All Honest Men

by Claude Stanush

  Frank’s room was in order, ever’thing in its place, just like the last time I come there. And there was a pot of coffee a-boiling on the stove, just like the last time. The only diff’rence was, lying over on the bed, I seen a newspaper with a headline so big and so black you could read it across the room: “DARING MIDDAY BANK ROBBERY!”

  Frank picked up the paper and brung it over to me.

  There was other stories on the front page—about U.S. Army soldiers called out to knock down union strikers in Seattle, about women voting in city elections, about the batsman Frank Baker doin’ good for the Yankees—but the holdup story took up more space than all the others put together. It said there was five bandits. It said the bandits made ever’body in the bank lie down on the floor and tied up their hands behind their backs. It said the bandits got away with $20,000, including $5,000 in gold.

  Almost ever’ word a damn lie.

  “You’ll soon learn, Skinny,” Frank said, “that, sadly, you just can’t trust the papers. They sell more extras if they exaggerate things, and they know that. Of course, it might be the bankers. They get more insurance money if they say they lost more than they did. Drives me crazy, all the crooks in this world who parade around in their stiff little collars and their tight little bowties. At least we’re honest about what we do.” He reached over and tapped his finger on the page. “If they only knew who we were, we’d be famous.”

  “Or dead,” I said.

  How stupid can you get?

  “Too bad about Charlie.” Frank shook his head like Charlie’d been his favorite brother. “Paper says he got six bullets. That’s probably five more than it was. Whatever, Charlie’s dead. We got double-crossed, I think, by that son-of-a-bitch marshal.” He shook his head again. “Nothing we can do about it now. And there’s that much more to divide up.”

  Well, I don’t know what kinda blood Frank had running through his veins: German or Polack or Russian or Irish or what. He never would answer when I asked. But whatever kind it was, it was cold as a snake’s. And I couldn’t help but wonder: if my brains’d been blowed out, too, along there with Charlie’s, would Frank be smiling even bigger—now he didn’t have to divide up none of the money?

  I kept watching him outa the corner of my eye. Finally, he quit staring at that headline and he went around the room pulling down all the window shades. Then he reached under his bed and brung out a paper sack. He come over to the table and turned the sack upside down. Greenbacks come tumbling out. Some of ’em in bundles. Others of ’em, loose.

  “Here it is, my friend,” he said. “Eight thousand two hundred and forty-four. Now, you wanta talk about the next job?”

  Like always, Frank didn’t waste a word. Only I wasn’t wasting none either. “Count me out.”

  I’d been doing a lot of thinking them last few days. I didn’t have much to do but think while I was hunting for Frank, and waiting for Frank. And this is what I’d been thinking: I liked one part of robbing banks. I liked how you asked for money, and how they give it to you. Only I hated being stupid, and the way we robbed that bank was stupid.

  “Count me out,” I said again. “Four thousand’ll take me a long way.”

  Frank wrinkled up his forehead. “A long way where?”

  “Been thinking ’bout cutting up to Tulsa. Papers say there’s an oil boom up there. Things ’r wide open.”

  “Ha!” Frank give a kind of sneering laugh. “You ever see any of those oil promotors, Skinny? They’re crookeder than we are. Take your money faster than we took that bank’s. Besides, once you start in this kind of business, you don’t leave it just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “It isn’t healthy.”

  “Robbing banks the way we done it ain’t healthy either, Frank. Go ask Charlie.”

  “It was that fool, son-of-a-bitch marshal.”

  “Maybe the marshal thinks he was the smart one and you was the fool,” I said back. “It’s too risky, Frank, middle of the day, all them people around.”

  “Then you tell me how you’d do it.”

  To be honest, I wasn’t really planning to cut up to Tulsa. But I knowed I had to shake Frank up, or he wasn’t gonna pay me no mind. And I had a thought. Now that I seen how it worked, I knowed that riding horseback and going in midday was a good way to get blowed right into a casket, even if you was on a good cow horse. It’s how come the James Brothers got all shot up in Minnesota, and the Dalton Boys in Kansas. You ever seen that photograph of Bob Dalton laying in his coffin? There’s a river of blood pouring outa his ear, spilling all over the white lining of that coffin.

  But back in the penitentiary, I’d talked a coupla times to a old boy called the Dago. He was a safecracker, and he’d told me about something called nitroglycerin. He called it “grease.” Dago said railroad crews used it to blow up rocks when they was clearing right-of-way. It was soft, sloshy, slippery stuff, felt like hog lard, but it had more boom in it than dynamite. Dago’d steal some of that nitro, then break into a bank at night, do the sign of the cross on hisself—he was a good Catholic—and blow the safe door off. When you used grease, you could sneak into a bank at night, when most ever’body was asleep. And you could make your getaway in a car. A quick, quiet getaway. It wasn’t as exciting as one of them Wild West getaways—but what did we want, blood spilling outa our ears, or money?

  “You know a safecracker named the Dago?” I asked Frank.

  “Oh, yeah.” He stretched his arms out and popped his knuckles and said he knowed exact what I was saying. He asked me if the Dago’d ever told me about a partner of his, name of Skillet.

  “Don’t sound familiar.”

  “It was in all the papers,” Frank said. “Poor Skillet. He was heading out to Corsicana, to meet the Dago for a job. Driving a big old Hudson. The grease was in a jar, he was holding it right here.” Frank pointed where his legs come together, near his crotch. “It was tight, so it wouldn’t rattle any. But right around that little town of Ennis, something happened. They think maybe the Hudson was swerving to miss hitting another car, maybe the door flew open, maybe the jar fell out. Of course, they don’t know exactly what happened.”

  Frank leaned towards me and smiled.

  “Only thing left of Skillet and his automobile was a hole in the dirt.”

  Stupid Frank. That city boy thought he was scaring the pants offa me. He didn’t know me too good. I growed up on a farm. With people that took risks ever’ day if they wanted to eat. Just hitching up mules was a risk. I knowed two different men that’d been killed by mule kicks. I knowed one man had his leg yanked outa the socket by a hay baler. Griff Henson got both his arms sliced off at the gin stand. It’s just that some risks ’r worth it, some ain’t.

  “I don’t like day jobs,” I said to Frank again. “Day jobs, ever’body’s awake. Nights, they’re snoring. And when you’re on a horse, what’cha got between you and a bullet? Wind. That’s it. A car’s a can of steel. And I hear they got ’em now that’s forty, fifty horsepower.”

  “Machines break down. Horses don’t.”

  “Yeah? What about Charlie’s horse?”

  He didn’t say nothing. But the way his mouth was twisting told me exactly what he was thinking. That he didn’t like it, what I was saying, but maybe I was right. I knowed how to read people, just like Jess knowed how to read a horse. A person don’t need to tell you what they’re thinking. You can read it offa little things on their bodies—like how their head’s jerking, or how they’re squinting their eyes, or if their shoulders is tight, or how they’re breathing. Sometimes, like with Frank, what you read is their mouths—if they’re twisting, or twitching, or puckering; or how much of their teeth they’re showing.

  “Look Frank,” I said, “if I’m gonna stay in with you, I wanta talk to the Dago.”

  His mouth loosened up, one side crept higher. “You sure he’s out?”

  “Got sprung last month. I hear he’s in Jacksboro.”

  Frank banged his fist on his knee. “What are we waiting
for?”

  FOURTEEN

  The Dago wouldna won no beauty contests. He was short as a stump, with a crooked buzzard-beak and pop-eyes. Me and Frank found him working in a hardware store in the little town of Jacksboro, northwest of Fort Worth.

  When we first come up on him in the store, he pop-eyed us like a cat does when it’s circling a rattlesnake. He didn’t trust us. That’s how lots of cons are when they’re fresh outa the joint. But when we told him why we was there, and we worked on him a while, he come around.

  “Well, hell, any monkey can sell nails and crapper seats,” he said. “I’m the best box blower this part of the country. You wait ’n see.”

  I said to myself, “I will wait and see.” I wasn’t trusting nobody right off, not after that mess in Boswell. But the Dago did have a good rep, I knowed that from prison. And soon as he come in with us, he gave us a idea for our first mark: a little coal-mining town called Arma in the southeast corner of Kansas.

  “I got people working them mines,” he said. “And they say the bank’s got a big payroll, and a safe setting out in the open, and the town don’t got no nighthack.”

  The Dago swore his kin knowed what they was talking about. So finally me and Frank said okay.

  Since we was gonna drive up to Kansas, the Dago said it’d be smart to get us a fourth man, somebody that knowed about fixing cars if we was ever to get in a jam. So he hooked us up with a friend of his, a ex-con from Dallas named “Slim.” I got a kick outa the way the Dago introduced me and him: “Slim, Skinny; Skinny, Slim.” Slim wasn’t really slim, just like I wasn’t skinny no more. Fact is, he was on the edge of being thick. He had a thick chest and a thick neck and even his eyelids was thick. But he wasn’t bad-looking, except for a hole in his cheek, the size of a fifty-cent piece. Like somebody’d took a bite out.

  I wondered what he did to get that gouge.

  Still, to do the kind of work we was doing, you had to take risks with people, like you did with nitro.

  I didn’t have no proof that Slim was good at fixing cars, but I learned real quick that he was one helluva car thief. We was all gonna pitch in to buy a automobile when Slim said, “Why waste good money? I’ll get you one for nothing.” And he snatched us a green Studebaker Big-Six, right offa the street where it was parked. Stole it with a master key he’d made hisself.

  Lemme tell you what, was that Studebaker slick!

  That automobile was shiny dark green, as tall as I was, and nearly long as three men laying head to toe. And inside, where the driver set, there was so many levers and sticks you’d like to need three arms and three legs to run it. But old Slim, he knowed what he was doing. And that engine purred like a baby cat! Slim said it was sixty horsepower. I’d never rid in a Studebaker before, but I knowed all about ’em. They was tough, sturdy cars. I knowed that because, before it made cars, the Studebaker company had built the strongest, best farm wagons you could buy.

  We was four men in a Studebaker Big-Six with a flat, pint-size whiskey bottle to hold the grease—but no grease.

  The Dago took care of that.

  He told Slim to drive us alongside the railroad tracks outside of Texarkana ’til we come to a small red building on the side of the road. There was signs on it saying, “Danger-Explosives.”

  The Dago said it was a felony to snatch nitroglycerin, so Frank and Slim stood lookout while me and the Dago went over to the door. The Dago used a sledge-hammer to break the lock, and in we went. The building was mostly empty, except for a couple of two-gallon cans in one corner. Tied around the caps was chains with funnels on the end of ’em. The Dago told me to hold the bottle and the funnel, he’d do the pouring.

  “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t let the bottle drop.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  I was gripping that bottle so tight I thought it might break. But the Dago was calm as water on a cow trough. He propped hisself up on his knees and started pouring. The stuff dribbled in, slow and soft. It was hard to believe it, so much power in something that didn’t look no different’n lard. But the Dago said so long as you handled nitro with respect, it was a bank robber’s best friend.

  “With this stuff, you can peel the doors offa safes like you was opening a can of beans,” the Dago said. “Big, thick doors—they’ll peel right off.”

  When the whiskey bottle was near full, the Dago set the big can down. Then he took the bottle outa my hands, put the cork in, and wrapped the whole thing—real careful, like a fresh baby—in a soft, thick towel he pulled outa his belt. Back in the car, he put the bottle tight between his legs. But even if it was wrapped in a towel, I didn’t like how it was shaking. We was on a country road, and it was rough and rutty.

  “What’s it need to set that thing off?” I asked the Dago. “How big a jolt?”

  “Git your mind on something else.”

  “Just answer me that one.”

  “Fifty pounds. Like, you gotta drop it on a concrete floor.”

  A fifty-pound jolt? That’d be a big bump, to jar something fifty pounds. But Skillet done it. And thinking about Skillet didn’t make me feel too good about that bumpy road we was on. Pretty soon, we pulled off onto a good gravel highway, and the ride smoothed out. But Slim was a lousy driver. One time, we was going around a blind curve, he come right on top of a old farm wagon that was being pulled by two pokey mules. He swerved around it, but just missed hitting a Model T coming the other way.

  “Would’ya take it easy!” I hollered.

  “Son-of-a-bitch was eating up the whole road.”

  “Jesus Mary!” the Dago said, to back me up. “It ain’t Old Crow in this bottle.”

  After that, Slim took it some slower. But I kept thinking what he’d do if we had to make us a fast getaway.

  When I think back on it now, what come down on that first night job was so stupid I hate to even talk about it.

  You ever seen one of them picture shows about the Keystone Kops? The Keystone Kops was always bonking their heads, or slipping on things, or crashing into walls, or running outa gas on railroad tracks right at the wrong time. Well, on that first job, that’s just about how it was with Slim and Frank and the Dago.

  The only diff’rence was: the Keystone Kops was idiot laws, and my partners was idiot thieves.

  Fools, fools, fools.

  When we got to Anna, we drove around ’til we found the bank. It was just a small one-story brick building in the middle of Main Street. Coulda been anything, a doctor’s office or a meat market. But the Dago’s kin’d said there was two hundred miners around there, and the payroll run into big money.

  Then we drove out about ten miles outa town on a country road. We waited ’til midnight, when we figured most ever’body would be in bed. And when we come back, sure enough, the place was dark as a graveyard. We parked the car on the outskirts of town and hit off a-foot to the bank.

  “Okay, boys,” the Dago said when we come up near it, “me and Willis ’r gonna be inside on this one. You two are the outside men. And what’cha gotta watch for is if somebody’s going house to house, waking people up. These little towns that don’t got nighthacks, that’s what they do if they think something’s getting robbed.”

  Slim nodded, but I could tell Frank didn’t like the Dago giving the orders, acting like the boss. So when the Dago handed me a little saw and told me to go up a pole to cut the telephone wires—that was the first thing he said you do on night jobs—Frank piped up and said no, he was gonna do it.

  Frank grabbed the saw outa my hand and started to bear-hug his way up. It was about a thirty-five foot pole. But that old city boy couldn’t get more’n five or six feet offa the ground. He was so clumsy and his arm muscles was so puny that ever’ time he got a few feet up, he’d slide right back down.

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  Frank’s lip curled up. “All right, goddammit, one of you go up and do it.”

  I was used to shinnying up trees. I cooned right up to the top of that pole, and sawe
d that big old cable clean through.

  Then we went to the bank.

  Frank crotched his shotgun in his arm and stood on one side. He was still hacked over being lookout, but he done it. Slim went on the other side. The Dago and me went to the back. I used a crowbar to ease a window up, and I climbed in first. The Dago handed over that whiskey bottle through the window—careful—and in he climbed.

  We flicked on the flashlight.

  Nothing!

  Nothing!

  The Dago’s people had got things all wrong! There wasn’t no safe setting out in the bank, waiting to get blowed. All we could make out, way in the back, was the concrete wall of a big vault.

  The only thing that was gonna blow was me or Dago.

  The Dago done it first. “Goddamn cousins of mine! Goddamn coal-monkeys!”

  “We shoulda cased it!” was all I said back.

  “It’s over, I guess.”

  “I ain’t leaving. You think your people got a pick?”

  The Dago give me a look, but he took off back outa the window. It was twenty minutes before he come climbing back in.

  Only good thing, he was waving a sooty miner’s pick.

  I shined a flashlight on him, and he crouched in front of the vault and begun to go at it. The only sounds in the bank was a cricket chirping and the Dago’s pick a-pecking. Then he got a sneezing fit from all that concrete dust.

  ACHEW! ACHEW! ACHEW!

  “Don’t sneeze so damn loud,” I said.

  “You can’t fix how loud you sneeze.”

  “Well, cover your damn mouth.” The minutes was ticking away, tick-tick-tick. And the Dago was only making a dent. When I heard a man’s voice, coming from the window, my stomach flied into my throat.

  “What’s the problem in there?” a voice come barking in.

  But it was only Frank. And in he come—stuffing hisself through the window.

  “Lemme give it a try.” He grabbed the pick from the Dago.

  Peck, peck.

  Peck.

  Frank was the laziest thing I ever seen. He give up after just a few licks. “We can’t get in.”