II

In my fevered sleep I heard a deep tolling of bells and had one bad dream after another, mostly about Camp M. I saw dogs tearing at convicts like rats fighting over a garbage scrap. Headless men hacking at cane. A gang of cons with snakes hanging from their faces. Men hobbling on bare feet twisted by mutilated heelstrings. Sometimes I’d see Brenda Marie’s face over me, but never clearly. I’d hear her voice as if she were at a distance; I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Sometimes I faintly heard other female voices and high laughter.

And then I was awake. It took me a minute to realize I was in her bed. The bells were at it again, and now I recognized them as belonging to the Catholic church down the street. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the balcony doorway. Then the bells quit their clangor and I heard a Brandenburg concerto playing low in the next room.

I was naked under the sheet and smelling slightly sour but not too bad. My hands and arms were clean, and my whiskered face, and I knew she’d washed me. The fever had passed, but my mouth was dry, my throat scratchy. A pitcher and a tumbler stood on the bedside table. I sat up and poured a glass of water and my hand shook slightly as I brought it to my mouth. I’d never tasted anything so sweet. I wasn’t in pain but I felt like my bones had been hollowed.

She came into the room carrying a basin of soapy water and an armful of towels and saw me sitting up and she let out a gleeful little yelp and hastened to put the things on the table and almost knocked over the water pitcher, then took my face in her hands and kissed me hard.

“Welcome back to the world, Mr. Van Winkle.”

 

Now that I was awake, she said, she could give me a proper washing. I felt fit enough to bathe myself in a tub but she said to hush and made me lean this way and that while she spread several towels under me so she could go at me with a washcloth while we talked.

She said that at first sight she’d thought I was an Indian at her window, my face was so much darker than when she’d last seen me. The fellow I’d heard in the bedroom had helped her to get me inside and into bed. She told him I was a cousin who’d been working for an oil company in Central America, that a case of malaria I’d picked up last year must have acted up again and got me sent back to New Orleans.

“I doubt he believed a word of it,” she said. “I mean, your clothes, for God’s sake. But he knows better than to ask me too many questions. Lift up.” She tapped my arm and I raised it so she could get at my armpit with a soapy cloth, then rinse it clean with a damp one, then dry it with a towel.

“I have to say, sweetie, the smell of you was enough to chase him off,” she said. “He’s a violinist in the symphony orchestra—very sensitive type. Truth to tell, I thought of putting you out in the alley for the refuse wagon to pick up.” She smiled and pecked me on the lips, then started on the other underarm.

I’d been there two nights and days. She had summoned a doctor yesterday morning, a family acquaintance of reliable discretion. He diagnosed me as a case of fevered exhaustion and gave me an injection of something and told her to give me water every hour. She’d managed a few times to get me to sip from a glass she held to my mouth, and even at some of the chicken broth she spooned for me.

“You’d open your eyes,” she said, “but you weren’t really seeing me. You had me scared, baby.” She washed around my neck and dabbed it dry. What she wanted to know of course was what happened and where the hell I’d been all this time and why I hadn’t sent word to her.

The trick to good lying was to tell as much of the truth as you could, only not exactly or entirely, not even to those with no tie to your doings or reason to hurt you—because you never knew who they might pass it on to, deliberately or not. We’d hit a bank in Arkansas, I told her, and the job went bad. Buck and Russell got clear but I was caught and sent up for five years. I didn’t write her because I didn’t want to think too much about her—it would’ve made things even rougher if I had. Then I finally escaped and here I was. But Buck and Russell weren’t—at least they weren’t where they used to live. Did she have any idea where they were?

“That’s it?” she said. “Nine months and that’s your story? You went to prison and didn’t write me and now you’re back. The end?”

“Nothing else to tell,” I said. “Take my word for it, honey, there’s nothing more boring than prison. What about Buck and Russell?”

She stared at me a moment like she was trying to see behind my eyes, then got up and left the room. She returned with a small envelope and handed it to me. “Sonny” was scrawled on the front. The envelope had been cut open. I looked at her.

“Hey, mister,” she said, “I didn’t know if you were dead or alive, if I’d ever see you again or what.”

The sheet inside read, “Dolan’s,” and below that, “B.”

Jimmyboy Dolan. I had intended to check with him anyway, but they’d wanted to be sure I did. I kept my face blank but my heart was dancing.

“It was under my door one morning,” she said. She began laving my chest. “About three months ago, I guess. I thought it meant you’d be showing up soon. But after a couple of months, still no you, so I took a peek. I thought maybe it’d say where you were. It’s not the most detailed letter I ever read. I know ‘B’ is Buck, but what’s Dolan’s, a speakeasy or what? Or should I say who? What’s going on?”

“Damned if I know,” I said. I slipped the note back in the envelope and put it on the bedside table. “Strange message. Maybe he was drunk when he wrote it.”

“You’re such a liar,” she said. “What?—you think I’m going to blab it all over town? It really vexes me, Sonny, that you don’t trust me. You’ll probably think I robbed you while you were sleeping. You didn’t have but a nickel in your pockets, you know that?”

“Christ’s sake, girl, I trust you. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Such a liar,” she said, but I could see her pique was more affected than real. She pushed the sheet down to my hips and began bathing my stomach with slow circular strokes.

She said she’d gotten worried when I still hadn’t come back after a week, so she’d gone to my place and slid a note under the door, leaving a tiny corner of it visible. She looked every day and the note was always there. It went like that for more than a month and then one day the apartment was occupied by somebody else. She couldn’t check with Buck and Russell because I’d never told her where they lived and there was no listing for them in the directories. She scoured the newspapers every day but saw nothing about anybody who might’ve been us.

“If you all weren’t so damned secretive about everything, I might not’ve had to fret so much.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess that fiddle player was one way to get your mind off fretting for a while.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Hey boy, it’s not the same thing and you know it. And that fiddler is my business—just like I told him you’re my business.”

I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender. “You’re right,” I said, and I meant it. “It was a lousy crack.”

She smiled. “All right then, you’re forgiven.” Then cut her eyes to my lower belly where she’d been stroking me with the washcloth. “Oh my,” she said. “What’s this?”

She shoved the sheet off me. “Goodness! Look at this poor rascal trying to raise up on his feet.”

“Hey girl, quit it. I’m in no condition for this.” That’s what I said—but if she’d quit it I might’ve wept.

“Shush,” she said. “Don’t scare him. All he needs is a helping hand and a big kiss of encouragement.” She bent to it, cooing, “Come here, baby, come to momma.”

And it pretty quick did.

 

I woke the next morning feeling grand. The room was full of soft sunlight. Brenda Marie slept snugly against me, her breath warm on my neck and her black hair draped on my chest, one long leg between mine. She smelled wonderfully of seawater and flowers. I ran my hand over her buttocks and marveled at their trim swells. She came awake without opening her eyes, smiling, pressing herself tighter against me, affecting to purr like a cat. I stroked her flank and she shifted so I could get at her breast. She worked her hand between us and chuckled lewdly on finding me ready as can be. She wriggled herself under me and I slipped in smoothly and her legs closed around me and pulled me deeper. We rocked together and she drew my face down to hers and kissed me and lightly bit my lips and I don’t think I lasted thirty seconds before letting go with a groan and collapsing on her, gasping like I’d run across town. She laughed softly and thumped me on the back and said to get off her before she smothered, then rolled with me to keep me inside her. And then we slept again.

The next time we woke up it was early afternoon and I was ravenous. We hadn’t eaten since the leftover chicken stew she’d warmed up the night before. She had an assistant she trusted to run the gallery in her absence but a collector from Houston was coming late that afternoon to see some of her new acquisitions and she had to be there. We had enough time to have a late lunch before she went.

“Well then, let’s get a move on,” I said, slapping her on the bottom and getting out of bed. She hadn’t seen the scars on my ass until then, and she said, “Oh, those bastards.” It was the nearest I’d seen her come to crying since the time I’d told her that my father, like hers, had drowned.

I’d always kept a shaving razor and change of clothes in my Gladstone in her closet. As she gave my white suit a cursory pressing she said she’d more than once thought to throw away my stuff but couldn’t bring herself to do it—it would’ve felt like giving up hope of seeing me again. What I couldn’t find in the Gladstone was a .38-caliber bulldog I’d left tucked among some undershirts. She saw me digging around in the bag and said, “Here,” and went to the bedside table and took the snubnose pistol out of the drawer and handed it to me.

“Made me feel like some kind of desperado to keep it close to hand,” she said. I checked the cylinder—five chambers loaded and an empty one under the hammer.

“Every time I’d handle it I’d think of other things of yours I’d handled,” she said. “Aren’t I just awful?”

“You’re a shameless wanton and I’ll beat purple hell out of anybody who says different.”

She laughed deep in her throat and hugged my neck and bit my ear just hard enough to make me wince. “You’re such a charmer,” she said.

She stood in the bathroom door and watched me shave. The tall bath window gave onto a cluster of banana trees mottled with sunlight, their green fronds stirring in a gentle breeze spiced with the aromas of dinner hour. A streetcar bell jangled in the distance. A produce vendor sang his wares. A neighbor’s saxophone rendered a slow and rueful version of “Blue Skies.” Angola was about 150 miles from where I was standing but seemed farther removed than the moon. I suddenly felt so free my hand shook and I nicked my chin with the straight razor.

The suit pants were a little loose in the butt and I had to cinch my belt two notches higher than before and my shirt collar felt roomier under my finger, but my jacket still hung well on my shoulders. Brenda said she liked my new leanness.

When she went to get dressed I slipped the bulldog under my waistband at my back, then stood out on the balcony and smoked a cigarette. The air rang with the afternoon church bells. Flowers bloomed in large clay pots on every balcony. A formation of yellow-head pelicans sailed over the tiled rooftops and the blarings of shiphorns carried from the river. Schoolgirls in blue-and-white uniforms came clamoring out of St. Cecelia’s, set free for the day. They passed in flocks along the lacework iron fence and I recognized their happy chatter as the voices and laughter I’d heard in my fevered sleep.

We ate at a restaurant down the street. I put away a thick steak covered with fried green peppers and onions, a bowl of red beans and rice, a platter of eggs scrambled with chopped sausage. Brenda Marie had softboiled eggs and a buttered croissant and smiled as she watched me gorge myself, at one point touching my arm and giving me a look to keep me from wolfing my food. She asked about my plans for the rest of the afternoon. I said I was going to walk around the Quarter and look at things I hadn’t seen since last summer.

Back on the sidewalk she slipped me a ten and gave me her spare keys to the outer courtyard gate and to the apartment. She kissed me full on the mouth and pressed her belly hard against me and said she’d be home around eight and for me not to overexert myself.

“At least not till I get back,” she said, licking a fingertip and putting it to my lips. She laughed and waggled her fingers at me and I watched the play of her long trim legs as she strode off down the street.

 

Jimmyboy Dolan had partnered with Buck and Russell for about a year. But he was a bad gambler and got in arrears for close to a thousand dollars at one of Cockeye Calder’s clubs. Cockeye wasn’t one for complex negotiations with anybody who owed him money or tried to cheat him. Everyone knew about the Memphis cardsharp who got caught doing tricks at one of Cockeye’s tables and paid for his folly with the fingers of one hand. Cockeye told Jimmyboy he had a month to pony up what he owed. He charged him a daily interest that doubled the debt the first week. Jimmyboy could’ve paid him off with his cut from a job he did with Buck and Russell a few days later but that wasn’t his way. He made a partial payment on the debt and spent the rest on good times and gambling at other clubs around town. Who knows what he was thinking. When his month was up he got a visit from a pair of Cockeye’s collectors. His tally had inflated to almost five thousand dollars by then but he could only come up with a few hundred. Their disappointment was so great they sawed off his right foot.

When Buck and Russell introduced me to him about three months later, Jimmyboy was working as a car mechanic and living in the back room of the garage and doing his best not to provoke certain kinds of people anymore. He had to give Cockeye Calder all but five dollars of his pay every week and figured to clear his debt in about five years. He wore a cumbersome prosthesis that wasn’t much more than a heavy block of wood shaped like a fat dark boot. He walked like he was dragging a ball and chain and the wood foot clumped with every step. Watching him make his way to the men’s room, Russell whispered, “I thought I had a limp.”

I found him all alone in the garage and he seemed pleased to see me. “Hey, Sonny boy!” he said. “Ain’t seen you in a coon’s age, man. Where the hell you been keeping yourself?”

I told him I’d been living with a girl in Atlanta for the past nine months and then recently got a note in the mail from Buck saying he and Russell were moving, but for some damn reason he hadn’t told me where. He only said to come see Jimmyboy. So, here I was. Where were they?

He didn’t know, but he believed they’d left town, probably left the whole damn state. They’d stopped by the garage about four months ago for just long enough to say so long.

“I figure they were feeling the heat from the Bogalusa job, don’t you?”

“What Bogalusa job?”

I didn’t know about that? By the time he’d read about it in the newspaper the bank robbery was two days old and Buck and Russell were one day gone. What happened was, a customer tried to be a hero and jumped on one of the two robbers. While the other robber beat the hero on the head with a pistol to get him loose of his partner, the guard retrieved the gun they’d made him drop and opened fire, shooting three times and wounding a woman in the leg but missing both robbers before one of them shot him in the stomach. The bandits ran out and hijacked a car and made a getaway—but without a dime of the bank’s money. The guard died a few hours later.

“They came and told you about it?”

“No man, I saw it in the paper.”

“How’d the paper know it was them?”

“It didn’t. The cops didn’t either. What happened is, the one the hero grabbed lost his hat and sunglasses in the scuffle and a couple of people got a good look at him before he put them back on. The paper had a police sketch in it and wanted to know if anybody recognized him. Well, it wasn’t no photograph, but it was a good enough likeness I knew I was looking at Russell.”

“And they hijacked a car?”

“What the paper said. Sounds like somebody’s driver lit a shuck ahead of schedule, you ask me.”

“Yeah, it does. Anybody who’d do that is likely to rat out his partners if he gets in a spot. And there’s the guys who recognized the newspaper sketch. I can see why they left town.”

“Hey, Sonny, never in the world would I breathe a word to anybody.”

“I know,” I said. “But you couldn’t’ve been the only one to recognize the sketch. What I don’t get is why tell me to come see you if they didn’t tell you where they were going.”

“Well hell, man, to pick up what they left for you. I thought that’s what you come for.”

He clumped off into his little back room, its door screeching on its hinges, and returned a minute later with an envelope of the same sort they’d left with Brenda Marie. It was smudged with grease but still sealed.

The note inside said: “Star fill sta next RR depot Houston. See Miller.”

It made me proud that they’d thought it was even possible I might break out. And because they knew I’d come looking for them if I did, they’d left this trail for me, despite their own good reasons not to, being on the run themselves. That was them.

Jimmyboy wanted to buy me a drink at a speak down the block but I begged off, saying I had a ladyfriend waiting. I promised to take him up on the offer in a day or two.

 

I repacked my bag and took fifty dollars from the cash Brenda Marie kept in her desk. Then wrote a note: I had a lead on Buck and Russell and was sorry to go like this but I had to catch the next train. I owed her more than the money and I’d be back as soon as I could and blah blah blah.

I folded the note and propped it against the radio in the living room. Then went out and turned the lock and slipped the key under the door. Then went to the station and bought a ticket and read magazines and drank coffee until my train boarded and then chugged off into the darkness.

 

The sign for Star’s filling station stood atop a high pole and was visible from the front steps of the depot. The late-morning sun was warm and I walked down the street with the Gladstone in hand and my suit jacket slung over my shoulder. The building was fronted by a row of gasoline pumps, its windows dust-coated, its sideboards paint-peeling and warped. A mechanic was bent over the open hood of a Model T at the far end of the lot. Across the street was a small grocery where a man in an apron stood in the door and watched me.

A little bell tinkled over the door when I went in. A husky sandy-haired guy with a toothpick in his mouth sat behind the counter reading an adventure magazine. He looked at me over his reading glasses and then out at the pumps to see if I had a car waiting for gas. He had a drinker’s face—puffy bloodshot eyes, his nose and cheeks webbed with red veins.

“If you selling something, boy, save your breath.”

“You Mr. Miller?”

“Mr. Faulk.”

“There a fella named Miller around here?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where can I find him?” I said.

He rolled the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “What you want with him?”

“I got business with him.”

“What business is that?”

“Private business. Look mister, just tell me where I can find him.”

“You ain’t told me your name.”

“That’s none of your concern,” I said. “My business is with Miller.”

The man sighed and removed his spectacles and massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingers. I told myself to keep cool, there was nothing to be gained by getting blackassed. “All right,” I said. “The name’s Bill Loomis. Satisfied?”

He seemed to give the name some thought for a moment, then spat away the toothpick. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t help you.” He put his glasses back on and picked up the magazine.

“Hey man, you wanted my name, you got it.”

His expression was utterly blank. I cursed under my breath and started for the door, figuring to ask the mechanic about Miller, ask the grocer across the street. Then I thought, What the hell—you never know. I stopped and turned and said, “LaSalle, goddammit. I’m Sonny LaSalle.”

He put the magazine down again and looked like he might be thinking of smiling. “That so?” he said. He glanced out the window again. “Well now tell me, Mr. LaSalle: You ever hear of a fella named Ansel Mitchum?”

I felt like my horse had come in at thirty to one. “I guess I have.”

“Didn’t old Ansel have him a nickname? I disremember what it was.”

“I believe it might be Buck.”

He grinned back at me and put out his hand. “Miller Faulk,” he said as we shook. “Lived in Narlens most my life and known your uncles since way back when. Sorry for all the caution, Sonny, but it’s lots of fellas always looking for lots of other fellas, and a man can’t be too careful about who he helps find who, if you know what I mean.”

 

It was an hour’s ride to Galveston on an electric railcar over a causeway flanked by gleaming baywater as flat as a tabletop. A humid but pretty afternoon smelling heavily of the sea.

I got my bearings according to the rough pencil map Faulk had drawn for me and made my way along the island’s shady residential sidewalks until I came to Avenue H. On a corner two blocks over I found the house number I was looking for. A picket fence ran around the small yard and thick white oleander shrubs lined the porch. The whole place well shaded by a magnolia tree full of jabbering mockingbirds. A bright yellow Pierce-Arrow was parked in the driveway leading to the garage in back.

I stood at the gate, peering past the oleanders and into the dark shadows of the porch. Someone was sitting there, a woman, busy with something in her lap.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” I called out. “I’m looking for some kin of mine and I wonder if you can—”

The woman gave a small shriek and a pan clanked on the floor and a scattering of snap beans spilled off the porch. She came scooting down the steps and I saw it was Charlie.

I dropped the Gladstone as she yanked open the gate and flung herself on me. I spun her around and couldn’t help laughing as she cried and kissed me all over my face and said, “Sonny, Sonny, Sonny.”

“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s hairy uncle. Hey brother, come see what the tide’s washed up.”

Russell stood grinning at the top of the porch steps in his undershirt and galluses, hands in his pockets.

Now Buck came out in turned-up shirtsleeves, a newspaper in his hand. “Jesus Christ on a drunken plowhorse. That young scoundrel with his hands on your woman—is that who I think it is?”

“Looks like he’s been sunbathing down in Miami, don’t it?” Russell said. Beaming would not be too strong a word for the way they were looking at me. I could feel myself beaming right back.

“Can you all believe it?” Charlie said. She laughed and clutched me tighter.

“I always hoped you’d find a way out, kid,” Buck said, “but I never really…” He made a vague gesture.

“I figured if I wanted to see you no-counts again I’d best take measures,” I said.

“Listen to him,” Buck said. “Take measures. Smartypants is full of himself, ain’t he? Same like always.”

“Probably wants us to call him Houdini or some such,” Russell said. “Escape artist like him.”

“You all quit picking on him,” Charlie said. She grabbed up the Gladstone and tugged me by the arm, pulling me through the gate and saying to come on, we had a lot of celebrating to do.

And Buck and Russell charged down the porch to hug me hard.

 

I’d been pleasantly surprised to find Charlie with them but I wasn’t sure how freely we could talk in her presence. They must’ve read the uncertainty on my face. “Everything’s jake, kid,” Russell said. “She’s in.”

She was sitting next to him on the sofa and patted his knee. “He gave me ten seconds to decide if I wanted to come along,” she said. “I took about seven to make up my mind.”

“Had to play hard to get,” Russell said.

“Now here I am, a moll,” she said, affecting to talk tough out of the side of her mouth. Then smiled wryly and said, “My poor momma must be going round and round in her grave.”

The bulldog was digging into my hip, so I took it out and set it on the small table beside my chair. Buck and Russell smiled at the sight of it. Charlie didn’t.

I was as eager to hear what they’d been up to as they were to ask me questions, and we went through several quarts of homebrew as we caught each other up on things. Sharp Eddie had given them the details about the trouble that put me in Angola. They called me twenty kinds of fool for getting in a tank fight in the first place—especially in defense of some faggot—and in the second for hitting a jailhouse cop, no matter the cop hit me on the head. You couldn’t win a fight against a jailhouse cop; you only ended up with more time behind bars. And if you killed him, well, kiss your ass goodbye.

“The only thing surprises me,” Russell said, “is they didn’t hang you. I mean, John Bones’ kid. Even if it was an accident, the only worse trouble you could’ve made for yourself was if you strangled Huey Long’s momma.”

“That old sumbitch’ll turn Loosiana inside out looking for you,” Buck said.

I said I’d heard so much about what a hardcase John Bonham was that finally I didn’t believe it. “Maybe he was a rough cob in his younger days, but anymore he’s nothing but a gray old man with only one hand, for Christ’s sake.”

“Old and gray as he is,” Buck said, “I wouldn’t take him too light, me.”

“You ever have dealings with him?”

“No, but we know some who have, and we could tell you stories,” Russell said.

“I’ve heard plenty of stories,” I said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if he put out most of them himself.”

“Can we quit talking about that man?” Charlie said. “You already said he couldn’t do a thing to Sonny in Texas even if he knew he was here, so why go on about him?”

“Girl’s right,” Buck said. “To hell with that coonass.”

They wanted to hear all about Angola so I told them. Buck said it had always been one of the roughest prisons in the country and it couldn’t have gotten any softer since Long became governor. “I like the Kingfish,” he said, “but I wouldn’t pick his prison to do my time in.”

Charlie said a place like that was proof enough what beasts men really were. Russell affected to growl and gently bite her arm. She playslapped at him and said, “Quit that, or I’ll put you back in your cage.”

They loved hearing about the escape. When I told about turning the dog-bait trick around on Garrison, Buck laughed and said, “See? Told you it’d work!”

They couldn’t stop marveling that I’d run the levee. Through the rest of the evening one or the other would every now and again say “How do you like this kid?” and punch me in the arm and laugh the way they’d laughed on the night Russell brought Buck home from Texas. And I’d laugh along with them, the way I’d always wanted to.

They told me about their getaway from Verte Rivage, how the truck they’d stolen had busted a wheel in a bad rut and they’d fled into the swamp and were two days slogging through it before coming to another road. They stole a picnicking family’s car to get to Plaquemine. Buck won a twenty-dollar bet with Russell when they found the Model A unharmed beside the police station. When they got home they had to wash the mud off the money and spread the bills all over the house to dry. The report that they’d made away with ten grand was bullshit—they got a little over five. And if I’d been wondering what happened to my share, Buck said, it’s what they sent to Sharp Eddie to pay for my defense.

“You all ever see the fella gave you the tip on that bank?” I said.

“We did,” Buck said. “Claimed he didn’t know about the sheriffs’ convention. I believed him.”

“Me too,” said Russell. “It’s why all we did was bust his arm.”

Charlie stared into her glass of beer. I had a hunch there were aspects to the criminal life she hadn’t yet got used to.

After Verte Rivage they kept away from banks for five months. They went back to smalltime stickups, to working the poker and dice tables. Then a couple of weeks before Christmas they got a tip from Bubber Vicente about a Jackson bank. It had never been hit. No guard on the premises. They took on a driver named Buddy Smalls and did the job. It went slick as lard and they came away with over six grand. They figured they were back in bigtime business. Three weeks later, on another tip from Bubber, they hit the bank in Bogalusa. The news report Jimmyboy told me about was true—they didn’t get a dime.

“The teller was putting it in a sack when this peckerwood hops on my back like it was some goddam rodeo,” Russell said. “You could say our attention was pretty much distracted from the money for the rest of our visit.”

“I should’ve had that dumbshit guard kick the piece to me,” Buck said. “I never figured he’d try for it. Man’s stupidity got him killed, plain and simple—and added a goodly bit to our troubles.”

“Things did get a wee hairy,” Russell said. “Bang-bang-bang.” He grinned and affected to duck gunfire.

Charlie got up and went to the kitchen, saying we needed more beer. The quart on the table was half full. Russell watched her go, then looked at me and shrugged.

“And here’s the kicker,” Buck said. “We get outside and Buddy’s already flown. Left us high and dry. So I stop this sheba in a little roadster and say we’re taking her car. She says, ‘Ah shit,’ just like that. Cute little thing. Showed me a lot of leg as she got out. I should’ve asked her to come with us—you never know.”

They’d left their own car in Hammond—the yellow Pierce-Arrow, which they’d bought less than a week before Bogalusa—but when they got there the car was gone. They figured Buddy Smalls had it, so they drove the roadster on into Baton Rouge and stole another car and made for Buddy’s place in Metairie. Sure enough, the Arrow was parked around the side of Buddy’s house. While Buck knocked loudly at the front door and called out he was the Western Union man, Russell peeked in the back window and then jimmied the kitchen door and tiptoed to the living room and there was Buddy hunched down next to the sofa and holding a gun pointed at the front door.

“I kicked him in the back of the head so hard I near broke my foot,” Russell said. He let Buck in and they splashed water on Buddy’s face to bring him around. He started crying and saying they always said if a job went bad it was every man for himself. They reminded him that the rule applied only when your partners didn’t stand a chance, it didn’t mean you ran off and made their chances worse. They took him for a drive way out into the boondocks with Buddy talking the whole way, making every pitch he could to save his ass.

“I felt a little sorry for him,” Russell said. “I figured it was partly our fault he run out on us. We should’ve known he didn’t have the sand for a bank job.”

Maybe so, Buck said, but if a guy told you he’d be there, he had to be there, and if he wasn’t you couldn’t let it go. It was one of those lines you had to set, a line a man can’t cross without paying a price, otherwise nothing would mean anything.

“Just because it’s a world of thieves out there,” he said, “don’t mean there ain’t no rules to it.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him say it.

They figured nobody’d ever find Buddy in those boonies except by accident, and even if they did, they’d never know whose bones they had.

The next morning they’d read about the robbery in the paper and learned that the guard was dead. Then came the afternoon edition with Russell’s sketch in it.

“It was only a so-so likeness, I thought,” Buck said, “but Russell thought it was a little too like for comfort.”

They didn’t waste any time in removing themselves from Louisiana. They packed their bags and closed their bank account and didn’t take the time for anything else except to stop at Charlie’s to see if she wanted to go along—and to leave the notes for me at Brenda Marie’s and Jimmyboy Dolan’s.

They’d come straight to Galveston. They’d been here before and liked it. It struck them in some ways as a smaller version of New Orleans, and not only in the weather.

“It’s always been an easygoing town,” Buck said. “The cops’ll usually give a fella a break in appreciation of a cash contribution to their fight against crime.” He looked toward the kitchen, where Charlie was still keeping herself, then said in a lower voice, “When I first heard it’s got more cathouses than Narlens, I didn’t believe it, but it’s true. Most of the cats real young and sweet, too. Two bucks for your regular pussy, three dollars a throw for the best in the house. And every one of them so far real understanding about my, ah, deprived condition.”

“There’s no shortage of places to get laid, get drunk, or get a bet down,” Russell said. “They don’t call it the Free State of Galveston for nothing.”

“Seems just the place for some sharps I could name,” I said, grinning from one to the other of them.

“For relaxing, yeah,” Buck said, “but not for working, sad to say.” He said that all the big gambling joints and the local booze operations were run by a powerful pair of brothers named Sam and Rose Maceo who didn’t look kindly on outsiders trying to profit at their expense. Sharps who tried their trade at the Maceos’ tables, bootleggers who tried dealing their wares behind the Maceos’ backs—all such interlopers ended up going for a walk in the Gulf of Mexico in a pair of concrete shoes.

“You won’t believe how fancy their nightclubs are,” Russell said. “In the high-stakes rooms you get free booze while you’re playing. We saw the chief of police there one night, drink in one hand and dice in the other. We’ve had some good times in their places, but all told they’ve taken more of our money than we have of theirs. I’ve been tempted to use a trick or two but figured I’d best wait till I grow me some gills.”

“We saw them catch a dude playing card tricks at a poker table one night,” Buck said. “The strongarms were real polite. Would you come this way, please, sir? Got his coat from the checkroom and helped him on with it. Let him take his drink along. Right this way, sir. Week or so later somebody finds a leg on the beach. Just the bottom part. Still wearing a shoe. Florsheim, like this fella had been wearing. Of course, it could’ve been some other fella in Florsheims.”

“Or could be one kind of shark met another,” Russell said.

The same thing went for holdup men and thieves in general. The Maceos would not abide criminals in their midst to make citizens fearful and more demanding of stricter law enforcement. It was in the Maceos’ own interest that the locals feel safe enough to enjoy nights on the town. It was an open joke that Sam and Rose did a better job of protecting Galveston than the police department they paid off.

“In other words,” I said, “they got a monopoly on the thievery business in this town and mean to keep it that way.”

“In other words,” Buck said, “yeah.”

They’d come away from New Orleans with enough money to tide them over for a while, but between living expenses and gambling losses and Buck’s cathouse habit and Russell’s good times with Charlie, their stake had dwindled pretty fast. They started going up to Houston, where there were plenty of independent gambling joints. But as strangers they were everywhere suspect from the start and they’d had some close calls. Even where they were able to pocket their winnings without trouble, they were warned not to come back, and pretty soon they ran out of big-money games to sit in on.

So they’d gone back to holdups. Small stuff only—no banks. There’d been so many Houston banks robbed in the year before that the city and county both were now paying a bonus to any cop—and a reward to any private citizen—who shot a holdup man in the act. They paid bounties to manhunters who brought in wanted robbers, dead or alive. It wasn’t a policy ever made public, it hadn’t been in the newspaper, but the word was on the vine and everybody’d heard it.

“I tell you, kid, it’s some gun-crazy sonsofbitches in that damn Houston,” Buck said. “We ain’t real keen on hitting some bank where everybody in the place is packing a piece and praying for somebody to try a stickup.”

“Hell, I break a sweat robbing a grocery store anywhere near Houston,” Russell said.

Over the past few weeks they’d been taking it easy and talking things over, discussing possibilities, keeping their ears open in the speakeasies and gambling joints. And then last week they’d finally decided what to do. If I’d been a few days later in getting to Galveston they would’ve had to leave a different message for me with Miller Faulk.

 

They told me about it over supper at a bayside place overlooking the shrimp docks. We sat at a back corner table and between the four of us ate six dozen raw oysters and two big buckets of smoked shrimp, shucking the peels onto the newspaper the waitress had spread on the tabletop. We talked and talked as we ate, telling each other to keep our voices down, now and then snickering like a bunch of schoolkids.

West Texas was the place. Oil boom country.

“I don’t know why we ain’t gone out there before now,” Buck said. “It’s so damn right.”

East Texas had its share of oil towns, of course—hell, it’s where the business got started in this state—but according to Buck the boomtowns around here had mostly tamed down by now. There was still money to be made in them, but not by any Johnnies-come-lately like us. The way the Maceos had a lock on Galveston was how some bunch of big shots or other had a lock in every East Texas oil town—and with the same sort of cozy arrangement with the cops. No independent hustling allowed.

“But the way we hear it, out west it’s still wide open,” Buck said. “Every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. The cops all as crooked as corkscrews—except for the damn Rangers. But there ain’t all that many of them, praise Jesus.”

“All those towns full of boomers making money hand over fist,” Russell said, “and full of sharpies of every kind parting them from it.”

“But what they ain’t got enough of,” Buck said, “is somebody to part the sharpies from it.”

“In other words,” I said, “you’ve perceived a shortcoming in the economic system of West Texas. A shortcoming which presents lucrative possibilities to whoever might be bold enough to remedy it.”

“Exactly right, Mister smartass,” Buck said. “Lucrative possibilities. Especially since Bubber Vicente’s out there now. Our old job broker. Miller Faulk told us. He used to work for Bubber in Narlens till his wife left him and moved to Houston and he came out to try and get back with her. Anyway, a couple of months ago Bubber came to Houston and—”

“Poor old Miller,” Russell broke in. “Back in Narlens, Eula put the horns on him at least twice that I know of. Best thing ever happened to him was when she run off. But then the fool comes chasing after her. Buys that piece-of-shit filling station and tells everybody he’s turning a new leaf. I swear, some guys never learn.”

“He must love her is what it is,” Charlie said.

“I know it,” Russell said. “And look what it’s got him.”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“If you all don’t mind,” Buck said, giving Russell and Charlie a look.

He turned back to me. “A couple of months ago Bubber shows up in Houston and tells Miller he had to cut out of Narlens in a hurry after a pair of sonofabitch cops who’d been shaking down everybody in the Quarter were found floating in the river and some other sonofabitches were trying to stick the rap on him. Said he was on his way to West Texas to go partners with a old pal, another job setup man. Wanted Miller to go with him but Miller said no, he was back with Eula again and wanted to stay that way if he could. Bubber said if he changed his mind to get in touch with him at the Bigsby Hotel in Odessa.”

“Miller tell him you and Russell were in Galveston?” I said.

“Nope. We’d told him not to tell anybody where we were except you—if you should ever come around—and he took us at our word. He figured he’d tell us about Bubber the next time he saw us, but turned out that wasn’t till a couple of weeks ago. So we send Bubber a wire asking how’s business and a few days later he wires back it’s booming, he’s got more jobs than he’s got guys to do them, so come on out if we want some of them.”

“It’ll be just like in Narlens,” Russell said. “Bubber’ll point them out and we’ll do them.”

“His leads always been worth every dollar of his cut,” Buck said.

“In other words,” I said, “West Texas here we come.”

“In other words,” Buck said, “I can’t hardly wait.”

“Me neither,” Russell said. His grin as big as Buck’s and mine.

“Me neither,” Charlie said. Her smile small.

 

The plan was to rent a place to live in as soon as we got out west, a place where Charlie could stay while we were out on a job, a place we could retreat to and where we could pass for straight citizens, a place well removed from Bubber Vicente’s base of operations and whatever heat might all of a sudden come down on it. After studying a map of the region, we settled on Fort Stockton. If you drew a circle no more than a hundred miles across to include most of the boomtowns out there, Fort Stockton lay near the south rim of it and Odessa close to the north, some eighty-five miles away.

To beef up the stake we’d need to make the trip and get set up, Buck and Russell decided to sell the Pierce-Arrow—which was anyhow too showy for our line of work. You want a plain Jane of a car that blends right in with most others. They sold the Arrow to Miller Faulk, who’d always admired it and topped all other bids with an offer of five hundred dollars and a fairly new green Model A sedan which he’d had specially fitted with a radio. Miller said we were doing the right thing to swap the sometimes temperamental Pierce-Arrow for a hardy Model A that could handle that tough West Texas country.

Over the next few days, Buck and Russell settled their accounts and took care of a few other matters—including a special order of business cards with all three of our names listed on them as sales representatives of Matson Oil and Toolworks of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Meanwhile, Charlie took me shopping for new clothes and showed me the town. We ate lunch in cafés on the Strand or down the street from the docks. We’d always been able to talk frankly with each other back in New Orleans, and we found we still could. We were sipping lemonades in a restaurant across the street from the seawall one afternoon when she told me she’d once asked Russell what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

“Know what his answer was? He said, ‘Hell girl, I’m doing it.’” She shook her head and swayed the dangling gold star she wore on one earlobe. The other was pinned with a pearl stud.

“Well,” I said, “that’s Russell.”

“Yeah it is,” she said, “and Buck too. But what I can’t figure, Sonny, is why you’re here. When I heard you got sent to prison I cried. It seemed such a waste. I thought if you ever got out of there any kind of way, the last thing you’d do is go back to robbing. But here you are again. I don’t get it. You’re so young and so smart and all. You could be anything you want—a doctor, a lawyer, a—”

“An Indian chief,” I said, and put a hand to my mouth and went, “Whoo-whoo-whoo.”

“Yeah, ha-ha,” she said. “Make all jokes you want, but I still don’t get you, I just don’t.”

“There’s this story I heard somewhere,” I said. “A forest catches on fire and all the animals are swimming across the river to the other side where they’ll be safe. Except this rattlesnake can’t swim, so he asks a raccoon to let him ride across on his back. The coon says, ‘Hell no, if I let you on my back you’ll bite me.’ The rattler says, ‘No I won’t. If I did that I’d drown.’ Well, that makes sense to the coon, so he lets the rattler get on his back and he starts swimming across the river. Halfway across, the rattler bites him. The coon says, ‘You damn fool, why’d you do that? Now we’ll both die.’ And the rattler says, ‘I don’t know. I guess it’s just my nature.’”

She rolled her eyes but I could see she was fighting a smile. “I’ll tell you one thing you have in common with your uncles,” she said. “You can sure sling the bullshit.”

I laughed along with her, and then asked what she was doing here. Why did she come along with Russell?

“I wonder sometimes,” she said. “I don’t know. I guess because he’s still the most exciting thing to me. It beats working as a salesgirl or being married to some office manager. I’m not real ready for that.”

“Spoken like a true flapper,” I said.

“The flapper is passé, Sonny,” she said. Her smile was rueful. “Don’t you read the magazines?”

“Snappy number like you won’t ever be passé.”

She pursed her lips like she was imparting a kiss. Then smiled and said, “What the hell—maybe it’s just my nature.”

“Like an old Greek philosopher once said—the unrisked life is not worth living.”

“I knew this Greek guy back in Baton Rouge,” she said. “Sold life insurance. Biggest liar I ever met.”

When I told her about my brief reunion with Brenda Marie she said, “I bet that was some memorable whoopee, huh?” and waggled her brows.

“There wasn’t near enough of it, truth to tell.”

“Well hell, Sonny, whose fault is that? Running off on the poor girl as quick as you did.”

“Good thing I did. If I’d stayed longer I might’ve missed you all. Would’ve played hell trying to find you in West Texas.”

She patted my hand. “That’s life, ain’t it, honey? Always one tough choice or another.”

We took in a movie matinee every afternoon. Sadie Thompson. Our Dancing Daughters. She grinned in the screenlight and elbowed me in the ribs when I whispered during Wings that she and Clara Bow could pass for sisters.

One morning we went swimming in the Gulf, then lay on towels on the beach and got sunburns while we told each other what shapes we saw in the clouds. I said she ought to be a zookeeper since she saw nothing but various sorts of animals, and she said I ought to be in jail since I saw nothing but various parts of women’s anatomies. I said it was her fault for wearing such a sexy swimsuit—one of those new backless things with an X-halter over her breasts—and said she could quit pretending not to notice all the guys giving her the once-over. She threw sand at me and said all men were sex-crazy. I said I didn’t know about all men, but I sure was, and gave a high wolf howl. She laughed and said to shush up before the dogcatcher came and took me away.

 

To celebrate our last night in Galveston we all got dressed to the nines and took supper at the Hollywood Dinner Club, the Maceos’ fanciest place. It was easy enough to find—all you had to do was head up the beach road toward the source of the big searchlight beacon circling the sky and there you were. They could see that beckoning light miles away on the mainland.

The club’s exterior was designed like an old Spanish hacienda, lots of tiles and arches, porticos with torches in the walls. Inside, the ceilings blazed with chandeliers and the furnishings were très élégant. We were ushered to one of the dining rooms and agreed among ourselves to order something none of us had eaten before, which left plenty to choose from on the menu. We finally settled on roast partridge stuffed with wild rice and mushrooms and a couple of bottles of French wine.

It was a superb meal, but Buck said that for less than the tip we’d be leaving we could’ve stuffed ourselves on the best fried chicken in Texas at a joint he knew of in niggertown—and got drunk for three days on bonded bourbon. Charlie told him not to be such a sourpuss. She didn’t understand how anybody could not have a good time in such a swell place.

“Hey, goddammit,” Buck said, “I know how to have a good time. I’m having one—see?” His grin was so exaggerated Russell said he looked like a lunatic with an electric wire up his ass. Buck rolled his eyes to add to the effect and we all cracked up.

After supper we went into the rooms in back. They were everything I’d heard. There were tables for every kind of game—poker, blackjack, craps, name it. The room was discreetly overseen by the club’s handymen, as Buck said they were called. Beefy well-dressed guys with watchful eyes and with bulges under their coats. After an hour of blackjack I was nine dollars to the good, but Buck dropped eighty at stud and Russell was forty dollars poorer after his turns with the dice.

As we made our way through the crowd to get to the speakeasy ballroom Russell whispered, “Goddam, I wish I had my own bones with me. I know I could work this place.”

Buck cut his eyes at him. “I’d say we ain’t getting out of this town any too soon. You’d lose more than a couple of fingers here, buddy-boy.”

Buck and I had a drink at the bar while Russell and Charlie took a turn on the dance floor in the company of about two hundred other couples whirling to the band’s rendition of “Stardust.” The smoky air was laced with perfume. Knockout women everywhere you looked, all of them in the company of highrollers.

“Man, you ever see so much goodlooking stuff under one roof?” Buck said. “What I wouldn’t give for a crack at any one of them. But hell, they too rich for my blood.”

“Why not try the direct approach?” I said. “Sometimes it does the trick.”

“I knew this old boy decided one night to try the direct approach,” he said. “Picks out this goodlooking thing at the bar and goes up to her and says, ‘Hey, honeybunch, I sure wouldn’t mind a little pussy.’ Gal gives him a look and says, ‘Me neither, Mac—mine’s as big as your boot.’”

After a while Russell bellied up to the bar and Charlie tugged me out on the floor as the band started up with “You Do Something to Me.” She was wearing a little black satin number and I felt the play of her belly and thighs against me as we swirled around in the midst of the other dancers. And like the times we’d danced so close together when I was a kid, the same thing happened in my pants.

She smiled wide and said, “Why Sonny, you still know how to pay a girl the sweetest compliment.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t help it.” My ears burned.

“Well of course you can’t, sugar. After being so long in that awful place. You really did need more time with that Brenda girl.” She laughed and pinched my cheek. “And you still blush more handsome than any man I know.”

We danced like that for a while and my embarrassing condition persisted. “Poor baby,” she whispered in my ear, her belly tight against me as we danced to “Amapola.”

She glanced at the bar and I looked too and saw Buck and Russell hunched over the counter in close conversation. She took the lead and sidestepped us through the dense crowd of dancers to the far side of the floor and into the darkness behind a partition of potted palms.

“Hey girl,” I said, “what the hell are—”

“Hush,” she said.

She backed me up against the wall and then slipped her hand off my shoulder and down between us and her fingers closed around me through my pants. I couldn’t believe it, but I wasn’t about to protest. I was already so worked up that it took her only a few quick squeezes to set me off. I dug my fingers into her hip and groaned into her hair.

She put her hand back on my shoulder and patted it gently. “There now. All better, baby?”

All I could think to say was “Whooo.”

She chuckled softly and pecked me on the cheek. “I’ll take that for a yes.” Then said: “Good thing we’re both wearing black. Stains won’t show.”

We danced out from behind the palms and into the crowd again and slowly swayed our way across the floor to the rhythms of “In a Little Spanish Town.” Buck and Russell were still talking.

She pushed her belly tight against me. “I must say, Mr. LaSalle, you certainly feel more relaxed.”

I grinned back at her. “No small thanks to you, Miss Hayes, I must say.”

“And I must say, Mr. LaSalle, what’s a friend for if not to lend a helping hand?”

Our cackles drew amused looks from the couples nearest to us.

“Listen, honey,” she said, “I really think you need to get yourself a girl.”

“I really think you may be right,” I said.

It was nearly one in the morning when we finally called it a night. The place was even more crowded than before and people were still coming in.

“It don’t really get jumping for another hour yet,” Russell said. “The highrollers won’t get their hats and coats till practically sunup.”

The parking lot was jammed and cars were lined on both shoulders of the beach road. The Model A was at the far end of the lot, in the shadows of a thick growth of oleander. Charlie led the way, showing off some slick dance moves as she went. We were almost to the Ford when the car parked next to it pulled out and a white Lincoln wheeled into the vacated spot.

Three good-sized guys in fancy suits got out, laughing like one of them had just told a good joke. One of them said something to Charlie that I didn’t catch, and she said, “Oh my, does your momma know you talk like that?” Then the one closest to her grabbed a handful of her ass.

She whirled and took a swipe at him with her purse. “Hands off, Buster!”

I was in front of Buck and Russell and moved in fast. One of them said, “Watch it!” and Buster started to reach in his coat but I caught him with a solid right that put him down. One of the others punched me high on the head but it didn’t have any weight behind it and I countered with a hook in the ear, knocking him against the Ford, then drove one into his solar plexus and that was it for him. He slid down the side of the car, trying to suck a breath.

As I stripped the two guys of their pieces—.38 four-inchers, both of them—I heard Russell say, “Do it, tough guy!” and Charlie shrill, “Russell, don’t!”

He was holding a cocked pistol in the third one’s face. The guy looked like he was posing as Napoleon, a hand inside his coat. Buck stepped up and jerked the guy’s arm away and relieved him of an army .45 automatic. “Thanks, pal,” he said. “I been wanting one of these.”

“You assholes got any idea who you’re fucken with?” the guy said.

“Oooooo,” Buck said in mock fright. “Scary man here.”

“We work for Sam and Rose, you stupid shits.”

Buck kneed him perfectly in the balls. The guy groaned and sank to his haunches with his hands at his crotch, then fell on his ass, cussing low.

“If I was Sam and Rose,” Buck said, “I’d hire me some better help.”

We hustled into the Ford and I wheeled us out of the lot and wove through the traffic in front of the club and then we were out of it and breezing along the beach road. The Gulf was shimmering brightly under a silver moon.

“Hot damn!” Buck yelled out the window—and Russell and I laughed like he’d said something funny. He held up the .45 for us to see. “Slug from one of these’ll knock a man down if it hits him in the little finger, you know that?”

“These are smart little Smith & Wessons too,” Russell said, handling the .38s I’d taken off the Maceo men.

In the rearview I saw Charlie looking from one to the other of us. “What am I doing with you guys?” she said.

“Why honeybunch, don’t you know?” Russell said. He snuggled up to her and kissed her neck and ran a hand over her breasts.

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, and slapped at his roving hands. “But like you boys are always saying…even when you know, you never know.”

That got another big laugh from all of us.

“What I know is, we ain’t getting out of this town any too soon,” Buck said.

Then he started singing “Bye Bye Blackbird” and we all joined in.

 

We set out a little before noon under a dark sky full of thunder rolling up from the Gulf. The rain started to fall while we were still on the bridge to the mainland. By the time we got to the outskirts of Houston it was coming down so hard I couldn’t see five feet in front of the car and had to pull off the road. Wiping the fog off the glass gave us no better view of the outside world at all. We opened a lee window a little to let out the cigarette smoke and had to turn the radio volume all the way up to hear the music over the rain pounding the roof.

The speaker crackled with every flash of lightning as we sang along. “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” “Lover Come Back to Me.” “It Had to Be You.” “Who’s Sorry Now.” When Charlie started vamping to “Makin’Whoopee,” we urged her on with wolf whistles and shouts of “Hubba hubba, red-hot momma!” Russell pretended to be a radio announcer, saying, “Welcome ladies and gents, to the LaSalle Model A Boom-Boom Room, featuring Fifi La Hayes. Yowza, yowza!”

And still the rain came hammering down. After a while Buck and Russell started nipping from their flasks and pouring short ones for Charlie. They let me have a sip but said they didn’t want me getting drunk and driving us into a bayou or head-on into another car. I said it didn’t look like I’d be driving us anywhere for about forty days and forty nights.

We were there for more than two hours before the storm eased enough to afford a sufficient view of the road to try driving on it. The engine cranked up easily enough—“Love them electric starters,” Russell said—but when I tried to get going the tires spun in place and dug themselves in and we got stuck.

“What Ford should’ve put in these cars is an electric pusher,” Buck said. There was nothing to do but let Charlie take the steering wheel while the three of us got out and shoved.

The storm had abated but the rain still fell steadily and we were soaked inside a minute. We cursed at passing cars for the added splashings they gave us as we leaned into the back of the car and struggled for footing and leverage. Charlie revved the engine and the car rocked forward and back in the ruts and the wheels spun and spun and splattered us with mud. We were all shouting at her at once—give it the gas, don’t gun it so much, cut the wheel hard, aim the wheels straight. She had turned off the radio but still couldn’t hear us very well for the rain on the roof and with the windows up. Her hollers came back muffled—“What? What?”

It was a situation to rub tempers a little raw. “Roll down the fucken window, goddammit!” Russell yelled.

She put the window down and stuck her head partway out, shielding herself from the rain with a folded newspaper, and shouted that she did not appreciate him cussing at her like that and would we make up our stupid goddam minds what we wanted her to do.

Just then a large truck went by and raised an enormous splash which could not get any of us any wetter except for Charlie, who was swamped through the open window and hurriedly rolled it up—like she thought she might undo the drenching if only she rolled fast enough. The spectacle had us staggering with laughter.

She glared furiously at us over her shoulder and then the transmission shrieked and the motor raced and the wheels whirled in reverse and found purchase and the car lurched up out of the ruts and came barreling rearward. Russell went sprawling and Buck and I barely managed to scramble out of the way as she roared by. She braked hard and the car slewed to a halt.

“Shitfire,” Buck said, gawking at the car and wiping water from his eyes. “Why the hell didn’t you think to back out of that rut?”

“Why the hell didn’t you think to suggest it?” I said.

Russell slowly got to his feet, cursing steadily and coated with mud. Charlie was laughing behind the windshield like she was watching a Chaplin movie, her hair plastered to her head.

“You damn crazy cooze!” Russell shouted.

Her grin vanished. She gunned the motor and ground the transmission into low gear. Russell hustled over to join me and Buck in the high weeds off the shoulder.

But she didn’t make another try at us. She eased the car forward until she was abreast of us, then reached over and lowered the passenger window a few inches. “Hey there, boys,” she called out, smiling with affected sweetness. “Think it’ll rain?”

“Crazy cooze,” Russell muttered.

“What’s that, baby?” Charlie said. Her eyes narrowed and she gunned the engine.

“He said we could sure use some booze,” Buck said.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Well, you ain’t gonna get it standing out there in the rain, are you?”

She slid over to the passenger side and gave me a smile and wink as I got behind the wheel and Buck and Russell got in the back. Buck cursed low about the mud we were smearing on the seats and floorboards.

I drove slowly through the continuing downpour while they passed around a flask without saying anything. Then Charlie chuckled and said, “You should’ve seen you all’s faces.”

“Real damn funny,” Russell said. “You might’ve killed us.”

“You’re so cute when you’re scared shitless, baby. Anybody ever tell you?”

That got me and Buck in on her laughter.

Russell stared in disbelief at Buck and me and shook his head. “She about runs over our asses and you all laugh.” Then said to her: “And you ought not to say ‘shit.’ It ain’t ladylike.”

And joined in our guffaws.

 

I turned off into the first motor camp we came to. Russell and Charlie took one room and Buck and I another. We got cleaned up and changed into dry clothes. Charlie had packed a picnic basket in case we got hungry on the day’s drive, and it now served for our supper. She brought the basket to our room and had Russell spread a blanket on the floor. He muttered about the foolishness of having a picnic on the floor and she said we could have it outside in the dark and rain if it would make him feel less foolish. She laid out paper plates and we sat down to a meal of ham sandwiches and potato chips, deviled eggs and cold fried chicken. We drank paper cups of lemonade dispensed from a glass jug.

A little later the Amos ’n’Andy show came on the radio, and while we laughed at them Buck tended to the nails of his thumbs with a file, keeping them finely serrated for marking cards. Then a music program came on and he and Russell took turns entertaining us with their tricks. Buck needed to shuffle a deck only twice and he’d know any card you picked out of the spread. More impressive was his skill in dealing. Need a ten to fill that inside straight? There it is. An ace or an eight to complete a Hickok full house? Got it. Jack of hearts to make the flush? Here you go. Blackjack was child’s play. If he was showing sixteen, he could easily enough give himself the five, but would as often make it a four, to hold down suspicion. Eighteen, and he’d flick himself a deuce or ace, unless the pot was sizable and the other guy was likely holding twenty—then here came the three.

And Russell with his dice. He’d roll with an honest pair a few times, then next thing you knew he was rolling his shaved bones and cleaning you out. Then the straight pair again. I never could spot him making the switch. He said he’d been even better at it when he had all his fingers. He would put down the dice and hold up his hands and all you’d see is empty palms. Then he’d pick up the dice and switch them, and no matter how much Charlie and I asked him to show us how he did it, he wouldn’t. Buck knew how he did it, and Charlie begged him to tell.

“Well all right, girl,” he said, “if you must know…he uses magic.”

“Goddammit,” Russell said, “there you go again, giving away my trade secrets.”

“Oh, go to hell,” Charlie said. “Both of you.”

“Yes ma’am,” Russell said, saluting like a soldier. “We’re on our way.”

Then we finished off the flasks and called it a night.

 

At dawn the desk clerk told us the weather report was for still more rain. We decided to drive on rather than sit on our hands in that motor court and wait who knew how long for the sky to break. Charlie bought one of the motor court’s blankets in case she got chilly on the road. We filled the Ford with gasoline at a nearby station and drove off in a steady windless rain under a sky that looked made of gray mud.

West of Houston the highway was in pretty good shape except that the lowest stretches of it were covered with water and the going was slow. In some places the water came up to the running boards and now and then seeped under the doors. We couldn’t get anything but crackling static across the radio dial. Every few miles we’d pass another car stalled by the side of the road, the people in it no more than vague shapes.

Crossing the Brazos bridge we saw the river running over its banks and saw a dead cow whirling in the current. I wondered aloud if it would carry all the way downriver and out into the sea. What if it got snagged by some fisherman trolling in the Gulf at night? What would he think when he reeled it in?

“If it was me,” Russell said, “I’d tow it back to the docks and tell everybody what a hell of a fight it put up. I’d claim a world record for the cowfish.”

The miles rolled by and the rain kept falling. The clouds looked low enough to poke with a cue stick. The Colorado was booming under its bridge too and close to spilling its banks. About twenty miles farther we came on the Navidad, also running fast but not as high as the rivers behind us.

We pulled in at a café in Schulenburg. The parking lot was full and the place was crowded and smelled of cooking grease and sweat and mud. When we told the waitress we were from Houston she said we’d left there at the right time. She’d heard on the radio that every bayou in town was over its banks and flooding the streets. “You’da waited till tomorrow to get out of there,” she said, “you’da needed a dang boat instead of a auty-mobile.”

We ate hamburgers and fried potatoes and bought packs of cigarettes and four ham sandwiches in waxed paper to take with us. Buck had a whispered conversation with the fry cook at the kitchen window and I saw him slip the man a dollar.

Russell took over the driving, and as we wheeled out of the parking lot Buck said that according to the cook there was a certain drugstore in a town called Flatonia about fifteen miles down the road where a fella could buy himself a pretty good brand of medicine. We made the stop and fifteen minutes later we were on the road again with both flasks full of hooch and a quart bottle besides.

By late afternoon the rain finally quit and the clouds began to break. The countryside was changed. The Spanish moss had vanished and the pineywoods played out. The oaks shrank. The land opened to grassy ranges and began to gain slow elevation. Pecans and cottonwoods stood thick along the streams.

The towns got farther apart and the radio stations were now fewer and more regional in their programming, less big-hit ballroom and more plunk and twang. Shitkicker music that had us yelling “Yeeeee-haw!” in derision. But a lot of Mexican stuff too, with plenty of accordion in it, which we all kind of liked because it reminded us of coonass music. Buck spelled Russell at the wheel and Charlie handed out the sandwiches.

At sunset the sky was almost cloudless. We passed around one of the flasks, doing away with that soldier slow and easy. As the darkness deepened, a few bright stars began to clarify. The waxing moon was high behind us. The night was fully risen when we saw the glow of San Antonio dead ahead.

 

An hour later we were winding all through the center of town, with me doing the driving again, crossing and recrossing the river, taking in the sights and sounds of a loud and lively Friday night. The whole town smelled of Mexican cooking, reminding us of La Belleza, a Mexican restaurant in New Orleans we all liked, and the spicy aromas stirred up our appetites.

We drove through several neighborhoods where everybody was yammering in Spanish and the store signs were all in Spanish and if you didn’t know better you’d have thought you were someplace south of the Rio Grande instead of more than a hundred miles this side of it. Then we came to a part of town with plenty of white faces and turned onto a long crowded street of one café after another with names like the Lucky Spur and Rio Rita’s and Fat Daddy, all of them loud with string band and boogie-woogie. We figured it for the main goodtime drag. Charlie spied a restaurant called the Texican in the middle of the block and said, “Right there’s where I want to eat.”

There was a ready parking spot near the restaurant but I passed it up in favor of one at the far end of the street. It was something Buck and Russell had taught me—always park on a corner facing an intersection. It allowed for a fast getaway either straight across the street or in a fast right turn, whichever seemed the wiser course at the moment. It was how we parked even when we weren’t on a job, a matter of professional habit.

They took their pistols out from under the seat. Buck checked the magazine of his .45. Then pulled back the slide far enough to see that there was a round already snugged in the chamber. He reset the safety and slipped the piece under his coat. Russell unlatched the cylinder of his .38 to check the rounds, then snapped it back in place with a fling of the wrist. It was another rule of theirs—better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it, because you never know, especially in a strange town. I didn’t see the need for carrying heat just to get a bite in a restaurant. Besides, it was a hot night and I didn’t want to wear a jacket. But I knew the rules and so I put on the coat and slid the bulldog in my waistband behind my back. Charlie had already got out of the car and was browsing at a clothing store window.

We walked back to the Texican and went inside and settled ourselves in a window booth. The place was run by an American with red hair and a faceful of freckles but all the waitresses looked Mexican and the radio was tuned to a station putting out a steady stream of the ranchero music we’d gotten to like so well. The waitress came and took our orders. While we waited for the food we drank cold bottles of cola and watched the people going by on the sidewalk.

The food was wonderful. Charlie declared her chicken enchiladas the best she’d ever had, and Buck and Russell said the same about the pork tacos.

“According to a famous old Spanish writer,” I said, “hunger makes the tastiest sauce.” I was going pretty energetically at a plate of roast kid.

“That’s one of those things nobody ever thinks to say till they hear somebody else say it,” Russell said. “Then it’s ‘I know that. Why didn’t I say that and get all famous?’”

“When this guy was in prison,” I said, “he’d sometimes go without eating for a day or two, so that on the days he did eat he’d be so hungry even the slop they fed him tasted good. He’d imagine he was dining at a lavish banquet.”

“Some imagination,” Buck said. “The shit I ate in the joint, I couldn’t even imagine it fit for pigs.”

“Nice talk for the supper table,” Charlie said.

“Say the Spanish guy was in prison?” Russell said. “What for?”

“His biography wasn’t specific. For ‘financial irregularities,’ I think it said.”

“I get it,” Russell said. “He was a thief.”

“Like some others I could mention,” Charlie said.

“World’s full of them,” Russell said, scooping up a mouthful of refried beans with a piece of tortilla. “Always been, always be.”

We wiped at our watering eyes and sniffed noisily with the effect of the chile sauces. Buck paused in his eating to blow his nose. “Jesus,” he said, “this stuff is great.”

While Russell took care of the bill at the register, Buck went to talk with the redhaired owner. Charlie and I went out on the sidewalk and smoked and eyeballed the passing parade of folk. A minute later Russell came out, swirling a toothpick in his mouth. He nudged me and nodded at a pair of cute girls staring out at us from a passing car. Charlie didn’t miss it, and gave him a dig of her elbow hard enough to make him wince. “Hey!” he said. “I thought Sonny might get something going with them is all.”

She stepped away from him, folding her arms tight over her breasts the way a miffed woman’ll do, and he whispered to me, “Jesus, eyes in back of her head.”

Buck joined us and said there was a good hotel a few blocks north of where we were. “We can go on over and call it a night,” he said. “Or we can have us a drink or two first at a speak at this other hotel down the street from where we parked the car. Place called the Travis. It’s got a poker room. Tell you what, if nobody’s got any objection to me using the travel money for a stake, I might could make us some jack.”

He’d been told about the Travis by the redhaired man. Experience had taught him and Russell to spot smalltimers pretty easily and they’d made the redhead for one the minute they saw him. Buck had introduced himself as John Ansel, a car salesman out of Schulenburg. The redhead said his name was Dickson. Buck told him he was in town visiting his sister, who was expecting her first kid in the next week or two. He said we were his in-laws. He told Dickson he played in a weekly poker game in Schulenburg and always came out pretty good, if he did say so himself, but he’d always hankered to sit in on one of the high-stakes San Antonio games he’d heard about. Now here he was, with wifey at sis’ baby shower and the evening to himself. How about it, he asked Dickson, did he know where a fella could get some action? Dickson said he did know of a game close by but was having trouble recollecting exactly where. His memory cleared when Buck ponied up a fin. He went in the back room to make a phone call and a minute later the matter was settled. He told Buck about the Travis and said they were expecting him in room 312. Just say Claude sent him.

“They’re all of them businessmen,” Buck said, “or so the man says. Not a pro among them. But we best play it safe.”

Plan A was this. During the small talk at the table, he would mention to the other players that his wife had been feeling poorly in recent weeks and never would’ve been able to make this trip to San Antone except she started taking some new kind of goatmilk treatment which seemed to be helping her a good bit. He would also let drop that his nephew was a dishwasher at Dickson’s place. That was where I came in. At ten-thirty—after he’d been up there about two hours—I’d go to room 312 with an urgent message for my Uncle John. I’d announce that his wife had collapsed and was in the hospital.

The fiction was intended to get him out of there without any ruckus. Without some sorehead loser insisting too strongly on the chance to win his money back. But if it didn’t work? If somebody refused to let his losses leave so soon in Buck’s pocket? Or worse, made a nasty accusation about Buck’s awfully good luck in his brief two hours at the table?

Then plan B. We’d pull our pieces to give them something to think about while we hustled the hell out of there and down to the car and got ourselves gone.

I didn’t have to ask what we’d do if one of them pulled a piece too. Whatever we had to hat was always understood.

Standing there on the sidewalk, I felt like everything had picked up speed—the passing cars and people, the flashings of the neon lights, my heartbeat. I could see Charlie wasn’t pleased by this innovation in the evening’s activities but she knew to keep her mouth shut. All Russell said was he wished it was a dice game and he was the one going up to room 312.

 

I took a walk with Russell and Charlie in the cottonwood shadows along the river. We stopped to buy cones in an ice cream shop but Russell and I took only a few licks off ours before pitching them away. Everything was moving fast but the minutes. When Russell wasn’t checking his watch I was consulting mine. Charlie tried to make conversation but soon gave it up. With an hour to go, we made our way to the Travis and went into the speakeasy and ordered drinks at the bar. Russell and I barely touched ours but Charlie was soon sipping on her second. We watched the couples on the dance floor but nobody suggested taking a turn.

At twenty after ten Russell slapped my shoulder and said, “See you at the car, bud. Don’t you all keep us waiting.”

I went out to the elevator. The operator was an old man with a face as gray as his uniform and purple bags under his eyes. “Three,” I told him.

“Private floor, Mac,” he said. “Unless you got business.”

My first impulse was to head for the stairs, wherever they were. But the old guy had likely been through this routine a hundred times before and he knew what I was thinking. “Stairwell door’s closed off on three,” he said.

For a second I almost spooked, thinking the plan was already in trouble. I had a vision of myself sticking the snubnose in this old guy’s ribs. I told him about my stricken aunt and my uncle in the game in 312. Knowing about the game must’ve been what did the trick. He didn’t say okay, didn’t nod, nothing—just pulled the folding lattice door closed and worked the lever and we slowly rose in a clank and whine of machinery.

I stepped out at one end of a hallway with a big grimy window under a faded sign saying “Fire Escape.” “All the way the other end,” the old guy said. He pulled the door to and the elevator groaned and descended.

The hall was musty and dimly lighted, the runner worn along its center. Whatever businesses operated up here weren’t the sort to worry much about workplace appearance. The rooms were on my right, beginning with 301. I heard faint music from behind some of the doors as I went by them, the drone of voices behind others. I thought I heard somebody crying in 307. Between 309 and 310 was a door with a sign saying “Exit” over it. Of course I had to try it and of course it was locked.

Just before I got to 312, I did a dozen fast deep-knee bends to help effect a mild breathlessness befitting a bringer of critical news. It’d be no trouble at all to look worried. I adjusted the bulldog at my back, then stepped up to the door and rapped hard.

The door guy was big, in shirtsleeves and apparently unarmed, which I was glad to see. A Japanese screen directly behind him blocked my view of the room but not the heavy waft of cigarette smoke or the drone of voices. I gave him the bit, expecting to see at least a squint of doubt, but he only nodded and let me in.

There were two round tables with a game going at each. A long narrow table against the wall held bottles of bonded whiskey and plates of bread and cold cuts and cheese. I spotted Buck with his back to me and started for him but the door guy put a hand on my shoulder and said softly, “After the hand.”

Buck was dealing seven-card stud. Last card going around, facedown. Two other guys still holding. A guy with a goatee bet big and Buck raised him big and the third guy cursed and folded. The goatee raised Buck back and Buck raised him even bigger. The goatee was showing a pair of kings, a ten, a three. Probably had a king down, maybe another ten or trey. I took a sidestep to get a look at Buck’s up cards—pair of jacks and one of them a heart, nine of hearts, eight of hearts. Possible straight flush.

“You ain’t buying it, buddy,” the goatee said with a cocksure grin. “Not from me.”

He called. Full house, kings over tens, and the hole ten was a heart—so no straight flush for Buck.

He didn’t need it. He turned up all the other eights. The goatee’s grin fell off. “Shit!” he said. “You believe this?”

As Buck pulled in the fat pot the door guy stepped up and whispered in his ear. Buck turned around and looked so truly surprised I was almost thrown off. “Tommy!” he said. “What you doing here?”

I delivered the bad news. He stared at me a moment, a man taking it in, then said low, “Oh Jesus”—then jumped up so fast he nearly upset his chair and began stuffing his winnings in his pockets.

“Got to go, boys, I got to…” He was so “rattled” he dropped some bills and affected not to notice—a perfect touch—and the guy next to him fetched the money up for him.

Buck was the very picture of a shaken man. “Sorry, boys, sorry,” he said. “Gotta go.”

“Hey now, what the hell…?” the goatee said.

“Christ’s sake, Parham, it’s the man’s wife,” another guy said.

“I’m really sorry, fellas,” Buck said. He tossed a twenty on the table. “You all have a few on me. Jesus, guys, I wish…ah, hell. Tommy, get me to that damn hospital. Let’s go!”

Then we were out of there and quickstepping down the hall. I could feel the door guy watching us. There was a muffled shriek from one of the rooms along the hall. I heard the door close behind us and let out my breath. We cut our eyes at each other and Buck’s grin looked as big as mine felt. He glanced behind us and said, “Dickson was right. Nothing but rubes.”

We were passing by 307 when its door flew open and banged the wall and a naked girl came running out.

I had an instant’s glimpse of a wide green bloodshot eye and a blackened swollen one, a raised purple cheekbone, a bloody nose—then her arms were tight around my neck and her blond bob was in my mouth and I heard Buck say, “Holy shit!”

I didn’t see the burly mustached guy until his fist closed in her hair and yanked her head back, trying to pull her away. But she kept her hold on me and tugged me off balance and I fell on top of her, her breath heaving up in my face with a smell like rotted fruit.

Then Buck and the man were on the floor and grappling beside us. I pried loose of the girl and scrambled to my feet as the guy got his hands on Buck’s throat. I gave him a kick in the ear that knocked him against the wall. Then one in the mustache that spattered the wall with blood. He curled up with his arms around his head and said “Okay, okay!” like he had a mouthful of marbles. But now Buck was on his feet and kicking him in the head and the guy cried out sharply a couple of times and then slumped still.

A middle-aged guy in shirtsleeves was standing in the doorway of 307 with his mouth open. Behind him was a slackfaced girl in a robe. He banged the door shut and turned the lock—but not before I got a look at the bright photography lamps set up around a red sofa and a camera on a tripod.

I expected rubberneckers out of every room, but the only door to open was down at 312. The door guy stepped out and looked at us. Buck brought out the .45 and the guy ducked inside and slammed the door. We backed up along the hallway, watching the doors, Buck repeatedly clearing his throat hard and rubbing his neck.

The girl was half-crouched next to the elevator shaft, her knees together and her arms over her breasts. Her eyes were on us but she seemed to be having trouble focusing. Buck gave her the once-over as he stuck the .45 in his pants. The face was a battered fright but the body was something to see. And she was a real blonde. I was still feeling the way she’d flung herself on me. The way she’d held on when the guy tried pulling her back.

“Drunk as a skunk, ain’t you, darling?” Buck said.

I didn’t think she was. She was looped, all right, but what I’d smelled on her breath wasn’t booze.

“They might’ve called downstairs,” Buck said. “Let’s skip any surprises.”

He raised the fire escape window with a rusty screech. By the hallway’s weak light we could make out the bricked wall of a neighboring building not ten feet away.

“Come on,” he said, and ducked out under the sash and started clunking down the iron stairs into the greater darkness.

I thought of the camera and told myself she had it coming. For a bare moment her eyes fixed on mine, then slipped out of focus again. I almost said “Good luck” before the stupidity of it struck me. I had one foot out the window when she grabbed me from behind, hugging to me and crying, trembling like a mistreated dog.

I didn’t think about it, I just did it. I took off my coat and helped her get her arms in the sleeves and she drew it close around her. The sleeves hung past her fingertips. I went out on the landing and helped her through the window. She hit her head on the sash but hardly seemed aware of it. The alley below us was dark as a grave. Unsteady as she was, I had to hold her close to me as we descended the creaky stairway into a deepening stink. At the second landing the stairs reversed direction and we went down the last flight.

“What the hell’s this?” Buck’s harsh whisper came up from the blackness.

As we came off the stairway she lost her footing and gasped but I caught her before she fell.

“What’re you doing, Sonny?”

“We can’t leave her up there,” I said.

“Goddammit, kid, are you…shit. Come on.”

I followed his vague form in the dark, pulling the girl along by the coat, catching her up each time she stumbled. We went past two alleyway intersections and around the corner of the next one, where Buck drew up so short I bumped into him. We stood still, listening hard, but didn’t hear anything except our own heavy breath and the scurrying of rats in the garbage. Nobody coming behind us. No police sirens on the air.

“What’s the big idea?” he whispered.

“No big idea,” I said. “It’s just…we don’t have to leave her to those guys to beat up some more.”

I couldn’t see his face in the gloom but I could feel his eyes. “Hey kid, the world’s full of punching bags and for all we know that’s her husband we kicked the shit out of.”

“If he is, I hope we busted his skull,” I said.

Like Daddy, I never could abide a womanbeater, and like him I thought guys who hit their wives were the worst of the bunch. The neighbor across the courtyard used to smack his wife around, but one night when he had her crying really loud Daddy went over there and thumped on the door and when the guy opened up Daddy knocked him on his ass. Told him if he hit her again he’d break his neck. They didn’t have any children and I figured this time the woman would finally leave him. But when Daddy came back out I saw her sitting on the sofa with the bastard and tending to his busted mouth. I thought she was a fool for staying with him, but my mother said we shouldn’t be to hard on her. “‘Love thieves the will to be free,’” she said, quoting some line I’d never heard. That was my mother, always the poetic soul, fond of Byron and Poe and Yeats, all those versifying fools of the heart. “Well, her love for that sonofabitch,” Daddy said, “is gonna thieve her of her dumb-ass life one of these nights.”

Buck struck up a match to illuminate the girl’s beatup face. She turned away. “What’s your name, Toots?”

She gripped my arm more tightly.

“Rat got your tongue?” Buck said. The match burned out and the dark swallowed us again. “Some breath on her. It ain’t hooch, either. She’s doped.”

“More reason to get her away from those bastards,” I said.

“She’ll just fall in with some other bastards. It’s how these bimbos are.”

“Well, we can’t leave her here.” She pulled away from me and we heard her being sick.

“Listen to that,” Buck said in disgust. “Christ’s sake, Sonny, this business ain’t got a lot of room in it for taking pity. It’s you and your partners and fuck the rest. Or go sell shoes for a living.”

“I know that, dammit.” And I did. She drew up against me again. I could smell the sick on her breath. “But this isn’t business right now and she’s already here and we can at least take her someplace else. That’s all I’m saying.”

“That’s all you’re saying, my ass. She’s built like a brick shithouse and you’d like the chance to climb all over her. Hell, kid, I don’t blame you—me too. But goddammit…”

That wasn’t the whole reason—I didn’t know the whole reason—but I couldn’t deny it was part of it.

He blew out a long breath. Then said, “Goddammit, Sonny, the minute…the minute she’s in the way…or even just a pain in the ass—”

“She’s gone,” I said.

“You goddam right she is.”

And that was it. He turned and headed off. I held the girl close to me and followed him to the end of the alley, where it abutted a street that wasn’t brightly lighted or heavily trafficked.

“Wait here out of the light,” he said. Then left. The girl kept her hold on me and pressed her face into my chest.

Fifteen minutes later the car pulled up in front of the alley. Russell stuck his head out the window and said, “Where you at? What’s this surprise you got?”

I steered the girl out of the shadows and over to the car and Russell said, “What the hell…?”—smiling kind of crooked, like he thought it might be a joke.

The rear door swung open and Charlie reached out and beckoned impatiently. “Get her in here, Sonny.”

I helped her duck into the door and Charlie drew her in. “Good Lord, girl,” she said, “what happened to you?”

I started to get in the back too but Charlie wouldn’t have it. She made me sit up front with Buck and Russell so the girl could lie on the seat with her head on Charlie’s lap.

“Smells like somebody been using her for a…hey now,” Russell said. I don’t think he’d noticed till then that all she had on was the coat.

“You hush up, Russell LaSalle,” Charlie said. “And turn around—all of you. It’s not a coochie show back here.” She unfurled her motor court blanket and spread it over the girl.

Russell got the Ford rolling. Buck drained the last drops of the flask, then got the bottle from under the seat. He uncorked it and took a slug and then handed it to me. I turned it up and swallowed deep and felt the heat of it in my eyes and nose, the flooding warmth in my belly.

Buck said it might be wise to make a beeline out of San Antonio and look for a motor court somewhere down the road. Nobody argued the point.

“You poor thing,” Charlie crooned. She was stroking the girl’s hair. “You poor…Sonny, what’s her name?”

“Beats me,” I said.

“Belle.” Faintly spoken but clear enough.

And then she was asleep.

 

The Vieux Carré. Three o’clock of a Tuesday morning. Rivermist wafting through the streets and shaping hazy aureoles around the lamplights. Some of the jazz clubs still at it, some of the speaks and sporting houses, others of them calling it a night. Edward Longstreet Charponne emerges from Miss Daniella’s front door and makes a final adjustment to his cravat as the proprietress herself smoothes the shoulders of his coat. She kisses his cheek, bids him goodnight and a good long sleep, steps inside and closes the door. He lights a thin cigar, exhales smoke and self-satisfaction, feels vestigial but pleasurable ache in his loins from the evening’s ruttish indulgences. He crosses the street to the maroon Packard parked in the shadow of an overhanging balcony, unlocks the door and slides in behind the wheel.

He flinches at the touch of something small and hard against the back of his head as a voice says, Easy does it, counselor. Sharp Eddie is certain that the object at his head is a pistol and he feels a moment’s keen urge to urinate. He peers into the rearview but the man’s face is obscured by shadows and a white widebrimmed hat.

Have a smoke, the man says. Good for the nerves.

Eddie lights a cigarette and the man leans forward so the glow of the match will clarify his face in the mirror. The gray mustache spreads slightly in what might be a smile as Eddie recognizes him. He shakes out the match, certain that no amount of lawyerly outrage at being confronted in such felonious manner will be of effect with this man. Still, he is quick to recoup his self-confidence and invoke a bravado learned from his years of professional association with the rougher trades.

Wouldn’t it be more polite, he says, not to say more productive and less warranting of assault charges, if you’d simply made an appointment to see me in my office?

Who killed Charlton?

Pardon me? His tone affecting a nettled bemusement. Look, deputy, the police have already interrogated me at length about Lionel Buckman’s escape, so—

His left ear abruptly afire. His hand flies up to find there the pincers which snap onto the forefinger as well and he hears a small crack of bone. Before he can scream, the pistol barrel is deep in his mouth, scraping palate, grinding tongue on molars, inciting a surge of vomit to burn the nasal passages and cut off breath and spill over his goatee. He thinks he will drown. Then the barrel withdraws sufficiently to permit him to cough and suck a hard breath. The pincers unloose the torn ear and broken finger. Blood cascades hotly on his neck. Tears blur his vision and stream down his face, mucus floods his mustache. He snorts, chokes, gasps around the gun barrel. Tastes oil and steel and his own ferrous blood.

The beslimed muzzle leaves his mouth and presses into his good ear. The man embracing him from behind like a perverse lover, sliding the open pincers down his chest like a caress. Touching them lightly to his crotch.

I won’t ask again.

Sharp Eddie gives up the names of Sonny LaSalle and his outlaw uncles—and with hardly a pause offers all he knows of last summer’s Verte Rivage bank robbery, volunteers that he recognized the newspaper drawing of the unidentified Bogalusa robber and murder suspect as one of the LaSalle brothers. But he has little else to reveal. The LaSalles have kept him on retainer for nearly two years and occasionally joined him for a drink, but they’ve always been closemouthed about their business and their associates and never yet required his services in court for themselves.

The man jabs the gun hard into Eddie’s ear. I don’t give a rat’s ass about them. Where’s the kid?

Eddie swears he doesn’t know. He’s heard rumor the brothers fled New Orleans following the botched job in Bogalusa. Maybe the kid’s with them. He feels his tender parts constricted small between the ready pincers.

Who else knows them? Other kin? A ladyfriend?

A ladyfriend, yes—a girl!—there was a girl. Eddie tells of an amused reference the brothers once made to a girl their nephew was humping. Last summer. A rich arty girl. Her father was the oil guy who drowned off the coast of Europe a few years back. Matson.

He nearly weeps with relief as the pincers come away from his genitals. Then hears as well as feels the horrifying crunch of them through his throat….

 

Police investigators speculate that Sharp Eddie’s bloodsoaked demise most likely came at the hands of a client with a grievance.

Kind of lowlifes he did business with, I always expected it, me, a detective tells reporters.

The newspaper’s pious editorial on the checkered career of Edward Longstreet Charponne closes with the observation that every criminal he set at liberty through the immoral and unethical application of his considerable legal acumen was but one more thief turned loose among the honest, one more seed of peril cast into the law-abiding world. We can hardly be faulted, the editorial opines, for perceiving some small measure of divine retribution in Mr. Charponne’s having reaped of the pernicious fruit he sowed.

 

We pulled into the Guadalupe Motor Camp outside of Kerrville sometime after two in the morning. The hills cast deep shadows under the high oval moon. The air redolent of cedar. The manager wasn’t happy about being wakened at that hour but he shuffled to the office door in robe and slippers and let us in. There were two cabins available. Charlie claimed one of them for herself and the girl and told Russell he had another think coming if he thought he was going to share it with them. She helped the girl out of the car and into the cabin and closed the door.

Russell hadn’t complained about my “rescue” of the girl, as Buck jokingly insisted on calling it, until he realized he’d have to bunk with the two of us, and he berated me for a meddling fool as we finished off the bottle.

“Next time you get a notion to save some chippy from a fate worse than whatever,” he said, “don’t do it—not if it’s gonna get me kicked out of my fluff’s bed.”

Even Buck’s announcement that the San Antonio take came to $290 did little to soothe Russell’s irritation. The cabin had two beds and I didn’t think to argue about which one of us was going to sleep on the floor.

We slept till nearly midmorning but still were ready for breakfast before the girls, so we went to wait for them at the camp’s café. When they finally came in and headed for our booth, we saw that Charlie had made a heroic effort with her makeup kit, but there was only so much she could do for the girl. The swollen black eye was a squint. Her other cheek looked embedded with a small wedge of plum, and her nose was lightly blue across the bridge. But she’d had a bath and her hair had been washed and brushed and showed a shine. She wore one of Charlie’s dresses. It rode high on her legs and was tight across the breasts but otherwise seemed to fit okay. Until now I hadn’t realized just how young she was—she didn’t look more than sixteen. And I could tell that under the bruises the face was a pretty one.

“Like the blind man said when he passed the shrimp docks,” Buck said, “hello, girls.”

“For Pete’s sake, Buck, try to be nice.” Charlie said. She slid into the booth next to Russell and patted the seat beside her for the girl to sit there.

“Belle honey,” Charlie said, “this here’s Buck and that’s Russell.”

She looked up timidly from under her lashes and her eyes cut from Russell to Buck and her lips made a small twitch in what was probably the best she could do for a smile.

“An ass-kicking hurts even worse the day after, don’t it, honeybunch?” Buck said. She lowered her eyes to the table.

Charlie gave Buck a look of reprimand, then touched Belle’s arm and said, “And that’s Sonny.”

She met my eyes across the table for a second and then dropped her gaze again, her ears bright pink.

“My hero,” Buck said, grinning at me. I flicked him a two-finger “up yours.”

“Wish she’d give somebody a chance to get a word in edgewise,” Russell said, smiling at the girl, and her ears got redder.

“She talks plenty,” Charlie said, “when she’s in company worth talking to.”

Russell looked around, checking to see if anybody was within earshot, then said low-voiced, “Ah, exactly how much talking you done with her about us?”

“Enough,” Charlie said. “I thought she ought to know what kind of company she was keeping so she could choose not to keep it if she didn’t want.”

“But here she still is,” Buck said. “You got a thing for bad-asses, girl?”

“Buckman, please?” Charlie said.

“All right, all right,” Buck said. “So now we’re all properly introduced, can we get something to eat? I’m about starved to death.”

He signaled for the waitress. She was an older woman and had probably seen a few things in her time because she never batted an eye at Belle’s face.

When Charlie asked Belle what she wanted to eat, she stared at the table and shook her head slightly. She seemed to be trying hard to make herself invisible.

“Tell you what,” Charlie said, “I’ll get bacon and eggs and you get pancakes and sausage and we’ll eat whatever we want off each other’s plate, okay?”

But all she did was nibble at a piece of toast and sip her coffee while the rest of us ate like farmhands without much pause for conversation.

Then we were on the road again, me at the wheel and Buck in the shotgun seat, Russell at a back window, Charlie between him and Belle. I’d take a look at her in the mirror every so often, and every time she was staring steadily out at the passing countryside like an immigrant entering some strange new world.

Pretty much like us all.

 

The highway rose and fell and rose again. The towns smaller and fewer and getting farther apart. Hills and cedars and dwarf oaks. The grass turning dull, going sparse, giving way to stony scrub. Mesquites. Low clumps of cactus. The hills shrinking, scattering, the vistas widening, the sky deepening dead ahead.

In the early afternoon we stopped in some burg along the highway to get gasoline. When I shut off the engine the silence was profound. We all sat mute for a moment and all I could hear was the ticking of the hot engine. “Goddam,” Buck said. “For minute I thought I’d gone deef.” We all got out to stretch and use the restroom. I told the attendant to fill it up.

Russell asked the guy how it felt to live in the middle of nowhere. The guy got the pump going and spat a streak of tobacco juice and said, “It’s another four, five hundred miles to anywhere near the middle.”

Belle still hadn’t said a word other than her name the night before. At one point Russell had casually asked where she was from, but she only gave him a spooked look and then turned her face back to the window. “Nice chatting with you,” Russell said. Charlie punched him on the arm and said to leave the girl be. We’d gone along without anyone saying much after that, just listening to the sporadic music we’d pick up on the radio, usually more of the stringband stuff.

While the others were buying the sandwiches and sodas I stood at the side of the highway and stared off into the barrenness ahead, marveling at its vastness. I hadn’t known New Orleans could feel so far away.

Buck came up beside me, sipping from a bottle of Dr Pepper and munching a Clark Bar. “We can at least take her somewhere else,” he said, trying to mimic my voice. “Well…here’s somewhere else. How about we leave her here?”

I didn’t know he was joking and my face must’ve shown it, judging by the way he laughed. “Hell kid, the more I think on how she looked without a stitch, the more I believe we done the smart thing to bring her.” He walked off to the car before I could think of what to say.

Then we were on the road again and pretty soon another station faded off the radio. Buck fiddled with the tuning knob, static rasping along the dial until we picked up a hissing and crackling rendition of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” We started singing along—all but Belle, who kept staring out the window for a minute and then put her face in her hands and broke into sobs.

“Honey, what?” Charlie said. She took her in her arms.

“That song…it was playing when those…those men, they were…it was so…awful!”

“Easy, baby,” Charlie said, patting her shoulder, rocking her like a child. Russell arched his brow at me in the rearview and I shrugged and turned the radio down. Buck rolled his eyes and shook his head.

And then she told her story. Told it bit by bit as the miles went by. Told it by fits and starts and mostly out of sequence. Told it with pauses to cry some more and to gently blow her tender nose and take a sip of Charlie’s strawberry Nehi before resuming.

 

What it came to was this. She was Kathryn Belle Robinson—Kitty Belle, her daddy’d called her—seventeen years old, born and raised in Corsicana, Texas, and every passing mile was taking her farther from there than she’d ever been before. Her daddy had worked in the oil fields. Her mother came from Tyler, where she’d won some kind of rose festival beauty contest when she was in high school, but she hated oil towns and lamented her foolishness in marrying so young and ruining her dream of becoming a photography model. From the time Belle was a child, her mother advised her not to make the same mistake.

“Don’t waste your good looks like a rose in a mudpit” was how her mother put it. Finish school, she told Belle, and then grab the first chance that came along to get away from the stink and grime of oil-town life.

Her daddy himself had been killed in the fields a year ago, gassed to death, him and eight others, by a leak at one of the rigs. They’d brought the bodies into town and laid them all in a row and every man of them had a bright red face and huge eyeballs and their bulging tongues were black. She hated that she still couldn’t get that picture of him out of her head. He didn’t leave any money so they’d had to move in with his brother Lyle and sickly wife Jean. To help with expenses Belle got a job at a bakery that specialized in fruitcakes. Her mother didn’t do much of anything for a couple of months except sleep or sit at the window and stare out at the derricks, and then finally took a job as a waitress at a hotel restaurant.

For a time everything went all right, then her mother started going with a waitress friend to speakeasy parties after work. She sometimes didn’t come home till dawn. Uncle Lyle pleaded with her to no effect. She told Belle not to worry, she was only having a little fun. It was like that for weeks and weeks. And then four months ago a policeman showed up at the door late one night. Her mother and some salesman from Waco had kicked up their heels for a while in a couple of speakeasies and then gone speeding off in the man’s coupe. A few miles outside of town they’d crashed into a tree and were killed. Belle’s mother was at the wheel.

For weeks afterward she felt like she was going around in a kind of trance. School lost the small pleasure it had held for her and she quit going. She stayed with her job because it didn’t require much concentration and she could pass the days in the hum and whirr of the batter machines.

The problem was at night, when she’d lie in the dark and feel more alone than she’d ever imagined it was possible to feel. Her boyfriend, Billy Jameson—the only boy she’d ever “been with,” as she put it—had got in trouble for breaking into a grocery store and left town without even saying goodbye. And her only two girlfriends had recently moved away with their daddies to some new oil boom in Oklahoma. She got along with her aunt and uncle, but in truth they were little more than strangers to her, and they anyway had their own troubles, what with her aunt now bedridden. The only relief she could find from her loneliness was at the movies. She began going every night. She loved sitting in the dark and getting swept into the stories on the screen, into the daring adventures and grand romances.

And then one night about three weeks ago, as she came out of the moviehouse, she was approached by a pair of well-dressed men who politely introduced themselves as Mr. Benton and Mr. Young. She’d noticed them outside the theater the night before and had felt herself blush when one of them nudged the other and nodded at her. They said they were talent scouts for a Hollywood producer who was sending them to towns all over America in search of fresh new faces. They thought she might be one. Would her parents give permission for her to go to Austin—all expenses paid, of course—to take a screen test?

I saw a look pass between Buck and Russell and knew what they were thinking. We’d heard stories of girls getting conned by guys passing themselves off as bigtime talent scouts. It was fairly easy to do, since singing contests and movie star look-alike competitions were popular entertainments all over the country, and it seemed like every couple of weeks there was another story in the papers of a smalltown girl being discovered and whisked off to New York to sing on the radio or taken to Hollywood by a movie producer who’d been passing through. Charlie had told me that a cousin of hers won twenty-five dollars for finishing third in a Mary Pickford look-alike contest in Baton Rouge.

The offer was so unexpected that Belle couldn’t think of what to say except no, thank you. All right, the men said, but in case she should change her mind they gave her a few forms for her parents to sign. They were on their way to Dallas to meet with some other scouts and would then take their talent search into a few more towns in the region before coming back through Corsicana. If she changed her mind, all she had to do was be at the station in exactly two weeks when the Dallas southbound made its daily stop.

She made up her mind before the next sunrise, reminding herself of her mother’s urging to get out of Corsicana at the first chance. She was scared, of course—she didn’t know these men from Cain and Abel—but who knew when, if ever again, she’d have another chance to make her getaway? Over the next thirteen days and nights she bit her nails raw, afraid the men might not come back.

But they did. She met them at the station, suitcase in one hand, forged papers in the other. They had another pretty girl with them, Gladys Somebody from Waxahachie. She and Belle hit it off and talked about how swell it’d feel to be a movie star someday.

They changed trains three times before finally arriving in Austin, but they didn’t get off there, after all. Instead they were joined by yet another girl—Lucy Somebody. Change of plan, the men told Belle and Gladys. The producer had decided to hold the screen tests in San Antonio. If either Belle or Gladys wanted to return home rather than go to San Antone with them, just say so and they’d be on the next train back. Neither Belle nor Gladys wanted that. How about calling home to tell the folks about the change in plan? Neither Belle nor Gladys felt the need to do that either.

“They knew you wouldn’t,” Russell said. “They’d already checked to see if either of you had any family that might be a problem. Asking did you want to call home about going to San Antonio was the last check to be sure.” Buck stared out the window and nodded.

When the train got to San Antonio, Benton and Young took them to supper at a nice restaurant and then checked them into a hotel—the Travis. She and Gladys shared a room, and they figured Lucy must’ve been given a room of her own. She never did see Lucy again.

After breakfast the next morning they went to a room on the third floor that had been made into a sort of studio, with a camera set up in the living room to take what they called portfolio stills, and a movie camera in the other room for the screen tests. The windows were kept draped so the lighting would be consistent in all the pictures. There was a closet full of clothes of all kinds and sizes, and Young took a series of pictures of her and Gladys in turn wearing different outfits. He said they were naturals, the camera loved them. It was fun and she was enjoying herself. Then Benton brought lunch up to the room, sandwiches and a pitcher of ice-cold fruit juice.

“It’s hard to remember things real clear after that,” she said. And started crying again.

“The old Mickey Finn,” Buck said. “In the Quarter one time a guy I knew was having trouble getting past first base with this girl. One night I run into them as they’re coming out of a speak and the girl’s smiling and all shitfaced and the guy’s grinning like tonight’s the night. She’d always said no to more than one drink, see, but I thought he’d finally figured some way to get her soused. Then she gives me a sloppy kiss hello and her breath didn’t smell of booze, it smelled like this girl’s did last night. Few days later the guy tells me she only had the one drink but he’d slipped a mickey in it. Worked like a damn charm, he said. A sweet drink’ll hide the taste at the time but you sure breathe it out afterward.”

Belle accepted Charlie’s hankie to wipe her tears and swab her nose, then went on with her tale. She said it was like knowing you’re having a dream but you can’t wake up. She was vaguely aware of time going by but she had no idea how much of it passed before she realized she didn’t have any clothes on and that somebody was “doing it” to her. A young curlyhaired blond guy. She was terrified and wanted to tell him to stop, to let her out of there, but it was like she’d forgotten how to talk. She felt so puny—it was all she could do to raise her hands to his chest, never mind push him away.

She heard music and voices and a low steady whirring. She saw Gladys sprawled in an easy chair by the wall, naked under an open robe and looking like she was drunk. The music was coming from a radio on a little table beside the chair—“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” The whirring came from a movie camera. Young was operating it. Benton was at his side. By now her head was clearing and she felt some of her strength returning, but she still couldn’t push the guy off. He cursed her and pinned her arms over her head.

She heard Young say, “She needs another dose.” He sounded farther away than he looked. Benton said, “In a minute.” He was giving the blond kid directions, telling him to change positions on her, to touch her here, there, do this to her, do that. Finally the blond guy scooted up so that he was kneeling next to her face, pinning one of her arms with his knee and the other with one hand, trying to make her—

She broke off and started crying again. Charlie reached for her but the girl held her off. “No,” she said, “I’m going to tell it, I am. He tried to…he was trying to put his…you know, his thing…to put it in my mouth. So I…I bit him. I did!”

Her face dropped into her hands again and her shoulders shook.

Buck turned around to look at her. In the mirror, Charlie was openmouthed and staring at her too.

“You mean,” Russell said, “you bit the guy’s johnson?”

She kept her face in her hands and nodded. “Hard,” she said, the word muffled.

“Not for long, I bet it wasn’t,” Russell said—and we all busted out laughing. Belle looked up and gaped around at us like we were crazy.

“Oh honey,” Charlie said, and hugged her close.

“I’d say you evened the score pretty good,” Russell said. He put his knees together and made a face of pain.

“You’re damn lucky he didn’t kill you,” Buck said.

“It wasn’t for lack of trying,” she said—and for the first time seemed truly angry. “Next thing I knew I was seeing stars. That son of…that man started—”

“Sonofabitch,” I said. “Say it. It’s what he was.”

She looked at me in the mirror. “That son of a bitch started hitting me with his fists. Benton was hollering for him not to mess me up and trying to get him off me and when he finally did, I up and ran.”

“Right out into the hall,” Buck said, “wearing nothing but that shiner, as I recall.”

She blushed under the bruises and cut her eyes away. Charlie shook her head at Buck.

“Benton the mustache guy we laid out in the hall?” Buck said.

Belle nodded. “Thank you for…getting him away.”

“I only gave him the finishing touches,” Buck said. “Sonny here took the ambition out of him.”

She fixed her green eyes on me in the mirror. “Thank you,” she said.

 

The countryside expanded to an immensity of craggy rockland and thorny scrub under a cloudless sky beyond measure. We’d seen this West Texas country in photographs and in movieshows without having known its colors. Low blue mountains in the distance, long red mesas, conical purple buttes with peppercorn hides. Pale orange dust devils rising off the flats and swirling for miles before vanishing into the emptiness. Hawks sailing high, arcing over the scrub. Charlie had persuaded Russell to buy her a good pair of binoculars, and they turned out to be so much fun we all wanted a pair of our own. But no other place we stopped at sold them, and so Charlie let us take turns with hers.

All through the day, roadrunners would suddenly appear along the shoulder of the road, scooting with their long bills and tail feathers low to the ground, then veering away into the scrub. In midafternoon we spied a small herd of white-assed antelopes not a quarter-mile from the road and a pair of them butting heads. We pulled off the highway to watch them with the field glasses, and when I cut off the engine you could hear the faint smacking of their tall curved horns. We wished the bucks were distinctly different colors so we could lay bets, but it was impossible to tell them apart at that range.

We were still a couple of hours from Fort Stockton when the engine started to overheat. Luckily we came on a filling station within the next few miles, just beyond the Pecos River. I wheeled into the place with steam billowing from under the hood panels. We’d hoped the problem was nothing more than a ruptured hose but discovered it was a leak in the radiator. The station man said it would have to be soldered but he didn’t have the iron for the job. He did, however, keep a few eggs handy for such emergencies as this and he went inside and got one.

We’d uncapped the radiator to let it steam off and Buck refilled it with water. With the motor idling, the station man broke open the egg and dropped it in the radiator and put the cap back on. As the hot water circulated through the engine it cooked the egg and plugged up the leak. It was an old trick we were all familiar with, one which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. The station man said the makeshift repair should hold us till we got to the Sundowner Motor Camp and Diner about twenty miles down the highway. The place had a garage and a mechanic who lived on the premises.

We bought cold drinks and bags of potato chips. Charlie asked the station man the names of the more common plants around us. He pointed out broad-daggered yucca and skeletal ocotillo and long-stemmed lechugilla, scraggly creosote shrubs, the red tuna of the prickly pear. The tuna had spines so fine you couldn’t see them, and as Russell found out when he touched one, you can’t get those spines out even with tweezers. He’d feel their sting in his finger for days until his body finally absorbed them.

We drove on, everyone wearing dark glasses against the glare of the sun. The heat rose off the road in shimmering waves. Where the highway met the horizon behind us, a constant mirage gleamed like a pool of quicksilver.

The sun was a blinding incandescence at the ridge of the distant mountains when we spotted the Sundowner Motor Camp a mile or so ahead. A little ways beyond it stood a butte shaped exactly like a woman’s breast with an erect nipple.

“You believe that?” Buck said. The likeness was so true we thought it might’ve been sculpted by some half-crazed artist who had devoted years or maybe his whole life to the project.

I parked in front of the camp’s small garage and the mechanic came out and looked things over and said he could easy enough solder the radiator but it would have to wait till first thing in the morning. That was fine with us. Better to rest up tonight and get to Stockton feeling fresh tomorrow. We asked about the butte and he said it was a natural formation locally known as Squaw Tit Peak.

“Only one who can lay claim to that work of art is the Lord Almighty,” he said, “and He didn’t use no tools but wind and sand.”

We took our bags out of the car and went over to the office to check in. The place was run by a married couple, the wife taking care of the desk, the husband doing the cooking in the café. The camp had a dozen cabins and ten of them were available. We took three—one for me and Buck, one for Russell and Charlie, one for Belle. We put the bags in the cabins and then went for supper in the café.

When the waitress saw Belle’s face she glowered at us like she was trying to figure which one had done it to her—and looked ready to bite whoever it was. Belle read her expression and said, “These fellas are real nice. They fixed the one who…” She gestured at her bruises.

“That so?” the waitress said. “Well, I hope you all fixed the sumbitch good.”

We had big bowls of chili beans that stung our mouths, huge hamburgers with all the trimmings, baskets of thick french fries slathered with ketchup. Tall glasses of lemonade with mint and lots of crushed ice. After nothing but a nibble of breakfast and a couple of bites of a cheese sandwich for lunch, Belle finally showed an appetite. Russell nudged me and nodded at her. She was bent over her plate and wolfing the burger, the juices running out of the bun and down her wrists. Charlie and Buck were watching her too. She stopped chewing and looked up at us.

“Welcome back among the living,” Russell said.

She blushed through her bulging smile, her cheeks full of burger. Charlie reached over with a napkin and wiped a smear of mustard off her lip.

For dessert we had slabs of peach pie thick with fresh peach chunks and rich grainy sugar. Then Buck went to have a chat with the manager. In a little while he came back with the irksome news that there was no hooch to be had at this place. But an oil camp about twelve miles north was said to have its own still, and the crew was said to sometimes be of a mind to sell a little something to a fella in need.

We finished our coffee and went outside and stopped short. The whole world was steeped in a dying daylight so deeply red and darkly yellow it seemed unreal.

The manager stood in the door behind us and said, “Does it every time. I come out here from Ohio near to twenty-five years ago and still can’t believe it. It’s like the light’s made of blood and gold.”

I smiled and said, “You’re a poet, mister.”

“Not me, son,” he said. “I’m just glad to see it with my own eyes and hope to do it again tomorrow.” He flicked away his cigarette and went inside.

 

Buck drove off in the Model A and the rest of us went to the cabins. After a long shower and a change of clothes I went outside into the gathered darkness. The air smelled of dust and cooling stone. At the foot of a nearby rise I found a low flat boulder that made a good bench. A narrow streak of violet still showed above the western mountains, but the rest of the sky had gone black and glimmered with early stars. The first fireflies were out and flashing softly. The moon was up in the east, nearly full, the color of a new penny.

Highway traffic was sparse. You could see the lights of an approaching vehicle from a long way off before it finally went whirring by. A series of high yowls rose somewhere to the distant south, and it took me a minute to realize they must be coyotes.

“I heard them before.” I started at the sound of her voice in the darkness slightly behind me—then made out her vague silhouette about ten feet away. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to spook you.”

“How long you been there?” I said.

“Only a little bit.”

“I didn’t see you come out.”

“Huh?”

“Out of your room,” I said. “I didn’t see you come out.”

“Oh, you mean you didn’t see me from out here. Well, no, you couldn’t’ve seen me come out from out here. I already was.”

“What?”

“I already was out here.”

“You were already out here when I came out?”

“It’s what I just said. Is there something wrong with how I’m talking?”

“I know what you said. I mean, why didn’t you say something?”

“What do you mean? Jeepers, I did say something. I said I’d heard—”

“No, before.”

“Before when?”

“When I first came out here, goddammit. Why didn’t you say something right away instead of lurking in the dark? Jesus Christ, what a conversation.”

“You don’t have to swear at me,” she said. “And I wasn’t lurking. And I could say the same, you know—about this conversation.”

I blew a long breath, surprised at my own agitation. “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose you could.”

“All right, then,” she said.

There was a faraway keening of a train whistle. The highway lay dark in either direction.

“I didn’t say anything before,” she said, “because…well, you don’t talk as much as the others. I thought maybe you don’t care to. That answer your question?”

I nodded and said, “Utterly.”

She only half succeeded in suppressing a snicker. “I don’t guess this chat’s going to do a whole lot to change your attitude about not talking much.”

It was the first time I’d heard her try to be even a little bit funny, and coming when it did it struck me as so funny I busted out laughing—and she did too, laughing hard, from deep in the belly, like she hadn’t done it in a hell of a while.

I moved over on the boulder and patted it for her to have a seat beside me. She accepted an Old Gold from the pack I offered. She smelled freshly clean, and when I struck a match to light the cigarettes, I saw that her hair hung damp and straight. She took a small puff and coughed. She was no practiced smoker.

“You never even smoked a cigarette before?”

“In secret a couple of times with this girl back home e didn’t have all that much chance to get good at it.”

“What about that boyfriend you had? You didn’t smoke with him?”

“He didn’t smoke, he chewed. I wasn’t about to try that.”

“I guess love has its limits, huh?”

“Maybe,” she said. “It anyway wasn’t love, I don’t believe, not really. I think I was only…I don’t know.”

In the ensuing silence I sensed she was embarrassed at having told too much, so I said in a tough-guy rasp, “Well, stick with me, kid, and you can practice at smoking all you want. I’ll show you all the fastest ways to hell.”

“Look who’s calling anybody kid,” she said. “How old are you—eighteen, nineteen?”

“Right the second time,” I said.

The high cries of the coyotes rose again and seemed keener in the greater darkness. She said she used to hear them all the time at her grandparents’ farm in Comanche County when she was a child.

“They sound different ways if you listen really careful,” she said. “Sometimes it’s like they’re having a high old time, and sometimes like they’re trying to tell you something you’ll never in the world understand.” There came a long solitary howl and then another right behind it from another coyote and of different timbre. “And sometimes it’s like that—like the loneliest talk there is.”

We sat and smoked in the dark, our cigarette tips glowing red among the pale green sparks of the fireflies, our smoky exhalations mingling in the light of the rising moon. We stayed like that for a long time without speaking. Russell and Charlie had remained in their room and I figured he was making up for what he’d missed the night before. The thought of them going at it made me keenly conscious of Belle’s nearness. I thought I could feel her body heat on my bare arm. I lit another cigarette and she asked if she could have one too.

I struck a match and she touched my hand as she leaned forward to accept the light. She looked up at me from under her lashes, her good eye wide and bright and a little scared. Then blew out the flame and took away her hand.

And then here came headlights down the road, brightening as they approached—and sweeping over us when the car turned into the parking lot. The Model A halted in front of the cabins and the engine shut off and the door opened and then banged shut. Buck called out, “You all come on down here and see what I got us.”

 

When we got to the room, he had already set out drinks for us in a pair of tumblers. He’d sweet-talked the oil crew into selling him three bottles. He’d tapped into one of them on the drive back and it showed in the high shine of his eyes. The bottle was already down by a third. He tossed off his drink and smacked his lips, smiled at us and served himself another. I took a sip of mine and had to admit it seemed like pretty good hooch.

Belle hadn’t picked up her glass. Buck gestured at it and said, “It’s aged plenty enough, honey. Down the hatch.”

“I don’t guess I want any,” she said, rising from her chair. “I’m really awful tired. Think I’ll go on to bed.” She said goodnight to Buck and waggled her fingers at me and left.

He got up and went to the window and pushed the curtain aside to watch her go to her cabin.

“She’s probably still hungover from the mickey,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “If it was a mickey.”

“What do you mean if it was?”

He turned and arched his brow at me. “Just because she says she was Shanghaied into it don’t make it so. Most of them who do those movies do it because it pays good and because they like it.”

“What are you saying? She was doped, man. You smelled it on her breath, you said—like on that girl in New Orleans.”

“Yeah—and what I didn’t say was I’d smelled it even before that. In a Chink dope den in New York. Me and another doughboy went in to see what it was like and got looped just breathing the air in there. You can mix that stuff all kinds of ways. Makes a swell mickey in a drink, but they mostly smoke it in pipes with a little hose. They do it for the dreams, but a right dose’ll let you stay awake and keep you smiling at nothing all night. The stag movie guys like to have the girls take a puff to loosen them up, put a dreamy look on their face for the camera, but some like it too much—sucking the devil’s dick, they call it. Get too dopey to do anything but lay there like the dead.”

I watched him pour another, then light a cigarette and blow three perfect smoke rings. “You think her story’s bullshit?” I said.

“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe not. Or maybe everything she’s said is bullshit—all that stuff about her momma and daddy, everything. Maybe she was willing enough to fuck in front of a camera for the right price or a little encouragement from the pipe, or both. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for her to admit it, though. Only thing we know for sure is she got somebody damn mad at her.”

“Russell believes her,” I said.

“Hell he does. He’s like me—he just doesn’t give a shit if she’s lying. What difference does it make if she’s a good girl on the stray or some bullshitting little tramp? Who cares? Those tits are as nice either way, and those tits are why she’s here, right? You’ve had plenty of schoolgirl tail, Sonny, but this one’s a different breed, so don’t be a sap and think that she’s—”

There came a hard rapping on the door and then it swung open and Russell and Charlie came charging in with wide smiles, their faces flushed with their recent sporting.

“There it is!” Russell said, making a beeline for the booze. “Can we count on this man to come through or can we count on him to come through?” He poured drinks for him and Charlie.

Charlie was sorry to hear Belle had called it a night but said she didn’t blame her, all she’d been through the last couple of days. Russell toasted our arrival in this strange new world. He said he loved the dryness of the heat, so different from New Orleans, where you could drown in the humidity. Charlie said she felt smaller out here. “It’s that big old sky and hardly any trees,” she said. “I can’t get used to hardly any trees.”

We finished the bottle and started on another. Russell told a joke he’d heard from a filling station guy. Fella goes to the doctor for a checkup and the doctor tells him it’s bad news, he doesn’t have long to live. Fella says, “Oh my God, that’s terrible! How long do I have?” Doctor says, “Ten.” Fella says, “Ten what? Months? Weeks?” Doctor says, “Nine…eight…seven…”

Buck told one he’d heard from the oil rig guys. The queen of England was riding in her carriage with her guest the king of Belgium when one of the carriage horses lets go with a tremendous fart. The queen turns all red and says to the king, “Oh dear, I must apologize for that.” The king says, “Quite all right, your highness—actually, I had thought it was the horse.”

The bottle was down to its last couple of inches and Russell took it with him when he and Charlie said goodnight—a little hair of the dog for the morning, he said. Buck and I stood at the door and watched them go. Belle’s cabin window was dark.

We went back inside and Buck uncorked the last bottle and filled a tumbler to the brim. “That ought to hold you,” he said. Then gave me a wink. “Don’t bother to wait up.” He took the rest of the bottle and went out and shut the door behind him.

I sat on the bed and took off my shoes and stared at the floor for a time. I couldn’t clarify what I was feeling. I picked up the tumbler and took a swallow. And then another. Then got up and went to the curtain and pushed it aside. Her window curtain was dimly yellow. I stared at it till my eyes burned. Then the window went dark.

Of course she wouldn’t admit it if she’d done it willingly. So what? He was right. Who gave a rat’s ass if she lied or even what she lied about? What difference did it make to any of us? Those tits were terrific either way and that’s why we’d brought her along. Goddam right.

Then I pictured myself standing there and felt like a damned fool. I dropped the curtain and took another big gulp from the tumbler, striped to my underwear, turned off the light and got into bed. And the booze carried me right off.

 

It was still dark when I woke with a parched tongue and a throbbing head. I felt my way along the wall to the bathroom and switched on the light. With my mouth to the spigot I drank till my belly was bloated. I was about to snap off the light when I saw somebody on the floor by the door and for a moment thought Buck had come back and passed out before he could make it to his bed. And then I saw it was her.

She was sitting up and watching me, hugging her knees to her breasts, the skirt of her dress tucked between her legs. The way the shadows fell across her face her bad eye looked like a black patch.

“The light woke me,” she said. “For a minute I didn’t remember where I was and I couldn’t see it was you in there and I thought I was having a bad dream.”

“When’d you come in?”

“I don’t know. A while ago.”

“Buck?”

“The other cabin.” She sniffed and wiped at her nose. “I didn’t mean to come in without asking, but I didn’t want to wake you. I tried to sleep in the car but it’s got so cold out and I didn’t have a blanket or anything and…I’m sorry.”

“Why you on the floor? Why didn’t you get in the other bed?”

“I didn’t want to be using his bed if he came over here.”

I helped her up and sat her on the edge of my bed. I lit two cigarettes and handed her one. “So what happened?” I said.

She’d been awakened by his knocking on the door. He said to open up, it was cold out there. She thought we were getting ready to leave right away for some reason. She turned on the light and quickly got dressed, then unlocked the door. He came in and locked it again. When she saw his eyes she knew he was very drunk and knew what it was he wanted. She’d seen a lot of drunk men back in Corsicana and had learned to fear them all. She asked him please to go, but he said there wasn’t any need to play the innocent, not with him.

She was afraid to do anything but stand there while he ran his hands over her and up under her dress. He told her to take her clothes off and get on the bed. Then he switched off the light and took off his shoes and pants and got in bed with her. At first she thought he had his hand down there and was pushing on her with the tip of his thumb—and then was astonished to realize that what was rubbing on her was his “thing.” What there was of it. He rubbed and rubbed himself on her and then it was over and he rolled off her and turned his face to the wall. She thought he might’ve been crying. She hadn’t known she’d been crying too until she got up and went into the bathroom to clean herself and saw her face in the mirror.

When she came out he had the cover pulled over him and was snoring. She had no idea how long she stood there before finally putting on her dress and shoes and going out to the car and lying down on the seat. But she couldn’t sleep for the cold and she kept listening for her cabin door to open. Finally she came to my door and tried it and found it unlocked and came in real quiet and curled up next to the wall. She didn’t think she’d be able to sleep but she must’ve because next thing she knew she saw the light in the bathroom.

“He threaten to hurt you if you didn’t do like he said?”

“No, he never.”

“Then why do it if you didn’t want to?”

“I thought I had to. I thought you were right outside.”

“Come again? You thought I was right outside? Outside your cabin? Then why didn’t you run out?”

“I thought…I thought you were waiting to be next.”

And then she was crying into her hands again.

Well hell. After a minute I put an arm around her and she leaned into me with her face on my chest. Her crying became a case of hiccups, and when I chuckled at the mix of hics and sobs, she hit me lightly on the shoulder with her fist and said, “It’s not—hic—funny”—and we both laughed.

“Let’s try and get some sleep,” I said. “Sun’ll be up soon. You can have this bed.”

She lay down and I covered her with the blanket and tucked it around her. Then got in Buck’s bed and under the blanket.

I don’t know how much time passed before she said, “Sonny?” She said it so softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard it. “You awake?”

“What?”

“Charlie told me the trouble you had in Loosiana.”

“She did, huh?”

“Was it terrible in prison?”

“What do you think?”

“It must’ve been terrible.”

“Go to sleep.”

“I’m glad you got away.”

“Not as glad as I am. Now go to sleep.”

Another minute went by.

“Sonny?”

“Christ’s sake, what?”

“I’m glad you weren’t waiting to be next.”

“Do I have to go knock you on the head to shut you up?”

She chuckled. “You wouldn’t neither. You’re too nice.”

 

I came awake up with my head still hurting and discovered her lying beside me. No telling how long she’d been there. She was rolled in her blanket like an Indian, her back to me, her ass against my hip. I had an urgent erection, and my first inclination was to use it on her. Then I remembered how pathetic she’d looked last night, and how she’d thought I’d been waiting to take a turn. I’d never been prone to confusion about myself or about women, but if somebody had put a gun to my head at that moment and demanded to know exactly what I was feeling, I couldn’t have given a straight answer.

She stirred and started to come awake. I rolled on my side away from her and feigned to be still sleeping. She lay still for a minute, then eased out of bed. I waited till I heard the bathroom door click shut and then got up and put my clothes on.

When she came out and saw me she blushed. Then looked down at herself and said, “Will you look at this dress? You’d think somebody’d been sleeping in it, for Pete’s sake.” I smiled at that and then she smiled too. Then we went over to the café.

The others weren’t there yet but we went ahead and ordered. Several mugs of coffee and some fried eggs and sausage and hash-browns and biscuits dripping with butter all helped put a cushion on my hangover. Belle ordered the same thing but only picked at it. She was nervous and kept cutting her eyes to the front door. I was feeling a little squirmy myself. She probably sensed it and didn’t even try to make small talk.

I was done eating when Buck showed up. I’d figured he’d get there ahead of Russell and Charlie, who were prone to a morning hump and were usually the last ones to the table. He slid into the seat opposite us in the booth and gave a lopsided grin. His eyes were badly bloodshot. “Feel like I been run over by a damn booze truck,” he said. The waitress came with a mug of coffee for him and took his order and went away again.

He lit a cigarette and smiled at Belle. She was looking at her plate and pushing her food around with her fork. “When I woke up by my lonesome,” he said, “I figured you’d gone to see if young Romeo here could use some company too.” He winked at me. “She’s a darling, ain’t she?”

I wasn’t smiling, and he finally seemed to tune in to our mood.

“What?” he said.

“She didn’t like what you did last night,” I said. I hadn’t intended to be so blunt, but there it was.

“Say what?” He looked at me like I’d spoken in a foreign language.

“You scared her, man,” I said. “She’d rather you don’t do that again.”

He laughed. “She’d rather, would she?” He looked at Belle. “Is this rascal telling me true, missy? I scared you?”

She kept her gaze on her plate and nodded. I was pulled between pity and the urge to slap her on the head for being so damned sheepish.

“And so?” Buck said. “You don’t want me to come creeping into your tent no more?”

She looked all set to start crying again. It really irked me. “It’s what she said, Buck.”

“Not to me, she didn’t—and she can speak for herself.”

She laid her fork alongside her plate and for the first time looked at him directly. “I don’t want you to do that again.”

He stared at her without any expression at all.

“Please,” she said.

Which got a smile from him. “Well hell, honey. All you had to do was say so. I never in my life forced myself on a woman and I ain’t starting now. This how you want it, this is how you got it. Good enough?”

She nodded.

“Still friends?”

She looked like she’d never heard such a question. Then made a small smile and nodded again.

“Well, all right then,” he said.

The waitress arrived with his food and the coffeepot and refilled our mugs. Buck cut into his pork chop and said it was done just right. Belle started nibbling the sausage links off her plate with her fingers. The matter of last night had been so swiftly settled it felt like I’d missed something, but she seemed well satisfied with the way it went.

Buck said he’d already checked on the car—radiator all patched up and ready to go. Then Russell and Charlie showed up and ordered big well-done steaks with scrambled eggs and hashbrown potatoes and biscuits and gravy and tall glasses of milk.

Charlie was happy to see how much the swelling had gone down in Belle’s cheekbone. She lightly traced the bruises with a forefinger and said, “Look here where the purple part’s already turning blue. This spot here’ll be green by tomorrow, and here’s some yellow starting to show. Declare, girl, right now you got about the most colorful face in Texas.”

Russell leaned over for a closer look at the swellings. “You’re lucky the bastard wasn’t wearing some kind of mean ring,” he said. “You won’t have no scar at all.”

 

A half hour later we’d retrieved our bags from the cabins and loaded them in the car. The girls got in the back seat with Russell. Our old road map was practically in tatters so I went in the office to buy a new one. Buck had settled the bill for the car repair and the rooms and was standing outside the office, counting what was left of our stake money. He was still there when I came out.

“Here’s the lucky stud gets her all to himself,” he said, punching me lightly on the arm.

He was smiling but there was something in his tone. I smiled back and shrugged. “I guess,” I said.

“I want you to know,” he said, “if she said I forced her it’s a lie.”

“She didn’t say that. Only that she asked you to go.”

“I don’t recall that she did.”

“We were all pretty soused,” I said. “Except for her.”

He spat and looked off at the distant mountains. “I wasn’t so soused I ain’t sure she didn’t say no.” He turned to me again. “I ain’t no rape fiend, kid. I can’t abide a rape fiend.”

“Hell, Buck, I know that.”

“Like as not she couldn’t deal with Mr. Stub,” he said, using the name he’d given his mutilated pecker. “It’s some who can’t.”

I made a wry smile and shrugged. “Maybe. She’s pretty much the fraidy-cat type as it is.”

“I thought I had her figured,” he said, “but now I ain’t so certain.”

“Cries at the drop of a damn hat,” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah she does.” He looked over at the car, where she and Charlie were laughing at something Russell was saying. “But Lordy, don’t that body beat all?”

“You said a mouthful.”

“Couple of nice mouthfuls is what she got. Well, hell, enjoy it while it lasts, kid.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Just one thing. You sappy for her?”

“Sappy?” I said. I peered at the car and lowered my voice. “Hell no, man, it’s not like that.” And told myself I meant it.

He studied my face. “Good,” he said.

“I mean it.”

“All right.” He smiled. “Let’s go.”

On our way to the car he said in a low voice, “You know, even if I had tried to force her—and I sure as shit didn’t, but even if I had—it couldn’t’ve been but attempted rape nohow. Can’t be nothing but attempted with a damn one-inch pecker, right?”

We were laughing when we got to the car, and Charlie asked what was so funny.

“This damn Sonny,” Buck said. “Listen here to the dumbass joke he just told me.”

As I drove out of the parking lot and started down the highway with the sun directly behind us, he told the one about the woman who goes to the doctor and tells him she just all of a sudden went deaf in one ear. The doctor takes a look and says, “Well, I see your problem—you’ve got a suppository in there.” And the woman says, “Oh for Pete’s sake…now I know what happened to my hearing aid.”

 

Indigo night of drizzling rain. Water dripping from eaves and clattering on banana fronds, running off gutters and spattering on cobblestones. Sporadic and trembling heat lightning. Hoarse bellows of ships’ horns out on the river.

He works the pick gently. Feels the lock yield to his expert application. Eases the door ajar and listens intently. Opens it further and slips inside and closes it softly behind. Stands immobile and studies the geography of the place by the intermittent flares of lightning at the windows. There the kitchen. There the bath. There the bedroom door. Light and dark, light and dark. Mapping in his head the furniture’s array. And then a quavering illumination finds him gone from the front door, transported as by the darkness itself to the bedroom threshold.

The bed stands empty and neatly made. He cannot know if she will return this selfsame evening, whether she will be alone or in company. The lightning quits. He positions himself in a chair in the bedroom and listens in the darkness for sound at the front door. And remains thus for hours. The rain ceases. The windows turn pink with the rising of the morn. When the place is sufficiently daylit he begins to search. And comes to find an envelope in the bedside drawer. The word Sonny inscribed upon it. Two items within. A sheet of paper with the single word Dolan’s and the initial B. And a note.

Chérie—Sorry to leave this way, but got word of B & R! Have to catch a train in 15 min. Took $50. I owe you more than $. Be back soon. You’re an angel—an incomparably lovely vixen—the classiest dame in the Quarter—the most erotic of dreams made flesh—the cat’s veriest whiskers. In other words, you ain’t bad, kiddo. Think of me, S.

She will never know of her inestimable good fortune in choosing to go to St. Louis at this time to appraise an oil collection for possible exhibit in the Fontaine. So deft was his search she will also never suspect that someone was prowling her home in her absence and prying into the recesses of her life. Some days after her return she will hear a neighbor play Blue Skies on the saxophone and her lingering resentment toward Sonny for his rude departure will quite suddenly give way to missing him terribly. She will go to the bedside drawer for his goodbye note and read it yet again for reassurance of his intention to come back. And will again get nothing from it but the sinking feeling that she has seen him for the last time.

 

Though well outside his bailiwick, the Quarter is not unfamiliar to him. He has made occasional visits to its ranker pockets, has had dealing with various of its meaner denizens, is not without notion of where to begin his search. And thus, on an early-darkening evening of impending rain, after two days of discreet inquisitions he stands informed of the Dolan who worked for a time with the brothers LaSalle….

 

At his small table in the back room of the garage Jimmyboy sups on a small pot of tomato soup and listens to the radio. He has the volume turned up loud against the rain’s drumming on the roof, but the reception is poor and crackles with static. Rudy Vallee opens the show with his customary greeting of Heighho, everybody! and the band swings into a rendition of I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.

So badly rusted are the hinges of the door at Jimmyboy’s back that the radio’s loudness does not mute their screech. He turns with a sardonic intention of telling the intruder to learn to read so he can understand window signs that say Closed, then sees a tall lean man with gray face and mustache, a broad-brimmed hat dripping rainwater, a chrome contraption where his hand should be. A man not here with complaint of car trouble. A man—and Jimmyboy knows this with instant and iron certainty—of grave intolerance for bullshit.

He turns down the radio and pushes his chair back and points at his prosthetic foot. I got a part missing too, mister, he says, and it done give me all the pain I care to know in this life. I ain’t no tough guy even a tiny bit. You tell me what you want and if I can give it to you I will, believe you me.

John Bones holds up Sonny LaSalle’s prison photograph. Name? he says. Seeking to see how truthful this gimp is.

Jimmyboy names Sonny without hesitation. He tells everything he knows about the LaSalles, even producing the sketch of Russell attached to the newspaper report of the Bogalusa bank robbery, and concluding with what he learned by steaming open the envelope the brothers had left for Sonny and reading its contents before sealing it up again. He tells of the note’s instruction to go to a filling station that he’s sorry he can’t remember the name of but he remembers it’s right next to the Houston train depot and it said talk to a guy named Miller.

I’d say that’s where he’s gone, sure enough, Jimmyboy says.

The man’s eyes never blink.

You see, mister, Jimmyboy says. You see how I’m cooperating? Not a need in the world to get rough, not with me, no sir. You only got to ask is all.

Jimmie Rodgers starts yodeling on the crackling radio.

The man smiles. I like that, he says. Turn it up some.

Sure thing, Jimmyboy says. He turns around and raises the volume—and all in an instant there is a large-caliber pistolblast and his forehead bursts in a spray of blood and brain and his ruined head thumps the table.

The radio yodels on as John Bones goes out of the room and through the garage and into a dark and sodden night beshrouding the deserted streets in this empty neighborhood of padlocked warehouses and shuttered shops.

 

The police will record Jimmyboy Dolan’s death as an unsolved homicide—hardly rare fate among smalltime New Orleans crooks. No one will attend his pauper’s burial, but at least one of his familiars will feel something akin to grief on learning of his demise. Cockeye Calder will be near to tears when he sorrowfully laments, That sonofabitch still owed me four grand!