In truth Daddy knew how good they were at what they did. I’d heard him tell my mother he’d never seen a better cardsharp than Buck or anybody who could palm dice as slickly as Russell.
“How wonderful,” she’d said. “With skills such as those, can notable achievement be far behind?” She had a sardonic side that rarely showed except when something scared her that she couldn’t do anything about, like the felonious ventures of her brothers-in-law.
Over the next few years they gambled and grifted and now and then did a burglary. Daddy was afraid they might step up to armed robbery or already had but every time he asked them about it they assured him they hadn’t. They said pulling holdups was risky enough even if you knew what you were doing—and if you didn’t, it was sheer recklessness.
“There’s an old saying,” Buck said. “A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty you’re a damn genius. Pretty lousy odds, man.”
Daddy was glad to know that’s how they saw it. Armed robbery was the fastest way he knew of to get put in prison or an early grave. “At least they’re not doing holdups,” he told my mother.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s something to boast about, to be sure.”
As it was, they had their share of scrapes and sometimes carried the evidence of them—Buck with a black eye more than once, a few times with an ear puffed like a portion of cauliflower, once with his arm in a sling; Russell with a deep cut across his cheek, another time with his ribs too sore to permit him to cough, and then with his left hand swathed in a bandage until the day he and Buck came over while my mother was at the library and we saw that the gauze was off and he was missing two fingers.
“Jesus Christ, Russell,” Daddy said. “What the hell happened?”
A dice game in Chalmette had turned unsociable when somebody accused him of cheating.
“That dickhead couldn’t have spotted me palming if I’d been wearing fireman’s gloves,” Russell said. “His problem was he lacked the proper sporting spirit—sometimes you win, sometimes not.”
What the fellow didn’t lack was a razor, nor the inclination to use it. Russell fended with his left hand and zup, his little finger vanished. Then zup, the next finger at the second knuckle. At which point he yanked out his bulldog and shot the guy one time in the heart.
It was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard—but Daddy’s face dropped. “Holy shit, man, you killed him?”
“What was I supposed to do, Lonnie?” Russell said. “Let him carve me up to the elbow?”
Buck said he’d been playing stud in the next room when the gunshot sounded—and the men at the table grabbed up their money and scattered like spooked birds. He pulled his piece and ran in the dice room and there was Russell wrapping his hand in a bandanna and nobody else in the room except the dead guy on the floor. They casually walked out and on down the street back to their car, and if anybody in the neighborhood heard the shot they must not’ve paid it much mind.
“Tough place, Chalmette,” Buck said. “Anyway, this doc we know in Metairie did the stitch job. Does good work.”
They told Daddy not to worry so much about it, they figured they were clear. Nobody knew their real names or where they were from or even that they knew each other. The police weren’t likely to give much of a damn anyhow about some razor-toting grifter laid out in a gambling scrape.
“Goddam razor,” Buck said. “That’s no weapon for a white man.”
“I wish I’d thought to scoop up my fingers,” Russell said. “I’d’ve buried them decent. Some broompusher probably swept them out with the trash.”
It’s why the three of them were always so cautious in their conversation when my mother was around—they didn’t want her getting an earful of any such story.
When she came home and saw Russell’s hand she nearly wept. He told her he’d been working at a packinghouse and got careless with the saw, but I could tell she didn’t believe that for a second.
All the same, they could usually make my mother smile with stories about their girlfriends or with some of their cleaner jokes or with their imitation of a robber being chased around the apartment by a Keystone Cop. The biggest grin they ever got out of her was when Buck said he was getting married.
It was all fairly sudden, he’d only known the woman a few weeks—Jena Ragnatela her name was—but he was as in love as a man could be. We didn’t even meet her till the day they got hitched in the city hall and we had a small reception for them at our place.
Jena wasn’t one to talk much, and when she did say something you had the feeling it wasn’t what she was really thinking. She rarely smiled, and if she ever laughed I never heard it. My mother had wanted Buck to get married but I could see by her face that Jena wasn’t what she’d had in mind. Still, it was easy to see why he’d gone for her—she was a knockout. Black-haired and green-eyed, lean-hipped, high-breasted, as easy in her moves as a cat. She always drew every eye in the room and you could tell she always knew it.
It was at Buck’s wedding that we also met Charlie Hayes, Russell’s latest girlfriend. Her real name was Charlotte but she didn’t care for it. She was nineteen, only five years older than me, a copper redhead, slim and pretty. She liked to joke and cut up and she taught me to do the Charleston. Sometimes when we were slow-dancing I’d get such a stiffie I knew she could feel it. The first time it happened I tried to back away a little but she only smiled and pulled me tighter against her and whispered, “Don’t fret about it, honey, it’s perfectly natural.” That’s how she was. Every time it happened, she’d give me that same smile and hold me close, and I couldn’t help smiling back at her, even though my ears were on fire and I felt like everybody in the room knew what was going on.
Russell himself had been shy about dancing ever since the limp he got from the war but Charlie got him over that and he pretty soon enjoyed dancing as much as anybody. He’d had a lot of girlfriends but she was the best of them and he knew it. She would still be his girl four years later when I started partnering with him and Buck. I asked him once if he planned on marrying her and he laughed and said hell no. Well, did he love her, I asked. He said he didn’t know but didn’t lose any sleep over it.
“Lots of people say they love each other and don’t do nothing but cause each other heartache,” he said. “Love’s harder to figure than long division. All I know is we like being together without a lot of talk about love. That’s fine with me.”
Despite my mother’s reservations about Jena it looked for a while like Buck’s marriage had done as she’d hoped and turned him and Russell away from the criminal life. They bought a filling station across the river in Algiers and seemed to be doing all right at it. Daddy was as glad as my mother was, but I had my doubts about the new leaf they’d supposedly turned. Even back then I didn’t believe that falling in love would change a man’s nature.
And sure enough, it wasn’t long before they admitted to Daddy that they were running a nightly poker game in the back room of the station and selling hooch for a local bootlegger.
“It ain’t like we’re really in the life anymore,” Buck said. “I mean it’s not but cards and a little moonshine, for Christ’s sake.”
Daddy smiled sadly and shook his head like it was no surprise to him. And like he didn’t really believe that was all they were up to.
It wasn’t. In addition to the gambling and the booze sales, they were doing burglaries again and had already pulled their first holdups—only small jobs so far, groceries and filling stations, a couple of cafés. They were learning the trade slowly and carefully, but they had ambitions. A fellow in Algiers named Bubber Vicente—who had a hand in everything from bootlegging to burglary to armed robbery—was setting up jobs for them and giving them pointers.
I knew all this because Buck and Russell told me. They were secretly giving me shooting lessons, and when it was only the three of us they talked pretty freely. They’d asked me at the start if I could keep my mouth shut and took me at
my word when I swore I always would. When I’d asked them to teach me to shoot they said sure—as long as we kept it between the three of us, so as not to upset my mother or get an argument from Daddy.
That was fine by me. And so once or twice a week they took me out to the boonies and taught me all they knew about handling and shooting their pistols and shotguns.
The day I busted twelve bottles in a row at forty paces with the .44 top-break, Buck gave it to me for a present.
E very day began with a big bell clanging in the dark. I’d wake to the darkness and remember where I was and for a moment I’d feel like I was suffocating and my heart would bang against my ribs like some trapped thing. I’d have to fast remind myself that you never know—you never know—before I could breathe a little easier. It was like that for the first few seconds of every morning.
Then the ceiling lights would come on and the floorwalker did a headcount and told us to unass the bunks. The barrack windows were screenless and my ears were always swollen with mosquito bites. We jostled each other going in and out of the latrine, getting to the piss troughs, the shitters, the water faucets. The usual bunch playing grab-ass and cracking wise, the usual ones cussing at nothing in particular or muttering to themselves, the same ones of us rarely saying a word.
We’d form up in the darkness like rows of broken ghosts in our black-and-white stripes and trudge off to the mess shack for a breakfast that rarely changed—sweet potatoes and blackstrap, grits and coffee. Then out in formation again and off to the toolshed. The eastern sky only now turning gray and the trees still black against it, the roosters crowing at the chicken house behind the captain’s quarters, the air still wet and heavy with the smells of muck and overripe vegetation. The toolshed trusty gave us whatever tools we needed for the day—cane knives, shovels, axes, hoes. Then the bosses took us away to trim or cut cane or hoe the fields or lay down shell on the camp roads or fell trees or clean out shit ditches, something.
We started before sunrise and went at it till dusk. I’d arrived in the hottest part of the summer, and we’d be dripping sweat before the sun even cleared the trees. By the end of my first few days I was as eaten up with sweat rash as every man in camp. Dinner came out to us in a truck—beans and rice and cornbread, now and then some greens, once in a while some pork. Supper back in camp was the noon leftovers.
During my first few weeks in Camp M, I would come in from the fields so tired I’d sometimes lie down to rest for a minute before stripping off my filthy skunk suit and going to the showers—and next thing I knew I’d wake up mudcaked and stinking, feeling like I couldn’t breathe, my heart thrashing, the morning bell clanging in the dark.
Angola was set on an oldtime plantation of that name. It was a most serious prison with no need of stone walls. Some sixty miles north of Baton Rouge, it was bordered on three sides by a long meander of the Mighty Mississippi and on the fourth by the Tunica Hills—a lay of land naturally isolated and perfect for its purpose. It covered nearly twenty thousand acres of forest and swamp and marshland and fields of sugarcane.
We were housed in various and scattered camps, and as bad as it was in the white ones, everybody knew it was worse for the coloreds. I was put in Camp M, one of the smallest, with only about eighty men, and the most remote. It stood between a cypress swamp and a cane field. A narrow corduroy road ran through the swamp and out to the levee more than a mile away.
There were only three freemen on the place—the captain, his foreman and his clerk. The guards were convicts, most of them doing long stretches for some crime of hard violence. They wore khakis instead of stripes and carried .30-caliber carbines or twelve-gauge double-barrels with buckshot loads. Out in the field, they’d keep an eye on us from the shade of the trees and left it to the pushers to keep us working. Pushers wore khaki too, but they were unarmed. They moved along the line and made sure we never slacked off—“flogged the dog,’’ as they called it. If a con gave a pusher any backsass, the pusher called for a gun boss to come deal with him. They were the most hated men in camp, the pushers, and they lived in the guard barrack for their own safety.
Besides the guard barrack, which had its own mess, there were three convict barracks, each one run by a floorwalker, a trusty who bunked in the barracks storeroom behind wire walls that let him keep watch on things. The captain lived in a big clapboard house with a screened front porch and a backyard vegetable garden and henhouse, and the foreman and clerk shared quarters in a sidehouse. There was a mess shack, a stable for the mules and where the camp’s two trucks and two long flatwagons were kept, a tin-roofed laundry without walls, a toolshed, and a pen of large tracking hounds that went half crazy with snarling at anybody in stripes that came near them. There were three sweatboxes and a whipping log.
Camp M covered about ten acres. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence twelve feet high with rolls of barbed wire along the top. A guard tower stood at each corner, and the tower bulls had high-powered rifles.
I never got a letter from Buck or Russell and I never wrote to them. They had told me the hacks opened every bit of convict mail, going out and coming in, no matter how much they might deny doing it. So never write to anybody you did business with on the outside, and never expect to hear from any of them. That was one of the rules they taught me in case I ever took a fall.
They’d also told me that if I ever found myself in the joint some hardcase was sure to try me soon and in front of everybody so they could see what I was made of. When the guy braces you, they said, get right to it without any talk. I hadn’t been there two weeks when it happened. The lights had just come on one morning and I was sitting on my bunk when one of the camps’ daddy hardcocks, a big redhead named Garrison, snatched up my shoes and dropped a raggedy pair in their place, saying he was making a trade and I could swap with the next newcock to come in.
He was ready for me and clubbed me on the face with a shoe as I came up off the bunk at him. I hooked him in the belly and over the eye and he went on his ass. He scrabbled up quick and swung wild and I hit him twice on the ear and he went down again. He was back up on one knee when I gave him one to the jaw with all my shoulder behind it and he hit the floor on his face, out cold.
I threw his shoes down the aisle and retrieved mine and put them on. I figured I was headed for the sweatbox for sure, but the floorwalker, a trusty named Gaylord, walked on by like he hadn’t seen a thing and said for us to get outside and form up. I found out later that he had it in for Garrison and was glad to see him get cooled.
A couple of Garrison’s pals brought him around and helped him up and out to formation. His ear looked like a bunch of red grapes. His jaw wasn’t broken but over the next few days he’d have a devil of a time eating. I’d jammed a couple of knuckles on my hand but at least it wasn’t broken. Most people have no idea how easily you can break your hand on somebody’s head. It’s why they invented boxing gloves.
As we went out to formation some of the cons were grinning at me. “Ain’t this boy something,” one said. “A regular Dempsey.”
“Dempsey, hell,” said another. “Tunney’s more like it.”
And from then on, Tunney’s what they called me. None of the cons would try me again, not even Garrison, who would tell me I had a hell of punch and then let me be, like all the rest of them.
The pushers were a different story. They rode me hard from the very first day, cursing me, ordering me to work faster. I’d set my jaws tight and keep hacking at the cane and if I ever said anything it was only “Yeah boss, working faster.” But as the days became weeks they pushed me harder still. Sometimes they’d hit me across the back and legs with a stripped cane stalk and it was all I could do to keep from going at them with my cane knife. I’d have to remind myself over and over of everything Buck and Russell taught me.
Still, word had it that the captain wanted the cop killer to earn a whipping and a day in a sweatbox, to get an early taste of what was in store for him if he tried getting tough in Camp M. Some
of the cons told me he wouldn’t let the pushers ease up on me till I was punished. It was no secret why I was there—every con’s crime was common knowledge in the camp. They said I was lucky the gun bulls were convicts too, because they didn’t have it in for cop killers like freeman guards did. A cop killer in a prison with freeman guards was real likely to get shot dead “while trying to escape.”
I figured the sooner it happened the sooner the pushers would quit riding me, so the next time a pusher hit me with a stalk I snatched it out of his hand and cut it in two with a swipe of my cane knife and flung the stub in his face.
The cons around us laughed and one said, “Do that to his fucken neck, Tunney.”
The pusher hollered, “Trouble here!” but the gun bosses had been watching the whole thing and were already on their way.
I spent the rest of the day in leg shackles, trying to dig a six-foot hole in the soft muck beside the bayou, a swarm of mosquitoes feeding on my face and neck. The hole naturally filled up with muddy water as fast as I shoveled it out, but that was the idea—it was a job that couldn’t be done, no matter how long and hard you went at it. After a couple of hours, I hadn’t managed to do much except dig a small pool of muck up to my shins.
One of the gun bulls came over and said, “How you like your new job, hardcase?”
“It’s a Sisyphean ordeal,” I said.
That took the smirk off his face. “You watch your fucken mouth, boy,” he said.
When we got back to camp at dusk, the field boss made his report and the captain sentenced me to thirty lashes and a day in the box.
I had already witnessed a couple of whippings by then, so I knew what I was in for. If you were going in the sweatbox after the lashing, you stripped naked, but if you were getting nothing more than the whipping, you only dropped your pants. Either way, you knelt in front of the whipping log—a portion of oak trunk about three feet thick—and hugged yourself to it with one arm and held up your balls with your other hand in case the whip tip snapped up between your legs. The whipping guard would lay into you with a leather strap some three inches wide and four feet long and attached to a long wooden handle. With the proper wrist action, he could tear up your ass pretty well in twenty strokes, the usual number the captain called for.
A World of Thieves Page 3
