The Isle of Youth: Stories

LESSONS

1.

There are four of them.

Dana, Jackie, Pinky, and Cora are cousins. Pinky is also Dana’s little brother. They call themselves the Gorillas because all gangs need a name — see Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Stopwatch Gang, Winter Hill Gang — and also because they wear gorilla masks during their holdups. They are criminals, but they still have rules: no hostages, small scores, never stay in one town for more than a week. It’s late summer and they’re roving through the Midwest, from motel to motel, making just enough to keep going. Dana watches the impossibly flat landscapes of Lafayette and Oneida pass through the car window and wonders how they all ended up here. Why didn’t they go to school and get regular jobs and get married and live in houses? The short answer: they are a group of people committed to making life as hard as possible.

Cora says they need to think bigger. No more knocking over delis and drugstores and dinky banks. They need to do a real heist. There are millions to be made, if they could just grow some balls. Jackie has simpler desires. She wants a boyfriend and a set of acrylic nails. Pinky is thirteen and wants to build a robot. Dana is more about what she doesn’t want, as in: she doesn’t want anyone to go to jail or die.

In L.A., a gang of female bank robbers have been making headlines. They wear Snow White masks and carry semiautomatics. Witnesses have reported them doing tricks with their guns during heists. They’re rumored to be retired Romanian acrobats. Naturally, the press loves them. They’ve been nicknamed the Go-Go Girls.

“Why aren’t we ever on TV?” Cora complains one night. They’re in a motel in Galesburg. They have plans for the Farmers & Mechanics Bank on Main Street. Dana lies on one of the musty twin beds; her cousins are curled up on the other. Cora is green-eyed and lean with cropped auburn hair, like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Jackie is shaped like a lemon drop. Her dark, wide-set eyes remind Dana of a well-meaning cow. Pinky is working on his robot in the bathroom. He’s been collecting materials from gas station and motel Dumpsters: pins, wires, batteries, little black wheels. Earlier, Dana stood in the doorway and watched him screw two metal panels together. He sat cross-legged on the floor, his lips puckered with concentration. The overhead light flickered and buzzed. The spaces between the shower tiles were dark. She’d never seen him work so hard on anything before.

“Those are the kind of people who end up in shoot-outs with the police,” Dana tells Cora. The Go-Go Girls have just stolen two million in diamonds from a bank in Beverly Hills. Dana picks up the remote and changes the channel to a cooking show. A woman is finishing a dessert with a blowtorch. Dana closes her eyes and listens to Pinky rattle around in the bathroom. Did they want a shoot-out with the police? She considers the Dalton Gang and John Dillinger. Is that what they want, to bleed to death on the street? The room is hot. The smell of burning rubber wafts through the bathroom door. No, she decides. No, it is not.

There is a river in Elijah, Missouri, that always appears in her dreams. They all grew up in Elijah. In this river they learned to float. Dana would stare up at the clouds and imagine they were spaceships or trains. In this river they would dive and search the bottom for smooth, flat stones. In real life it’s a slender, slow-moving river, but in her dreams it’s as wide as the Mississippi and silver, as though it’s made of melted-down coins. From the shore she sees a raft with no one on it. She wants to get on the raft, but doesn’t know how.

That night she wakes sweaty and breathless. She sits up. Pinky is next to her, asleep on top of the covers. He’s rangy and sharp-elbowed. His arms are folded under his head. His mouth is pink and sticky from chewing red hots. She touches his pale hair — towheaded, her father used to say — and feels heat rising from his scalp. Outside, she hears rain falling. She lies back down. She tells herself to go to sleep. She tells herself to stop dreaming.

In the morning, they case the Farmers & Mechanics Bank. They drive around the block twice in their Impala and then park at the pizza place across the street. To their left is a small roundabout with a patch of green and two withered trees in the center. It’s called Central Park, which makes Dana think of the real Central Park in New York City, a place she will probably never see. A truck rattles past. The exhaust pops and Dana twitches in her seat. Cora is driving. Dana is sitting next to her. Jackie and Pinky are in the back and of course her brother is trying to wind two wires together. Dana imagines that when the Go-Go Girls case, it’s all high-tech, with thermal imaging binoculars and fancy cameras. They just have their eyes.

They watch people come and go from the bank. They consider the flow of traffic on the street. They send Pinky in to pretend he’s filling out a deposit slip. In Central Park, an American flag snaps in the breeze. A church bell calls out the hour. The bank is unassuming, just a brick building with tinted windows. When Pinky returns to the car, he gives a report on the interior layout, the number of tellers, and the points of exit and entry. According to him, there are only two tellers and they’re both fat and slow. Dana watches a young woman emerge from the bank; a white envelope is tucked under her arm and she’s holding a little boy by the hand. It startles Dana to think that the course of your life could depend on when you decide to cash a check or buy a roll of quarters.

“This one is going to be a breeze,” she says.

“Where’s the fun in easy?” Cora replies. She turns on the radio and surfs until she finds the news. Tornadoes are in the forecast. Last night one of the Go-Go Girls was spotted at a nightclub in Malibu. There was a big chase with the police. Naturally, she escaped.

“A nightclub!” Cora slaps the steering wheel. “She was probably sitting in some guy’s lap. She was probably drinking champagne.”

“Champagne gives me a headache,” Jackie says from the back.

“That’s because you’ve never had the good stuff,” Cora tells her.

“How would you know what the good stuff is?” Jackie replies.

At the motel, they clean their guns. Except for Pinky, who locks himself in the bathroom. They can hear him banging around in there. It sounds like he’s acquired a hammer and a drill. Dana doesn’t know where he could have gotten those things.

“He really wants to finish that robot before we leave town,” she says.

“What if someone has to pee? Or take a shower?” Cora asks. “What then?”

“Your brother is so weird,” Jackie says.

Their guns are old Smith & Wesson revolvers. They wipe them down with the white face towels they found in the motel room. Afterward they take out their gorilla masks and line them up on a bed. Black synthetic fur surrounds the rubber faces. The mouths are open, showing off plump pink tongues and fangs. They put the masks on. They pick up their guns and point them at each other. They aren’t loaded, so they pull the triggers and listen to the hollow click. Bang, Dana whispers into the sweet-smelling rubber. She can see a bullet flying from the chamber and pinging her right in the forehead. She can see it burrowing into her brain. When people get shot in the movies, they flail and scream and stagger. Sometimes they even pretend to be dead and then come back to life. But that’s not what it would be like at all, Dana thinks. She imagines it’s just like turning out a light.

2.

In Elijah, they lived on a farm. The property held two gray houses, a chicken coop, and a dilapidated barn. The metal skeletons of cars rusted in the front yard. The barn was filled with dust and moldy straw. On the edge of the property, a small cross made from sticks had been pushed into the ground. It was a grave, but Dana never knew who it belonged to.

The mothers — her and Pinky’s, Cora and Jackie’s — were both the same: long-faced women scrubbed free of dissent and desire. Dana never heard either of them make a joke or sing. One of her earliest prayers was asking God to not let her end up like them. Cora and Jackie’s father was gone. Years ago, he had driven away in the middle of the night. Dana remembered him being like lightning cracking in the sky, quick and mean. Her own father was stern but quiet, the kind who didn’t need to raise his voice to incite fear. Once, during a homeschooling lesson, she learned 95 percent of the ocean was unexplored and thought her father must be like that, too: filled with dark, unseen caverns. Sometimes she longed for a father that popped and exploded like Cora and Jackie’s had. At least then you knew what he was capable of.

Little was actually farmed on the farm. Her father didn’t believe in working for pay. That was the government’s system, he said. They were sovereign citizens. They ate homemade bread, snap beans that grew on vines, peppers, collards, and venison; they drank water that came from a well. They had chickens and a milk cow and a white goat. By the time the girls were seven, they knew how to handle a gun. They could hit the center of a bull’s-eye. They could shatter the clay pigeons Dana’s father tossed into the air. Every Sunday they had target practice because that was God’s day and He would want them to be prepared. Cora always had great aim. Pinky never liked the shooting. He got his nickname from the way he flushed whenever he fired. He didn’t like the weight of a gun in his hands. He didn’t like the noise. He knew better than to say these things in front of his father, of course, but he told Dana when they were alone. She would lick her index finger and wipe dirt from his face and tell him that he would get used to it in time.

Once, when Dana was thirteen and Pinky was eight, their father took them turkey hunting. They were instructed to climb a tree and stay put until he called. From the branches of a chestnut oak, they watched him crouch in the tall grass and lure the turkey with a whistle. The bird moved slowly through the woods. Fall leaves crunched under its scaly gray feet. When it appeared, its tail feathers were spread into a beautiful rust-colored fan. Dana thought he looked big and regal, and for the first time the gap between what she knew and what the animal knew seemed cruel. It took only one bullet for the turkey to fall, heavy and silent as a sack of grain. Pinky put his hands over his eyes. Dana rubbed his back. When their father called, she hesitated. She pretended they were invisible in the tree. He kept calling, but his voice never sparked with anger. It wasn’t patience, though. Dana understood that it was something else. When they finally went to him, he rolled the turkey over and showed where the bullet had gone in. He made them kneel beside the bird and touch the hole. It was gummy and warm. He told them fear of death was their greatest human weakness. He pulled a brown feather, the end tipped with white, from the turkey’s tail and stuck it in Dana’s hair.

The winter the girls turned eighteen, everything changed. A notice came in the mail. No one had paid taxes on the farm in decades and now the government was saying it owned the land. Her father tore up the first notice, because he didn’t believe in taxes, but they kept coming. Dana saw the envelopes stamped with URGENT that he brought home from the P.O. Soon they had just sixty days to pay. That was when their training became serious. They had target practice daily. They had drills where they would run along the perimeter of the property, rifles in hand. Even Pinky had to come. He always lagged behind the girls. Dana worried about him slipping on the ice and shooting himself in the foot. They would go out bundled in parkas and leather gloves and hunting caps, their breath making white ghosts in the air. After the first hour her arms would burn from the weight of the gun, but she would keep going. They were given a pair of binoculars and told to look out for strangers. Every night their father waited up in the kitchen for something to happen, for someone to come. Every night they recited a prayer that was meant for the eve of battle: His days are as a shadow that passeth away / touch the mountains, and they shall smoke / Cast forth lightning, and scatter them. During a snowstorm, Dana said she didn’t see how anyone from the government could find them in this weather, and her father pointed out that snowfall could give the enemy perfect cover. That night, he asked her to wait up with him. He kept opening the front door and looking outside. Snow gusted into the house and padded the hallway with white. Flecks of ice got stuck in his dark eyebrows and hair. He showed her a pamphlet newspaper called The Embassy of Heaven, which had a Bible quote on the cover: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.” He said he had been writing to the newspaper and asking for help.

“Help with what?” They were sitting at the kitchen table. A rifle lay across his lap. Last week he’d torn out the landline and now a bundle of red and green wires dangled from the kitchen wall. They had a radio that got two stations, local news and gospel music; in the background she could hear the drone of an organ. She kept telling herself that the tax notices and her father’s new habits would all pass eventually, like a hunting season.

“With the soul of this land,” he told her. “With the soul of this family.”

They’d turned the generator off for the night and the kitchen was cold. Dana had wrapped herself in a wool blanket. The room was lit by an oil lamp. In the half-dark, she could see how much her father’s face had changed. The crescents under his eyes had hollowed out; his pupils looked darker, his cheekbones and chin sharper. His skin carried the sheen of a light sweat, even though it was freezing outside. The surface was falling away. She was finally seeing what lay beneath.

No one from the bank or the government ever came to Elijah. The snow kept falling. The river stayed frozen. By February the notices had stopped appearing in the mail. It seemed they had been forgotten. Still things did not go back to the way they were before. Dana’s father thought it was a trick. He started working on a secret project in the barn. His face kept changing. At night she could hear her parents arguing and sometimes Dana would find her mother crying as she collected eggs from the chicken coop or squeezed milk from the cow. Both the mothers seemed exhausted by the vigilance they’d been required to keep. They lost the energy for homeschooling. When they gave the children their schoolbooks and sent them away, Dana’s father didn’t notice.

Of course, the children weren’t really children anymore. There was only so much time they could spend shooting skeet and patrolling the property and flipping through musty textbooks. The idle time sparked a curiosity they had never felt before; it was as though they had each swallowed an ember and now it sat simmering in their stomachs. One afternoon Cora had this idea to wait on the road for a car to pass. They had some sense of what the outside world was like. They had accompanied Dana’s father on trips to the farm store and the P.O. in West Plains. Once a month they went with the mothers to Fairfield’s Discount Grocery, just a few miles down the road in Caulfield. Every fall they drove to visit Dana’s grandparents, who had a computer and a TV, in Arkansas. But they had never done anything on their own, just the four of them.

After an hour of waiting, a truck rolled by and they hitched a ride to Miller’s One Stop in Tecumseh. They wandered the dusty gas station aisles. Under the glare of fluorescent lights, Dana stared at the rows of Cokes and the freezer full of ice-cream sandwiches. Before they hitched a ride back, Cora pocketed a tube of Chapstick and a plastic comb. At home, they mashed the Chapstick into Pinky’s hair and then combed it so it stood upright.

On another outing, they discovered that, five miles beyond the gas station, there was a town with a movie theater and a liquor store. The theater had an old-fashioned marquee and two screens. One of the films was always R-rated. The girls started talking the liquor store owner into selling them cigarettes; Pinky was the lookout. They would smoke behind the store and then toss the butts into a field. Once, they let Pinky smoke. He coughed and dropped the cigarette and Cora flicked his ear. They were always back well before dark. Their parents didn’t seem to know they’d been gone, or catch the strange smells they brought home. The farm was more than two hundred acres, and Dana figured they thought their children were out on the land, like they’d always been. But their children were learning quickly. They were learning that the outside world and the pleasures it held weren’t so bad. They were learning that they had never really believed in God; they had only ever believed in fear.

After they stole a map of American highways from the gas station, they spent hours sitting on the floor of Pinky and Dana’s room, tracing the lines out to California and Oregon and Florida.

“Here.” Cora lay on her side and pointed at San Luis. She had been eating sugar cubes from a cardboard box and her fingertip glistened. “That’s where we should go.”

Jackie was interested in traveling south, to New Orleans or Fort Lauderdale, but Cora said those places were too hot. Dana was intrigued by the small patchwork of northern states. They had studied geography during homeschooling, but now they were looking at the map in an entirely new light, as being full of places they might one day go.

“Too cold,” Cora said when Dana touched the hook of land extending out of Massachusetts.

“Do you promise to take me with you?” Pinky asked. He didn’t look his age, thirteen. He could have passed for ten or eleven. He reminded Dana of a rabbit; he had the same nervous nature and quick-beating heart. He never requested any particular place. He just wanted to make sure he wasn’t left behind.

“We’ll see.” Cora ran her finger along the edge of California.

“Of course we’ll take you,” Dana said. He wasn’t cut out for life in Elijah. It was too rugged, with the target practice and the long winters and the dead animals. She didn’t yet know that he would be even more ill-prepared for the life she and her cousins would choose.

One night, in the early spring, they packed a single suitcase, hitched a ride to West Plains, and kept going. That was six months ago. Their parents never came looking for them, or if they did, they must not have looked very hard. Maybe they thought their children had fallen in with the government or the devil and were beyond hope. Or maybe they just didn’t know how to search.

At first Dana thought leaving Elijah meant getting away from how things were on the farm, but now she thinks the past is like the hand of God, or what she imagines the hand of God would be like if God were real: it can turn you in directions you don’t want to be turned in. They are still in a battle with the laws of the land. The laws that say they shouldn’t steal or point guns at people. And she feels the same resistance to these laws that her father must have felt toward paying taxes. Why not do these things? she found herself thinking. Who is going to stop us?

Their first robbery was at a feed-and-grain store. They wanted money to buy a used car. It was so simple. They had stolen a shotgun from the bed of a truck they’d hitched in. All they had to do was walk inside. Dana told the teenage boy behind the counter to empty his register because that was a line she’d heard in one of those R-rated movies. She called him a cocksucker, too, since criminals seemed to say that all the time and she wanted him to know that she was to be taken seriously.

The boy gave them everything he had. Feed-and-grain stores aren’t used to being robbed.

3.

The night before they hit the bank, Pinky tests his robot in the parking lot. Dana is the only one interested enough to watch. The floodlights are on; tiny bugs hover around the glow. The robot is covered in a pillowcase. It stands on the black asphalt like a ghost. Dana is smoking one of Jackie’s cigarettes. She doesn’t smoke much anymore, but it’s the night before a job and that always makes her nervous. Once the thing is started, there’s no sense in worrying because it’s done, it’s over. You can’t rewind. But being on the edge, that’s the hardest part. It’s like standing in front of a burning building and knowing that it won’t be long before you have to walk inside.

She sits on the ground and watches her brother peel away the pillowcase. The robot looks like a kid’s science project. It has a round silver head and black buttons for eyes, an economy-size tomato soup can for a body, and large plastic suction cups for feet. It doesn’t have any arms. Dana realizes that, for some reason, whenever she thinks of a robot, the first thing that comes into her mind are its arms.

“What do you think?” Pinky says.

“Nice work.” Dana flicks the cigarette into the lot.

He tweaks some wires and the robot starts lurching in Dana’s direction. It squeaks and sighs. A suction cup slips forward. It’s working! She can’t believe it. She stands up and begins to applaud. She feels proud of her brother for building something. For finding a way to escape his circumstances.

The robot takes one full step before toppling to the ground. The eyes pop off and slide under a car. The head gets dented. Pinky rights it and adjusts the wires, but he can’t bring it back to life. Dana stops clapping. She sits down on the sidewalk.

He carries the robot over to her. “Do you want to hold it?”

“Sure.” She holds it away from herself. It’s surprisingly light.

“On TV people build robots that can talk.” Pinky licks his lips.

“It probably takes a lot of practice,” she says.

An old woman with flame-red hair shuffles past and disappears into a motel room. Above them Dana hears slamming doors.

“I don’t want to leave,” Pinky says. “I want to stay here and keep practicing.”

“You want to stay in Galesburg?”

Pinky tells her that whenever they leave a place, he worries they won’t make it to the next town. He worries the car will break down and no one will give them a ride and they’ll starve to death or get heatstroke or something equally horrible. He’s breathless. His eyes are glassy. She pictures his rabbit heart pulsing under his ribs. Probably leaving him in Galesburg would be the best thing for him, though she knows she could never do such a thing. She was the one who took him away from the farm and now she has to live with the consequences.

She gives the robot back to him. She doesn’t tell him that if they die, it won’t be from starving to death in their car. Instead she says everything is going to be fine, just like she used to in Elijah. No one is going to die. Soon he’ll have all the time in the world to build a new robot.

“Does this one have a name?” she asks.

“Donald.” He squeezes the robot’s metal stomach and asks Dana what she thought their father was building in the barn.

Dana shrugs. She’s never given much thought to what he was doing. She just remembers looking out her window and seeing him trudge into the mouth of the barn at dawn and not emerging until after dark. His skin would be caked in dust, straw caught in his hair. But mainly she had been preoccupied with figuring out how to live her own life, with how to spend her time. Dana wonders if her father is still working on his project in the barn, whatever it was. She imagines going back to Elijah one day and finding him a shrunken old man, and feels an ache shoot through her chest.

“I snuck in there once and watched him.” Pinky describes pliers and cords and strips of metal. He talks about smelling smoke and seeing tiny silver sparks. “I think he was building a robot. I think that’s what he wanted to do.”

Dana looks at her brother and feels woozy. She never should have taken him along. It was a game at first, but now it’s something much more serious and he is becoming an attachment she doesn’t need.

“You know what they say in the movies?” she asks him.

“What?”

“They say you have to be cool.” She can see a man in a ponytail delivering the line, but can’t remember which movie it’s from.

“Okay.” He’s staring at the ground. She can tell she’s not getting through.

“Say it to me.”

He keeps hugging the robot. In his arms it looks like a heap of trash. It’s only recently occurred to Dana that some people might call what she did — taking her brother away from their parents — kidnapping.

“Be cool,” he tells her without looking up.

“You got it,” she says.

4.

Dana was questioned by the police only once. It didn’t have anything to do with the Gorillas. Rather, she was a witness to a hit-and-run. This was two months ago, in Jefferson City. She had just walked out of a bank the Gorillas were casing and was waiting to cross the street. A car ran a red light and struck a girl on a bicycle. The girl was dead by the time the ambulance came. Dana could remember the twisted handlebars and the crushed bell. She could remember the peculiar angle of the girl’s torso and her open eyes. Her lips were parted. Her teeth were straight and white. She was still wearing her helmet. She looked like a life-size doll someone had left in the street. Pedestrians gathered. The police were called. Dana tried to slip away, but someone identified her as a witness and she was taken down to the station. She got to ride up front with the officer. She wondered what Cora or Jackie would think if they saw her, if they would think she had turned on them.

At the station, the officer brought her a cup of coffee. He was handsome, with his broad shoulders and gelled hair. So this is the lair of the enemy, Dana thought as they settled into an interrogation room. She held the warm foam cup with both hands. If only this officer knew what she had done, what she was going to do, she would not be answering questions over coffee. There would be handcuffs and threats. She figured that one day he would see her face on the news and feel like a dolt.

He asked her the usual questions: what she’d seen, if the light had been red, if she’d gotten a look at the driver, if she remembered the license plate. She answered honestly. She hadn’t seen anything but the collision itself, hadn’t taken in anything but the shock of the crash. She didn’t mention that she hadn’t been paying closer attention because she’d been busy imprinting the interior of the bank onto her brain.

“Do you need someone to identify the body?” Dana asked. She surprised herself with the question.

“You knew her?” The office frowned. He pulled in his chin and a little roll of fat appeared.

He had mentioned the girl was a college student. Dana muttered something about being classmates and seeing her around campus. She didn’t know what had come over her. She had never seen a dead body before and up until then, that was A-okay. But she had been gripped by an urge she could not recognize or understand, only follow.

“Her parents are coming in from Chicago,” the officer said. “We could save them the grief.”

Dana sighed. Didn’t he know there was no saving anyone any grief?

They took an elevator down to the morgue and passed through a cool, shadowed hallway. They stopped in front of a dark window. Dana could hear music coming through the glass. It was faint. A Michael Jackson song. For a moment, she imagined the medical examiner moonwalking around the autopsy room. The officer asked if she was ready. She nodded. A light came on.

The girl was lying on a coroner’s table. She was naked, which alarmed Dana. It didn’t seem right for her to be uncovered; someone had been careless. Her breasts were small and her knees seemed too big for her body. Her eyes were closed. Her hair looked wet and sleek. The blood had been cleaned away. Dana wondered where her bicycle helmet was. She couldn’t believe this was the same girl she’d seen sprawled out on the street. It looked like her body had been replaced by a fake. How could these parents from Chicago identify their daughter with any kind of certainty? Maybe that was what happened when you died, Dana thought. Your real body went one place and a replica was provided for the rituals. And if that were true, where did the real bodies go? Someplace nice? Probably not.

“So is it her?” the officer said.

“What?” Dana turned from the window.

“Is she your classmate? Do you know her name?”

“It’s not her,” Dana said.

“What do you mean it’s not her?” The officer frowned again. He was getting less attractive by the minute.

“I made a mistake,” she said.

“Who makes that kind of mistake?” For the first time she noticed the gun holstered to his hip.

Dana wasn’t afraid to just tell the officer the truth. After all, she hadn’t broken any laws, that he knew of.

“Look, I wanted to see a body. I wanted to know what it would be like.” She thought of that turkey in Elijah strolling through the woods one minute and still the next.

The officer said she could show herself out.

5.

At first everything goes perfectly at the Farmers & Mechanics Bank. They are all in their gorilla masks. Cora is pointing her gun at the tellers. Dana is aiming hers at the handful of customers who had the misfortune of being in the bank. They are crossed-legged on the floor; they have been ordered to sit on their hands, like elementary schoolers who can’t stop hitting each other. Dana tries to ignore the little girl with braided hair. Pinky is guarding the door. Jackie, the getaway driver, is idling around the corner. Dana watches one teller load bricks of money into a bag. He has red hair and a mustache. The other teller is a woman. She’s used so much hair spray, her hair doesn’t budge when she whips her head left then right. Her lips are slick with pink, her lashes clumped with mascara. There’s no sign of the fat, sluggish tellers Pinky described, but it looks like these two will do just fine.

It’s the woman who fucks everything up. They see her hand slide under the counter and know she’s going for the alarm. Cora shouts at her—Hands in the air—but the woman doesn’t listen. Pinky is pacing by the door and pawing his rubber face. Dana takes small, quick breaths behind her gorilla mask. Be cool, she whispers, but it sounds artificial and weak. Stronger words are needed. She just doesn’t know what they are.

The gunshot stops everyone. The mustached teller stops putting money in the bag. Pinky stops pacing. The customers stop squirming. The female teller is clutching her left eye. Blood seeps between her fingers. Cora’s gun is still raised. It takes Dana more time than it should to understand that one of the Gorillas has just shot a bank teller in the face.

Her hands are numb. She concentrates on not dropping her gun. She thinks she’s going to suffocate behind the mask.

“Give us our money.” Now Cora is aiming at the other teller. His shirtsleeves are drenched in sweat. He goes back to heaving cash into the bag.

A woman in cowboy boots raises her hand. Her mouth is open, but she’s not saying anything. She’s pointing at something by the door. Dana turns and there’s Pinky, slumped against the wall. He’s kneading his gorilla mask in his hands. The customers and the tellers and the security cameras are all taking in his face. They are memorizing it. They are branding it onto their brains like Dana did with the interior of that bank in Jackson City.

“He is in such deep shit.” Cora is waving her gun. She swivels toward Dana. “Can’t you do something?”

But Dana can’t. If she were a Go-Go Girl, then maybe she could, but she is just herself. The female teller is hunched over the counter and whimpering. She sounds like the wild dog Dana’s father once had to shoot in Elijah. He kept coming onto their property, frothy and snarling, but once he had a bullet in him, he was docile as a lamb. Blood is still squirting through her fingers, as though her hand is a dam that’s about to give. She’s blinded at best. In the distance, Dana hears a siren. She looks at Cora and her cousin nods. They run for the exit. She pauses only to yank Pinky up by his shirt collar. He drops his gorilla mask on the sidewalk, but right then it doesn’t matter. All that matters is diving into the waiting Impala. Of course Jackie wants to know what happened and where’s the money and why isn’t Pinky wearing his mask. Cora tells her to shut up and drive. They blast out of Galesburg. It’s nearly dusk. The sun looks like it’s setting the sky on fire.

They drive through the night. Pinky is up front, next to Jackie. Dana and Cora are in the back. The window is cracked and Jackie is chain-smoking. They are heading to a little town called Wapello. They think it will be a good place to lie low, but soon Pinky’s face will be all over the news and there will be no lying low from that.

“He can’t stay with us anymore,” Cora hisses in the backseat.

Dana just shakes her head. He could get plastic surgery, she thinks. A crazy idea. She gazes at her brother’s profile. They are on a dark, straight highway. A little slicing, a little rearranging. She thinks of how handsome he could be.

On the radio, they hear that one of the Go-Go Girls has been shot in the stomach. She fell behind during a getaway. The officer who shot her said that he meant to hit her shoulder. Turns out that she wasn’t an acrobat or Romanian. Just a girl from Minnesota.

“This is the problem with being famous,” Dana announces to the car. “It makes everyone want to kill you.”

No one says anything. Not even Cora. Dana leans her head against the window. As they’re passing signs for Kirkwood, she thinks of the girl at the morgue and her parents in Chicago. She wonders if the cop ever tells her story, about the woman who conned him into checking out a dead body. If anyone ever tells her story.

Tornadoes are still in the forecast. A few times Dana thinks she sees a big black funnel moving toward them in the night. She thinks she hears that locomotive sound and feels the ground shake. She imagines being swept away. But there is nothing coming for them. Not yet. There is only this highway and this car and this darkness. She leans forward and squeezes her brother’s elbow. He doesn’t move, doesn’t look at her. The remaining Gorilla masks are piled in his lap. He knows he’s in a world of trouble.

They stop for gas and Dana makes Jackie hand her the car keys. When she says she wants to be sure no one gets left behind, Cora gives her a look. Pinky needs to use the bathroom. Dana stands outside and jingles the keys. She can see her parents hearing about Pinky on the radio. She can see them turning up the volume and leaning in close. Maybe they are being kept company by a robot made of soup cans and chicken wire, or maybe they are alone. Through the bathroom door, she hears the toilet flush. Her brother takes his time washing his hands.

When they’re all back in the car, Cora passes her a note written on a paper napkin. We are leaving him at the next fucking gas station! it says in jagged black letters. Dana crumples the note and drops it on the floor. She slumps back and something crunches under her sneaker. She peers between her knees. It’s the robot. Pinky got one of the eyes glued back on. If she tilts her head the right away, the metal gleams and she can tell herself it’s their treasure, their loot. She thinks about rescuing the robot from the floor and giving it to her brother. She thinks about doing him that kindness. Instead she nudges the robot under the driver’s seat and then feels sad about it. Poor Donald. She has to remind herself that robots don’t have feelings. All these little choices that push her closer to something she’s not sure she wants.

They pass a billboard with the slogan WANT A BETTER WORLD? It’s too dark for Dana to see what’s being advertised, but she guesses it’s something religious. Of course she wants a better world. Who wouldn’t want that? A world where everyone was like Pinky, pure and soft and full of dreams. Or she could just do things differently when it came to those small choices. She could give her brother the robot. She could throw her gun in a river. These could be her lessons. It’s right there for her, that better world. She barely has to go looking.

Dana knows this, just as she knows that this is not the day she will find it.