Wilma & Betty: Episode X
Here’s the full story read on Saturday, Jan 30th at Jengo’s Playhouse at the latest installment of The Cure for the Common Reading. I’ll leave it here for about a week, then probably take it down. I may or may not try to actually send it out somewhere!
Hope you all enjoy!
-JM
The Further Adventures of Wilma & Betty:
Episode X: How It Does or Does Not End
(Dedicated to Bill Shipman)
It was 4:59 on a Friday afternoon and outside the 1st National Bank of Bedrock the sky was gray. A steady, dreary rain was falling. The two women just did make it through the front door of the bank as the clock struck 5 pm. The security guard pulled the door shut behind them and closed the lock home.
He was a young, broad-shouldered boy. Reminiscent of a young Dennis Quaidstone.
To be sure, he was handsome. A handsome boy that might someday ripen into a handsome man—if his life was long enough and hard enough and he made just enough bad decisions.
“You ladies got lucky,” the young guard said, smiling a perfect smile.
Betty grinned, looking both guilty and disingenuous.
Wilma sighed. “Yes,” she said. “We did get lucky.” She smiled an apology.
Then she pulled out her pistol and shot the young guard just above the knee.
He crumpled with a scream.
“Here we go,” Wilma said.
*
Betty took her cue and raised the shotgun from beneath her sloth-skinned trench coat and leveled it at the crowd. No one was screaming the way she had expected them to. They stood frozen, like animals that have found themselves in the path of a great storm. Betty could see it in their faces. Everyone doing the math. Everyone wondering: is this real? Is this happening? Is this happening to me? This can’t be real.
She had to show them that it was real. Wilma had told Betty that. Very clearly. Everyone had to know that, yes, this was happening. Then, and only then, would the screaming begin.
Betty fired the shotgun above the crowd, shattering a gold-plated chandelier just above the bank manager’s desk. The roar of the shotgun indoors was like a small star detonating. The sound fell like a hammer. People buckled, all of them covering their ears.
Then the screaming began.
*
The plan was simple and Wilma had planned it to perfection. Take the bank on the first Friday of the month when the deposits were at their heaviest. Betty would work crowd control with the shotgun while Wilma wrangled the tellers and the manager into the vault for the jewels and the cash to be loaded into the two black backpacks. Everything was planned. Take only what the backpacks could carry. Nothing more.
The mistake people made when they tried to rob banks was being greedy, Wilma had decided. They wanted more than they could easily carry. Then they needed cars. Accomplices. More planning. More opportunities for things to go wrong.
But Wilma kept it all simple.
Two people. Two raptor-skinned backpacks.
Fill one with cash. Fill one with jewelry.
Exit stage left.
Smooth. Simple. Easy.
Everything was planned.
And, most importantly, as Wilma prodded the gun into the bank manager’s ribcage and he went to blubbering and promising to do whatever she wanted, most importantly, the plan was working.
Just about now Betty would be—
“Thirty-seconds!” Betty shouted, right on cue.
“Thirty-seconds!” Wilma called back.
Everything was going perfectly. So long as nobody tried to play the hero—a slim chance so long as they were in and out before anyone had time enough to build up courage—Wilma & Betty would make it out with only the boy at the door being injured, and even that would heal with time. He would never be a track star, but at least he’d live.
Wilma could live with that.
*
Out in the lobby Betty worked the crowd of frightened bank patrons with surprising ease. She split them into two lines along the walls and had them lay on their bellies with their hands behind their heads and their faces on the floor. She had them cross their feet. Their legs pointed out into the center of the lobby so that their heads were aimed at the stone bank walls.
When Betty spoke, it was evenly and sternly.
“Thank you all for your cooperation,” she said. “This will be over very soon.”
Now and again the young guard who had been shot could be heard moaning in pain and sniffling as he cried softly. Betty had allowed him to warp a tourniquet around his knees. He was bleeding, but not badly enough to cause alarm. Just as Wilma had told her when they were planning it, the bullet had passed cleanly through and, in time, the boy would be fine.
Whenever the boy moaned Betty could see a pair of burly, Neanderthal-looking men on the floor in the corner whisper to one another. They looked like the type on high-protein diets. The types with dreams of faded sports glory and the idea that they are just who they used to be in those wonderful teenage years when their cocks were hard and granite and their arms as strong as mammoths.
They cut their eyes at one another.
It was only a matter of time before they tried to be heroes.
“Sixty seconds!” Betty shouted.
“Sixty seconds!” Wilma called back.
The two heroes looked at Betty. Wilma had told her how to handle this. She could hear Wilma’s voice in her head, clear as an arctic wind.
Betty walked over to the two men in the corner, placed the barrel of her shotgun between where their heads lay on the floor, right next to their ears. Then she fired the shotgun, deafening both men for life.
*
Wilma paused when she heard the gunshot. The backpack with the cash was loaded to the top with the cash and the one with the jewels was two-thirds full now.
The store manager was as efficient as he was cooperative.
“Secure,” Betty called out.
“Secure,” Wilma replied
They had to go now and Wilma knew it. The second gunshot could cause the people to panic and a panicked people were capable of anything.
She had the bank manager zip the second backpack closed even though it was not quite all the way full with valuables. When both bags were closed she had the manager carry them out into the lobby. Then Betty took the one with the jewels and Wilma the one with the cash and, without wasting any movements or any time, they headed for the front door.
Wilma took one last look at the young security guard bleeding on the floor and mumbled as she passed, softly, just low enough to be sure he would not hear her: Sorry kid.
Then she and Betty opened the front door of the bank and the cold, gray world greeted them…just before the gunshots rang out.
*
All of this had begun because almost a year ago, one gloomy fall night. Wilma had a very anxious dream. She dreamed that she awoke one day in bed to find herself transformed into a great verminous bug.
She’d come out of the dream screaming and clutching at the darkness. With no air in her lungs, as if she’d was rising up from beneath a great depth of water.
Beside her in the bed Fred lay sleeping, or pretending to sleep.
For a moment she thought of waking him. Asking him to say something that would make her feel better. Asking him to hold her, if only until the heart of the dream faded from her mind.
But, in the end, she kept her horrors to herself.
And, for her, that was where this began.
*
For Betty it had also began with a dream.
She was in the hold of a great, heaving ship. It rolled back and forth through angry seas. Everywhere around her sat women of her own ilk. Tall, dark-haired women whose faces shined with a light reminiscent of her own.
They could be her sisters. Cousins perhaps. Aunts. Daughters. Nieces.
Somehow they were herself, all of them.
Somehow they were not apart from her.
The women sat in long, even lines upon old wooden benches. All of them dressed in shining, red armor. All of them armed with savage weapons. Everywhere the water was pouring in from the upper parts of the ship, pooling here in the hold, rising higher. It was very likely that they would all drown here. All of them pulled down into that soft, warm nothing of death.
But Betty did not mind. Or, perhaps, she minded but was unafraid for some other reason. As she looked round at the other women, she could not help but marvel at them, in their red armor, the color of dark fire, the color of blood, the color of Wilma’s hair.
*
The front door of the bank shattered in a hail of gunfire and it was little more than luck and bad aim by the police that helped the women make it back inside. Just for good measure the police fired a few more rounds at the front door—clattering against the bank teller’s desks, sending papers and bank statements flying into the air.
Wilma and Betty moved back from the door until the shooting stopped and the police began shouting through their megaphone that the women should just come out with their hands up and nobody would get hurt.
Wilma laughed at that. So long as they survived the initial hail of gunfire, then no one would get hurt.
*
“What the fuck?” Betty spat, her head against the wall beside the door.
She peeked out. They were everywhere—the men with the guns—filling the entire world it seemed. It was as if they were the entire world. As if, should Wilma & Betty somehow make their way through the innermost crowd—which could never, never happen—there would still be another, even larger, outer ring of policemen, stacked highly like sediment, filling the city, their dwelling places everywhere and infinite.
“What the fuck?” Betty said again. There was blood pooling on the floor beneath her. Her left warm was a little numb. They’d knicked her.
*
Wilma knew immediately what had happened. Knew immediately how it had happened. She peeked through the half-opened front doors of the bank, scanning back and forth over the black mass of cavemen in police suits. It took her a little while to find them…but there they were: Fred. Barney. The kids. That damned Dino (yapping, yapping, yapping. Always yapping).
*
Wilma had no idea how they’d found out about the plan. It had been nearly a year of planning and Betty’s been known to talk in her sleep. Maybe the kids overheard something, repeated it back to Fred or Barney in that mindless, parrot-like way that kids sometimes repeat what they hear, not knowing the weight of their words.
But the “how” didn’t matter. All that mattered was that one of the husbands had found out about it all and, rather than helping, they’d gone to the police.
Maybe they knew what the money meant to Wilma & Betty.
Maybe they knew that it was the key to the Last Goodbye.
Maybe they knew that, with the cash and the jewels, the women would never be seen again.
Even if the husbands had offered their help, the women would have refused them. The men were dumb. Dumb and gullible and incapable of planning anything. There was laundry list of half-assed schemes the two men had gotten themselves into over the years. None of them producing anything other than headaches and greater levels of stupidity.
But none of that mattered now.
They would not survive this. And Wilma knew it.
*
“Have you ever wondered about time travel?” Wilma asked, checking the bullets in her gun.
“What?” Betty said.
Betty and Wilma eyed one another. Outside, in the gray, gloomy rain, the policemen shuffled back and forth. Lining up here. Organizing there.
They would be coming soon.
Wilma squatted with her back to the wall. She looked over the hostages. “Time travel,” she said. “Moving forward through time. Moving backward. Things like that.”
Betty shrugged.
Outside the men with the guns were almost in position.
“I think about it sometimes,” Wilma said. “I’m not sure why. I’m not sure whether I’d go forward through time or backwards through time or maybe even sideways through time.”
“Sideways?” Betty asked.
Wilma placed her pistol on the floor beside her feet and wrung her hands.
“You wouldn’t know it to look at me,” she said, “but temporal theory is one of my hobbies. There’s this theory that every decision a person makes creates a new temporal path, a new “fork in the road” if you will.”
Outside the rain fell harder. All the world wet and cold and gray.
The men with the guns shuffled about. They tightened their ranks. Checked their weapons. Took aim.
“Basically,” Wilma said, “there’s this theory that we never make any single decision, but all decision all the time. Every choice you’ve ever had, no matter how big or small, you’ve actually decided both “yes” and “no” at the same time. You turned both left and right. You wore the red dress and the black dress to the same party, and, every time, something different happened and you wound up some place different and you made some new set of choices—again, choosing all outcomes at once—and the roads forked again and again, almost unto infinity.”
Betty’s brow furrowed. She was keeping up with what Wilma was trying to say, but only barely. It was all very ungainly.
Now and again she glanced out into the street towards the policemen.
“Then how do you explain us being here,” Betty asked. “Why is my mind here with you, talking about how I’m really everywhere at once.”
Wilma smiled. “Yes,” she said. “You are here,” but you’re also in a billion other places. Right now. Not in the past. Not in the future. But right now. At this exact same moment in time, you’re somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else. You’re buying coffee somewhere. You’re fighting a war somewhere. You’re robbing this same damned bank with a pistol instead of a shotgun. You’re at a poetry reading somewhere. All of it is happening right now. And you’re just as much there as you are here. Same goes for me. I’m out there somewhere. Right now.” She lowered her voice, “I’m out there somewhere. Happy.”
Betty was silent. As if some thief had come and taken away all of her words. As if she might never speak again.
Wilma shrugged. She picked up her gun from the floor and checked the chamber once again to be sure the bullets were there and ready. She turned and gazed through the bank door.
“I’m out there somewhere,” Wilma said. “Both of us are.”
*
Then there was nothing more to be said.
The policemen opened fire and the world went white with the sound of guns and, not to be outdone, Wilma and Betty craned their weapons around the doorframe and began firing blindly and Fred and Barney and the kids and that damned Dino watched—all of them trembling with fear—and the rain fell harder and the world turned to a darker shade of gray and beyond the sounds of the gunfire the city of Bedrock went about its hustle and bustle and beyond that the world spun perfectly on its axis and beyond that the galaxy churned in the gravity of that supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way, that infinite point to which we, everyone, even you and I, are all hurtling inexorably towards at this very moment.
*
You’ll be pleased to know that Wilma & Betty survived the robbery. You’ll be pleased to know that Wilma & Betty were killed in the robbery. You’ll be pleased to know that Wilma & Betty never staged the robbery. You’ll be pleased to know that Wilma & Betty spent their entire lives happily married to wonderful men. You’ll be pleased to know that Wilma & Betty never married. You’ll be pleased to know that Wilma & Betty never met. You’ll be pleased to know that Wilma & Betty lived and died and still continue to live at this very moment and that Wilma & Betty never existed at any point in time. You’ll be pleased to know that anything is not only possible, but happening right now, at this exact time, almost in this exact place. You’ll be pleased to know that, mathematically, all of this is true. That we are never alone. That we have all done everything. We have, somewhere, made every choice, won and loss every decision.
You’ll be pleased to know that all of us are infinite.
*
But for now, this time, back at the bank:
Wilma & Betty fired blindly into the wall of policemen. Fred & Barney did the same. Then Wilma led the way, charging into the gleaming daylight, all four of them racing into the world, backpacks loaded with money and jewels, guns firing into the rows of ill-prepared policemen. All of them sprinting toward the car where Pebbles and Bam-Bam and good ol’ Dino sat waiting. And there was not a cloud in the sky and the sun was a golden coin spinning above them all, pouring legs of light upon them…
…unto inifinity.
_____________
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