I bit him back!
He didn’t go for that. He yanked his finger outa my mouth, looked at it hard, yelped, and then wheeled around and flied on back to that old dusty Model T. And he was a-hollering bloody murder the whole way: “My finger’s bit off! My finger’s bit off! And yur goin’ to jail for it, goddamn you! Yur goin’ to jail!”
Well, I hadn’t bit off Dudley’s finger. It was still hanging there by a couple of gristles. But I knowed it was a goner, and I knowed I was gonna be a goner, too, if I stayed at Ma’s. I sure as hell was gonna get arrested, even if it was Dudley that’d bit me first. I quick put a hunk of ham in a bag, dug up my train loot from where I’d buried it, and hit into the brush.
I went about three or four miles ’til I come to a clearing that had some feed troughs for cattle, and that’s where I decided to spend the night. I curled right up under one of them troughs. I don’t know how come I did that, except at a time when I was starting to feel more and more cut off from ever’thing, them cows milling around—crunching cornmeal and slobbering and snorting out hot puffs of air—seemed like kinda friendly company.
And they was. All night they’d get up from where they was bedded down, and they’d come over to feed a little—up and down, up and down, all night—and for me that one night they was the best company in the world.
Next morning I walked back into Crystal City and hid behind some railroad ties ’til a freight come in, heading for San Antone.
When the engine tooted, I was ready to go. I jumped into a empty boxcar.
ELEVEN
My train loot got ate up fast, on food and places to sleep and gals and kin.
And the money I made after that sure seemed slim.
I blowed here, and I blowed there. Arkansas … to visit kinfolk. Oklahoma … to prowl around. Houston.… to work on a oil derrick. San Angelo.… to gamble. Mineral Wells … to rob a clothes stores. Abilene … to fence some stole stuff.
That oil job I had in Houston was lousy, dirty work that broke your back, and didn’t pay but a couple of dollars a day. And you had to answer to a sorry old foul-mouthed boss. Gambling paid better if you wasn’t altogether honest, but if you wasn’t altogether honest, you couldn’t rake in too many pots in one place before you had to scoot outa town. Robbing that clothes store had got me the biggest haul, $845, after I sold my take to a fence.
But it wasn’t hardly worth the trouble.
In Austin County, I got arrested for selling them clothes and the charges, if I’da got convicted, woulda landed me in the joint again. I escaped by flinging myself outa the sheriff’s car when we was going down a hill, and hitting off into some woods. I knowed it’d take them old laws a while to get their car stopped, and by the time they done it, and went to raining them woods with bullets, I was long gone.
I got shed of my handcuffs by banging ’em agin a iron spike at a train track.
Meantime, while I was blowing around, here and there, doing this and that, the country had got itself all messed up in that World War, over across the ocean. My brother Jess got called off to fight, and the ranchers wasn’t bringing many horses to Joe. Things was tighter for Ma for a while, and I got to mailing her some of what I could spare.
For a while, the War pumped up the price of cotton—to thirty-five cents a pound—and I went back to picking, even though I’d swore off it. Then the war ended and Ma wrote she didn’t need money no more. Jess’d come back home in one piece (mostly ’cause he’d never got sent no further’n New Jersey). And Joe was a good buster by then. Ma had a yardful of chickens and a milk cow name of “June,” and ever’thing was took care of.
Jess Newton, in uniform during World War I.
Ever’thing, but me.
To this day, I can still see myself squatted down on a shivery Sunday morning, hid up in some bushes near the little old German town of New Braunfels, waiting to hop that Katy No. 12. It was the second day of March, nineteen and nineteen. I was thirty years old and my life, what I was gonna do with it, was a question that didn’t have no answer.
I was heading for God knows where.
All I knowed was this: I wanted something outa life, even if I didn’t know exactly what that was.
What kept coming back to my head, over and over, was how most of them hard-working cotton farmers I knowed ended up when they got old. Their kids’d put ’em in a little back room and that’s where they lived ’til they died. I damn sure didn’t wanta die that way! I wanted something more. You watch a cow, or a horse, they’ll always move over to graze where they see the grass is thicker and sweeter. Even Pa wanted something better’n he had, that’s how come he was always hunting for them honey ponds and fritter trees.
I’d see where the train’d take me.
Katy No. 12 was way on down the tracks. Just a dot. Still, a way-off train dot is the prettiest dot you ever seen. Ever since I was a kid, there wasn’t nothing I liked more’n waiting to hop a train. You’d glue your eyes on that dot, hold ’em there … watching it grow … and grow … and GROW … ’til all of a sudden that big iron engine would explode right up on you—bells a-clanging, steam a-hissing, black smoke a-gushing, dragging a line of grumbling, swaying cars that musta each weighed as much as ten elephants.
There wasn’t nothing like it in the whole world.
But when No. 12 come in, there was only a few boxcars on it, and ever’ last one of ’em was locked.
I hit on over to the blinds. The blinds was the second best place to ride, after empty boxcars. That was a little platform at the front of the first car, just behind the coal tender. There wasn’t no window on that car for the conductor to see anybody riding on it. And the engineer or fireman couldn’t see nobody behind ’em either because the coal tender was in the way.
But when I got to the blinds, four tramps was already there. That meant I had to either ride the rods, or ride up on the roof of a boxcar.
I picked the rods.
Lucky for me, I’d thought ahead. The rods was long steel bars that run longways under the train cars to keep ’em from sagging in the middle, and you could ride on top of ’em if you had a good thick board to throw across. Well, I had me a good, thick board—I’d pulled it off a old red barn not a hour before. Still, even with a board, it’s risky business riding the rods. First, you slide yourself under the car and then you lay the board sideways over them long rods and then you lay yourself on top of that board. Flat on your belly, you grab your hands onto whatever you can—a brake pipe, the queen post, whatever. The scary part comes when the train starts moving and you’re looking down and watching them railroad ties and that rocky roadbed whoosh by right under your nose. If you was to slip off and fall, you’d be mashed to dough under them big, grinding wheels. That happened to a lot of hobos.
When I laid down on that board, I held onto the brake pipe so tight there wasn’t a drop of blood left in none of my knuckles. By the time we pulled into San Antone, I was stiff and achy as a old man.
In San Antone, I slid on out and found me a empty Missouri Pacific boxcar. I was ready for a easy ride. That boxcar smelled like moldy corn and body stink. There was a old hobo passed out in the corner of it. He was a-snoring and a-mumbling, and ever’ few seconds one of his legs’d pop up in the air and then clunk back down again. But a empty is a empty and to a train-hopper, riding in a empty is like riding in a Cadillac.
I rode north to Hearne.
Them days, Hearne was a crossroads. There was a big railroad yard, and a jumble of track. ’Course, you can’t go no place ’til you know where it is you wanta go.
North, south, east, west?
What was there for me in any of ’em?
I finally picked north. That’d point me towards Fort Worth.
Back in the pen, Frank Holloway was always talking about Fort Worth like it was one of them cities in the Bible where the roads is paved with gold pebbles. He’d told me that Fort Worth was growing fast into a big city, a city full of “opportunity,” and that things was happening
there. And there was supposed to be a lot of other ex-cons living and working there that wouldn’t see the “mark of Cain” on you.
Maybe Frank’d be there too. Fact is, I’d heard from the grapevine that, sure enough, that’s where he’d gone after he got sprung.
I already knowed a little about Fort Worth from when I was a kid. It was the biggest place near Rising Star and Cisco to do business, and it was a wild town. Full of saloons and gambling joints and bawdy houses and whore cribs. Way on back, Fort Worth was the last main stop on the Chisholm Trail before the cowboys hit on through Indian Territory, and it’s where them old boys went for their last snatches of fun. And even after the trail drives stopped, all the boozing and gambling and whoring places stayed around, and that’s how come Fort Worth was called “Sin City.” If a farm lady’s husband ever had business to do in Fort Worth, soon as he come back home, she’d check him top to bottom for signs of sinning as careful as a rancher’ll look for fever ticks on a cow.
But there was a lot of other things in Fort Worth, too. Big stockyards. And it was where a bunch of railroads come together.
I was curious to see if Frank was right—if all the cow dung in that place was turning into gold pebbles.
I found me a freight on the Fort Worth Southern Pacific line. Only there wasn’t no empties on it.
This time, I decided to deck a rattler, to ride up on top.
On the lid of a boxcar like that, you ain’t so cramped like riding the rods. And you get to see more of the country—the fields and the cows and the birds and the clouds. Only trouble is, there ain’t much to hold onto. And when that train is tearing down the tracks, a-swaying and a-bouncing, full-throttle all the way, curves and ever’thing, and when them big, heavy cars are a-shaking and a-leaning, and the ground down below ain’t nothing but a flash, well, I can tell you, it’s damn spooky. You ain’t really that high offa the ground. But you feel like you’re a mile up in the sky. With nothing to catch you if you fall.
I seen gold my first minute in Fort Worth.
It was on a tooth.
I’d just hopped offa that boxcar and untied my stomach when I seen a “Depot Dolly” swinging her big hips up and down the next track, a passenger line. She smiled over at me and that gold tooth give me a twinkle. Her lips was painted red and she had on a big hat with long, white, fluffy feathers and a lacy dress cut low to show off her big things. I smiled back at her, but my smile wasn’t a “want it” smile, just like her smile wasn’t a “for-sale” smile. Even if I’da wanted it, I wasn’t gonna waste my money on a whore, and she could see right off I wasn’t no moneybags. But depot dollies and train-hoppers got something in common, lots of times, living off the seat of their pants, and that’s how come our smiles was just plain friendly.
I figured the best thing to do, the first thing to do, would be to see if Frank was in town.
I didn’t have no address for him, but things like that never bothered me. What I done was walk around the freight yards ’til I seen a couple of shady-looking characters about to get into a boxcar. I asked ’em if they knowed where there was any hangouts for pimps, prostitutes, and ex-cons. They give me the names of some bootleg beer joints across Main Street.
But as I come up near Main Street, I got stalled out by a huge crowd of people. Hundreds of ’em! All a-cheering and a-hollering and throwing white confetti, so it looked like it was snowing. And then here come the soldiers! Lined up in six rows, clicking their heels and marching: clickity-clomp, clickity-clomp. They was the soldiers coming back from the World War, it was one of them “home parades.”
I stopped to watch. It was right exciting, seeing all them soldiers in their uniforms, and all the flags a-waving. For half a hour, I just stood there and watched ’em go by. But then it come the tailend, and that was harder to swallow. They was the soldiers that had eye patches on or bandages around their heads, or was missing parts of their arms and parts of their legs or whole arms and whole legs. One of ’em, a blonde-headed kid, about eighteen, didn’t have neither one of his legs and there was two men carrying the top half of him—and that’s all there was.
And the more bad off them soldiers was, the louder them people cheered!
All I could think of was this: Poor bastards! Poor, poor, poor bastards! Did them butchered-up servicemen even know why we was fighting that war? Or was they just the ones doing the dirty work, blind, for the ones that had the say in this world? Then, another thought come to me: how it was my “bad luck” that’d saved me from maybe being a butchered-up soldier, too. And how it’s hard to tell, sometimes, if bad luck is really bad luck, or just good luck with a mask on.
I didn’t get drafted into that War, see, on account of that shot-up foot I’d got from that dirty Sweetwater sheriff when I was a kid. Besides that, I was a ex-con, and some of the registration boards was leery of ’em. That was all, maybe, that kept me from getting bayoneted by a Hun, or blowed to shreds by a Turk.
Well, I’ll tell you what: watching them cut-up soldiers made me feel so good about my bad luck it give me fresh wind to hunt for Frank.
I crossed over Main Street and tracked down them beer joints I was told about. At the first one, the door opened just a crack. “What’ya want?” a man snarled. I musta looked like a real hayseed, I was in a sweaty work shirt and a pair of Jess’ bib overalls. “Looking for a man, name of Frank. Slick hair. Straight teeth. Kinda smart-alecky.”
The man slammed the door.
Same thing happened to me at the next joint, and the next one, and at one after that. But at joint number five, somebody give me the goods. It was a lady with red-dyed hair and she thought she knowed who I was talking about. She said to try looking for him at Missus Rinas’ Rooming House, two blocks down, first on the left.
It was a sorry part of town, garbage in the yards and mangy dogs slinking all over. The house was a old two-story frame thing sagging ever’where, run by a thin, squeaky-voiced woman. She told me to go up the stairs and knock on Number 6. And when that door come inching open, and then swinging wide, you’da thought I was Frank’s long-lost brother.
I’d never seen Frank in nothing but his prison clothes, so it took me a bit to get used to his new look. He had on black leather citizen shoes, they looked like they was fresh-shined. And black wool suit pants, they looked fresh-ironed. And a long-sleeve dress shirt, it looked fresh-starched. And at his wrists was cufflinks with diamonds the size of sweet peas. And something else I sure never seen on him in the joint: a arm holster with a .38.
The holster banged up agin my shoulder when Frank throwed his arms out and give me a hug.
“Well, well, well! If it isn’t my old schoolmate, Mister Willis ‘Skinny’ Newton! Skinny Newton! Come on in here, boy! Come on in!”
I took a look around the room. It had gray walls with long streaks of green and brown wiggling down ’em. And it smelled like mold. Still, ever’thing was in its place, just like when we was in the penitentiary. His razor was laid out neat on a table, with a cup of shaving cream next to it. There was a newspaper folded neat on a old stuffed chair. A blanket was folded neat at the end of a narrow bed. And there was one other Holloway thing: a tin coffee pot boiling on a little kerosene stove.
In half a minute we was both drinking stiff black coffee, me setting on the chair, Frank setting on the bed, talking our heads off.
“I can’t say I’m surprised to see you, Skinny,” he said to me. “I had a funny feeling our paths might cross again. ’Course you never know. You just never know. But let me ask you this: You been on the square since you got out?”
“Enough.”
“Well, I tip my hat to you.” And he made out like he was tipping his hat though there was nothing on top of his head except neat-combed black hair.
“You, Frank?” I pointed at his diamond cufflinks.
“Oh, these are just for around the house. This part of town, they’ll chop your hands off for less.” He give a wink, but he didn’t really answer me. He just leaned way forward.
“So, why are you here?”
“Looking for work.”
“Work, huh? Bad time to look. All those war boys coming back.”
“I seen ’em.”
“War boys get first crack at anything worth anything,” he said.
“Don’t surprise me.”
“What kind of work do you think you might want, Skinny?”
“Something that pays good.”
“Well, jobs at the packing house—if you can get one—are up to $3.25 a day. Only twelve hours a day. And they give you Sunday off.”
I give him a look.
“Alright then.” Frank took a big gulp from his coffee. “Let’s get down to business. You want to rob a bank?”
You had to hand it to Frank Holloway. He come right to the point. Not one word wasted. And he done it without changing the look on his face, no more’n if he was asking me if I wanted sugar in my coffee.
“You still robbing banks, Frank?”
“I’m a bank robber. How can I be a bank robber if I don’t rob banks?”
“So you ain’t reformed?” I give a smile.
“Reformed?” Frank went to laughing so hard I thought he’d bust a gut. “Of course I’m reformed. You put a ‘re-’ in front of a word, what does that mean? It means ‘To do again.’ ‘To do anew.’ And that’s exactly what I’m doing. Formed myself right back into one helluva bank robber. Better than before. Learned a few things in the joint last time around. And I can teach ’em to you!”
To be honest, the idea of robbing a bank had come to my mind before. And to be completely honest, the idea of robbing some greedy old banker like Mister H.L. Pike didn’t bother me a’tall. Them bankers never minded hurting us poor cotton farmers, so why should I mind hurting them? It seemed like most rich folks got rich by robbing from poor folks, or by working ’em to death. Even the Bible said it was gonna be harder for a rich man to get into Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. And so most of me was saying: “Hell, yeah, let me in on a bank job!” There was only one thing niggling at me. Rich folks wasn’t the only ones that kept their money in banks. Even Ma’d just opened a account at the Main Street State Bank in Crystal City.
All Honest Men Page 12
