Things started to go bad after that.
Dates got canceled for the circus. Suddenly, towns and places that’d had us for years said they didn’t want us back. Mr. Barnum brought me in for a meeting and asked me: Young lady, we’ve been told our circus is gonna get bankrupted if we keep you on as so much as a dung sweeper. What’s going on?
I told him about Daddy and Ma. When he heard Ma’s maiden name was, and what her last name was now, I thought he’d fall out of his chair. “She came from that family?” he said. “And she’s married to that family now?”
Mr. Barnum said he was gonna hafta let me go, just for a year, and then we’d see if it all blew over.
I went back to our hometown, back to our house. Where else was I gonna go? After a while I started to get letters in the mail. I didn’t understand what one of them said, really, except that it had Ma’s name, Daddy’s name, and my name in it with a whole lot of big words. I took it to Miss Hanson, the town schoolteacher, who by now was Mrs. Davis. She was the smartest lady I knew, but I truly wondered if even she would understand all the gobbledygook in that letter.
She had trouble too. So she took me to the only lawyer in town, a nice fellow who brought us in and took a long, quiet time reading the letter. When he was done he took off his reading glasses and looked at us with a sad expression on his face. He said that Ma had gotten some kinda lawyers, and even with him havin’ got married again, all Daddy’s money was hers. There really wasn’t anything now I could do about it; I couldn’t even wait for Ma to die, ‘cause I was no longer listed as one of her heirs in her will, neither.
I wasn’t too broken up about it, really. Not right away. I took a job as a waitress in the diner downtown, and that paid the bills for a while. If Ma had left me alone, I might’ve stayed there the rest of my life, calling orders, pouring coffee and taking tips.
But Ma didn’t leave me alone. I guess she felt Daddy had failed her somehow, and I was bad because I’d gone off with him. Whatever it was, I got another paper from the same place I got the last one from, sayin’ now she’d sued Daddy after he was dead, claiming he’d caused her pain and suffering, and wanted the house.
The house was nothing to her. She’d hated living there. Mrs. Davis’ lawyer friend said if I sold it the money I’d get wouldn’t pay for the gas Ma used in the fancy cars she was being driven about in these days. But she still wanted everything, and if she couldn’t hurt Daddy, she was gonna hurt me.
“I’m sorry, honey,” the lawyer said, “but your Ma has used her influence in a big way, since her husband’s family owns the bank. They’ve called the note on your house and started foreclosure. Your Ma’s said she’s gonna buy it up before the ink gets dry on the papers, so in a week at most, It’s gonna be hers.”
Well, that made me plumb angry, it did. Where was I gonna live? The house wasn’t much, the farm was less- the land hadn’t been worked over in years and years. But Ma was gonna have hers, the lawyer said, and again, we could try to fight it, but really there was pretty much nothing we could do.
Until I heard about Pretty Boy.
It was in all the papers, how he’d been a career criminal and taken the money out’ve a bunch of places, from a post office to a payroll master, and then from banks.
So, I took the two pistols Daddy’d given me, an’ hitched a ride into the big city. I’d thought about robbin the bank in our small town, but why? I didn’t want to upset poor old Mr. Johnson who was both teller and manager of the place. Besides, all I wanted was Daddy’s $150,000; the little podunk bank in the center of our town probably didn’t have even a tenth that much in the vault. And most important, when I thought it over: Where would I run to, even if I got every dime of the cash? No place to hide in a one-horse town of about 300 people.
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No, I wanted my Daddy’s money, and I was gonna get it, if only to spite my mean, old Ma. But I couldn’t afford a lawyer now, and so the best way was to go to the bank that had Daddy’s money and pull it out. I had scraped a little money together and got myself a cheap hotel room once I got there, and then got myself a cab.
I knowed it sounds silly tellin’ it now, but the cops weren’t all that smart then like they are today. If you could get a bit of distance back then between them and yourself, you was scott-free, and no worries.
I had the cab wait outside, and then waltzed into First National like a queen on a tour. Well, if a queen wore cowboy boots, a stetson, bluejeans, a red-checked shirt, a black cloth mask and a pair of six-guns with mother-of-pearl handles. But y’all get the idea.
I felt all tingly, too. Not just alive, but buzzing alive, like I’d touched a live wire and I didn’t wanna let go. My head was just about to fry itself, it felt like, and my fingertips were sizzling.
I took the hint from what I’d read Pretty Boy Floyd’d said when he did a stick-up:
“EVERYBODY DOWN! THIS IS A STICK-UP!” And I put one round in the ceiling to make sure they knew I meant business.
Today, I wouldn’t a’ done that. I woulda done a bank shot off of a lamp or two, or something like that so’s I’d get their attention faster. But I was new at the game and not thinkin’ how seeing several things drop at once from one bullet gets the whole blamed bank to quiet down that much quicker.
But, happy for me, it was the thirties and not later.
Like I said: I put a round into the ceiling. The bank guard went for his gun while everyone screamed and started dropping to the floor. I went and put one in the floor by his foot, and that got his attention. “Put it on the floor and kick it over here!” I yelled, “Or I’ll put a hole in yuh!”
He figured it out pretty quick. I scooped up his gun and put it in my pocket while he laid down like the rest.
I knowed I had maybe a couplea minutes to get what I was after. To this day, I really don’t remember going up to the teller, but I do recall sayin’ “You got sixty seconds to get at least a hundred-fifty clams in a sack, or I’ll put so many holes in yuh, your next glass o’water’ll turn you into a lawn sprinkler. Now git!”
They got. They filled the sack, and the manager promised it was at least a hundred-fifty thousand, though it didn’t seem like that. There was maybe thirty bundles of bills in the sack, and it got heavy, way heavier than I thought a bag of paper ought to be.
Well, no worry. I got outta there without any more words, and into the cab, and I pulled my pistol and told him to drive.
He drove. We got away clean before I could even hear the siren going.
He made off like a bat outta Hell for about twenty minutes, ‘til I knew we was close to my hotel [I hadn’t told him the address; I was green but not stupid]. “Stop here,” I sez. He stopped.
I looked at him through his rearview. He looked pretty scared, poor fella. I figured he deserved better than he’d got today. I saw the wedding ring on his finger, and realized I’d grabbed some poor fella who was just trying to pay the bills for his family.
“Are you, uh, gonna . . . please, ma’am, don’t hurt me. I . . . I got a wife at home, and a little boy.”
Well, I felt pretty bad, honest to tell. “Here,” I said, reaching into my sack and peeling out a hundred-dolar bill, “Take this. I’m sorry I took all your fares today. Don’t tell nobody, an’ this is yours. Tell anyone, though, and I might be a fair bit displeased, unnerstand?”
He unnerstood. I never saw him again.
I got out, changed in an alley from the clothes I liked to a cotton dress, pulled over my flannel and jeans in a jiffy. Pulled the bobby-pins out’ve my hair, and presto-changeo, as Mister Marvel the Magnificent Magician used to say back at the circus, I went from bein’ a bank robber to a sweet, midwestern gal who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and all in under a minute.
Cop cars blasted by, sirens goin’ to beat the band, and they didn’t so much as look at me twice.
Today, I’d do almost everything different. I got real, real lucky that day. So many things coulda gone wrong it’d probably take me nigh an hour to tick ‘em all off. If I’d tried it today, I’d be in the hoosegow faster n’ a jackrabbit with a belly full o’ coffee.
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To Be Continued...