The Heavenly Table

17

THANKS TO A beaten-down bank manager named Leonard Spindler who had actually been praying for the past several weeks that such an event might happen, Cane and his brothers took the Farleigh Savings & Trust without firing a single shot. For the past nine years, Leonard had been ensnared in an increasingly unhappy marriage to the daughter of Francis Gilbert, a moneyed and maniacal bully who also happened to own the bank, along with most everything else in the town and the surrounding area. Ironically, he even had a hold on the property of Thaddeus Tardweller, a despised second cousin from his mother’s side of the family. For Leonard, it wasn’t so much that Mirabelle was hard to get along with — from the first time he’d met her, he had found the poor girl as easy to manipulate as a cud-chewing cow — but that her father wouldn’t back off in his demand that they start turning out babies. However, no matter how many times a day they had intercourse, sometimes with Gilbert standing right outside the bedroom door urging them on with a snappy rhythm he beat on a snare drum, the results were nil. What had once looked like a golden opportunity for advancement — Leonard had grown up on a chicken farm out in the country, but had fled to Farleigh on his eighteenth birthday with aspirations of becoming a dandy — had slowly turned into an unremitting nightmare, and the bank manager’s nerves had become so overwrought that he now suffered from interminable crying jags that he had no control over. And the longer his father-in-law clamored for an offshoot, the worse the affliction became. Just that morning, standing in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea and dabbing at his eyes with a dish towel while Mirabelle frantically did her fertility exercises in the parlor, he heard the man say loudly, “Girl, I realize anybody can make a mistake, but I still can’t understand why you hang on to that no-account fool. When in the hell is he ever going to plant his seed in ye? I can’t wait around forever for a grandson, though God only knows what kind of pinheaded cretin that might turn out to be with ol’ Bucket of Tears as the father. I’m tellin’ you, Mirabelle, honey, you’d be best to go ahead and cut your losses now before he saps all your youth. I know one or two men over in Atlanta who still ask about ye.”

Leonard had endured a thousand such insults and harangues in silence over the years, but, as many tyrants realize too late, even a spineless toady sometimes has his limits. Although Francis Gilbert would have never dreamed that his son-in-law had the grit for such a scheme, Leonard had been slowly and methodically draining the bank coffers for the past eleven months, in preparation for his escape to gaudy, wide-open San Francisco. Once there, he planned, in no particular order, to become a complete fop, seek out the best ophthalmologist on the West Coast, and knock up the first woman with a good set of childbearing hips who’d spread her legs for him. Only one more thing was needed to perfect his plan, and that was a scapegoat.

And so, when the awkward and grubby trio entered the bank just a few minutes after Leonard unlocked the door, and announced their felonious intentions, it was all he could do not to welcome them with open arms. In fact, he almost felt sorry for them, as he watched the short fat one trip on the doorjamb, and the youngest accidently spill over a spittoon on his way to guard the front window with a shotgun. It was obvious to the bank manager that the oldest, tall and serious in a black frock coat a bit too big for him, was the brains behind the operation, but even he, after pulling a pistol from the waist of his ragged overalls, seemed at a loss over what to do next. Afraid that some customer might walk in and spoil everything, Leonard took it upon himself to hurry the heist along, first showing them the empty vault, and then dumping the money from the two cash drawers into a bag and setting it on the counter. After that, to give them time to make their getaway and also to cover his own ass, he pretended to faint.

The Jewetts were already two miles out of town by the time Leonard moseyed up the street to the sheriff’s office. On the way there, he went over the story he planned to tell one more time in his head, and then squeezed his eyes shut in front of Ollie’s Livery until the tears were practically cascading down his pale cheeks. Everyone in Farleigh knew that he bawled like a baby over the slightest upset, and he figured that anything less than full-scale blubbering might arouse suspicion. And what did it matter? After nine years of ridicule, what were one or two more embarrassments? He had thirty thousand dollars hidden under the floorboards on the back porch at home, and only he and the robbers knew how little cash had actually been in the bank that morning. Within a few days, he would be on a train bound for the West Coast with a suitcase of money and the last laugh.

The sheriff, Earl Cotter, a potbellied man with greasy gray hair and a vein-streaked nose shaped like a cork, was sitting at his desk leafing through a seed catalog when Leonard walked in wiping at his eyes. He shook his head at the powder-blue parasol the bank manager carried and the white carnation stuck in his buttonhole. Cotter was just about to ask Leonard why he was carrying a goddamn umbrella when there hadn’t been a drop of rain in three weeks, when it suddenly occurred to him that the man never left his post before lunchtime. Never. “What are you doin’ over here?” he said, furrowing his brow.

Leonard took several deep breaths as he wiped at his face with a handkerchief, then let out a sigh and whimpered, “It was awful. I thought for sure I was a dead man.”

Before the bank manager could finish his report, Cotter leaped up from his desk and grabbed a shotgun from the rack behind him. Hurrying to the door, he stepped out warily and pointed the gun up and down the street. But there wasn’t a sign of anything out there except for the Phillips boy bouncing on his damn pogo stick on the wooden walkway in front of Cinderella Vanbibber’s house. After the way she had harassed him since spring about birds landing on her fence posts, he was a little surprised the old bitch hadn’t already sent her maid over with a complaint about it. “How long since this happened?” he shouted at Leonard through the open doorway.

“Oh, fifteen, twenty minutes ago. No more than thirty.”

The sheriff walked back into the office, a dumbfounded look on his face. “And you just now tellin’ me!”

“Well, Earl, it takes a while to count to a thousand, even for a banker.”

“Count to a thousand? What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“That’s what I was told to do and I did it,” Leonard said. “You weren’t there, Sheriff. They were killers if I ever saw one.”

Cotter rolled his eyes. “I doubt very much if you’ve seen many killers in your lifetime, Leonard.”

“Well, I seen three this morning, I can tell you that.”

“So they was packin’ guns, was they?”

“Had ’em pointed right at me,” Leonard said, as he watched the sheriff pull open a desk drawer and rummage around for his pistol and holster.

“Anybody else see them?”

“No, I’d just unlocked the door when they barged in threatening to murder me.”

“How much they get?”

“All of it.”

“Jesus Christ, boy, how much was that?”

“Thirty thousand,” Leonard replied without batting an eye. “Thirty thousand, three hundred, and fifty-four, to be exact.”

“Lord, have mercy!” Cotter shrieked. “Ol’ Gib will probably cry his own self when he hears about this.” He hurried to load the gun. His fingers started to tremble just thinking about how Francis Gilbert would react if the thieves got away; he’d once seen him, over the course of several weeks, drive a clerk named Henry Loomis to suicide over an accounting mistake that amounted to sixteen cents. Outside, the sound of the pogo stick got a little closer. He dropped a bullet and dug in the drawer for another one.

“Yeah, Earl,” Leonard said, fighting to suppress a smile, “I reckon he might.”

“We’ll be damn lucky if he don’t fire the both of us,” the sheriff said. By this time, sweat was running down his face, dripping onto the desk. In his seventeen years of being Gilbert’s lawman, he’d never had to deal with anything this bad before, and he was already thinking the worst. If it ended up that he had to kill himself, he swore to God he’d take Leonard with him. And that goddamn pogo stick, too, while he was at it. He holstered the pistol and thrust the shotgun into the banker’s hands, then grabbed a rifle from the rack and turned toward the door. “Well, come on, boy, let’s go. Thanks to your sorry ass, they done got a good start on us.”

“You go on ahead,” Leonard said.

“What?”

“I need to go home and change first. Do you realize how much this suit cost?”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Cotter said, shaking his head. “We got us some robbers to catch.”

—

STAYING OFF THE main road, the Jewetts rode north for several hours before finally stopping in a thicket to give the horses a rest. Cane opened the green cloth bag the bank manager had provided them with and counted the money while they finished eating the rest of Tardweller’s ham. “Three hundred and fifty-four dollars,” he finally said.

Though Cob had never been able to comprehend exactly how numbers worked — three hundred and fifty-four didn’t mean any more to him than a million — he detected disappointment in his brother’s voice. But if the old boy at the bank wasn’t upset, then why should they be? Heck, he had been one of the nicest fellers they had ever met. He swallowed a piece of meat and said, “Well, heck, that ain’t bad.”

“Shit, that ain’t nothing but chickenfeed,” Chimney said. “Especially once you go to splittin’ it three ways. Why, a good whore probably costs two or three dollars.”

Cane began putting the money back in the bag. “I got a feeling that fancy boy pulled one over on us,” he said.

“How do ye figure?”

“Things just seemed a little too easy in there. Hell, he seemed almost glad to see us. I’m bettin’ he had the biggest part of it hid somewhere else.”

“I knew I should’ve killed the bastard,” Chimney spat.

“Fuck, that won’t work. How’s he gonna tell us where the money is if he’s dead?” Cane wiped some sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and squinted up at the huge yellow sun bearing down on them. In less than twenty-four hours they had become murderers, horse thieves, and bank robbers, and all they had to show for it was three hundred dollars? Christ Almighty, he’d planned on that safe being stuffed with more money than they could carry away.

“Yeah,” Chimney said, “I see what you mean. Just need to scare ’em a little. Like when Bloody Bill chopped that ol’ boy’s fingers off that claimed he couldn’t open the safe.”

“Well, maybe not quite…”

“But I thought we only had to rob the one?” Cob said. “Wasn’t that the—”

“I made a mistake,” said Cane.

“Don’t you worry,” Chimney went on. “Next bank we come across, I’ll have the boss man squeezin’ silver dollars out of his ass by the time I’m done with him.”

—

A COUPLE OF hours later, as they made their way through a thorny brake in single file, Cob turned in his saddle and looked back at Chimney. “Can I ask ye something?” he said.

“What’s that?”

“If’n one of them whores you talk about is worth two or three dollars, how much ye figure a good ham cost?”

“Oh, probably about the same, I reckon. They wouldn’t be much difference between a whore and a ham.”

“Well, then,” Cob said, “how many of them could we buy with the money we got?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a hundred.”

“Whew,” Cob exclaimed. “That sounds like a lot.”

“Yeah, it’d take a day or two to fuck that many.”

“No, I mean, that’s a lot of hams, ain’t it?”

Chimney laughed. “You’re goddamn right it is. Why, if ye was to eat that many hams, ye’d probably turn into a pig yourself.”

“Oh, that’d be fine with me,” Cob said. “All they do is lay around in the mud all day while somebody feeds ’em horseweeds and slop. Shoot, what more could a feller want out of life than that?”