“Sure will,” he said.
Whereupon she turned out the light and went back to the living room to watch a rerun of Hee Haw and Royce rolled over and went to sleep. Fell right off to sleep too. He never did have any trouble doing that.
Then just about exactly eight hours later he opened his eyes and he was thirty-eight years old. He got out of bed quietly, careful not to wake Essie, and he went into the bathroom and studied his face as a prelude to shaving it.
“Be double damned,” he said. “Thirty-eight years old and my life’s half over and I never yet did a single thing.”
While it is given to relatively few men to know in advance the precise dates of their death, a perhaps surprising number of them think they know. Some work it out actuarially with slide rules. Some dream their obituaries and note the date on the newspaper. Others draw their conclusions by means of palmistry or phrenology or astrology or numerology or some such. (Royce’s birthday, that we’ve been talking about, fell on the fourth of March that year, same as it did every year. That made him a Pisces, and he had Taurus rising, Moon in Leo, Venus in Capricorn, Mars in Taurus, and just a shade over three hundred dollars in the First National Bank of Schuyler County. He knew about the bank account but not about the astrology business. I’m just putting it in in case you care. He had lines on the palms of his hands and bumps on the top of his head, but he’d never taken any particular note of them, so I don’t see why you and I have to.)
It’s hard to say why Royce had decided he’d live to be seventy-six years old. The ages of his four grandparents at death added up to two hundred and ninety-seven, and if you divide that by four (which I just took the trouble to do for you) you come up with seventy-four and a quarter change. Royce’s pa was still hale and hearty at sixty-three, and his ma had died some years back at fifty-one during an electric storm when a lightning-struck old silver maple fell on her car while she was in it.
Royce was an only child.
Point is, you can juggle numbers until you’re blue in the face and get about everything but seventy-six in connection with Royce Arnstetter. Maybe he dreamed the number, or maybe he saw The Music Man and counted trombones, or maybe he was hung up on the Declaration of Independence.
Point is, it hardly matters why Royce had this idea in his head. But he had it, and he’d had it for as many years as he could remember. If you could divide seventy-six by three he might have had a bad morning some years earlier, and if he’d picked seventy-five or seventy-seven he might have skipped right on by the problem entirely, but he picked seventy-six and even Royce knew that half of seventy-six was thirty-eight, which was what he was.
He had what the French, who have a way with words, call an idée fixe. If you went and called it a fixed idea you wouldn’t go far wrong. And you know what they say about the power of a fixed idea whose time has come.
Or maybe you don’t, but it doesn’t matter much. Let’s get on back to Royce, still staring at himself in the mirror. What he did was fairly usual. He lathered up and started shaving.
But this time, when he had shaved precisely half of his face, one side of his neck and one cheek and one half of his chin and one half of his mustache, he plumb stopped and washed off the rest of the lather.
“Half done,” he said, “and half to go.”
He looked pretty silly, if you want to know.
Now I almost said earlier that the only thing noteworthy about the number thirty-eight, unless you happen to be Royce Arnstetter, is that it’s the caliber of a gun. That would have had a nice ironical sound to it, at least the first time I ran it on by you, but the thing is it would be a fairly pointless observation. Only time Royce ever handled a pistol in his whole life was when he put in his six months in the National Guard so as not to go into the army, and what they had there was a forty-five automatic, and he never did fire it.
As far as owning guns, Royce had a pretty nice rimfire .22 rifle. It was a pretty fair piece of steel in its day and Royce’s pa used to keep it around as a varmint gun. That was before Royce married Essie Handridge and took a place on the edge of town, and Royce used to sit up in his bedroom with the rifle and plink away at woodchucks and rabbits when they made a pass at his ma’s snap beans and lettuce and such. He didn’t often hit anything. It was his pa’s gun, really, and it was only in Royce’s keeping because his pa had taken to drinking some after Royce’s ma got crushed by the silver maple. “Shot out a whole raft of windows last Friday and don’t even recall it,” Royce’s pa said. “Now why don’t you just hold onto this here for me? I got enough to worry about as it is.”
Royce kept the gun in the closet. He didn’t even keep any bullets for it, because what did he need with them?
The other gun was a Worthington twelve gauge, which is a shotgun of a more or less all-purpose nature. Royce’s was double-barrel, side by side, and there was nothing automatic about it. After you fired off both shells you had to stop and open the gun and take out the old shells and slap in a couple of fresh ones. Once or twice a year Royce would go out the first day of small-game season and try to get himself a rabbit or a couple pheasant. Sometimes he did and sometimes not. And every now and then he’d try for a deer, but he never did get one of them. Deer have been thin in this part of the state since a few years after the war.
So basically Royce wasn’t much for guns. What he really preferred was fishing, which was something he was tolerably good at. His pa was always a good fisherman and it was about the only thing the two of them enjoyed doing together. Royce wasn’t enough of a nut to tie his own flies, which his pa had done now and then, but he could cast and he knew what bait to use for what fish and all the usual garbage fishermen have to know if they expect to do themselves any good. He knew all that stuff, Royce did, and he took double-good care of his fishing tackle and owned nothing but quality gear. Some of it was bought second-hand but it was all quality merchandise and he kept it in the best kind of shape.
But good as he was with a fishing rod and poor as he might be with a gun, it didn’t make no nevermind, because how in blue hell are you going to walk into a bank and hold it up with a fly rod?
Be serious, will you now?
Well, Royce was there at twenty minutes past nine, which was eleven minutes after the bank opened, which in turn was nine minutes after it was supposed to open. It’s not only the First National Bank of Schuyler County, it’s the only bank, national or otherwise, in the county. So if Buford Washburn’s a handful of minutes late opening up, nobody’s about to take his business across the street, because across the street’s nothing but Eddie Joe Tyler’s sporting goods store. (Royce bought most of his fishing tackle from Eddie Joe, except for the Greenbriar reel he bought when they auctioned off George McEwan’s leavings. His pa bought the Worthington shotgun years ago in Clay County off a man who advertised it in the Clay County Weekly Republican. I don’t know what-all that has to do with anything, but the shotgun’s important because Royce had it on his shoulder when he walked on into the bank.)
There was only the one teller behind the counter, but then there was only Royce to give her any business. Buford Washburn was at his desk along the side, and he got to his feet when he saw Royce. “Well, say there, Royce,” he said.
“Say, Mr. Washburn,” said Royce.
Buford sat back down again. He didn’t stand more than he had to. He was maybe six, seven years older than Royce, but if he lived to be seventy-six it would be a miracle, being as his blood pressure was high as July corn and his belt measured fifty-two inches even if you soaked it in brine. Plus he drank. Never before dinner, but that leaves you a whole lot of hours if you’re a night person.