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49.

You have been living as Saul Williams for two years when you first rob a bank.

The decision is not made lightly; it is a result of long seasons of desperation. When you first relocated to Montana, you thought you would be able to live mostly off the land, like a homesteader. You read up on farming methods, kitchen gardens, the most practical vegetables to grow in your new climate zone. For material goods, there was the Salvation Army in Bozeman, where you would scour the dumpster bins for donations that they had rejected. You have always been good at building and fixing—you assembled your own computer in 1978, just for fun—and you found that most trash could easily be brought back to life with a little wire or solder and some rudimentary grasp of engineering. Clothes with holes could be patched. Clocks could be made to tick again. Pots with broken handles could be glued back together.

People waste so much: Our shortsighted consumer culture believes in replacement rather than repair, values cheap Chinese crap over quality materials. You take full advantage of that, scooping up perfectly good discards with only minor flaws. You delight in how Jane doesn’t seem to miss owning new things; already, she has forgotten the consumerist mindset of more more more.

You figured you could cobble together enough odd jobs to cover the rest of your needs: chopping wood, washing cars, cleaning houses, honest labor for which you could be paid in cash. But you’ve quickly learned that there aren’t that many under-the-table jobs after all, not when you live an hour out of town, and you also have to balance the childcare requirements of a little girl. And meanwhile there is too much, you’re discovering, that you have to pay for: Sturdy shoes for Jane’s ever-growing feet, gas for the truck, sacks of rice. Suitable books, rather than the bodice rippers that tend to land at the thrift stores. Rent.

As for food, your ability to farm has also proven to be rather limited: Although you’ve planted two bumper crops of potatoes and your tomato plants are impressive by any measure, you’ve utterly failed to grow a carrot and the squirrels eat your squash before it even ripens. It pains you to look at Jane and see the outline of her tiny rib cage, the bulge of malnutrition in her belly from living mostly on Quaker oatmeal.

By the end of year two, you have run out of money and are starting to feel panicked. In your darkest moments, you wonder if this whole project was a terrible mistake. If it was just you, you could leave and start again, someplace where it might be easier to scratch a living together. But Jane is the problem: Jane, for whom this whole endeavor was intended. She is thriving here, it’s so obvious to you. She spends contented hours weaving dandelions into crowns and watching the ants deliver sustenance to their queen. She soaks in everything you teach her, her mind clear and undistracted, an avid pupil. The minute you leave the safety of your cabin, you know this will come to an end. Worse: You’ll run the risk of being discovered, and separated entirely.

It’s clear that you have to find some way to survive.

You and Jane are reading aloud Sherlock Holmes: The Red-Headed League, about a group of thieves who tunnel into a bank vault, when it occurs to you: Why not rob a bank? You don’t need to steal a million dollars; the contents of one teller’s till will get you through most of the year. A few thousand dollars, more or less.

A week later, you march into a Farmers State Bank in Missoula wearing a wig and a pair of gas station sunglasses, select the youngest-looking teller, and hand her a note that reads Give me all the money in your till and no one gets hurt. Three minutes later, you walk out the door with $5,327.

Over the next dozen years, you will repeat this interaction nineteen times.

It turns out that it’s remarkably easy to rob a bank. Multinational financial institutions—in their attempt to lay claim to every pocketbook in America—have been opening neighborhood branch offices as fast as they can. And because they want to hide their true vampiric nature behind a “friendly” mien, they no longer bother to hire security guards for these branches. Suburban moms don’t like guns.

And so you discover that you can waltz right into any neighborhood bank branch, slide a note to the teller, and no one will bat an eye. The teller, usually an underpaid twenty-something, is not going to cry out an alarm. Why would they? It’s not their money to protect. There’s no reason to play the hero when their efforts won’t ever be rewarded.

You rarely have to actually converse with the teller; when you are forced to speak, it’s only to tell them that you have a gun in your pocket if they don’t comply with the note’s instructions. (You do not have a gun in your pocket, of course; this would only be asking for trouble.) Typically, the teller will obey immediately, sliding over the money without raising an alarm until after you’ve departed. You are always long gone by the time the police showup.

There are still risks, of course. In the absence of security guards, the banks now rely on dye packs and electronic transmitters shoved in among the bills. But removing these is child’s play for you: They are easily identified by using a simple RF radio receiver, which you have built yourself, and you hand these right back to the teller before you walk out the door. Banks all now have CCTV surveillance cameras, but you simply wear a rotation of eyewear and wigs to render yourself unrecognizable. You conduct most of your robberies in the winter, when scarves and hats and gloves aren’t considered suspicious. And you vary the banks and locations you target, typically driving beyond Montana’s borders, so that authorities won’t link the robberies to one person.

In the beginning, you bring Jane with you on these expeditions. You have no choice: She is too young to stay at home alone. You leave her in the car with a book and when you return, five minutes later, with a much heavier backpack, you drive straight to the closest ice cream shop. There, licking your mint-chip cones, you are just a sweetly innocuous father-daughter pair spending the day together. No one looks twice at you, not even the police cars racing past you toward the bank.

You frame these excursions as “day trips.” She loves them, of course. There are no ice cream cones in your normal routine.

You stop bringing her along around the time she turns eight and her powers of observation start to amaze you. By then, she is capable of spending a night at home by herself. You are driving farther and farther afield to scout suitable bank branches—ones that are near a highway on-ramp, that have an affluent customer base, that hire easily intimidated teenage tellers rather than jaded adult professionals. These trips take time. When the phone company comes through the area, installing lines for a new luxury hunting lodge ten miles past your cabin, you convince them to also run a line to your cabin; and so you are able to check in with Jane daily while you are gone. It proves unnecessary. Your daughter is supremely self-sufficient—a sign, you think, that your decision to leave California was a wise one.

You soon find that you have more money than you need. You are still living like you have nothing at all, and dip into the money only when necessary. You keep the rest hidden in a locked drawer of your desk, and think of it as your “go cash.” The likelihood, you are beginning to realize, is that you will not be able to stay hidden in the woods forever. At some point, your cover will be broken, the police will come looking for you, and you and Jane will need to make a quick escape. So you add to your nest egg bit by bit, until the money in the drawer adds up to more than five figures.

After a time, you come to realize that you aren’t robbing banks now because you need to. You are doing it because you like to. Because it feels good to stick it to these big multinational financial institutions, the fat-cat bankers, who represent everything you loathe. Because it reinforces your conviction that you are smarter than they are. And even though you are aware that what you are doing is nothing at all to them—not even a blip on their radar—you like to think that you are sending a message, however small.

You just wish there was a better way of making your point, one that the rest of the world might hear. An audience of one—even if Jane remains the most curious, willing listener—can sometimes feel quite small. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder: What kind of impact could you have on the shape of humankind, if humankind were only to listen?