THIRTY-NINE

It was to be our first Christmas together. The previous year my job had taken me to Washington right before the holidays, and I hadn’t returned to Memphis until after New Year’s. This year we wanted something special. We took the Ford and drove far out into the country hunting a tree. It took a while, but at last we found a dense, perfectly shaped cedar we could both agree on, and hauled it home in the back of the wagon. That evening I put a stack of Christmas carols on the turntable and we got mildly plastered on rum punch and had a ball decorating the tree. Later we made love on the sofa once more, and then fell asleep, our arms and legs twined together, only to waken much later when the fire had burned down and the room had grown chilly. We stumbled off to our bedroom, giggling at ourselves. The next morning Della departed for Dallas on an overnight trip to do her gift shopping, leaving me alone at the breakfast table with my morning coffee. She had no more than rolled out of the drive when I got three phone calls in rapid succession. The first was Ollie Marne inviting us to a Christmas party at his home. The second was from Manlow Rhodes with a similar invitation, this one a dance at the Cottonwood Country Club. The third was from Chicken Little. “We need to talk,” I heard his voice say across the distance.

He had business in Fort Worth the next day. I suggested that we meet at Cattleman’s Steakhouse, which had just opened that year. He objected on the grounds that it would be too crowded at noontime. We finally settled on Nana’s Café, a hole-in-the-wall joint run by Nana Puckett, a woman I’d known for years. Nana was the widow of a once-famous rodeo star named Clyde Puckett, a tiny, acerbic man who’d been the country’s top bull rider until a two-thousand-pound Brahman stomped him to death in Phoenix a decade earlier. Her café was only a block from the Stockyards Coliseum, and I’d been there many times.

Like our meeting at the Fan Tan, Little was already waiting for me when I arrived. After the waitress had taken our orders, the old man looked across the table at me with an expression that made me think of the Grim Reaper. “Lum Shamblin is dead,” he said.

“Wha—?”

He shook his head sadly. “I couldn’t do nothing to stop it.”

“Willie?” I asked.

“No. Willie didn’t have a thing to do with it. It was woman trouble. Lum had been seeing a married woman. She wasn’t but twenty-two, and her husband was about ten years older. He was also mean as hell, from what everybody says. He’d beat her up a few times, and didn’t give her much attention nowhere except in the bedroom, so she took to seeing Lum on the side. Then last Friday night her husband give her a really good shellacking, and Lum was able to talk her into leaving and going with him. The husband drove a bread truck for that big bakery there in Tulsa, which meant he left home about four every morning and was gone most of the day. They’d been careful, but he must have suspicioned something. The next Tuesday she and Lum were packing up her things about ten in the morning when he come home unexpected, and shot and killed both of them with a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

“It sounds pitiful, and I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

“It was pitiful, and it’s left us with problems.”

“How so?”

“Lum’s momma is old and sick and I think she ought to get his cut, but Willie’s raising sand for a three-way split now that Lum is dead. He says the old lady didn’t take any of the risk and she’s not entitled to any of the money.”

“Hell, let her have my share,” I said. “Then everybody will be happy.”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t work that way. That ain’t the way we started out to do it, and be damned if I’m going to stray from our appointed course. And there’s one other hitch. Willie don’t want to wait till after Christmas to get the money.”

“But that’s what we all agreed on, Little. I was going to bring it up to Tulsa right after the holidays.”

“Yeah, I know. But it seems like agreements don’t mean too much to him no more. If I’d knowed he was going to be such an aggravation I wouldn’t have brought him in on this business in the first place.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I checked him out myself, and from what I heard he’s solid.”

“Oh, he is,” Little said. “During the job itself you couldn’t want nobody better, but he’s got to where he’s a damn squirrel the rest of the time. See, my whole reason for putting the money in the well in the first place is that the heat’s always the worst the first couple of days. It’s been my policy to get rid of everything that can tie me to a job as soon as possible. Then you can go back in a week or a month or even a year if you have to, and pick it up. But he didn’t like doing that from the start.”

“It was the smart way to do it. With the bank job they could have had roadblocks all over the county, and there we would have been. They would have searched an out-of-state car for certain.”

“Yeah, and this was my last job, no doubt about it, and I wasn’t about to take chances. Hell, if it wasn’t for the principle of the thing, I’d tell him where the money is and let him go get it. I’ve got more than enough for me and Annie to live on from here on out. But I be damned if I’m going to let him strong-arm me this late in life. Besides, there’s something else about him that’s worrying me.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “It’s a story I heard a little while back, and I believe it, because the old boy that told me about it don’t lie. Anyhow, he said that about three years ago Willie done a little five-year-old girl.”

“You’ve got to be joking.…”

“I wish I was,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

“But why?”

“Money. Pretty big money. A bunch of bootleggers wanted to scare the hell out of a guy, a jeweler in Little Rock that was gonna testify against one of them in a murder case. He had four kids and this was supposed to show him what would happen to all of them if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.”

“Who was behind it? The Kansas City outfit?”

“Oh, hell no. The Dagos won’t mess with nobody’s family, and especially not with their kids. It was a bunch of white trash peckerwoods out of the Mississippi Delta.”

“And Willie did it for sure?”

“Yeah, he done it all right enough.”

“Then we can’t let him have all the money now,” I said. “We’d just look weak, and there’s no telling what he might come back on us with later on.”

The waitress came with our food, and we ate our meal in near silence. Finally the old man looked across the table at me with a sad expression on his face. “I hate for something like this to come up,” he said. “And I hate that I put you in this position. Fifteen or so years ago, back when I first met Willie, he was a lot different. I don’t know what happened to him, but in them days he wouldn’t have done nothing like that little girl. Like I said, he just got to where he liked killing too much.”

“Forget it,” I said. “We’ve been friends too long for you to think you have to apologize when you’ve done your best.”

“Son, I’m awful glad you feel that way.”

“Then what do you think we ought do?…” I asked.

“Well, I guess we could just tell him to go to hell,” Little said. “Then you bring it on up to Tulsa after the holidays like we planned.”

I shook my head. “No. Let’s compromise with him. There’s really no reason not to go ahead and get the money and split it up before Christmas. That’s apparently the only thing that will shut him up.”

“If you’re sure you want to do it like that. It could be dangerous. Willie don’t like you, and he may have ideas.”

“I’m aware of that, and I think we ought to be prepared,” I said.

He smiled a grim smile and nodded. “Don’t worry. We will be.”

“Good. Why don’t the two of you meet me in front of that newsstand on Roosevelt at five o’clock on the evening of the twenty-third.”

“We’ll be there,” he said. “And by the way … Tobe wanted me to tell you that the take from that job was almost three hundred thousand.”

“I know you must have wondered about the money found in Sweetwater,” I said. “I’ll give you the whole story when we come up after Christmas,” I said.

“You can if you want to. It’s none of my business, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it except that he asked me to. He also wanted you to know it was a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Tell him the pleasure was all mine.”

A short while later we stood and shook hands, and then I watched Chicken Little leave the café, a trim, erect old man in his neat gray suit and snappy fedora.