A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  Because she wanted him to rest as comfortably as possible she let him have the bed to himself and she slept on a foldout army cot she’d bought somewhere. The electric fan stood on the dresser, humming and oscillating, keeping the heat off him. She was hardly ever out of his hailing distance, never further away than the kitchen. She spent much of every day in a chair at his bedside, leafing through magazines and listening to radio music at low volume. There was always a pot of warm broth on the stove, and whenever he woke she spooned some into him.

  The first time he was awake when I looked in on him, he smiled weakly and said, “Hey kid, how you doing?”

  “Better than you, I’d say.”

  “Not for long,” he said. And was asleep again in a minute.

  He was awake again that evening when I looked in. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll lead the way out and you or Buck can bring up the rear.”

  “Anyway you want it, Uncle,” I said, grinning back at him. The way he said it, you’d have thought Buck was in the next room rather than in a Midland jail cell.

  Whenever I checked to see how he was coming along over the next few days, Charlie would often as not be ministering to him—feeding him, bathing him, shaving him, changing the bandage around his upper torso and shoulder or the one on his leg. He had dark circles around his eyes and was uncommonly pale, but he said he was doing fine. “Be right as the rain in no time,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Charlie said. “Only it hardly ever rains around here, so don’t let’s get too far ahead of ourselves.”

  We’d been back twelve days when the telegram came from Bubber: GOOD LAWYER BUT HARD JUDGE STOPTWOYEARS SANTA RITA STOP LM WELL STOP TRANSFERS TOMORROW STOP BV.

  Charlie didn’t want me to wake him up just to read him the telegram but I did anyway. He listened to it and rubbed his face and scowled. “Two years. Bastards.”

  “That’s not so bad, is it?” Charlie said. “He can get parole in, what, seven or eight months, right?”

  Russell looked at her like she was trying to sell him something—then turned to me and said, “If only I was in better shape we could’ve sprung him when they were transferring him to the farm. That would’ve been the ticket.”

  “What are you talking about?” Charlie said.

  He ignored the question. “Send a telegram,” he said to me. “Tell Bubber we need everything he can give us on this Santa Rita joint. Once we have that we can figure how to—”

  He had a sudden coughing fit. There’d been a hard wind for the past two days and the air was full of dust. He said it didn’t hurt his back wounds when he coughed but it looked to me like he was flinching despite his best effort not to. He tried to resume what he’d been saying but got caught up in coughing once again, this time the pain of it starkly evident on his face. He slumped back on the pillows, gasping.

  “All right, that’s enough visiting now,” Charlie said sharply. “Come on, Sonny, let the man get his rest.” I let her steer me to the door.

  “Send it now, Sonny,” Russell said in a tight rasp, then fell to coughing again. I said I was on my way. Then Charlie closed the door on me.

  She’d been testy ever since our return, and I was pretty sure it had to do with our business. She’d never much cared for Russell’s being in the robbery trade, and now she seemed to get upset by any talk of it at all. I had the feeling they’d been arguing about it, but if that was the case, they were keeping it between themselves. We’d always shared confidences, Charlie and I, but just the day before, when I asked her what was wrong, she’d said, “Nothing” in a way that made clear she wasn’t going to bring me into it.

  Belle didn’t know what was troubling Charlie, either. She’d gotten to know her at least as well as I did, maybe better, and she’d tried to feel her out a couple of times, but Charlie wasn’t confiding in anybody.

  “I think she’s real scared he might get hurt worse,” Belle said. “But she’s just as scared to say anything to him about it. You know how he is when she complains about you all’s work.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “She’s always known what he does. She’s always known it’s a risky business.”

  “Yeah, well. Being told something’s risky is a lot different from seeing what can happen.”

  I figured she was probably right—Charlie was just scared. Russell’s blood was her first look at what can happen when the job goes bad. And I realized how different Belle was in that respect. She’d seen plenty of cases of risk gone bad. She’d seen what men looked like after falling off derricks, after getting their heads smashed by falling drill pipe. She’d seen men who’d been burned up so bad in field fires they looked, as she put it, like big charred dolls and gave off a smell you’d never forget. In the case of her own daddy, she’d seen what they looked like after being gassed to death. I doubted that Charlie had ever seen any such things or their like.

  By the time we got the word about Buck, we had another problem—we were nearly broke. After the latest visit to the grocer’s and then to the Callaghan Street house to get some beer and hooch, I had less than ten dollars. I searched Buck’s room in case he might’ve stashed some money in there but all I found was sixty-three cents in a dresser drawer. Belle had about two dollars left of the grocery money I’d given her before I went to Odessa. Maybe Russell had enough money to cover our rent and groceries and booze and so forth until he was ready to work again, but I had a feeling he didn’t. He’d always let Buck take care of the money and only carried enough himself to pay for incidentals or to take Charlie out for a night on the town. Forget borrowing money from Bubber. I’d heard Buck say that Bubber never lent money to his holdup men—not because he didn’t trust them, but because the risk was too great that something would happen to them before they could repay him. Nobody faulted him for his caution.

  That night in bed I explained our financial problem to Belle and told her if Russell was as flat as I was I’d have to go out on a job pretty soon.

  At first she didn’t say anything, but although it was too dark to see her face, I could feel her eyes on me. Finally she said, “Who’d do it with you?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “It won’t be that big a one.”

  “It’s always better if somebody stays with the car and has it ready for the getaway.”

  “Do tell,” I said. “What do you know about it?”

  “I’ve heard you all talk, you know.”

  I’d had no idea she’d listened so closely to any of our shop talk.

  “Let me go with you, Sonny. I can drive for you, you know I can.”

  Until a little over a week ago I hadn’t known she could drive a car at all, never mind drive as well as she did. For lack of anything else to do one afternoon, we’d gone for a long drive way out into the desert. We put the top up on the roadster to keep the dust off us and I sped us over an old truck trail that went winding every which way around outcrops and arroyos and came to an end at an abandoned oil camp. She loved it, yahooing along with me as the roadster went leaning through the turns, raising high rooster tails of dust behind us. I told her about the rough trails we’d had to drive on in doing the Blackpatch hijack, and she said she’d learned to drive on some pretty rough roads around Corsicana.

  “I was fourteen when Daddy started teaching me in his Dodge,” she said. “He loved to speed around like you, and he’d always let me drive fast too. I don’t mean to brag on myself, but he said I was a regular Barney Oldfield. He taught me lots of stuff—how to fish, how to use tools. I was an only child, so he didn’t have anybody else to teach.”

  “Want to show me what a hotshot driver you are?” I said.

  “Think I’m lying, don’t you?”

  We traded seats and she got us going, smoothly working the gearshift and clutch. At first she took it easy, rolling along at moderate speed, taking the turns slowly. But I could tell she was only getting the feel of the car. Then she began to accelerate. As we headed for the next curve she gave me a sidelong glance and said
, “Hold on to your hat.”

  She smoothly shifted down into second gear and gunned the motor and I fell against my door as she wheeled through a tight left turn. She took the next two curves just as nicely, and I whooped along with her.

  But she got a little too cocky and took the next one too fast. We skidded off the trial and onto the softer sand and the car slogged to a stop and stalled before she could shove in the clutch. She started it up again and put it in low but the back wheels spun in the sand.

  “Dammit!” she said. Her face was redly angry. “I’m sorry, Sonny.”

  “Nice ride,” I said. “But now I’m going to have to sweat my ass off getting us unstuck.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  She got out of the car and ducked down out of sight for a minute by one of the rear wheels and then went around and squatted by the other one and then got back in the car. She put the car in gear and eased out the clutch and we slowly rolled forward and back onto the trail.

  “What’d you do?” I said.

  “Let a bunch of air out the back tires so they get a better grip in the sand. It’s an old trick Daddy taught me. We got to take it kind of easy getting back, though. Till we can fill them back up again.” She was smiling as we plodded along.

  I said, “Stop the car a minute.”

  She did, and looked at me in question. I leaned over and kissed her a good one.

  “Whoo,” she said. “What’s that for?”

  “Call it a yen. Any objections?”

  “Oh no sir,” she said with a big grin. “Matter of fact I’m getting some yens of my own. Why don’t we hustle on back home and I’ll show you them?”

  “Let’s do that,” I said.

  Her driving wasn’t the only surprise of the week. The next day we were out on another truck trail and she was barreling through the curves with even more skill and confidence than the day before—and then she unexpectedly hit the brakes in the middle of a long straight stretch. The sudden stop threw me hard against the dash and I bonked my head on the windshield. A cloud of raised dust rolled over us.

  “Oh baby, I’m sorry—you all right?” She was all big-eyed. “But jeezo, did you see the size of it?”

  “Of what?” I said, rubbing my forehead.

  “Rattlesnake. In the road ahead. He’s probably gone now.”

  We strained to see through the settling dust. “I don’t see it no more,” she said.

  “There,” I said, and pointed.

  It was a good-sized rattler, all right, about fifteen yards away and alongside the trail, coiled in front of a creosote shrub. It was nearly the same color as the sand and hard to spot. Except for the darker bush behind it I might not have seen it.

  I took the Smith & Wesson six-inch out from under the seat and eased the door open and stepped out. I held the revolver in a two-hand grip and braced my arms on top of the windshield frame, then cocked the piece and took a bead and squeezed off the shot.

  The bang was swallowed almost instantly in all that open space and the sand kicked up a little to the right and slightly behind the snake. It drew into a tighter coil.

  “Almost,” Belle said.

  “Almost only counts in horseshoes,” I said.

  I hit it with the next one—knocking the rattler into a writhing tangle. I walked up to within a few feet of it and shot it twice more and it stopped moving. Belle came up beside me as I straightened it out some with my foot. It was close to five feet long, even bigger than I’d thought.

  “Wow,” she said. “Look at it.”

  “It’s one less hardcase in the world,” I said, and headed back to the car. I released the revolver’s cylinder and put my thumb over the two live rounds still in it and shook out the empty shells. I had a box of .38 cartridges under the driver’s seat and I got it out and reloaded.

  She lingered over the snake a moment before coming back to the car. “Nice shooting, huh?” I was a little surprised to realize I’d been showing off, that I wanted to impress her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Nice.” There was something else on her mind.

  “What?” I said.

  “Sonny,” she said. It was the voice she used when she didn’t quite know how to broach a subject. She looked over at a bunch of prickly pear, then off at the mountains, then finally back at me. “Teach me?”

  “What? You mean shoot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You never fired a gun?”

  “Daddy was always going to show me but never did get the chance.”

  I took the bullets out of the .38 and passed it to her so she could get the feel of its heft and its fit in her grip. I showed her how to stand sidelong to the target to shoot with one hand and how to face it when you shoot with two and how to use the front sight. I showed her how to squeeze the trigger rather than jerk it. How to cock the hammer and uncock it again without firing. How to unlock the cylinder and how the ejector rod worked and how to load the chambers.

  “I love the sounds of it,” she said. She spun the cylinder to hear its soft whirr. She cocked the hammer with its softly ratcheting double click and snapped it on an empty chamber. “It sounds so…I don’t know. Efficient.”

  “That’s the word for it,” I said.

  I gathered a few stones about the size of my fist and set them in a row on top of a waist-high mound of sand, then backed up about a dozen yards and reloaded the piece and handed it to her. I told her to shoot into the mound first, to get used to the report and the recoil.

  She stood facing forward with a two-hand grip. Pop! She flinched hardly at all. She turned and looked at me and silently formed the word, “Wow!” Then stood sideways and fired two one-hand shots.

  “Oh man!” she said. “I can do this. Watch the rock on the right.”

  She took careful aim. Pop! Sand spurted an inch to the side of the rock.

  “Hey girl, almost.” I was impressed.

  “Almost is for horseshoes,” she said without looking at me, taking aim again, the tip of her tongue in the corner of her mouth. Missing again, this time by a slightly wider margin.

  “Dammit!”

  She drew another bead and held it. Then lowered the revolver to her waist and regarded the rock like she was seeing it in some different way. Then brought the gun up smoothly and fired and the rock went flying.

  “Whooo!” I applauded. “Give em hell, Kitty Belle!”

  She whirled around to me, wide-eyed. “Know how I did it? I didn’t think about it or even aim so much, I just sort of up and pointed at it, like with my finger. It felt, I don’t know, so natural.”

  “I’ll be damn,” I said. “Fired six rounds in her life and already she’s giving lessons how to shoot.” I was smiling when I said it, but I was also flat amazed.

  She opened the cylinder and shoved out the empty shells with the ejector rod. “More bullets, please,” she said.

  I let her shoot up the whole box. She missed about as much as she hit but she always came close. It was damn good shooting, any way you looked at it. And you could see she loved it. It was in the brightness of her eyes, in the way she set herself to fire, in her eagerness to reload. By the time she’d used up the last of the cartridges she was as easy with a gun as she was behind the wheel of a car. It comes that naturally to some.

  “Not bad, girl,” I said when she was done. “If you want, I’ll bring the .380 tomorrow and show you how to shoot that.”

  She leaped into my arms, locking her legs around my waist and giving me an unintentional conk on the back of the head with the revolver in her hand.

  “Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, and kissed my head—and then we were both laughing as I swung her around.

  We stopped at the swimming hole to cool off before going home. There were a few kids there, swinging on the rope and splashing around, but they left pretty soon after we arrived, and we had the place to ourselves. We dogpaddled over to a shady spot under a dense overhang of tree branches where we could stand with the water up to ou
r necks. We ran our hands all over each other under the water and she undid my pants and took hold of me and I slipped my hand up under her dress and underwear and we hugged close and gasped against each other’s neck as we used our hands on each other and a minute later both of us groaned with our climax. Then hugged and kissed and got into another laughing fit.

  “You really think I’m good?” she said. “At shooting, I mean. You really?” She looked radiant. Her face had fully healed and every passing day I’d marveled even more at how truly lovely she was.

  “Your daddy didn’t know the half of it,” I said. “You’re a regular Barney Oldfield and a regular Annie Oakley.”

  And so, a week later, when I told her what I had in mind and she said she wanted to do the job with me, I said, “Well now, I don’t know about that. Let me think about it.”

  The truth was, I’d been thinking about it for days.

  The day after the arrival of Bubber’s telegram, we heard Russell and Charlie arguing in their room. He’d had her go into town that morning and buy a crutch—“To have ready for when I’m able,” he’d said. But when she got back with it he wanted to use it immediately. He said he needed to get up and walk around some before he went crazy from being on his ass day and night.

  “I knew it!” she said. “What a dope I am! The doctor said to stay off that leg a month and you know it.”

  “What the hell do doctors know? I’m turning into a goddam vegetable lying here all day.”

  “If you put weight on the leg before it’s ready you might hurt it worse. It needs to mend more.”

  “That’s what a crutch is for, to keep weight off it. Now quit arguing and hand it over here.”

  “No. Quit acting like such a child!”

  “Quit acting like my goddam mother!”

  She stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind her and stomped into the kitchen to snatch up her cigarettes without a glance at me and Belle and headed out the back door, letting it bang shut on its spring. Belle gave me a look and then went after her.

  I went to Russell’s door and opened it. He was sitting up on the edge of the bed looking gloomy.