Fate would’ve dealt them improved hands.
And yet if they were telling this story, it would naturally be a different one, in which they were the principals in the events that were coming, and my sister and I the spectators—which is one thing children are to their parents. The world doesn’t usually think about bank robbers as having children—though plenty must. But the children’s story—which mine and my sister’s is—is ours to weigh and apportion and judge as we see it. Years later in college, I read that the great critic Ruskin wrote that composition is the arrangement of unequal things. Which means it’s for the composer to determine what’s equal to what, and what matters more and what can be set to the side of life’s hurtling passage onward.
Most of what I know that went on next—from the middle of the summer, 1960—I know mostly from various unreliable sources: from what I read in the Great Falls Tribune, which carried stories about our parents that made it seem that there was something fantastic and hilarious about what they did. I know other things from the chronicle my mother wrote while she was in the Golden Valley County jail, in North Dakota, awaiting trial, and later in the North Dakota State Penitentiary in Bismarck. I know a few things from what people told me at the time. And, of course, I know some particulars because we were there in the house with them and observed them—as children do—as things changed from ordinary, peaceful and good, to bad, then worse, and then to as bad as could be (though no one got killed until later).
For almost the whole time my father had been stationed at the base in Great Falls—four years—he’d been involved (though we didn’t know it) in a scheme to provide stolen beef to the officers’ club, for which he received money and fresh steaks we ate at home twice a week. The scheme was well established at the base, handed down from supply officer to supply officer as they passed through their assignments and out. The scheme involved doing illegal business with certain members of the Cree Indian tribe, who lived south of Havre, Montana, on reservation land and were experts at stealing Hereford cows from local ranchers’ herds, butchering the cows in secret, then transporting the beef sides down to the base all in a night’s work. The meat was stored away by the officers’ club manager in the club’s cold box and served to the majors and colonels and the base commander and their wives, who knew nothing about where it came from and didn’t care as long as no one got caught and the beef was good quality—which it was.
Obviously this was a small, penny-ante scheme, which was why it had easily gone on for years and everyone expected it to go on permanently. Only, a misunderstanding arose on the base, and parts of the scheme that involved billing practices in the supply and requisition office came embarrassingly to light, and several Air Force people were disciplined, and my father lost his rank of captain (of which he was proud) and became a first lieutenant again. He may have been one of the parties who caused the swindle to come to light, but that was never stated. The whole episode—which no one in our house ever discussed and Berner and I didn’t know about—almost certainly contributed to his decision to leave the Air Force. It’s possible he was forced to retire, although he received an honorable discharge certificate, which he framed and hung up in our living room above the piano, beside his FDR photograph. The picture was there after our parents were arrested, when my sister and I were alone in the house and no one came to see about us. In several moments during that time, I stood and perused it (“Honorably discharged from the United States Air Force . . . a testimonial of Honest and Faithful Service . . .”) and thought that what it said wasn’t true. I considered taking it with me when I left. But in the end I forgot about it, hanging in our abandoned house for somebody else to make fun of and eventually throw in the trash.
What my father did—and this is in my mother’s chronicle (“A Chronicle of a Crime Committed by a Weak Person” was her title; she may have intended her story to be published someday)—what my father did, while he was unsuccessfully trying to sell Oldsmobiles, then Dodges, and then trading used cars and motorcycles to airmen, was again seek out the Indians south of Havre and try to establish a new business in beef sides. He believed the Indians had lost a profitable outlet for their line of work. And if he could find someone or someplace new to supply meat to, everything could start up again and even be better than before, because the Air Force wouldn’t be involved, and he’d have no one to split his proceeds with. Once again, it was such a third-rate, badly considered connivance that it could’ve been comical had it not been life altering: our father and our tiny, stern Jewish mother in their modest rented house in Great Falls, these hapless Indians and the rustled cows slaughtered in the middle of the night in an old semi-trailer. Common sense should’ve dictated none of this ever take place. But no one had access to common sense.
After realizing he wouldn’t make enough money to support our family while he learned the farm and ranch business—even with his two-hundred-eighty-dollar Air Force pension and my mother’s salary from the Fort Shaw school—my father set out to find someone who could be a new customer for stolen beef, someone he would be the middle man for. There wouldn’t be many such possibilities in Great Falls, he knew.
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