someone was prowling her home in her absence and prying into the recesses of her life. Some days after her return she will hear a neighbor play Blue Skies on the saxophone and her lingering resentment toward Sonny for his rude departure will quite suddenly give way to missing him terribly. She will go to the bedside drawer for his goodbye note and read it yet again for reassurance of his intention to come back. And will again get nothing from it but the sinking feeling that she has seen him for the last time.
Though well outside his bailiwick, the Quarter is not unfamiliar to him. He has made occasional visits to its ranker pockets, has had dealing with various of its meaner denizens, is not without notion of where to begin his search. And thus, on an early-darkening evening of impending rain, after two days of discreet inquisitions he stands informed of the Dolan who worked for a time with the brothers LaSalle….
At his small table in the back room of the garage Jimmyboy sups on a small pot of tomato soup and listens to the radio. He has the volume turned up loud against the rain’s drumming on the roof, but the reception is poor and crackles with static. Rudy Vallee opens the show with his customary greeting of Heighho, everybody! and the band swings into a rendition of I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.
So badly rusted are the hinges of the door at Jimmyboy’s back that the radio’s loudness does not mute their screech. He turns with a sardonic intention of telling the intruder to learn to read so he can understand window signs that say Closed, then sees a tall lean man with gray face and mustache, a broad-brimmed hat dripping rainwater, a chrome contraption where his hand should be. A man not here with complaint of car trouble. A man—and Jimmyboy knows this with instant and iron certainty—of grave intolerance for bullshit.
He turns down the radio and pushes his chair back and points at his prosthetic foot. I got a part missing too, mister, he says, and it done give me all the pain I care to know in this life. I ain’t no tough guy even a tiny bit. You tell me what you want and if I can give it to you I will, believe you me.
John Bones holds up Sonny LaSalle’s prison photograph. Name? he says. Seeking to see how truthful this gimp is.
Jimmyboy names Sonny without hesitation. He tells everything he knows about the LaSalles, even producing the sketch of Russell attached to the newspaper report of the Bogalusa bank robbery, and concluding with what he learned by steaming open the envelope the brothers had left for Sonny and reading its contents before sealing it up again. He tells of the note’s instruction to go to a filling station that he’s sorry he can’t remember the name of but he remembers it’s right next to the Houston train depot and it said talk to a guy named Miller.
I’d say that’s where he’s gone, sure enough, Jimmyboy says.
The man’s eyes never blink.
You see, mister, Jimmyboy says. You see how I’m cooperating? Not a need in the world to get rough, not with me, no sir. You only got to ask is all.
Jimmie Rodgers starts yodeling on the crackling radio.
The man smiles. I like that, he says. Turn it up some.
Sure thing, Jimmyboy says. He turns around and raises the volume—and all in an instant there is a large-caliber pistolblast and his forehead bursts in a spray of blood and brain and his ruined head thumps the table.
The radio yodels on as John Bones goes out of the room and through the garage and into a dark and sodden night beshrouding the deserted streets in this empty neighborhood of padlocked warehouses and shuttered shops.
The police will record Jimmyboy Dolan’s death as an unsolved homicide—hardly rare fate among smalltime New Orleans crooks. No one will attend his pauper’s burial, but at least one of his familiars will feel something akin to grief on learning of his demise. Cockeye Calder will be near to tears when he sorrowfully laments, That sonofabitch still owed me four grand!
III
Under a midmorning sun and high blue sky we rolled into Fort Stockton, seat of Pecos County. The place had its share of oil fields and oil money, but we would try for none of it. This town would be our refuge, where we’d return after pulling jobs in other places. We wanted no trouble with the local citizens or police. As far as they were concerned, we were sales reps for Matson Oil and Toolworks, assigned to the West Texas circuit.
We went to a real estate office and told the lady there what we were looking for. She said we were in luck, a local oil rigger had put his house up for rent just two days ago. He’d been offered a job in some panhandle boomtown too good to turn down. He’d taken his family with him and expected to be gone a year. The place was at the south edge of town and she led us over there in her car and showed it to us. Three bedrooms and fully furnished, styled sort of like a double-barreled version of the shotgun houses you saw in Louisiana. All the bedrooms were along one side and a narrow hallway separated them from the parlor, bathroom and kitchen. The bathroom had an old clawfoot tub that had been rigged with a showerbath pipe and nozzle. The kitchen was equipped with a spanking new Frigidaire and a good gas stove. Both the parlor and the kitchen had doors that opened onto an L- shaped porch running the length of the house and around the back of it. The sideporch had a long picnic table and afforded a grand view of the mountain sunsets. The rent was steep and we’d have to put up a large damage deposit, but when Buck looked at me and Russell we both nodded.
“We’ll take it,” he told the woman.
Buck claimed the front bedroom for himself, and Charlie took the middle one for her and Russell because she liked the mesquite tree that stood against the window. “That leaves you two with the private one in back,” she said, winking at Belle and getting a blushing smile out of her.
After we unpacked we went shopping and bought groceries and cigarettes, cookware and towels. Buck made inquiries and learned that if a man wanted really good beer and top-grade moonshine he should go to a certain green house at the end of Callaghan Street and tell whoever came to the door that Grover sent him. So we did—and bought a dozen quarts of excellent beer and three quarts of pretty fair corn liquor.
According to the real estate lady the town had sprung up next to an army fort back around 1860 and then became a main station on the stage line. What made the location so desirable was that it had water—Comanche Springs, where the Indians had been refreshing themselves for God knew how long before the white man showed up. She’d said the spring was now the site of a pretty park about fifty yards up the road from our house. When we got back from town we walked over to have a look at it.
There was a swimming hole with grassy banks, shade trees, barbecue pits, picnic tables and benches. “A veritable oasis,” I said, and got one of Buck’s “Ain’t you smart?” looks.
Nobody was happier about this geographical marvel than Charlie. “I hadn’t wanted to say anything and be a spoilsport,” she said, “but the farther we’ve come into this damn desert the more I’ve been wondering how I can live in such a godforsaken place. This little patch of trees and water is exactly what I need to keep from losing my mind.”
It was a roasting afternoon and the swimming hole too tempting to resist. Buck and Russell and I stripped down to our trousers and dove in. That was all the encouragement the girls needed to kick off their shoes and take the plunge in their dresses. The water was chilly and dark green and smelled wonderfully fresh. We splashed and dunked each other and took turns on the rope somebody had tied to a high tree branch overhanging the pool. You’d swing way out over the deep part and let go of the rope and stay suspended in the air for one marvelous instant before dropping into the water.
An old couple sat at a table and seemed to enjoy our frolic. Every time Charlie or Belle swung out on the rope and dropped off, their skirts flapped up around their hips, affording us a good look at their legs all the way up to their underwear—and every time, the old man would yell “Ya-hooo!” along with me and Buck and Russell. When the girls came out of the water to take another swing, we’d grin and grin at the way their thin sopping dresses clung to them.
“You bunch of oversexed galoots,” Charlie said.
“And they always will be, honey,” the old woman said, giving the old guy a reproving look. He shrugged with his palms turned up in the universal gesture of “Who, me?”
