Rules for Getting Away After a Bank Robbery

Rules for Getting Away After a Bank Robbery are the narrator’s improvised field manual for the dangerous transition from armed robber to ordinary passerby. The rules depend less on a flawless disguise than on controlling what other people see: cover the face, leave quickly, hide the weapon, and do not run where anyone can watch. Their tension lies in the narrator’s knowledge that the disguise is already too late, the escape is already imperfect, and the street remains full of witnesses.

The Robbery and Its Exposure

Before entering the bank, the narrator wears an Indians cap, a red scarf, a blue hooded top, a white buttoned shirt, ordinary jeans, and white Adidas. The clothes are deliberately unremarkable, and the scarf is pulled up over the lower half of the face while he passes the ATMs. But he recognizes that this measure may accomplish little: he has been doing this for a while, and people know what he looks like. The outfit is therefore less a reliable concealment than an attempt to appear like anyone else at the moment when he is least able to do so.

He waits until a man comes out of the bank, then enters with the gun drawn and makes a loud announcement that he is wanted and will be killed. The narrator regards the declaration as a joke that everyone probably understands, but its comic tone does not make the robbery less real. He needs money before leaving. The gap between performance and practical purpose runs through the episode: a line delivered as a joke accompanies an armed threat, and a planned exit begins with the admission that the face beneath the scarf is already familiar.

Speed, Route, and the Missing Accomplice

The bank is emptied quickly. A woman clears drawers full of bills, while the narrator takes the piles on the counter and stuffs them into his pockets. He does not linger; a police station is only four hundred meters away. In his reasoning, the amount matters less than getting clear. A robbery, he thinks, resembles breaking a shop window or pickpocketing: the central requirement is to get away, and getting away means moving fast.

But speed has a boundary. Outside, he passes the corner and the ATMs without running, then turns behind the bank before breaking into a run. The route takes him past a dumpster and the base of a building where he once lived, down stairs behind a nearly vegetarian restaurant, and toward a fence and parking lot. Black is not there. The narrator is not surprised, treating the absence as typical dealer behavior, but the missing accomplice leaves him to manage the escape alone. The episode’s first governing distinction emerges from this route: run only where the bank and the street no longer have a direct view of him.

Concealment Without Stopping

The narrator’s car is parked a street away, so reaching it still seems possible. The parking lot, however, is bordered on three sides by solid walls with windows, leaving him exposed to people who might look out. He removes his cap and puts the gun inside it. The weapon is heavy because it is loaded; carrying it in the cap is an awkward arrangement, but he does not want its weight pulling down his trousers as he walks away.

He crosses the lot with the cap in his left hand and the gun inside it. No one else is in the lot, yet the weapon is not well hidden. Still walking, he removes the scarf, rolls it into a ball, and places it over the gun. The cash creates another problem: bills protrude from his pockets and might fall out. The escape is thus a sequence of small, imperfect corrections rather than a clean change of identity. Each object that served the robbery—the gun, scarf, cap, and stolen money—continues to mark him as he tries to become inconspicuous.

The Rule Against Running

On Hampshire Road, with the police expected to arrive from Mayfield, the narrator reduces his advice to its central command: do not run. An approaching man is walking toward him on the same sidewalk. The narrator reads him as old and assumes he is unlikely to care what the narrator is doing. He instructs himself to behave as if he is going somewhere and has people to meet; to act as though he likes the police, has never taken drugs, and loves America to an absurd degree. Most important, he must not behave as if he has just robbed a bank.

These imagined social performances are not evidence that anyone has been fooled. They are instructions for managing his own visible conduct while the authorities close in. Sirens are coming up Mayfield Road, the money still bulges from his pockets, and the gun remains in the cap. The rule is less a guarantee of safety than a discipline imposed on a body under pressure: walking may preserve an appearance of routine where running would declare the crime.

Beauty in the Escape

The narrator’s attention repeatedly slips from escape to the street around him. He wonders whether he has wasted his youth, while insisting that beauty does move him and affects him so intensely that it nearly overwhelms him. He cannot explain the force within him that has always pulled him away from other things. This reflection interrupts the tactical instructions without resolving them; inwardly, he is absorbed by beauty, while outwardly he must keep moving and look ordinary.

As the sirens approach, he notices the grass, the porches, and starlings fighting over a rich garbage bag. One bird frightens the others and gets access to the best scraps. The scene makes the ordinary world vivid at the very moment the narrator cannot stop to inhabit it: lying down in the grass is impossible with the gun visible in the cap and money spilling from his pockets. He imagines that the sirens tell everyone he is scum and that the police hope he will try something, giving them a chance to kill him and tell the story at home. The passage ends not with confirmation that he reaches the car or escapes, but with the rules still being tested against exposure, fear, and the beauty he can see but cannot pause to enjoy.