Now, a half inch.
KA-BLOOOEY!
Dust flied! The safe bounced forwards! The door blowed halfways across the room! The big plate glass window in front of the bank cracked like a rifle shot!
And money flowed out like a river.
SIXTEEN
Trouble come diff’rent than I thought it would.
It was the dead of winter, about eight months after we first put our team together. A mean norther’d just blowed up and was she a-whistling! Cold, cold, cold. We was driving down a rutty little country lane, about thirty miles north of Fort Worth.
Me, Dago and Frank. No Slim.
We was in a Model T touring car, no roof on it. Frank was driving. That Model T was a-bouncing and a-creaking. And that icy wind was cutting right through us, even though we was all in heavy brush jackets. Our teeth was a-clattering near as much as that car.
When we come to a clearing, Frank steered offa the lane. We bounced on over that open place, and then he ducked the car in a clump of trees.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s get it done.”
We took tools outa the back. I took a grubbing hoe; Frank got a shovel; the Dago, a pick and a ax. We pushed our way through thick scrub ’til Frank pointed to a bare spot on the ground.
“There,” he said.
We went at it.
At first, we was digging and hacking so hard that dirt was a-flying and rocks a-flinging and roots a-snapping. Even Frank, that lazy old louse, was kicking up a sweat. After a while, though, one or the other of us’d slow up. It wasn’t that we was getting wore out. I think we was working like we was feeling about what we was doing, and that was flip-flopping.
Finally, the Dago straightened up. “I think we’ve got it.”
“Not quite.” Frank motioned him back to work. “He’s not a stump like you. He’s six feet.”
The Dago give a snort, but went back to digging. This time, I just stuck my hoe in the dirt and leaned on it.
Frank give me a look. “Get back to it, Skinny. It’s not a murder. It’s just a killing.”
Now lemme tell you what brung all this on: After our last job, Slim’d gone out and spent $2,500 on clothes and hid another $3,500 in a old cedar trunk at his sister’s house. Then what’d he do? Told his sister and her husband what was in the trunk, and where it come from. How come? God knows how come. Maybe he’d been drinking. All I know is it was one big, bad mistake. His kin was all sorry people—pimps and whores and drug-peddlers. Anyhow, one day that money disappeared. Slim knowed who took it: his brother-in-law. But when Slim wanted it back, that old boy said, “Hell, no. It ain’t really yours, Slim.” Before long, a dozen other of Slim’s people knowed about the robberies.
One of ’em was sure to rat.
For those that don’t know about it, the State of Texas in them days offered a $25 bounty to snitches.
It was a hard call, what we was about to do to Slim. But I was just as burned at that old boy as Frank and the Dago was. Slim was the one that’d preached the rule, and here he was, first one to break it! And if he done that, who knows what else he’d do? Meantime, if one of his sorry kin snitched, we could be waylaid by the laws. Maybe get sent back to the joint. Maybe get hung if there was a shootout and one of the police got killed. You could say, it was Slim’s life or our lives, and when it’s you agin them, who you gonna pick?
But which one of us was gonna have to lay down the law?
When the hole looked big enough, Frank come out with a silver dollar. “Everybody throw. Odd man out. You first, Skinny.”
I throwed and lifted my hand. It was tails.
“Dago.”
Dago throwed and lifted his hand. Heads. If Frank’s dollar come out heads, I’d be the odd man.
Frank throwed.
I had my eyes glued on the top of his hand. I’ll be honest, I didn’t wanta be the one.
He pulled it up.
Tails!
The Dago didn’t bat a eye. “Alright then. Only I ain’t gonna shoot him, if that’s okay with you, boys. My hell is bashing. But I’ll bash him ’til he’s gone.”
It was so cold his words come out in little white clouds.
So what do you do when you’re waiting to kill a man?
You make you some coffee.
Frank went back to the clearing and picked up dead kindling and branches lying around, and made a little fire. And being that he had to have his coffee no matter wherever he was, he brung out a little tin pot. There was water already in it, so he just dumped in a handful of coffee grinds that come outa a paper bag.
A ways off, we could see the Dago hacking a thick branch offa a big tree. Then he chopped a three foot length. Then he crashed it agin the trunk of the tree to test it. WHAM! WHAM! It was rock solid.
Before long, we was all setting on a log in front of a crackling fire, drinking coffee. Just the smell of it, and the smell of that burning wood, was enough to make a man feel good. Only I was thinking over what was gonna happen. It was bad enough if we was gonna shoot Slim; smashing his head was something else. I was the one that’d told him to meet us in the woods. I’d made up a story with lots of detail: that we’d got a good tip on a whiskey shipment of 150 gallons; it was coming by boat up a river nearby, and we was gonna waylay it at a secret dock; that we was gonna need two cars to lug off all them gallons.
“He’s late,” Frank said. He seemed kinda rubbed that Slim was late for his own funeral.
“Maybe he caught on,” Dago said.
“Maybe … no, what’s that?”
At a distance, we could hear the chug-chug of a car motor. As it come down the lane, we could see headlights a-bouncing, two big white moons, over the deep ruts. For a little bit, we couldn’t tell what kind of car it was. I stiffed up, and Frank and the Dago stiffed up too. What if Slim’d got wind of what was up and sent out some of his thug relations?
Or, if somebody’d ratted, maybe it was a decoy for the laws.
But when the car got closer, I seen it was our Studebaker Big-Six, and then I seen Slim’s thick neck. He was by hisself.
When Slim turned off into the clearing he drove it up to the fire and got out.
“Damn country roads all look alike,” he said. “Sorry. Ain’t we gotta go?”
Frank handed Slim a tin cup of coffee. “We want to go over things one last time. Sit down.”
“I thought we gotta be there before four.”
“We’ll make it,” Frank said.
Slim took the coffee, but he didn’t set down right off. He kept standing; his right hand was in his overcoat pocket. I think he’d got a whiff of something along with that coffee.
I smiled at Slim, to put him at his ease. “You know the dock?”
He shook his head. “I thought I was gonna follow you.”
“Yeah, you are.”
Now Slim’s eyes was shifting side to side. “We still gonna take it to that warehouse?”
The Dago shook his head. “We’re gonna bury it.”
“Why you wanta bury it?”
The Dago give Slim a queer look. “Safer that way.”
Frank couldn’t stand it no more, the waiting. He went off a few yards into the brush and turned his back on us, like he was taking a leak.
Slim kept shifting his eyes, from Frank’s backside to me to the Dago and back to Frank’s backside.
The Dago acted like he was shivering. “Damn, it’s cold out here. Fire’s getting puny.”
He walked off like he was gonna look for some wood.
Slim’s eyes followed the Dago. Then he turned his head back quick to look at me. He looked me right in the eye. I looked straight back at him. He couldn’t tell nothing from my eyes.
WHAM! Slim musta seen it coming at the last second. He ducked. The limb slammed him on the shoulder. Throwed him tumbling backwards.
“E-e-e-e-y-o-o-o-w!”
He hollered, like a cornered, snarling bobcat.
Then he was back up on his feet. Quicker’n I ever thought he could get up.
And with his left hand he was pulling something outa his pocket. There come a spitting, hissing sound, and a streak of red light.
Then Slim’s gun jammed. He turned and run off towards the woods.
The bullet’d just glanced the Dago’s left arm. “Goddammit to hell!” He tried to yank his own pistol out, but it took him a while to do it, being that he’d been shot. When he did, he fired into the dark after Slim, and kept it up until the hammer clicked empty.
Wasn’t no sounds after that. Either the Dago’d got Slim, or Slim was just crouching down there, out in that brush, playing possum.
Now Frank was back, his gun out.
“Little late for that, Frank! How come I’m always looking at your ass!” The Dago give Frank a look, then went to checking out his shot. There was a trickle of blood coming outa a hole in his jacket.
Frank crab-walked sideways over to me. He said in a low voice, “You know Slim better than I do. Yell out there. Tell him to come back, we won’t bother him. Then I’ll shoot the son-of-a-bitch.”
“Put it down, Frank,” I said. “If he ain’t dead already, nobody’s gonna shoot him. We’ll just cut him out.”
The left side of Frank’s top lip went up. “What?”
“We made our point.”
“You kidding me?”
“It ain’t worth it, Frank,” I said. “It’s just gonna bring down more trouble.”
Frank looked over at the Dago, to get some back-up. But the Dago didn’t give him none. He never liked taking Frank’s side, if he had a say in it, no matter what the deal was.
Frank rolled his eyes. “Alright, but it’s a bad mistake.”
I hollered out into the brush, “Come on back, Slim! You brung this all on yourself. You know that. You was the one that preached that rule. But ain’t nobody gonna hurt you.”
Nothing.
I hollered again, “Get on back! Ain’t nobody gonna do nothing. You got my word.”
There was some rustling and a body—big and black in the dark—come out between two bushes. I was surprised he come back. I guess he trusted me. Or maybe he was gonna trick us.
The fire was throwing little patches of light on him. I seen he had his gun out. On the ready.
Me and Frank grabbed our own pistols. “I’m being straight with you, Slim,” I said. “Use your head.”
He didn’t say nothing. His jaw was tight.
He inched hisself up closer to the fire.
Frank’s pistol was aimed dead-eye. “Get out of Texas, Slim. You can have the car. Go back to Fort Worth, get your things, get out of Texas. Drive as far west as you can go. Go to California. Stay there.”
Slim sucked in a breath and nodded.
I walked him over to the car. He musta still suspicioned something, he kept his hand on his gun. But when he finally climbed in, I told him in a low voice, “If I’da lost the toss, I don’t think I coulda done it, Slim. I want you to know that. But they got a hole dug out yonder. And it ain’t going nowhere. You best stay gone.”
SEVENTEEN
We didn’t have no choice.
After that thing in the woods with Slim, me and Frank and the Dago for once thought the same way about something. We’d move our headquarters. We didn’t wanta risk that Slim’s kin’d rat on us, even if they hadn’t done it yet. And we couldn’t know for sure that Slim’d really go off to California. Frank kept saying it was a big mistake to let him go anywheres but into that hole.
So we cleared outa Fort Worth and cut on up to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
How come Tulsa?
Back in the way old days, Oklahoma—like Texas—was settled by a lot of bad seeds. A lot of ’em was folks that’d stole something, or killed somebody somewheres else, and so they headed to Oklahoma to live, where they could be in peace. Well, a lot of them bad seeds spit out more bad seeds, and so on, down the line. And when the oil boom hit, that drawed in even more.
We’d have lots of good company. The state was swarming with thieves and ex-cons. Some of ’em was selling bogus oil leases or shares in bogus drilling companies. Others of ’em made money offa bootlegging. And there was plenty of other crooks in Tulsa, too. Ever’ kind you could think of—forgers, gamblers, embezzlers, honkey-tonkers, even hit men.
It didn’t take Frank two days to find somebody to take Slim’s place.
Frank knowed the fella from prison, a guy that’d been in for “assault,” but Frank said the guy never assaulted nobody that didn’t deserve to be assaulted. Mostly, this fella was a bank robber. Frank said the guy’s old “Wanted” posters called him one of the most “notorious bank burglars” in the U.S. and Canada. He had about ten aliases—A.M. Graham, Little Mizzou, Claude White, and a bunch of others—but his real name was Brentwood Glasscock.
“He’s a top box man,” Frank said. “And a great car mechanic. And he’s got a good web of tipsters. Knows every crook between New York and San Francisco. Only problem with him is he’s got stomach trouble, but he’s got a wife who used to be a nurse and she takes care of him.”
I didn’t like the fella’s looks. It wasn’t that he was ugly. Fact is, he was handsome, near six foot, with a strong chin and neat-trimmed hair. But his cheeks was kinda sucked in, I guess because of his stomach trouble. And I could tell he was one of them skittery types. I could tell that by how he moved his head, like he was always shaking a gnat offa his face.
“My name’s Brentwood,” he said the first time we met. “But call me whatever you’d like, Willis. I answer to just about everything.”
“I hear you get around,” I said back.
“I have. I do.” He smiled.
Well, I checked with the grapevine and even with them sucked-in cheeks and that twitchy head, Glasscock did have a good rep as a bank robber. And with Frank pushing so hard for him, finally I said okay.
Glasscock always wore a bullet-proof vest, and he was always looking over his shoulder. He was skittery, like I thought he’d be. But he knowed a helluva lot about grease, more’n even the Dago. Like he knowed how to blow the doors off the better-milled safes and the better-built vaults.
I was learning a lot.
None of us liked it that Glasscock always wanted to bring his wife on our trips. She was a tall, skinny blonde with round glasses and a pinched face, like she’d been eating green apples. And she was always preaching the Bible. She didn’t believe in stealing. But Glasscock said he had to have her along to make sure he got his stomach medicine.
As it come out, though, Glasscock’s bad gut had its good side.
He started having a hard time tolerating the nitro fumes, said that they was making him sick to his stomach. So he didn’t have no problem with me and the Dago doing all the blows—with him just teaching us his tricks.
What helped even more, we got us a tipster down south that was a detective with the Texas Bankers Association. The tipster knowed almost ever’ bank in Texas that had one of them old, square safes. He was about to retire, see, and he wanted to make some extra cash so he could hunt and fish the rest of his life.
He sold us a list of about fifteen or twenty banks for $3,000.
For a little bit, I was leery about using them tips. How’d we know the tipster wasn’t doing a double-cross? But we hit a couple of the banks on his list, just to test, and ever’thing went okay.
By the time summer break come around, my haul was up past $120,000.
A hundred and twenty thousand dollars!
Before, that $70,000 seemed like a million dollars. Now it begun to look like piker change.
And I finally was learning how to spend that money.
We was staying at the best hotel in Tulsa. I’d registered under the name “Will Reed” and when anybody asked me my business, I said “Texas oil man.” Ever’ inch of that hotel was first-class. Marble floors. Lamps with sparkly glass. Little bellboys that bowed at you like you was a king. I’d set on them shoe-shine stands in the lobby, they was like thrones, and goddamn, I’d feel like I was a king.
I had me
a favorite shine boy, Booty Blue Tindle, and I liked to watch his fingers fly in and out of that polish and wax, and I’d think how my own fingers used to fly in and outa them cotton burrs.
“You ever pick cotton?” I asked Booty Blue one time.
He flicked his shine rag out so it give a loud pop. “Did a nigga pick cotton? I reckon I picked ’nough cotton to stuff this whole, entire hotel. Yessir. Only I likes this job lots better. Sun don’t burns your head in here.”
“The day I left the patch,” I said to him, “I never did look back.”
“Well, my, my, Mister Reed. You wuz a cotton picker before you wuz a oil man?”
“Yessir.”
“Then we’s alike, Mister Reed.” He give his rag another pop. “We’s both sorry ole cotton-pickers that’s moved up in this big ole world. And you knows how come? ’Cause we knows how to work. The patch’ll shore teach a man how’ta work. Some shine boys, aw, you might as well get a dog to lick your shoes. Me, I never do a half-job.”
Booty Blue’s shines was only a dime, but I’d always peel off a crisp dollar bill when I give him that dime. He was right. We was alike. Except that he was colored and he was still poor.
No, I wasn’t poor no more. Fact is, I was moving up pretty fast to rich.
The best thing I liked to do with all that money was tip. To me, it was kinda like dealing cards. I’d peel the top bill off a roll with one finger, then I’d take that bill between my thumb and forefinger and stuff it in somebody’s pocket. Or, if it was a tip for food, I’d fan the bills next to my plate. And I’d call ’em all “sir,” if they was men or boys waiting on me, didn’t matter, and if they was a lady I seen all the time—like a waitress or a desk clerk—I’ve give her a nickname. “Gimme a smile, Miss Susie Belle. Gimme a smile.”
The bigger the tip, the bigger they smiled.
But even if I was staying in slicked-up hotels and eating good food and getting my shoes shined ever’ other day, something was missing.
I ain’t saying women wasn’t around. They was, droves of ’em. Droves and droves. Most of ’em smiling. And in the big cities, our getaway car, that shiny-black Studebaker Big-Six, was better’n diamonds to pull ’em in. Just drive along a downtown street in Tulsa, Memphis, Kansas City, Omaha, and stop on the corner where gals is waiting to get on the street car. They’d jump right in with you, they would, nine times outa ten. And five times outa ten, they’d stay all night with you. I called them gals “Streetcar Sallies.”
All Honest Men Page 16
