A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  It was the second thing Russell told us after the hugging and backslapping. The first was in answer to Daddy’s questions of where the hell was Buck and was he all right.

  “He’s okay,” Russell said, “sorta.”

  But that was as good as the news got. It’s why he’d waited for my mother to leave for the library before he came to the door. He told us the whole thing over a couple of pots of coffee.

  They’d arrived in Beaumont late at night and checked into a hotel, but the next morning Buck insisted on going to Wilkes’ house alone. He wouldn’t even tell Russell the address. He left his car at the hotel and drove off in a Dodge they’d stolen the day before. Russell waited all day, and when Buck still hadn’t come back by sundown he had a bad feeling. Then he went down to the dining room for supper and there it all was in the evening edition.

  Russell had torn the report out of the newspaper so Daddy and I could read it for ourselves. A local businessman named Roman Wilkes had been assaulted in his home by a suspect who identified himself to police as Ansel Mitchum. The victim was reported to be in a coma and suffering from “severe facial disfigurement.” Police had been alerted to the fracas by neighbors who reported screams from the Wilkes residence. On arriving at the scene, police found Wilkes unconscious on the living-room floor. They followed “a trail of blood” out the back door and found the “severely injured” Mitchum crawling across the yard toward a car parked in the alley. Mitchum had been taken to the hospital but refused to give any information other than his name. Police were “not specific about the nature of his injuries.” The car, they said, had been reported stolen in Orange the day before.

  Neighbors told investigators they’d seen the suspect peeking into Wilkes’ windows just prior to entering the house and that “a godawful screaming” ensued shortly after he went inside. According to neighbors, a woman—“a real looker”—had been living with Wilkes for the past several weeks, and police speculated that the assault may have been provoked by a “love triangle.” A search was underway for the woman, last seen by neighbors when she ran from the house with a suitcase in hand and drove away in Wilkes’ car.

  Mitchum had been arraigned in the hospital and stood charged with attempted murder. If Wilkes should die of his injuries, police said, they would amend the charge to murder or manslaughter, depending on the facts brought out in their investigation. Mitchum would remain in the hospital under guard until he was well enough to be transferred to the city jail and there held for trial.

  Ansel Mitchum was an alias I hadn’t known Buck to use before. Ansel was his middle name and Mitchum was Russell’s. Russell’s favorite phony name was Caesar Smith—God knows why. Both of them had a slew of names they went by. The idea was never to give the cops a name you already had on a jail record somewhere, even in another state. Most cops couldn’t find their ass with both hands, Buck always said, but sometimes they got lucky and came up with a previous-arrest record. You wanted always to be a first-time offender.

  The next day Russell had put on a coat and tie and gone to the hospital. He told the uniformed cop guarding Buck’s door that he was Luther Sammons of Houston, Texas, a cousin of Ansel Mitchum and his only living relative. They’d lost touch with each other over the past years but had been very close when they were younger. He was in Beaumont on business and had read in the paper about his cousin’s awful trouble and that he was badly hurt. He’d brought a basket of fruit and wondered if it would be all right to visit with him for a few minutes. The guard examined every piece of fruit in the basket and then gave Russell a good frisk and said all right, ten minutes.

  Russell said Buck’s face was orange with iodine and all scabbed up with deep scratches over his eyes and on his cheeks. One hand was manacled to the bed by a yard of narrow chain. A catheter hung down from under the sheet and drained red piss into a plastic bag.

  “He got a kick out of me just waltzing in there,” Russell said. “I asked him could he go along with me taking down the guard and busting him out, but he said hell no, he was too stove up to even stand.”

  Buck told him in a whisper how he’d snuck up to Wilkes’ house and looked in the windows and saw them together on the sofa. They were in their underwear and laughing at some damn thing on the radio like they didn’t have a care in the world. He’d been ready to kick down the door but tried the knob first and found it unlocked. He was practically on top of them before they realized he was there. He got Wilkes on the floor and hit him over and over in the face with a big marble ashtray. Jena was hollering and clawing at his eyes and he snatched her by the hair and slung her across the room. Then he started stomping on Wilkes’ head and meant to keep at it for a while except Jena came up from behind and stuck him in the short ribs with a steak knife. He grabbed her by the throat but she swung the knife underhand and stabbed him in the thigh and then swung it up again and got him between the legs.

  “He said the pain of it beat all he’d ever known about pain,” Russell said. “Said he couldn’t holler for the want of breath.”

  He yanked out the knife but must’ve fainted because next thing he knew he was on the floor in a mess of his own blood and Jena was gone. Wilkes looked dead. The pain was something to reckon with but he managed to get on his feet and make it out the back door before he fell again and couldn’t get up. Then the cops were there. He could remember telling them he was Ansel Mitchum but had no memory of anything else until he woke up in the hospital and got the bad news.

  Russell broke off from the story to light a cigarette. He took a deep drag and sighed a long stream of smoke. Then he told us Buck had lost his dick—most of it, anyway.

  “He’s got about yay much left,” he said, holding two fingers an inch apart.

  “Oh sweet Jesus,” Daddy said.

  I’d read that some Indian tribes used to cut the dicks off enemies they captured. And heard tales about blackhanders who’d castrated guys in revenge for getting the horns put on them. Such a thing had always seemed so terrible it was almost unreal, like something out of a campfire scare story.

  Buck hadn’t minded talking about it, Russell said, and even joked about it, although he couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice when he wisecracked about the greater likelihood of pissing on his shoes from now on. The doctor told him he was lucky they’d been able to save both balls, and lucky he didn’t get stabbed in his only kidney. Buck said yeah, he couldn’t hardly believe his luck. He agreed with the doctor that it could’ve been worse—hell, the bitch might’ve used a spade and took his whole crotch out at the roots.

  The doctor insisted he didn’t have call to be so pessimistic. The surgery had gone well and would be swift to heal. Buck still had the nerves and blood vessels in place to feel pleasure down there and would still be able to shoot off.

  “Buck said that was good news, all right,” Russell told us. “Said it’d be easier on his hand too, since now he’d be able to jack off with just his thumb and forefinger.”

  “Oh man,” Daddy said, and sighed and rubbed his face.

  After three weeks in the hospital Buck was transferred to the city jail. Despite the efforts of a local attorney Russell had retained for him, he’d been denied bond—he didn’t own property and was unemployed and Wilkes was still in a coma, a condition the doctors said would likely be permanent. Without the testimony of either the victim or the woman who’d fled the scene, however, the state would’ve been hard put to prove attempted murder, so it went with a charge of mayhem. The trial was two weeks later and Russell was right there for it.

  Buck’s lawyer began by reminding the jury that Texas law so deeply frowned on cuckoldry that it sanctioned a husband’s killing of any man he found in flagrante delicto with his wife. His client, however, had gone to Wilkes’ home unarmed and without malice, solely to try to retrieve the beloved wife stolen from him by that homewrecker of a traveling salesman. Wilkes had met Mitchum at the door and invited him in and then attacked him with a knife, mutilating him in an unspeaka
ble manner and forcing him to defend himself. If anyone was guilty of mayhem, Buck’s lawyer told the jurymen, it was Wilkes. He described the wound in detail and offered to have his client lower his trousers so they could see the horror for themselves, but the judge said nothing doing, counselor’s description would suffice.

  “The jury kinda wormed around in their chairs when he told about Buck’s wound,” Russell said. “But they did plenty of squirming too when they saw the pictures of Wilkes all laid out like a dead man in a Halloween mask.”

  The state made hash of the self-defense claim by pointing out that Mitchum couldn’t have done the awful damage he did to Wilkes after receiving his own incapacitating wound. Furthermore, since Wilkes would’ve been incapable of inflicting the wound after being beaten so badly, Mitchum must have been wounded by the woman, the only other person on the scene. She’d fled from him to be with Wilkes and then stabbed him in defense of the man she really loved. As for Mitchum’s claim that she was his wife and he had a legal right to protect his marriage, where was the proof of their union?—he’d also claimed to have lost his marriage paper in a house fire.

  Russell said the jury didn’t look all that pleased with themselves for finding him guilty. The judge wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to Buck, either. He made a little speech about the difficulty of passing sentence on someone who’d already suffered in a manner to make any man quail just to hear of it. Then again, the defendant did put a man in a coma, and there was some question as to whether the woman was his legal wife. So the judge gave him three years.

  Buck was taken to the state pen in Huntsville for processing, and a few days after that he was transferred to a road prison near Sugarland.

  “I just came back to let you all know what happened and how things stand,” Russell said. “And to take care of some things—rent and stuff. Visit with Charlie a little. Then I’ll be heading back to Texas for a bit.”

  Why go back there, Daddy wanted to know. What more could he do in Texas? The only thing to do now was hope Buck kept his nose clean and got an early parole.

  “Well,” Russell said, “I figure to set Buck free of that road camp or know the reason why.”

  He said it the way somebody might tell you he’d made up his mind to buy a car. I’d been sitting there feeling glum about Buck being in prison and it took a second for Russell’s words to sink in—and then my heart jumped up and danced.

  Daddy called him a damn fool. He said Russell could end up in prison too. He said they might both get killed. He said it wasn’t worth it, not with Buck so likely to get paroled in just a year.

  Russell said Buck wasn’t likely to think of it as just a year. Daddy talked himself blue in the face but couldn’t dissuade him. They argued about it until I warned them from the front window that my mother was home for lunch.

  She was happy as a pup to see him. Then she noticed Buck’s absence and asked where he was. Still at the oil rig in Lake Charles, Russell told her, where they’d been working these past weeks and carrying home their pay in a wheelbarrow. He apologized for not having sent word but they’d been working double shifts and hadn’t had time to do anything else. He was heading back to the rig himself in a few days.

  My mother’s smile was as phony as a paper cutout. She said she was glad they were doing so well and asked him to stay to supper, but he said he had a date with Charlie. Daddy suggested a short one at the corner speak but Russell said he was already late and had to hurry off. He didn’t want to hear any more of Daddy’s arguments is what it was.

  We didn’t see him again before Daddy shipped out a week later on a freighter taking oil-rig parts to Tampico and Veracruz. I don’t know what went through Daddy’s mind in the three weeks he was gone, but not a day passed by that I didn’t wonder if I’d ever see my uncles again.

  And then a few days after Daddy’s return from Mexico, just as we were finishing supper one night, there came a jaunty little knock at the door and I answered it and there stood Russell—with Buck smiling over his shoulder.

  They hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. We were all laughing and Daddy and Buck wrestled each other around the room as my mother hugged and hugged Russell and then they traded off and kept at it. For my mother’s sake, they told a bullshit story about the Lake Charles field going dry and them deciding to come home and see about maybe opening a business of some kind. She said that was wonderful. I think she knew they were lying but didn’t care, she was so glad to see they were all right. She made no mention of Jena that night or anytime after, and as far as I would ever know, she never did find out about Buck’s maiming or his time in a Texas prison.

  To celebrate their homecoming we went out into the summer night and down to the corner café and its crowded backroom speakeasy. Russell telephoned Charlie to come join us. She and my mother and a pretty waitress named Jill took turns dancing with us. The beer kept coming to the table in large foaming pitchers and we cut a rug and laughed it up till almost midnight. Every now and then Buck or Russell would let me take a pull off their beer while my mother wasn’t looking. The laughter between them was different from the way they laughed with the rest of us. It was the laughter of men who’d faced danger together. Who would risk their ass for each other.

  After my mother left for the library the next morning—the only time she’d ever been late and with the only complaint of hangover I’d ever hear from her—Buck and Russell came by and told us about the break.

  Russell had recruited an old pal of theirs to help out, a car mechanic and smalltime thief named Jimmyboy Dolan. They’d driven to Texas and checked into a motor court on the main highway about two miles from the Sugarland prison camp. On Sunday, the visiting day, Russell went to the camp in his guise of cousin Luther Sammons. They sat at an outdoor table and Buck told him all about the guards and the work routine and how to get to the stretch of road where his gang would be clearing ditches the next day. It was a perfect spot, isolated and lightly traveled.

  The following morning Russell and Jimmyboy smeared mud on the car’s license plates and drove out to the work site. Russell stopped the car next to the transport truck where two of the gun bulls stood in the shade and Jimmyboy asked them for directions to Rosenburg. Next thing the guards knew they had pistols in their faces. The boss bull hollered at the third guard, down near the end of the work line, to throw down his gun too, but the guy just stood there. “Like he was maybe thinking of trying to save the day,” Russell said.

  Buck came up out of the ditch behind him and knocked the notion out of his head with a shovel.

  “Should’ve seen it,” Buck said. “Old boy wobbled around in little circles with his eyes rolled up in his head like he was having a religious experience before he finally thought to fall down.”

  Some of the cons went hightailing into the woods and some stood there like they wouldn’t know what to do until somebody told them. “Sorry bastards,” Buck said. “They’re exactly where they belong.”

  While Jimmyboy held a pistol on the guards, Buck collected their guns and tossed them into the car. Russell opened a hood panel on the prison truck and yanked out the coil wire and put it in his pocket. They got back in the car and Russell wheeled it around and Buck said all he saw out the back window as they made their getaway was a yellow cloud of road dust.

  He looked over at me and smiled—and I felt my grin get bigger.

  The first time I did it was with Solise DuBois, in her family’s boathouse, only a few weeks before Buck’s escape from the Texas road gang. Over the following months I had the pleasure of lots of other schoolgirls as well and made my first visits to some of the Quarter’s best cathouses. With such experience under my belt, so to speak, I naturally thought I knew everything there was to know about sex. But it came as a revelation to me that Buck could still sport with the ladies despite lacking most of his pecker.

  I received this enlightenment one evening when I was taking supper with him and Russell in a restaurant. They’d spent most of the afte
rnoon in a speakeasy and were feeling pretty loose. As we watched the waitress sashay off to the kitchen with our order, Buck said he sure wouldn’t kick her out of bed. Then he caught my look and laughed.

  “I can read your mind, kid,” he said. He aped a look of awe and tried to mimic my voice as he said, “Can he still cut the mustard, him?”

  Some patrons at a neighboring table turned our way. Buck smiled and winked at them and they gave their attention back to their plates.

  He leaned forward and in a lower voice informed me that there were all kinds of pleasures he could still take with women who didn’t scare easy at the sight of his stub. He still enjoyed what they could do for him with their mouth and hands, and he could still get off by just rubbing himself on a cooter. If he fit himself just right against it, he could get the woman off too. Between that and the things he could do for them with his own hands and mouth, there was plenty of fun to go around. He said he’d proved it with nearly a dozen women already, and only the first two of them whores.

  “Hell, some of them’s told me the thing feels better than a whole one,” he said. “Say it gets them in the button better.”

  Russell had known about the whores—the first time Buck tested himself after getting back from Texas was at Miss Quentin’s over on St. Ann’s, and Russell had gone with him—but the others were news to him and he asked how come Buck hadn’t said anything about them before.

  “What?” Buck said. “I got to report to you every time I hump a broad? I got to keep a list for you? You practicing to be parole officer?”

  “Hey man, I don’t give a damn who you hump or how you do it,” Russell said. “Just don’t tell me they like that stump better than they do a whole one.”

  “I’m telling you what they tell me,” Buck said. “Not all of them, but some.”

  We got more looks from the surrounding tables and I cleared my throat and cut my eyes sideways to let Buck and Russell know it.