to dip behind the western range under a sky in riot with all the colors of fire. I cut off the motor and we got out and I breathed deeply of the warm dry wind coming gently from the south. The screen door screeched open and Belle and Charlie came running out, shrilling like schoolgirls, coming to greet us like we’d been gone for weeks instead of only two days.
Belle flung herself on me, hugging me by the neck and locking her legs around my waist. “I thought you’d
Her ass felt wonderful in my hands and I laughed and spun us around. I was amazed at how much her bruises had improved in the brief time we’d been away. Only a smudge of yellow remained on her cheekbone, and although the flesh around her eye was still blue, it was no longer swollen. She was even prettier than I’d thought.
Charlie made the same sort of fuss over Russell and then let go of him and ran over to me as Belle turned loose and went to Russell and there was more hugging and kissing. Then Charlie looked over her shoulder at Buck, who was headed for the door with the Wink briefcase in one hand and his travel valise in the other. She gave me one more peck on the forehead and set out after him, calling, “Hey you.” Buck turned as she threw herself on him and jarred him off balance and they went down in a heap.
Belle hesitated, then went over and stood smiling down on them as Charlie straddled Buck’s stomach and mussed his hair and planted kisses on his face and babbled at him in babytalk. He cussed mildly and made like he was trying to ward her off, but you could see how much he was enjoying it, how gently he got her off him. She kept petting him as he got to his feet muttering that a man could get his back broken being greeted by such a crazy woman. Belle playslapped him on the shoulder and said, “Oh, you love it and you know it”—then gave him a sidelong hug and said, “Welcome home.”
It wasn’t often you’d see him look as surprised as he did then, but she released him before he could hug her in return. Then Charlie had her arms around him from behind and lightly nipped his ear and he let out an exaggerated yelp and squirmed free of her and said, “Christ’s sake! Didn’t you nutty broads get enough to eat while we were gone?”
We took the bags out of the car and wrapped the shotgun in a coat before carrying it to the house—in case some curious neighbor who’d been watching the welcome-home show was still looking on. Not knowing we were going to show up, Charlie and Belle had planned to make sandwiches for their supper, but now they started getting out the pots and pans to cook us a proper meal. Buck told them to forget it, we’d go out to eat. We washed up and put on clean shirts while the girls changed into nicer dresses. Charlie had taken Belle shopping for clothes and she put on a blue sleeveless one I liked a lot.
We went to a barbecue place on Main Street and gorged on pork ribs and French fries and coleslaw, joking and laughing the whole while, and the patrons sitting around us smiled at our boisterous spirits. Afterward we went home by way of the house on Callaghan Street, where we stopped and bought six bottles of moonshine and a dozen quarts of beer.
Neither of the girls had asked about the job. From the beginning of her acquaintance with Russell, Charlie had known what he did for a living, but he’d made it clear that she shouldn’t question him about his business. He might now and then deign to share something of it with her but she was never to pry. And she never did. I’d always had a hunch she was glad to have it that way, that she preferred not to know any of the specifics about the risks he took. All through supper, though, I’d caught Belle looking at me with an eagerness that went beyond her pleasure in my return. She was dying to know about the past two days, I could see it in her eyes.
Not till we were on the way back to the house did Russell tell Charlie that we were heading back out tomorrow. “We got a matter to tend to tomorrow night and then another one a couple of nights after that,” he said. “That puts us back here in four days, if my arithmetic’s correct.”
“And if nothing goes wrong,” Charlie said softly.
“Right,” Russell said. “Like the sun’ll come up tomorrow if nothing goes wrong. Like I’ll wake up in the morning if nothing goes wrong. Like we’ll be leaving after lunch if nothing goes wrong.”
Whenever he thought she was being smart-mouth with him he would come back at her even more so. He rarely did it, though, because she rarely gave him cause.
It was too dark in the car to make out Charlie’s expression in the rearview mirror. She sat very still for the span of another block and then turned and snuggled up close to him and said, “Well then, I think we ought to get to bed early, don’t you?”
I hadn’t said anything to Belle, either, about our leaving on another job tomorrow. She was sitting in front between me and Buck and I felt her hand on my leg as she leaned close and said low, “I think she’s got the right idea.”
Buck stared out at the darkness and said nothing.
Later that night, after a round of humping that left us gleaming with sweat on the moonlit bed, I told her all about it while our cigarettes flared and dimmed and a soft breeze lifted the gauzy window curtain. I told her about Bubber Vicente, the sandstorm, about Crane and Odessa and Wink, about the payroll team and how we’d taken them down, how Buck left the courier and his married honey bound together naked for the hubby to find, how the other two had looked as we drove them out of town, thinking we were going to kill them, and then the way they’d looked when they realized we weren’t.
She stroked my chest and listened without interruption. When I was done with the telling I was rigid again and she had her hand around me. I rolled up over her and she took me in.
And when we were once again spent, she whispered in my ear, “It all sounds…so
“It’s more than that,” I said. “There’s nothing like it.”
“Almost nothing,” I said, and laughed with her.
On the following evening we were in Blackpatch. The place was as isolated as Bubber had said—and smelled even worse, like an open grave soaked in oil and giving off gas. The nearest town was Rankin, thirteen miles away as the crow flies, but the country directly between them was too rugged and too cut up with gullies and draws to lay any kind of road, and so to get to Rankin from Blackpatch you had to drive eighteen winding miles west on a dusty junction road to the Iraan highway and then go north another eleven miles.
Bubber had said there was one other route into and out of Blackpatch, if you didn’t mind taking a chance on busting a wheel or snapping an axle. An old mule trace the copper mine had used for packing ore out to the railroad. It twisted and turned for almost twenty miles from Blackpatch out to the rail tracks flanking the Big Lake highway, emerging at a spot about thirteen miles east of Rankin with a rusted water tower and a dilapidated loading platform. Hardly anybody ever used that trail anymore, Bubber said. He’d taken it once and it was the roughest drive he’d ever made. He’d braved it in broad daylight and it took him two hours to cover the twenty miles—not counting the time it took to fix the two flats he had on the way. “I’d have to be more damn desperate than I can imagine to drive on that sonofabitch again,” Bubber said.
We’d arrived at sundown. Derricks everywhere. Pumpjacks steadily dipping like monstrous primeval birds at their feed. The old copper-mine hill stood a hundred yards or so to the east of town and the holding tank on top of it was cast in the dying red light of day. It really did look like an enormous soup can. Jagged gullies ran like black scars down the hill and right to the edge of town. The town itself was composed of four short blocks to north and south, three longer ones to east and west, and included a sizable shantyville of tents on its west side. Every building was either a store, a place of entertainment, an eatery, a hotel or a boardinghouse. Most men lived in the ragtown or in their vehicles. There wasn’t a private house in Blackpatch. Mona’s girls lived in the rooms where they worked, and Mona herself kept a room at the Wellhead Hotel.
The junction road passed through the tent colony and ran directly onto the main street. We crawled along in the heavy traffic, the cafes and juke joints and pool halls all roaring with music. According to Bubber, about six hundred people lived here now—all of them men except for a couple of dozen wives, even fewer daughters, and Mona’s girls—and it sounded like they were all yelling at once to make themselves heard above the music and the incessant pounding of the drills. Drunks staggered in the streets and sidewalks, doing the hurricane walk, as we called it in New Orleans. Bubber said the local police force was paid for by the oil company. It consisted of a sheriff and two deputies and they pretty much let the workers take their fun as they pleased—mostly drinking and gambling and fighting each other, and sporting at Mona’s place. The cops intervened only in matters of flagrant robbery, deadly violence, or undue property damage.
