A World of Thieves

could remember telling them he was Ansel Mitchum but had no memory of anything else until he woke up in the hospital and got the bad news.

Russell broke off from the story to light a cigarette. He took a deep drag and sighed a long stream of smoke. Then he told us Buck had lost his dick—most of it, anyway.

“He’s got about yay much left,” he said, holding two fingers an inch apart.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Daddy said.

I’d read that some Indian tribes used to cut the dicks off enemies they captured. And heard tales about blackhanders who’d castrated guys in revenge for getting the horns put on them. Such a thing had always seemed so terrible it was almost unreal, like something out of a campfire scare story.

Buck hadn’t minded talking about it, Russell said, and even joked about it, although he couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice when he wisecracked about the greater likelihood of pissing on his shoes from now on. The doctor told him he was lucky they’d been able to save both balls, and lucky he didn’t get stabbed in his only kidney. Buck said yeah, he couldn’t hardly believe his luck. He agreed with the doctor that it could’ve been worse— hell, the bitch might’ve used a spade and took his whole crotch out at the roots.

The doctor insisted he didn’t have call to be so pessimistic. The surgery had gone well and would be swift to heal. Buck still had the nerves and blood vessels in place to feel pleasure down there and would still be able to shoot off.

“Buck said that was good news, all right,” Russell told us. “Said it’d be easier on his hand too, since now he’d be able to jack off with just his thumb and forefinger.”

“Oh man,” Daddy said, and sighed and rubbed his face.

After three weeks in the hospital Buck was transferred to the city jail. Despite the efforts of a local attorney Russell had retained for him, he’d been denied bond—he didn’t own property and was unemployed and Wilkes was still in a coma, a condition the doctors said would likely be permanent. Without the testimony of either the victim or the woman who’d fled the scene, however, the state would’ve been hard put to prove attempted murder, so it went with a charge of mayhem. The trial was two weeks later and Russell was right there for it.

Buck’s lawyer began by reminding the jury that Texas law so deeply frowned on cuckoldry that it sanctioned a husband’s killing of any man he found in flagrante delicto with his wife. His client, however, had gone to Wilkes’ home unarmed and without malice, solely to try to retrieve the beloved wife stolen from him by that homewrecker of a traveling salesman. Wilkes had met Mitchum at the door and invited him in and then attacked him with a knife, mutilating him in an unspeakable manner and forcing him to defend himself. If anyone was guilty of mayhem, Buck’s lawyer told the jurymen, it was Wilkes. He described the wound in detail and offered to have his client lower his trousers so they could see the horror for themselves, but the judge said nothing doing, counselor’s description would suffice.

“The jury kinda wormed around in their chairs when he told about Buck’s wound,” Russell said. “But they did plenty of squirming too when they saw the pictures of Wilkes all laid out like a dead man in a Halloween mask.”

The state made hash of the self-defense claim by pointing out that Mitchum couldn’t have done the awful damage he did to Wilkes after receiving his own incapacitating wound. Furthermore, since Wilkes would’ve been incapable of inflicting the wound after being beaten so badly, Mitchum must have been wounded by the woman, the only other person on the scene. She’d fled from him to be with Wilkes and then stabbed him in defense of the man she really loved. As for Mitchum’s claim that she was his wife and he had a legal right to protect his marriage, where was the proof of their union?—he’d also claimed to have lost his marriage paper in a house fire.

Russell said the jury didn’t look all that pleased with themselves for finding him guilty. The judge wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to Buck, either. He made a little speech about the difficulty of passing sentence on someone who’d already suffered in a manner to make any man quail just to hear of it. Then again, the defendant did put a man in a coma, and there was some question as to whether the woman was his legal wife. So the judge gave him three years.

Buck was taken to the state pen in Huntsville for processing, and a few days after that he was transferred to a road prison near Sugarland.

“I just came back to let you all know what happened and how things stand,” Russell said. “And to take care of some things—rent and stuff. Visit with Charlie a little. Then I’ll be heading back to Texas for a bit.”

Why go back there, Daddy wanted to know. What more could he do in Texas? The only thing to do now was hope Buck kept his nose clean and got an early parole.

“Well,” Russell said, “I figure to set Buck free of that road camp or know the reason why.”

He said it the way somebody might tell you he’d made up his mind to buy a car. I’d been sitting there feeling glum about Buck being in prison and it took a second for Russell’s words to sink in—and then my heart jumped up and danced.

Daddy called him a damn fool. He said Russell could end up in prison too. He said they might both get killed. He said it wasn’t worth it, not with Buck so likely to get paroled in just a year.

Russell said Buck wasn’t likely to think of it as just a year. Daddy talked himself blue in the face but couldn’t dissuade him. They argued about it until I warned them from the front window that my mother was home for lunch.

She was happy as a pup to see him. Then she noticed Buck’s absence and asked where he was. Still at the oil rig in Lake Charles, Russell told her, where they’d been working these past weeks and carrying home their pay in a wheelbarrow. He apologized for not having sent word but they’d been working double shifts and hadn’t had time to do anything else. He was heading back to the rig himself in a few days.

My mother’s smile was as phony as a paper cutout. She said she was glad they were doing so well and asked him to stay to supper, but he said he had a date with Charlie. Daddy suggested a short one at the corner speak but Russell said he was already late and had to hurry off. He didn’t want to hear any more of Daddy’s arguments is what it was.

We didn’t see him again before Daddy shipped out a week later on a freighter taking oil-rig parts to Tampico and Veracruz. I don’t know what went through Daddy’s mind in the three weeks he was gone, but not a day passed by that I didn’t wonder if I’d ever see my uncles again.

And then a few days after Daddy’s return from Mexico, just as we were finishing supper one night, there came a jaunty little knock at the door and I answered it and there stood Russell—with Buck smiling over his shoulder.

They hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. We were all laughing and Daddy and Buck wrestled each other around the room as my mother hugged and hugged Russell and then they traded off and kept at it. For my mother’s sake, they told a bullshit story about the Lake Charles field going dry and them deciding to come home and see about maybe opening a business of some kind. She said that was wonderful. I think she knew they were lying but didn’t care, she was so glad to see they were all right. She made no mention of Jena that night or anytime after, and as far as I would ever know, she never did find out about Buck’s maiming or his time in a Texas prison.

To celebrate their homecoming we went out into the summer night and down to the corner cafe and its crowded backroom speakeasy. Russell telephoned Charlie to come join us. She and my mother and a pretty waitress named Jill took turns dancing with us. The beer kept coming to the table in large foaming pitchers and we cut a rug and laughed it up till almost midnight. Every now and then Buck or Russell would let me take a pull off their beer while my mother wasn’t looking. The laughter between them was different from the way they laughed with the rest of us. It was the laughter of men who’d faced danger together. Who would risk their ass for each other.

After my mother left for the library the next morning—the only time she’d ever been late and with the only complaint of hangover I’d ever hear from her—Buck and Russell came by and told us about the break.

Russell had recruited an old pal of theirs to help out, a car mechanic and smalltime thief named Jimmyboy Dolan. They’d driven to Texas and checked into a motor court on the main highway about two miles from the Sugarland prison camp. On Sunday, the visiting day, Russell went to the camp in his guise of cousin Luther Sammons. They sat at an outdoor table and Buck told him all about the guards and the work routine and how to get to the stretch of road where his gang would be clearing ditches the next day. It was a perfect spot, isolated and lightly traveled.

The following morning Russell and Jimmyboy smeared mud on the car’s license plates and drove out to the