He answered without the question. “Damn thing won’t lock itself open. Course Baker checks to see it’s locked after the safe’s open. Don’t blow my dirty suspicions to Marullo, will you? He’s too solvent.”
“Okay, Morph,” I said and turned to my own door on my own side of the alley, and looked around for the cat that always tried to get in, but he wasn’t there.
Inside, the store looked changed and new to me. I saw things I had never seen before and didn’t see things that had worried and irritated me. And why not? Bring new eyes to a world or even new lenses, and presto—new world.
The leaky valve of the old box toilet hissed softly. Marullo wouldn’t get a new valve because the water wasn’t metered and who cared. I went to the front of the store and lifted a slotted two-pound weight from the old-fashioned balance scale. In the toilet I hung the weight on the chain above the oaken tassel. The toilet flushed and kept on flushing. I went back to the front of the store to listen and could hear it bubbling and scolding in the bowl. It’s a sound you can’t mistake for anything else. Then I returned the weight to its bar on the scale and took my place in my pulpit behind the counter. My congregation in the shelves stood waiting. Poor devils, they couldn’t get away. I particularly noticed the Mickey Mouse mask smiling down from its box in the pew of breakfast foods. That reminded me of my promise to Allen. I found the extension hand for grabbing things from top shelves and took a box down and stood it under my coat in the storeroom. When I was back in the pulpit, the next Mickey Mouse in line smiled down at me.
I reached behind the canned goods and brought out the gray linen sack of small change for the cash register, then, remembering something, reached farther until my hand found the old greasy .38-caliber revolver that had been there ever since I can remember. It was a silvered Iver Johnson[40] with most of the silver peeled off. I broke it and saw the cartridges green with verdigris. The cylinder was so sluggish with ancient grease that it turned with difficulty. I put the disreputable and probably dangerous piece in the drawer below the cash register, pulled out a clean apron, and wrapped it around my middle, folding the top over neatly to conceal the strings.
Is there anyone who has not wondered about the decisions and acts and campaigns of the mighty of the earth? Are they born in reasoning and dictated by virtue or can some of them be the products of accidents, of daydreaming, of imagining, of the stories we tell ourselves? I know exactly how long I had been playing a game of imagining because I know it started with the Morph’s rules for successful bank robbery. I had gone over his words with a childish pleasure adults ordinarily will not admit. It was a play game that ran parallel with the store’s life and everything that happened seemed to fall into place in the game. The leaking toilet, the Mickey Mouse mask Allen wanted, the account of the opening of the safe. New curves and angles dropped into place, the Kleenex nudged in the door lock in the alley. Little by little the game grew, but entirely in the mind until this morning. Putting the scale weight on the toilet chain was the first physical contribution I had made to the mental ballet. Getting the old pistol out was the second. And now I began to wonder about the timing. The game was growing in precision.
I still carry my father’s big silver Hamilton railroad watch with thick hands and big black numbers, a wonderful watch for time-telling, if not for beauty. This morning I put it in my shirt pocket before I swept out the store. And I checked the time so that at five minutes to nine I had the front doors open and had just taken the first deliberate broom strokes at the sidewalk. It’s amazing how much dirt accumulates over a weekend, and what with the rain, the dirt was slush.
What a wonderful precision instrument is our bank—like my father’s railroad watch. At five minutes of nine Mr. Baker came into the wind from Elm Street. Harry Robbit and Edith Alden must have been watching. They backed out of the Foremaster Grill and joined him midstreet.
“Morning, Mr. Baker,” I called. “Morning, Edith. Morning, Harry.”
“Good morning, Ethan. You’re going to need a hose for that!” They entered the bank.
I leaned my broom in the store entrance, took the weight from the scale, went behind the cash register, opened the drawer, and went through fast but deliberate pantomime. I walked to the storeroom, hung the weight on the toilet chain. Hooked the skirt of my apron over the belly band, put on my raincoat, and stepped to the back door and opened it a crack. As the black minute hand of my watch crossed twelve the clock bell of the firehouse began bonging. I counted eight steps across the alley and then in my mind twenty steps. I moved my hand but not my lips—allowed ten seconds, moved my hand again. All this I saw in my mind—I counted while my hands made certain movements—twenty steps, quick but deliberate, then eight more steps. I closed the alley door, took off my raincoat, unhooked my apron, went into the toilet, took the weight off the chain and stopped the flushing, moved back of the counter, opened the drawer, opened my hatbox and closed and strapped it, went back to the entrance, took up my broom, and looked at the watch. It was two minutes and twenty seconds past nine o’clock; pretty good, but with a little practice it could be cut under two minutes.
I was only half finished with the sidewalk when Stoney, the chief constable, came across from the Foremaster Grill.
“Morning, Eth. Gimme a quick half-pound of butter, pound of bacon, bottle of milk, and a dozen eggs. My wife run out of everything.”
“Sure thing, Chief. How’s everything?” I got the things together and snapped open a bag.
“Okay,” he said. “I come by a minute ago but I heard you was in the can.”
“It’ll take me a week to get over all those hard-boiled eggs.”
“That’s the truth,” said Stoney. “Man’s got to go, he’s got to go.”
So that was all right.
As he was about to leave, he said, “What’s with your friend, Danny Taylor?”
“I don’t know—is he on one?”
“No, he looked pretty good, fairly clean. I was sitting in the car. He had me witness his signature.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Had two papers but turned back so I couldn’t see.”
“Two papers?”
“Yeah, two. He signed twice and I witnessed twice.”
“Was he sober?”
“Seemed like. Had his hair cut and a necktie on.”
“I wish I could believe it, Chief.”
“So do I. Poor fella. I guess they never stop trying. I got to get home.” And he galloped away. Stoney’s wife is twenty years younger than he is. I went back and brushed the larger pieces of filth off the sidewalk.
I felt lousy. Maybe the first time is always hard.
I was right about the heavy custom. It seemed to me that everybody in town had run out of everything. And since our deliveries of fruits and vegetables didn’t come in until about noon, the pickings were pretty slim. But even with what we had, the customers kept me jumping.
Marullo came in about ten o’clock and for a wonder he gave me a hand, weighing and wrapping and ringing up money on the cash register. He hadn’t helped around the store for a long time. Mostly he just wandered in and looked around and went out—like an absentee landlord. But this morning he helped to open the crates and boxes of fresh stuff when it came in. It seemed to me that he was uneasy and that he studied me when I wasn’t looking. We didn’t have time to talk but I could feel his eyes on me. I thought it must be hearing that I had refused the bribe. Maybe Morph was right. A certain kind of man, if he hears you have been honest, probes for the dishonesty that prompted it. The what’s-he-getting-out-of-it? attitude must be particularly strong in men who play their own lives like a poker hand. The thought gave me a little chuckle but a deep one that didn’t even raise a bubble to the surface.
40
Iver Johnson: “Suicide Special” pocket pistol produced between 1880 and the early twentieth century.