A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  “Every oil town stinks,” Bubber said, “but Blackpatch stinks the worst of them. They say it’s because it’s not only got all the usual stinks of an oil patch, it’s got the stink of all them people who got burnt into the ground. Now they got even more wells on the hill and a fifty-thousand-barrel holding tank up there. Looks like a giant soup can. I sure’s hell wouldn’t want to live down there under it. Mona says the only reason I’m worried is because I’m from Loosiana and naturally scared of hills. Now I ask you boys, how do you argue with a remark like that? I offered to pay whatever it’d cost her to set up in Odessa and she finally said maybe, she’d have to think it over. She likes her independence, she says. Doesn’t want to be beholden, she says. Christ. I love the woman, boys, no lie, but damn if she don’t about make me insane sometimes.”

  “Sounds like love, all right,” Buck said, and Russell said he’d drink to that, and everybody laughed.

  Then we got down to business.

  The first job Bubber had for us was in Wink, some sixty miles away in the neighboring county. We checked out of the Bigsby early the next morning and had breakfast at the Rancho Restaurant across the street. The orange sun was clearing the rooftops behind us as we drove past the city limit sign and onto the Pecos highway. The setting moon looked like a bruised pearl.

  We hadn’t been on the road an hour, rolling through the flat and barren scrubland, when a low cloud of strange brown haze began rising directly ahead of us.

  “What in the hell’s that?” Russell said.

  “Beats me,” Buck said. “Smoke?”

  “Maybe,” Russell said.

  I said I didn’t think so. I’d never seen smoke that color or in a cloud that shape.

  “Well, whatever it is,” Russell said, “it’s coming this way.”

  We watched it swelling as we bore toward it. Then Buck said, “Oh, shit.”

  Russell said “Sand” at the same time I said “Dust” and we were both right.

  We’d been told about such storms and what to do if we got caught in one out on the open road. There was no traffic ahead of us, only a solitary truck far behind. I slowed the car and pulled off the highway, then wheeled into a U-turn across the road and onto the opposite shoulder. I switched off the engine and set the brake and we rolled the windows up tight.

  The idea was to have the rear of the car turned toward the wind to protect the radiator and engine from the driving sand, the windshield from flying debris. We looked through the back window at the growing dust cloud, the road disappearing under its advance.

  The car lurched with the thump of the wind’s impact and the world around us abruptly dimmed and went obscure. Each gust rocked the Ford on its creaking springs like a railcar riding uneven tracks. The doorjambs whistled. Tumbleweeds caromed off the rear window like headlong drunks. Sand and grit drilled into the glass, hissed against the back of the car, rasped over the roof and fenders. The floorboards quivered under our feet and a fine dust came up through the pedal openings. We couldn’t see at all behind us or even to the other side of the road, could see only a few yards ahead of the car.

  “Bubber told me some men who been caught out in a storm like this ended up blind in one or both eyes,” Buck said. “Said he’s heard of some fellas with the bad luck to be passed out drunk on the ground when a sandstorm hit and covered them up and smothered them—buried them alive. Some weren’t found till days or weeks afterward and some were never found at all. He said one guy got caught in one and couldn’t think of what to do except sit down with his back to the wind and hug tight to his knees. By the time it was all over, the only parts of him still showing was the tops of his knees and his head and shoulders. Lost some of the hair off the back of his head, and his ears and the back of his neck were bloody raw. Guy’s still got the scars of it, Bubber says.”

  Russell coughed against the rising dust in the car. “Damn me for a liar if I wouldn’t rather go through a hurricane than this,” he said. “Any day.”

  A half hour later the worst was over. A dusty wind still held and the sky was still hazed, but the strongest gusts were done with and you could see for a distance down the road. The rear window had been scoured to a pale translucence. We got out and saw that the back end of the car was now of fainter green and rougher finish than before. This region was full of motor vehicles patchworked with portions of bare metal—a phenomenon locally referred to as a West Texas paint job.

  We got back in the Ford and I turned it around again and we pressed on.

  “All that dust,” Buck said, “reminds me of the fella who goes to the doctor and the doc tells him he ain’t got but a few weeks to live. Fella says, ‘Goddamn, ain’t there nothing you can suggest?’ Doc says, ‘Well, you could go to one of them spas, take you a mud bath every day.’ Fella says, ‘Will that help my condition?’ Doc says, ‘No, but it’ll help you get used to the feel of dirt.’”

  For the last two hours before getting into Wink we had to poke along behind a long muletrain of bunkhouses being hauled to an oil company camp at the edge of town. Overall, the town wasn’t much different from the other oil towns we’d seen—as loud and crowded and smelly and dusty, as overrun with ragtowns. Workers coming and going with every change in shift, the cafés and stores doing business round the clock. But Wink had the rare advantage of its own ice plant, and it had a scad of moviehouses. Russell counted six of them as we went down the central street.

  We made our way over to E Street and found the house we were looking for and studied it as we drove by. A fading yellow bungalow on the corner of a neighborhood as crowded and noisy as every other. Most boomtown homeowners were raking in cash by renting rooms in their house—or in some cases simply the cots in a room, renting each cot to a different man on every shift. But this house showed none of the frenetic activity of so many of the others. “Looks just like the man told us,” Buck said.

  Despite the delays of the sandstorm and the muletrain, we still had plenty of time to kill, so we went to a café and ordered hamburgers and coffee. The place was so jammed we couldn’t converse without shouting. Then we took a walk through the teeming streets.

  At the corner of an intersection, we heard a surge of cheering and high laughter from a large crowd gathered in an open lot down the street, so we went to see what was going on. Spectators were bunched on two sides of the lot and hollering exhortations at a dozen men staggering like drunks. Then we drew closer and saw that the men weren’t only drunk but crippled. Every man’s feet twisted in some awkward attitude and his legs in twitching rebellion, some with a leg dragging like a dead weight, all of them trying to navigate toward a rope stretched across the far end of the lot. They listed and stumbled and fell, struggled to their feet and tried to bear toward the rope and went veering off at a tangent and fell again, the crowd roaring at their antics, shouting encouragements. Some careened into the spectators and were shoved back toward the center of the lot and urged to keep trying to reach the rope. There were steady outcries of betting.

  “Jakeleg race,” Buck said.

  Bubber had told us all about the jakeleg, a disorder of the nervous system brought on by drinking a bad batch of ginger jake—a fiery booze made with Jamaican ginger—and most batches of it were bad. He’d shown us a half-full bottle of the stuff, a meanlooking dark brown, and when he pulled the cork we caught a smell like rotten peppers.

  “Christ!” Buck had said. “People drink that?”

  “And some ask for more,” Bubber said. “There’s every manner of wicked hooch in the world, boys, and West Texas has a goodly portion of it. You all be careful of what you toast your health with or you might could ruin your health real quick.”

  From one of the men beside us we learned that every contestant had been given a few free slugs of ginger jake prior to the start of the race. “To get them good and primed,” the man said with a laugh.

  “The winner get a prize or anything?” Russell asked.

  “Why, hell yes,” another man said. “Winne
r gets a pint of jake. It’s about the only prize they’ll race for.”

  We watched awhile longer, then Russell checked his watch and arched his brow at Buck. It was one o’clock.

  “Yeah,” Buck said. “Let’s go.”

  As usual with Bubber’s jobs, he’d gotten his information on this one from an inside man—somebody’d who’d come to him and was in a position to know how much the job would reap, where and when it could be done, the kind of resistance likely to be encountered, and whatever other key details might be pertinent. If Bubber liked the setup, he’d pass the job on to a holdup team for thirty-five percent of the haul, which included the inside man’s cut.

  This one was a White Star Oil payroll, coming from Fort Worth. Seventy-five hundred in cash, according to the inside man. Three guys bringing it in—a courier named Sewell, a guard named Hatten, a driver named Lane—all three armed with pistols and they had a shotgun in the car, a blue ’27 Dodge sedan with Oklahoma plates. Unless they had trouble on the road, they were due to reach the company field office around four o’clock that afternoon. Once the money got to the field office, forget it—there’d be more than a hundred workers already there, lined up and waiting to be paid, and anybody who tried sticking up the place would be killed on the spot, no matter how well armed. And you couldn’t simply lay for the carriers a few miles outside of town and hijack them when they came along—there was way too much traffic for that.

  But the inside man had provided one other important detail, the one that decided Bubber on doing the job. The courier, Sewell, had a sweetheart in Wink, the wife of a White Star tool pusher who worked the afternoon shift. Whenever he delivered a payroll to Wink, Sewell always arrived in town about an hour or two before the money was due at the field office, giving himself enough time to pop into the pusher’s house on E Street for a roll in the hay with the wayward wife. They felt pretty safe about it because they knew hubby would be out at the field, waiting for his pay.

  We spied a couple of Dodges on E Street but neither of them blue or showing an Okie license. We circled the block twice before somebody pulled away from the curb ahead of us and opened a parking space, and I wheeled into it. We were a half-block from the yellow house and had a clear view of the place.

  By three o’clock the courier still hadn’t shown. We started to worry that maybe he’d had car trouble, that he and the woman had called it quits, that the company had sent somebody else to deliver the money this time.

  And then a blue Dodge came from behind us, and even in the rearview I could tell the Okie tag. The car passed us by and stopped in front of the yellow house and a man carrying a briefcase and fitting the description we’d been given of Sewell got out and said something to the driver. Then headed for the front door of the house, where the screen door had already opened to reveal a woman standing there in a long pink robe.

  “She sure don’t mind taking chances, does she?” I said. “A neighbor might see her.”

  “Maybe the bitch wants it that way,” Buck said. “Maybe she wants hubby to hear a few rumors and eat his guts out wondering if they’re true.”

  “Could be,” Russell said. “But even a sap has his limits. She and loverboy might could find theirselves looking up into his pistol one of these days.”

  “I’d wager she’s planning to take a powder before he gets to that point,” Buck said.

  “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, goodbye,” Russell sang.

  The Dodge was still idling in the street. We figured the driver was waiting for a parking place to open up, so we gave him one. Buck and Russell got out of the car and waved so long to me and I pulled out. As I drove off, I watched the Dodge in the rearview mirror as it backed up to take the spot I’d vacated.

  I went around the block, and when I got back to where the Dodge was, Buck and Russell were in the back seat of it. They smiled at me as I pulled up alongside. The two guys in the front seat were staring straight ahead and looking unhappy. Russell was grinning big. He raised a pump-action shotgun high enough for me to see it and then lowered it out of sight again.

  Buck got out of the Dodge and leaned into the Ford’s passenger-side window. “I guess it would’ve been too easy if these assholes had it,” he said. “The Sewell guy took it in the house with him. It’s in the briefcase. I’ll just run on over and get it.” A car behind me squalled its klaxon and Buck glared and waved for him to go around us.

  “Keep driving around till I get back,” Buck told me. “Russell’s got these guys.” Then he walked off toward the house.

  Even though the traffic was so heavy I was moving hardly faster than a walking pace, I circled the block twice before Buck reappeared at the Dodge again. He was standing by the driver’s door and holding the courier’s briefcase. He was all smiles when I pulled up. “All right,” he said into the Dodge.

  The guy sitting on the passenger side, the guard named Hatten, got out and came around the Dodge and got in beside me. He looked abject. Buck sat in the back, directly behind him. Russell sat behind the driver of the Dodge, the Lane guy.

  “We’re off, kid,” Buck said. “Head for the Pecos highway.”

  We made our slow way through the street traffic, the Dodge trailing close. I looked at Buck in the mirror and said, “So?”

  “Seventy-five hundred on the nose,” Buck said. “I counted it.”

  “I mean, how’d it go?” I wanted details, a picture of the job.

  “Oh, well,” Buck said, “I slipped the hook off the door with my pocketknife and snuck on down to the bedroom and there they were, going at it like a couple of happy rabbits. I eased over to the chair where he’d put his clothes and gun and stood there watching them until the gal spots me over his shoulder and it’s like she was struck paralyzed. Sweet piece of calico. The fella keeps on hunching for a bit and then it must’ve dawned on him he’s doing all the work, so he rears up and sees she’s looking past him and he turns around and sees me holding the .45 on him and his eyes got this big. I told him to go ahead and finish, don’t mind me, but he didn’t have it in him to keep it up, I guess.”

  “You were in there a while,” I said.

  “Took a while to truss them up,” he said. “On the bed and belly to belly. Hands behind them.”

  “Still bare-assed?” I asked.

  “Goddam right. You reckon they’ll manage another hump before hubby gets home? I’d like to be a fly on that wall when he does, wouldn’t you?”

  The Hatten guy shook his head. “It’s shitty, man. Her husband’s an ox. He’s liable to kill him. Her too. Bust them up bad at the least.”

  Buck laughed. “You reckon?”

  “Shit,” Hatten said.

  I cold see how much Buck was enjoying himself. Hatten’s face was shiny with sweat. He had to be wondering if we were going to kill him.

  About a quarter-mile north of the Pecos highway, Buck had me turn off onto a rough ranch road that curved around a scrubby rise. As soon as we were out of sight of the passing traffic he said to stop the car. The Dodge pulled up behind us and we all got out, the dust settling over us. Russell was holding the shotgun he’d taken from them, a Remington twelve-gauge. He had their revolvers—.44s—stuck in his pants.

  Buck told Hatten and Lane to sit on the ground. They had the aspects of condemned men. I hadn’t thought he would shoot them but now I wasn’t so sure.

  He told them the word was already going around Wink that they had been in on the payroll theft. “I told Sewell you guys were the inside men for the job,” Buck said, “and it looked to me like he believed it. Hell’s bells, far as I know, one of you or both you was the inside man. Don’t matter true or false. Them boys at White Star are going to be awful mad their pay got stole and you’ll play hell trying to get them to believe you wasn’t in it with us. If I was you I wouldn’t even try to explain it, no sir, not at the risk of getting lynched on a derrick. I was you, I’d get in my car and get out of West Texas as fast as I could and I wouldn’t never come back, me.”

  He ge
stured for me to get behind the wheel of the Ford again. He got in the front with me, and Russell sat in the back.

  “Keys are in the car, boys,” Buck called out. “Good luck!” They were still on the ground, looking like they couldn’t believe their reprieve.

  I wheeled around and gunned the engine and waved at them as we went by and they vanished behind us in the raise of dust.

  Back on the highway and barreling south, I hollered “Whoo-eeee!” for no reason except I thought I’d bust if I didn’t. I looked over at Buck, my grin feeling almost too big for my mouth, then laughed at Russell in the mirror.

  “Cheer up, kid,” Buck said, looking at me with a wry smile.

  “This damn Sonny,” Russell said, joining in my laughter and clapping me on the shoulder from behind. “I never did know of such a good luck charm, I swear.”

  W hen we pulled up in front of the house, the sun was starting to dip behind the western range under a sky in riot with all the colors of fire. I cut off the motor and we got out and I breathed deeply of the warm dry wind coming gently from the south. The screen door screeched open and Belle and Charlie came running out, shrilling like schoolgirls, coming to greet us like we’d been gone for weeks instead of only two days.

  Belle flung herself on me, hugging me by the neck and locking her legs around my waist. “I thought you’d never get back!” she said, and kissed my ears and the top of my head.

  Her ass felt wonderful in my hands and I laughed and spun us around. I was amazed at how much her bruises had improved in the brief time we’d been away. Only a smudge of yellow remained on her cheekbone, and although the flesh around her eye was still blue, it was no longer swollen. She was even prettier than I’d thought.