A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  “He threaten to hurt you if you didn’t do like he said?”

  “No, he never.”

  “Then why do it if you didn’t want to?”

  “I thought I had to. I thought you were right outside.”

  “Come again? You thought I was right outside? Outside your cabin? Then why didn’t you run out?”

  “I thought…I thought you were waiting to be next.”

  And then she was crying into her hands again.

  Well hell. After a minute I put an arm around her and she leaned into me with her face on my chest. Her crying became a case of hiccups, and when I chuckled at the mix of hics and sobs, she hit me lightly on the shoulder with her fist and said, “It’s not—hic—funny”—and we both laughed.

  “Let’s try and get some sleep,” I said. “Sun’ll be up soon. You can have this bed.”

  She lay down and I covered her with the blanket and tucked it around her. Then got in Buck’s bed and under the blanket.

  I don’t know how much time passed before she said, “Sonny?” She said it so softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard it. “You awake?”

  “What?”

  “Charlie told me the trouble you had in Loosiana.”

  “She did, huh?”

  “Was it terrible in prison?”

  “What do you think?”

  “It must’ve been terrible.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “I’m glad you got away.”

  “Not as glad as I am. Now go to sleep.”

  Another minute went by.

  “Sonny?”

  “Christ’s sake, what?”

  “I’m glad you weren’t waiting to be next.”

  “Do I have to go knock you on the head to shut you up?”

  She chuckled. “You wouldn’t neither. You’re too nice.”

  I came awake up with my head still hurting and discovered her lying beside me. No telling how long she’d been there. She was rolled in her blanket like an Indian, her back to me, her ass against my hip. I had an urgent erection, and my first inclination was to use it on her. Then I remembered how pathetic she’d looked last night, and how she’d thought I’d been waiting to take a turn. I’d never been prone to confusion about myself or about women, but if somebody had put a gun to my head at that moment and demanded to know exactly what I was feeling, I couldn’t have given a straight answer.

  She stirred and started to come awake. I rolled on my side away from her and feigned to be still sleeping. She lay still for a minute, then eased out of bed. I waited till I heard the bathroom door click shut and then got up and put my clothes on.

  When she came out and saw me she blushed. Then looked down at herself and said, “Will you look at this dress? You’d think somebody’d been sleeping in it, for Pete’s sake.” I smiled at that and then she smiled too. Then we went over to the café.

  The others weren’t there yet but we went ahead and ordered. Several mugs of coffee and some fried eggs and sausage and hash-browns and biscuits dripping with butter all helped put a cushion on my hangover. Belle ordered the same thing but only picked at it. She was nervous and kept cutting her eyes to the front door. I was feeling a little squirmy myself. She probably sensed it and didn’t even try to make small talk.

  I was done eating when Buck showed up. I’d figured he’d get there ahead of Russell and Charlie, who were prone to a morning hump and were usually the last ones to the table. He slid into the seat opposite us in the booth and gave a lopsided grin. His eyes were badly bloodshot. “Feel like I been run over by a damn booze truck,” he said. The waitress came with a mug of coffee for him and took his order and went away again.

  He lit a cigarette and smiled at Belle. She was looking at her plate and pushing her food around with her fork. “When I woke up by my lonesome,” he said, “I figured you’d gone to see if young Romeo here could use some company too.” He winked at me. “She’s a darling, ain’t she?”

  I wasn’t smiling, and he finally seemed to tune in to our mood.

  “What?” he said.

  “She didn’t like what you did last night,” I said. I hadn’t intended to be so blunt, but there it was.

  “Say what?” He looked at me like I’d spoken in a foreign language.

  “You scared her, man,” I said. “She’d rather you don’t do that again.”

  He laughed. “She’d rather, would she?” He looked at Belle. “Is this rascal telling me true, missy? I scared you?”

  She kept her gaze on her plate and nodded. I was pulled between pity and the urge to slap her on the head for being so damned sheepish.

  “And so?” Buck said. “You don’t want me to come creeping into your tent no more?”

  She looked all set to start crying again. It really irked me. “It’s what she said, Buck.”

  “Not to me, she didn’t—and she can speak for herself.”

  She laid her fork alongside her plate and for the first time looked at him directly. “I don’t want you to do that again.”

  He stared at her without any expression at all.

  “Please,” she said.

  Which got a smile from him. “Well hell, honey. All you had to do was say so. I never in my life forced myself on a woman and I ain’t starting now. This how you want it, this is how you got it. Good enough?”

  She nodded.

  “Still friends?”

  She looked like she’d never heard such a question. Then made a small smile and nodded again.

  “Well, all right then,” he said.

  The waitress arrived with his food and the coffeepot and refilled our mugs. Buck cut into his pork chop and said it was done just right. Belle started nibbling the sausage links off her plate with her fingers. The matter of last night had been so swiftly settled it felt like I’d missed something, but she seemed well satisfied with the way it went.

  Buck said he’d already checked on the car—radiator all patched up and ready to go. Then Russell and Charlie showed up and ordered big well-done steaks with scrambled eggs and hashbrown potatoes and biscuits and gravy and tall glasses of milk.

  Charlie was happy to see how much the swelling had gone down in Belle’s cheekbone. She lightly traced the bruises with a forefinger and said, “Look here where the purple part’s already turning blue. This spot here’ll be green by tomorrow, and here’s some yellow starting to show. Declare, girl, right now you got about the most colorful face in Texas.”

  Russell leaned over for a closer look at the swellings. “You’re lucky the bastard wasn’t wearing some kind of mean ring,” he said. “You won’t have no scar at all.”

  A half hour later we’d retrieved our bags from the cabins and loaded them in the car. The girls got in the back seat with Russell. Our old road map was practically in tatters so I went in the office to buy a new one. Buck had settled the bill for the car repair and the rooms and was standing outside the office, counting what was left of our stake money. He was still there when I came out.

  “Here’s the lucky stud gets her all to himself,” he said, punching me lightly on the arm.

  He was smiling but there was something in his tone. I smiled back and shrugged. “I guess,” I said.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “if she said I forced her it’s a lie.”

  “She didn’t say that. Only that she asked you to go.”

  “I don’t recall that she did.”

  “We were all pretty soused,” I said. “Except for her.”

  He spat and looked off at the distant mountains. “I wasn’t so soused I ain’t sure she didn’t say no.” He turned to me again. “I ain’t no rape fiend, kid. I can’t abide a rape fiend.”

  “Hell, Buck, I know that.”

  “Like as not she couldn’t deal with Mr. Stub,” he said, using the name he’d given his mutilated pecker. “It’s some who can’t.”

  I made a wry smile and shrugged. “Maybe. She’s pretty much the fraidy-cat type as it is.”

  “I thought I had her figur
ed,” he said, “but now I ain’t so certain.”

  “Cries at the drop of a damn hat,” I said.

  He smiled. “Yeah she does.” He looked over at the car, where she and Charlie were laughing at something Russell was saying. “But Lordy, don’t that body beat all?”

  “You said a mouthful.”

  “Couple of nice mouthfuls is what she got. Well, hell, enjoy it while it lasts, kid.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Just one thing. You sappy for her?”

  “Sappy?” I said. I peered at the car and lowered my voice. “Hell no, man, it’s not like that.” And told myself I meant it.

  He studied my face. “Good,” he said.

  “I mean it.”

  “All right.” He smiled. “Let’s go.”

  On our way to the car he said in a low voice, “You know, even if I had tried to force her—and I sure as shit didn’t, but even if I had—it couldn’t’ve been but attempted rape nohow. Can’t be nothing but attempted with a damn one-inch pecker, right?”

  We were laughing when we got to the car, and Charlie asked what was so funny.

  “This damn Sonny,” Buck said. “Listen here to the dumbass joke he just told me.”

  As I drove out of the parking lot and started down the highway with the sun directly behind us, he told the one about the woman who goes to the doctor and tells him she just all of a sudden went deaf in one ear. The doctor takes a look and says, “Well, I see your problem—you’ve got a suppository in there.” And the woman says, “Oh for Pete’s sake…now I know what happened to my hearing aid.”

  I ndigo night of drizzling rain. Water dripping from eaves and clattering on banana fronds, running off gutters and spattering on cobblestones. Sporadic and trembling heat lightning. Hoarse bellows of ships’ horns out on the river.

  He works the pick gently. Feels the lock yield to his expert application. Eases the door ajar and listens intently. Opens it further and slips inside and closes it softly behind. Stands immobile and studies the geography of the place by the intermittent flares of lightning at the windows. There the kitchen. There the bath. There the bedroom door. Light and dark, light and dark. Mapping in his head the furniture’s array. And then a quavering illumination finds him gone from the front door, transported as by the darkness itself to the bedroom threshold.

  The bed stands empty and neatly made. He cannot know if she will return this selfsame evening, whether she will be alone or in company. The lightning quits. He positions himself in a chair in the bedroom and listens in the darkness for sound at the front door. And remains thus for hours. The rain ceases. The windows turn pink with the rising of the morn. When the place is sufficiently daylit he begins to search. And comes to find an envelope in the bedside drawer. The word Sonny inscribed upon it. Two items within. A sheet of paper with the single word Dolan’s and the initial B. And a note.

  Chérie—Sorry to leave this way, but got word of B & R! Have to catch a train in 15 min. Took $50. I owe you more than $. Be back soon. You’re an angel—an incomparably lovely vixen—the classiest dame in the Quarter—the most erotic of dreams made flesh—the cat’s veriest whiskers. In other words, you ain’t bad, kiddo. Think of me, S.

  She will never know of her inestimable good fortune in choosing to go to St. Louis at this time to appraise an oil collection for possible exhibit in the Fontaine. So deft was his search she will also never suspect that someone was prowling her home in her absence and prying into the recesses of her life. Some days after her return she will hear a neighbor play Blue Skies on the saxophone and her lingering resentment toward Sonny for his rude departure will quite suddenly give way to missing him terribly. She will go to the bedside drawer for his goodbye note and read it yet again for reassurance of his intention to come back. And will again get nothing from it but the sinking feeling that she has seen him for the last time.

  Though well outside his bailiwick, the Quarter is not unfamiliar to him. He has made occasional visits to its ranker pockets, has had dealing with various of its meaner denizens, is not without notion of where to begin his search. And thus, on an early-darkening evening of impending rain, after two days of discreet inquisitions he stands informed of the Dolan who worked for a time with the brothers LaSalle….

  At his small table in the back room of the garage Jimmyboy sups on a small pot of tomato soup and listens to the radio. He has the volume turned up loud against the rain’s drumming on the roof, but the reception is poor and crackles with static. Rudy Vallee opens the show with his customary greeting of Heighho, everybody! and the band swings into a rendition of I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.

  So badly rusted are the hinges of the door at Jimmyboy’s back that the radio’s loudness does not mute their screech. He turns with a sardonic intention of telling the intruder to learn to read so he can understand window signs that say Closed, then sees a tall lean man with gray face and mustache, a broad-brimmed hat dripping rainwater, a chrome contraption where his hand should be. A man not here with complaint of car trouble. A man—and Jimmyboy knows this with instant and iron certainty—of grave intolerance for bullshit.

  He turns down the radio and pushes his chair back and points at his prosthetic foot. I got a part missing too, mister, he says, and it done give me all the pain I care to know in this life. I ain’t no tough guy even a tiny bit. You tell me what you want and if I can give it to you I will, believe you me.

  John Bones holds up Sonny LaSalle’s prison photograph. Name? he says. Seeking to see how truthful this gimp is.

  Jimmyboy names Sonny without hesitation. He tells everything he knows about the LaSalles, even producing the sketch of Russell attached to the newspaper report of the Bogalusa bank robbery, and concluding with what he learned by steaming open the envelope the brothers had left for Sonny and reading its contents before sealing it up again. He tells of the note’s instruction to go to a filling station that he’s sorry he can’t remember the name of but he remembers it’s right next to the Houston train depot and it said talk to a guy named Miller.

  I’d say that’s where he’s gone, sure enough, Jimmyboy says.

  The man’s eyes never blink.

  You see, mister, Jimmyboy says. You see how I’m cooperating? Not a need in the world to get rough, not with me, no sir. You only got to ask is all.

  Jimmie Rodgers starts yodeling on the crackling radio.

  The man smiles. I like that, he says. Turn it up some.

  Sure thing, Jimmyboy says. He turns around and raises the volume—and all in an instant there is a large-caliber pistolblast and his forehead bursts in a spray of blood and brain and his ruined head thumps the table.

  The radio yodels on as John Bones goes out of the room and through the garage and into a dark and sodden night beshrouding the deserted streets in this empty neighborhood of padlocked warehouses and shuttered shops.

  The police will record Jimmyboy Dolan’s death as an unsolved homicide—hardly rare fate among smalltime New Orleans crooks. No one will attend his pauper’s burial, but at least one of his familiars will feel something akin to grief on learning of his demise. Cockeye Calder will be near to tears when he sorrowfully laments, That sonofabitch still owed me four grand!

  III

  U nder a midmorning sun and high blue sky we rolled into Fort Stockton, seat of Pecos County. The place had its share of oil fields and oil money, but we would try for none of it. This town would be our refuge, where we’d return after pulling jobs in other places. We wanted no trouble with the local citizens or police. As far as they were concerned, we were sales reps for Matson Oil and Toolworks, assigned to the West Texas circuit.

  We went to a real estate office and told the lady there what we were looking for. She said we were in luck, a local oil rigger had put his house up for rent just two days ago. He’d been offered a job in some panhandle boomtown too good to turn down. He’d taken his family with him and expected to be gone a year. The place was at the south edge of town and she led us over there in her car and showed it
to us. Three bedrooms and fully furnished, styled sort of like a double-barreled version of the shotgun houses you saw in Louisiana. All the bedrooms were along one side and a narrow hallway separated them from the parlor, bathroom and kitchen. The bathroom had an old clawfoot tub that had been rigged with a showerbath pipe and nozzle. The kitchen was equipped with a spanking new Frigidaire and a good gas stove. Both the parlor and the kitchen had doors that opened onto an L-shaped porch running the length of the house and around the back of it. The sideporch had a long picnic table and afforded a grand view of the mountain sunsets. The rent was steep and we’d have to put up a large damage deposit, but when Buck looked at me and Russell we both nodded.

  “We’ll take it,” he told the woman.

  Buck claimed the front bedroom for himself, and Charlie took the middle one for her and Russell because she liked the mesquite tree that stood against the window. “That leaves you two with the private one in back,” she said, winking at Belle and getting a blushing smile out of her.

  After we unpacked we went shopping and bought groceries and cigarettes, cookware and towels. Buck made inquiries and learned that if a man wanted really good beer and top-grade moonshine he should go to a certain green house at the end of Callaghan Street and tell whoever came to the door that Grover sent him. So we did—and bought a dozen quarts of excellent beer and three quarts of pretty fair corn liquor.

  According to the real estate lady the town had sprung up next to an army fort back around 1860 and then became a main station on the stage line. What made the location so desirable was that it had water—Comanche Springs, where the Indians had been refreshing themselves for God knew how long before the white man showed up. She’d said the spring was now the site of a pretty park about fifty yards up the road from our house. When we got back from town we walked over to have a look at it.

  There was a swimming hole with grassy banks, shade trees, barbecue pits, picnic tables and benches. “A veritable oasis,” I said, and got one of Buck’s “Ain’t you smart?” looks.