Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
At Counter No. 3
Ms. Robin Banks was immediately attracted to the robber
when he crossed the bank floor. The robber had his pick of
tellers; it had been a slow morning and most of the lines were
empty, so Robin smiled to herself and took it as a compliment
when he chose her after considering all his options. He walked
smoothly across the checkered tile, hands in his pockets,
stepping through the morning light and making a knight’s move
around the “CAUTION: WET SURFACE” sign. He wore an unbuttoned
jacket and light blue shirt, with a pair of sunglasses tucked in
the pocket.
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
He came up to Robin’s counter and she greeted him with a
sunny smile, leaning forward and asking how his morning was. He
didn’t respond but slid an empty money bag to her, followed by a
folded scrap of paper. They looked at each other for a few
seconds. Robin knew that most robberies these days started with
a note-slide, and a moment later the man confirmed his
intention. He drew back his jacket, quickly, like he was
straightening out the shoulders, and revealed a small gun,
covered with black tape.
Robin read the note, and her body locked into place. The
robber had chosen the right teller, more out of luck than
hunter’s intuition. Both the tellers at No. 1 and No. 7 were
unflappable women, and No. 8, though her rainbow makeup might
suggest otherwise, had been the only girl on her high school
football team and single-handedly tackled three robbers over her
career at Harrington Bank and the Wells Fargo. Many tellers in
the States will experience a bank robbery at some point during
their career, at least second-hand, but Robin had no such
experience. Even so, she remembered the training video “Study-Up
For a Stick-Up,” and its ten pointers acted out by a woman in a
clownish red-wig.
Number one: let the robber have the money; the sooner he
has what he wants, the sooner the will leave. Robin unlocked the
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
drawer and scooped up hundreds first, then down to ones. She did
this slowly.
Number two: the most heroic thing you can do in a robbery
is to remember physical details about the robber. However, avoid
staring. Under no circumstance should you or anyone in the bank
try to stop the robbery with force. Robin had already scanned
him up and down, but she took another peek. He had a baby face,
and some odd facial features, but each came together in a
pleasant way. He might have been four or five years younger than
Robin. He had long blonde hair and hooded eyelids, very blue
eyes, cheeks a little full, a straight line for a mouth. From
across the floor his walk seemed even, but up close Robin could
identify small details that ruined any hope of this boy
intimidating anybody. She could see a vein pulsing in his neck
and on the counter his hands were tensed into claws.
Even though her whole body was seizing too, (spine,
forearms, legs, sweating fingertips) she knew that this robber
had no idea what he was doing. Firstly, he didn’t have to show
her the gun at all. His fingers were quivering and in the
Western ghost-town setting of Robin’s mind, the sheriff would
catch this cowboy any time. When this kid got caught his charge
would be knocked up to include “with a deadly weapon.” He would
go to jail, he’d get kicked around and his mother would miss
him.
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
Robin mentally shuffled through the rest of the tips. The
alarm button was four inches away from her left hand. The steady
whirr of counter machines and ballpoint pens never stopped, and
the other tellers were oblivious to the robbery at hand.
Robin also realized that she was catching him in medias res
and for this little moment, at counter no. three in the steady
rain of bank machinery and bystanders caught in dreamland, Robin
knew more about this stranger than anyone else in the world. She
knew he was young enough, old enough and desperate enough to rob
a bank, to do it poorly, and be shaking at the sight of a teller
wearing a light blue, polka dot dress with a silver clasp in her
hair. The robber would never tell his mother he was robbing a
bank. He would never tell his best friend how he nearly threw up
on the mahogany counter. If he had any starving children for
which he was stealing, Robin doubted he would ever pass down
this particular story to the collection of fatherly mythologies.
He was committing one of the three evil acts that all normal
people will commit at some point in their life.
Robin pretended to count out the money she was stacking in
the bag. She counted silently, exaggerating with her lips,
getting that mechanical wrist motion going as she flicked
through the bills. She was into the five hundreds now and her
precision was making this stick up look far better than the
robber could ever hope for. He didn’t ask her to spread the
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
money out on the counter. If he had, he would have seen the dye
pack. She imagined him ripping into the bag later and getting
blasted with scarlet ink.
Robin thought back on the most evil things she had ever
done. Once when she was twenty-five, she was laid off. She drove
home early, head ringing from the dry evening heat. She stopped
by a Kroger to pick up ingredients for Spaghetti Bolognese, but
she was so distracted that when she pulled into a parking space,
she rammed into the side of a Ford Windstar, leaving a threefoot gash in the left side of the car. There was no way she
could afford to pay for the damages. The Windstar had other
dents and scratches anyways, so she checked the lot for
witnesses and slid back out onto the bypass.
Another time she had stolen a coat at a New Year’s party.
It was -2 degrees outside, roads slick with black ice, and her
coat was too light. But when she took it home she found the
pockets were inlaid with iridescent, ridiculous fabric and there
was a funny smell at the neck of the coat. She threw it away the
next day. So two things, neither so bad. She was capable of
worse. There were other things of course, but nothing that sent
her heart into a frantic six-eight time.
Robin finished with the money bag and now the boy was
sweating and breathing a little too hard. A strawberry flush
heated his face and Robin was glad he had forgone a balaclava.
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
He rolled on the heels of his feet and judged the height of the
counter. The sequence played over his face. He could pull out
the gun and hit all of the registers. He could scream and stamp
and tell everyone on the ground to get on the ground. He glanced
at the guard’s position. Teller number one passed behind Robin
to take a lunch break, and the manager, an ancient man who
called old women “young lady,” wandered off to the bathroom.
Security camera lenses focused. Robin leaned forward and spoke
in a low commercial voice.
“That’s $736.75 from the drawer. I can’t take anymore
without someone noticing.” She reached out a hand across the
counter, as if to soothe him. His hand clutched the gun from
outside his jacket. He still wouldn’t respond, as though
speaking would ruin his invisibility. He grabbed the bag from
the counter and hid it in his jacket. He did an odd little pivot
that again showed his anxiety-charged motor skills. He made for
the exit. She took three deep breaths and slid her fingers down
to the alarm button. She ran her thumb around it.
What kind of person was she? She quickly thought out the
facts. She was thirty-one. She had put on five pounds since
college. She called her father on Sundays. Mr. Banks was an
uneasy patriarch with health that never deteriorated, even in
his old age, despite his dissatisfaction with life and seasonal
bouts of depression. After Robin’s mother died he tried to be
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
didactic enough for two parents, often telling Robin what to do
with her tampons or how to dress herself for formal occasions,
but the only real lesson that ever stuck with Robin was that she
could expect to not do as well as the generation before her.
She spent a great deal of her work day running and rechecking the bill counters. At first she enjoyed the rigmarole
of daily life, shooting deposits up suctioned pipes, spinning
vault wheels and drinking the free coffee, but once the novelty
faded she had to train her brain to either entertain itself or
wipe blank. She chewed her gum on the left side of her mouth,
then on the right. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, filled
out crosswords and took too much time for lunch. She had held
dollar bills under microscopes, finding the tiny owl on the top
right corner, had dreams of unfinished pyramids and all-seeing
eyes. She touched hundreds of thousands of dollars until the
cotton and linen fibers meant absolutely nothing to her. Outside
of work, she had a few brief relationships, often with married
men, but each ended inconclusively. Some nights she would have
late dinner with one guy, take him back to her 5th floor
apartment for a trial round of sex, just to feel things out,
then he’d stumble out at 4 a.m. and she’d never hear from him
again. She’d rearrange her countless throw pillows in the
morning and regret having nothing to daydream about.
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
This was the boy’s first robbery. That much was clear.
Robin’s father insisted that with the economy, job market, and
environment, she should never expect too much. She had gladly
leapt into accounting. She never moved out of Illinois. She
never asked for too much or asked that her married men leave
their wives. The young man in the blue shirt, cash stashed in
his pockets, sweat staining the underarms of his shirt, was
taking what he needed. Maybe he had never expected too much
either, but here he was taking what he could out of life. He
passed the security guard, a giant ginger-haired man reading a
paperback book, giving him a little glance before getting
through the door and quick walking onto the sidewalk.
It was a beautiful day outside. The sun had reached its
apex and a light humidity has settled in the air. The daffodils
were in full bloom in the quartered spaces of grass. Robin
stared out the great window of the bank at the cross walks, the
shoes and brightly dressed people. The young man darted down the
sidewalk, occasionally checking over either shoulder. Robin took
her finger off the button, feeling like her body was tearing her
into two different directions. She could stay in the stale air
of the bank, running tasks, depositing and cashing and
transferring her interest in life, finding ways to pass time,
budgeting herself and calling her father on Sundays.
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
She tossed the wooden “next counter please” plate onto the
counter. One eye on the window, she grabbed her bag, stuck her
gum under the counter and darted around the partition. None of
the tellers called out to her or asked if she wanted to go to
lunch. She didn’t knock on the president’s door to quit. She ran
out of the bank, stumbling over the doorway and sprinted after
the robber. He last crossed at the corner of Main St. and West
King. She searched as fast as she could, sorting out the wrong
colors: pink, orange, gray, needing the blue and blonde
combination. He needed someone to teach him how to really rob
banks. He would need help deactivation the dye pack at the very
least.
She dodged pedestrians and raced across during a walk
light, made an excited leap towards the sidewalk and broke the
heel of her shoe clean off. She fell flat onto the sidewalk,
catching herself with her palms, but spilling the contents of
her bag all over the place. She scrambled up and went about
putting things back in her bag. She stood back up and pushed the
hair out of her face. She looked around for the robber again,
but she had lost him. Traffic lights and walk ways had changed
one or two too many times and the people occupying these roads
now had been shuffled. People she had never meet were swapped in
an out as the crowds moved East, West, North and South and the
robber was gone.
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Gerlach: At Counter No. 3
10
She took a deep breath, removed her shoes and ducked into a
delicatessen nearby. She wasn’t hungry and slipped into a
window-side booth, folding her bare feet under the seat. She
examined her tights. The fall had ruined them. She thought about
the bag of money stowed in a jacket pocket somewhere. There was
over seven hundred in cash in the bag. Her phone vibrated in her
purse. There was no way she could explain not hitting the
emergency button. The phone kept buzzing. She took the phone
out; her work number flashed on the screen. She didn’t answer it
but crumpled a little, cradling her head in her hands, massaging
her temples and thinking, thinking what could she do? The phone
kept buzzing. She started to cry.