A World of Thieves

“Listen to him,” Buck said. “Take measures. Smartypants is full of himself, ain’t he? Same like always.”

“Probably wants us to call him Houdini or some such,” Russell said. “Escape artist like him.”

“You all quit picking on him,” Charlie said. She grabbed up the Gladstone and tugged me by the arm, pulling me through the gate and saying to come on, we had a lot of celebrating to do.

And Buck and Russell charged down the porch to hug me hard.

I’d been pleasantly surprised to find Charlie with them but I wasn’t sure how freely we could talk in her presence. They must’ve read the uncertainty on my face. “Everything’s jake, kid,” Russell said. “She’s in.”

She was sitting next to him on the sofa and patted his knee. “He gave me ten seconds to decide if I wanted to come along,” she said. “I took about seven to make up my mind.”

“Had to play hard to get,” Russell said.

“Now here I am, a moll,” she said, affecting to talk tough out of the side of her mouth. Then smiled wryly and said, “My poor momma must be going round and round in her grave.”

The bulldog was digging into my hip, so I took it out and set it on the small table beside my chair. Buck and Russell smiled at the sight of it. Charlie didn’t.

I was as eager to hear what they’d been up to as they were to ask me questions, and we went through several quarts of homebrew as we caught each other up on things. Sharp Eddie had given them the details about the trouble that put me in Angola. They called me twenty kinds of fool for getting in a tank fight in the first place— especially in defense of some faggot—and in the second for hitting a jailhouse cop, no matter the cop hit me on the head. You couldn’t win a fight against a jailhouse cop; you only ended up with more time behind bars. And if you killed him, well, kiss your ass goodbye.

“The only thing surprises me,” Russell said, “is they didn’t hang you. I mean, John Bones’ kid. Even if it was an accident, the only worse trouble you could’ve made for yourself was if you strangled Huey Long’s momma.”

“That old sumbitch’ll turn Loosiana inside out looking for you,” Buck said.

I said I’d heard so much about what a hardcase John Bonham was that finally I didn’t believe it. “Maybe he was a rough cob in his younger days, but anymore he’s nothing but a gray old man with only one hand, for Christ’s sake.”

“Old and gray as he is,” Buck said, “I wouldn’t take him too light, me.”

“You ever have dealings with him?”

“No, but we know some who have, and we could tell you stories,” Russell said.

“I’ve heard plenty of stories,” I said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if he put out most of them himself.”

“Can we quit talking about that man?” Charlie said. “You already said he couldn’t do a thing to Sonny in Texas even if he knew he was here, so why go on about him?”

“Girl’s right,” Buck said. “To hell with that coonass.”

They wanted to hear all about Angola so I told them. Buck said it had always been one of the roughest prisons in the country and it couldn’t have gotten any softer since Long became governor. “I like the Kingfish,” he said, “but I wouldn’t pick his prison to do my time in.”

Charlie said a place like that was proof enough what beasts men really were. Russell affected to growl and gently bite her arm. She playslapped at him and said, “Quit that, or I’ll put you back in your cage.”

They loved hearing about the escape. When I told about turning the dog-bait trick around on Garrison, Buck laughed and said, “See? Told you it’d work!”

They couldn’t stop marveling that I’d run the levee. Through the rest of the evening one or the other would every now and again say “How do you like this kid?” and punch me in the arm and laugh the way they’d laughed on the night Russell brought Buck home from Texas. And I’d laugh along with them, the way I’d always wanted to.

They told me about their getaway from Verte Rivage, how the truck they’d stolen had busted a wheel in a bad rut and they’d fled into the swamp and were two days slogging through it before coming to another road. They stole a picnicking family’s car to get to Plaquemine. Buck won a twenty-dollar bet with Russell when they found the Model A unharmed beside the police station. When they got home they had to wash the mud off the money and spread the bills all over the house to dry. The report that they’d made away with ten grand was bullshit—they got a little over five. And if I’d been wondering what happened to my share, Buck said, it’s what they sent to Sharp Eddie to pay for my defense.

“You all ever see the fella gave you the tip on that bank?” I said.

“We did,” Buck said. “Claimed he didn’t know about the sheriffs’ convention. I believed him.”

“Me too,” said Russell. “It’s why all we did was bust his arm.”

Charlie stared into her glass of beer. I had a hunch there were aspects to the criminal life she hadn’t yet got used to.

After Verte Rivage they kept away from banks for five months. They went back to smalltime stickups, to working the poker and dice tables. Then a couple of weeks before Christmas they got a tip from Bubber Vicente about a Jackson bank. It had never been hit. No guard on the premises. They took on a driver named Buddy Smalls and did the job. It went slick as lard and they came away with over six grand. They figured they were back in bigtime business. Three weeks later, on another tip from Bubber, they hit the bank in Bogalusa. The news report Jimmyboy told me about was true—they didn’t get a dime.

“The teller was putting it in a sack when this peckerwood hops on my back like it was some goddam rodeo,” Russell said. “You could say our attention was pretty much distracted from the money for the rest of our visit.”

“I should’ve had that dumbshit guard kick the piece to me,” Buck said. “I never figured he’d try for it. Man’s stupidity got him killed, plain and simple—and added a goodly bit to our troubles.”

“Things did get a wee hairy,” Russell said. “Bang-bang-bang.” He grinned and affected to duck gunfire.

Charlie got up and went to the kitchen, saying we needed more beer. The quart on the table was half full. Russell watched her go, then looked at me and shrugged.

“And here’s the kicker,” Buck said. “We get outside and Buddy’s already flown. Left us high and dry. So I stop this sheba in a little roadster and say we’re taking her car. She says, ‘Ah shit,’ just like that. Cute little thing. Showed me a lot of leg as she got out. I should’ve asked her to come with us—you never know.”

They’d left their own car in Hammond—the yellow Pierce-Arrow, which they’d bought less than a week before Bogalusa—but when they got there the car was gone. They figured Buddy Smalls had it, so they drove the roadster on into Baton Rouge and stole another car and made for Buddy’s place in Metairie. Sure enough, the Arrow was parked around the side of Buddy’s house. While Buck knocked loudly at the front door and called out he was the Western Union man, Russell peeked in the back window and then jimmied the kitchen door and tiptoed to the living room and there was Buddy hunched down next to the sofa and holding a gun pointed at the front door.

“I kicked him in the back of the head so hard I near broke my foot,” Russell said. He let Buck in and they splashed water on Buddy’s face to bring him around. He started crying and saying they always said if a job went bad it was every man for himself. They reminded him that the rule applied only when your partners didn’t stand a chance, it didn’t mean you ran off and made their chances worse. They took him for a drive way out into the boondocks with Buddy talking the whole way, making every pitch he could to save his ass.

“I felt a little sorry for him,” Russell said. “I figured it was partly our fault he run out on us. We should’ve known he didn’t have the sand for a bank job.”

Maybe so, Buck said, but if a guy told you he’d be there, he had to be there, and if he wasn’t you couldn’t let it go. It was one of those lines you had to set, a line a man can’t cross without paying a price, otherwise nothing