The Sentence That Does the Killing

We met in a motel room outside Woodward, Oklahoma, which was Leonard’s idea. He said you couldn’t talk about bank robbery in a coffee shop because someone would overhear and call the police, and you couldn’t talk about it in a bar because bars made everything sound like a movie pitch. A motel room was honest. A motel room was the kind of place where actual desperation lived, where plans got made that should not have been made, and where the bedspread had a pattern that existed only to hide what the bedspread had witnessed. He was not wrong about the bedspread.

McCarthy had the room’s only chair, the one by the window. He’d pulled it to face the wall and then turned it back, as though he’d considered looking outside and decided against it. He was drinking black coffee from a styrofoam cup, and everything about him — the stillness, the worn denim, the absolute refusal to begin speaking before he was ready — suggested a man who had spent his life making other people wait for the weather to change.

Leonard sat on the foot of the bed, one leg crossed over the other, a legal pad on his knee. He had already written something on it. When I craned to see, he flipped it over and said, “Notes. You’ll get them when I’m dead.”

I was standing near the bathroom door because there was nowhere else. I had brought a folder with the combination spec in it — McCarthy’s mythic desolation, Leonard’s blue-collar crime energy, the structure of Hell or High Water, the themes of Winter’s Bone — and I held it the way a student holds a paper he’s not sure he should have written.

“Bank robbery,” Leonard said. “Let’s start with the crime.”

McCarthy did not look at him. “The crime is the least interesting part.”

“The crime is always the least interesting part. That’s why it’s the place to start. You get it out of the way. Two people rob a bank. Why.”

“Because they are owed.”

“Nobody robs a bank because they’re owed. People rob banks because they’re broke. The theology comes after.”

I saw something flicker across McCarthy’s face — not irritation, something closer to recognition. He set his coffee on the windowsill. “A woman,” he said. “Not a man. The robber is a woman.”

“Why?”

“Because when a man robs a bank in fiction it is a parable. When a woman robs a bank it is a fact. The reader does not ask what it means. The reader asks what she needed the money for. And what she needed the money for is the whole of the story.”

Leonard uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “Okay. I like that. But she doesn’t rob the bank alone.”

“No.”

“She’s got someone with her. A brother, a cousin, a boyfriend who’s no good.”

“A sister,” I said.

They both looked at me. McCarthy’s look was neutral, appraising — the look of a man deciding whether a stone was load-bearing or decorative. Leonard’s was warmer but no less evaluative.

“A sister,” I repeated. “Two sisters. One of them has children. The other doesn’t. The one with children is the one who plans the robbery. The one without children drives.”

“Why does the mother plan it?” Leonard asked.

“Because she has the reason. Her kids are about to lose the house. The bank holds the note and the bank is three towns over and the bank is also the entity that destroyed her credit when her husband went to prison and couldn’t make payments on equipment he’d already sold. The debt is circular. She owes money on a thing that doesn’t exist to a place that manufactured the conditions of her owing.”

McCarthy picked up his coffee again. “That is the machine. You have described the machine correctly. The question is whether the story lives inside the machine or outside it.”

“Inside,” Leonard said. “Always inside. You show the gears by putting someone between them.”

“The gears are not what interests me. What interests me is the hand that built the machine and the hand that reaches into it and the moment when you cannot tell which hand is which.”

Leonard made a sound — not quite a laugh, more like the exhale of a man who has heard this kind of sentence before and knows where it leads. “Cormac. With respect. The woman robbing the bank doesn’t care about the hand that built the machine. She cares about the payment that’s due on Thursday. She cares that her daughter needs new shoes and the school sent home a note about the shoes her daughter is wearing now, and the note was written by a woman who has never in her life worried about shoes, and the humiliation of that note is heavier than any theological question about the architecture of capitalism.”

“The humiliation is the theology.”

“No. The humiliation is the humiliation. It doesn’t need to be elevated. You elevate it, you make it smaller. You turn a woman’s shame about her daughter’s shoes into a metaphor for American decline and suddenly nobody’s thinking about the shoes anymore. They’re thinking about your sentence.”

McCarthy said nothing for a long time. Outside, a truck downshifted on the highway and the sound entered the room like a third opinion.

“The shoes are important,” I said, because I felt the silence required something and I wanted both of them to know I understood what Leonard was saying. McCarthy turned to me.

“The shoes are important because you can hold them. You can smell the rubber and the canvas and the particular exhaustion of a shoe that has been worn past wearing. You can put that shoe in a reader’s hand and they will know everything the story needs them to know. But you must not explain to them what the shoe means. The shoe is not a symbol. The shoe is a shoe that a child has worn to nothing because her mother cannot afford another. If you write it correctly, the shoe is heavier than any sentence I or anyone else could construct about the failures of the American economic arrangement.”

“That’s what I said,” Leonard said.

“It is not what you said. You said don’t elevate. I am saying the object is already elevated. You do not need to raise it because it is already at the height of the thing it represents. The work of the writer is not to lift the shoe but to see it clearly and to set it down on the page without flinching.”

“Fine. We agree.”

“We do not agree. You think clarity is a matter of restraint. I think clarity is a matter of witness.”

Leonard wrote something on his pad. He showed it to me this time. It said: He’s going to use the word “witness” six more times. I almost laughed. McCarthy, who could not have seen the pad, said, “Do not write jokes about me, Elmore. Your jokes are better when they’re about people who deserve them.”

“Everybody deserves them.”

I asked about the sister — the one without children, the driver. What was her stake?

“Blood,” McCarthy said. “She does it because her sister asks. There is no other reason and no other reason is needed. When your blood asks you for something, you give it. That is not a decision. That is the condition of being alive in a family.”

Leonard shook his head. “That’s the McCarthy version. In the McCarthy version, family obligation is gravity — you don’t question it, you just fall. But real people do question it. The sister without kids, she has a life. Maybe not a great life, but a life. She works somewhere — a feed store, a Dollar General, some job that doesn’t pay enough but pays. Her sister calls and says I need you to drive and she says drive where and her sister says you know where and there’s a pause. A real pause. And in that pause is everything the story is about. Because she’s going to say yes. We know she’s going to say yes. But the pause is where she’s a person and not a plot device.”

“I did not say she should be a plot device.”

“You said blood. You said there’s no other reason. That makes her a plot device for her own family. Give her the pause.”

McCarthy set his cup down with a finality that suggested the coffee was done and possibly the conversation. But he stayed. “The pause. Fine. Give her the pause. But inside the pause she is not weighing pros and cons. She is not calculating risk. She is feeling the weight of something she has always known — that her sister’s life is more precarious than hers, that her sister’s children are more real than her freedom, that the distance she has put between herself and the family’s poverty is a distance she has maintained by letting her sister absorb the blows. The pause is guilt. Not deliberation.”

“Guilt is deliberation,” Leonard said. “Guilt is the slowest kind of thinking there is.”

I wrote that down. Neither of them objected.

“The robbery itself,” I said. “How does it go?”

“Badly,” Leonard said. “But not the way you think. They don’t get caught during it. The robbery is almost boring — small-town bank, one teller, a Tuesday morning. They walk in. The sister with kids has a pistol that belonged to their father. She doesn’t point it at anyone. She sets it on the counter like she’s returning something. The teller sees the gun and sees the woman’s face and sees that the woman is more frightened than she is, and she opens the drawer. Sixteen thousand dollars. That’s all. That’s what’s in a small-town bank on a Tuesday.”

“Is sixteen thousand enough?” I asked.

“It’s not enough. It’s never enough. That’s the point. The debt is twenty-three thousand. They’re seven short. They’re going to have to do it again.”

McCarthy made a sound that was almost a word but wasn’t. Then: “The insufficiency is important. They risk everything and it is not enough. That is not irony. That is the structure of poverty. You reach and what you reach for moves. You sacrifice and the sacrifice is accepted and nothing changes. The distance between what you need and what the world will give you is always seven thousand dollars or seven thousand years and the distance does not close.”

“Don’t turn seven thousand dollars into seven thousand years,” Leonard said. “Keep it at seven thousand dollars. That’s plenty heavy.”

“You are a man of great talent and no ambition.”

“And you’re a man who’d make a parking ticket sound like Revelation. We balance each other out.”

There was something in the room that might have been warmth. It lasted about three seconds.

I asked about the town. What did it look like, feel like, smell like?

“Grain elevators,” Leonard said. “A courthouse with a flag that’s been up so long it’s gone pink. A Sonic Drive-In where the high school kids work and the high school kids’ parents eat because there’s nowhere else. A pawn shop that used to be a hardware store that used to be something else. The town is a series of failures stacked inside each other like nesting dolls, except each doll is uglier than the last.”

“The town is not a failure,” McCarthy said. “The town is a consequence. It was built to serve an economy that moved on. The people who remain are not failures. They are the residue of a transaction. They were spent.”

“Spent is good,” Leonard said. “I’ll take spent.”

“You would. It is your kind of word. Efficient. Direct. Missing the point by exactly the right amount.”

“What’s the point I’m missing?”

“That being spent implies a spender. That the town did not simply decline. It was used. Deliberately, systematically, with full knowledge of the outcome, by institutions whose buildings still stand in cities four hundred miles away, where the money went and did not return.”

“The bank,” I said. “The bank that holds the note on the house. It’s not local.”

“Of course not,” Leonard said. “The local bank closed eight years ago. The note was sold to a holding company in Tulsa that was bought by a larger company in Dallas that was absorbed into a financial entity so abstract it doesn’t have a building, just a server farm in Virginia. The woman with the gun is robbing a branch office of a branch office. She’s holding up the fingertip of a hand she cannot see.”

“That image,” McCarthy said, and for the first time I heard something that might have been approval. “The fingertip of a hand she cannot see. That is correct. That is the condition.”

Leonard looked pleased in a way he was trying not to show. “So she robs the fingertip. She gets sixteen thousand. She goes home. The kids are at school. She puts the money in a boot box under her bed — her dead husband’s boots, the ones she kept even after she sold everything else, because you have to keep something or you’re not a person anymore. She sits on the bed and she counts the money again even though she’s already counted it, and it’s still not enough, and her daughter’s shoes are by the front door, and the shoes are worn through at the toe, and she can see the sock through the shoe, which is a pink sock with a cartoon character on it whose name she should know but doesn’t because she has been so busy surviving that she has missed something essential about her own child, some small bright thing about a cartoon character on a sock.”

I felt something tighten in my chest. The specificity of it — the sock, the cartoon character whose name the mother doesn’t know. It was the kind of detail that made you understand what poverty costs beyond money. It costs attention. It costs the space in which a parent learns the name of the thing on their child’s sock.

McCarthy stood. He walked to the window and looked out at the parking lot, which contained his truck and Leonard’s rental and my borrowed Camry and nothing else that mattered.

“The sister,” he said. “The one who drives. She is going to be the one who suffers.”

“They both suffer,” Leonard said.

“They both suffer, but the driver is the one who pays. The mother goes home to the boot box and the money and the children and the sock. She has something to hold. The driver goes home to an apartment where the television is on and nothing is underneath her except the thing she has done and the knowledge that she will do it again. She is not tormented by guilt. She is tormented by the ease of it. How simple it was. How quiet. How the teller opened the drawer the way you open a drawer. And the driver understands that this is because the teller’s money is also not enough. That everyone in the bank and outside the bank and in the town and outside the town is living in the same condition of insufficiency, and the gun is not what makes the robbery — the insufficiency is what makes the robbery. The gun is just the part you can see.”

“That’s the story,” I said.

“That is not the story,” McCarthy said. “That is the ground. The story is what grows in it.”

Leonard capped his pen. “I want the law in this. A sheriff or a deputy or a ranger — someone whose job it is to find these women. And he knows them. Of course he knows them. He went to school with one of them. He dated the other one for a summer when they were seventeen. He knows exactly who did it and he does not want to know.”

“The law is always a person who does not want to know,” McCarthy said.

“In your books, sure. In mine, the law is a person who knows exactly what’s happening and is trying to figure out the angle. He’s not anguished about it. He’s just doing math. Can he prove it. Does he want to. What happens to his life in this town if he arrests these women. The town will not forgive him. Not because they approve of robbery but because they understand it. Everyone in town is seven thousand dollars short of something.”

McCarthy turned from the window. “The sheriff does not arrest them.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did not need to say it. The sheriff does not arrest them because the sheriff is also inside the machine. The sheriff is also spent. His badge is a function of the same economy that produced the debt that produced the gun. He enforces the law and the law is the mechanism by which the town was emptied, and he knows this the way a tool knows the hand that uses it, which is to say he does not know it at all but he feels it in every motion.”

Leonard looked at his legal pad, looked at McCarthy, looked at me. “You know what, that might be the one thing he said tonight that I wouldn’t cut.”

“You would cut my work.”

“I’d cut anybody’s work. Cutting is how you find out what’s load-bearing.”

“Some structures are not meant to be cut. Some sentences exist to carry the weight of what cannot be said in shorter sentences.”

“And some sentences exist because the writer fell in love with them, and love is not a good enough reason to keep a sentence.”

They were not going to resolve this. They were never going to resolve this. The argument between McCarthy’s accretive, almost geological prose and Leonard’s stripped, spring-loaded efficiency was not an argument with an answer. It was a magnetic field with two poles, and the story I would write would live somewhere in that field — pulled toward the mythic, pulled toward the vernacular, held in the tension between a woman’s cosmic insignificance and the extremely specific weight of seven thousand dollars she does not have.

Leonard stood, collected his legal pad, patted his pockets for keys. “One thing. The second robbery.”

“What about it.”

“Don’t write it. Let the reader know it’s coming. Let the sister agree to drive again. Let the mother choose which bank. But stop before they walk through the door. The first robbery is a story. The second robbery is a life.”

He left. The door closed with the pneumatic hiss of motel doors everywhere, a sound that is identical whether the room costs forty dollars or four hundred, which is perhaps the most democratic sound in America.

McCarthy remained at the window. I thought he would say something about the story, about the ending Leonard had proposed, about whether stopping before the second robbery was restraint or cowardice. Instead he said, “The boot box.”

“What about it?”

“She kept her dead husband’s boots. She sold the truck and the tools and the tack and the dog — they had a dog, she sold the dog — but she kept the boots. You must understand why she kept the boots and you must not explain it. The reader must feel the boots in the box and the money on top of the boots and the closet door that she closes and the weight of that door closing, which is the weight of a woman sealing something she will never unseal, and you must render all of this without telling the reader what any of it means. If you tell them it is about grief or about holding on or about the last physical trace of a man who was eaten by the system that is now eating her, you have failed. If you simply show the boots and the money and the door, you have told the truth.”

He picked up his coffee cup, found it empty, set it back down. “The sock,” he said. “The cartoon character. Find out its name.”

“Is that important?”

“It is the most important thing in the story. The mother does not know the name. You, the writer, must know it. You must know it and choose not to write it. The restraint is the meaning. What you know and do not say is the only honest form of silence.”

He left without saying goodbye, which I understood was not rudeness but simply the way a man leaves a room when he has said the last thing he intends to say and does not believe in the ritual of departure.

I sat on the bed. The bedspread was exactly as ugly as Leonard had promised. I looked at my folder, at the notes I had taken, at the word spent circled twice. I thought about the boot box and the sock and the gun on the counter and the teller who opened the drawer the way you open a drawer. I thought about seven thousand dollars, which is an abstraction until it is the distance between your daughter having shoes and your daughter not having shoes, at which point it is the most concrete number in the world.

I did not know the name of the cartoon character on the sock. McCarthy had told me to find it out. Leonard would have told me it didn’t matter, that the sock was the sock and the character was the character and the reader didn’t care what was on a child’s foot as long as they could feel the mother not knowing. They were both right. They were both wrong. The story would have to live in the place where knowing and not knowing were the same kind of failure.