The Spot: Stories

A heroic fallacy botch, in which one soul stands firm, gathering strength of will from some deeper source — a profound latent rage, perhaps, formed from an overly dramatic sense of fairness — and, seeing the gun muzzle, staring deep into the heart of the bore, feels compelled to side with the idea of authority and thus internalizes the onus of the crime — as he sees it — to the point of active rage, which in turn gives him the strength to stand firm and to resist barked orders. (In a nonbotch scenario the hero’s vision is lost when he’s shot or pistol-whipped. In the nonbotch the intuitive abilities — or the connection to some higher law — is short-circuited by a flush of fear. In the nonbotch scenario the hero lifts his heels from the floor or has an annoying tic: One way or another, all good intent and God connections — in the nonbotch setup — fade when his brainpan is shattered, and he then slumps off with the rest of the customers.) Let it be noted that the botch situation can only, in retrospect, be fully understood in relation to the nonbotch possibilities. Therefore, there is a deeply sentimental aspect to the whole matter. Nothing is sadder than the examination of a crime gone awry. Insofar as these things go, a nonbotch scenario (resistant-hero type is shot in the nick of time) can shift to a botch (gunshots alert passerby, or create uncontrollable chaos situation in which the disorder supersedes the ability to forcefully instill order) on a dime. So the idea is to play the two sides against each other to create a harmony between the two potentials. Idea is to avoid second-guessing and to maintain focus on the job at hand: getting the money and fleeing the bank, hooting and hollering in jubilation at a fate avoided, lead-footing it out of town and into the spectacular monotony of the open road.

When I turned from the window that afternoon, after watching the woman with those bags — those ankle-hobbling high heels! the instability of her gait! the afternoon sky firm against the brick facades! — I strained to reorient myself to the heist. But my attention was snagged on that beautiful vision in the street. This led to a classic error. Let me say here that I’ll never admit, as some might, to a split in my attention. What transpired was the opposite, actually. The effort that it took to cast the natural distraction factor away (and I did cast her away!) served to sharpen the acuteness of my attention when I swung my gaze back to the interior, and I locked with too much intensity on the resistant factor: the Old School Mennonite refusing Donnie’s orders, holding his hands out not with his palms up, but rather with his palms down, lifting them up and down in defiance, as if he were trying to shoo something away. At that moment my obligation — working hard to unsnag myself from the vision in the street — was to stay steady and calm. The idea was to keep cool. But instead I only saw the Old Order Mennonite. I fixed on him and he felt me looking and turned to me and presented his face: lean, long, gaunt around the chin, with a bristle of beard and agate eyes, cold and stony, set beneath busy black brows, above which were deep furrows leading up to a knobby forehead that drove itself into the heavy felt of his black hat. The look he shot me was on equal terms with mine — hard, ruthless, and blunt.

Idea is to push the botch as far it can go, to rally the chaos into an escapable situation, to arrange the disorder into itself, to affirm the oft-repeated phrase — by Carson, mostly — that a good botch ends not with a bang, but with the whisper of shoe leather on pavement. So when Donnie shot the Old Order Mennonite, I shot him at exactly the same time. Then all hell broke loose. One of the tellers in the back began to break away, running forward, and Carson tagged him one in the back of the head. Another dashed to the side — pure panic, no motive, no real intent — and I unleashed one in her direction. Needless to say, the bullets flew. Nothing but the roar and saltpeter in the air and the echoes in the high reaches as we drove the madness into shape and were left with nothing but bags of cash — the two of us — and a persistent ringing in our ears.