I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender. “You’re right,” I said, and I meant it. “It was a lousy crack.”
She smiled. “All right then, you’re forgiven.” Then cut her eyes to my lower belly where she’d been stroking me with the washcloth. “Oh my,” she said. “What’s this?”
She shoved the sheet off me. “Goodness! Look at this poor rascal trying to raise up on his feet.”
“Hey girl, quit it. I’m in no condition for this.” That’s what I said—but if she’d quit it I might’ve wept.
“Shush,” she said. “Don’t scare him. All he needs is a helping hand and a big kiss of encouragement.” She bent to it, cooing, “Come here, baby, come to momma.”
And it pretty quick did.
I woke the next morning feeling grand. The room was full of soft sunlight. Brenda Marie slept snugly against me, her breath warm on my neck and her black hair draped on my chest, one long leg between mine. She smelled wonderfully of seawater and flowers. I ran my hand over her buttocks and marveled at their trim swells. She came awake without opening her eyes, smiling, pressing herself tighter against me, affecting to purr like a cat. I stroked her flank and she shifted so I could get at her breast. She worked her hand between us and chuckled lewdly on finding me ready as can be. She wriggled herself under me and I slipped in smoothly and her legs closed around me and pulled me deeper. We rocked together and she drew my face down to hers and kissed me and lightly bit my lips and I don’t think I lasted thirty seconds before letting go with a groan and collapsing on her, gasping like I’d run across town. She laughed softly and thumped me on the back and said to get off her before she smothered, then rolled with me to keep me inside her. And then we slept again.
The next time we woke up it was early afternoon and I was ravenous. We hadn’t eaten since the leftover chicken stew she’d warmed up the night before. She had an assistant she trusted to run the gallery in her absence but a collector from Houston was coming late that afternoon to see some of her new acquisitions and she had to be there. We had enough time to have a late lunch before she went.
“Well then, let’s get a move on,” I said, slapping her on the bottom and getting out of bed. She hadn’t seen the scars on my ass until then, and she said, “Oh, those bastards.” It was the nearest I’d seen her come to crying since the time I’d told her that my father, like hers, had drowned.
I’d always kept a shaving razor and change of clothes in my Gladstone in her closet. As she gave my white suit a cursory pressing she said she’d more than once thought to throw away my stuff but couldn’t bring herself to do it—it would’ve felt like giving up hope of seeing me again. What I couldn’t find in the Gladstone was a .38-caliber bulldog I’d left tucked among some undershirts. She saw me digging around in the bag and said, “Here,” and went to the bedside table and took the snubnose pistol out of the drawer and handed it to me.
“Made me feel like some kind of desperado to keep it close to hand,” she said. I checked the cylinder—five chambers loaded and an empty one under the hammer.
“Every time I’d handle it I’d think of other things of yours I’d handled,” she said. “Aren’t I just awful?”
“You’re a shameless wanton and I’ll beat purple hell out of anybody who says different.”
She laughed deep in her throat and hugged my neck and bit my ear just hard enough to make me wince. “You’re such a charmer,” she said.
She stood in the bathroom door and watched me shave. The tall bath window gave onto a cluster of banana trees mottled with sunlight, their green fronds stirring in a gentle breeze spiced with the aromas of dinner hour. A streetcar bell jangled in the distance. A produce vendor sang his wares. A neighbor’s saxophone rendered a slow and rueful version of “Blue Skies.” Angola was about 150 miles from where I was standing but seemed farther removed than the moon. I suddenly felt so free my hand shook and I nicked my chin with the straight razor.
The suit pants were a little loose in the butt and I had to cinch my belt two notches higher than before and my shirt collar felt roomier under my finger, but my jacket still hung well on my shoulders. Brenda said she liked my new leanness.
When she went to get dressed I slipped the bulldog under my waistband at my back, then stood out on the balcony and smoked a cigarette. The air rang with the afternoon church bells. Flowers bloomed in large clay pots on every balcony. A formation of yellow-head pelicans sailed over the tiled rooftops and the blarings of shiphorns carried from the river. Schoolgirls in blue-and-white uniforms came clamoring out of St. Cecelia’s, set free for the day. They passed in flocks along the lacework iron fence and I recognized their happy chatter as the voices and laughter I’d heard in my fevered sleep.
We ate at a restaurant down the street. I put away a thick steak covered with fried green peppers and onions, a bowl of red beans and rice, a platter of eggs scrambled with chopped sausage. Brenda Marie had softboiled eggs and a buttered croissant and smiled as she watched me gorge myself, at one point touching my arm and giving me a look to keep me from wolfing my food. She asked about my plans for the rest of the afternoon. I said I was going to walk around the Quarter and look at things I hadn’t seen since last summer.
Back on the sidewalk she slipped me a ten and gave me her spare keys to the outer courtyard gate and to the apartment. She kissed me full on the mouth and pressed her belly hard against me and said she’d be home around eight and for me not to overexert myself.
“At least not till I get back,” she said, licking a fingertip and putting it to my lips. She laughed and waggled her fingers at me and I watched the play of her long trim legs as she strode off down the street.
Jimmyboy Dolan had partnered with Buck and Russell for about a year. But he was a bad gambler and got in arrears for close to a thousand dollars at one of Cockeye Calder’s clubs. Cockeye wasn’t one for complex negotiations with anybody who owed him money or tried to cheat him. Everyone knew about the Memphis cardsharp who got caught doing tricks at one of Cockeye’s tables and paid for his folly with the fingers of one hand. Cockeye told Jimmyboy he had a month to pony up what he owed. He charged him a daily interest that doubled the debt the first week. Jimmyboy could’ve paid him off with his cut from a job he did with Buck and Russell a few days later but that wasn’t his way. He made a partial payment on the debt and spent the rest on good times and gambling at other clubs around town. Who knows what he was thinking. When his month was up he got a visit from a pair of Cockeye’s collectors. His tally had inflated to almost five thousand dollars by then but he could only come up with a few hundred. Their disappointment was so great they sawed off his right foot.
When Buck and Russell introduced me to him about three months later, Jimmyboy was working as a car mechanic and living in the back room of the garage and doing his best not to provoke certain kinds of people anymore. He had to give Cockeye Calder all but five dollars of his pay every week and figured to clear his debt in about five years. He wore a cumbersome prosthesis that wasn’t much more than a heavy block of wood shaped like a fat dark boot. He walked like he was dragging a ball and chain and the wood foot clumped with every step. Watching him make his way to the men’s room, Russell whispered, “I thought I had a limp.”
I found him all alone in the garage and he seemed pleased to see me. “Hey, Sonny boy!” he said. “Ain’t seen you in a coon’s age, man. Where the hell you been keeping yourself?”
I told him I’d been living with a girl in Atlanta for the past nine months and then recently got a note in the mail from Buck saying he and Russell were moving, but for some damn reason he hadn’t told me where. He only said to come see Jimmyboy. So, here I was. Where were they?
He didn’t know, but he believed they’d left town, probably left the whole damn state. They’d stopped by the garage about four months ago for just long enough to say so long.
“I figure they were feeling the heat from the Bogalusa job, don’t you?”
“What Bogalusa job
?”
I didn’t know about that? By the time he’d read about it in the newspaper the bank robbery was two days old and Buck and Russell were one day gone. What happened was, a customer tried to be a hero and jumped on one of the two robbers. While the other robber beat the hero on the head with a pistol to get him loose of his partner, the guard retrieved the gun they’d made him drop and opened fire, shooting three times and wounding a woman in the leg but missing both robbers before one of them shot him in the stomach. The bandits ran out and hijacked a car and made a getaway—but without a dime of the bank’s money. The guard died a few hours later.
“They came and told you about it?”
“No man, I saw it in the paper.”
“How’d the paper know it was them?”
“It didn’t. The cops didn’t either. What happened is, the one the hero grabbed lost his hat and sunglasses in the scuffle and a couple of people got a good look at him before he put them back on. The paper had a police sketch in it and wanted to know if anybody recognized him. Well, it wasn’t no photograph, but it was a good enough likeness I knew I was looking at Russell.”
“And they hijacked a car?”
“What the paper said. Sounds like somebody’s driver lit a shuck ahead of schedule, you ask me.”
“Yeah, it does. Anybody who’d do that is likely to rat out his partners if he gets in a spot. And there’s the guys who recognized the newspaper sketch. I can see why they left town.”
“Hey, Sonny, never in the world would I breathe a word to anybody.”
“I know,” I said. “But you couldn’t’ve been the only one to recognize the sketch. What I don’t get is why tell me to come see you if they didn’t tell you where they were going.”
“Well hell, man, to pick up what they left for you. I thought that’s what you come for.”
He clumped off into his little back room, its door screeching on its hinges, and returned a minute later with an envelope of the same sort they’d left with Brenda Marie. It was smudged with grease but still sealed.
The note inside said: “Star fill sta next RR depot Houston. See Miller.”
It made me proud that they’d thought it was even possible I might break out. And because they knew I’d come looking for them if I did, they’d left this trail for me, despite their own good reasons not to, being on the run themselves. That was them.
Jimmyboy wanted to buy me a drink at a speak down the block but I begged off, saying I had a ladyfriend waiting. I promised to take him up on the offer in a day or two.
I repacked my bag and took fifty dollars from the cash Brenda Marie kept in her desk. Then wrote a note: I had a lead on Buck and Russell and was sorry to go like this but I had to catch the next train. I owed her more than the money and I’d be back as soon as I could and blah blah blah.
I folded the note and propped it against the radio in the living room. Then went out and turned the lock and slipped the key under the door. Then went to the station and bought a ticket and read magazines and drank coffee until my train boarded and then chugged off into the darkness.
The sign for Star’s filling station stood atop a high pole and was visible from the front steps of the depot. The late-morning sun was warm and I walked down the street with the Gladstone in hand and my suit jacket slung over my shoulder. The building was fronted by a row of gasoline pumps, its windows dust-coated, its sideboards paint-peeling and warped. A mechanic was bent over the open hood of a Model T at the far end of the lot. Across the street was a small grocery where a man in an apron stood in the door and watched me.
A little bell tinkled over the door when I went in. A husky sandy-haired guy with a toothpick in his mouth sat behind the counter reading an adventure magazine. He looked at me over his reading glasses and then out at the pumps to see if I had a car waiting for gas. He had a drinker’s face—puffy bloodshot eyes, his nose and cheeks webbed with red veins.
“If you selling something, boy, save your breath.”
“You Mr. Miller?”
“Mr. Faulk.”
“There a fella named Miller around here?”
“Sometimes.”
“Where can I find him?” I said.
He rolled the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “What you want with him?”
“I got business with him.”
“What business is that?”
“Private business. Look mister, just tell me where I can find him.”
“You ain’t told me your name.”
“That’s none of your concern,” I said. “My business is with Miller.”
The man sighed and removed his spectacles and massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingers. I told myself to keep cool, there was nothing to be gained by getting blackassed. “All right,” I said. “The name’s Bill Loomis. Satisfied?”
He seemed to give the name some thought for a moment, then spat away the toothpick. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t help you.” He put his glasses back on and picked up the magazine.
“Hey man, you wanted my name, you got it.”
His expression was utterly blank. I cursed under my breath and started for the door, figuring to ask the mechanic about Miller, ask the grocer across the street. Then I thought, What the hell—you never know. I stopped and turned and said, “LaSalle, goddammit. I’m Sonny LaSalle.”
He put the magazine down again and looked like he might be thinking of smiling. “That so?” he said. He glanced out the window again. “Well now tell me, Mr. LaSalle: You ever hear of a fella named Ansel Mitchum?”
I felt like my horse had come in at thirty to one. “I guess I have.”
“Didn’t old Ansel have him a nickname? I disremember what it was.”
“I believe it might be Buck.”
He grinned back at me and put out his hand. “Miller Faulk,” he said as we shook. “Lived in Narlens most my life and known your uncles since way back when. Sorry for all the caution, Sonny, but it’s lots of fellas always looking for lots of other fellas, and a man can’t be too careful about who he helps find who, if you know what I mean.”
It was an hour’s ride to Galveston on an electric railcar over a causeway flanked by gleaming baywater as flat as a tabletop. A humid but pretty afternoon smelling heavily of the sea.
I got my bearings according to the rough pencil map Faulk had drawn for me and made my way along the island’s shady residential sidewalks until I came to Avenue H. On a corner two blocks over I found the house number I was looking for. A picket fence ran around the small yard and thick white oleander shrubs lined the porch. The whole place well shaded by a magnolia tree full of jabbering mockingbirds. A bright yellow Pierce-Arrow was parked in the driveway leading to the garage in back.
I stood at the gate, peering past the oleanders and into the dark shadows of the porch. Someone was sitting there, a woman, busy with something in her lap.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” I called out. “I’m looking for some kin of mine and I wonder if you can—”
The woman gave a small shriek and a pan clanked on the floor and a scattering of snap beans spilled off the porch. She came scooting down the steps and I saw it was Charlie.
I dropped the Gladstone as she yanked open the gate and flung herself on me. I spun her around and couldn’t help laughing as she cried and kissed me all over my face and said, “Sonny, Sonny, Sonny.”
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s hairy uncle. Hey brother, come see what the tide’s washed up.”
Russell stood grinning at the top of the porch steps in his undershirt and galluses, hands in his pockets.
Now Buck came out in turned-up shirtsleeves, a newspaper in his hand. “Jesus Christ on a drunken plowhorse. That young scoundrel with his hands on your woman—is that who I think it is?”
“Looks like he’s been sunbathing down in Miami, don’t it?” Russell said. Beaming would not be too strong a word for the way they were looking at me. I could feel myself beaming right back.
“Can you all
believe it?” Charlie said. She laughed and clutched me tighter.
“I always hoped you’d find a way out, kid,” Buck said, “but I never really…” He made a vague gesture.
“I figured if I wanted to see you no-counts again I’d best take measures,” I said.
“Listen to him,” Buck said. “Take measures. Smartypants is full of himself, ain’t he? Same like always.”
“Probably wants us to call him Houdini or some such,” Russell said. “Escape artist like him.”
“You all quit picking on him,” Charlie said. She grabbed up the Gladstone and tugged me by the arm, pulling me through the gate and saying to come on, we had a lot of celebrating to do.
And Buck and Russell charged down the porch to hug me hard.
I ’d been pleasantly surprised to find Charlie with them but I wasn’t sure how freely we could talk in her presence. They must’ve read the uncertainty on my face. “Everything’s jake, kid,” Russell said. “She’s in.”
She was sitting next to him on the sofa and patted his knee. “He gave me ten seconds to decide if I wanted to come along,” she said. “I took about seven to make up my mind.”
“Had to play hard to get,” Russell said.
“Now here I am, a moll,” she said, affecting to talk tough out of the side of her mouth. Then smiled wryly and said, “My poor momma must be going round and round in her grave.”
The bulldog was digging into my hip, so I took it out and set it on the small table beside my chair. Buck and Russell smiled at the sight of it. Charlie didn’t.
I was as eager to hear what they’d been up to as they were to ask me questions, and we went through several quarts of homebrew as we caught each other up on things. Sharp Eddie had given them the details about the trouble that put me in Angola. They called me twenty kinds of fool for getting in a tank fight in the first place—especially in defense of some faggot—and in the second for hitting a jailhouse cop, no matter the cop hit me on the head. You couldn’t win a fight against a jailhouse cop; you only ended up with more time behind bars. And if you killed him, well, kiss your ass goodbye.
A World of Thieves Page 10
