I Faked a Robbery for Content and the Church Threw Me a Fundraiser
Dewey Otis Shirley drives a propane truck through the west half of a dry Alabama county twelve hours a day, and for four years he has been building an audience out of a phone stuck to a vent mount. Nineteen thousand people who show up to watch a man in a truck cab be certain about things he has never once looked into. It pays about eighty dollars a week. He has never told anybody that number, including his grandmother, and he has never told anybody the other thing either, which is that on that phone he is somebody people wait on, and on the west route he is just the fellow who brings the gas.
His numbers have been down twelve weeks running. There is a repossession notice on his kitchen table with the word surrender in it, over three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars he owes on a side by side he did not need and bought in 2019 because a man was nice to him on a Saturday. And on the twentieth of July, at eleven forty at night, standing in his own dark kitchen in a pair of gym shorts, he kicks in his own back door.
He kicks it from the inside, because he is standing inside, because it is his house, and it does not occur to him for one second that a door which opens in does not throw its own jamb out into the grass. He throws his fifty-five-inch television across his own living room and it lands dead center of the floor, as far from every wall as an object can get, which is not how a thing lands when somebody is carrying it out a door. His fourteen-year-old beagle sleeps through every bit of it, because the dog went deaf in the spring. Then he sits down on the floor of his own wrecked house, turns the phone around, and cries for two minutes and forty seconds, and the crying is completely real, because he has just broken his own television and he is thirty-six years old and he did all of it on purpose.
It does four hundred and six thousand views before five in the morning.
And then it gets away from him, and the thing that takes it is not the internet. It is his neighbors.
By eight fifteen there are three vehicles in his yard and a woman who taught his Sunday school in 1997 is putting a hash brown casserole in his oven and telling him twice not to let it dry out. A man he barely knows shows up at half past five the next morning, before his own work, and hangs him a new steel door with a little window in it so his grandmother can see who is knocking, and will not discuss payment. A family from church takes the television out of their own den and brings it over on a quilt with a half-peeled puffy star sticker still on the corner. The woman at the Dollar General who has thought his videos were embarrassing for two solid years starts a fundraiser at six forty in the morning before she is all the way awake, and it is at twelve hundred dollars by the time he gets there to shut it down, and he cannot make himself say it.
And on Wednesday night, with no warning at all, his pastor sets his Bible down on the pulpit and calls for a love offering, and ninety-two people in a hot country church pass a five-gallon bucket with SANDBOX written on the side of it in marker and put one thousand four hundred and fifty-five dollars in it, mostly in ones and fives, while Dewey’s own grandmother sits at the organ with her back to the room and plays the invitation hymn underneath it, which is not what you play during an offering, and which nobody in that building notices except the two people it is meant for.
By Thursday there is a four-thousand-dollar reward on it, put up anonymously out of a boat account a preacher opened in 1994 and has been feeding for thirty-one years and is never going to buy a boat with. By Thursday night there is a benefit on the calendar with four hundred pulled pork plates, a silent auction, a bounce house rented from a man in Boaz, and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band out of Cullman who turn out to be genuinely, unfairly good. And a comment section three counties wide has started doing arithmetic out of two photographs of a work truck and a road distance, and nobody in it says one untrue thing, and that is exactly how it works.
On Friday afternoon at two fifteen, in a front yard on Union Grove Road, three men from the sheriff’s department pick up a thirty-year-old drywall finisher who matches the description Dewey invented at his own kitchen table on Monday morning while feeling quietly proud of the detail work. They are polite. Nobody raises a voice. They run his license the way you run everybody’s, and a four-year-old failure to appear comes back on a seat belt ticket he had partly paid at an address he moved out of in 2022, and it goes in at 3:22 on a Friday, and the magistrate closes at 4:30.
And nine days before any of this began, on the eighth of July, that same man had pulled his truck over on the shoulder of Highway 68 in a hundred and one degrees, gotten out with his own tools, spent forty minutes getting a stranger’s broken-down propane truck running again, and refused the forty dollars. Twice.
Dewey never looked at his face. He was on his phone the whole time, refreshing a number.
He finds out at four forty-three on a Friday afternoon in a Dollar General parking lot, and he does not recognize the mugshot at all, and he feels relieved for about ninety seconds because it means it is nobody. And then he scrolls down, and somebody has pulled a photograph off the man’s business page to prove they have the right guy, and Dewey recognizes the truck. The homemade ladder rack with the uprights a little off square on the passenger side. Four mud buckets, one with the lid still on. A tarp gone from blue to gray.
He has until Saturday night. His grandmother has given him that long, and she is not threatening him with anything at all, which is what makes it unbearable.
This is a comedy, and a genuinely funny one, and there are stretches of it, the tea argument, the bounce house debate, the casserole disposal runs at eleven o’clock at night behind the Dollar General, that are as funny as anything on this shelf. It is also the most serious book I have written. Because the engine of the whole thing is not a crime. It is that Dewey Shirley has spent four years building a machine for turning strangers into suspects, and the first time he ever runs it for real, it points straight at the only person who ever stopped for him. And because every single kindness in this novel is authentic, and none of it can be given back, and the people doing it are not fools and are not hypocrites and are not going to be punished for it by the story.
Nobody in this book ever raises their voice. Not the sheriff who knew inside of three minutes on Monday morning and spent eleven days politely holding a door open. Not the grandmother who read the yard in ninety seconds because she carried her husband’s lunch out to framing sites for twenty years. Not the man who sat four days in a county jail for something that never happened and then, months later, in his own carport, in October, said the only thing he had to say about it, which was that the strap he put on that belt would have held another six months and Dewey should not have wasted the money on a new one.
That turns out to be the worst part.
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