Beginner's Luck
"Read it to me, Honeybun."
Honeybun stood, leaning against the door to support the weight of her pregnancy. With her feet apart, she pressed the small of her back against the hard, flat surface and squinted to read what she had torn out of the envelope. The front of her terry cloth robe rose with the immense swell of her tummy to show plump knees.
"It says we got to get out, Woodrow." She looked up from the printed notice to where he sat on the tumbled bed in his underwear, a plump young man with smooth, heavy jowls, very pale skin and brown hair, thinning in the front. She stared at him for a long moment, while a frown gradually gathered on his forehead and began to spread down his cheeks to his mouth.
"Do you think we could stay if we paid the rent?" he asked.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot to say. We can. But where’re we going to get the money for that?" She bypassed the two metal chairs, which were covered in clothes, to sit on the edge of the bed with a sigh.
Woodrow stared at the smooth skin of his own knee and remained silent while she worked her way backwards onto the bed, getting one leg up at a time and breathing effortfully.
When she was settled, he said, "Do you know where’s my winter hat?"
"I’m not getting up. It’s in the closet somewheres in a bag if you want it," Honeybun said from her position against the headboard.
Woodrow hauled himself across the lower end of the mattress and got off the bed, to spend a long time going through the plastic bags of stuff that were heaped in the small closet. A couple of them broke and small roaches glided swiftly away across the linoleum floor. But, finally, he gave a triumphant, "Ha!" and held up a blue, knit stocking-cap.
"Woodrow, what you going to do with that in this weather? I put that away for winter," she called out..
"I can’t tell you, Honeybun. But I need it."
"What do you mean you can’t tell me. We always share secrets," she said.
But Woodrow began to dress and could not answer. Puffed, he tied the final shoelace and let his foot drop to the floor with a thump. After a moment of recovery, a worried look came over his face.
"Honeybun, I want you to write me a note."
"A note? What’m I going to write you a note for. You’re right here all the time," she said.
"Don’t write it to me," he told her. "I want you to write it to the bank."
"What bank? We don’t have no bank account."
"Just any bank," Woodrow said.
"What’m I going to write then?" she asked.
"Write, 'This is a robbery. Give me all your money.'"
"Woodrow, you’re going to rob a bank! That’s how you’re going to get the money?" Her voice was animated, but her swollen body was inert against the pillows and headboard.
"That’s right," he said, smiling slowly.
"Oh, Woodrow," she said, holding out her arms from her position. He fell into them, heavily.
Honeybun chewed all around the top of her pen. "Okay, here’s what I got," she finally said.
"Dear Sir, this is a hold-up. Give me all your money. Yours truly.
"Do you think I ought to sign it?"
"I don’t think so," he said after a moment’s reflection.
"Where’s my hat, again?" he asked, looking around. "I just had it."
"You’re sitting on it," she told him. When he rose to look, there it was. "What do you want with a hat anyway?"
"Well," he said, with a sly grin, "I guess I can tell you. It’s a disguise."
"It is?"
"That’s right. You pull a stocking-cap down over your face, so nobody knows who did it.
"Woodrow, you’re wonderful," she said. He took the note and jammed it in his trouser pocket and took up the cap. "Wait, I’m coming, too!" she cried out.
Woodrow was startled. "You can’t come!"
"I can, too!" She struggled out of bed and to her feet. Her sturdy bulk came up to his.
"Girls don’t..." his voice trailed off.
"And I have a disguise, too." She drove against the heap escaping from the closet’s open door. "You are not going to rob any banks without me along."
"Well, you have to stand behind me and pretend that you’re somebody else," he told her.
"Woodrow, you’re such a smarty!" She dug into the heaps and bags tangled with thin coat-hangers, gasping from time to time as she had to lean forward on her knees. Woodrow watched placidly the huge, terry cloth bottom and bare feet, which were all that could be seen of her at times. "Nothing I got fits me anymore!" she wailed, in kneeling position and re-attacked the heap. "Lookit here," she said, smiling and smoothing a shiny, red band against her front, between her breasts and down the curve of her stomach. "It’s from our honeymoon." Woodrow grunted.
Woodrow had begun shifting about on his seat when she finally cried out, "Got it!" She sat back, waving yards of black cloth. Laboriously, she rose to her feet. Woodrow waited silently for the revelation.
"You remember Halloween two years ago?" she asked him, suddenly hiding the garment behind her.
"Um..." Woodrow ventured.
"I was a nun, remember? And it’ll fit, too!" But Woodrow had to help her in the end. "Not too tight!" she exclaimed as he tied her sneakers. "My feet kill."
"You sure you want to come along, Honeybun?"
"Course!" she snapped and rose to her feet to fix the white edge of a wimple about her face. The cloth of her habit smoothed itself over the mound of her middle. "We can have lunch-out after."
It was a long walk in the sun along the highway after they left the house. They stopped across the street from a strip-mall where the bank was located.
"Honeybun, you stay right here where you’re at. I’ll go and get the money."
She was leaning heavily on the fender of a parked car. "You come right back, Woodrow," she told him.
"Don’t worry, Honeybun," he promised. "You got my note?"
"Did you look in your pants pocket?" she asked.
"Okay." He dragged the knit cap down over his hair and turned to cross the street.
Approaching the glass and metal doors of the bank’s main entrance, he tugged the hat down over his face to his upper lip. A hurried customer, exiting the building, courteously held the door for Woodrow. The man hardly glanced to see who it was he handed the door to before hustling off. As he moved forward, the center of Woodrow’s knit-covered face caught the edge of the door– hard. He snatched off the cap and put his hand over his nose, moving to stand with his face pressed to the blank, brick wall of the building for several minutes. When he finally turned away from the wall, pale streaks marked his flushed cheeks.
This time he pulled the cap down so that it only half-covered his eyes, leaving his tender nose exposed.
Woodrow threaded the ropes and pylons, which made a maze of the money-center lobby. He tilted his head up for better visibility and joined the queue of three persons waiting to see a teller. In his pocket, he fingered the note, speaking to no one.
"May I help someone?" the teller called out, when Woodrow had reached the head of the line. He raised his chin and peered about. "You, sir?" He shuffled to the left, still peeking along the side of this swollen nose from beneath his cap.
The teller waited impatiently and busied herself with some papers.
"Just a minute," he told her, fishing in the other pocket. "Here." He placed the folded paper on the teller’s raised counter. She took it briskly and smoothed it open.
"Marge," the branch manager spoke over her shoulder, "did you enter the October seventy-four forties for Kwikky-Pik a little while ago?"
She turned quickly. "I did, but Ginny gave me the figures because she was working the window...."
Ka-BOOM!
In the sudden silence that followed, the tinkle of glass dropping from the ruined video monitor was the only sound.
"This is a stick-up, you mothers!" a huge voice roared. Woodrow turned, pushing his cap up above his eyes.
A man stood in the center of the lobby, brandishing a shot-gun in all directions. He had a woman’s panty-hose pulled over his head, so that his features were indecipherable.
"Don’t nobody move, you mothers! Don’t nobody move."
Staring hard at the man’s stockinged head, Woodrow said, "Oh," and reached up to remove his own cap.
"Don’t move!" The man fairly leaped across the floor to stick his shotgun in Woodrow’s stomach. "You want me to blow you apart, sucker?" he screamed in Woodrow’s face.
Woodrow’s red nose stood out bright against his pale skin. He froze with the stocking-cap in one hand and the force of the shotgun’s muzzle pressed him back up against the counter. Then the robber shoved him aside.
"You!" he bellowed at the manager and teller, who were clinging together. He threw a large plastic trash bag over the protective grill at them. "Start filling this with money. Fast!"
The manager stumbled forward to snatch up the bag. With hands that trembled, he swept the cash and papers off the teller’s work-station, then dumped the contents of her cash drawer in on top. Woodrow’s note went with it. The manager moved down the counter to the next teller’s space, followed by the man with the shotgun. Woodrow remained in the hands-up position, staring straight ahead.
"Woodrow!" Honeybun screamed from the doorway.
The robber whipped around and fired his shotgun, shattering the glass door beside her. A panic huge enough to lift him off the ground seized Woodrow and he was in the air. He was not a powerful young man. But there was a lot of him and he came down with force on the robber from the side. They landed solidly, with the robber beneath Woodrow’s two hundred and eighty-five prostrate pounds.
As the man made an effort to throw off Woodrow’s body, Honeybun waddled rapidly across the bank’s small lobby and performed a good replica of the knee-drop favored by the more vindictive wrestlers she followed on TV. One knee found the space between the robber’s hip and ribs, where his right kidney lay. He lost control of his shotgun with that; and then Honeybun’s toppling weight was added to the load on his back, diminishing his efforts.
Sirens could be heard half a block away, as a man with a police scanner hanging from his belt stepped cautiously through the door. Sizing the situation up quickly, he raised a camera, which flashed at the heap of bodies. Then he took a metal pylon, with the velvet ropes still attached, and whacked the only head wearing a stocking. He had pictures from three different angles before the first policeman charged across the gravel of glass paving the entryway.
As uniformed arms lifted, first Honeybun, and then Woodrow, he snapped his light in their faces. The police were busy for a few moments on the floor with the robber. The cameraman approached Woodrow and Honeybun, where they leaned together in shocked confusion.
"Silvers, from the News," he said, getting their attention. "You’re going to be on the front page tonight. What do you think of that?"
Honeybun’s dimples winked at him and she clutched harder at Woodrow. "We are?"
"You betcha!" said the cameraman, flashing at them again. "And you know what the headline’s probably going to read?" He grinned in the avid focus of their attention. "Bank Robbery Foiled by Clown with Red Nose and Pregnant Nun."
Honeybun was not quite able to jump up and down, but she jiggled.
"Sure," said the reporter, "and there’s a nice reward somewhere in this, too. I’ll bet you never thought of that."
"Well, we never...," Woodrow began.
"Sure we did!" Honeybun exclaimed. "We knew it all the time."
Honeybun stood, leaning against the door to support the weight of her pregnancy. With her feet apart, she pressed the small of her back against the hard, flat surface and squinted to read what she had torn out of the envelope. The front of her terry cloth robe rose with the immense swell of her tummy to show plump knees.
"It says we got to get out, Woodrow." She looked up from the printed notice to where he sat on the tumbled bed in his underwear, a plump young man with smooth, heavy jowls, very pale skin and brown hair, thinning in the front. She stared at him for a long moment, while a frown gradually gathered on his forehead and began to spread down his cheeks to his mouth.
"Do you think we could stay if we paid the rent?" he asked.
"Oh, yeah, I forgot to say. We can. But where’re we going to get the money for that?" She bypassed the two metal chairs, which were covered in clothes, to sit on the edge of the bed with a sigh.
Woodrow stared at the smooth skin of his own knee and remained silent while she worked her way backwards onto the bed, getting one leg up at a time and breathing effortfully.
When she was settled, he said, "Do you know where’s my winter hat?"
"I’m not getting up. It’s in the closet somewheres in a bag if you want it," Honeybun said from her position against the headboard.
Woodrow hauled himself across the lower end of the mattress and got off the bed, to spend a long time going through the plastic bags of stuff that were heaped in the small closet. A couple of them broke and small roaches glided swiftly away across the linoleum floor. But, finally, he gave a triumphant, "Ha!" and held up a blue, knit stocking-cap.
"Woodrow, what you going to do with that in this weather? I put that away for winter," she called out..
"I can’t tell you, Honeybun. But I need it."
"What do you mean you can’t tell me. We always share secrets," she said.
But Woodrow began to dress and could not answer. Puffed, he tied the final shoelace and let his foot drop to the floor with a thump. After a moment of recovery, a worried look came over his face.
"Honeybun, I want you to write me a note."
"A note? What’m I going to write you a note for. You’re right here all the time," she said.
"Don’t write it to me," he told her. "I want you to write it to the bank."
"What bank? We don’t have no bank account."
"Just any bank," Woodrow said.
"What’m I going to write then?" she asked.
"Write, 'This is a robbery. Give me all your money.'"
"Woodrow, you’re going to rob a bank! That’s how you’re going to get the money?" Her voice was animated, but her swollen body was inert against the pillows and headboard.
"That’s right," he said, smiling slowly.
"Oh, Woodrow," she said, holding out her arms from her position. He fell into them, heavily.
Honeybun chewed all around the top of her pen. "Okay, here’s what I got," she finally said.
"Dear Sir, this is a hold-up. Give me all your money. Yours truly.
"Do you think I ought to sign it?"
"I don’t think so," he said after a moment’s reflection.
"Where’s my hat, again?" he asked, looking around. "I just had it."
"You’re sitting on it," she told him. When he rose to look, there it was. "What do you want with a hat anyway?"
"Well," he said, with a sly grin, "I guess I can tell you. It’s a disguise."
"It is?"
"That’s right. You pull a stocking-cap down over your face, so nobody knows who did it.
"Woodrow, you’re wonderful," she said. He took the note and jammed it in his trouser pocket and took up the cap. "Wait, I’m coming, too!" she cried out.
Woodrow was startled. "You can’t come!"
"I can, too!" She struggled out of bed and to her feet. Her sturdy bulk came up to his.
"Girls don’t..." his voice trailed off.
"And I have a disguise, too." She drove against the heap escaping from the closet’s open door. "You are not going to rob any banks without me along."
"Well, you have to stand behind me and pretend that you’re somebody else," he told her.
"Woodrow, you’re such a smarty!" She dug into the heaps and bags tangled with thin coat-hangers, gasping from time to time as she had to lean forward on her knees. Woodrow watched placidly the huge, terry cloth bottom and bare feet, which were all that could be seen of her at times. "Nothing I got fits me anymore!" she wailed, in kneeling position and re-attacked the heap. "Lookit here," she said, smiling and smoothing a shiny, red band against her front, between her breasts and down the curve of her stomach. "It’s from our honeymoon." Woodrow grunted.
Woodrow had begun shifting about on his seat when she finally cried out, "Got it!" She sat back, waving yards of black cloth. Laboriously, she rose to her feet. Woodrow waited silently for the revelation.
"You remember Halloween two years ago?" she asked him, suddenly hiding the garment behind her.
"Um..." Woodrow ventured.
"I was a nun, remember? And it’ll fit, too!" But Woodrow had to help her in the end. "Not too tight!" she exclaimed as he tied her sneakers. "My feet kill."
"You sure you want to come along, Honeybun?"
"Course!" she snapped and rose to her feet to fix the white edge of a wimple about her face. The cloth of her habit smoothed itself over the mound of her middle. "We can have lunch-out after."
It was a long walk in the sun along the highway after they left the house. They stopped across the street from a strip-mall where the bank was located.
"Honeybun, you stay right here where you’re at. I’ll go and get the money."
She was leaning heavily on the fender of a parked car. "You come right back, Woodrow," she told him.
"Don’t worry, Honeybun," he promised. "You got my note?"
"Did you look in your pants pocket?" she asked.
"Okay." He dragged the knit cap down over his hair and turned to cross the street.
Approaching the glass and metal doors of the bank’s main entrance, he tugged the hat down over his face to his upper lip. A hurried customer, exiting the building, courteously held the door for Woodrow. The man hardly glanced to see who it was he handed the door to before hustling off. As he moved forward, the center of Woodrow’s knit-covered face caught the edge of the door– hard. He snatched off the cap and put his hand over his nose, moving to stand with his face pressed to the blank, brick wall of the building for several minutes. When he finally turned away from the wall, pale streaks marked his flushed cheeks.
This time he pulled the cap down so that it only half-covered his eyes, leaving his tender nose exposed.
Woodrow threaded the ropes and pylons, which made a maze of the money-center lobby. He tilted his head up for better visibility and joined the queue of three persons waiting to see a teller. In his pocket, he fingered the note, speaking to no one.
"May I help someone?" the teller called out, when Woodrow had reached the head of the line. He raised his chin and peered about. "You, sir?" He shuffled to the left, still peeking along the side of this swollen nose from beneath his cap.
The teller waited impatiently and busied herself with some papers.
"Just a minute," he told her, fishing in the other pocket. "Here." He placed the folded paper on the teller’s raised counter. She took it briskly and smoothed it open.
"Marge," the branch manager spoke over her shoulder, "did you enter the October seventy-four forties for Kwikky-Pik a little while ago?"
She turned quickly. "I did, but Ginny gave me the figures because she was working the window...."
Ka-BOOM!
In the sudden silence that followed, the tinkle of glass dropping from the ruined video monitor was the only sound.
"This is a stick-up, you mothers!" a huge voice roared. Woodrow turned, pushing his cap up above his eyes.
A man stood in the center of the lobby, brandishing a shot-gun in all directions. He had a woman’s panty-hose pulled over his head, so that his features were indecipherable.
"Don’t nobody move, you mothers! Don’t nobody move."
Staring hard at the man’s stockinged head, Woodrow said, "Oh," and reached up to remove his own cap.
"Don’t move!" The man fairly leaped across the floor to stick his shotgun in Woodrow’s stomach. "You want me to blow you apart, sucker?" he screamed in Woodrow’s face.
Woodrow’s red nose stood out bright against his pale skin. He froze with the stocking-cap in one hand and the force of the shotgun’s muzzle pressed him back up against the counter. Then the robber shoved him aside.
"You!" he bellowed at the manager and teller, who were clinging together. He threw a large plastic trash bag over the protective grill at them. "Start filling this with money. Fast!"
The manager stumbled forward to snatch up the bag. With hands that trembled, he swept the cash and papers off the teller’s work-station, then dumped the contents of her cash drawer in on top. Woodrow’s note went with it. The manager moved down the counter to the next teller’s space, followed by the man with the shotgun. Woodrow remained in the hands-up position, staring straight ahead.
"Woodrow!" Honeybun screamed from the doorway.
The robber whipped around and fired his shotgun, shattering the glass door beside her. A panic huge enough to lift him off the ground seized Woodrow and he was in the air. He was not a powerful young man. But there was a lot of him and he came down with force on the robber from the side. They landed solidly, with the robber beneath Woodrow’s two hundred and eighty-five prostrate pounds.
As the man made an effort to throw off Woodrow’s body, Honeybun waddled rapidly across the bank’s small lobby and performed a good replica of the knee-drop favored by the more vindictive wrestlers she followed on TV. One knee found the space between the robber’s hip and ribs, where his right kidney lay. He lost control of his shotgun with that; and then Honeybun’s toppling weight was added to the load on his back, diminishing his efforts.
Sirens could be heard half a block away, as a man with a police scanner hanging from his belt stepped cautiously through the door. Sizing the situation up quickly, he raised a camera, which flashed at the heap of bodies. Then he took a metal pylon, with the velvet ropes still attached, and whacked the only head wearing a stocking. He had pictures from three different angles before the first policeman charged across the gravel of glass paving the entryway.
As uniformed arms lifted, first Honeybun, and then Woodrow, he snapped his light in their faces. The police were busy for a few moments on the floor with the robber. The cameraman approached Woodrow and Honeybun, where they leaned together in shocked confusion.
"Silvers, from the News," he said, getting their attention. "You’re going to be on the front page tonight. What do you think of that?"
Honeybun’s dimples winked at him and she clutched harder at Woodrow. "We are?"
"You betcha!" said the cameraman, flashing at them again. "And you know what the headline’s probably going to read?" He grinned in the avid focus of their attention. "Bank Robbery Foiled by Clown with Red Nose and Pregnant Nun."
Honeybun was not quite able to jump up and down, but she jiggled.
"Sure," said the reporter, "and there’s a nice reward somewhere in this, too. I’ll bet you never thought of that."
"Well, we never...," Woodrow began.
"Sure we did!" Honeybun exclaimed. "We knew it all the time."