It’d been a dry year till the snowstorm hit a few days ago.
It came suddenly and out of nowhere. But like another of God’s jokes he played on this part of Oklahoma, it only initially had dusted the landscape with about six inches of dry, skittering snow, with a promise from the weather man of more to come-a lot more.
Now though, no matter how deep it was, it made everything anyone did more difficult in this desolate landscape. Returning to his task, Landry dug under the snow, discovering it was still dry and sandy, despite the small snowstorm.
“Just like western Oklahoma.” He chuckled to himself as he placed both feet on the shovel. Bouncing his full weight on the tool, he forced it past the crusty top layer of ice and frozen sand and into the ground. The sand, loosed from the sides of the growing hole, slid into the hole and filled it again.
“Damn!”
He hopped back off the shovel to more solid ground and dropped to his knees at the snow-covered edge of the hole he was trying to dig in the dark, bitter weather. He hugged the loose sand and dry snow with his arms and pulled it out of the hole and into a pathetic pile in front of him.
Somewhere to the north, a calf bawled.
Landry dropped the bag into the inadequate hole and pushed the sand over it again. It made a sort of permanent, heavy sound on the canvas bag. It was a sound that reminded him of his father’s funeral two weeks ago, as the dirt tumbled, cold and damp onto his casket.
He paused and surveyed the sage covered plateaus around him, hoping he would be able to remember this spot.
“God, everything out here looks the damn same,” he said aloud to himself.
He stomped the spot and pushed fresh snow over it. Anger welled inside him and somewhere in the back of his mind, doubts about his decision swirled like yard ornaments in a tornado.
Indeed, he thought he might be even more enraged now than before. Yet why, he wondered. He thought this final act would have settled the score.
It was because of her bein’ there that ruined it. It wasn’t supposed to go that way, he thought to himself.
He shook his head as the thoughts cascaded through his mind.
It was on the dark nights, alone in his home, after he was shamed out of his own rightful position that he had planned this. When he played it in his mind though, the people he was pointing a gun at and stealing from had always been the ones who had hurt him. Not people he loved.
She had been the last person he thought he’d see there, and it had claimed him in that second – that millisecond – and it had changed how he pulled off the robbery.
At that moment, his attention had shifted ever so slightly from the task at hand to her. In that moment, for the first time since he had pointed his weapon at the bank teller, he felt panicked.
It was not so much because someone would shoot and kill him, which was more probable than possible in this part of the country. But instead, his fear was wrapped in the idea that he would be revealed, and she would know what he really was.
He had wanted what they had to be perfect. He wanted it to be a memory, separate from all that had become of his life. It was supposed to be a movie in his mind, to which only he had a ticket. He needed to believe that she did the same in those moments of the night when the black lowered its blanket and tucked in the day.
Now, as he completed the last step of his plan as he hid the money, he considered what his actions meant about him. He pictured himself trying to explain all of this to her, had he been caught.
It would be one more thing he would have to explain in a year and a half that was already full of awful things to try and explain.
During all his troubles of the last year, she seemed like a friend to him. She had been someone who knew he was being railroaded. She had been the one who listened to him, held him, became his sole source of comfort.
But when it had all gone wrong, when he had lost the election, she had stopped calling or returning his calls. He had spent the last two months holed up in his house, laying in his own darkness, with nobody but a bottle of Pendleton to help him pass his days.
He wanted to call her now, to confide in her. But he couldn’t make himself punch her number into his flip top cell phone. He tried but his eyes blurred with tears and the shaking of his hand made it impossible to carry out the tiny task.
Surrounded by his doings now, Landry was overwhelmed with conflict. His thoughts raced back and forth, like a dog with two hamburgers. At that moment, his mind filled with anger again and once more he convinced himself this was not his fault. Society had forced him to this.
He had made them pay the only way he could now; with their money. “And by-God, I earned it,” his mind screamed at him.
The whole thing didn’t go off like he’d planned it exactly. But he had done it. In fact, while he was committing the crime was the first time in months he felt up, energetic, like he finally had a purpose.
However, he could not shake the worry that he had, in some indelible and final way, lost the one person he had connected with through all of this.
“Hell, she probably doesn’t even remember me.”
His words sounded tired and the timbre of his voice galloped away on a frosty horse into the coldness of the night, heard by only himself.
He continued pushing more snow and dirt on the spot, changing his focus to the people of Cheyenne who he had truly meant to direct this final action against.
He wondered if he had waited any longer to rob the bank, would he have really done it. It wasn’t his way or what he’d spent his life doing. In fact, quite the opposite.
The way he figured it, as he smoothed the last of the snow on the spot with a sprig of sage and listened to his own internal dialogue. You have to be angry to do these things if stealin’ aint just second nature to ya. But the way things were, the way I been treated, they had it comin’. There was never a bank heist when I was Sheriff. Now they’d see what they had sittin’ in that office up there. They’ll be sorry they ran a real sheriff off from there.
The man looked up, toward a slip of light creeping from the east, just over the ridge and he let out a deep sigh and a curl of frost escaped into the frigid air.
Now, he was a man that had nothing left to lose.
Landry had once been someone who’d give his life for his people, he had served all those years. Back then, he thought he had something. He had given himself fully, believing the people of Cheyenne County would return that same measure of loyalty. He was almost embarrassed now, when he thought about his old life. He would have done anything for them.
He had spent his days tending to the mountain of details it takes to run a sheriff’s department. His nights at home were spent motionless in a twilight sleep, listening to the scanner at his house in case his men needed him somewhere in the nearly 700 square miles that made up the county. His only dream was to find someone who would love him and finally retire here. That was a difficult task for any man in these parts. He’d never had a wife or children, choosing instead to make his deputies and the residents of the county his family. This country was hard and unforgiving. It took a special woman to live here.
But now, betrayal burned deep in his chest.
I know the truth about them now. The same folk I sat across from at community Thanksgiving dinners are the ones who believed the lies about me. I am so done with this place and these people.
All Landry had now was a new plan to leave this place with enough money to start somewhere new. He’d never make the same mistake again. He’d never give himself to anyone the way he had these people. From now on, his life would be all about what he could wring out from it.
His horse, showing his age just like his owner, nickered and pawed the snow where he’d tied him to an old, broken fence post.
“It’s okay ole Brownie.”
Landry crooned to the horse, his only partner in the caper-indeed it seemed now, his only friend.
“You done real good, just hang on a little longer and we’ll get you home and get you some dinner.” The words came between chattering teeth now as the morning grew even colder.
It would be light soon.
His eyelids were heavy, but his mind willed his body to keep moving. It had been hours since the robbery. He had planned on being home, safe by his fireplace by now, but had been forced to hide in an old hay barn up in Kansas for several hours.
He had easily pulled his stock trailer with Brownie out of the small town and north up Hwy 283 into Kansas. But the law seemed to be everywhere. Some even came in from Kansas to help, since there had never been such a robbery of this kind all the way out here.
So he had pulled off the highway into old Myles Casey’s place and closed the door. All the while, the law hovered around Cheyenne, looking for a guy on a horse.
His plan had been foolproof, he thought. He’d leave Brownie tied to the bushes on the east side of the bank. Those bankers were so used to ranchers there, they would never think twice about it. The back door to the bank was right there and he knew the code, since he had helped the bank install the system when he was Sheriff.
He’d planned to leave through that door because it faced the alley and he could, in a matter of a couple of blocks, be into Beaver River where he could ride without leaving tracks all the way to his stock trailer.
He envisioned sauntering into the front entrance, covered all the way to his eyes so no one would be able to “make” him. And then he’d do it.
He knew, in small banks like this, folks would do whatever they needed to in order to survive. He knew it. And that is how it went. Except for her being there-that little detail spun the whole plan just a little bit.
He chuckled when he thought of the looks on some of the customer’s faces when he told them all they were being robbed, especially old Lloyd Pointer.
Damn, that man thinks of nothing but expanding his ranch. Stole that place right out from under ole’ Wayne Coulten. Kicked him when he was down and out. He’s one of the men who was so nice to my face and told me he knew I was being screwed over. Come to find out, he has coffee every morning with that little sawed-off runt they made Sheriff.
Landry had intended to hide the money close to home for the time being. When the light had begun to fade, he pulled his stock trailer and horse out of the barn in Kansas and drove as far as the road would take him back into Oklahoma. At the spot where the dirt road ran out and turned to shifting, snow-covered sand, he’d mounted up and rode on to his final destination with the money.
The way he figured now, if he had gotten it right, he could climb that ridge, north of where he stood, and look down on Cheyenne and even see the lights to his own house.
He struggled to his feet now and dusted the snow and sand from his Wranglers with red, bared hands. He cupped his hands and blew warmly into them while he glanced east at the sun as it climbed over the Gloss Mountains and shone golden on his doings.
He rubbed his hand over graying stubble and fought back a hint of guilt.
Night’s funny that way, how it supports doing things that suddenly seem wrong when the sun peeks over the ridge.
The slithering mass of Rattlers heaved, seeming to breathe as one unit, then loosened, and wrapped themselves into a tighter bundle within the confines and warmth of their den. The largest one, a male, lifted its head momentarily and sensed the human hand too near them and he moved around the group, pushing them farther into the tight corner and safety.
“How did he get away?” A young, red-faced sheriff asked the question simultaneously as he marched into his office.
“On a horse.” His undersheriff answered the question without looking up.
“On a friggin horse.” The uniformed man repeated the statement, shaking his head as if he were still trying to understand it.
Young Sheriff Gatlin Sandridge walked to his desk and waved the undersheriff out of his chair.
Sandridge wore an orange and brown sweater, over crisp, dark brown slacks and a Rolex no one ever saw him wear while in uniform. The sweater bore a pumpkin emblem over his left breast and he hated that he was wearing it, but his wife Izzie had insisted.
Now, as he looked through the mass of law officers who had crowded into his office, he couldn’t help still being distracted by the ass-chewing he had just taken from his wife, for yet again, being called into the office.
Sandridge had left the office Wednesday afternoon. He and his wife had dressed for an early holiday dinner with his in-laws, who had come in all the way from their second home in Montana for Thanksgiving. He and Izzie had been parking his Tahoe outside his wife’s parent’s home in west Cheyenne when the call had come in.
“Sheriff, the Cattleman’s Exchange Bank just got robbed.”
It was Aldan Newman, the former sheriff’s second in command. Newman was still serving as the under sheriff but Sandridge knew he would have to replace the man. He had too many loyalties to the former sheriff. For now, though, he used the man for his knowledge of the county and the inner workings of the department.
When his phone had buzzed in his shirt pocket, Izzie had flown into a rage.
“I knew this would happen. Ever since you got this job, it is all you do.” She fiddled with her bangle bracelets and looked away from him. “Are you really going back there?”
“Honey, I’m the Sheriff of Cheyenne County and the bank has been robbed. What do you think?” He reached to stroke her arm lightly.
“I’ll be back in a little bit.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll do what you always do.” Izzie snatched her hand away from him and opened the Tahoe door and bared her teeth in a forced smile toward her parents. She waved at them as they stood in the entry way of their spacious home, puzzled by the couple’s delay.
“You better rethink this ridiculous job, or you might find yourself without a woman and the money that comes with her.”
Gatlin sat back in his seat, surprised by her anger.
“It was your father who pushed me to do this.”
“Oh, shut up! Go to the office and hurry up!” Izzie slid out of the Tahoe, her many gold bracelets jingled and chimed as she trotted up the snowy drive in matching, gold stilettos.
Now he sat at his desk and stared at his deputies. They were all poised to do just what he told them to do. If he only knew.
He looked over at Newman and threw his hands up.
“Well?” Newman knew what the man was asking.
“We need to contact the ‘Feds’,” Newman said without looking up. “They have to be contacted when there is any bank robbery of this level.”
Sandridge waved at the phone impatiently. “Okay then, git to it.”
“Well sir, tomorrow is Thanksgiving.”
“I don’t care if it’s the Second Coming of Christ. Get them on the phone to handle this. I have family in town.”
