The contagion was as old as Africa, older than Babylon, wafting from century to century upon sunlight and moonbeams and the vibrations of wagging tongues. During the second decade of the twenty-first century, the contagion alighted in Fulda, California, riding aboard the bytes of a MacBook Air. Dink O’Neill, warlord of the Fulda Holy Rollers, infected his brother Chub, Fulda’s mayor, who infected Chamber of Commerce President Earl Fenstermacher, who that evening headlined his weekly blog with the bulletin that a South Beach ingenue had been imprisoned in the U.S. Senate cloakroom for disclosing that Form 1040 caused infidelity, infertility, and testicular cancers. The news spread swiftly. From Montpelier to Brownsville, from Eastport to Barstow, dull reality was replaced by fanciful delusion. Reinvigorated by repeated utterance, fertilized by outrage, mythomania claimed its earliest victims among chat room patrons—the disappointed, the defeated, the disrespected, and the genetically suspicious. In Fulda, immunocompromised Kiwanis club members transmitted the infection to Shriners and American Legionnaires, who transmitted it to their children, who carried it off to Sunday school. Masks were worthless. The disease spread northward into Oregon, eastward into Idaho, arriving on Pennsylvania Avenue in January of 2017. Soon afterward, the whistle-blowing South Beach ingenue, a seventeen-year-old rollerblader, was secretly transferred to a federal prison in upstate Wisconsin. Reptiles manned the IRS phone banks. Locusts ate the truth. Walls went up along the Rio Grande. Alt-Right fellow travelers, women included, had long ago forgiven POTUS’s locker-room lies. Time passed. By the summer of 2019, as glaciers melted and as chunks of civility calved from the Body Politic, mythomaniacs had taken refuge in a world of their own construction. In St. Joseph, Missouri, a forty-seven-year-old patriarch named Willard Swift announced to his wife and seven children that he had been crowned king of America in the frozen-foods aisle of a thriving Walmart. That evening King Swift deposited the remains of his family in eight fifty-gallon Rubbermaid recycling bins topped off with kitty litter. Almost simultaneously, a thousand miles away, in a suburb outside Baltimore, a racist, politically engaged orthopedist reported that the bones of disinterred slaves indicated “healthy, pleasant, and privileged lifestyles”; the Thirteenth Amendment, he said, was a “waste of words.” In New Mexico, highway speed limits were challenged as infringements on core liberties. In Washington, D.C., well-heeled lobbyists declared that handguns were “living human creatures.” And on talk radio, in the late hours of the night, it was revealed that Alka-Seltzer had become the Chinese “weapon of choice,” that a daily dab of Brylcreem remedied the common cold, and that Lee Harvey Oswald “war nicht so schlecht.”
On an afternoon in late August of the year 2019, after locking up the JCPenney store on South Spruce Street, Boyd Halverson strode out to his car, started the engine, sat without moving for several minutes, then blinked and wiped his eyes and resolved to make changes in his life. He had grown sick and tired of synthetics, rayon in particular.
That evening he packed a suitcase. As an afterthought, he tossed in two passports, a copy of the Iliad, his expired TribID card, and a pair of swimming trunks. He ate supper and went to bed with a biography of Winston Churchill.
Late the next morning—a Saturday morning—Boyd attended his bimonthly Kiwanis brunch. Midway through the proceedings, he excused himself and made his way across the street to Community National Bank. It was 11:34 a.m. The bank closed at noon on Saturdays, and only a single employee was on duty, a diminutive redhead named Angie Bing. Boyd filled out a withdrawal slip, signed his name, and approached the teller.
Angie chuckled.
“That’s a boatload of money,” she said. “If you’re headed for Vegas, Boyd, take me along.”
Then she laughed again. She had been flirting with Boyd over the better part of two years.
She tore up the withdrawal slip.
“Three hundred grand we don’t have. What else can I do for you?”
“How much is on hand, would you say?”
“On hand?”
“I’ll want it all.”
“You’re robbing me?”
“Not you,” said Boyd.
He took out his gun and showed it to her. It was not a toy. It was a Temptation .38 Special.
Angie Bing managed to scrape up just under eighty-one thousand dollars, a significant sum for a small bank in the small town of Fulda, California.
Boyd stuffed the cash into a paper grocery bag.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, “but I’ll have to ask you to take a ride with me.”
As they drove south out of town, Angie Bing predicted he wouldn’t make it fifty miles. But on Sunday morning they were in a motel near Bakersfield. By Monday afternoon they were in Mexico. The two passports had been a wise bit of last-minute whimsy even if Angie only dimly resembled one of the photos. After an unnerving and venal discussion with Customs, Boyd counted himself lucky to drive away with almost all of his eighty-one thousand.
He ditched the car—a traceable 1993 Buick LeSabre he’d owned for nine years—and then afterward, over an early dinner, he asked Angie if she’d consider giving him a head start before contacting the police. They were in a beachfront restaurant in the town of San Felipe. Angie was having grilled tuna; Boyd was working on a plate of chicken wings. Outside, framed by a latticed picture window, the Gulf of California presented itself in bewitching shades of twilight.
“How big of a head start?” Angie asked. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“Three days. Four days.”
“What’ll I do with myself?”
“You can swim, tune up your Spanish. Treat it like a holiday. I’ll leave you some cash.”
“How much?” Angie said.
“I don’t know. A thousand?”
“You’re kidding, I hope. Out of eighty-one?”
“Make it two thousand.”
“Make it forty-two.”
Boyd shrugged. “Greed is a carcinogen, Angie. You’d better sleep on it.”
“I’d better.”
In the morning she said, “I’m not a criminal. No deal.”
They caught a bus south, grinding in fits and starts through a day without flaw. Had he not long ago robbed a bank, Boyd Halverson would have perhaps envisioned nine pleasant holes of golf, succeeded by two very dry martinis on the stone terrace of the Fulda Country Club. There was, he reflected, something dazzling about the robust and undeniable reality of the Mexican vistas, and of this beat-up old Greyhound jolting along beneath him. There were the mixed smells of oranges and body waste. Across the aisle, a weathered old gentleman in a black Stetson and a red bow tie sat stoically with a large unhappy rooster flapping in his lap. All this, Boyd reasoned, would have seemed extraordinary only a few days ago. A slideshow for the Kiwanis boys—Here’s one of me robbing a bank!—Here’s Mexico!—Here’s a rooster!
Halfway to Santa Rosalía, Angie asked for his honest opinion: How far did he think eighty-one thousand dollars would take him?
Boyd shrugged and said nothing.
“I hope you’ve thought this out,” she said. “Because you’re in one tremendous pickle. You stuck up a bank, Boyd. You kidnapped me.”
“I was in a pickle anyway,” said Boyd.
“Maybe we should say a prayer. You and me.”
“There’s an idea.”
“Seriously, you go first,” she told him. “Just start with ‘Dear precious God,’ then if you get stuck, I’ll hop right in. Whenever I’m in a jam—like if I steal something or get squirmy for somebody’s husband—I don’t wait around to put things right with Jesus. It’s the only way, Boyd.” She closed her eyes briefly and then raised a finger to her nose. “See this little hole here? When I’m not at work, I wear a cross there, a little silver nose stud. People at the bank, they don’t go for it; they think it’s like—you know—too freaky, too metro. But I’m Pentecostal, the real deal, just so you’ve got the picture.”
“Stout of you,” said Boyd.
“Right, stout’s the word, and we don’t do holdups. It’s a strict religion.” Angie laced her fingers together and fell silent for a few thoughtful moments. “The thing is, just because the Lord Jesus saved me, that doesn’t make me a fanatic or a virgin or anything. He’s coming back, that’s all. Probably a lot sooner than you think.”
“Coming back?”
“Your Redeemer.”
“Ah, then,” said Boyd, eyes closed, feeling vaguely threatened. “Let’s hope he’s taking the overnight express.”
Angie looked at him with a disapproving frown. “You think Christ the Lamb finds that funny?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“He doesn’t.”
“All right then. Give the flock my apologies.”
“That’s not funny either. You better get prepared, Boyd. Especially now. After robbing a bank and all.” Angie glanced across the aisle at the rooster, which had quieted some, then she chuckled to herself. “Let me ask a question. How much would you say you’ve got tucked away in your Community National account?”
“I’m not sure, something like—”
“Seventy-two thousand and change. I should know, right?”
“You should,” said Boyd.
“Right. And you robbed us for eighty-one. So unless you plan to go back for another stickup—which, by the way, isn’t the greatest idea in the world—that looks to me like a net take of barely nine even.” She paused. “You didn’t do it for the money, did you?”
“No.”
“Why then?”
Boyd gave it some thought. The question, much like the bus and the rooster, seemed alarmingly surreal.
“Well,” he said, “I did it for entertainment.”
“Oh, right. Instead of square dancing, you mean?”
“Just the novelty, Angie.”
“Sure. Okay.”
“Okay?”
Angie pushed up her chin in annoyance. “I’m being polite, Boyd. Okay means you’re mentally ill.”
The bus passed through a dusty village and began climbing a purplish-red plateau that rimmed the Gulf of California. The terrain had more or less emptied itself of plant and animal life, and for a few sober miles Boyd marveled at the emptying turn his own life had taken.
How barren, he mused. One would’ve anticipated anxiety. How very otherwise.
Several miles later Angie sighed. “Well, if you ask me, entertainment isn’t a good answer. What if I did something like that? Like right now, what if I strangled that rooster for the pure fun of it?”
“Be my guest,” said Boyd. “Anything to occupy the soul.”
“Yeah, the soul, at least you know the word. Which is a start, I guess, except I hope you have a plan.”
“I wouldn’t call it a plan. Maybe an idea.”
Angie appraised him sternly. “A delusion, you mean, except we both know it can’t pan out.”
“Probably not.”
“It can’t,” she said. She waited a moment, watching the Gulf go by. The countryside was parched and desolate. “Listen, Boyd, I was afraid of you at first but not anymore. Not even a tiny bit. Right this instant, if I wanted to, I could jump up and start screaming bloody murder. What then? Take out your gun and shoot me?”
“I doubt it.”
“You’re not sure?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“How sure?”
“Eighty percent.”
“Eighty?”
“About that.”
“I thought you liked me.”
“I do. You’re fine, Angie. But you talk a lot.”
In Santa Rosalía they got off the bus and walked four blocks to a modest seaside hotel. They had supper in the dining room downstairs in the company of an elderly, bickering couple from Toronto. Later they took a short stroll along the beach before retiring for the night. As had been their practice since Saturday, Angie had first dibs on the toilet and shower, then she slipped into bed fully dressed.
Afterward, Boyd took his turn.
When they’d settled in, Angie said, “I’ll need fresh clothes tomorrow. Underwear and jeans and shirts and socks. And an electric toothbrush. And a new nose stud and probably a camera. And a good wristwatch.”
Boyd grunted and closed his eyes. Angie Bing exhausted him.
“I’ll need shoes, too,” she said. “Casual ones, maybe sandals, and a couple pairs of decent heels—I like those spikey ones—and if we’ll be eating out all the time—you know, like in restaurants—I’ll need dresses and skirts and stuff, and a shawl for when it gets chilly at night, and a manicure set. And spending money.”
An unpleasant taste rose in Boyd’s throat. “What about going home?”
“How so?”
“Home,” he said. “Don’t you want that?”
“Of course I do. But until then—whenever ‘then’ is—I’ll need things. I’ll need an ankle bracelet.”
“Angie—”
“You’ve got eighty-one thousand under the bed, Boyd. I didn’t ask to get kidnapped—that was your idea—so don’t go all stingy.”
“I’m not stingy, Angie.”
“You sounded stingy. Like a miser.”
“All right, I’m a miser,” said Boyd. “What about heading home? Promise me a head start, you’re free to go.”
“That easy?”
“All I need is the promise.”
Angie turned sideways in the overstuffed bed, looking down at him with a concoction of pity and amusement.
“That’s naïve, Boyd. What’s to stop me from promising and then running straight to the cops? You’d better start using some common sense.” She waved a hand at the dark. “Anyhow, here we are—in Mexico, for Pete’s sake. In the same bed.”
“You’d back out of a promise?”
“I didn’t say that. I said quote what’s to stop me unquote. What I meant was you’re a criminal now, so you shouldn’t be naïve. Robbers don’t go around trusting everybody.”
“Make it a one-day head start. Twenty-four hours.”
“I can’t honestly promise, Boyd. I’d be fibbing.”
“This one time?”
“No, I’m sorry. I can’t.” She paused to think, then shook her head. “I told you before, I’m the Lord’s servant and, by the way, that doesn’t mean I’m some goodie-goodie who never got naked. Christians fool around, too.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Boyd.
For a while they lay silent, then Angie sighed and kicked back the sheets and wiggled out of her skirt. The room’s ancient air conditioner made grinding noises in the dark.
“Boyd, how old are you? Be honest.”
“Forty-nine.”
“Yeah? I’ll be thirty soon.”
“Too bad,” Boyd said.
“What is?”
“That you won’t promise me a head start.”
“We weren’t talking about that. We were talking about life. If you can’t be friendly—”
“Angie, I’m trying to let you go. That’s friendly.”
“It’s not.”
“I’d say it is.”
“I’d say it’s not.”
Boyd got up and made a bed for himself on the tile floor.
“Friendly,” Angie said from the musty dark, “is when you talk about personal things.”
In the morning they bought a blue Samsonite suitcase, which Angie Bing filled with clothing and jewelry and toiletries and corn-husk memorabilia of the Baja.
Then it was dead time. They spent eight days at the hotel in Santa Rosalía, mostly spending Community National’s money, sometimes sitting at a wrought iron table on the veranda to watch the sun go down. In the late evenings they listened to an English-language radio broadcast out of San Diego—no bank stickup news, not a word, but plenty of turmoil north of the border: POTUS on the road to impeachment, Russians campaigning on Facebook, spree shootings in Philadelphia, Tucson, West Texas, and Biloxi. “Gunfire,” declared an enthusiastic Senate staffer, “is the dance music of American liberty.”
There were no other guests in the hotel except for the combative old couple from Toronto. The nights were long, black, ancient, and arid. The days were fever-hot. Angie talked a great deal; Boyd tried not to listen. She had been a gymnast back in high school. She did not care for the color yellow. Her mother had once whacked her in the eye with a stapler when she’d taken the Almighty’s name in vain. She had a steady boyfriend, an electrician named Randy something. “If you’d pay attention,” she said one afternoon, “you might learn something about the modern world, the modern woman. Like, you know, why turnips make a good, nutritious casserole, and why the word chick is offensive, and how it’s not such a great idea to pretend you’re asleep right now.”
Around noon on September 12, they boarded an express bus to Los Angeles.
As far as Boyd had a plan at all, he hoped to scatter a trail into Mexico and then double back on a cash basis, buying himself time to take care of a few personal matters. He had no illusions. This would end badly, he knew that, but for the present he found it hard to care. After nearly a decade managing a JCPenney store, Boyd had reached the end of an awfully long rope. He’d grown weary not only of his job, which was dull enough, but also of his own tedious companionship—polite, frugal, unremarkable of dress and manner, all but invisible even to himself. He hated his fourteen handicap. He hated Kiwanis and women’s hosiery.He hated going to bed with the likes of Winston Churchill.
With no real future, and with a past he cared not to dwell on, Boyd had nothing much to lose. Or, more precisely, nothing left to be. He was done hiding from the world. Dishonor was one thing—a terrible thing—but he’d paid for it with a divorce and a scuttled career and the loss of all appetite for the future. That seemed penalty enough.
The truth, give or take a detail, was that he had robbed a bank because he could think of nothing better to do. And maybe, if things worked out, he might settle a score or two with Jim Dooney.
These and associated reflections kept him busy until Angie Bing gave him a nudge. “Hey, robber,” she said. “You’re talking to yourself.”
“Sorry,” said Boyd.
“You all right?”
“I think so.”
She studied him for a time, then said, “I guess talking’s healthy even if it’s to yourself. It’s like a pressure valve, sort of—blow out all the unhealthy vapors—or like when you get down on your knees and pray to win the lottery. It’s how people figure things out.” Angie contemplated the wisdom of this, her face a banquet of self-congratulation. “So, who’s Dooney?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No kidding.”
“It doesn’t.”
Angie shrugged.
Five or ten minutes passed.
There were pigs and chickens along the road. There was a man on a bicycle, succeeded by a great many miles of nothing.
Then Angie said, “Look, I’m not the pushy type—I hate that—but sooner or later you’ll have to explain what all this is about. The Boyd Halverson I used to know; he wasn’t a bank robber. He didn’t run around kidnapping people.”
“That part was impromptu,” said Boyd.
“Impromptu?”
“Pretty much. I didn’t want you hitting the alarm.”
“That’s why you kidnapped me?”
“I could’ve shot you instead.”
“Ha-ha.”
“It isn’t funny, Angie.”
“I know it isn’t funny. That’s why I said ‘ha-ha.’”
She glanced down at Boyd’s coat pocket, where the pistol was, and then rearranged her hands in her lap.
“Scary you,” she muttered.
This young woman, Boyd decided, was a problem. Not a hair over four feet ten, barely a hundred pounds, but even so, she looked formidable in her new silver nose stud and turquoise ankle bracelet. Her acutely retroussé nose gave her the look of one of the Emerald Isle’s darker, somewhat roguish little people.
After a few minutes, she said, “One other thing, Boyd. This isn’t easy to say, but I thought—you know—I thought you had a crush on me. The way you flirted all the time.”
“No.”
“Why did I think that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Me either. Maybe I’m not nice enough.”
“You’re plenty nice, Angie.”
“Smart, too. I’ve got a brain in my head.”
“You sure do.”
“So?”
“Nothing,” Boyd said. “It was a holdup.”
“That’s all?”
“I’m positive.”
She put her mind to it for a moment, her thin lips poised for invective, but then she shrugged and said, “Probably I scare you. Most older guys, they get threatened by cute, spiritual women.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I bet that’s it.”
The miles went by and Angie Bing dozed off. Outside San Felipe, as the sky passed from blue to desert lavender, Boyd slid down inside himself. The first squeakings of disaster were upon him—metal fatigue, a wreck in progress. He was struck by the enormity of what he’d done. The novelty of robbing banks had worn thin.
He took out snapshots of Evelyn and Teddy, looked at them briefly, then put them away. He thought about Jim Dooney for a while.
At dusk the bus pulled into a gas station that sold prewrapped sandwiches and chips and candy bars. Boyd and Angie sat on a curb outside the station and ate their sandwiches. At what seemed a promising moment, Boyd asked where she stood on the issue of a head start.
Angie blew out a breath. “I haven’t decided yet. Everything’s different now.”
“What’s different?”
“Everything.”
“You want to give me an example?”
“Well, for one thing,” she said, “I was sure you had a crush on me, and you don’t, and that changes the whole deal.”
“I don’t see how.”
“It just does.”
Boyd nodded. “Let’s pretend I have a crush. Then what?”
“You just said you don’t.”
“Hypothetically. Would I get a head start?”
She looked at him as if he were the dimmest man on earth.
“If you had a crush, Boyd, you wouldn’t want a head start. You wouldn’t be spending all this time trying to dump me.” She unwrapped a Mars bar, took a bite, and chewed thoroughly. “I told you I’m smart. And while we’re at it, here’s another thing you haven’t thought about. I bet the police think I helped you. They’ll look at the camera clips and figure I’m an accomplice.”
“They might.”
“Not might. That’s exactly what they’ll think. For all I know, you probably planned it that way.”
“Of course I didn’t, Angie. Why would I?”
“Who the heck knows why? That’s for you to answer. The point is, how can I go home? The rest of my life, every single day, people will look at me and think, Hey, there goes a bank robber. How do I prove I’m not?”
“I could write a letter.”
“A letter?”
“Sure.”
Angie Bing stood up.
She stared at him for what seemed a long while, then shook her head and turned and walked to the bus.
They crossed back into the States around two in the morning. At daybreak they were in Los Angeles.
They took a cab to a small stucco house in Santa Monica.
Angie said, “What’s this?”
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