The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

Former Marine by Russell Banks

FROM A Permanent Member of the Family

AFTER LYING IN BED awake for an hour, Connie finally pushes back the blankets and gets up. It’s still dark. He’s barefoot and shivering in his boxers and T-shirt and a little hungover from one beer too many at 20 Main last night. He snaps the bedside lamp on and resets the thermostat from 55 to 65. The burner makes a huffing sound and the fan kicks in, and the smell of kerosene drifts through the trailer. He pats his new hearing aids into place and peers out the bedroom window. Snow is falling across a pale splash of lamplight on the lawn. It’s a week into April and it ought to be rain, but Connie is glad it’s snow. He removes his.45-caliber Colt service pistol from the drawer of the bedside table, checks to be sure it’s loaded, and lays it on the dresser.

By the time he has shaved and dressed and driven to town in his pickup, three and a half inches of heavy wet snow have accumulated. The town plows and salt trucks are already out. The plate-glass windows of the M & M Diner are fogged over, and from the street you can’t see the half-dozen men and two women inside eating breakfast and making low-voiced, sporadic conversation with one another.

By choice, Connie sits alone at the back of the room, reading the sports section of the Plattsburgh Press-Republican. He has known everyone in the place personally for most of their lives. They are all on their way to work. He, however, is not. He calls himself the Retiree, even though he never officially retired from anything and nobody else calls him the Retiree. Eight months ago he was let go by Ray Piaggi at Ray’s Auction House. Let go. Like he was a helium-filled balloon on a string, he tells people. He sometimes adds that you know the economy is in trouble when even auctioneers start cutting back, indicating that it’s not his fault he’s unemployed, using food stamps, on Medicaid, scraping by on social security and unemployment benefits that are about to run out. It’s the economy’s fault. And the fault of whoever the hell’s in charge of it.

Connie has already ordered his usual breakfast-scrambled eggs, sausage patty, toasted English muffin, and coffee-when his eldest son, Jack, comes through the door. Jack nods and smiles hello to the other diners like a man running for office and pats the waitress, Vivian, on the shoulder. He shucks his heavy gray bomber jacket and pulls off his winter trooper hat, hangs them on a wall hook next to his dad’s Carhartt and forest-green fleece balaclava, and takes the seat facing the door, opposite his dad.

“I was starting to think it was time to pack that stuff away,” Jack says.

Connie says, “One of my goddamn hearing aids just told me, ‘Battery low.’ Like I can’t tell when it’s dead and that’s why I’m getting no reception. Man my age, his batteries are always low, for chrissake. I don’t need no hearing aid to tell me.”

“Your hearing aids talk to you?”

“It’s a way to get me to buy new batteries before I really need them. I’ll probably buy fifty extra batteries a year, one a week, just to get my goddamn hearing aids to stop telling me my battery’s low.”

“Seriously, Dad, your hearing aids talk to you? You hearing voices?”

“Yeah, I’m a regular schizo. No, it’s these new computerized units Medicaid won’t subsidize. Over six grand! I shouldn’t have listened to that goddamn audiologist and bought the subsidized cheapos instead. With these, there’s a little lady inside whispers that your battery’s low. Also tells you what channel you’re on. I got five channels with these units-for listening to music, for quiet time, reverse focus, and what they call master. Master’s the human conversational channel. And there’s also one for phone. I can’t tell the difference between any of ’em, except phone, which when you’re not actually talking on the phone is like a goddamn echo chamber. It does help me hear with a cell phone, though.”

Vivian sets Connie’s platter of food and coffee in front of him. “That gonna be it, Conrad?”

“Please, Viv, for chrissake, don’t call me Conrad. Only my ex-wife called me Conrad, and thankfully I haven’t heard it from her in nearly thirty years.”

“I’m kidding,” she says without looking at him. “Connie,” she adds. She takes Jack’s order, oatmeal with milk and a cup of coffee, and heads back to the kitchen.

For a few seconds, while his father digs into his breakfast, Jack studies the man. Jack’s been a state trooper for twelve years and studies people’s behavior, even his seventy-year-old father’s, with a learned, calm detachment. “You seem sort of agitated this morning, Dad. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I was just teasing Viv about that Conrad business. But it is true, y’know, only your mother called me that. She used it to give me orders or criticize me. Like she was afraid I’d take advantage of her somehow if she got friendly enough to call me Connie.”

“You probably would’ve.”

“Yeah, well, your mother took off before I really had a chance to take advantage of her. Smart gal. She quit before I could fire her.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“You have to let it go, Jack. She didn’t want the job, and I did. In the end, everybody, including you boys, got what they needed.”

“You’re right, Dad. You’re right.” They’ve had this exchange a hundred times.

Vivian sets Jack’s coffee and oatmeal in front of him and scoots away as if a little scared of Connie, mocking him. Jack smiles agreeably after her and shakes out the front section of the newspaper and scans the headlines while he eats. Connie goes back to the sports page.

Jack says, “Looks like we got through March without another bank robbery. Maybe our boy has headed south, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He flips the front page over and goes on to national news.

After a few minutes, without looking up, Connie says, “You talk to Buzz and Chip recently?”

Jack looks over at his father as if expecting more, then says, “No, not in the last few days.”

“Everything the same with them these days?”

“More or less. Far as I know.”

“Wives and kids?”

“Yep, the same, far as I know. All is well. No news is good news, Dad.”

“I wouldn’t mind any kind of news, actually.”

“They’re busy, Dad. It’s easier for me, I don’t have a wife and kids. Plus Buzz has that long drive every day up to Dannemora and back, and Chip’s taking criminal justice courses nights at North Country Community College down in Ticonderoga. And they both live way the hell over in Keeseville. Don’t take it personally, Dad.”

“I don’t,” Connie says, and goes back to reading the sports page.

Jack finishes his oatmeal, shoves his bowl to one side, and cups his mug of coffee in his large red hands, warming them. He’s thinking. He suddenly asks, “You ever consider it a little weird that all three of us went into law enforcement? I sometimes wonder about it. I mean, it isn’t like you were a police officer. Like me and Chip. Or a prison guard like Buzz. I mean, you ran auctions.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget, I’m a former Marine. And you’re never an ex-Marine, Jack. So that was the standard you boys were raised by, the United States Marine Corps standard, especially after your mother took off. If my father had been a former Marine, I probably would have gone into law enforcement too. I always kind of regretted none of you boys were Marines.”

“Dad, you can’t regret something someone else did or didn’t do. Only what you yourself did or didn’t do.”

Connie smiles and says, “See, that’s exactly the sort of thing a former Marine would say!”

Jack smiles back. The old man amuses him. But he worries him too. The old man’s in denial about his finances, Jack thinks. He’s got to be worse than broke. Jack gets up from the table, walks to the counter, and tries to pay Vivian for both their breakfasts, but Connie sees what he’s up to. He jumps from his seat and slides between his son and the waitress, waving a twenty-dollar bill in her face, insisting on paying for both his and Jack’s meals.

Vivian shrugs and takes Connie’s twenty, just to get it out of her face.

She hands him his change, and father and son walk back to the table, where both men pull their coats and hats on. “You take care of the tip,” Connie says. “Make it big enough so you and I come out even and Vivian ends up forgiving me for being an asshole.”

“Dad, you sure you’re okay? I mean, financially? It’s got to be a little rough these days.”

Connie doesn’t answer, except to make a pulled-down face designed to tell his son he sounds ridiculous. Absurd. Of course he’s okay financially. He’s the father. Still the man of the house. A former Marine.

It’s a thirty-mile drive from Au Sable Forks to Lake Placid, forty-five minutes in good weather, twice that today. The roads are plowed and passable but slick all the way over-slowing to a creep through Wilmington Notch, where the altitude is more than 2000 feet and the falling snow is nearing whiteout.

It’s a quarter to ten when Connie pulls his white, two-wheel-drive Ford Ranger into Cold Brook Plaza. He’s filled the bed of the truck with a quarter ton of bagged gravel to give the vehicle traction in weather like this. The truck is seven years old, with a rust belt under the doors and along the seams of the bed. He parks it off to the windowless side of the Lake Placid branch of the Adirondack Bank, a low pop-up building not much larger than a double-wide. There are no other vehicles in the parking area. Nobody’s using the drive-through or the ATM. He notices in the employees’ lot behind the building a new Subaru Outback and one of those humpbacked Pontiac SUVs he hates looking at because they’re so ugly.

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.