All Honest Men

by Claude Stanush

  Yeah! I liked that. So did Joe. He smiled and shuffled his legs.

  The judge turned to Jess. “Mister Jess Newton, you have no prior convictions except for carrying whiskey in Texas. Your conduct in court has been congenial. Your conduct at the train robbery was congenial. The court sentences you to a year and a day.”

  Yippy-ti-yi-yo, git along little dogies!

  Jess felt the same way. A Texas yell started to jump outa his mouth. He swallowed it. It come out like a hiccup.

  I was last.

  When the judge looked at me, he frowned. “Mister J. Willis Newton. Mister Newton, I’ve been a judge for many years, and I’m still not sure if criminals are made or born or both. If I had to pick one, I’d say they’re born. But I do know that God has given you some gifts. If you’d have chosen another line of work, you might have become president of Ford Motor Company.”

  He paused for a second, like he wanted to let that one sink in. President of the Ford Motor Company?

  Yeah. I mighta been if.… If what?

  He banged his gavel. “Twelve years!”

  I turned to look at Louise.

  She nodded her head.

  FBI photos of the convicts. L. to R. Top: Willis and Joe Bottom: Dock and Jess

  Right before they led us away, a young man from the Chicago Tribune newspaper come in and asked if us Newtons would pose for a picture for him. He didn’t want Glasscock. Just us Newtons. I think Glasscock was a little mad about that. He sucked in his cheeks and stood off to one side.

  In all my crook days, I never did want my picture took. Almost ever’ picture that ain’t a mug shot before I went to the pen, you’d see the side of my face, or, better yet, the back of my head. But this time, I didn’t care. “Hell yes, you can take our picture. Just give me a minute.”

  I motioned one of the guards to comb my hair and straighten my tie.

  That picture run on December the tenth, nineteen and twenty-four.

  I still got a yellow copy.

  Under it they run these words: “WILD WEST BANDITS ON THEIR WAY TO PRISON.”

  Far as I know, it was the first picture—and the last picture—ever took of the four of us Newton Boys together. Except for poor old Dock, I thought we all looked real sharp.

  EPILOGUE

  It’s now the spring of nineteen and seventy-seven. I never thought I’d live to be eighty-eight. Joe’s still alive, too. He’s seventy-six. Near ever’body else I’ve talked about is dead. Like I said way on back, I know some folks think the world’d be better off if I was dead, too. But I don’t give a damn what they think.

  I live now in Uvalde, that little town in the southwest part of Texas where I seen them singing Baptist orphans more’n sixty years ago, right before I robbed my first train with Red Farley. Uvalde’s where Ma and Pa ended up their last days. Dock and Jess, too. Louise is buried here.

  I like the weather, and there’s good fishing in the Nueces River. And I like to mess with bees. Uvalde’s got the best honey in the world, huajilla, that comes from them brush country flowers. Also, Mexico’s not too far off, where you can get good whiskey at cut rate.

  The sheriff here throws me in jail ever’ so often, mostly when I drink too much, or one time when I pistol-whipped some old boy. But the sheriff’s a nice, easy fella and good company. I call him Kid.

  Louise died of heart trouble in nineteen and fifty-nine. We was together thirty-nine years before she passed on. Jess died of cancer of the lung in nineteen and sixty. He was seventy-three years old. Dock was eighty-three years old when he died in nineteen and seventy-four. Cancer, too. So me and Joe is the last of the Newton Boys.

  Ever’body in Uvalde likes Joe. They tell him that what happened so long ago should be forgot. He owns a barbecue stand here and has a little ranch where he runs a few cattle. He’s married to a woman named Mildred, a fine church-going woman who holds her head up high, and they have one son.

  Me and Joe still got our differences. Even down to how we dress. I still dress like a big-city businessman: good suit, white shirt, necktie, narrow-brim hat (what Joe calls a “dude hat”). And I drive a high-power Cadillac. Joe went back to Western clothes: high-crowned, wide-brim Stetson, checkered shirt, gabardine pants, oiled cowboy boots. And he drives a pickup.

  That little brother of mine is still horse-crazy. He rides a pinto cow horse called Old Paint. Except Joe ain’t the cowboy he used to be. He’s got that arthritis and nowadays he has to stand up on a chair before he can swing a leg over the saddle. Old Paint sometimes pitches when Joe gets on. It ain’t real pitching, it’s more like rocking. But Joe calls it pitching and he says he’d never have a horse that wouldn’t pitch.

  Somewhere along the way Joe got the idea that him and Old Paint ’r movie stars. So when Hollywood people make picture shows at a Wild West town that’s down the road from here, Joe takes Old Paint over there in a trailer and gets a job for him and his horse. In “The Last Command,” that picture about the Alamo, Joe played a Mex’kin lancer charging the Texans on Old Paint, and later on he played a Texan in buckskin shooting at hisself. ’Course, he didn’t get nothing but extras’ pay—scale for hisself and half-scale for Old Paint.

  Goddammit, if them movie people had any sense they’d be making a picture show about me. And they’d hire me to play a big part so I could show ’em the way things really was. It burns me up like nobody’s business when I hear all the to-do folks make over Bonnie and Clyde, the movie they made about ’em and all that other nonsense, when all them two silly kids ever done was shoot people and rob filling stations and little places like that. Hell, I bet they never had a thousand dollars in their lives!

  I don’t mix much with the people in Uvalde. When I get outa my car to go into a store downtown, some of ’em point at me and tell their kids, “There goes old Willis Newton, that bandit.” And some years back, a old Texas lawman who lives in these parts said: “Willis Newton? That man is hard, clean through hard. And I don’t think that old crook ever really retired.”

  How’d he know?

  One thing nobody knowed was why I never robbed the bank in Uvalde. I’ll let you in on that secret right here: I never robbed no banks in Uvalde because I needed some place to keep my money.

  A preacher said to me once, “Ain’t you at least ashamed for what you done? Don’t you realize how many people you hurt?” “Look here, preacher,” I said. “Nobody ever give me nothing but hell in my life, and I ain’t done nothing I’m ashamed of.” Joe says he is. He says the the biggest mistake he ever made in his life was to trade his spurs and chaps to become a bank robber. He’da made a good Baptist. But that’s Joe, not me.

  Now, there’s some things I was sorry about. Like when that fool old coward, Frank Holloway, left $200,000 in the vault in Arma, Kansas. He said we had enough. Can you imagine a bank robber, or somebody in business, or anybody you know in this country, saying they got enough?

  Why don’t the preachers ask the politicians if they’re sorry for lying and cheating and spending up ever’body else’s money except their own? Why don’t they ask the lawyers, the doctors, and the businessmen if they’re sorry for skinning people ’ever chance they get?

  Lemme tell you what I mean. One evening in Omaha back in nineteen and twenty, I drove my Studebaker up to a car-wash place and asked the colored man there if he’d slick me up. “Yessir,” he said, all smiles and politeness. But when he finished he told me the charge would be a dollar. “A dollar?” I said. “They always done it here for fifty cents.” “Yessir, you’re right,” the man said. “But it all starts up there in the White House and ever’body passes it on down. I gits you, so now you go git somebody else and pass it on.” I paid the dollar.

  What I didn’t tell that car-wash man was that I was planning to do just what he said. I was on my way to Illinois to rob a bank.

  As it come out, I only done four years and two months for that Rondout train robbery. I had what they call “good behavior.” And when I walked outa the front gate of L
eavenworth in nineteen and twenty-nine, Louise was standing right there, waiting for me with a taxi. Godamight! I never seen such a beautiful sight in my life. How come she loved me, and how come she waited for me, I can’t say. Some people just love each other, I guess. Their natures match.

  Some of what I done after Leavenworth was as wild as what I done before, but that ain’t part of my story here. Most folks knowed me for the nightclubs I opened up in Tulsa: the Buckhorn Palace, the Music Box, the Bucket of Blood. The papers called me one of the city’s “kingpin gamblers.” That Prohibition was still on when I started, but even after the Repeal, them crazy Okies voted to keep the state dry. So I sold “imported” whiskey. Imported from Missouri.

  My clubs was some of the busiest night spots in Tulsa. Stacks of people come to ’em! Stacks and stacks. Even Bonnie and Clyde showed up one time at my Buckhorn Palace. They’d just shot a sheriff over at Commerce, and they knowed about me through the underground, and they wanted me to hide ’em out. Well, I let ’em stay for a couple of nights in a little house I had out back. Only they wasn’t nothing but two silly kids, and I knowed they was bound to get their-selves killed.

  Altogether, in my life, I was in on eighty bank robberies, twenty before my brothers joined me and sixty afterwards. And I can remember ever’ bank we robbed and the dates, and how much we got out of each of them. But robbing banks full-time like that, it was here and it was there … here and there.

  ’Course, some folks say I never did stop being a robber, even after I moved to Uvalde. And they say I didn’t give up all the loot from that big Rondout train robbery. That I’d squirreled some away, and was always leaving town and coming back flush.

  But how do they know?

  I can tell you honest: I liked to pass out money as much as I liked to get it. I liked to help little people I knowed that was down on their luck. And I paid for Louise’s boy, Lewis, to go to college. (Me and Lewis are close to this day. Only he lives in California, with his family.)

  And I give my brothers Jess and Dock good jobs at good pay hauling whiskey for my Tulsa nightclubs. Except I wasn’t always around to tame ’em and they went wild—drinking too much and shooting off guns. The laws called my Music Box “Tulsa’s Number One Violence and Crime Hatchery.” Jess and Dock just couldn’t handle prosperity no more’n they could handle responsibility.

  Louise was a diff’rent story. She kept the books for my clubs, and took up money at the door, and was just as much the boss as me. Sometimes, if I was outa town on business, she’d take to drinking and ride taxicabs around town and tip the drivers with her diamond rings. By then, I’d bought her diamonds for near ever’ finger. I always had a devil of a time getting them taxi drivers to give me back them rings.

  But Louise was true blue—stayed with me in good times, and bad.

  Bad times come in nineteen and forty-nine when the competition among the gamblers in Oklahoma was turning into bloody wars, just like it had between them gangsters in Chicago. Somebody blowed up a nightclub near one of mine to bits with nitroglycerin and soon as the owner built it back up, BLOOEY! Somebody blowed it up again! There was folks that said I done both them blows.

  One night, when I was standing in my bathroom in my under-drawers, a bullet from a .38 come a-whistling through the window. It ripped into my back, flied through my right lung, and come out my left collar bone.

  Soon after I got out of the hospital, me and Louise moved down here to Uvalde. We bought us a big house, and I laid a row of silver dollars in a concrete walk right up to the front door.

  First time in my life I ever thought about praying was in the year nineteen and fifty-nine when Louise got heart trouble and I thought she might die. I got down on my knees trying to pray. But I didn’t know how.

  L. to R. Willis, Dock and Joe before Dock came out of retirement to attempt to rob the bank at Rowena.

  Goddamn.

  Poor old Dock!

  In nineteen and sixty-eight, when he was seventy-six years old, he got it in his mind to break into a bank in Rowena, Texas. He got a friend to help him, but Dock, like always, showed poor judgment. A burglar alarm went off in the middle of it all, and a sheriff’s posse showed up. Well, old Dock wouldn’t surrender. For a half hour ’r more he shot it out with the laws. Then a deputy slipped into the back of the bank and blackjacked Dock from behind. By that time the posse had shot the bank full of holes with a tommy gun. A tommy gun agin Dock! The owner of that bank was mad as hell. “They didn’t have to make it a battle, like in the movies,” he said.

  After that sock on the head, Dock’s judgment got even worse. After he served eight months in a prison hospital, they sent him to a nursing home and he didn’t try to rob no more banks.

  There’s some people that say I was driving getaway on that Rowena job. That I was setting in the alley in my Cadillac, waiting for Dock and his friend to get done in the bank, and that when all the shooting started, I hightailed it outa there. I woulda been eighty years old at the time. But how do they know?

  Way I see it, lots of folks would’ve liked to do what the Newton Boys done—they just didn’t have the guts, or they didn’t know how. Hell, most folks couldn’t rob a kitchen safe.

  I don’t rob banks no more. It’s not because I’m too good. It’s just because I’m too damn old. But I sure can rob them bee hives. I like that wild honey in the hives along the Nueces River. I’ll see a bee taking nectar from a flower and I’ll flop to the ground—even at eighty-eight I can get to the ground faster ’n a lot of young folks I know—and I’ll skylight him and watch which way he heads for his hive. Most times, them wild bees have their hives in a hole in a old oak or a mesquite tree. If I can’t get to where the honey is, I’ll take a chain-saw out and just buzz that big old tree down and rob that hive. Some people in Uvalde are sore at me for cutting them trees, but how else could I get that honey?

  Another thing I like to do is get drunk and drive my Cadillac down them long country roads around Uvalde. It’s 340 horsepower, and I’ll hit off helty-skelty, just like the Newton Boys done when we was making a getaway—only faster. Lots of times, I’ll see a stream with pecan trees and sycamores and cypresses along the banks. And I’d like to get out and do some fishing. But most times, the ranchers have the gates all locked and that just burns me up. When I was a kid we could prowl ’n hunt ever’where.

  Nowadays when I see a gate with a lock on it, I just boil over. I take my .45 thumb-buster out from the glove compartment and shoot the goddamn thing off.

  Joe’s got his pals, who raise hunting dogs, like he does, and at night they take them dogs out into the woods to chase foxes and coons. Most of the time, if I go anywhere, I go by myself.

  Cotton, cotton, cotton. There’s more around Uvalde now than there ever was before. This used to be nothing but cow and sheep-and-goat country. But now with water-pumps and sprinklers you can grow anything anywhere. The land is all plowed now with big gasoline-powered tractors, six rows at a time! And the cotton is all picked with machines. Just one machine can pick as much cotton as forty people used to. Sometimes if I’m driving past a cotton field, I’ll stop and hit down them middles and pick the fluffy, silky white puffs right-left, left-right, right-left. I stuff it in a sack to bring home to neighbor kids who never picked a boll of cotton in their lives. They don’t even know what cotton feels like.

  Pa? Crazy old Pa! I still can’t get him outa my head, even after all these years. Always moving from farm to farm, always hunting for honey ponds and fritter trees. For God’s Country. Here and there, here and there. Pa and Ma never lived together again after they split up. But I guess there musta still been something between ’em because later on, the old man moved into a little house only a few blocks from where Ma lived. He’d come over to her house for meals, and in fact, he was waiting on her front porch for supper one night when he keeled over and dropped dead. Had a heart attack.

  Ma died two years later of pneumonia.

  Joe always said I was too hard on Pa,
that he was a good man. But we either planted too early ’r too late. And Pa always looked like he was afraid to nose that plow-point down too deep, for fear the mules’d give out and maybe lay down and die. Before the ground was even busted, much less planted!

  By God, them mules sweated when I took a-hold of that plow. I wasn’t gonna plow shallow—not even if the mules did drop dead. And I sweated just as much as the mules did. Back in them days, you walked behind a old Georgia stock plow. And there was something about them walking plows that I liked, even if I didn’t wanta spend my life following no mule’s ass. You had to guide ’em with your hands—and how straight a row you plowed, and how deep or how shallow, said something about what kind of farmer you was. And what kind of a man you was.

  ’Course, you didn’t just plow once, and plant your seed, then wait for the cotton. When the plants come up green and strong and pretty—that is, if you had enough rain and at the right time—you chopped them weeds out with hand hoes or cut ’em down with a heel-sweep plow. That heel-sweep plow didn’t just cut down the weeds, it piled more dirt on the plants, and from then on you could watch the little green shoots grow up and spread out into big, leafy plants with big, green bolls. And then there come a point when you could say your crop was laid by—that it was far enough along that even weeds couldn’t hurt it no more.… and you could do other things like mend harness or chop stove wood … until one day, blooey!, them bolls exploded into big puffs of white like somebody’d put a shot of nitro inside.

  Willis in his eighties. He was feisty and unrepentent right up until the day he died

  I guess that’s the way I feel right now. The crop’s been laid by, not even weeds can do it no more harm.