Free Red Grass River by James Carlos Blake Page B

girls had dared him to do so and then all of them had said they preferred it like that. He neatly folded his white suit and put it in the bag and cached it in a corner. He slipped the pistol into the bib pocket of the overalls and then carefully set a wide strip of gauze over his nose and cheekbones and taped it in place.
    Five minutes after the bank opened for business he walked in and stood at the central counter and on a withdrawal slip wrote “Give me all your paper money.” The guard was a uniformed big-bellied fellow engaged in conversation with a young female clerk at her desk in a corner and the only other customer of the moment was in discussion with the bank manager at his desk at the far end of the room. There was but one other teller on duty and he was busy with a ledger.
    John Ashley went to the sulky teller’s window and pushed the slip of paper at him. The teller read it and looked up at him and John Ashley leaned close against the counter and exposed enough of the revolver in his bib for the teller to see what it was.
    Even as the teller’s eyes widened and his mouth came open JohnAshley smiled and said softly, “Everything’s just fine, bubba, you do like I say. Act natural and don’t holler. Make me any trouble I’ll shoot you graveyard dead. Now gimme it.”
    The teller did it. He handed over a banded pad of twenty-dollar bills with “$400” imprinted on the band and then several handfuls of loose paper currency of various denominations. John Ashley casually put it all into his overall pockets with the insouciance of a man reaping his just desserts. The teller handed him yet another small stack of bills and said in a quavering whisper, “That’s all I have in my cash drawers, sir, really it is.”
    John Ashley grinned under his bandaged nose and said, “Well, then, bubba, thats all I’ll take.” The teller looked dazed and for a moment John Ashley thought the man might faint. “Sit down at that desk back of you and just stay there and don’t say nothin to nobody for five minutes, you hear?” He said all this in a low conversational tone and with a broad smile and anyone looking their way would have seen a friendly farmer with an injured nose chatting with a teller who looked but a little more out of sorts than usual.
    As the teller turned and went to the desk John Ashley left the bank, whistling lowly and waving so long at the guard and feeling his heart banging against his ribs as if trying to make its own wild escape ahead of him. He steeled himself to walk at a normal pace as he made his way along the serpentine route he’d laid out through the alleys. At every step of the way he expected to hear police whistles suddenly shrilling behind him and shouted commands to stand fast and put up his hands.
    And then he was back in the shed and the gauze was off his face and he quickly changed into his white suit and stuffed the overalls and the hat in the paper sack and hid it behind a nail barrel in the corner. He put the money in his coat pockets and then went into the house and up to his room. In response to the look of curiosity he received from the cleaning women on the stairs he said, “Forgot my pipe.”
    He counted the money out on the bed—one thousand two hundred and seventy-two dollars, most of it in twenties and tens and no bill larger than a fifty, of which there five. He counted all of it again and laughed out loud. He felt better than he had in weeks—even as his heart yet pounded and he tasted now the brassy flavor of the apprehension he’d been holding in tight check all morning. He wanted to howl his elation. He divided the money into four even piles and rolled them tightly and stuffed them into a spare pair of boots and then went for a long walk on the seawall. He could not stop grinning.
    By the time the house sat down to dinner that afternoon the news of the robbery was all over town. The talk at the table was all about it and the bold broken-nosed farmer who’d done it