All Honest Men

by Claude Stanush

  Only thing neither me or Joe knowed while we was hard at work inside each one of our banks—coming down Main Street was a farm wagon drawed by two pokey old mules. What that farmer was doing out at one o’clock in the morning we’ll never know.

  But he was heading right for the front of my bank.

  Jess, who was doing lookout on the street, tried to head the old man off. “Hey-a, stop! Stop, you damned fool!”

  The fella kept right on coming. He mighta been drunk; he mighta been half-asleep. I don’t know. But clump, clump, clump. When.…

  BLOOEY!!

  .… Out flied a huge cloud of stuff outa my bank—broke glass, pieces of wood, a twisted-up lamp—right in front of that wagon.

  The mules rared up so high their front legs was just a-pawing the air. And that farmer wheeled his wagon around and started barrelling down the street, helty-skelty, whipping them mules into a froth.

  Only problem was, he was headed right for Joe’s bank.

  BLOOEY!

  Joe’s first shot went off. And ever’thing come flying outa his bank—window frames, doors, broke chairs and tables, pieces of rock wall.

  Well, them mules stopped dead in their tracks, skidding the wagon half way across the street. Then they started to rare again. This time the farmer just jumped the hell outa his wagon and started to running to beat the devil, back towards my bank, when.…

  BLOOEY!!

  I’d had to put another shot in the vault, and that’s when the second one went off. And Jesus Christ! Off flied the vault door, and crash went ever’ window in near ever’ building on that block!

  When I looked out the bank’s window—or what was left of it—I seen that farmer wheel around and start a-hollering and race down that street so fast his legs was just a blur.

  Jess was laughing so hard you’da thought he was gonna bust a gut.

  Me and the boys had a better night than that farmer. Altogether, we netted $33,000. Not bad for one hour’s work. And another notch toward that million dollars.

  There was only a coupla things wrong with my life right then. For one thing, more and more of the little banks in the little towns was starting to get them round, screw-in safes we couldn’t blow, and that meant that I was having to search harder and farther away for marks—from deep south Texas to western Canada.

  And that little worry tied in with another little worry. Louise.

  The more I was starting to care about that woman, the more I was hating to stay away on so many of them long trips. And she was starting to have some questions about my work. A couple of times she asked to see my oil-lease papers ’cause she was interested in business things.

  I never could find ’em.

  TWENTY-THREE

  There was a cigarette burning on a little saucer next to her stove. She was stirring something in a pot. I went up behind her and give her a nuzzle. I was just back from a job in Kansas.

  “Lewis let me in. I missed you like crazy, Lou.”

  She didn’t even turn around. Just picked up that cigarette and give it a puff.

  “When you start smoking, honey?” I asked her.

  “I smoke now and then.”

  “I never seen it before.”

  “You’re not around a lot of the time.” She still hadn’t turned towards me. Her voice sounded kinda chilly.

  “Something up, Lou?”

  “I’d like to talk. But not here. And not—” She stopped. A little Stetson’d showed up at the door, and the boy under it was saying he was hungry.

  Louise was quiet all through supper. Afterwards, she told Lewis to go to his room. He give me a hug, but he was looking glum. Kids ’r like dogs on that. They can tell when things ’r tense. And things was tense. Though I didn’t know how come.

  Then Louise picked up her handbag and went out the back door. I was on her heel. Soon as we was outside, I asked her, again, what the hell was up.

  “I’m not ready yet.” That’s all she said.

  We kept walking ’til we come to a park that had some patches of grass and a couple of benches. Wasn’t nobody else close by, only a couple of kids playing tag over a ways.

  For a little bit, we just set and watched two squirrels, chattering and racing up and down a tree limb.

  “When I was a kid, blooey!” I put my arms up like I was putting a bead on one of ’em. “I could blow a eye out at forty steps.”

  Louise didn’t say nothing. She popped open her handbag and pulled out a pack of Camels.

  “You ever ate squirrel dumplings?” I asked her.

  She didn’t say nothing, just lit her cigarette.

  “My Ma made ’em. I can still taste ’em. ’Course if the bullet’s tore up the body, the meat’s spoilt. That’s how come you gotta hit ’em in the eye. We had squirrel all the time. Hell, anything with four legs and paws, we ate it. Squirrel. Possum. Coon. We was just like coyotes who’ll eat anything. ’Course, lots of times we didn’t have enough to eat.”

  For the first time since we’d set down, she turned and looked at me. “I really don’t want to hear any more stories about how bad you had it when you were a boy.”

  Then she went to puffing.

  We just set there, quiet.

  Lemme tell you about quiets. There’s all kinds.

  When it comes to ever’day life, the best kinds of quiets ’r what I call the “soft quiets.” That’s like when you’re prowling the woods come a morning, maybe there’s a little breeze blowing, and the sun is splintering down through the trees. I’m not saying it’s altogether quiet. There could be a mockingbird up in a tree going tcack, tcack, tcack; or a armadillo pawing up some leaves. But mostly it’s quiet, and quiets like that ’r the best quiets that there is.

  Then there’s what I call the “sharp quiets,” and those ’r like when it’s late at night, and maybe you’re on a job, cutting a fuse or thumbing soap into a rim, and your ears ’r cocked for the laws, or a nighthack, or any sound that tells you there’s trouble. Sharp quiets put a edge on your nerves, and sometimes your heart is thumping so hard you think it’s booming loud as a drum, even though it ain’t making a sound. But even if them quiets is sharp, you want ’em to go on, long as you need ’em.

  And there’s a third kind of quiet, and that’s the kind you want to stop even before they get going. Those’re what I call the “heavy quiets.” And those’re the awful quiets. That’s like when two people ’r near each other, and there’s some trouble in the air, something tense, but nobody’s saying nothing. Oh, you want to say something, all the pistons in your head ’r going a-dukeda, a-dukeda. But you ain’t saying nothing, and the other person ain’t saying nothing. It’s like the air is froze up. And ain’t nothing worse than them heavy quiets.

  Well, this was one of them heavy quiets, what me and Louise was having. Nobody saying nothing, me just watching them squirrels, her puffing on that cigarette.

  After a while, I couldn’t take it no more. I got off the bench and crouched in front of her.

  “You gotta let me in on it, Lou.”

  She throwed down her cigarette. She ground on it with the tip of her shoe. She ground it and ground it. So hard there wasn’t nothing left of it. Then she pressed her fingers tight around the edge of the bench.

  “I’m not a widow, Will.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to know that I’m not a widow. I’m divorced.”

  “Divorced? Why you been saying you was a widow?”

  Her voice was shaky. “I learned a long time ago, it’s a lot more acceptable for a woman to have a dead husband than be divorced. Particularly if that dead husband is a dead war veteran.”

  “I don’t get it, honey. Why’d you think I’d care if you was divorced?”

  “It scares off some men.”

  Well, lemme tell you what: all I could do right then was grab both her hands and throw my head back and go to laughing. That’s what was making her act so crazy? A silly little lie?

  “Honey, I got plenty-a scares
in my life,” I said to her, “but I’ll tell you this, a divorced woman ain’t one of ’em.”

  Something come to me.

  “He wanting you back?” I asked. “He live here?”

  “He lives in St. Louis. We don’t see each other.” Now her eyes was starting to blink kinda fast. “I’m telling you this because I think people who are in love need to be completely honest with each other.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think people who are in love need to be completely honest with each other.” She said it again.

  I nodded my head. What could I say to that?

  Now she was starting to breathe fast. Just like she was blinking fast. “Is there anything you’re not telling me about your life?”

  Uh-oh.

  “Like what, Lou?”

  She pulled her hands outa mine. She leaned down and picked up her handbag and unsnapped it. She pulled out some kind of a white envelope. She opened it up. It crackled. She pulled out a bunch of pieces of papers. They crackled too. They looked like newspaper.

  “Can you tell me what these are?”

  “What are they?”

  “Read them.”

  I didn’t need to read ’em. I was looking down at the headlines and that was enough. Way, way more’n enough. “Missouri Bank Takes Hit in Nightime Crime.” “Airplane Used to Hunt New Braunfels Bandits.” “Denver Mint Robbed of $100,000 in Brand-New Bills and Silver.”

  “What are these, Lou?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “Where’d they come from?”

  “I found them in that last book you gave Lewis. They were stuck in one of the middle pages.”

  Goddamn! It was a book about a cowhorse. I’d had it in my hotel room before I give it to Lewis, and Joe musta found it. You couldn’t trust Joe if he was anywhere close to a book!

  “There you go, Lou. This stuff’s Joe’s. He musta stole off and read it. Just marking a page, most likely. Joe’s crazy like that. He’s always clipping things outa the newspaper. Baseball statistics, all kinds of things.…”

  “Did you have anything to do with these?”

  “Why’d you think that?”

  “Things are starting to fall together.” The muscles in her throat was hopping up and down. “All kinds of things. Like those coins.”

  “That money was from a oil strike, honey.” I’d give her a box of silver dollars to put under a floorboard for safekeeping right before I’d left town for the Kansas trip. They was fresh-minted.

  “You know where they are now, Will?”

  “Where?”

  “I took them to the Omaha State Bank. It was too much money to have in the house. I deposited them, right before I found these …”

  She pointed to the newspaper stories.

  Well, it was ever’thing I could do right then to keep my eyes straight on Louise’s. Goddamn! A bank! If them bankers was ever to put two and two together … goddamn … I couldn’t keep Louise’s look. My eyes shifted.

  She seen ’em shifting.

  “Will.”

  For the first time in my life, I knowed what a squirrel feels like when he looks down off a limb and sees the barrel of a .22 aiming up.

  It wasn’t ’til I thought over ever’thing later, hours later, that I even remembered some of what it was that I said next. Most times, I had one of them picture memories, like I said before. But I’d be hard pressed to tell you ever’thing I said, or how I said it, or what order I said it in.

  Times like that, it ain’t your mind that’s telling you what to do anyhow.

  It’s more like your bones.

  I do remember that I took her hands again. And somewhere in there, I said:

  “We don’t hurt nobody, Lou. You gotta know that.”

  “It’s just a business, like any other business.”

  “It’s just ’til I can go straight. ’Til I can be that oil man.”

  I do remember how, in the beginning, she yanked her hands back and her whole body started shaking. She wasn’t crying right off. But her body was shaking.

  I do know that I told her: “I got a brain, honey. Only I didn’t get no education. I wanted to go to school. Only I couldn’t. You gotta understand that. You gotta think about that real hard, Lou, and understand that.”

  And somewhere in there, she did go to crying. She put her hands over her eyes and she went to crying. And I put my hands on her knees and held ’em there, like a little kid that’s trying to hold a balloon so it don’t fly off.

  I told her this: “It ain’t like you think, Lou. Nobody loses nothing, see. All them banks got insurance. And insurance companies is the biggest crooks in the world.”

  I asked her this: “You worked with all them insurance companies at the Burlington, honey. They ever put the screws on you to turn down claims that you knowed good and well was legitimate?”

  And she raised her head up outa her hands and said in a whisper that was worse’n if she was hollering: “Insurance companies don’t stick guns in people’s faces.”

  I grabbed her hands tight: “No, no, no. You got that all wrong. We don’t shoot people. We don’t hurt nobody. That ain’t the way this thing works. You gotta believe me.”

  I leaned my face way down, right under hers, and said: “You go home, honey, and you ask your boy how he feels about me. You ask him what kind of a man I am. You can’t fool a kid.”

  And I remember seeing two old shoes in the corner of my eye and it was a old lady walking by and then them shoes was poking right next to me and the old lady was saying: “Your wife all right, mister? Your wife need a doctor?”

  “Don’cha worry, ma’am,” I said back. “Somebody jus’ died.”

  “Oh dear, God be with ’em,” the old lady said. And outa the corner of my eye, I seen them two old shoes shuffling off.

  All that was true, what I’d told that old lady. Somebody had just died. Will Reed, the oil man, was dead.

  All that was left was J. Willis Newton, the bank robber.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  HUGE GUSHER RAINS OIL OVER A THOUSAND ACRES NEAR SMACKOVER!

  The headline was a-hollering off the front page of the Omaha World Herald, and that’s what snagged my eye and pulled a nickel outa my pocket.

  The story told about how, used to be, Smackover was just a dumpy little old town down south in Arkansas, near the border of Louisiana. It said that, used to be, it was such a dumpy little old town where the only thing you was likely to see moving down the only street in town’d be some lazy old razorback hog.

  But things was changing.

  Turns out, oil drillers’d been out in a old cotton patch when a fountain of black crude come shooting up two hundred feet in the air, and raining down over a thousand acres, just like it was a spring shower. Folks said they could smell that oil ten miles in ever’ direction.

  Me, I was smelling that oil from six hundred miles north.

  “This is it!” I hollered back at that headline.

  I’d been reading the papers close ever’ day since Louise’d found me out. If I wanted to get her back, for the long picture, I figured my best chance was to get into oil, and legitimate. I knowed there was maybe a chance she’d take me back as a bank robber if she thought over ever’thing I’d told her, and if there was enough love there. But I knowed my chances’d be a helluva lot bigger if I could show her a oil lease.

  No matter how much I tried to talk to her again, she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t answering my telephone calls. She wasn’t coming to the door when I showed up at her house. She wasn’t looking at me from the cigar stand.

  It was killing me, the whole thing.

  Now that I knowed Louise, now that I loved her, I couldn’t think of my life without her.

  The papers was full of oil news. Stories about wells being drilled in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana. But most of ’em was “wildcats,” the kind they drilled in new country hoping for a lucky strike. Smackover was a diff’rent story. Geologists was saying
the whole area—that hard-packed red sand—might be atop a big huge lake of oil.

  Fact is, I’d always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to get in on the ground floor of a oil boom. Oil could do for me what cotton, or even robbing banks, never could. If you hit her right, blooey! One day you’d be a dirt-poor farmer slicing your bacon paper-thin; next day, you’d be rich enough to buy every goddamn hog from Texas to Canada.

  And I had near enough money to get into oil.

  Just near enough.

  The same day I seen that story about Smackover, I told my brothers to meet me in my hotel room for supper. I had room service send ’em up what the menu said was “extra-thick-cut ribeye steaks from cornfed Kansas steers.” And after they’d ate them steaks, and was feeling settled in their guts, I told ’em about what I just read. I told ’em Smackover was a great deal, we might never find another one like it, but that we had to do it fast or we’d be at the tail end of a stampede.

  All three of ’em balked.

  “I might could-a helped you out, old man, but not now.” Joe was the first one to talk. Only he kept throwing his eyes on his lap. “There’s a big ranch down in Uvalde County on the block. Ain’t there yet, but I’m close. Thirty-five thousand. Soon’s I get enough, I’m fixing to …” Now he was talking full-time to his crotch. “… I’m fixing to head back to Texas. I been meaning to tell you.”

  “I’m throwing in with Joe, old man.” That was Jess, only he didn’t have no problem looking me square. “I been meaning to tell you.”

  Dock didn’t say nothing. Just shook his head. I knowed what he was saying.

  Yeah.

  “Well, I’ve been meaning to tell you this, boys.” I shook my head slow. “The laws are still trying to find somebody to pin them jobs in Hondo and Boerne on. You put up cash money like that in South Texas—big cash money—they’re gonna wanta know where it all come from. And oil money’s a lot cleaner’n what you got now.”

  Jess snorted. He pulled his Colt out and started spinning it.