kidney. Russell was still using a cane then. He’d been an ace sniper until a machine gun knocked him out of a tree with one leg so shot up he almost hadn’t been able to talk the surgeon out of amputation.
After hearing the first few of their war stories my mother excused herself from the room. They later begged her pardon and promised not to talk of such things in her company again, and they didn’t. They usually kept to their best behavior around her, rarely using profanity in her presence and quickly apologizing when they slipped up. But I’d heard her talking to Daddy and knew she was as much bothered by their cavalier attitude toward the violence they’d seen as by the horror of their stories. She’d known them since they were wild boys in constant trouble with the law, and she was afraid they would revert to their old ways. Daddy didn’t think so. He believed the war had changed them for the better, had made them realize it was time they became responsible men.
“They’ll find themselves a right trade, you’ll see,” he said.
They’d come out of the army with enough money to see them through for a while and they told Daddy they wanted to take their time deciding what to do for a living. When they still didn’t have jobs after two months and he offered to help them get seaman’s papers or at least some kind of job on the docks, they said they didn’t want to lie to him anymore and confessed that they were back at their old trades. Daddy couldn’t understand why, after nearly being killed in France, they’d want to risk jail or even worse by going back to thieving and the gambling dens.
“Hell, Lonnie,” Buck said, lowering his voice and glancing toward the bedroom to make sure my mother wasn’t in earshot, “it’s
Russell nodded and said, “Amen, brother.”
They made a joke of his concern over their gambling, saying it wasn’t really gambling, not the way they did it. That made me laugh out loud, and Buck and Russell grinned at me. Daddy gave me a look like I’d said something he never heard before, then told them that the way they did it was even riskier than real gambling. Buck smiled wide and said, “You reckon?”
In truth Daddy knew how good they were at what they did. I’d heard him tell my mother he’d never seen a better cardsharp than Buck or anybody who could palm dice as slickly as Russell.
“How wonderful,” she’d said. “With skills such as those, can notable achievement be far behind?” She had a sardonic side that rarely showed except when something scared her that she couldn’t do anything about, like the felonious ventures of her brothers-in-law.
Over the next few years they gambled and grifted and now and then did a burglary. Daddy was afraid they might step up to armed robbery or already had but every time he asked them about it they assured him they hadn’t. They said pulling holdups was risky enough even if you knew what you were doing—and if you didn’t, it was sheer recklessness.
“There’s an old saying,” Buck said. “A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty you’re a damn genius. Pretty lousy odds, man.”
Daddy was glad to know that’s how they saw it. Armed robbery was the fastest way he knew of to get put in prison or an early grave. “At least they’re not doing holdups,” he told my mother.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s something to boast about, to be sure.”
As it was, they had their share of scrapes and sometimes carried the evidence of them—Buck with a black eye more than once, a few times with an ear puffed like a portion of cauliflower, once with his arm in a sling; Russell with a deep cut across his cheek, another time with his ribs too sore to permit him to cough, and then with his left hand swathed in a bandage until the day he and Buck came over while my mother was at the library and we saw that the gauze was off and he was missing two fingers.
“Jesus Christ, Russell,” Daddy said. “What the hell happened?”
A dice game in Chalmette had turned unsociable when somebody accused him of cheating.
“That dickhead couldn’t have spotted me palming if I’d been wearing fireman’s gloves,” Russell said. “His problem was he lacked the proper sporting spirit—sometimes you win, sometimes not.”
What the fellow didn’t lack was a razor, nor the inclination to use it. Russell fended with his left hand and
It was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard—but Daddy’s face dropped. “Holy shit, man, you
“What was I supposed to do, Lonnie?” Russell said. “Let him carve me up to the elbow?”
Buck said he’d been playing stud in the next room when the gunshot sounded—and the men at the table grabbed up their money and scattered like spooked birds. He pulled his piece and ran in the dice room and there was Russell wrapping his hand in a bandanna and nobody else in the room except the dead guy on the floor. They casually walked out and on down the street back to their car, and if anybody in the neighborhood heard the shot they must not’ve paid it much mind.
“Tough place, Chalmette,” Buck said. “Anyway, this doc we know in Metairie did the stitch job. Does good work.”
They told Daddy not to worry so much about it, they figured they were clear. Nobody knew their real names or where they were from or even that they knew each other. The police weren’t likely to give much of a damn anyhow about some razor-toting grifter laid out in a gambling scrape.
“Goddam
“I wish I’d thought to scoop up my fingers,” Russell said. “I’d’ve buried them decent. Some broompusher probably swept them out with the trash.”
It’s why the three of them were always so cautious in their conversation when my mother was around—they didn’t want her getting an earful of any such story.
When she came home and saw Russell’s hand she nearly wept. He told her he’d been working at a packinghouse and got careless with the saw, but I could tell she didn’t believe that for a second.
All the same, they could usually make my mother smile with stories about their girlfriends or with some of their cleaner jokes or with their imitation of a robber being chased around the apartment by a Keystone Cop. The biggest grin they ever got out of her was when Buck said he was getting married.
It was all fairly sudden, he’d only known the woman a few weeks—Jena Ragnatela her name was—but he was as in love as a man could be. We didn’t even meet her till the day they got hitched in the city hall and we had a small reception for them at our place.
Jena wasn’t one to talk much, and when she did say something you had the feeling it wasn’t what she was really thinking. She rarely smiled, and if she ever laughed I never heard it. My mother had wanted Buck to get married but I could see by her face that Jena wasn’t what she’d had in mind. Still, it was easy to see why he’d gone for her—she was a knockout. Black-haired and green-eyed, lean-hipped, high-breasted, as easy in her moves as a cat. She always drew every eye in the room and you could tell she always knew it.
It was at Buck’s wedding that we also met Charlie Hayes, Russell’s latest girlfriend. Her real name was Charlotte but she didn’t care for it. She was nineteen, only five years older than me, a copper redhead, slim and pretty. She liked to joke and cut up and she taught me to do the Charleston. Sometimes when we were slow- dancing I’d get such a stiffie I knew she could feel it. The first time it happened I tried to back away a little but she only smiled and pulled me tighter against her and whispered, “Don’t fret about it, honey, it’s perfectly natural.” That’s how she was. Every time it happened, she’d give me that same smile and hold me close, and I couldn’t help smiling back at her, even though my ears were on fire and I felt like everybody in the room knew what was going on.
Russell himself had been shy about dancing ever since the limp he got from the war but Charlie got him over that and he pretty soon enjoyed dancing as much as anybody. He’d had a lot of girlfriends but she was the best of them and he knew it. She would still be his girl four years later when I started partnering with him and Buck. I asked him once if he planned on marrying her and he laughed and said hell no. Well, did he love her, I asked. He said he didn’t know but didn’t lose any sleep over it.
“Lots of people say they love each other and don’t do nothing but cause each other heartache,” he said. “Love’s harder to figure than long division. All I know is we like being together without a lot of talk about love. That’s fine with me.”
Despite my mother’s reservations about Jena it looked for a while like Buck’s marriage had done as she’d hoped and turned him and Russell away from the criminal life. They bought a filling station across the river in Algiers and seemed to be doing all right at it. Daddy was as glad as my mother was, but I had my doubts about the
