From today's TIMES and NEWS-STAR
From
experience gained as a little boy in a little town, I can tell you that if you’re
going to be a bank robber, you need to cover up any tell-tale physical
giveaways. Sometimes, even a panty-hose stocking won’t help.
I
re-learned this much later in life when told about a guy in Ruston who’d long-ago
robbed a service station. He didn’t have any ears. So when the police asked the
attendant for a physical description, one of the first things the guy said was,
“Well, I noticed right off he didn’t have any ears.” It wasn’t five minutes
later that the police apprehended the careless robber, counting money in his
den; the officers had simply run through in their brains the list of non-ears
homeowners in town – you can imagine how small that number might be – and then
pointed their cruiser straight to his front yard, where he sat behind a screen
door counting 5’s and 1’s.
Cricket,
one of my hometown heroes, fell into this sad set of criminal, ones with an eye
for the prize but no real smarts concerning how, exactly, to get there. Step A
was get a gun and Step B was fill up the truck with gas and Step C was target a
location. But after that, the plan was shaky. Cricket learned the hard way.
He’d
been an All-State football player, this despite having lost a big toe in a
shotgun accident in a misspent junior high existence. The accident had happened
because he’d fallen asleep in the woods with the gun on his foot. He was called
lazy, and he probably was, unless he was your hero. And he was no less than
that to me and the rest of the elementary school gang who watched him tackle
ball carriers on Friday nights, knock people down right and left, and run to
daylight when we had the ball. He even punted. With his big-toeless foot. What some
people called lazy, we boys called efficient. Cricket was the man.
But
he turned down scholarship offers after he learned he’d have to go to class in
college, and that sad fact relegated him to the tobacco fields with the rest of
us. I was still little and a tractor driver; Cricket and the grown guys did the
heavy work. But it could get to be unpleasant for everybody, there with the
snakes and the mud and the gummy tobacco in the big fields of my little South
Carolina hometown.
It
was in weather like this, the back-end of a steamy, sultry summer, that is happened.
It rained all night and was still drizzling that morning, making the fields too
wet for work. It’s a long story that Keever or Mertie or Mr. Peabug or most
anyone back home could tell better, but the short version is that Cricket
decided to bolt boredom that day. Some of us went to the city pool. Some of us
went fishing. Not Cricket. He told his two scrawny twin cousins to get in the
truck, handed each a bandana like the one around his own neck, and headed toward
town and our little First National Bank.
With
bandanas over their faces, the trio walked in to a small building about the
size of the average garage. Only the teller – a young farmer’s wife – and Miss
Jean Watson, perpetual bank president, were there. Once inside, things
progressed quickly: Cricket was slow in life, fast in competition.
In
the minute it took for them to get in and out, Cricket made two huge mistakes.
One, he called the teller by name when he asked for money. Two, when Jean, a
pear-shaped woman, started to get up from behind her desk, he made an unkind
weight reference when telling her to sit back down, though her weight was
largely hidden behind stacks of loan requests.
It
was a half hour later when Cricket’s uncle, Zimp Ivy, walked in on the three barefoot
boys counting money in Cricket’s bedroom. Zimp happened to be the sheriff. When
she’d called in the robbery, Jean had already told Zimp about Cricket’s third
mistake. “If your nephew plans to rob more banks,” she said, “he should
probably wear shoes. At least on the foot that doesn’t have the big toe.”
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