FORTY

As Little and I had agreed, they picked me up in front of the newsstand on Roosevelt Avenue at five on the evening of the twenty-third. They were in the old man’s black Ford two-door sedan with Willie at the wheel and Little in the front passenger seat. I was lost in my thoughts when Willie broke the silence. “Hey! You got a big Christmas planned?” he asked. I looked up to see his muddy eyes dancing beneath the bill of his seedy cap as he gazed into the rearview mirror.

“Not really,” I replied. “I’m not big on celebrations.”

“That’s a shame,” he said. “What are you going to do with your share of the money?”

“I don’t know. Buy some oil leases, I guess.”

“Oh, ho!! Going into business, huh? Not me. I’m gonna have fun with mine.”

“Just how does a man like you have fun, Willie?” I asked.

He’d been watching me in the mirror when suddenly the right tires began throwing up gravel as he let the car drift onto the shoulder of the road. He quickly whipped the wheel and the Ford swerved back up on the highway.

“Shut up and drive the damn car,” Little said. “You go to fooling around and you’re liable to get us all killed.”

“I just want to have a conversation here,” Willie said angrily. “You know, a little exchange of opinions.”

“We don’t need no conversation,” Little replied.

Willie was quiet until we reached the place where we turned off onto the county road. Then I heard that private little laugh of his, and it sounded like it came from an empty room. “You asked what I do for fun,” he said. “Well, I like to watch.”

“Watch what?” I asked in spite of myself.

“Whatever’s going on. I’m a big watcher.”

“You shouldn’t need much money for that,” I observed.

He gave me a throaty chuckle this time, and once again I could see his eyes darting around in the mirror. “It depends on what you wanna watch and where you go to watch it. The more classy your tastes are, the more it costs.”

“Willie, just be quiet and pay attention to the road,” Little told him. “You keep this up and you’ll have a wreck, I tell you.”

“I happen to think some good talk spices up a drive in the country,” Willie said, glaring over at the old man. “That’s all.”

“We can do without the spice right now,” Little replied.

Willie fell silent for a few seconds, then began humming some melody off-key while he patted the wheel in slow time to the music. Finally I recognized the tune as “Nearer My God to Thee,” and I felt like laughing.

“Is that your favorite hymn?” I asked.

“Yeah!” he said, his eyes reappearing in the mirror. “Ain’t it great?” He lapsed back into silence for a couple of minutes, then resumed his humming. The little Ford sped along toward the setting sun through a bleak and frozen land. The scrub oaks in the creek bottoms were bare and lifeless and the pastures had been grazed down to the quick. We passed through a field that must have held a thousand acres of ranked cotton stubble that hadn’t gotten over a foot high before the drought hit. Off to one side of the road I caught a glimpse of a coyote shivering on the crest of a low bluff, its coarse, ratty fur ruffled by the icy wind. Ahead, the dull orange orb of the sun looked cold and depleted as if the dead earth had sucked the very life from it. Darkness would be falling soon, and with it would come the end of the day.

“You don’t talk much, big guy,” Willie said at last. “You’re as bad as Chicken Little here.”

“What’s there to talk about?” I asked.

Willie chuckled once again.

“Here’s the turnoff, Willie,” Little said. “You almost missed it fooling around. You need to keep your mind on business and look where you’re driving.”

We pulled up behind the old house just as the sun began to drop below the horizon. Willie killed the engine and we climbed from the car.

“Get the keys and open the trunk,” Little told him.

Once the trunk lid was up, Willie stepped back away from the vehicle. “Go on and get the magnet out,” Little said, exasperation beginning to creep into his voice. “Do I have to tell you everything?”

“I guess I’m thinking about other things,” Willie said as he leaned over into the yawning trunk of the Ford. He jerked and tugged at something back in its far recesses for a few moments, then straightened up. “Damn it! It’s stuck in there.”

“What?” Little asked.

“It’s too damn strong. It’s stuck to the floor of the car.”

“If it wasn’t strong it wouldn’t pull that sack and that fourteen-pound weight out of the bottom of the well,” Little explained patiently. “Can’t you understand nothing?”

“Move over and let me get it,” I told Willie. As I turned my back to him the hair on the nape of my neck tried to stand up on end. Near the rear of the compartment sat a large industrial magnet. An eyelet had been affixed to a semicircular handle that was cast into its top. A short length of heavy chain that ended in a coil of half-inch rope was fastened to the eyelet with a spring-loaded clasp. I reached in and easily jerked the magnet loose with one hand, then hauled it and the coil of rope out of the trunk.

“Goddamn!” Icepick Willie said with a shiver. “Let’s get moving and get that money out of that damned well. It’s cold out here.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Willie,” Little admonished. “I’ve told you that kind of talk don’t do a man no good at all.”

“Shit,” Willie said to nobody in particular. He looked off at the horizon, his face drawn up like a sullen child’s. “I hate cold weather.”

“You got the key?” Little asked me.

“No,” I replied after feeling around in my pockets.

“Shit!” Willie blurted once again, wheeling around to glare at me. “If this ain’t turning into a hell of a mess. First the magnet gets stuck, and now we got no key. I don’t see why we didn’t bring a bunch of damned Chinamen along to really clabber things up.”

“Settle down and don’t pitch a fit, Willie,” Little told him. “Just get the tire iron out of the trunk and we’ll bust the lock open.”

Willie bumbled around behind the Ford until he finally managed to unfasten the tire iron from the clamp that held it to the jack. Once he’d pulled it from the trunk, he trotted over to the well and slipped its tip under the hasp. Then he put his shoulder under the end of the iron and heaved upward. The screws that held the hasp to the wood gave way with a loud creak and the well was open.

“See how easy that was?” Little asked.

“Shit,” Willie announced once again.

“Why don’t you go fish that sack out?” Little asked me quietly. “His mind is somewhere else, and he’s liable to drop the whole business in the well, magnet and all, and then we really will be in a fix.”

I held the magnet over the side of the curb and began to uncoil the rope. The well was only about thirty feet deep and it didn’t take long for the magnet to hit the water. It took me a couple of minutes of probing around, picking the magnet up and moving it until at last I came close enough to the steel disc inside the bag. Finally I felt a tug at the rope as the disc and the magnet made contact. Slowly I began drawing up the rope. Finally the bag came up and I dropped it on the ground. By putting my foot on the sack I was able to tug the magnet loose and then unseal the first bag. I pulled out the second bag and threw it over at Little’s feet.

“Hot damn!” Willie said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Let’s split it up.”

“Not out here,” Little told him. “We’ll go up to Sweetwater and get a room in a tourist court where it’s nice and warm, and then we’ll count it out and divide it.”

“I don’t like that idea,” Willie said with a sly grin and slipped his hands into his coat pockets.

“Well, I like it,” Little said. “And that’s the way we’re going to do it. There’s something else we may as well air out while we’re on the subject. Lum’s momma is going to get his cut, and there ain’t no use arguing about it.”

“Oh, ho ho,” Willie chuckled. “I got a better plan. How about we do a one-way split? Then we won’t need to do no counting.”

Little’s face was grim beneath the edge of his fedora. “Now, why don’t it surprise me that you’d come up with a notion like that?” he asked rhetorically.

Willie glanced at me and winked. I shook my head, and said, “Better back away from it, Willie.”

“And you better zip it shut, city boy,” he growled as he pulled a .45 automatic smoothly from his overcoat pocket and pointed it at us. His big, blurry face held a happy grin and his swampy eyes danced. “The first time we met, I told you payday was gonna come someday.”

“I’m sorry it’s come to this, Willie,” Chicken Little said. “I could overlook some of the other stuff you done, much as I hate it. But I got no use for a man that turns on his own partners. There ain’t no place for him in this world. Maybe not in the next one, neither.”

“Well, who in the hell are you to be so high and mighty, Chicken Little? You ain’t nothing but a damned old Okie moonshiner.”

“Maybe not, but my word’s good.”

“It ain’t gonna be for much longer,” Wille said. He pointed the gun at Little and pulled the trigger only to have the hammer fall against the firing pin with a dull click. He looked down at the .45 for a moment as though he’d never seen it before, then quickly jerked the slide back and fed a fresh cartridge into the chamber. Aiming at me this time, he squeezed the trigger a second time with no better results. “You gave me a damn gun that don’t work!” he bellowed.

“The gun works fine, Willie,” the old man said, and pulled his own old Colt Pocket Auto from his shoulder holster. A silencer appeared in his left hand and he began to screw it carefully onto the Colt’s barrel. “I just took the powder out of them cartridges about a week ago. That’s one of them little things I keep trying to tell you about. You don’t never pay no attention to the little things.”

Willie crouched there beside the old abandoned house in the falling darkness while he worked the pistol’s action and squeezed the trigger again and again, aiming first at Little and then at me, back and forth, until the gun was empty. He stared at it for a moment with an expression of sick bewilderment on his face, then raised his head to glare at us with eyes that were growing wide with fear. An icy wind had been blowing earlier, but it had lain with the sunset, and now a deathly stillness reigned. In the west a band of fading crimson marked the place where the sun had dropped below the horizon, and beneath it the cold, desolate land was passing quickly into night. For a few moments the whole earth seemed to hang suspended in silence, and then I heard Little’s voice, low and apologetic. “I know it’s a hell of a note, but we ain’t got a shovel.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll just throw the body down the well.”