She’d been testy ever since our return, and I was pretty sure it had to do with our business. She’d never much cared for Russell’s being in the robbery trade, and now she seemed to get upset by any talk of it at all. I had the feeling they’d been arguing about it, but if that was the case, they were keeping it between themselves. We’d always shared confidences, Charlie and I, but just the day before, when I asked her what was wrong, she’d said, “Nothing” in a way that made clear she wasn’t going to bring me into it.
Belle didn’t know what was troubling Charlie, either. She’d gotten to know her at least as well as I did, maybe better, and she’d tried to feel her out a couple of times, but Charlie wasn’t confiding in anybody.
“I think she’s real scared he might get hurt worse,” Belle said. “But she’s just as scared to say anything to him about it. You know how he is when she complains about you all’s work.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “She’s always known what he does. She’s always known it’s a risky business.”
“Yeah, well. Being told something’s risky is a lot different from seeing what can happen.”
I figured she was probably right—Charlie was just scared. Russell’s blood was her first look at what can happen when the job goes bad. And I realized how different Belle was in that respect. She’d seen plenty of cases of risk gone bad. She’d seen what men looked like after falling off derricks, after getting their heads smashed by falling drill pipe. She’d seen men who’d been burned up so bad in field fires they looked, as she put it, like big charred dolls and gave off a smell you’d never forget. In the case of her own daddy, she’d seen what they looked like after being gassed to death. I doubted that Charlie had ever seen any such things or their like.
By the time we got the word about Buck, we had another problem—we were nearly broke. After the latest visit to the grocer’s and then to the Callaghan Street house to get some beer and hooch, I had less than ten dollars. I searched Buck’s room in case he might’ve stashed some money in there but all I found was sixty-three cents in a dresser drawer. Belle had about two dollars left of the grocery money I’d given her before I went to Odessa. Maybe Russell had enough money to cover our rent and groceries and booze and so forth until he was ready to work again, but I had a feeling he didn’t. He’d always let Buck take care of the money and only carried enough himself to pay for incidentals or to take Charlie out for a night on the town. Forget borrowing money from Bubber. I’d heard Buck say that Bubber never lent money to his holdup men—not because he didn’t trust them, but because the risk was too great that something would happen to them before they could repay him. Nobody faulted him for his caution.
That night in bed I explained our financial problem to Belle and told her if Russell was as flat as I was I’d have to go out on a job pretty soon.
At first she didn’t say anything, but although it was too dark to see her face, I could feel her eyes on me. Finally she said, “Who’d do it with you?”
“Nobody,” I said. “It won’t be that big a one.”
“It’s always better if somebody stays with the car and has it ready for the getaway.”
“Do tell,” I said. “What do you know about it?”
“I’ve heard you all talk, you know.”
I’d had no idea she’d listened so closely to any of our shop talk.
“Let me go with you, Sonny. I can drive for you, you know I can.”
Until a little over a week ago I hadn’t known she could drive a car at all, never mind drive as well as she did. For lack of anything else to do one afternoon, we’d gone for a long drive way out into the desert. We put the top up on the roadster to keep the dust off us and I sped us over an old truck trail that went winding every which way around outcrops and arroyos and came to an end at an abandoned oil camp. She loved it, yahooing along with me as the roadster went leaning through the turns, raising high rooster tails of dust behind us. I told her about the rough trails we’d had to drive on in doing the Blackpatch hijack, and she said she’d learned to drive on some pretty rough roads around Corsicana.
“I was fourteen when Daddy started teaching me in his Dodge,” she said. “He loved to speed around like you, and he’d always let me drive fast too. I don’t mean to brag on myself, but he said I was a regular Barney Oldfield. He taught me lots of stuff—how to fish, how to use tools. I was an only child, so he didn’t have anybody else to teach.”
“Want to show me what a hotshot driver you are?” I said.
“Think I’m lying, don’t you?”
We traded seats and she got us going, smoothly working the gearshift and clutch. At first she took it easy, rolling along at moderate speed, taking the turns slowly. But I could tell she was only getting the feel of the car. Then she began to accelerate. As we headed for the next curve she gave me a sidelong glance and said, “Hold on to your hat.”
She smoothly shifted down into second gear and gunned the motor and I fell against my door as she wheeled through a tight left turn. She took the next two curves just as nicely, and I whooped along with her.
But she got a little too cocky and took the next one too fast. We skidded off the trial and onto the softer sand and the car slogged to a stop and stalled before she could shove in the clutch. She started it up again and put it in low but the back wheels spun in the sand.
“Dammit!” she said. Her face was redly angry. “I’m sorry, Sonny.”
“Nice ride,” I said. “But now I’m going to have to sweat my ass off getting us unstuck.”
“No, you’re not.”
She got out of the car and ducked down out of sight for a minute by one of the rear wheels and then went around and squatted by the other one and then got back in the car. She put the car in gear and eased out the clutch and we slowly rolled forward and back onto the trail.
“What’d you do?” I said.
“Let a bunch of air out the back tires so they get a better grip in the sand. It’s an old trick Daddy taught me. We got to take it kind of easy getting back, though. Till we can fill them back up again.” She was smiling as we plodded along.
I said, “Stop the car a minute.”
She did, and looked at me in question. I leaned over and kissed her a good one.
“Whoo,” she said. “What’s
“Call it a yen. Any objections?”
“Oh no sir,” she said with a big grin. “Matter of fact I’m getting some yens of my own. Why don’t we hustle on back home and I’ll show you them?”
“Let’s do that,” I said.
Her driving wasn’t the only surprise of the week. The next day we were out on another truck trail and she was barreling through the curves with even more skill and confidence than the day before—and then she unexpectedly hit the brakes in the middle of a long straight stretch. The sudden stop threw me hard against the dash and I bonked my head on the windshield. A cloud of raised dust rolled over us.
“Oh baby, I’m sorry—you all right?” She was all big-eyed. “But jeezo, did you see the
“Of
“Rattlesnake. In the road ahead. He’s probably gone now.”
We strained to see through the settling dust. “I don’t see it no more,” she said.
“There,” I said, and pointed.
It was a good-sized rattler, all right, about fifteen yards away and alongside the trail, coiled in front of a creosote shrub. It was nearly the same color as the sand and hard to spot. Except for the darker bush behind it I might not have seen it.
I took the Smith & Wesson six-inch out from under the seat and eased the door open and stepped out. I held the revolver in a two-hand grip and braced my arms on top of the windshield frame, then cocked the piece and took a bead and squeezed off the shot.
The bang was swallowed almost instantly in all that open space and the sand kicked up a little to the right and slightly behind the snake. It drew into a tighter coil.
“Almost,” Belle said.
“Almost only counts in horseshoes,” I said.
I hit it with the next one—knocking the rattler into a writhing tangle. I walked up to within a few feet of it and shot it twice more and it stopped moving. Belle came up beside me as I straightened it out some with my foot. It was close to five feet long, even bigger than I’d thought.
“Wow,” she said. “
