“The only thing surprises me,” Russell said, “is they didn’t hang you. I mean, John Bones’ kid. Even if it was an accident, the only worse trouble you could’ve made for yourself was if you strangled Huey Long’s momma.”
“That old sumbitch’ll turn Loosiana inside out looking for you,” Buck said.
I said I’d heard so much about what a hardcase John Bonham was that finally I didn’t believe it. “Maybe he was a rough cob in his younger days, but anymore he’s nothing but a gray old man with only one hand, for Christ’s sake.”
“Old and gray as he is,” Buck said, “I wouldn’t take him too light, me.”
“You ever have dealings with him?”
“No, but we know some who have, and we could tell you stories,” Russell said.
“I’ve heard plenty of stories,” I said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if he put out most of them himself.”
“Can we quit talking about that man?” Charlie said. “You already said he couldn’t do a thing to Sonny in Texas even if he knew he was here, so why go on about him?”
“Girl’s right,” Buck said. “To hell with that coonass.”
They wanted to hear all about Angola so I told them. Buck said it had always been one of the roughest prisons in the country and it couldn’t have gotten any softer since Long became governor. “I like the Kingfish,” he said, “but I wouldn’t pick his prison to do my time in.”
Charlie said a place like that was proof enough what beasts men really were. Russell affected to growl and gently bite her arm. She playslapped at him and said, “Quit that, or I’ll put you back in your cage.”
They loved hearing about the escape. When I told about turning the dog-bait trick around on Garrison, Buck laughed and said, “See? Told you it’d work!”
They couldn’t stop marveling that I’d run the levee. Through the rest of the evening one or the other would every now and again say “How do you like this kid?” and punch me in the arm and laugh the way they’d laughed on the night Russell brought Buck home from Texas. And I’d laugh along with them, the way I’d always wanted to.
They told me about their getaway from Verte Rivage, how the truck they’d stolen had busted a wheel in a bad rut and they’d fled into the swamp and were two days slogging through it before coming to another road. They stole a picnicking family’s car to get to Plaquemine. Buck won a twenty-dollar bet with Russell when they found the Model A unharmed beside the police station. When they got home they had to wash the mud off the money and spread the bills all over the house to dry. The report that they’d made away with ten grand was bullshit—they got a little over five. And if I’d been wondering what happened to my share, Buck said, it’s what they sent to Sharp Eddie to pay for my defense.
“You all ever see the fella gave you the tip on that bank?” I said.
“We did,” Buck said. “Claimed he didn’t know about the sheriffs’ convention. I believed him.”
“Me too,” said Russell. “It’s why all we did was bust his arm.”
Charlie stared into her glass of beer. I had a hunch there were aspects to the criminal life she hadn’t yet got used to.
After Verte Rivage they kept away from banks for five months. They went back to smalltime stickups, to working the poker and dice tables. Then a couple of weeks before Christmas they got a tip from Bubber Vicente about a Jackson bank. It had never been hit. No guard on the premises. They took on a driver named Buddy Smalls and did the job. It went slick as lard and they came away with over six grand. They figured they were back in bigtime business. Three weeks later, on another tip from Bubber, they hit the bank in Bogalusa. The news report Jimmyboy told me about was true—they didn’t get a dime.
“The teller was putting it in a sack when this peckerwood hops on my back like it was some goddam rodeo,” Russell said. “You could say our attention was pretty much distracted from the money for the rest of our visit.”
“I should’ve had that dumbshit guard kick the piece to me,” Buck said. “I never figured he’d try for it. Man’s stupidity got him killed, plain and simple—and added a goodly bit to our troubles.”
“Things did get a wee hairy,” Russell said. “Bang-bang-bang.” He grinned and affected to duck gunfire.
Charlie got up and went to the kitchen, saying we needed more beer. The quart on the table was half full. Russell watched her go, then looked at me and shrugged.
“And here’s the kicker,” Buck said. “We get outside and Buddy’s already flown. Left us high and dry. So I stop this sheba in a little roadster and say we’re taking her car. She says, ‘Ah shit,’ just like that. Cute little thing. Showed me a lot of leg as she got out. I should’ve asked her to come with us—you never know.”
They’d left their own car in Hammond—the yellow Pierce-Arrow, which they’d bought less than a week before Bogalusa—but when they got there the car was gone. They figured Buddy Smalls had it, so they drove the roadster on into Baton Rouge and stole another car and made for Buddy’s place in Metairie. Sure enough, the Arrow was parked around the side of Buddy’s house. While Buck knocked loudly at the front door and called out he was the Western Union man, Russell peeked in the back window and then jimmied the kitchen door and tiptoed to the living room and there was Buddy hunched down next to the sofa and holding a gun pointed at the front door.
“I kicked him in the back of the head so hard I near broke my foot,” Russell said. He let Buck in and they splashed water on Buddy’s face to bring him around. He started crying and saying they always said if a job went bad it was every man for himself. They reminded him that the rule applied only when your partners didn’t stand a chance, it didn’t mean you ran off and made their chances worse. They took him for a drive way out into the boondocks with Buddy talking the whole way, making every pitch he could to save his ass.
“I felt a little sorry for him,” Russell said. “I figured it was partly our fault he run out on us. We should’ve known he didn’t have the sand for a bank job.”
Maybe so, Buck said, but if a guy told you he’d be there, he had to be there, and if he wasn’t you couldn’t let it go. It was one of those lines you had to set, a line a man can’t cross without paying a price, otherwise nothing would mean anything.
“Just because it’s a world of thieves out there,” he said, “don’t mean there ain’t no rules to it.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him say it.
They figured nobody’d ever find Buddy in those boonies except by accident, and even if they did, they’d never know whose bones they had.
The next morning they’d read about the robbery in the paper and learned that the guard was dead. Then came the afternoon edition with Russell’s sketch in it.
“It was only a so-so likeness, I thought,” Buck said, “but Russell thought it was a little too like for comfort.”
They didn’t waste any time in removing themselves from Louisiana. They packed their bags and closed their bank account and didn’t take the time for anything else except to stop at Charlie’s to see if she wanted to go along—and to leave the notes for me at Brenda Marie’s and Jimmyboy Dolan’s.
They’d come straight to Galveston. They’d been here before and liked it. It struck them in some ways as a smaller version of New Orleans, and not only in the weather.
“It’s always been an easygoing town,” Buck said. “The cops’ll usually give a fella a break in appreciation of a cash contribution to their fight against crime.” He looked toward the kitchen, where Charlie was still keeping herself, then said in a lower voice, “When I first heard it’s got more cathouses than Narlens, I didn’t believe it, but it’s true. Most of the cats real young and sweet, too. Two bucks for your regular pussy, three dollars a throw for the best in the house. And every one of them so far real understanding about my, ah, deprived condition.”
“There’s no shortage of places to get laid, get drunk, or get a bet down,” Russell said. “They don’t call it the Free State of Galveston for nothing.”
<
br /> “Seems just the place for some sharps I could name,” I said, grinning from one to the other of them.
“For relaxing, yeah,” Buck said, “but not for working, sad to say.” He said that all the big gambling joints and the local booze operations were run by a powerful pair of brothers named Sam and Rose Maceo who didn’t look kindly on outsiders trying to profit at their expense. Sharps who tried their trade at the Maceos’ tables, bootleggers who tried dealing their wares behind the Maceos’ backs—all such interlopers ended up going for a walk in the Gulf of Mexico in a pair of concrete shoes.
“You won’t believe how fancy their nightclubs are,” Russell said. “In the high-stakes rooms you get free booze while you’re playing. We saw the chief of police there one night, drink in one hand and dice in the other. We’ve had some good times in their places, but all told they’ve taken more of our money than we have of theirs. I’ve been tempted to use a trick or two but figured I’d best wait till I grow me some gills.”
“We saw them catch a dude playing card tricks at a poker table one night,” Buck said. “The strongarms were real polite. Would you come this way, please, sir? Got his coat from the checkroom and helped him on with it. Let him take his drink along. Right this way, sir. Week or so later somebody finds a leg on the beach. Just the bottom part. Still wearing a shoe. Florsheim, like this fella had been wearing. Of course, it could’ve been some other fella in Florsheims.”
“Or could be one kind of shark met another,” Russell said.
The same thing went for holdup men and thieves in general. The Maceos would not abide criminals in their midst to make citizens fearful and more demanding of stricter law enforcement. It was in the Maceos’ own interest that the locals feel safe enough to enjoy nights on the town. It was an open joke that Sam and Rose did a better job of protecting Galveston than the police department they paid off.
“In other words,” I said, “they got a monopoly on the thievery business in this town and mean to keep it that way.”
“In other words,” Buck said, “yeah.”
They’d come away from New Orleans with enough money to tide them over for a while, but between living expenses and gambling losses and Buck’s cathouse habit and Russell’s good times with Charlie, their stake had dwindled pretty fast. They started going up to Houston, where there were plenty of independent gambling joints. But as strangers they were everywhere suspect from the start and they’d had some close calls. Even where they were able to pocket their winnings without trouble, they were warned not to come back, and pretty soon they ran out of big-money games to sit in on.
So they’d gone back to holdups. Small stuff only—no banks. There’d been so many Houston banks robbed in the year before that the city and county both were now paying a bonus to any cop—and a reward to any private citizen—who shot a holdup man in the act. They paid bounties to manhunters who brought in wanted robbers, dead or alive. It wasn’t a policy ever made public, it hadn’t been in the newspaper, but the word was on the vine and everybody’d heard it.
“I tell you, kid, it’s some gun-crazy sonsofbitches in that damn Houston,” Buck said. “We ain’t real keen on hitting some bank where everybody in the place is packing a piece and praying for somebody to try a stickup.”
“Hell, I break a sweat robbing a grocery store anywhere near Houston,” Russell said.
Over the past few weeks they’d been taking it easy and talking things over, discussing possibilities, keeping their ears open in the speakeasies and gambling joints. And then last week they’d finally decided what to do. If I’d been a few days later in getting to Galveston they would’ve had to leave a different message for me with Miller Faulk.
They told me about it over supper at a bayside place overlooking the shrimp docks. We sat at a back corner table and between the four of us ate six dozen raw oysters and two big buckets of smoked shrimp, shucking the peels onto the newspaper the waitress had spread on the tabletop. We talked and talked as we ate, telling each other to keep our voices down, now and then snickering like a bunch of schoolkids.
West Texas was the place. Oil boom country.
“I don’t know why we ain’t gone out there before now,” Buck said. “It’s so damn right.”
East Texas had its share of oil towns, of course—hell, it’s where the business got started in this state—but according to Buck the boomtowns around here had mostly tamed down by now. There was still money to be made in them, but not by any Johnnies-come-lately like us. The way the Maceos had a lock on Galveston was how some bunch of big shots or other had a lock in every East Texas oil town—and with the same sort of cozy arrangement with the cops. No independent hustling allowed.
“But the way we hear it, out west it’s still wide open,” Buck said. “Every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. The cops all as crooked as corkscrews—except for the damn Rangers. But there ain’t all that many of them, praise Jesus.”
“All those towns full of boomers making money hand over fist,” Russell said, “and full of sharpies of every kind parting them from it.”
“But what they ain’t got enough of,” Buck said, “is somebody to part the sharpies from it.”
“In other words,” I said, “you’ve perceived a shortcoming in the economic system of West Texas. A shortcoming which presents lucrative possibilities to whoever might be bold enough to remedy it.”
“Exactly right, Mister smartass,” Buck said. “Lucrative possibilities. Especially since Bubber Vicente’s out there now. Our old job broker. Miller Faulk told us. He used to work for Bubber in Narlens till his wife left him and moved to Houston and he came out to try and get back with her. Anyway, a couple of months ago Bubber came to Houston and—”
“Poor old Miller,” Russell broke in. “Back in Narlens, Eula put the horns on him at least twice that I know of. Best thing ever happened to him was when she run off. But then the fool comes chasing after her. Buys that piece-of-shit filling station and tells everybody he’s turning a new leaf. I swear, some guys never learn.”
“He must love her is what it is,” Charlie said.
“I know it,” Russell said. “And look what it’s got him.”
She stuck her tongue out at him.
“If you all don’t mind,” Buck said, giving Russell and Charlie a look.
He turned back to me. “A couple of months ago Bubber shows up in Houston and tells Miller he had to cut out of Narlens in a hurry after a pair of sonofabitch cops who’d been shaking down everybody in the Quarter were found floating in the river and some other sonofabitches were trying to stick the rap on him. Said he was on his way to West Texas to go partners with a old pal, another job setup man. Wanted Miller to go with him but Miller said no, he was back with Eula again and wanted to stay that way if he could. Bubber said if he changed his mind to get in touch with him at the Bigsby Hotel in Odessa.”
“Miller tell him you and Russell were in Galveston?” I said.
“Nope. We’d told him not to tell anybody where we were except you—if you should ever come around—and he took us at our word. He figured he’d tell us about Bubber the next time he saw us, but turned out that wasn’t till a couple of weeks ago. So we send Bubber a wire asking how’s business and a few days later he wires back it’s booming, he’s got more jobs than he’s got guys to do them, so come on out if we want some of them.”
“It’ll be just like in Narlens,” Russell said. “Bubber’ll point them out and we’ll do them.”
“His leads always been worth every dollar of his cut,” Buck said.
“In other words,” I said, “West Texas here we come.”
“In other words,” Buck said, “I can’t hardly wait.”
“Me neither,” Russell said. His grin as big as Buck’s and mine.
“Me neither,” Charlie said. Her smile small.
The plan was to rent a place to live in as soon as we got out west, a place where Charlie could stay while we were out on a job, a place we could retre
at to and where we could pass for straight citizens, a place well removed from Bubber Vicente’s base of operations and whatever heat might all of a sudden come down on it. After studying a map of the region, we settled on Fort Stockton. If you drew a circle no more than a hundred miles across to include most of the boomtowns out there, Fort Stockton lay near the south rim of it and Odessa close to the north, some eighty-five miles away.
To beef up the stake we’d need to make the trip and get set up, Buck and Russell decided to sell the Pierce-Arrow—which was anyhow too showy for our line of work. You want a plain Jane of a car that blends right in with most others. They sold the Arrow to Miller Faulk, who’d always admired it and topped all other bids with an offer of five hundred dollars and a fairly new green Model A sedan which he’d had specially fitted with a radio. Miller said we were doing the right thing to swap the sometimes temperamental Pierce-Arrow for a hardy Model A that could handle that tough West Texas country.
Over the next few days, Buck and Russell settled their accounts and took care of a few other matters—including a special order of business cards with all three of our names listed on them as sales representatives of Matson Oil and Toolworks of Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Meanwhile, Charlie took me shopping for new clothes and showed me the town. We ate lunch in cafés on the Strand or down the street from the docks. We’d always been able to talk frankly with each other back in New Orleans, and we found we still could. We were sipping lemonades in a restaurant across the street from the seawall one afternoon when she told me she’d once asked Russell what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
“Know what his answer was? He said, ‘Hell girl, I’m doing it.’” She shook her head and swayed the dangling gold star she wore on one earlobe. The other was pinned with a pearl stud.
“Well,” I said, “that’s Russell.”
“Yeah it is,” she said, “and Buck too. But what I can’t figure, Sonny, is why you’re here. When I heard you got sent to prison I cried. It seemed such a waste. I thought if you ever got out of there any kind of way, the last thing you’d do is go back to robbing. But here you are again. I don’t get it. You’re so young and so smart and all. You could be anything you want—a doctor, a lawyer, a—”
A World of Thieves Page 11
