a little old for that.
He leans back against the counter and says to the bank officer, “Would you look at this, please?” He puts his left hand deep into his jacket pocket and holds out the gym bag with his right. She comes up to him, and he hands her the open bag.
She furrows her brow, puzzled, wary, but places the notary stamp press on the counter anyhow, takes the bag, and peers into it. It’s empty, except for five words hand-printed in capital letters with a black Magic Marker on a white sheet of paper: FILL WITH CASH. OWNER ARMED.
“Oh, dear,” she says. She takes the gym bag and, avoiding his eyes, passes through the low gate and goes behind the counter where the confused tellers stand and watch.
Connie says to the tellers, “You girls just step back a few feet from the counter there and don’t touch anything. Keep your hands where I can see them. This’ll all be over in a minute.” To the white-faced bank officer he says, “Less than a minute, actually. Thirty seconds. I’m counting,” he says and commences to count backward from thirty. By the time he reaches twelve, she has emptied the contents of the cash drawers into the gym bag. She zips the bag closed and passes it to him.
It’s nice and heavy, about three pounds of money, he guesses. He thanks her with a nod and, still counting out loud, backs quickly away from the counter toward the door, right hand holding the gym bag, left hand deep in his jacket pocket clasping the grip of his reliable old Colt M1911 service pistol. At five he is outside the bank, and at one he’s in his truck, then releasing the hand brake, and he has backed the truck up and turned, unseen, and is headed west out of town on Old Military Road.
In the falling snow traffic is light and slow-moving. A mile beyond the city limits, where the road enters the hamlet of Ray Brook, a pair of state police cruisers, their lights flashing, speeds toward him, and he pulls slightly off to the right to let them zoom past. A minute later he passes the Ray Brook state police headquarters, where until a year ago his son Jack was stationed. If Jack were headquartered there today, he’d likely be driving one of those cruisers that just blew by, and he might have recognized his dad’s white, rusted-out Ford Ranger and wondered what he was doing way over here. But Jack’s stationed in Au Sable Forks now, not Ray Brook, and that’s why, after robbing four branches of three different banks in Essex and Franklin Counties in the last seven months, Connie has waited until now to rob the Lake Placid branch of the Adirondack Bank and why afterward he drove west, away from Au Sable Forks and home. He doesn’t want his sons to ask him any questions that he can’t answer truthfully.
He drives through the town of Saranac Lake, looping via Route 3 gradually north toward Plattsburgh, where he spends the rest of the morning into the afternoon hanging out at the Champlain Centre mall like a bored teenager. With the gym bag locked in the pickup in the parking lot and the money uncounted, unexamined—for all he knows it could be three pounds of one-dollar bills, although more likely it’s tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds, like the others—he roams through the tool department at Sears and drifts on to the food court, where he eats Chinese food, and then goes to a 2 P.M. screening of Lincoln, which he likes in spite of being surprised that Abraham Lincoln had such a high, squeaky voice. While he’s watching the movie, the temperature outside rises into the mid-thirties and the falling snow dwindles and finally stops. It’s almost 5 P.M. when he comes blinking out of the multiplex and decides it’s safe now to drive back to Au Sable Forks.
The six-lane Northway is puddled with salted snowmelt and slush. In Keeseville, still 10 miles from home, he exits from the turnpike on the wide, sweeping off-ramp to Route 9N. Keeseville is where his two younger sons and their families live and is not so damned far from Au Sable Forks that they couldn’t drop by to visit once a month if they wanted to, he thinks, and in order to power the truck through the curve, Connie guns it. The quarter ton of bagged gravel in the truck bed has shifted the weight of the vehicle from the front tires to the rear, and the centrifugal pull of the turn causes the rear tires to lose their grip on the pavement and slip sideways to the left. Connie automatically flips the steering wheel to the left, the direction of the slide, but the rear end whipsaws back to the right, putting the truck into a slow 180-degree spin, back to front, until he’s facing the way he’s come and the truck is sliding sideways and downhill toward the off-ramp guardrail at about 40 miles an hour.
It’s only a concussion and a busted collarbone, Jack explains to his father. But the collarbone broke in two places and as a result is in three separate pieces. “They called in one of the sports docs from Lake Placid, guy who works on ski accidents all the time. He operated and put pins in it, but given your age and bone loss, he doesn’t think the pins’ll hold if you get hit in that area again. He said you’ll have to protect your right side like it’s made of glass.”
“How long was I out?” Connie asks. He’s just realized that Chip and Buzz are in the room, standing somewhere behind Jack. He’s woozy and confused about where he is exactly, although he can tell it’s a hospital room. He’s in a bed with an IV stuck in his arm and an empty bed next to his and a chair in the corner and a window with the curtain pulled back. It’s dark outside.
“You were out when I got to the truck, which was no more than ten minutes after the accident, I’d guess. A citizen with a cell phone in a car right behind you saw the truck go over and called 911. I happened to be driving north on 87 just below the exit. You came to in the ambulance, but they knocked you out when you went in for surgery. You don’t remember the ambulance and all that?”
“Last thing I remember is the truck going into a slide. Hello, boys,” he says to Chip and Buzz. “Sorry to bring you out like this.” They look worried, brows furrowed, unsmiling, both in uniform, Buzz in his Dannemora prison guard’s uniform and Chip in his Plattsburgh police officer blues. All three of his sons wear uniforms well. He likes that. “Hope you didn’t have to leave work for this.”
Chip says that he was on duty, but since that had him here in Plattsburgh, it was no big deal to come right over to the hospital, and Buzz says that he was just getting home when Jack called, so it was no big deal for him, either, to drive back to Plattsburgh. “Edie sends her love,” Buzz adds.
“Yeah, Joan sends love too, Dad,” Chip says.
Connie asks about his truck
. He has just remembered the gym bag.
Jack says, “Totaled. Northway Sunoco came over and towed it out. You really put it all the way off the ramp and into the woods. Thicket of small birches stopped you. Good thing it wasn’t a full-grown tree or you’d have gone through the windshield. You weren’t wearing a seat belt. Where were you coming from?”
“Plattsburgh. The movies at Champlain mall. I wanted to see that movie about Abraham Lincoln everybody’s talking about.”
All four men are silent for a moment, as if each is lost in his own thoughts. Finally Chip says, “Dad, we’ve got to ask you a couple of tough questions.” Jack and Buzz nod in agreement.
Connie’s heart is racing. He knows what’s coming.
Chip says, “It’s about the money in the bag.”
“What bag?”
Jack says, “The EMT guys gave me the bag, Dad, the gym bag, when they pulled you out of the truck. I didn’t open it till after you were in surgery. I wasn’t prying. I opened it in case there was a bottle in it that might’ve broke or something. Although I don’t think you were drinking,” he adds.
“No, I wasn’t! Not a drop all day! It was the snow and ice on the road that did it.”
Chip says, “We need to know where you got the money, Dad. There’s a lot of it. Thousands of dollars.”
Buzz says, “And we need to know why you were carrying your forty-five.”
“It’s not illegal,” Connie says to him. “Not yet, anyhow.”
Jack says, “But the gun and the money, they’re connected, aren’t they, Dad? I’ve been putting two and two together, you know. Connecting the dots, like they say. For instance, wondering where you got the money for those hearing aids that Medicaid wouldn’t pay for.”
“I’m doing okay money-wise. I had some savings, you know.”
Buzz says, “I know what goes on inside prison, Dad. It’s worse than anything you can imagine. I don’t want you there. But you’re looking at hard time. Armed robbery. You’ll be there the rest of your goddamn life. What the Christ were you thinking?”
Of the three, Buzz is the only one who looks sad. Jack’s face and Chip’s show no emotion, not even curiosity, but that’s because they’re trained police officers. Connie says, “I don’t know what you guys are talking about.”
Buzz says, “Dad, what the hell do you want us to do? What do you think we should do? What’s the right thing here, Dad?”
“You don’t have to do anything. As an American citizen I can carry my service pistol if I want, and I can carry my money around in cash in a goddamn gym bag if I want. Who can trust the goddamn banks these days anyhow?”
Jack says, “It’s not your money! It belongs to the Adirondack Bank branch in Lake Placid that was robbed this morning. Robbed by a guy in a ski mask and a Carhartt jacket with a gym bag that had a note in it that said, ‘Fill with cash, owner armed.’ The note’s still in the bottom of the bag, Dad. Under the money. I checked.”
“You checked? So you were snooping? Invading my privacy?”
Buzz says, “Jesus Christ, Dad, make sense! There’s two of us standing here who can arrest you! Is that what you want? To be arrested by your own sons? And make the third your prison guard?”
Connie looks across the room at the window and through the glass into the darkness beyond. He wonders if it’s late at night or very early in the morning. He says, “Sounds funny when you put it that way. Like I wanted it to happen.”
But it’s not what he wanted to happen. When his sons were little boys and their mother abandoned them all so she could go off to live with an artist in a hippie commune in New Mexico, Connie held it together with discipline and devotion to duty. All by himself, he held the fort and took perfect fatherly care of his sons. And after they graduated from high school he paid for Jack to go to college at Paul Smith’s and for Buzz at Plattsburgh State for those two years when he wanted to be a radiologist. He paid for Chip’s Hawaiian honeymoon with Joan. He even took care of them when they were in their early thirties by taking out a second mortgage and home equity loan, borrowing against his trailer and the land in Elizabethtown he inherited from his father, so his sons could buy their first houses. He wanted to take impeccable care of his sons, and he did. And after the boys grew up and no longer needed him to take care of them, he planned on continuing to hold the family together by being able to take impeccable care of himself. That was the long-range plan. They would still be a family, the four of them, and he would still be the father, the head of the household, because you’re never an ex-father, any more than you’re an ex-Marine.
But the way things turned out, he can’t take care of himself. How can he explain this to his sons without them thinking he’s pathetic and weak and stupid? First the real estate market tanked, and neither the trailer nor the land his father left him was worth as much as he owed on them, so even if he wanted to, he couldn’t sell the properties for enough to pay off the loans and move into a government-subsidized room or studio apartment in town. Who’d buy his trailer and land anyhow? He’d still owe the banks tens of thousands of dollars and would have to go on making the monthly payments. Then he lost his job at Ray’s Auction House. Without it he could no longer make the payments to the banks, and when he missed two consecutive months, the banks’ lawyers threatened to seize his trailer and the land. He was about to become an ex-father.
“How late is it?” he asks.
Jack says, “Late. Quarter of three.”
“What do you want us to do, Dad?” Buzz says again.
Connie asks them what they’ve done with the money, and Jack says it’s still in the gym bag, which he put on the shelf in the closet of the hospital room, where they hung his clothes and coat.
“What about my service pistol? Where’s it at?” A man’s gun is not to be disturbed, especially when the man is your father and a former Marine.
“It’s in the bag with the money,” Buzz says.
“So nobody else knows about this yet, except for you three?”
Jack says, “That’s right.”
Connie says, “Then nobody has to do anything about this tonight, right? It’s late. You boys go get some sleep, and tomorrow the three of you sit down together and decide what you want to do. It’s your decision, not mine. I know that whatever you do, boys, it’ll be the right thing. It’s what I raised you to do.”
They seem relieved and exhale almost in unison, as if all three have been holding their breath. Buzz reaches down and tousles the old man’s thin, sandy gray hair, as if ruffling the fur of a favorite dog. He says, “Okay. Sounds like a plan, Dad.”
“Yeah,” Chip says. “Sounds like a plan.”
Jack nods agreement. He’s the first out the door, and the others quickly follow. They catch up to him in the hallway, and the three walk side by side in silence to the elevator. They remain silent in the elevator and down two floors and all the way out to the parking lot. They stop beside Jack’s cruiser for a second and look back and up at the large square window of their father’s room. A nurse draws the blind closed, and the light in the room goes out.
Jack opens the door on the driver’s side and gets in. “You want to meet for breakfast and figure out what’s next?”
“Where?” Chip asks. “I’ve got the noon-to-nine shift, so breakfast is good.”
“M & M in Au Sable Forks at eight? The old man’s favorite breakfast joint.”
“I can make it okay,” Buzz says, “but I have to be on the road to Dannemora by nine.”
Chip says, “I guess we already know what’s next, don’t we?”
Buzz says, “His pistol, is it loaded?”
“I didn’t check,” Jack says, getting out of the car. Buzz is already walking very fast back toward the hospital entrance, and Chip is running to catch up, when from their father’s room on the second floor they hear the gunshot.
JAMES LEE BURKE
Going Across Jordan
FROM The Southern Review
WHO WOULD BELIEVE s
omebody could drive a car across the bottom of an ancient glacial lake at night, the high beams tunneling in electrified shafts of yellow smoke under the surface, but I stood on the bank and saw it, my head still throbbing from a couple of licks I took when I was on the ground and couldn’t protect myself. The sky was bursting with stars, the fir trees shaggy and full of shadows on the hillsides, the cherry trees down by the lake thrashing in the wind. Most of the people we picked cherries for lived in stone houses on the lakeshore, and after sunset you could see their lights come on and reflect on the water, but tonight the houses were dark and the only light on the lake was the glow of the high beams spearing across the lake bottom, the ginks that had chased us through the timber with chains afraid of what their eyes told them.
Flathead Lake was a magical place back in those days, all 28 miles of it, the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, so beautiful that when you stood on the shore at sunrise it was like day one of creation and you thought you might see a mastodon with big tusks coming down out of the high country, snow caked and steaming on its hide.
We called ourselves people on the drift, not migrants. Migrants have a destination. Buddy Elgin wasn’t going anywhere except to a location in his head, call it a dream if you like. He was the noun and I was the adverb. We never filed an income tax form, and our only ID was a city library card. Like Cisco Houston used to say, we rode free on that old SP. Tell me there’s anything better than the sound of the wheels clicking on the tracks and a boxcar rocking back and forth under you while you sleep. Buddy was like a big brother to me. Even though he was a water-walker and took big risks, he always looked out for his pals.
We worked beets in northern Colorado and bucked bales in the Big Horns during the haying season. I can still see Buddy picking up the bale by the twine and flinging it up on the flatbed, the bale as light as air in his hands, the muscles of his upper arms swollen like cantaloupes, a big Swedish girl in the baler not able to take her eyes off him. Buddy was on the square with women and never spoke crudely in front of them or about them, so any trouble we got into was political and never had female origins. Not until we got mixed up with a hoochie-coochie girl who could rag-pop your boots and leave you with a shine and a male condition that made it hard for you to climb down from the chair, pardon me if I’m too frank.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 Page 11
