I looked over at Jess and Dock. “You know, boys, this is a family business. How ’bout it?”
They knowed what I was saying, but they didn’t say nothing back. Their faces was droopy. I seen Dock’s Adam’s apple go up and down as he gulped air.
“Look-it,” I said, “that was what they call a ‘hundred-year’ flood.’ Ain’t gonna be another one ’til the year twenty and twenty-two. And we’ll be dead as dogs by then. But we can be rich as Rockefeller in three months if you help us out here. Me and Joe need $30,000, that’s it. All we gotta do is pump the water outa them wells and build some new derricks. We’ll give you fifty percent interest.”
Dock ’n Jess still didn’t answer. They just looked at each other with them droopy faces.
“What’s your problem? Me ’n Joe was the ones that got busted, not you.”
“Me ’n Jess ’r busted too,” Dock said.
“What?”
“Reckon we went to the tables.”
“You what?”
“Aw, don’t give us that ‘you what?’” That was Jess this time. “We wasn’t doing nothing you wasn’t doing, old man. You tell me the diff’rence between a bad hand and Noah’s flood! Exact same thing!”
“It ain’t nowhere near the same! Nowhere near it!” What fools! If it wouldna been for that hundred-year flood, me ’n Joe coulda been millionaires right then. But ain’t no way you can beat professional gamblers.
Dock had a bright idea. “How ’bout we borrow some money from that gal of yours?”
“A widow with a kid? No, boys, this one we gotta figure out ourselves.”
The one I most hated to talk to after the oil-bust thing was Louise. She’d been quiet all the way back from Smackover and I figured this time she was really gonna give me my walking papers.
I couldn’t hardly believe it when she opened her door and run her hand over my forehead, like I was a kid with a skinned-up knee.
“You feeling any better?” she asked.
“Hell, no.”
“Come upstairs.”
Well, I’ll tell you what, if I’d coulda knowed what was coming up next, I never woulda flopped on her bed like I done. But Smackover had sucked the starch outa me. So I flopped, my legs and arms throwed ever’ which-a-way, my neck hanging off the edge like there wasn’t no neckbone in it.
Louise walked over to the little desk she had in the corner. She opened up a drawer. She pulled some pieces of paper outa it. She come back over and laid them on the bed.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Newspaper stories. Read them.”
“Last time you give me some newspaper clippings, honey, things ended up a little bit sour.”
“Read them.”
“I’d have to set up.”
“Alright. Lay there then, but listen.”
She picked the stories up and started reading ’em out loud.
They was about oil.
They was stories about oil strikes in this state and that state, about how oil companies was being set up in this place and that place, and about what kinda frauds to watch out for, and what kinda promotors to believe. They was stories about things like the Arkansas Oil Trust and about Burkburnett and about Mexia, even about the oil boom down in Eastland County in West Texas.
I set up.
“When you get interested in oil, Lou?”
She set the papers back on the bed, kneeled in front of me and said something that near knocked me back down: “You’re not the only one who wants something out of life, Willis. I think if we put our heads together, we can get into it smarter next time.”
“I’m busted, honey.”
“You know how to get more money.”
“What are you saying?”
“You remember when you told me to ask Lewis what he thought of you. Well, two times, I told Lewis I was leaving you, moving back to Wisconsin. And two times he told me that if I was leaving, he was staying. With you.” She took my hand. “That’s about all I have to say about it. I want to manage your money. I’ll be your banker.”
“I still don’t know what you’re saying here, Lou.”
“Just keep it out of town.”
You ever found out something you didn’t know about somebody, and all of a sudden, that person looks completely diff’rent to you? Well, I looked at Louise while she was kneeling there, and she looked completely diff’rent to me. Like when it comes a six o’clock sun, and it’s hitting a maize field, and it lights up the tassels on the stalks and makes ’em look like that whole field is on fire. That’s just how Louise looked. Like she was lit up around the edges, and on fire.
And while I was setting there, looking at Louise, you know what else come to me?
My old Uncle Henry.
Uncle Henry was meaner’n dirt, but he was sharp, too, and something he always said stuck in my head: “I never had no trouble in my life figuring out dogs and cows and men. They usually act pretty much like you expect ’em to. But I give up, I give plumb up, when it come to cats and horses and women.”
After a little bit, I give Louise a surprise of my own. “You know, honey, if you’re gonna be messing with my money, I’m gonna have to keep a close eye on you. Let’s get married.”
I wasn’t planning on asking her that when I come over that day. But I wasn’t expecting none of what was happening.
What the hell? I asked it.
She smiled at me. “You can’t make an honest woman out of me, Willis, until you’re an honest man.”
“Oh, I’m honest, honey. I just ain’t straight.”
“That’s an interesting distinction.”
“Well, how about we just play-act then? ’Til I get me a couple of them gushers.”
“Play-act?”
“Set up house. Act like we’re married.”
“Wouldn’t that be setting a bad example for your brothers?” She give me another smile.
“C’mon honey. It’s a cupboard here. We’ll get us a nice big house. You and me and Lewis. We’ll be a family. We’ll play-act it all the way. I’ll get you a ring. I’ll give you a name. Hell, we’ll even take us a honeymoon.”
“I don’t know, Willis.”
“I’ll keep things outa town, honey.”
“What would my name be?”
“I got lots of ’em. You get your pick.”
TWENTY-SIX
Dock didn’t know what a honeymoon was.
“Oh, Mother of God, what’ll they come up with next?” he said, and he shook his head a few times like the whole thing wasn’t nothing but a damn shame. “Back home, gal just packs up the wagon and moves her things from her folks’ house to his folks’ house, and it’s all done. That’s it. So don’t you go spending none of my money on no honeymoon.”
“Don’t worry, Dock. You ain’t got no money.”
That was the truth. God’s awful truth. He was broke. I was broke. All of us boys was broke.
We could barely buy us a hamburger. Much less me and Louise go on a honeymoon.
The week after me and Joe got smacked over at Smackover, and after Jess and Dock got smacked over by them dirty gamblers, my mind was racing helty-skelty: Ought we hit out farther West for fresh marks, maybe Oregon or Washington State? Could our tipster that was retired from the Texas Banker’s Association maybe hook us up with crooked bank detectives, like him, but in other states? Was there any other tipsters who might could—
I hit on it.
Brentwood Glasscock.
Glasscock showed up at our boardinghouse in a nice suit with a fresh-brushed derby and fresh-shined Oxfords.
Bringing somebody new to our team wasn’t something I’d counted on, or wanted. Particularly another ex-con that maybe you could count on, maybe you couldn’t. That risk was why I’d got shed of Glasscock in the first place. But I also knowed he was a gold mine when it come to tipsters.
The boys was leery at first. They wasn’t used to outsiders. But I told it to ’em this way:
“Glasscock�
��s got a web of tipsters you can’t beat. He can let us in on where the real money’s at. The big hauls, not the scraps we’d been getting. Think about it this way: Do you get more meat cutting up a big fat hog into five pieces, or a scrawny little squirrel into fours?”
Glasscock joined the team.
Only problem: the first tips he give us was squirrels.
He thought we should try robbing trains for a little bit, that he could get tips on trains from his underworld friends, just like he could get tips on banks. And I knowed from robbing that train way on back with Red, that in some ways, they was easier than robbing banks, if you could get ’em way out in the country. Well, we did rob a few trains. Three of ’em, in fact. One in St. Joe, Missouri, and two down in Texas—Bells and Texarkana.
They was almost all busts.
Like in Texarkana, we had a tip that there was a big payment shipment on the Katy No. 34. Me and Jess hid out at one of the water stops, hopped onto the mail car, and throwed down on the clerks. I stuck a pistol in the back of one of the clerks—he was a short old boy, so squat he couldn’t rare back up on me—and I made him take me to ever’ one of them baggage cars. Our tipster said the money was in a big square chest in a baggage car. But there wasn’t no box. Somebody’d switched the shipment day.
Outa all them three trains, all we got was $11,000. Total.
Then Glasscock said maybe we should go back to banks. He said long as we was in Texas, he had a good tip down on a bank in San Marcos, a little town about fifty miles outside of San Antone. His tipster’d told him the bank was flush up with extra cash for some reason or t’other.
So we lit on down to San Marcos and “Blooey!”
I used six ounces of grease on the vault door, it was so big and thick, and doggone if the whole thing—that whole door—didn’t shoot straight through the bank window, crashing it into a thousand pieces, and skid all the way over to the other side of Main Street, kicking up white sparks the whole way!
Well, there was money inside the vault, all right, but not where we could get most of it. There was two safes: a square one we could blow, a round one we couldn’t. It was the round one that musta had all the money; the one we could blow, a Steel Pete, had only a few bundles of greenbacks and a bag of loose bills.
Damn!
Meantime, that vault door’d made so much ruckus we didn’t wanta waste no time on the loose bills that went a-flying. So we left thousands on the floor. (As we was running out, we seen two newsboys on a corner sacking their papers. “Don’t mess with them nickel papers,” I said. “There’s money all over the floor in the bank. Go help yourself!”)
On the way back to Omaha, we counted out what we’d got from that little Steel Pete.
It come up to about $30,000.
A fatter squirrel, but still a squirrel.
The boys was razzing me about “where the hell’s the hogs?” and I was razzing Glasscock.
He barely blinked a eye. “I’ve got it this time. Canada. Small towns up there are twenty-five years behind the American banks. I know somebody who can give me a list of the square safes. Nearly all of ’em’ll be marks.”
“You sure?” My faith in Glasscock was draining fast.
“You don’t believe me, we can go up there and case ’em first. We have plenty of dough to last us the summer. We can all headquarter in Toronto. Meantime, you and Louise can have your honeymoon. Go down to Ni’gra Falls. Whatever you want. If you have the right kind of wife, she won’t mind if you have some company.”
I can still see it clear as day, me and Louise driving to our honeymoon in a 1923 black Studebaker Light Six—with my three brothers in the back. Glasscock and his wife was behind us, in another car.
First thing we done in Toronto, we checked into the King Edward Hotel.
Being that it was my honeymoon, I wanted to slick it up.
That King Edward was the best hotel in that whole city, and the clerk put us in a brand-new part that shot up sixteen stories. None of us’d Newtons had ever been so high offa the ground and, right off, Jess went to spitting juice from some Prince Albert tobacco outa a window to see it drop down all them sixteen stories.
“Rack up your umbrellas, folks!” he kept a-hollering down to the people on the street. “Prince Albert’s raining down outa the King Edward!”
I give Jess five minutes to spit. Then I said why didn’t we all go check out the city. Even back in them days, Toronto was a real busy, busy place. It’s where a lot of the banking and other business was done for the whole country of Canada and so the downtown sidewalks was packed with people, most of ’em dressed in suits carrying briefcases, all of ’em hurrying somewheres.
I’d heard how Toronto had the longest street in the entire country—a street called Yonge—and I wanted to see it. Sure enough, that Yonge Street went on forever. The part we was at had buildings on both sides of it so tall it made you feel like you was walking in the alley of a canyon. Only it wasn’t like no canyon that the Good Lord ever made. All up and down that street, there was slicked-up stores with ever’thing under the sun in their windows: beaver fur coats, big diamond rings, fancy ladies’ hats with ostrich feathers.
Louise stopped at ever’ window.
I told Louise it was bad luck if a lady didn’t toss some silver on her honeymoon. She didn’t want to at first, we was still so close to being broke, but I told her it was bad, bad luck if she didn’t—and so she done it. She bought her a silver-colored hat with glittery beads on it from one of them shops, and, later on, she got herself a manicure at the King Edward’s “lady’s room.”
And ever’ night we was in Toronto, from that day on, we’d eat at some fancy restaurant.
The chef at the best one in town was a squat little Frenchman who got sweet on Louise, and he was always fussing over if we liked this or that. Some of it was pretty queer, but it all tasted good: a soup made out of ocean turtles; rolled-up French flapjacks; reindeer meat from Alaska; swordfish from somewhere. So we’d set there and eat all them things, and whilst we was a-chewing, we’d look around and watch all the other rich people chewing too.
I still couldn’t get over watching how some rich people acted.
Watching rich people was like moving to some new part of the world and watching all the new animals you never seen before. Like camels or monkeys. They was all diff’rent from each other, of course, but there was some things I seen that was the same. They preened a lot, and there’s always some part of ’em puffed up—their chests; or their hair; or their lips. And most of ’em moved their arms and legs a little diff’rent than poor people, like their joints was oiled better.
Yeah, having money is a lot diff’rent than not having money. If you ain’t but five feet tall, money’ll give you a foot more. If you got a ugly face, money’ll ease that face up. ’Course, if the folks looking at you ain’t go no money, it works the other way. If you’re ugly, you look uglier. If you’re short, you look like a stump. But rich people don’t know that. That’s how come they put on airs. Well, hell! A lot of them folks didn’t even earn their money. They got it from dead kin.
I can tell you this—me and Louise didn’t put on airs.
Neither did my brothers.
We talked plain and we tipped big (except for Joe), and we enjoyed ourselves.
Only problem was, we was fast going back to dead broke.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“See that?” I said it low into Joe’s ear.
Me and the boys was walking around the middle of Toronto marking time one afternoon while Louise was off getting her hair done, when I seen two men in light-gray topcoats and black-bill caps. They was standing on a corner, waiting to cross the street. Stretched between ’em was a leather bag so big and bulgy it looked like a pregnant sow.
“See what?” Joe said.
“Look-it. That bag.”
“So what?”
“Look at what it says.” You could just make out two words on the side—Bank Property.
“I know
what you’re thinking, old man.” Joe shook his head. “But that ain’t it. You think somebody’d be fool enough to take a bag fulla money down a street like this? There’s a hundred people around.”
“Canucks ’r dumb, little brother.”
What me and my brothers and Glasscock done a week or so after we seen that bag is something that took more nerve than Jesse James, or the Dalton Boys, or any of them other Wild West outlaws ever had. I ain’t bragging about what we done. We was crazy to do it.
But we done it anyhow.
And more’n fifty years later, I can still see them big, black headlines.
When I first seen that bag, I poked Joe in the ribs.
“Let’s trail ’em.”
We started following ’em. And that’s when I seen something that got me even more worked up: a third man, same light-gray overcoat, same black cap, walking close behind the ones with the bag. I suspicioned that third man was a guard.
We trailed ’em for three blocks ’til they come to a huge, bulky-looking granite building. It had stone letters on top: TORONTO CURRENCY CLEARING HOUSE. And just about the same time, from two other directions, come a bunch of other men. Some of ’em had big bags, some had little bags, some had briefcases. And each pair of men was followed by a third man.
There musta been twenty concrete steps leading up to the entrance of the building. And all them men marched up all them steps and disappeared through a big, heavy door.
“Whoa,” I said to Joe. “Eleven bags. Four briefcases.”
“Probably canceled checks.”
“You don’t need guards for canceled checks.”
“It could be solid gold bullion, Willis, but we ain’t gonna get it. Not in the middle of the business district in the middle of the day.”
“Well, we can’t bust in. Look at the building. It’s solid granite. Only way we’re gonna get that money is offa them messengers.
Joe give me one of his looks. “Bet they got a coupla six-shooters under ever’ one of them coats.”
“Naw, they got little short bulldog pistols. That one’s coat flied open, I seen his gun. Won’t hurt nothing.”
All Honest Men Page 23
