“Dress rehearsal,” Hopp muttered.
“That’s right, kid,” Elam said, “you got the right idea. You just stick to the script I give you, and, well, pretend it’s an actual robbery. Otherwise I won’t be able to get a good idea of how the real robbery’ll go.”
“I won’t be part of it,” I said. “Of a robbery or a trial run or anything.”
Elam unbuttoned his jacket.
“I don’t care,” I said. “Threaten all you want. I don’t even think you have a gun under your arm, how do you like that? You just got out of jail. How could you have a gun? I’m too good a poker player to be bluffed, pal. So just run along. Just forget about it and go. Wheat and me will have no part of your bank robbery or anything else.”
Elam opened his jacket a little, as if he was warm and wanted to cool off. The metal of the gun butt caught some of the light of the dying sun from the window behind me and reflected.
I reflected, too. And after reflecting I said, “It’s not like you were asking us to be part of, uh, actually robbing the bank, I mean, it’s just a run-through, after all...”
Chapter 18
I wouldn’t have got in that car if I’d known it was stolen.
But I thought it was just a car. Just a car Elam and Hopp had arrived in at the lake cottage yesterday. Had I been thinking, and not just operating on automatic pilot, it would have occurred to me that Elam and Hopp had just got out of jail, and this car — a brand-new yellow Mustang — was a model that had not been on sale when Elam and Hopp went into jail a year ago, that had come on the market while they were inside, and since they were broke they couldn’t have bought it yesterday, so of course it was stolen, what else could it be but stolen?
Only none of that occurred to me till I sat in the stolen car in Wynning, Iowa, in front of the Wynning branch office of the nearby Lone Tree bank, at nine o’clock in the morning, waiting for Elam and Hopp to come out.
We had come down from Wisconsin in a two-car caravan, Wheat and me in the copper-color Volks, following Elam and Hopp in the yellow Mustang. I could have made a break for it, I suppose. I probably should have. I think the reason I didn’t was Hopp was turned around in the rider’s seat of the Mustang up ahead of us, staring at us the whole time with a look so full of meanness Peter Lorre could have learned something from it.
Wheat was in a talkative mood, but I wasn’t listening. He was alternating between excitement about our forthcoming adventure, and panic about said adventure’s illegality; but he never got to the hand-waving and my-mom’ll-kill-me stage, so I didn’t try to calm him down or even bother entering into conversation with him. I just drove. I had that crystal-clear, wide-awake feeling you can only have when you haven’t had any sleep for twenty-four hours; you are past being tired, and feel you are alert. You feel you are alert the way a drunk feels he’s witty.
It had been dark when we started out. I’d watched the dawn as we drove through Wisconsin on into Illinois, and the morning was turning out sunny and blue-skied by the time we hit Iowa. Elam kept the Mustang at a steady fifty-five, taking no chances. That was fine with me: I was in no hurry, though at the same time wished to hell it was over. Finally, we crossed a bridge over the Cedar River and Elam took a side road turn-off, which was as expected, since his plan called for a side route into Wynning, rather than taking the regular turn-off a few miles hence.
Soon we were pulling in behind the yellow Mustang down a gravel drive that led to an abandoned farmhouse, a two-story clapboard gutted by fire and beyond restoration. A barn stood nearby, a paint-peeling, gray building that had been untouched by the fire but was badly sagging and apparently not being used or if so just for storage or something. I parked the Volks on the far side of the barn, so that the car could not be seen from the blacktop road that passed by the farmhouse.
We gathered together, beside the Volks, and Elam told us one more time what it was we were each to do. We were dressed casually, Wheaty and I in cut-off jeans and tank-top tee-shirts, Elam and Hopp wearing unusually bright Hawaiian print sport-shirts and light summer slacks. It seemed odd to me that Elam and Hopp would dress so loudly, and I pointed that out, but Elam explained that the attention of the bank employees would be drawn to the shirts, not the faces of the men wearing the shirts. There was, evidently, a lot of psychology in bank robbing. There was also a lot of attention to detail in Elam’s run-through: Hopp was even going to carry the laundry bag into the bank, rolled up under his arm, the laundry bag that would be used to dump the money in on the real robbery.
Then I got in the Mustang, behind the wheel, while Elam got in on the rider’s side and Hopp climbed in in back. We left Wheat behind with his Volks. All of this was according to plan.
A little more than a mile later we were in Wynning. The side route into town brought us through a middle class residential neighborhood of older homes, ranging from modest one-story clapboards (usually white, with a screened-in porch) to nearly elaborate two-story gothic types, and most of those were white clapboard too, but not always: a red brick house broke the monotony now and again, and some of the less conservative residents had dared to paint their homes a color other than white... you know, something really daring, like a washed-out pastel yellow. Glancing down side streets I saw that the town seemed to be nothing but middle class: the lowliest residence around was an occasional trailer, and those sat in large, well-tended yards.
I also saw a church, or maybe I should call it a chapel; it was Methodist, and I thought of my father, and squirmed.
And then the residential area seemed to end before it began, and we were sitting at a stop sign looking out onto the smallest, least active Main Street imaginable.
Down to the right I could see the lumber yard and feed stores Elam had mentioned, with the grain elevator looming behind them; to the left I could see the towers of the oil company’s storage silos. In between was the world’s smallest business district. On the side of the street closest to us was the filling station and garage, where farm machinery was repaired and sold, all of that taking up a small city block. Next to that, across a narrow street, was a city park, which was for the most part a green open area, with a few trees around the edges; there was a small band shell and benches in front of it. The park took up somewhat more space than the nearby filling station and garage, having some room to stretch out, as there was no street cutting between it and its sprawling next-door neighbor, the oil company storage dump. By normal standards, the park was small, but by the standards of this tiny town, it was huge, and I found it somehow refreshing that Wynning, seemingly a very business and industry-oriented little community, had set such a relatively large section of itself aside for a park.
Directly across from the park, but staggered somewhat so that it was also across from the filling station and garage, was the long single block that made up the bulk of Wynning’s business district. On the corner straight across from us, as we sat at the stop sign, was the town’s only bar. Next to the bar was a Clover Farm grocery store.
Next to that was a general store of sorts, apparently a hardware store as much as anything. Then came a large appliance store, and finally, on the other corner, the branch office of the Lone Tree bank.
All of these stores were old; none of them had had their faces lifted. The buildings were brick and the store-fronts were wood and glass. Old, but scrupulously well-maintained. Wynning had looked the same way in 1925.
And clean. The whole damn town was frighteningly clean: you couldn’t find a candy wrapper or crushed cigarette package to save your life.