A World of Thieves

bruises the face was a pretty one.

“Like the blind man said when he passed the shrimp docks,” Buck said, “hello, girls.”

“For Pete’s sake, Buck, try to be nice.” Charlie said. She slid into the booth next to Russell and patted the seat beside her for the girl to sit there.

“Belle honey,” Charlie said, “this here’s Buck and that’s Russell.”

She looked up timidly from under her lashes and her eyes cut from Russell to Buck and her lips made a small twitch in what was probably the best she could do for a smile.

“An ass-kicking hurts even worse the day after, don’t it, honeybunch?” Buck said. She lowered her eyes to the table.

Charlie gave Buck a look of reprimand, then touched Belle’s arm and said, “And that’s Sonny.”

She met my eyes across the table for a second and then dropped her gaze again, her ears bright pink.

“My hero,” Buck said, grinning at me. I flicked him a two-finger “up yours.”

“Wish she’d give somebody a chance to get a word in edgewise,” Russell said, smiling at the girl, and her ears got redder.

“She talks plenty,” Charlie said, “when she’s in company worth talking to.”

Russell looked around, checking to see if anybody was within earshot, then said low-voiced, “Ah, exactly how much talking you done with her about us?”

“Enough,” Charlie said. “I thought she ought to know what kind of company she was keeping so she could choose not to keep it if she didn’t want.”

“But here she still is,” Buck said. “You got a thing for bad-asses, girl?”

“Buckman, please?” Charlie said.

“All right, all right,” Buck said. “So now we’re all properly introduced, can we get something to eat? I’m about starved to death.”

He signaled for the waitress. She was an older woman and had probably seen a few things in her time because she never batted an eye at Belle’s face.

When Charlie asked Belle what she wanted to eat, she stared at the table and shook her head slightly. She seemed to be trying hard to make herself invisible.

“Tell you what,” Charlie said, “I’ll get bacon and eggs and you get pancakes and sausage and we’ll eat whatever we want off each other’s plate, okay?”

But all she did was nibble at a piece of toast and sip her coffee while the rest of us ate like farmhands without much pause for conversation.

Then we were on the road again, me at the wheel and Buck in the shotgun seat, Russell at a back window, Charlie between him and Belle. I’d take a look at her in the mirror every so often, and every time she was staring steadily out at the passing countryside like an immigrant entering some strange new world.

Pretty much like us all.

The highway rose and fell and rose again. The towns smaller and fewer and getting farther apart. Hills and cedars and dwarf oaks. The grass turning dull, going sparse, giving way to stony scrub. Mesquites. Low clumps of cactus. The hills shrinking, scattering, the vistas widening, the sky deepening dead ahead.

In the early afternoon we stopped in some burg along the highway to get gasoline. When I shut off the engine the silence was profound. We all sat mute for a moment and all I could hear was the ticking of the hot engine. “Goddam,” Buck said. “For minute I thought I’d gone deef.” We all got out to stretch and use the restroom. I told the attendant to fill it up.

Russell asked the guy how it felt to live in the middle of nowhere. The guy got the pump going and spat a streak of tobacco juice and said, “It’s another four, five hundred miles to anywhere near the middle.”

Belle still hadn’t said a word other than her name the night before. At one point Russell had casually asked where she was from, but she only gave him a spooked look and then turned her face back to the window. “Nice chatting with you,” Russell said. Charlie punched him on the arm and said to leave the girl be. We’d gone along without anyone saying much after that, just listening to the sporadic music we’d pick up on the radio, usually more of the stringband stuff.

While the others were buying the sandwiches and sodas I stood at the side of the highway and stared off into the barrenness ahead, marveling at its vastness. I hadn’t known New Orleans could feel so far away.

Buck came up beside me, sipping from a bottle of Dr Pepper and munching a Clark Bar. “We can at least take her somewhere else,” he said, trying to mimic my voice. “Well…here’s somewhere else. How about we leave her here?”

I didn’t know he was joking and my face must’ve shown it, judging by the way he laughed. “Hell kid, the more I think on how she looked without a stitch, the more I believe we done the smart thing to bring her.” He walked off to the car before I could think of what to say.

Then we were on the road again and pretty soon another station faded off the radio. Buck fiddled with the tuning knob, static rasping along the dial until we picked up a hissing and crackling rendition of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.” We started singing along—all but Belle, who kept staring out the window for a minute and then put her face in her hands and broke into sobs.

“Honey, what?” Charlie said. She took her in her arms.

“That song…it was playing when those…those men, they were…it was so… awful!”

“Easy, baby,” Charlie said, patting her shoulder, rocking her like a child. Russell arched his brow at me in the rearview and I shrugged and turned the radio down. Buck rolled his eyes and shook his head.

And then she told her story. Told it bit by bit as the miles went by. Told it by fits and starts and mostly out of sequence. Told it with pauses to cry some more and to gently blow her tender nose and take a sip of Charlie’s strawberry Nehi before resuming.

What it came to was this. She was Kathryn Belle Robinson—Kitty Belle, her daddy’d called her—seventeen years old, born and raised in Corsicana, Texas, and every passing mile was taking her farther from there than she’d ever been before. Her daddy had worked in the oil fields. Her mother came from Tyler, where she’d won some kind of rose festival beauty contest when she was in high school, but she hated oil towns and lamented her foolishness in marrying so young and ruining her dream of becoming a photography model. From the time Belle was a child, her mother advised her not to make the same mistake.

“Don’t waste your good looks like a rose in a mudpit” was how her mother put it. Finish school, she told Belle, and then grab the first chance that came along to get away from the stink and grime of oil-town life.

Her daddy himself had been killed in the fields a year ago, gassed to death, him and eight others, by a leak at one of the rigs. They’d brought the bodies into town and laid them all in a row and every man of them had a bright red face and huge eyeballs and their bulging tongues were black. She hated that she still couldn’t get that picture of him out of her head. He didn’t leave any money so they’d had to move in with his brother Lyle and sickly wife Jean. To help with expenses Belle got a job at a bakery that specialized in fruitcakes. Her mother didn’t do much of anything for a couple of months except sleep or sit at the window and stare out at the derricks, and then finally took a job as a waitress at a hotel restaurant.

For a time everything went all right, then her mother started going with a waitress friend to speakeasy parties after work. She sometimes didn’t come home till dawn. Uncle Lyle pleaded with her to no effect. She told Belle not to worry, she was only having a little fun. It was like that for weeks and weeks. And then four months ago a policeman showed up at the door late one night. Her mother and some salesman from Waco had kicked up their heels for a while in a couple of speakeasies and then gone speeding off in the man’s coupe. A few miles outside of town they’d crashed into a tree and were killed. Belle’s mother was at the wheel.

For weeks afterward she felt like she was going around in a kind of trance. School lost the small pleasure it had held for her and she quit going. She stayed with her job because it didn’t require much concentration and she could pass the days in the hum and whirr of the batter machines.

The problem was at night, when she’d lie in the dark and feel more alone than she’d ever imagined it was possible to feel. Her boyfriend, Billy Jameson—the only boy she’d ever “been with,” as she put it—had got in trouble for breaking into a grocery store and left town without even saying goodbye. And her only two girlfriends had recently moved away with their daddies to some new oil boom in Oklahoma. She got along with her aunt and uncle, but in truth they were little more than strangers to her, and they anyway had their own troubles, what with her aunt now bedridden. The only relief she could find from her loneliness was at the movies. She began going every