All Honest Men

by Claude Stanush

  For a minute or two after that, Joe didn’t say nothing. But then I seen his fingers clamp down on the steering wheel so hard they turned white and out it come—all in a rush, even faster and harder than when that flash flood hit our derricks down in Smackover.

  “Jesus, Willis, what the hell happened there?” Joe’s whole body was shaking. “I don’t wanta die just so’s you can get your damn million dollars! We coulda all been killed! Hell, we coulda killed them! Hell, maybe we did kill ’em! Two of ’em was bloody as beef.”

  “Them Canucks was the stupid ones, Joe. They shoulda let go of the bags.”

  “They was doing their job, Willis!”

  “And that’s all we was doing.”

  “Our job ain’t shooting people!”

  “Shoulda let go of the bags then.”

  “If you was one of them messengers,” he said, “would you a-let go?”

  “Shut up, Joe. This ain’t getting us nowhere.”

  A few minutes later the car was parked in the garage. I quick did a rough counting of the loot in them two bags. Come to right around $80,000. Better’n nothing. But not nearly what we coulda got, and after all the trouble! Hell. We hid the bags under the back seat and went to a picture show at a little theater around the corner. The show was about that trained wolf dog, Rin Tin Tin.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  In my whole life I been really boogered only two times.

  One time it happened in a watermelon patch when I was a little kid living near Cisco. I was hanging around with a bunch of older boys one night and they said why didn’t we sneak into Old Man Rockwell’s melon patch to get us a fat, ripe one. It was just coming a good dark. Well, there was a real tight old wire fence around the patch but we squeezed on through it. I was right behind a boy named Big Ears, and I’d just found me a nice big melon and I was going thump! thump! thump! to make sure it was ripe, when BLOOEY!, there blasts a gun, and all a sudden, Big Ears falls on the ground and starts a-hollering, “I’m kilt! I’m dead!” And then, BLOOEY! The gun blows again! And one of them other boys yells, “Oh my God, they kilt another!”

  You talk about being scared!

  I hit on back to that fence, my legs never run so fast in my life, but that wire, it’s so tight I bounce right off it and get throwed back six feet. I pull myself up and charge at it again and, oh boy, I’m just a-clawing at it and my clothes is half ripped off and my skin is all scraped and bloody, but I don’t care. At last I get through it and I’m just a-scrambling, looking back behind me one more time for the killer, when who do I see? Big Ears! He ain’t shot a’tall. He’s all bent over, just a-shaking. Laughing like a crazy man. See, that whole thing was just a trick. A boy named Roy was the one shooting off that gun, and he was shooting up into the air.

  I’ll tell you what, even if it was a trick, that fright stuck in my belly and wouldn’t leave. It’s like when you catch a chill and your teeth won’t stop a-chattering. I just shook and shook for all the next day.

  I never got another melon out of that patch.

  After that I never was really boogered bad again ’til up in Toronto. On that bank messenger holdup. It didn’t hit me full blast ’til it was completely over. ’Til I was going with Joe through the door for that Rin Tin Tin picture show. Yeah, I’d fought with Joe and got my back up over ever’thing. But when I really thought over what we done, I got scared inside of me more’n I’d ever been before. I still do. I will all my life. If them Canucks hadn’t been such lousy shots, one of us—maybe all of us—coulda been killed. Or if they had caught us, they’d have stomped us to pieces. Or strung us up from that telephone post.

  After the movie ended, Joe went to another theater down the street to watch a Tom Mix picture, and I caught a taxi back to the hotel. I wasn’t there half a minute before a newsboy run up to me shouting, “EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about the big bank messenger robbery!” He shoved a paper in front of my face with big black headlines, “SENSATIONAL HOLDUP DOWNTOWN!” I give him a nickel. It had a second headline: THREE BANK MESSENGERS SHOT DOWN. The story said one of the guards had got shot in the lung. And that all three was in the hospital in a “undetermined” condition. I’ll never forget that word “undetermined.” Good godamighty!

  If we was murderers, them Canucks’d be after us ’til they caught us—and they’d likely kill us too.

  In the hotel lobby, I throwed the newspaper away. All over the lobby people was reading that same paper with the same headlines. A few of ’em was crowded around a radio. I could hear ’em all a-yapping. That was probably happening all over Toronto, maybe all over Canada.

  Maybe in Louise’s room.

  All I wanted right then was to get up the elevator, tell Louise what happened, and get it over with. She had to know. At the door to Room 1206—that’s one number I’ll never forget either—I stopped for a couple of minutes. I’d rather face all them bullets again than face her. But there was no way out.

  I put the key in the door and turned it.

  “You here, Lou?”

  There wasn’t no answer.

  “You here, honey?”

  The bathroom door creaked open.

  She come out slow.

  I froze. There was something in how she was looking at me I never seen in her eyes before.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “Whatdaya mean?”

  “You know damn well what I mean.”

  She had a handkerchief in her hand. I seen she’d been crying. She wasn’t crying no more, but her face was white and tight. And the way her eyes was moving, it was like she was trying to throw something outa her head, and it wasn’t going.

  I walked over to her. I put my hands on her shoulder. I looked her straight in the eye.

  “When we come here, Lou, I didn’t have no plans for this thing …”

  “You shot them?” Her voice was so low I could hardly hear her.

  “It wasn’t nothing like you mighta heard. The way we planned it, nobody was gonna get hurt. We was gonna catch ’em off guard, by surprise.…”

  “You told me you were ‘casing’ a job, Willis. Casing a job? Three men and—”

  “Listen to me, honey. Listen hard …”

  “—and one is dying. A war veteran … with three children.…”

  “They was like crazy men, them Canucks. They wouldn’t let go of the bags …”

  She slumped to the floor. “It’s gone too far, Willis. Too far.”

  “Lemme tell you how it happened, Lou …”

  I crouched down in front of her. I put my hands on her shoulders again.

  “We didn’t shoot ’em to kill ’em …”

  She throwed her hands up and knocked my hands away. I never knowed a woman could have so much power in her arms. Her eyes was looking dead set again, only they wasn’t seeing me.

  Now she was hollering.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Next day, it was more big, black headlines—headlines so big and so black you’da thought the whole world had blowed up. Well, I don’t know who in the devil them newspapers hired to write their stones, but could their reporters whoop and holler and kick up dust!

  They wrote that we’d pulled off “the most cold-blooded and daring crime ever committed on the streets of Toronto.”

  They wrote that we musta been “schooled in the business of killing and maiming” and that our guns was “vomiting death.”

  They wrote we’d left one of them messengers “gasping in pain through blanched lips, a bullet buried in his lungs.”

  Like always, they got plenty wrong. One worse’n the other. One of ’em wrote: “It’s quite possible that the mind that planned the robbery was not on the scene when the thing took place. It all smacks of a cunning that seldom goes with boldness and initiative.”

  Well, hell! They didn’t know nothing!

  I was hoping to God that Louise hadn’t seen none of them papers. I figured she’d left in the night and took a train back to the States. All her clothes and bags wa
s gone when I come back to our room in the morning. There wasn’t nothing I coulda done. When she got something into her head, she was like Ma—stubborn as a gov’ment mule.

  I had a awful fear that I’d lost her forever.

  And there was something else worrying me.

  I wasn’t scared, like the boys was, that she might snitch. It was something else. Right before the stickup, I’d hid a .45 pistol in her nightbag, the one where she kept her lady things. I’d put it there “just in case.” And in all the ruckus, I’d forgot about that gun. And now that nightbag was gone with Louise, and God knows what was happening to her at the border of Canada, if they was to search her things.

  Was Louise gonna get arrested for my pistol?

  It made me sick with worry. But what could I do about it?

  I gotta say something else quick, though. Not ever’thing we read in them papers that morning after that Toronto stickup was bad. The best thing, all three of them wounded messengers was still alive! Even the one hurt the worst, the one that’d took a bullet in the lung, was “moving out of danger,” one paper said.

  When I read that, I took my first full breath in twenty-four hours.

  ’Course, we still wasn’t off the hook.

  The papers said there was a $10,000 reward out for us and the laws had set up roadblocks on ever’ highway going outa the city.

  We knowed from the papers that the laws didn’t have no hard descriptions of us, being that most of the witnesses was so rattled and ever’thing happened so fast. All they got was stuff like, “One bandit was wearing a brown suit and straw hat and witnesses described him as having a fat face.” That was Jess. And “two witnesses said the getaway car was driven by a colored chauffeur.” That was Joe. (He’d got hisself a dark hide from hanging out at a lake, looking at gals in bathing clothes.)

  But there was probably hundreds of colored chauffeurs in Toronto, and thousands of white men with fat faces.

  The laws did know we was driving that 1919 Studebaker; they called it a “red high-powered mystery car.” Only that was parked in a secret garage.

  Anyhow, me and Joe went out and bought us some wide cotton ducking, a few big sewing needles, and some thick thread. We took a taxi to the garage where we’d parked our getaway car. We took about $65,000 of the loot and sewed it in layers into that tape. Then we wrapped it around our chests, like it was a vest.

  We put our shirts over them belts, and when we was done, we looked like burly muscle-men with barrel chests.

  We took another taxi to the garage where we’d parked the car we’d drove up to Toronto in. In that one, we headed outa town. Sure enough, we passed a couple of roadblocks, but the laws was looking for a 1919 dark-red Studebaker—not our 1923 black one. We went about thirty miles outside of town, and buried the money in some old sandy country. Then we went back into Toronto, split up the rest of the money into fives—and all five of us sewed it into that ducking, same way, and wrapped it around our chests.

  When we cut outa town, in our car and Glasscock’s, the laws was still posted all over the sides of the roads. But we was split up and driving in two cars—neither one of ’em a 1919 Studebaker—and nobody blinked a eye.

  Even with how bad things had gone in Toronto, they was beginning to look up.

  Except the boys was still mad at me. And Louise was gone.

  First thing I done when I got to Detroit, I checked by telephone with a friend of Louise’s in Omaha. She said Louise had left town, took Lewis to her folks in Wisconsin. The good part of that was, she’d got across the border, even with that .45 in her lady’s things; the bad news was, she’d left me.

  I wasn’t gonna give up in trying to get her back, I wasn’t ever gonna give up. But like as not, I was gonna have to do it a diff’rent way. The last time I did it, it was by trying to go legitimate, to get into oil. Now I was gonna have to drop the trying and just do it. ’Course, the only way I knowed how to get enough money to go straight was to stay crooked a while longer.

  First off, I found a fence for the money we’d brung with us; he give us 90 cents on the dollar.

  Then, two weeks later, me and Joe drove back up to Canada and dug up that $65,000. We planted it all under the cushions of the car, stuffed it in there with them springs, and headed back. Joe did the driving. He was still mad at me, so we didn’t say much of nothing the whole trip.

  But we done what we went to do.

  When we come to the border, I got outa the car and went to walking across the bridge, casual-like. Outa the corner of my eye, I seen the border inspector walk over to Joe. I never did turn my head, just slid my eyeball way to the corner of my eye socket. The old boy asked Joe a coupla questions, I seen Joe’s head moving around, and the inspector waved him on.

  Yessir! We’d got away with it!

  All them Canuck messengers was alive! And not a nick or scratch on any of us!

  Still, I felt like somebody’d stuck a thumb-buster in my chest and pulled the trigger. There was a big empty hole there, right in my middle. I wanted to get as close to Louise as I could. And I wasn’t ever gonna give up on that gal. Even if the chances of her coming back to me was a million to one.

  Soon as we got back to the States, I told the boys and Glasscock we was gonna switch headquarters. To Chicago. That was the closest big city to where Louise was at.

  “Why Chicago?” Joe asked.

  “’Cause it’s the wickedest city in the United States. We get picked up for anything, there’s fixers ever’where.”

  THIRTY

  “She’s not talking to you. Don’t call anymore.” Louise’s Pa and Ma told me that ever’ time I called up to their house from Chicago. Louise was there, all right, with Lewis, but she wouldn’t come to the phone. And if I went up there, they told me, she wouldn’t see me.

  Oh, Chicago was a wide-open place back then!

  Folks called it “the hub of the nation” because it had trains running from it north, south, east, west. And it was filled with honest, hard-working people—lots of ’em immigrants that sweated their hind-ends off at the factories and packing houses. But Chicago was rotten at the core. It was run by crooked thugs—the newspapers called ’em gangsters—and by crooked police and politicians.

  Them days, the gangsters made their money mostly from bootlegging.

  It was that Prohibition law that made it a crime to sell hooch, or even to drink it. But all that law done was make people wanta drink it even more. One of the songs ever’body was singing went, “You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea.” Well, there musta been shimmies shaking all over Chicago ’cause the papers said bootleggers sold more’n $60 million of beer ever’ year. Sixty million dollars!

  And that was just beer.

  I hadn’t been in Chicago one week before I seen one of the city’s biggest, meanest gangsters, Deany O’Banion. It was when me and Glasscock was walking down North Street. Ever’body in town knowed about O’Banion. He run a flower shop across from a Catholic cathedral, but flowers was just his front. When it come to ruling Chicago’s underworld, O’Banion was one of the Big Ones. Johnny Torrio and Al Capone had their fists on the south side; O’Banion had most of the north.

  “That’s O’Banion,” Glasscock whispered, and he poked me in the side. “White suit.”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes offa that old boy. He had a round face, like a lump of Ma’s biscuit dough, and his mouth and his eyes was like the way a knife slits into dough. You couldn’t see no lips, couldn’t hardly see no eyelids. And he was limping, his right leg was shorter’n his left. But even with that dough head, and that kerthump of a walk, his chest was puffed out like he was the king of Chicago. He had on a snow-white suit, double-breasted, with a red rose stuck in the lapel, and he was shaking hands and slapping backs on half the people that walked past him.

  “See how he keeps his left hand in his pocket?” Glasscock whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  “I hear he’s got three secret pockets for his guns.”

&n
bsp; Lemme tell you what: If I coulda knowed that the Newton Boys was gonna cross paths with that O’Banion one day, I woulda give that gimpy old son-of-a-bitch a even harder look. But something like that didn’t even come into my mind.

  I didn’t have no plans to do any jobs inside the city.

  It woulda been a good deal if me and my brothers coulda figured out a way to dip into all them bootleg profits. But we wasn’t fools. I knowed how jealous them Chicago gangsters was of their territories, and they was cold-blooded thugs. They said they had a code, but it wasn’t no code of the West. Hell, they didn’t even have the manners of a rattlesnake. Didn’t even buzz before they bit. If somebody was trying to do business in their part of town, you was likely to find that person slumped over the steering wheel of his car, with a bullet in the back of his head, or shot up with bullets on the sidewalk.

  But I’m getting ahead of my story here. Because for a long while nobody messed with us. In fact, most of the time I wasn’t even in Chicago.

  I was out on the road hunting for marks.

  And I liked being on the road, a-moving. The boys liked me being on the road, too. They stayed in Chicago and lived it up! They was all so hacked at me over Toronto, particularly Joe, that I told ’em I’d pay their hotel bills for a month while I was off doing the scouting work. I figured that’d give time for the “hot coffee to cool,” and that’s just what it done. ’Course we was all hacked at Glasscock, for being such a yeller-dog. But I didn’t want to lose out on his tipsters. So I just let him be.

  Anyhow, while I was on the road, there was plenty of things for the boys to do in Chicago, particularly Joe and Jess. They was free to roam around more’n Dock was. They become big White Sox baseball fans and started going to ever’ home game there was. Joe even kept a list of ever’ player’s hitting and batting averages. Other times, they’d go out to the Union Stockyards to visit with live animals, or to the meat-packing plants where they could watch the big, bloody carcasses being cut up into steaks, roasts, and chops. They liked to ride around the city on that elevated Railway, called “the El.”