THE SONSABITCHES HAD LEFT HER CUTE LITTLE KITCHEN A goddamn mess. Kathryn was no nigger maid- Junie came on Wednesday-and she didn’t have time to be scraping out skillets and pouring suds into her big sink to clean up the piles of dishes laden with pancake syrup and cigarette ash. Coffee mugs that smelled like piney gin and sweet bourbon, open bottles of beer and busted poker chips.
The radio was tuned to WBAP, Jimmie Rodgers singing “Miss the Mississippi and You.” That yodeler was dead but still singing like the world was nothing but heartache and pain.
She poured in more suds and scrubbed another dish with a brush, rinsing with the clean water, drying with a damp towel, and placing it up on the rack. She grabbed a coffee cup that had been part of a set from her mama, Ora, and she gritted her teeth at the sight of a fat cigar ash in the bottom.
The back door to her little bungalow opened, and she smiled up at the face of old Albert Bates, the only friend of George Kelly’s that she could stand. He was nearly as tall as George, soft muscled, with a high forehead and gentle eyes. Bates was a good egg. A professional thief who was as honest as they come.
“Hey, doll,” Kathryn said.
“Jesus H.,” Albert said, kissing her on the cheek and setting a suit jacket across a chair. “I miss the party?”
He rolled up his sleeves and began to clear more dishes, whistling along with old Jimmie the brakeman’s yodels while Kathryn bopped her head in time.
“Harvey Bailey and Verne Miller stopped by last night.”
“They’re gone?” Albert asked, nudging Kathryn over with his butt and taking a spot in the suds, handing her the clean dish to rinse.
“I told George to get ’em gone.”
“Where to?” he asked.
“They showed George a map, easy-pickin’ banks.”
“No banks are easy pickin’ these days. Nothin’ to pick.”
He handed her a couple of her mother’s cups. Chipped china with delicate rose designs.
“I can’t stand either one of those bastards,” Kathryn said, rinsing and then drying. “Verne Miller gives me the creeps. Those eyes. Jesus.”
“Did George…”
“He’s not that stupid, thank God,” Kathryn said. “This is a two-man job.”
“And one woman.”
“And one woman.”
“Doesn’t come much better than Charles F. Urschel,” Albert Bates said. “Hey, can I have a smoke?”
Kathryn dried her hands and reached for her pack of Luckies, sticking one into Albert’s chiseled mug and lighting it with a kitchen match.
“Oil,” Bates said. “Those people shit money. How’d you find ’im?”
“Can you believe it was George’s idea?” she said. “He’s got a finger man in O.K. City who said this fat cat was ripe.”
“Just like we like ’em.”
“Al?”
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“You ever get a pain in your heart just ’cause you feel so damn regular and dull?”
“No one would ever call you dull, Kit.”
Kathryn smiled and pulled out another smoke. “It sure is good to have some sense in the house.”
“Me and George will plan this thing so tight, it’ll be-”
Kathryn mashed her index finger to Albert Bates’s lips and said: “Shush. Don’t be a dope and get all cocky.”
3
Charles F. Urschel found the cigar a little dry to his liking and squashed it out in an ashtray while Walter Jarrett dealt another rubber of bridge for the couples. Jarrett was just another oilman in Oklahoma City, someone Charlie knew casually from the club, but he’d seen fit to invite himself and his talkative wife over for a long evening. They’d already played too many rubbers, and despite Betty coming home at eleven-thirty as promised and kissing her mama on the cheek, they continued to stay on the sunporch and talk about government price schedules for low-grade gasoline, a shoe sale at Katz Department Store, and the new president’s radio address on Monday night. Charlie lit up another cigar, the same brand, but this one kept much better, and he said, “What the hell, one more rubber,” and the cards were all spread around and drinks refreshed. Mrs. Jarrett remarked how pretty young Betty looked in her summer dress, and Berenice was the one who said thank you, because, after all, Betty wasn’t Charlie’s daughter but Tom Slick’s, and as long as Charlie lived he damn well knew the differences between him and his old buddy and brother-in-law, who folks still called King of the Wildcatters.
“You must watch boys,” Mrs. Jarrett said. “You can’t trust boys. They are ruled by their thingamajigs.”
Charlie smiled over at Mr. Jarrett because it seemed to be the thing to do at the mention of peckers, and Jarrett grinned back before he leveled his eyes back at the cards. Jarrett was an uneasy card player who needed complete concentration, whereas Charlie could give the hand one glance, lean back, and enjoy his cigar while working out the basic math and guessing who had what and how they’d play ’em. Didn’t matter if you were playing with an oil executive or a driller in some rotten boomtown, people had their systems and rarely liked to break tradition.
“More pay for less hours does not make a lick of sense to me,” Jarrett said. “But they say we don’t have a choice.”
“I have warned Betty, but she won’t listen to me about boys and their animal ways,” Berenice said. “A new one comes calling almost every day, like tomcats.”
“ Roosevelt means well,” Charlie said. “But you won’t see me wearing that goddamn NRA eagle on my breast.”
“You can be like that dry cleaner I read about in Muskogee,” Jarrett said. “He said the eagle was mentioned in Revelations and that he wouldn’t sign a damn thing with the mark of the beast.”
“I heard from a woman at the club that one young man tried to hide his in a popcorn box during a matinee movie show,” Mrs. Jarrett said, eyes on her hand and then cutting them over at Berenice. “It wasn’t even a romance picture. It had Tom Mix in it.”
“I’m not one for handouts,” Charlie said. “They can have their time with all this NRA nonsense until sharper minds prevail. Have you seen that film
“You aren’t thinking of getting into politics?” Jarrett asked.
“What did that boy want?” Berenice asked, hand light on her breast. “For her to touch it? My Lord.”
