Me an' Poot wanted to be famous but we didn't want nobody to know. That is we wanted to do something nobody had never done before, set a world record, but we wasn't anxious to go to prison which we would if the law ever found out about the stuff we done. We thought for a long time. Like weeks. It took that long considering what all we had already pulled off. Over the years, we had broken into Bankston School and wrecked the place, shot out street lights all over North Greenwood, burned down a dozen houses, and shot cars. That's not even counting sneaking out at night and stealing bicycles only to ride them around and leave them in a ditch somewhere. One time we throwed one off the Fulton Street Bridge into the Yazoo River.
Poot finally come up with the idea to break into a book store. He said, "Ain't nobody never done that not ever not nowhere."
I didn't know but generally I believed Poot because he kept up with stuff like that. We both read newspapers which looking back is kind of amazing since we never read nothing our teachers told us to. Greenwood had a small store downtown on Howard Street. I think it was called The Nook of Knowledge. Poot said if we could get in there and steal some books, the police would think they was looking for some geniuses, and they wouldn't never come anywhere near us.
I liked the idea. I could just see the headlines in the Commonwealth:
Evil Geniuses Make Book Heist
Police Search for Intelligent Robbers
Crime Has Taken an Upturn in IQ
Everybody would admire robbers like that. I bet the preacher at First United Methodist would even mention it in his sermon like he had the Bankston School incident. He would say a mind like that ought to get saved and serve God. I couldn't wait.
This stuff had me staying awake most nights dreaming of how our deeds would baffle the police and the FBI and how TV shows and movies would be made about it, how all the girls in Greenwood would want to date the robber. But they wouldn't know it was me. That was the part that made me sad. It seems like all the stuff me n Poot's done was secret and nobody knowd we was smart and had done big stuff like that.
Unless we got caught in the act, Poot said, we was scot-free for the rest of our lives. We was sure of that much. But how to get into the store without getting nabbed? Me an' Poot took to riding our bicycles down there and going into the store every day. "Casing the place," is what Poot called it. All good criminals do it. He saw it on TV so it had to be true.
At first, the book store lady like to have worried us to death trying to find out what kind of books we was looking for. When I said, "Crime," Poot stomped on my bare foot and made me holler a little. Poot told her we was just gettin' ideas for a book report and Christmas presents. She said it was good we was already thinking of Christmas presents and it was only May. "Showed good raisin'," she said.
After that first day, we rode back to my house and talked things over in the back yard. I wanted to go to the river to do our plotting, but Poot said we shouldn't go down there because an operation this serious "couldn't be compromised." I didn't know what "compromised" meant, but I took it that Poot didn't want nobody else knowing what we was up to. He was tight lipped like that and he could keep a secret. That was one of Poot's great qualities. I said if there weren't no bikes down there we could talk freely, but he said you never knowd if someone walked and was hidin' behind a tree listening.
We talked it over and finally decided that the only way into that store was to knock the big front window out. That idea had my stomach churning and diarrhea was coming on. Poot's ideas always give me diarrhea.
"Good gosh amighty, Poot. We'll get caught for sure. 'Specially with us hauling off a load of books in each hand."
Poot thunk awhile. Then he said, "We could knock the window out and then hide and see how long it takes for the police to get there."
"Hide where?"
"We gotta to do more casin'," he answered.
So the next day we was riding all over Howard Street again, and then we found it. There was a ladder on the side of the building in the alley across the street from the bookstore. From there, we could get up on top of the building and watch the police from above.
"What about our bikes?" I asked. "If the police see two bicycles below the ladder, they'll know someone is up there."
"We gotta do more casing."
So we rode back to Howard Street. Again. I was beginning to wonder if people would get so used to seeing us that they would tell the police it was them boys on the bikes. But Poot said unless we got caught red handed, they would never think we could be that smart as to steal books.
We went up and down every alley and then we found the big green dumpster. The plan was to hide our bicycles in the dumpster, bust out the front window, start the stop watch, and climb up on top of the building. We would then know how long it took the police to get there. Poot said we could each get a pillow case full of books and be across the bridge in five minutes. If they took that long to get there, we would be the first folks ever to rob a book store.
So on the dark night of June 3rd, one day after my birthday and one week after school was out, me n Poot met up at Little Red School house at midnight for the Great Greenwood Book Heist as we had took to calling it. We didn't even talk but cycled in silence down the Boulevard and across the bridge. We rode to Ramcat Alley and put our bicycles into the dumpster and then walked to Howard Street and to the Nook of Knowledge. Poot hurled the brick bat through the front glass and we run across the street, into the alley and tried to climb the ladder. The bottom rung was about eight feet off the ground. We thought jumping up there and pulling ourselves up would be not problem. We was wrong.
We couldn't make it. I thought, Poot has done it to me again. He's always getting me in tight spots. I was so scared I was about to pee my pants. Then we saw some big cardboard boxes in the alley. Maybe they was what some refrigerators come in. We climbed in and hid under paper and pieces of boxes.
Sure enough the police showed up and drove all over the place. They went up and down the alley and we could hear them talking over the radio as they cruised by at maybe one mile per hour. One officer even got out of his car and walked around. We could hear his heals tapping on the asphalt. He stopped a couple of times, but we couldn't see what he was doing. I thought for sure we was done, we was goin' to prison forever. It must have been hours before the place cleared out. Well, at least thirty minutes. I was thinking they would be there all night and our folks would catch us gone in the morning.
Finally, they left and we climbed out of the boxes and run back to Ramcat Alley where we yanked our bikes out of the dumpster and rode as fast as we could over the bridge. Safely inside North Greenwood, we stopped at Little Red, and Poot told me it took the police six minutes to get there. I cursed in my mind because that meant Poot would think we had enough time to pull off the heist, and I didn't want to do it nomore. I went home, crawled back through the window, and didn't sleep for hours.
Like with all our other crimes, I was nervous for weeks. I kept thinking Poot would bring it up, want to go back and do the real thing. First time we got together after that, he come over and we shot basketball in the backyard, but he didn't say nothing about stealing no books. School started back, and I never brought it up and neither did he. Finally, I come to see that we wasn't going to do it. I was awful glad 'cause I think they would of caught us for sure and sent us to prison for forty years or more.
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