A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  “Jesus,” he said. “Bad enough without having to put up with her shit too.”

  He gestured for the crutch leaning in the corner and I got it for him.

  “Easy does it,” I said, helping him up and slipping the crutch under his arm.

  “Beep beep,” he said to get me out of his way. He stepped off a few awkward paces, repositioned the crutch for a more comfortable fit, then slowly gimped out of the room and into the parlor and all around it and came back down the hall and into the kitchen. Bracing himself on his good leg, he eased down into a chair and let out a hard breath.

  “Christ damn,” he said. “Feel like I run a mile.” His face shone with sweat.

  I checked the bandages. The one on his back was still spotless, but there were a couple of rosy stains showing on the back of the one around his leg.

  “Best keep off it yet for a while longer,” I said.

  “Goddammit,” he muttered.

  I offered to get him a cold soda pop but he said the hell with that, give him a beer. I got one for each of us and sat across from him and we clinked bottles in a silent toast and drank. Then I told him about our tight money situation and asked how much he had.

  “Had about twenty bucks on me in Midland,” he said. “Charlie’s probably spent most of it by now.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s only one thing for it.”

  “Hell kid, I’ll be ready to go in a few days. First we deliver Buck and then we get back to working Bubber’s jobs.”

  “Bullshit, Russell. You’re still leaking, man. Be a couple of weeks, at least, before you can even get around on that crutch worth a damn.”

  “Coupla weeks, my ass,” he said. He looked miserable.

  He shook a Chesterfield out of an open pack on the table and I struck a match and lit it for him. He drew deep on it and exhaled slowly. We didn’t say anything for a minute as he thought things over.

  “One score might be enough,” I said. “Might need two. Filling station, grocery. Enough to see us through till you’re okay.”

  He took another deep drag, exhaled a long stream of smoke and nodded. “Yeah, I guess. But you can’t hit anyplace around here. Got to be out of the county, at least, and the further the better. If you do more than one, spread them way out.”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “And no lone wolfing,” he said. “Even with nickel-and-dime jobs, you can run into a world of trouble. You’ll need a guy at the wheel and ready for backup. I’ll give Bubber a call, see if he can get you—”

  “I already got somebody in mind,” I said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Belle.”

  He looked at me like he thought I was pulling his leg.

  I told him all about how well she could drive, how naturally she’d taken to handling a handgun. He listened with a smile.

  “Well, that girl’s full of surprises, ain’t she?” he said. “All the same—”

  “And,” I said, “a woman partner would be perfect. She can put her hair up under her hat, see, and wear a jacket to hide her tits. Unless somebody gets right up close to her, everybody’ll think she’s a man. Once we drive off, she ditches the hat and jacket and we’re a married couple on a car trip and the cops are looking for two guys.”

  “Real clever,” he said. “But just because she was good at shooting rocks didn’t mean she’d be good at shooting at a real person, if it came to that—especially if the real person had a gun too and was shooting at her.

  “It’s a whole different thing, Sonny, and you damn well know it. And speeding around in the desert ain’t like making a getaway through streets full of cars and people and with the cops maybe right on your tail. I don’t have to tell you this stuff.”

  “No you don’t,” I said. “I’ve talked it over with her and told her how it can be. She thinks she can handle whatever comes up.”

  “Oh she thinks so? What if she can’t and you get taken down because of it? Goddammit, I need you to help me with Buck.” He leaned back and let out a long breath. “I’d ruther we asked Bubber to get you somebody experienced.”

  “Then we’d have to give them a piece of the take,” I said, “and the take’ll be awful small as it is. I wouldn’t think Bubber’d care to have anything to do with such smalltime jobs anyway. Look, man, she can do it. It’s only the driving.”

  “Well hell, it’s your job, kid,” he said. “You got my advice for what it’s worth, take it or leave it.” But I could tell how mad he was by the way he gave his attention to the bandage on his leg and then to lighting a fresh cigarette, to anything that kept him from having to look me in the eye.

  “I guess I’ll give her a try,” I said.

  M iller Faulk made no trouble in the county lockup, not whenever any guard was in earshot. His fellows in the tank were mostly drunks and petty thieves and it had not proved difficult to make his point to them that he wished to be let alone. He passed his days in his rude bunk, brooding on the perfidy of women, the absurdity of love, the cruel nature of existence. A week into his sentence he received a visit from Weldon, who brought him cigarettes and tidings that Eula had departed for places unknown. This news came as no surprise to Faulk and saddened him but little until Weldon added that she’d departed in his yellow Pierce-Arrow—whereupon Faulk had with the fervor of a true believer supplicated the Lord Almighty to afflict her with cancer of the cunt. That, he told Weldon, would pretty much cover her from head to toe. Still and all, he comported himself as a model prisoner, and after twenty-one days behind bars he was granted a good-time release into the supposed free world.

  And only a few hours later John Bones hears Faulk’s name, the sixth one of the thirteen names on the list of that day’s jail releases. But he says nothing until the man on the telephone has read them all. Then says, Thank you, detective, and hangs up.

  The Closed sign faces out through the glass but the door is unlocked. He steps from the outer dark into the weak yellow light of the station’s office and a small bell jingles over the door. He slides the bolt lock home. The door to the garage is to his left and stands open. He goes to it and sees them within, staring at him, each man with a quart bottle of beer in hand, standing next to a new DeSoto with its engine exposed under the open hood. The garage bay doors are shut.

  Sorry, mister, the bigger one says, his eyes narrowing. We already closed. There’s a filling station a few blocks down still open at this hour.

  No, man, the Weldon one says, that’s the fella I was telling you wants to buy the place. Howdy, Mr. Cheval.

  He nods at Weldon, sees that Faulk is not so obtuse as the mechanic, that the man has jailbird eyes and knows a policeman on sight.

  That right, Mr. Cheval? Faulk says. You looking to buy this gold mine from me? He sets down his beer bottle and picks up a heavy crescent wrench.

  He steps into the garage and shuts the office door behind him, draws a short-barreled .44 revolver from under his coat, withdraws the pincer contraption from his coat pocket to reveal the two sets of handcuffs dangling from it.

  It requires artistry to mete pain in sufficient degree to make its recipient desire nothing on earth so much as its cessation, yet not to such extent as to grant him even the briefest respite of swoon. In this regard John Bones is an artist. He has known a few true hardcases in his time and Miller Faulk proves one of the most admirable of his experience—outdone only by a grizzled Cajun of years ago who withstood John Bones’ interrogation for more than two heroic hours before his heart abruptly failed, thus distinguishing himself as the only one ever to deny him the information he desired. Faulk lasts roughly half that long, yet is only the second to endure beyond an hour before finally—when John Bones again loosens his gag to permit him to speak—whispering in a nasal rasp: Bubber Vicente. Bigsby…Hotel…Odessa. That’s where…I swear.

  That’s where, you swear, John Bones echoes with a smile. You’re a poet, sir.

  Crouching beside Faulk, he studies the man’s remaining eye and read
s the verity therein, knows that unlike previous names and places Faulk has cried out in the course of their fragmented colloquy, these are the truth. Knows too that Faulk’s surrender is to the only hope left to him—a sooner rather than later demise. Supine on a concrete floor amid smears of grease and oil and blood, hands over his head and cuffed to the DeSoto bumper, legs at awkward attitude for their hammer-shattered knees effected to keep him from kicking, pants down to his thighs and his manly parts in ruin, a few toes rawly absent from the bared feet…what can he hope for except a quick end to it all?

  And Weldon? Lying close by. Facedown, hands cuffed behind him. Intact but for his pincered Adam’s apple and his drained blood gelling in a dark mat under his head. He would have done better to keep other company this evening.

  John Bones takes up the ball peen hammer once again.

  You did good, he tells Faulk. Nothing to be ashamed of.

  The hammer describes a blurred arc and in the instant of bonecrack Faulk is forevermore delivered from pain.

  He stands and unrolls his sleeves, so deft with the pincers he can rebutton a cuff as facilely as he undid it. Puts on his jacket, his hat. Sets the brim at his preferred angle. Goes out of the garage and out of the office and over to the Model T sedan parked in the shadows. He sets the throttle and ignition and goes to the front of the car and positions the handcrank and whirls it hard and the well-tuned motor rumbles into throaty combustion. He gets into the driver’s seat and readjusts the fuel flow and spark settings and his feet adeptly operate the planetary transmission pedals and he sets out for the westward highway. Bearing into the darker remnant of the night.

  I t was close to midnight when we pulled into a little filling station a mile south of Pecos. I chose it because the traffic at this hour wasn’t very heavy and there were no other cars at the pumps and only one parked alongside the building. A lamp on a high post glowed over the two pumps but we had the car top up and she had her hair bunched under her hat and wore a baggy windbreaker zipped up to her neck. A big bulge of chewing gum in her cheek the better to distort her face. It wasn’t likely anyone would take her for a woman even if they passed close to the car. She had the four-inch .38 beside her on the seat and covered with a fold of her skirt. I was wearing a hat too, and a paste-on mustache.

  “Set?” I said.

  She nodded, and revved the motor with a little goose of the gas pedal.

  “Remember, if somebody pulls in—”

  “I’ll tell them the guy’ll be right out and I’ll honk the klaxon. I’m okay, Sonny.”

  I got out of the car as the attendant swung open the screen door and said, “Gas, mister?”

  “A road map’s all,” I said, and followed him back inside.

  There was another guy in there, sitting at a small table with a checkerboard on it and a game in progress. I drew the .380 from under my belt and let them see it, then held it in the side pocket of my coat and told the attendant to sit in the other chair at the table and for both of them to put their hands under their ass. I went around behind the counter and yanked out the telephone cord. I found a Colt six-inch in the shelf under the counter. I looked at the attendant and he said, “The owner’s.” I put it in my other coat pocket, then opened the register and took out all the bills and stuffed them in the same pocket with the Colt. I told them I’d shoot the first man to stick his head out the door. Then I slipped the .380 back in my pants and walked out to the roadster and got in and Belle drove us off, smoothly shifting through the gears and accelerating steadily. I watched out the back window but didn’t see either guy come to the door before we were out of sight. The whole thing didn’t take three minutes.

  After we swung east at the highway intersection at Pecos, I quickly counted the take by the light of the lampposts—$375. More than it had looked like in the till, but awful puny compared to the hauls I was used to with Buck and Russell.

  Belle was singing, “Ain’t We Got Fun?”

  We checked into a motor camp more than twenty miles away, outside of a place called Pyote. The camp was well off the main highway, set back in a grove of scraggly mesquites and flanked by a high sand hill. I parked the car behind the cabin and we went inside and locked the door and laughed at each other in our comic rush to get our clothes off. I started to take off the mustache too but she stopped me and kissed me and said she’d never kissed anybody with a mustache before. It made me look like Douglas Fairbanks, she said. She stared down between us and said, “You even got a pirate sword and everything.”

  She shrilled happily as I swept her up in my arms and said, “Prepare to be ravished, woman!” and slung her onto the bed and leaped in after her. She hurriedly guided me into her, already panting the way she did when she was close, and before we’d been at it a half-minute she was digging her fingers into my back and tightening her legs around me and letting out her long low cry of climax. I’d never known her to get there so fast.

  After a while we sat up and lit cigarettes. I took off the mustache and she said, “Well hey there, Sonny LaSalle! Where you been? I just now had the best time with Douglas Fairbanks, you wouldn’t believe!”

  I got out the pint of mash I’d brought along and took a long pull and then offered her the bottle. She took a small sip off it and arched her brows and smiled and took another.

  Once she got started talking about the heist, she couldn’t stop. “In one way it was like you were taking so long in there I couldn’t stand it. But at the same time it was like I didn’t want it to be over with. Does that make any sense?”

  I smiled at her.

  She said she could hardly imagine how it must feel to rob a bank. The way she was carrying on made me laugh and remember my own happy babblings to Buck and Russell the first few times I went on jobs with them.

  “I was scared,” she said, “but I felt so…I don’t know…so real. Does it ever make you feel like that too?”

  “Only every time,” I said.

  “Wow,” she said.

  And then we were at it again.

  We didn’t check out of the cabin until midmorning and we stopped at the first café we came to. We sat in a booth in back and ate like we hadn’t seen food in days, each of us putting away a platter of fried eggs, pork chops, and potatoes, with a side of open-face biscuits covered with sausage gravy. We lingered awhile over coffee and cigarettes and then hit the road again.

  As we passed through various oil patches and the towns around them, she said it all reminded her of Corsicana. The landscape out here was different, but the derricks and pumps and storage tanks and trucks, the mule wagons and the crowded stores and cafés, the dirty streets teeming with oil workers, the constant racket and hazy air and awful stinks were the same as they’d been back home.

  “It’s the same in every oil town I’ve seen,” I said, “and I’ve seen a few lately.”

  We were in no rush, taking it slow and easy, stopping alongside the road once so I could help an old man change a flat tire on his truck, pulling up another time to watch a herd of pronghorns bounding over the grassy flats in the distance.

  The sun was almost down when we arrived in Crane. As rough as Corsicana was she didn’t think it was as rough as this little town, or as loud. Pulling a job in such a place was unthinkable—you’d never get away through all the traffic. We finally emerged at the east end of town into the gathering twilight and the traffic began to thin. A mile farther on we passed an isolated grocery store where several men were loading large cardboard boxes onto the beds of a couple of red pickup trucks parked in front. A supply run for an oil camp kitchen, probably.

  Neither of us spoke for the next minute or so as the road rolled under us. Then she looked at me and said, “That was a big bunch of groceries them boys bought.”

  “Yes it was,” I said.

  “They must’ve run up some bill,” she said. “I wonder has business been that good all day?”

  “Turn it around,” I said.

  As we drove back to the store I stee
red the car with my left hand for a moment while she put her hair up in her hat and zipped up the baggy windbreaker. The red pickups went past us in the other direction. We pulled into the lot and parked near the front door. It wasn’t a particularly large place, but through the front windows it looked jammed with goods. I figured it for a main supplier to a lot of the camps around there, and it must’ve recently received deliveries of new stock. There were a couple of other trucks in the lot, and one car, so there were at least three customers in there and who knew how many employees. Too many for one man to watch. It was a two-man job, but I didn’t want Belle out of the car. I was about to say forget it and tell her to get going again, but then a couple of guys came out, each with a boxful of groceries. As they were putting their goods in one of the trucks, another man came out with two big sacks and got in the car. A minute later both car and truck were gone.

  I decided to wait a little longer. I took the paste-on mustache from my pocket and put it on, turned to Belle and said, “Okay?” She smiled and winked. She had a big wad of gum going in her mouth. I checked the .380 and put it back into my waistband against my side.

  Five minutes later two more guys came out with groceries and got into the other truck and left. Ours was the only vehicle in the lot. I had her pull the car up directly in front of the entrance with the passenger side toward the door. Then I got out and went in, the screen door jingling a little bell hung atop the frame.

  There were several aisles of shelves and a pair of men were replenishing them with canned goods from various open cartons. The younger guy was big, beefy, with a red face and curly hair, the other was grayhaired, shorter and leaner, but I could see a family resemblance. The younger one looked at me and I nodded a greeting. The elder said, “Help you, sir?”

  “Need some cigarettes,” I said.

  The elder motioned to the younger and went back to his shelving. The younger left off what he was doing and went around behind the front counter where the register was. “What kind you want?” he said.