Local man is eating lunch in his car and reading the newspaper
when a guy with a gun jumps in and says okay, start her up,
and off they go to one bank drive-thru after another,

the guy putting his handgun to the driver’s temple
and counting down from ten as the man pleads with the tellers
to hand over the money. At one point, the gunman trips up

on the number six, so the driver says you miscounted
and the gunman says what and the driver says
you miscounted, so the gunman starts over again.

What was the driver thinking during the silent times,
the stretches when the two men were going
from one bank to another, stopping at the red lights,

keeping an eye out for cops? Maybe he thought that life
will break you, as Louise Erdrich says, and when it does,
you should sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples

as they fall around you, wasting their sweetness,
or maybe he remembered years earlier when he saw
a car flip and land so hard that no one inside

could have survived, and in that instant he knew
that someone had died before the person who loved them most
knew: the wife chopping a salad in the kitchen,

the husband wondering why his wife is late at work.
The gunman who miscounted finally succumbed
to drugs or mental illness or fatigue or all three

and staggered into a field and was picked up
by the officers who’d been trailing him.
Now the driver is spending his days doing

the things you or I might do and remembering that
he’d managed to add a handful of seconds to his time
on this earth, enough to taste, what, one more apple?