Mad River

Tom wasn’t with them anymore. His eyes just weren’t right. He’d always been a little slippery about eye contact, but now he could hardly look at Jimmy at all.
    They got into Oxford early in the afternoon, working the back roads into Bare County, dodging down side lanes when they saw other cars coming. Oxford was no bigger than Shinder, but because it was tucked away in the far southeast corner of Bare County, with no other towns close by, it had something that Shinder didn’t: a branch of the Bare County Credit Union. Becky had once applied for a job there, but hadn’t gotten it.
    And they needed the money now: they were bandits, and they were famous, and they were going to jail if they were caught, but first they’d make a run for it. Jimmy had a vague idea that they might find a way to get to Cuba, or some other place far south.
    Becky had her doubts, but she was in for the ride.
    Tom . . .
    •   •   •
    JIMMY DECIDED THAT when they hit the credit union, he and Tom would go in together. Becky would drive and wait in the street outside. He didn’t trust Tom to wait, and didn’t want to come running out the door and see the getaway car disappearing over the horizon.
    Though no place in Minnesota should be dusty in April, Oxford was. There hadn’t been any recent rain, and half the streets in the town were still unpaved, with gravel-and-oil surfaces. Six or eight blocks in the center of town had tar roads, including the single-street business district, which consisted of a Marathon gas station and convenience store, a bar named Josie’s, a barbeque restaurant with a cartoon pig cutout on the door, the credit union, and three empty buildings, one with a fading sign in the window that said: “Artist Lofts Available.”
    When they came into town, Becky said, “There’s a chicken on the street.”
    A white hen was pecking at gravel on the side of the road, and Jimmy sped up a little, tried to clip the chicken with the passenger side tires, but missed, and the indignant pullet scuttled back into the yard she’d come out of.
    Tom was in the backseat again, 9mm handgun in his lap. He said, “They’ll have guns in the bank.”
    “No, they don’t,” Becky said. “I went out with a guy once, Bill Hagen, who worked in a bank, and I asked him if he’d shoot a robber and he said they weren’t allowed to keep guns in the bank because the banks were afraid they’d shoot a customer and get sued. He said it was cheaper and safer to give up the money.”
    Tom said, “Bill Hagen is only like seventeen years older than you are.”
    “So what?” She added, “The thing is, they got money ready to give us—”
    “Yeah, yeah, and it’s going to explode on us, you already told us,” Jimmy said. She’d seen it happen on one of the crime-scene shows. “So we’re not taking that money.”
    Then Jimmy asked Tom, “Who’s Hagen?”
    “Asshole up in Bigham. He’s gotta be like forty.”
    Jimmy asked Becky, “You fuck him?”
    Tom snorted in the backseat, and Becky said, “Shut up,” and to Jimmy, “What if I did?”
    “Nothing. Just wondered.”
    Tom asked, “What were you? Fourteen?”
    “I was a senior in high school.”
    “Everybody shut up,” Jimmy said. “Everybody get ready. We’re two blocks away. Get your hankies.”
    They had handkerchiefs to cover their faces, and ball caps to cover the tops of their heads and their eyes. Tom had the handgun, and Jimmy had the pump-action .30-06 with an extra magazine in his pocket. The gunstock was made of a black synthetic, and was big and frightening.
    “I bet they have guns,” Tom said.
    “I told you, they don’t,” Becky said.
    “We got no choice,” Jimmy said. “The cops know about us. So we either get enough money to run, or we go to prison for life, if they don’t shoot us down like a bunch of dirty dogs. If we take a hundred grand outa here, we’re gone. We disappear like a fart in a cyclone. It’s the only chance we got.”
    Tom thought,
No, it isn’t
.
    Jimmy said to Becky, “When I get out, you slide over and get ready to roll. We’ll be inside one minute.” And to Tom, “Get your mask up.”
    •   •   •
    THEY’D GONE INTO THE BANK, the guns out front, screaming at the three women inside, about the time that a Bare County deputy sheriff named Dan Card, alone in his patrol car, was turning the corner onto Main Street, six blocks out. Everybody in the world was looking for the Boxes’ Tahoe and Lexus,