All Honest Men

by Claude Stanush

  “If you’re gonna be in business, boys, you gotta look like businessmen,” I said when we was back in their hotel room. “And that’s what we’re gonna be. We’re not gonna be thugs, or kill nobody. We’re just gonna be quiet businessmen. Just like lawyers or bankers or storekeepers or any other men that’s in a business. All we want is the money.”

  Joe was setting on his bed, his shoulders slumped, his new fedora on his lap. He was thumbing the brim of that city hat so hard you could see the marks of his fingernails. Jess was setting on his bed, too, yanking off his new Oxfords and rubbing his feet like they was sore. Which they was. He hadn’t been wearing no socks.

  “Don’t get too used to us, Willis,” Jess said. “Soon’s this month is up, we’re putting our Stetsons back on and we’re taking our thousand and we’re cutting right on back to Texas.”

  I walked over to Joe, picked that dude hat offa his lap, and banged it on his head. Then I looked over at Jess. We was a team now, and I was the one in charge. “Get some socks on, boy. Right now, the only place you’re going is a show.”

  “A what?”

  Before I started in the bank-robbing business, I didn’t know much about how city people entertained theirselves. In the country, folks mostly just set out on the porch and told stories—about dead kin, about big hunts, about bad scars, about ornery neighbors, about anything and ever’thing. They’d spin ’em and stretch ’em and twist ’em—you never let what really happened mess up a good story. But in the city, folks didn’t have to make their own entertainment. Long as you had cash for a ticket, there was dozens of places where somebody’d do your entertaining for you. Vaudeville shows, opera houses, speakeasies, movie palaces, even something with wild city gals called burlesque shows.

  The newspapers called them things “amusements.” That night, I was calling ’em “tossing my brothers some oats.”

  It wasn’t a hour later, the three of us boys was sliding into front-row seats at the Trail West Burlesque in downtown Omaha. It was a big dark room, like a cave. Only it wasn’t no cave. It had a big stage in front with long purple curtains, and right under that stage, in a pit, there was a little music band. The players was tuning up their instruments, and they was screeching and snorting. And on the stage, in front of them closed curtains, there was two comics, dressed like clowns with red rubber noses, and they was slamming each other on the head with blowed-up hog bladders.

  Then, crash!

  There went them brass things together.

  And up went the curtains!

  The gals was all sizes and had all colors of hair—yellow, red, black, brown—but all of ’em was young and more’n half of ’em was pretty. And they was all lined up in a row, their arms linked together like a fence, and they was wearing little slivers of shiny pink cloth that just barely covered their things. They all had big pink hats on top of their heads and big clumps of pink feathers tied to their ankles.

  Up. Up. Up.

  Their legs was all kicking up, so high you’da thought they was gonna rare up and fall backwards.

  I looked sideways at the boys.

  I sure hoped this’d help to turn ’em. I had to have partners that wouldn’t run off and leave you in a tight spot. That wouldn’t knock you off when you wasn’t looking to get your share of the loot. Being blood kin, we’d have that natural loyalty to each other. A lot of outlaw teams had been brothers—the Jesse James boys, the Daltons, the Youngers. It’s true that Jess was lazy, a big old tumbleweed, but when we was kids and tooted around West Texas hopping freights, he never let me down. If he had a dollar in his pocket, and I wanted it, he’d give it to me, even though I was a lot more likely to have a dollar in my pocket than the other way around. Joe was a lot younger than either of us, but from what I’d seen of him and what Ma told me, he was true blue. The fact was, we was tight as a family, even if I’d run away from home all them times. Some of that family feeling was due to Ma, but most farm families was tight back then.

  If ever’body didn’t work, and work together, nobody ate.

  Anyhow, when them burlesque gals started kicking their legs, Jess’s arms started waving and now he was letting loose with a couple of them wild, hot Texas yells. Yeeee-aaaaah! Happy as a man could ever hope to be. There was only one thing that wasn’t going like it was supposed to.

  It was Joe.

  He was setting stiff as a fence post. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t even tapping his foot.

  I leaned over to him. “You okay, Joe?”

  He didn’t say nothing.

  “You ever seen so many angels?” I asked.

  Nothing.

  “That blonde’s a-winking at you, Joe.”

  Nothing.

  It was then that something come to me. Joe was nineteen, tall and skinny, but with enough hard, bulging muscles to make him look ever’ bit a man. By the time I was his age, I’d seen the sweet sides of plenty of gals when I was traveling with that gambler Jenkins. But maybe Joe’d never really been offa the farm. Growing up in a big family, a boy’s always getting a eyeful of his sisters. Still, that ain’t the same as seeing somebody you ain’t kin to. And even after the World War, women out in the country was still wearing long skirts with high collars that barely give you a peek of anything, much less anything interesting.

  “You okay, Joe?” I asked it again.

  Still nothing.

  The chorus gals had gone to singing. It was hard to make out all the words, their voices was kinda high, but it was something about a “pitter-pat” and a “raggie-tune” and a “walk down lover’s lane.” And ever’ so often, they’d pull off their hats and bang ’em against their knees.

  It took near a hour for my plan to start working.

  I seen it out the corner of my eye.

  Joe didn’t start waving his arms like Jess was. Or howling like Jess was. Or popping up offa his seat and wiggling his hind-end like Jess was. All he done was start blinking his eyes and swallowing and sighing. They was fast little blinks and fast little swallows and short little half-sighs. They wasn’t nothing nobody’d a-noticed if they wasn’t looking for it. I don’t think Joe even knowed he was doing it.

  But, to me, it was sign:

  The oats I was tossing to the boys was starting to get et.

  Next morning, I marked our getaway route with a thick red line on a map.

  The town was in Iowa, not too far southeast of Omaha, a place called Glenwood.

  At first, the boys listened without saying nothing. They was both a little drooped from the night before. It was when I opened a big black bag and showed ’em the guns we was gonna take with us on the job—old Colt .45s and sawed-off shotguns—that both of ’em come back to life.

  They looked at me walleyed.

  It wasn’t because they was scared of guns. Like all Texas farm boys they was used to handling ever’ kind of gun. And they was both crack shots, like me. But it was one thing killing rabbits ’n deer ’n quail, it was something else when you figured you might be in a gun-fight with another human being.

  “I ain’t shooting nobody.” Joe had his hat on his lap again. Thumbing the rim, and pinching it and patting it.

  “You boys still don’t get what I’m telling you here, do you?” I said back. “We ain’t gonna be gunfighters. We do what we do real late at night, when ever’body’s asleep.”

  “You know it well as I do, Willis,” Joe said, “that there’s always somebody awake at night in them country towns. Some old nighthack, or some old lady that’s got the vapors.”

  “We got ways of handling nighthacks. And if it’s a old lady, newsboy, sheriff that don’t sleep too good, whatever, we just keep on driving. It’s no disgrace to keep going, boys. Better to say ‘There he goes,’ than ‘Here he lies.’”

  Jess was setting with his legs wide apart, smacking a piece of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit. “What if somebody sees us anyhow, and gets a bead on us?”

  “That’s why we got these guns,” I said right back. “For scare.”
/>   My brothers was still jumpy, that much was clear. So I pulled out one more trick. I hated horses, but I could talk horse if that’s what it took. And this is what you do when you want to saddle a jittery bronc:

  You grab a-hold of its ear. You chew on it.

  “Listen boys. Y’all both wanna have your own ranches, right?”

  Both their heads come up at that. There wasn’t nothing either of ’em wanted more’n a sprawling ranch with a remuda full of hot-bloods. Only the chance of two rawhide cowboys like them ever owning a ranch like that was close to zero, no matter how good they was at busting broncs.

  “Think about it,” I said. “It’s gonna take a lotta money to buy you land and some pretty horses, ain’t it?”

  Both of ’em nodded.

  “You got that kinda money?”

  Both of ’em shook their heads.

  “Where’s that kinda money gonna come from?”

  Both of ’em shrugged.

  “That’s what I thought. Lemme tell you where that kinda money comes from, boys. It comes outa a bank. But what you think a banker’s gonna do, two scruffy old cowboys walk into his office and ask him for money like that?”

  They didn’t answer me.

  “Hell, that old banker wouldn’t even give you a smile at fifty-percent interest.”

  I told ’em they didn’t have’ta feel bad about taking the money from banks, ’cause banks do all kinds of crooked things theirselves. Like foreclosing on old widow women. Or buying stole bonds at a discount from bank robbers. When I was working with Frank Holloway and them other old boys, we never had trouble finding a banker to buy them bonds. And them bankers knowed they was stole.

  “We’ll just be little thieves taking money from big thieves.”

  Jess smacked his gum again. “If we’re little thieves and they’re big thieves, why’s the laws on their side?”

  “Law’s always on the side of the ones that got the most money,” I said right back. “And why do the bankers have all that money? By taking what ain’t theirs! Same reason all them old German ladies near Cisco had all that egg business. You ever seen any of them ladies squat down on one of them nests and lay a egg? I’d sure like to see it if they do. They don’t. All they do is build the hen-houses and then steal the eggs. That’s what bankers ’r like.”

  Then I told ’em what Frank told me: Nobody really gets hurt when a bank is robbed ’cause most banks ’r insured. Besides, I told ’em, insurance companies was just as crooked as the banks. And they wasn’t just thieves; they was liars!

  “They’ll promise you ever’thing but the moon to get you to buy the most expensive policy they got,” I said. “Then just try to collect. Ha! Maybe they pay a little here, a little there, but for ever’ dollar they give back, they keep five for theirselves.”

  Joe give me a funny look. “If the insurance companies are such big thieves, ain’t they just gonna pass it on down somehow? If a bank gets robbed and they gotta pay out? And is ever’thing insured? Bank back home got robbed last year, and I seem to recollect the paper said some folks didn’t get their money back.”

  I laughed. “You got too much going on between your ears, little brother. You gotta look at it how I look at it: Most ever’thing’s insured these days, and most of them insurance companies are crooks. And something else: Them insurance companies ain’t never planning to go straight. We are.”

  “Well, if we throw in with you, when is it we’re planning to go straight?”

  “Soon’s we get enough.”

  “How much is that?

  To be truthful, I’d never put a figure on how much I wanted to have before I give up robbing banks. Only, when Joe asked me that, a number come up. Come up right there in the middle of my head. And set there, just clear as day. But soon as I got a good look at it, with all them zeros, I decided I wasn’t gonna tell it.

  It woulda boogered my brothers right back to Texas.

  “Tell you what, boys,” I said. “You join my business, I’ll let you tell me when you think we got enough.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  We was all ready to hit a bank, to test ourselves as a brother team, except for one thing. We needed one more man. I knowed that four was the best number when you wanted your jobs to be a lead-pipe cinch: two to be inside men, two to be lookouts.

  Luck was with us.

  Three days before we was gonna pull out for Glenwood, I got a telephone call at five in the morning. And that call give me just what I wanted, though I didn’t say nothing about it right off to the boys.

  Two days later, the three of us set off. When I opened the throttle of that Studebaker Special-Six, it shot forward like a race horse. I felt near as good as I’d ever felt in my life. Having my two brothers with me was kinda like having our family back together again. Only this time it was me that was boss, not Pa. And we’d all put down a good breakfast that morning: thick-cut bacon, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, toast, blackberry jam, strong coffee.

  And as we was cutting down that highway, I was thinking about something that was sending shivers up my spine.

  I was thinking what it’d be like to have a million dollars.

  In all the newspapers and ever’where you went them days, folks was starting to talk “millions of dollars” and “millionaires.” And it wasn’t just the big-name, old-time millionaires like Mister John D. Rockefeller, Mister J.P. Morgan, Mister Andrew Carnegie, or Mister William Wrigley Jr. Ever’day, it seemed, there was a story about somebody that’d growed up poor and then Blooey!, near overnight, because of some invention or some kind of deal, he was a millionaire.

  20-year-old Joe in one of the gang’s getaway cars, a Studebaker Special Six. Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  That could’ve never happened before the big war over in Europe, because back then there wasn’t much money going around the country. Even Mister H.L. Pike, the richest man in Eastland County, was worth only $20,000, according to what I read one time in the Rising Star Record. But after the big war, there was more money around because the government had been paying for the war by printing more and more money, and selling more and more Liberty and Victory bonds. And American factories was starting to sell all kinds of things—automobiles, stoves, typewriters, soap—all over the world. And lots of people was after that money, and they didn’t give a damn how they got it—if they cheated the government, or rigged the price of things, or sold stocks and bonds that wasn’t worth the paper they was printed on.

  However they got it, more money passing around the country meant more money in the banks, and more money in the banks was what I was thinking about as we was racing down that Iowa highway. Hell, with my brothers helping me, there wasn’t no reason why I couldn’t get enough of that new money to make me a millionaire too. Enough to make all of us millionaires! In America, one newspaper fella wrote, nobody could dream about being a king or queen, because we didn’t have no kings or queens. But ever’body, no matter how poor they was (and plenty of people was still poor), could dream about being a millionaire. And when folks talked about millionaires, they always made it sound like being a millionaire was greater than being a king, or even Jesus Christ.

  ’Course, when I was a kid, I’d never even knowed the word “million.” First time I ever heard that word I was passing a old man’s cotton field out in Taylor County. He was near to crying, and he was pinching something between his fingers—one of them ugly, fuzzy, black boll weevils with hump backs and long snouts. Farmers hated boll weevils more’n the Devil hisself, because of how they eat the tender little leaf buds and bore into the blossoms and baby bolls—leaving a field of empty burrs instead of soft cotton.

  “There’s a million of ’em! A million of ’em!” that old farmer kept saying, pinching that ugly bug. “I’m just plain ruin’t!”

  It was the same word, all right. But just like there’s a big diff’rence between what folks thinks is in Heaven and what they think is in Hell, a million dollars was a altogether diff’rent thing from a million boll weevils.
/>
  Joe Newton

  When we was about thirty miles into Iowa, we crossed over a river called the West Nish and turned left, heading away from the sun.

  “Whoa, boy!” Jess said. “Map here says Glenwood’s more north.”

  Like most cowboys, Jess never missed a trick when it come to directions. Cowboys did ever’thing by the sun.

  “We’re making a stop,” I said.

  Jess snorted. “You got you another heifer, Willis?”

  “A bull.”

  “A bull?”

  “Just hang onto your hat.”

  Jess banged his fedora. “What hat? This thing ain’t a hat. It’s a lid.”

  We rattled over some railroad tracks, and I pulled offa the road and put on the brake. I told the boys to stay in the car and I hopped on out.

  “Gol-dang, Willis! How come you can’t tell us nothing?” Joe said after me. “You ain’t the only one in this outfit, ya know.”

  I walked off from the car and looked ever’ which-a-way. About a hundred yards down from the train tracks I seen a stream with thick brush and tall, pretty cattails. That had to be the spot.

  I cupped my hands to my mouth. “Whip-poor-weel, whip-poor-weel.”

  Nothing.

  “Whip-poor-weel! Whip-poor-weel!”

  This time, a line of cattails went to snapping and crashing flat on their heads, like dominos a-falling, and here he comes, a-barrelling!

  “Yeah-yeah-hell’s-o’-fire it’s me, me, me!”

  Hell’s-o’-fire, who else?

  He was covered from head to toe in sticky brown mud, and he had long, spikey whiskers, and his hair was going ever’ which-a-way. But he looked good to my eyes! He couldn’t help it he’d been bit by a mad coyote.

  He hugged me so hard he liked to crack a rib.

  No sooner they seen who it was, Jess and Joe come a-running.

  “Dock!” Joe said. “We thought you was still locked up.”

  “Broke out.”

  “Again?”

  “Hell, yeah. Warden made me a trusty.”

  “You?”

  Dock give a smirky smile. “I won that warden some big money, I’ll tell you what. Warden seen me knock out a guard, see, and it give him the idea to have prizefights. He put me up agin the big boys, the niggers and the bulls, and I knocked ’em all out! After that, he give me priv’leges. Let me be a dog boy ’n all. Only one day, old hound trainer went off to get some smokes, left his horse without no rider on it, and that was it for me …”