And joined in our guffaws.
I turned off into the first motor camp we came to. Russell and Charlie took one room and Buck and I another. We got cleaned up and changed into dry clothes. Charlie had packed a picnic basket in case we got hungry on the day’s drive, and it now served for our supper. She brought the basket to our room and had Russell spread a blanket on the floor. He muttered about the foolishness of having a picnic on the floor and she said we could have it outside in the dark and rain if it would make him feel less foolish. She laid out paper plates and we sat down to a meal of ham sandwiches and potato chips, deviled eggs and cold fried chicken. We drank paper cups of lemonade dispensed from a glass jug.
A little later the Amos ’n’Andy show came on the radio, and while we laughed at them Buck tended to the nails of his thumbs with a file, keeping them finely serrated for marking cards. Then a music program came on and he and Russell took turns entertaining us with their tricks. Buck needed to shuffle a deck only twice and he’d know any card you picked out of the spread. More impressive was his skill in dealing. Need a ten to fill that inside straight? There it is. An ace or an eight to complete a Hickok full house? Got it. Jack of hearts to make the flush? Here you go. Blackjack was child’s play. If he was showing sixteen, he could easily enough give himself the five, but would as often make it a four, to hold down suspicion. Eighteen, and he’d flick himself a deuce or ace, unless the pot was sizable and the other guy was likely holding twenty—then here came the three.
And Russell with his dice. He’d roll with an honest pair a few times, then next thing you knew he was rolling his shaved bones and cleaning you out. Then the straight pair again. I never could spot him making the switch. He said he’d been even better at it when he had all his fingers. He would put down the dice and hold up his hands and all you’d see is empty palms. Then he’d pick up the dice and switch them, and no matter how much Charlie and I asked him to show us how he did it, he wouldn’t. Buck knew how he did it, and Charlie begged him to tell.
“Well all right, girl,” he said, “if you must know…he uses magic.”
“Goddammit,” Russell said, “there you go again, giving away my trade secrets.”
“Oh, go to hell,” Charlie said. “Both of you.”
“Yes ma’am,” Russell said, saluting like a soldier. “We’re on our way.”
Then we finished off the flasks and called it a night.
At dawn the desk clerk told us the weather report was for still more rain. We decided to drive on rather than sit on our hands in that motor court and wait who knew how long for the sky to break. Charlie bought one of the motor court’s blankets in case she got chilly on the road. We filled the Ford with gasoline at a nearby station and drove off in a steady windless rain under a sky that looked made of gray mud.
West of Houston the highway was in pretty good shape except that the lowest stretches of it were covered with water and the going was slow. In some places the water came up to the running boards and now and then seeped under the doors. We couldn’t get anything but crackling static across the radio dial. Every few miles we’d pass another car stalled by the side of the road, the people in it no more than vague shapes.
Crossing the Brazos bridge we saw the river running over its banks and saw a dead cow whirling in the current. I wondered aloud if it would carry all the way downriver and out into the sea. What if it got snagged by some fisherman trolling in the Gulf at night? What would he think when he reeled it in?
“If it was me,” Russell said, “I’d tow it back to the docks and tell everybody what a hell of a fight it put up. I’d claim a world record for the cowfish.”
The miles rolled by and the rain kept falling. The clouds looked low enough to poke with a cue stick. The Colorado was booming under its bridge too and close to spilling its banks. About twenty miles farther we came on the Navidad, also running fast but not as high as the rivers behind us.
We pulled in at a café in Schulenburg. The parking lot was full and the place was crowded and smelled of cooking grease and sweat and mud. When we told the waitress we were from Houston she said we’d left there at the right time. She’d heard on the radio that every bayou in town was over its banks and flooding the streets. “You’da waited till tomorrow to get out of there,” she said, “you’da needed a dang boat instead of a auty-mobile.”
We ate hamburgers and fried potatoes and bought packs of cigarettes and four ham sandwiches in waxed paper to take with us. Buck had a whispered conversation with the fry cook at the kitchen window and I saw him slip the man a dollar.
Russell took over the driving, and as we wheeled out of the parking lot Buck said that according to the cook there was a certain drugstore in a town called Flatonia about fifteen miles down the road where a fella could buy himself a pretty good brand of medicine. We made the stop and fifteen minutes later we were on the road again with both flasks full of hooch and a quart bottle besides.
By late afternoon the rain finally quit and the clouds began to break. The countryside was changed. The Spanish moss had vanished and the pineywoods played out. The oaks shrank. The land opened to grassy ranges and began to gain slow elevation. Pecans and cottonwoods stood thick along the streams.
The towns got farther apart and the radio stations were now fewer and more regional in their programming, less big-hit ballroom and more plunk and twang. Shitkicker music that had us yelling “Yeeeee-haw!” in derision. But a lot of Mexican stuff too, with plenty of accordion in it, which we all kind of liked because it reminded us of coonass music. Buck spelled Russell at the wheel and Charlie handed out the sandwiches.
At sunset the sky was almost cloudless. We passed around one of the flasks, doing away with that soldier slow and easy. As the darkness deepened, a few bright stars began to clarify. The waxing moon was high behind us. The night was fully risen when we saw the glow of San Antonio dead ahead.
An hour later we were winding all through the center of town, with me doing the driving again, crossing and recrossing the river, taking in the sights and sounds of a loud and lively Friday night. The whole town smelled of Mexican cooking, reminding us of La Belleza, a Mexican restaurant in New Orleans we all liked, and the spicy aromas stirred up our appetites.
We drove through several neighborhoods where everybody was yammering in Spanish and the store signs were all in Spanish and if you didn’t know better you’d have thought you were someplace south of the Rio Grande instead of more than a hundred miles this side of it. Then we came to a part of town with plenty of white faces and turned onto a long crowded street of one café after another with names like the Lucky Spur and Rio Rita’s and Fat Daddy, all of them loud with string band and boogie-woogie. We figured it for the main goodtime drag. Charlie spied a restaurant called the Texican in the middle of the block and said, “Right there’s where I want to eat.”
There was a ready parking spot near the restaurant but I passed it up in favor of one at the far end of the street. It was something Buck and Russell had taught me—always park on a corner facing an intersection. It allowed for a fast getaway either straight across the street or in a fast right turn, whichever seemed the wiser course at the moment. It was how we parked even when we weren’t on a job, a matter of professional habit.
They took their pistols out from under the seat. Buck checked the magazine of his .45. Then pulled back the slide far enough to see that there was a round already snugged in the chamber. He reset the safety and slipped the piece under his coat. Russell unlatched the cylinder of his .38 to check the rounds, then snapped it back in place with a fling of the wrist. It was another rule of theirs—better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it, because you never know, especially in a strange town. I didn’t see the need for carrying heat just to get a bite in a restaurant. Besides, it was a hot night and I didn’t want to wear a jacket. But I knew the rules and so I put on the coat and slid the bulldog in my waistband behind my back. Charlie had already got out of the car an
d was browsing at a clothing store window.
We walked back to the Texican and went inside and settled ourselves in a window booth. The place was run by an American with red hair and a faceful of freckles but all the waitresses looked Mexican and the radio was tuned to a station putting out a steady stream of the ranchero music we’d gotten to like so well. The waitress came and took our orders. While we waited for the food we drank cold bottles of cola and watched the people going by on the sidewalk.
The food was wonderful. Charlie declared her chicken enchiladas the best she’d ever had, and Buck and Russell said the same about the pork tacos.
“According to a famous old Spanish writer,” I said, “hunger makes the tastiest sauce.” I was going pretty energetically at a plate of roast kid.
“That’s one of those things nobody ever thinks to say till they hear somebody else say it,” Russell said. “Then it’s ‘I know that. Why didn’t I say that and get all famous?’”
“When this guy was in prison,” I said, “he’d sometimes go without eating for a day or two, so that on the days he did eat he’d be so hungry even the slop they fed him tasted good. He’d imagine he was dining at a lavish banquet.”
“Some imagination,” Buck said. “The shit I ate in the joint, I couldn’t even imagine it fit for pigs.”
“Nice talk for the supper table,” Charlie said.
“Say the Spanish guy was in prison?” Russell said. “What for?”
“His biography wasn’t specific. For ‘financial irregularities,’ I think it said.”
“I get it,” Russell said. “He was a thief.”
“Like some others I could mention,” Charlie said.
“World’s full of them,” Russell said, scooping up a mouthful of refried beans with a piece of tortilla. “Always been, always be.”
We wiped at our watering eyes and sniffed noisily with the effect of the chile sauces. Buck paused in his eating to blow his nose. “Jesus,” he said, “this stuff is great.”
While Russell took care of the bill at the register, Buck went to talk with the redhaired owner. Charlie and I went out on the sidewalk and smoked and eyeballed the passing parade of folk. A minute later Russell came out, swirling a toothpick in his mouth. He nudged me and nodded at a pair of cute girls staring out at us from a passing car. Charlie didn’t miss it, and gave him a dig of her elbow hard enough to make him wince. “Hey!” he said. “I thought Sonny might get something going with them is all.”
She stepped away from him, folding her arms tight over her breasts the way a miffed woman’ll do, and he whispered to me, “Jesus, eyes in back of her head.”
Buck joined us and said there was a good hotel a few blocks north of where we were. “We can go on over and call it a night,” he said. “Or we can have us a drink or two first at a speak at this other hotel down the street from where we parked the car. Place called the Travis. It’s got a poker room. Tell you what, if nobody’s got any objection to me using the travel money for a stake, I might could make us some jack.”
He’d been told about the Travis by the redhaired man. Experience had taught him and Russell to spot smalltimers pretty easily and they’d made the redhead for one the minute they saw him. Buck had introduced himself as John Ansel, a car salesman out of Schulenburg. The redhead said his name was Dickson. Buck told him he was in town visiting his sister, who was expecting her first kid in the next week or two. He said we were his in-laws. He told Dickson he played in a weekly poker game in Schulenburg and always came out pretty good, if he did say so himself, but he’d always hankered to sit in on one of the high-stakes San Antonio games he’d heard about. Now here he was, with wifey at sis’ baby shower and the evening to himself. How about it, he asked Dickson, did he know where a fella could get some action? Dickson said he did know of a game close by but was having trouble recollecting exactly where. His memory cleared when Buck ponied up a fin. He went in the back room to make a phone call and a minute later the matter was settled. He told Buck about the Travis and said they were expecting him in room 312. Just say Claude sent him.
“They’re all of them businessmen,” Buck said, “or so the man says. Not a pro among them. But we best play it safe.”
Plan A was this. During the small talk at the table, he would mention to the other players that his wife had been feeling poorly in recent weeks and never would’ve been able to make this trip to San Antone except she started taking some new kind of goatmilk treatment which seemed to be helping her a good bit. He would also let drop that his nephew was a dishwasher at Dickson’s place. That was where I came in. At ten-thirty—after he’d been up there about two hours—I’d go to room 312 with an urgent message for my Uncle John. I’d announce that his wife had collapsed and was in the hospital.
The fiction was intended to get him out of there without any ruckus. Without some sorehead loser insisting too strongly on the chance to win his money back. But if it didn’t work? If somebody refused to let his losses leave so soon in Buck’s pocket? Or worse, made a nasty accusation about Buck’s awfully good luck in his brief two hours at the table?
Then plan B. We’d pull our pieces to give them something to think about while we hustled the hell out of there and down to the car and got ourselves gone.
I didn’t have to ask what we’d do if one of them pulled a piece too. Whatever we had to hat was always understood.
Standing there on the sidewalk, I felt like everything had picked up speed—the passing cars and people, the flashings of the neon lights, my heartbeat. I could see Charlie wasn’t pleased by this innovation in the evening’s activities but she knew to keep her mouth shut. All Russell said was he wished it was a dice game and he was the one going up to room 312.
I took a walk with Russell and Charlie in the cottonwood shadows along the river. We stopped to buy cones in an ice cream shop but Russell and I took only a few licks off ours before pitching them away. Everything was moving fast but the minutes. When Russell wasn’t checking his watch I was consulting mine. Charlie tried to make conversation but soon gave it up. With an hour to go, we made our way to the Travis and went into the speakeasy and ordered drinks at the bar. Russell and I barely touched ours but Charlie was soon sipping on her second. We watched the couples on the dance floor but nobody suggested taking a turn.
At twenty after ten Russell slapped my shoulder and said, “See you at the car, bud. Don’t you all keep us waiting.”
I went out to the elevator. The operator was an old man with a face as gray as his uniform and purple bags under his eyes. “Three,” I told him.
“Private floor, Mac,” he said. “Unless you got business.”
My first impulse was to head for the stairs, wherever they were. But the old guy had likely been through this routine a hundred times before and he knew what I was thinking. “Stairwell door’s closed off on three,” he said.
For a second I almost spooked, thinking the plan was already in trouble. I had a vision of myself sticking the snubnose in this old guy’s ribs. I told him about my stricken aunt and my uncle in the game in 312. Knowing about the game must’ve been what did the trick. He didn’t say okay, didn’t nod, nothing—just pulled the folding lattice door closed and worked the lever and we slowly rose in a clank and whine of machinery.
I stepped out at one end of a hallway with a big grimy window under a faded sign saying “Fire Escape.” “All the way the other end,” the old guy said. He pulled the door to and the elevator groaned and descended.
The hall was musty and dimly lighted, the runner worn along its center. Whatever businesses operated up here weren’t the sort to worry much about workplace appearance. The rooms were on my right, beginning with 301. I heard faint music from behind some of the doors as I went by them, the drone of voices behind others. I thought I heard somebody crying in 307. Between 309 and 310 was a door with a sign saying “Exit” over it. Of course I had to try it and of course it was locked.
Just before I got to 312, I did a dozen fast
deep-knee bends to help effect a mild breathlessness befitting a bringer of critical news. It’d be no trouble at all to look worried. I adjusted the bulldog at my back, then stepped up to the door and rapped hard.
The door guy was big, in shirtsleeves and apparently unarmed, which I was glad to see. A Japanese screen directly behind him blocked my view of the room but not the heavy waft of cigarette smoke or the drone of voices. I gave him the bit, expecting to see at least a squint of doubt, but he only nodded and let me in.
There were two round tables with a game going at each. A long narrow table against the wall held bottles of bonded whiskey and plates of bread and cold cuts and cheese. I spotted Buck with his back to me and started for him but the door guy put a hand on my shoulder and said softly, “After the hand.”
Buck was dealing seven-card stud. Last card going around, facedown. Two other guys still holding. A guy with a goatee bet big and Buck raised him big and the third guy cursed and folded. The goatee raised Buck back and Buck raised him even bigger. The goatee was showing a pair of kings, a ten, a three. Probably had a king down, maybe another ten or trey. I took a sidestep to get a look at Buck’s up cards—pair of jacks and one of them a heart, nine of hearts, eight of hearts. Possible straight flush.
“You ain’t buying it, buddy,” the goatee said with a cocksure grin. “Not from me.”
He called. Full house, kings over tens, and the hole ten was a heart—so no straight flush for Buck.
He didn’t need it. He turned up all the other eights. The goatee’s grin fell off. “Shit!” he said. “You believe this?”
As Buck pulled in the fat pot the door guy stepped up and whispered in his ear. Buck turned around and looked so truly surprised I was almost thrown off. “Tommy!” he said. “What you doing here?”
I delivered the bad news. He stared at me a moment, a man taking it in, then said low, “Oh Jesus”—then jumped up so fast he nearly upset his chair and began stuffing his winnings in his pockets.
A World of Thieves Page 13
