out of this.“
Susan frowned at me.
”Don’t be mad at me,“ Pam Shepard said.
”Bullshit,“ I said. ”You want me to bring you flowers for being a goddamn thief and a murderer? Sweets for the sweet, my love. Hope the old guy didn’t have an old wife who can’t get along without him. Once you all get guns you can liberate her too.“
Susan said, ”Spenser,“ quite sharply. ”She feels bad enough.“
”No she doesn’t,“ I said. ”She doesn’t feel anywhere near bad enough. Neither do you. You’re so goddamned empathetic you’ve jumped into her frame. ‘And you felt you had to stand by them. Anyone would.’ Balls. Anyone wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.“
I snarled at Pam Shepard. ”How about it. You thought you were going to a dance recital when you went into that bank with guns to steal the money? You thought you were Faye Dunaway, la de da, we’ll take the money and run and the theme music will come up and the banjos will play and all the shots will miss?“ I bit a fried shrimp in half. Not bad. Tears were rolling down Pam Shepard’s face. Susan looked very grim. But she was silent.
”All right? Okay. We start there. You committed a vicious and mindless goddamned crime and I’m going to try and get you out of the consequences. But let’s not clutter up the surface with a lot of horseshit about who stood by who and how you shouldn’t tell secrets, and oh-of-course-anyone-would-have.“
Susan said, between her teeth, ”Spenser.“
I drank some beer and ate a scallop. ”Now start at the beginning and tell me everything that happened.“
Pam Shepard said, ”You will help me?“
”Yes.“
She dried her eyes with her napkin. Snuffled a little. Susan gave her a Kleenex and she blew her nose. Delicately. My fisherman’s platter had fried haddock in it. I pushed it aside, over behind the French fries, and ate a fried clam.
”Rose and Jane are organizing a women’s movement. They feel we must overcome our own passivity and arouse our sisters to do the same. I think they want to model it on the Black Panthers, and to do that we need guns. Rose says we won’t have to use them. But to have them will make a great psychological difference. It will increase the level of militancy and it will represent power, even, Jane says, a threat to phallic power.“
”Phallic power?“
She nodded.
I said, ”Go ahead.“
”So they talked about it, and some other women came over and we had a meeting, and decided that we either had to steal the guns or the money to buy them. Jane had a gun, but that was all. Rose said it was easier to steal money than guns, and Jane said that it would be easy as pie to steal from a bank because banks always instruct their employees to cooperate with robbers anyway. What do they care, they are insured. And banks are where the money is. So that’s where we should go.“
I didn’t say anything. Susan ate some crab salad. Pam Shepard seemed to have no interest in her lobster stew. Looked good too.
”So Rose and Jane said they would do the actual work,“ she said. ”And I—I don’t know exactly why—I said I’d go with them. And Jane said that was terrific of me and proved that I was really into the women’s movement. And Rose said a bank was the ideal symbol of masculine-capitalist oppression. And one of the other women, I don’t know her name, she was a black woman, Cape Verdean I think, said that capitalism was itself masculine, and racist as well, so that the bank was a really perfect place to strike. And I said I wanted to go.“
”Like an initiation,“ I said.
Susan nodded. Pam Shepard looked puzzled and shrugged. ”Maybe, I don’t know. Anyway we went and Jane and Rose and I all wore sunglasses and big hats. And Jane had the gun.“
”Jane has all the fun,“ I said. Susan glared at me. Pam Shepard didn’t seem to notice.
”Anyway, we went in and Rose and Jane went to the counter and I stayed by the door as a… a lookout… and Rose gave the girl, woman, behind the counter a note and Jane showed her the gun. And the woman did what it said. She took all her money from the cash drawer and put it in a bag that Rose gave her and we started to leave when that foolish old man tried to stop us. Why did he do that? What possessed him to take that chance?“
”Maybe he thought that was his job.“
She shook her head. ”Foolish old man. What is an old man like that working as a bank guard for anyway?“
”Probably a retired cop. Stood at an intersection for forty years and directed traffic and then retired and couldn’t live on the pension. So he’s got a gun and he hires out at the bank.“
”But why try to stop us, an old man like that. I mean he saw Jane had a gun. It wasn’t his money.“
”Maybe he thought he ought to. Maybe he figured that if he were taking the money to guard the bank when the robbers didn’t come, he ought to guard it when they did. Sort of a question of honor, maybe.“
She shook her head. ”Nonsense, that’s the machismo convention. It gets people killed and for what. Life isn’t a John Wayne movie.“
”Yeah, maybe. But machismo didn’t kill that old guy. Jane killed him.“
”But she had to. She’s fighting for a cause. For freedom. Not only for women but for men as well, freedom from all the old imperatives, freedom from the burden of machismo for you as well as for us.“
”Right on,“ I said. ”Off the bank guard.“
Susan said, ”What happened after Jane shot the guard?“
