And suppose I did tell the patrolmen: there was liable to be shooting that way, too.
See what I mean about the options at hand? Did you ever see such a bunch of lousy damn options in your life?
Then it occurred to me that if I was not going to leave, if I was not going to turn my back on the bank and walk away, I at least had to warn Elam and Hopp. I had to tell them not to come out of there with that bag of money slung casually over their shoulders.
So, with what I hoped was a nonchalant air, I walked back over and tried the door to the bank.
Locked.
Well. That was no surprise.
I knocked. Softly. Not wanting to unduly disturb the patrolmen sitting drowsily in their vehicle nearby.
No answer.
That was no surprise, either.
I kept at it. I knocked a bit louder. Just a bit.
And finally Elam’s voice, in a friendly tone, said, “I’m sorry, we’re closed this morning.”
“It’s me,” I said.
Elam cracked the door open.
“Take a look out front,” I whispered.
Elam looked. There was an almost imperceptible tightening around his eyes, but that was all. He did not blow. He was too professional for that, I guess.
“All right, kid. Turn around and face the street. Fine. Now lean against the building there. Good. I’m going to leave this door cracked open just a shade so I can keep talking to you. I’m gonna have to keep it low, kid, can ya hear me okay?”
“Yes.”
“Cover your mouth with your hand when you talk. Like you was yawning or coughing or something.”
I nodded.
There was a pause, and he said, “I guess you know what we’re doing in here.”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for sticking around.”
“Go to hell.”
“I know how you must feel, kid. When you get a chance, think of it from our point of view and maybe you’ll understand. For right now just hang loose a second and leave me think about this. Well. We obviously can’t come sashshaying out of here with a bag of money over our arm, can we? So okay. We wait it out a while. We wait and see if the Highway Patrol is staying around for something, or just making a short stop to kill some time. If things stay the same for longer than fifteen minutes, knock on the door again, and I’ll tell ya where we go from there. Got that, kid?”
“Listen, I’m leaving. The key’ll be in the ignition. I’m going to walk out and join Wheat at that farm and get out of here. You can’t say I ran out on you, ’cause I came up and warned you.”
“Kid. Stick around.”
I heard the door close.
Chapter 21
And then the concession wagon rolled in. I was still standing on the sidewalk, just getting ready to get back in the Mustang and “stick around,” like Elam suggested, when this dinosaur of a camper came rumbling down the street. The camper was white, but it was garishly painted with red, yellow and blue lettering that said, “El Tacomobile.”
“Gooooooood Eats, Hombres.”
“Burritos, Enchiladas and Tacos” and “Gringo Food, Too!” There were also bad paintings of little plump Mexicans wearing extravagant sombreros, sleeping under palm trees.
The Tacomobile pulled in two inches from the back bumper of the Mustang.
My mouth dropped open, and not from craving a taco. I walked unsteadily around the Mustang (there was a space of half a foot between it and the Highway Patrol car, so I could just squeeze through) and took a look at the front of the concession wagon, or rather the side of it, the part facing the street. There was more garish Tacomobile lettering on the bottom half, and more plump Mexicans taking siestas under palm trees; but the upper half was unpainted, as if they hadn’t gotten around to that yet, but then a panel dropped to reveal screened windows behind which food was cooked and served up and sold. The woman inside was a tiny middle-aged Chinese lady. Why was a Chinese lady running a Tacomobile, you ask? How should I know? I was busy wondering what a Tacomobile was doing pulled in behind the stolen Mustang, on an otherwise deserted street in Wynning, Iowa.
I was still wondering when the second concession wagon rolled in. It was much the same as the Tacomobile, only it
“Sno Cones,” and “Lemonade,” with poorly painted depictions of each. I mean, you had to sort of study it a while before deciding which picture went with which caption. I think the same artist did them as the Mexicans.
Along about then a band started to play.
From off in the distance. But not terribly far away, like from maybe two blocks. The song the band was playing was “Going Out of My Head,” performed in the style of John Phillip Sousa.
A marching band.
But what were they doing?
They were marching. And playing. They marched and played their way from the cafe two blocks down and ended up right there, in their stiff blue uniforms, all twenty-some of them, high school kids and a skinny young director with a sissy mustache, standing in front of the Wynning bank, the Highway Patrol car, the stolen Mustang, the Tacomobile and the cotton candy wagon. And me.
When they stopped playing, I asked the Chinese lady in the Tacomobile what was happening here.
She answered me in Chinese.
Then the director dismissed the band from what apparently had been a rehearsal, and they loosened their hot little collars and scattered around the street, chattering, shouting, mostly swarming around the two concession wagons. I backed away in horror. Some of these creatures were girls, but in those sexless uniforms it was hard to tell if anybody was human or not. A good-looking majorette with blond hair and a skimpy sparkly uniform was over talking to the director, but otherwise I felt engulfed by faceless, sexless blue uniforms.
“I told you to move your car,” somebody said, “and you wouldn’t listen.”
It was the Highway Patrolman with the dazzling badge, teeth and forehead.
“Well if you weren’t here for the day before,” he said, smiling that ugly smile you only find in people with no sense of humor, “you are now.”
And he walked away.
Across the street things were starting to happen.
I noticed the tent I’d seen those teenage boys starting to pitch was pitched. Some people were in the park. Not many, maybe half a dozen, men and women both, wearing clothes too formal and hot for the day, walking around in circles and looking official, carrying clipboards, wearing square plastic name badges.
I heard a scraping noise. Like an eight hundred pound man scraping a hundred pounds of fingernails across a four hundred pound blackboard. But it was only the two Highway Patrolmen, lugging this thing out into the street, hauling this huge saw-horse thing, the type you use to seal a street off with.
They were using it to seal off the street.
“Oh brother,” I said.
I glanced down in the other direction, to see if the street was sealed off that way, too.
It wasn’t. It wasn’t sealed off with a saw-horse thing. There was a bus, however, two blocks down, by the cafe, parked sideways in the street. The school bus the band came in, of course.
And over between the garage and the park, cars were parked in the street. Not along the street. In it. Cars belonging, apparently, to those official looking people wandering around the park with clipboards and plastic badges.
Right now one of those official-looking people, a male, was supervising while two of the teenage boys hung a banner over the entrance of the big tent.
The banner said:
There was only one thing I could think of to do. I bought some cotton candy.