Free Canada by Richard Ford Page B

the country.” She pushed me right out of the doorway and stepped into their bedroom and closed the door. I heard heated talk then, though they were whispering because they knew I was listening. “You can’t . . . you can not under any circumstances . . .” she said. And he said, “Oh, for Christ fucking sake. We’ll talk about it later.” He rarely ever cursed, and neither did she. Berner did. She’d learned it from Rudy. It was shocking to hear him say that to our mother.
    I thought our mother might open the door suddenly and be angry at me for listening, so I went back to my room and sat down in front of my green-and-white chess board. I felt calm behind the rows of white pieces established in their specific purposes, waiting to walk into battle at my command.
    In a little while, my father went out the front door, carrying his canvas bag with the pistol inside, and got in his car. He never told me what the business was or even said good-bye. I suspected his business had nothing to do with selling farms and ranches, but with the Indian who’d been at our house. In any case, I knew it was important or he wouldn’t be leaving in a rush. It felt to me that something was in our life now that had never been in it before.

Chapter 10
    W HAT MY FATHER DID DURING THE NEXT DAYS was drive around eastern Montana and western North Dakota (places he’d never been), searching for a bank he could rob. His plan was not to rob a bank right away but to choose a town and a bank, based on criteria he’d developed in his head, then go back to Great Falls, briefly re-enter family life, then come back and rob the chosen bank a couple of days later. This plan seemed less hasty and more thought out, more susceptible to recalculation and even abandonment—wiser, as a way to go about bank robbing. The opposite of that was how people’s actions lurched off wrong and they landed in jail.
    It’s odd to imagine, of course: you pass a car on a lonely rural highway; you sit beside a man in a diner and share views with him; you wait behind a customer checking into a motel, a friendly man with a winning smile and twinkling hazel eyes, who’s happy to fill you in on his life’s story and wants you to like him—odd to think this man is cruising around with a loaded pistol, making up his mind about which bank he’ll soon rob.
    I think that even though my father was frightened by the Indians—and by what calamity Williams-Mouse had promised would befall us if the money wasn’t forthcoming—by the time he’d driven the long way east into the vast, voided parts of Montana stretching all the way to North Dakota, had sized up banks and towns, thought about places to hide, noticed the number of state troopers and deputies he passed, determined how far from the state line a bank would be (being southern meant state borders signified something to him that they didn’t mean to people in other places we’d lived)—by the time he’d done all that, the idea of a robbery had begun to seem if not reasonable, at least acceptable, and an idea that provoked surprisingly little worry. I judge this by how he acted when he got home, two days later, which was confident and ebullient, once again in high spirits—as if he’d had a large problem when he left but it had turned out to be the simplest thing in the world to solve. Which was typical of how he minimized his problems. I also judge his unburdened frame of mind by the fact that he gave some thought that I go with him to commit the robbery. Not that he reached the point at which a robbery was proposed to me. I only found it out later, in my mother’s chronicle, though I heard through closed doors words actually spoken about it between them, but didn’t fully understand: that in his view I could’ve been a persuasive accomplice. My mother (his other choice) would, he felt, be immediately recognizable because of her foreign appearance and small stature and because she was unfriendly to most