“Set?” I said.
She nodded, and revved the motor with a little goose of the gas pedal.
“Remember, if somebody pulls in—”
“I’ll tell them the guy’ll be right out and I’ll honk the klaxon. I’m okay, Sonny.”
I got out of the car as the attendant swung open the screen door and said, “Gas, mister?”
“A road map’s all,” I said, and followed him back inside.
There was another guy in there, sitting at a small table with a checkerboard on it and a game in progress. I drew the .380 from under my belt and let them see it, then held it in the side pocket of my coat and told the attendant to sit in the other chair at the table and for both of them to put their hands under their ass. I went around behind the counter and yanked out the telephone cord. I found a Colt six-inch in the shelf under the counter. I looked at the attendant and he said, “The owner’s.” I put it in my other coat pocket, then opened the register and took out all the bills and stuffed them in the same pocket with the Colt. I told them I’d shoot the first man to stick his head out the door. Then I slipped the .380 back in my pants and walked out to the roadster and got in and Belle drove us off, smoothly shifting through the gears and accelerating steadily. I watched out the back window but didn’t see either guy come to the door before we were out of sight. The whole thing didn’t take three minutes.
After we swung east at the highway intersection at Pecos, I quickly counted the take by the light of the lampposts—$375. More than it had looked like in the till, but awful puny compared to the hauls I was used to with Buck and Russell.
Belle was singing, “Ain’t We Got Fun?”
We checked into a motor camp more than twenty miles away, outside of a place called Pyote. The camp was well off the main highway, set back in a grove of scraggly mesquites and flanked by a high sand hill. I parked the car behind the cabin and we went inside and locked the door and laughed at each other in our comic rush to get our clothes off. I started to take off the mustache too but she stopped me and kissed me and said she’d never kissed anybody with a mustache before. It made me look like Douglas Fairbanks, she said. She stared down between us and said, “You even got a pirate sword and everything.”
She shrilled happily as I swept her up in my arms and said, “Prepare to be ravished, woman!” and slung her onto the bed and leaped in after her. She hurriedly guided me into her, already panting the way she did when she was close, and before we’d been at it a half-minute she was digging her fingers into my back and tightening her legs around me and letting out her long low cry of climax. I’d never known her to get there so fast.
After a while we sat up and lit cigarettes. I took off the mustache and she said, “Well hey there, Sonny LaSalle! Where you been? I just now had the best time with Douglas Fairbanks, you wouldn’t believe!”
I got out the pint of mash I’d brought along and took a long pull and then offered her the bottle. She took a small sip off it and arched her brows and smiled and took another.
Once she got started talking about the heist, she couldn’t stop. “In one way it was like you were taking so long in there I couldn’t stand it. But at the same time it was like I didn’t want it to be over with. Does that make
I smiled at her.
She said she could hardly imagine how it must feel to rob a bank. The way she was carrying on made me laugh and remember my own happy babblings to Buck and Russell the first few times I went on jobs with them.
“I was scared,” she said, “but I felt so…I don’t know…so
“Only every time,” I said.
“Wow,” she said.
And then we were at it again.
We didn’t check out of the cabin until midmorning and we stopped at the first cafe we came to. We sat in a booth in back and ate like we hadn’t seen food in days, each of us putting away a platter of fried eggs, pork chops, and potatoes, with a side of open-face biscuits covered with sausage gravy. We lingered awhile over coffee and cigarettes and then hit the road again.
As we passed through various oil patches and the towns around them, she said it all reminded her of Corsicana. The landscape out here was different, but the derricks and pumps and storage tanks and trucks, the mule wagons and the crowded stores and cafes, the dirty streets teeming with oil workers, the constant racket and hazy air and awful stinks were the same as they’d been back home.
“It’s the same in every oil town I’ve seen,” I said, “and I’ve seen a few lately.”
We were in no rush, taking it slow and easy, stopping alongside the road once so I could help an old man change a flat tire on his truck, pulling up another time to watch a herd of pronghorns bounding over the grassy flats in the distance.
The sun was almost down when we arrived in Crane. As rough as Corsicana was she didn’t think it was as rough as this little town, or as loud. Pulling a job in such a place was unthinkable—you’d never get away through all the traffic. We finally emerged at the east end of town into the gathering twilight and the traffic began to thin. A mile farther on we passed an isolated grocery store where several men were loading large cardboard boxes onto the beds of a couple of red pickup trucks parked in front. A supply run for an oil camp kitchen, probably.
Neither of us spoke for the next minute or so as the road rolled under us. Then she looked at me and said, “That was a big bunch of groceries them boys bought.”
“Yes it was,” I said.
“They must’ve run up some bill,” she said. “I wonder has business been that good all day?”
“Turn it around,” I said.
As we drove back to the store I steered the car with my left hand for a moment while she put her hair up in her hat and zipped up the baggy windbreaker. The red pickups went past us in the other direction. We pulled into
