A World of Thieves

“Ook ooze talken.”

I helped Russell out to the roadster. Earl tried to help, but he had enough pain of his own to contend with, grunting and grimacing as much as Russell as we made our slow limping way to the car. The passenger side of the seat was darkly stained with dried blood. I got Russell settled into the seat and Earl shook our hands and said, “Gome, gessum ress, eel up.”

He slept for most of the drive to Fort Stockton, now and then groaning, shifting on the seat to try to ease his pain. As we went through McCamey the boomtown clamor woke him.

He stared around at the heavy traffic, the air hazed and acrid with gas and oil fumes. Then scrutinized the interior of the roadster. “Oughta got one with a damn radio,” he said. And went back to sleep.

A few miles farther along he woke again and looked at me like he’d just been told something very important and had to share it immediately.

“Busted him out one time, I’ll do it again,” he said. “We’ll do it, Sonny.”

And closed his eyes once more.

IV

The girls must’ve been in the kitchen and not heard us until my car door banged shut. They came running out with wide smiles that collapsed into fearful looks when they saw me helping Russell out of the roadster.

“Oh my God,” Charlie said. Russell had one arm over my shoulders and she put his other over hers. “Where’s Buck?”

“Hell, he’s all right,” Russell said. “He’s a guest of the state at the moment but not for long, believe you me.”

Belle put a hand on my arm. “You okay?”

I winked at her and she showed a quick weak smile.

As we made our way toward the porch, Charlie said, “How bad is it, baby?” Her eyes were brimming.

“If you gonna cry,” Russell said, gritting his teeth with every step, “you can go somewhere else to do it.”

“And you can go to hell,” she said. But it was all the admonition she needed to soldier up.

We had to take the porch steps slowly. Belle ran ahead of us into the house, moving chairs out of our way, opening their bedroom door, pulling down the bedcovers. I braced him up while Charlie took off his shirt. She bit her lip when she saw the bandage around his chest and the red stains at his back where the wounds had been seeping. She undid his belt and started tugging down his pants and he flinched and sucked a breath and said, “Easy, goddammit.” She gently lowered the trousers past the bandage on his thigh. I eased him to a sitting position on the edge of the bed and she removed his shoes and socks and then took off his pants.

Belle fetched a glass of water and I gave Russell a pill to wash down with it. We helped him to squirm further up onto the bed and accommodate himself on his side. He was asleep almost immediately but pouring sweat from heat and pain. We went out of the room and left the door open a crack so we could easily hear him if he should wake and call out.

In the kitchen I drank a full glass of iced tea without taking it from my mouth until it was drained, then asked Belle for a refill. Charlie wanted to use the car to go buy an electric fan to keep Russell cool during the day. I went out to the roadster with her and showed her how to connect the ignition wires.

“Nice new car and no key for it,” she said. “That’s a good one.” She gave me a look I couldn’t read and drove off.

Belle and I sat in the kitchen for a while, smoking cigarettes and sipping iced tea, not saying much. She offered to fix me something to eat but I was too tired. I’d been two days without sleep, and now that we were back at the house I felt exhausted. I snubbed the cigarette and finished off the tea, got up and went to the bedroom, stripping off my shirt. She came in behind me and watched me finish undressing and get into bed. She sat down beside me and brushed the hair out of my eyes and I was asleep before she took her hand away.

I woke in the dark, spooned up against her from behind, my face in her hair. The open window was moonless and the curtains hung lank, the air cool despite the lack of breeze. I fingered her nipples and she came awake and made a small sound of pleasure. She rubbed her bottom against me and felt my readiness and I squirmed down for a better angle and easily slipped into her slickness. She was breathing through her teeth.

When we were done, she turned her face to kiss me, to whisper, “I’m so glad it wasn’t you.”

For most of the following week Russell was asleep as often as not. Charlie fed him a pain pill every couple of hours. “It keeps him from hurting too much and it helps him sleep,” she said. “He needs all the sleep he can get.”

Because she wanted him to rest as comfortably as possible she let him have the bed to himself and she slept on a foldout army cot she’d bought somewhere. The electric fan stood on the dresser, humming and oscillating, keeping the heat off him. She was hardly ever out of his hailing distance, never further away than the kitchen. She spent much of every day in a chair at his bedside, leafing through magazines and listening to radio music at low volume. There was always a pot of warm broth on the stove, and whenever he woke she spooned some into him.

The first time he was awake when I looked in on him, he smiled weakly and said, “Hey kid, how you doing?”

“Better than you, I’d say.”

“Not for long,” he said. And was asleep again in a minute.

He was awake again that evening when I looked in. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll lead the way out and you or Buck can bring up the rear.”

“Anyway you want it, Uncle,” I said, grinning back at him. The way he said it, you’d have thought Buck was in the next room rather than in a Midland jail cell.

Whenever I checked to see how he was coming along over the next few days, Charlie would often as not be ministering to him—feeding him, bathing him, shaving him, changing the bandage around his upper torso and shoulder or the one on his leg. He had dark circles around his eyes and was uncommonly pale, but he said he was doing fine. “Be right as the rain in no time,” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” Charlie said. “Only it hardly ever rains around here, so don’t let’s get too far ahead of ourselves.”

We’d been back twelve days when the telegram came from Bubber: GOOD LAWYER BUT HARD JUDGE STOPTWOYEARS SANTA RITA STOP LM WELL STOP TRANSFERS TOMORROW STOP BV.

Charlie didn’t want me to wake him up just to read him the telegram but I did anyway. He listened to it and rubbed his face and scowled. “Two years. Bastards.”

“That’s not so bad, is it?” Charlie said. “He can get parole in, what, seven or eight months, right?”

Russell looked at her like she was trying to sell him something—then turned to me and said, “If only I was in better shape we could’ve sprung him when they were transferring him to the farm. That would’ve been the ticket.”

“What are you talking about?” Charlie said.

He ignored the question. “Send a telegram,” he said to me. “Tell Bubber we need everything he can give us on this Santa Rita joint. Once we have that we can figure how to—”

He had a sudden coughing fit. There’d been a hard wind for the past two days and the air was full of dust. He said it didn’t hurt his back wounds when he coughed but it looked to me like he was flinching despite his best effort not to. He tried to resume what he’d been saying but got caught up in coughing once again, this time the pain of it starkly evident on his face. He slumped back on the pillows, gasping.

“All right, that’s enough visiting now,” Charlie said sharply. “Come on, Sonny, let the man get his rest.” I let her steer me to the door.

“Send it now, Sonny,” Russell said in a tight rasp, then fell to coughing again. I said I was on my way. Then Charlie closed the door on me.