The Collected Stories of William Humphrey

by William Humphrey

  Meanwhile, following Bull Childress’s strike, the oil fever hit the section, and it seemed to poor Jesse that everybody except his folks had a piece of ground big enough to drill a hole and sink a pipe; only they had none. Land prices began to skyrocket, and there went the other dream of Jesse’s life. Land that always, until now, had gone begging at twenty dollars an acre, land that had sold for unpaid taxes and gone unsold even for that, was suddenly fetching thousands of dollars. He alone owned none. Now he never would.

  Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were dead, the Texas badman and his gun moll. The town, one Saturday just past noon when Jesse joined his gang of buddies on Main Street, pullulated with the news. Dead. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. It had happened some days before (the previous Wednesday, in fact) but it was news, for if like Jesse and most of the others on the streets you spent Monday through Saturday morning behind a plow talking only to a mule, it was in town on Saturday afternoon that you caught up on the week’s events. Clyde and Bonnie. Dead. The groups of men collected on the corners were both subdued and excited, with an air at once conspiratorial and challenging, as if defying a ban on public gatherings; and as with the people of an occupied country, when a partisan hero (and heroine), one of their own, had been caught and executed by the authorities, the flag of their traditional, classless, blood sympathy with the outlaw flew at half-mast.

  The folk hero, in yet another avatar, was dead, and already the prose of their lament was growing cadenced and incantatory, half on its way to being verse, and soon would be music, and then, in the cotton fields, to the rhythm of the chopping of a hoe, on records in café nickelodeons, on street corners sung by blind, legless veterans to the whang of a steel guitar, young men would be adjured to take warning and listen to me, and told his story. How he was a poor boy—and thus already, even before his first recorded infraction (which had been to defend his sister’s honor against a rich lecher, or the theft from hunger of a dime loaf of bread, or through impatience with the law’s delay in righting a wrong which he, a poor boy, had suffered) on the outs with the law. A poor boy, alone, against the world, and orphaned. Orphaned of a father, that is; for a mother there would be, old and ailing, to visit whom in her illness he regularly slipped through the cordon of deputies and marshals posted around the family homestead with the loose insolent ease of a nocturnal panther. A poor boy who died young; handsome it went without saying; with women by the score ready to die for him, and one who gained immortality by dying with him. And a man (already in the barber shops and around the marble machines in the cafés they were wondering how the law could have known that Clyde would come down that road at that hour that day, he whose every move had been as stealthy and as sly as a hunted coyote, they who for two years he had made look like monkeys), a bosom friend, the one man he had ever taken into his confidence, whose life perhaps, which is to say undoubtedly, he had saved, ready to kiss his cheek in public for a handful of silver.

  The actual place it had happened was in Louisiana, where, as their car passed through a narrow and bushy defile, they had been jumped, ambushed, by a party of local and out-of-state lawmen, who opened fire with shotguns, pistols, and automatic rifles. The car in the picture looked like a colander and the bodies of a thin, undersized young man and a thin young woman, who even in death retained the lean and sinewy wariness of an alley cat, looked like wild game, the lawmen standing over them with their guns, posing with stiff proud smiles, as in those photographs of hunting parties with the day’s trophies lying at their feet. “I hated to bust a cap on a woman,” the gallant leader of the posse was quoted as saying. “Especially when she was sitting down. But if it wouldn’t of been her it would of been us.”

  And so at last it had come: the end to a reign of terror throughout the whole Southwest of some two years, as the newspapers put it. The end which had been expected daily and its every detail long foreseen (he would go out blazing, would take as many with him as he could, if they gave him a chance, which they didn’t, and her too, old cigar-smoking Bonnie too, would never surrender, not Clyde, but would, should it come to that, save one last cartridge, or rather two, for themselves) had been foreseen and almost already lived through, yet never for one moment believed in, and secretly prayed against, even by those holding what they considered the sure number in the betting pools that had been made on the date.

  And already, in the barbers’ chairs beneath the turbaned mounds of towels, on the shoeshine stands, to the click of snooker balls, in the otherwise unused (except as a kind of local Salvation Army shelter for the town’s two incorrigible and hopeless drunks) waiting room of the depot, hanging around waiting for old 88 to howl through and fling off the mail sack, they were saying: a dozen of them, and after two years of being made to look like a pack of fools, against one man and a girl! And without even giving them a chance to surrender (when what they meant was, without giving them a fighting chance to return fire). And saying that when the bodies were taken from the car (he had been at the wheel) she was found to have died in the act of drawing her pistol—not no lady’s purse popgun but a real sonofabitching honest-to-by-God old .45 government-issue Colt automatic—from the glove compartment. And maybe her kind was what had led that poor boy astray in the first place, but she had stuck by her man, I God, through thick and thin, you had to say that for Bonnie Parker, she had stuck by her man.

  And then—a note of state pride in the voice then, and a dry cackle of a snort—“I God, they ain’t caught Purty Boy yit!” Meaning Oklahoma’s own Pretty Boy Floyd. And how there was a man—not mentioning no names, but if you was to, why, it wouldn’t be the first time they ever heard it, and he lived not so very far away—that answered a knock on the farmhouse door late one cold and rainy winter night and called Who’s there? and got back for answer A friend, and opened the door and held the lamp up to a handsome young face that he had never seen before except on the wall alongside the rental boxes in the post office, but had said Come in, friend, for he had been honored by the title, been proud to give him the night’s lodging he asked for, and had turned the kids out despite his protests and made them down a pallet on the floor, and next morning had found, or his wife had, pinned to the blanket a one-hundred-dollar bill. And that man was not the only man in Oklahoma that such a tale might tell. Not none of these biggety new oil-rich that up to six months ago had always wiped on a cob and now tried to look as if they never wiped at all, but them that still knew what it was to be a poor boy and on the outs with the law—which two things came to the same.

  And someone wondered, for sooner or later someone was bound to, if it really was Clyde and Bonnie in that car. For the law shot first and asked questions later, and never confessed afterwards to any little mistakes of theirs. And they had been made to look mighty foolish for a long time. And they could use the bodies of a young man and a young woman, too shot up to be really identified, for public consumption. And that led to talk of the greatest badman of them all. How a man, an old-timer, had turned up in Oklahoma City, or maybe it was Tulsa, not so very long ago, claiming he was Jesse James and could prove it, and that the dirty little coward who in the song had shot Mr. Howard and laid poor Jesse in his grave had done no such thing, only it had been convenient at the time to let it be thought so.

  And our Jesse listened, smiling bashfully, the black leather bow tie riding up his Adam’s apple as he ducked his chin, reddening a little, as one must when a hero is being spoken of who shares one’s name.

  And they talked of other storied outlaws past and present, of Baby Face Nelson and Dillinger, of Sam Bass and Billy the Kid, and always, here among Jesse’s crowd in particular, the word poreboy, a poreboy, sounded, like the bass string which the hand must always strum no matter what the chord, on a guitar. A poreboy who had got himself into a little trouble, and was maltreated and made mean by the law because he was a poreboy with nothing and nobody to buy them off, whom they might club and rubber-hose with impunity, a poreboy with no one to go his bail. For the gang tha
t Jesse squatted and whittled and spat with in town on Saturday afternoon was different now from his former companions. Instead of the older, steadier (and as he now thought of them, cowed and beaten) family men, he hung out now with a group of young men of all ages, bachelors married and unmarried, hired hands and tenant farmers’ sons from off the land and young mechanics and day laborers from the town and those without any fixed address nor visible means of support nor traceable origins who spent the days between Saturdays sitting along the loading platform of the cotton compress or in the domino parlor, those left out of the current oil boom, who made vague threats every now and then of running off and joining the Navy. And always in their telling there was a woman in it, too, at the root of it always some woman, one for whose sake a poreboy had gone wrong, and who, if she had not actually sold him out, had deserted him when the chips were down. As in the ballad, merely one of the most popular of hundreds on the theme, which had become Jesse’s favorite among his repertoire:

  I got no use for the women.

  A true one can never be found.

  They’ll stick by a man while he’s winning;

  When he’s losing they turn him down.

  Except for passing showers lasting half an hour, and leaving upon the parched soil a crust like dried blood, it was six weeks since rain had fallen. The sun swooped lower by the day, singeing the stunted cotton like feathers in a flame. There was not even dew by night to settle the dust that choked the air. Men’s heads were commencing to shake. It looked as if they were headed into another summer like the last, and the one before that.

  In all of Oklahoma there was probably just one farmer whose mood this weather exactly suited, and that was Jesse Neighbours. He was spoiling for something, he himself did not know what. Now that he had nothing and no one to work for, he was working harder than ever, in the field before daybreak and out until after nightfall, unable to straighten his back, stalking down the rows (it was cotton-chopping time) with his hoe rising and falling as though motor-driven, neither speaking nor spoken to for twelve to fourteen hours at a stretch, so that his mind was furrowed by his thoughts as regular as a tractored field, throbbed to a beat as insistent as the rise and fall of his hoe. You chopped three acres a day and what did it get you? A plate of greens at night, enough to just keep you going tomorrow. You picked two hundred pounds, dragging the heavy sack after you like a wounded animal its entrails, bent double, blinded by your own salt sweat, no time to mop your brow, other hands quick to pick whatever you missed, half a cent a pound, take it or leave it, and at the end of the season what did you have? Enough to not quite pay your bill at the company store. Convinced now that farming was for fools—fools like him—Jesse delighted in every affliction that beset the crops: the fitful blossoming of the cotton, as if discouraged by the price it was fetching on the market, the coming of the boll weevils and the leaf hoppers and the corn smut, the blackbirds in clouds, the dust storms, the scorching sun that wrung a man out like a rag. He despised his condition and despised himself for acquiescing in it. And it was not long before that talk of desperadoes which had been dropped like refuse in a corner of his heated and airless brain burst aflame through spontaneous combustion.

  People were robbing banks again, now that they had reopened following their little holiday. In town every Saturday there was talk of some bold new stickup. Then on Monday back to the fields, up and down the long weary rows, swinging a hoe or dragging a sack, and Jesse dreamed of fast cars, a new one stolen every week, always on the move, always in the money, spend it fast before it burned a hole in your pocket, plenty more where it came from, of living by the gun, quick on the trigger, feared and adored by multitudes, your exploits followed in the daily newspapers, good-looking women at your feet, fancy clothes, fast company. And when his name was on everybody’s lips, then wouldn’t Naomi feel sorry! Suppose you got caught? That was the risk you ran. Suppose you got killed? Suppose you did. Death by gunfire, quick, clean, a pistol bucking in your hand, at the end of a few glorious years, dying young and leaving a handsome corpse—compared with that was long life, spent in a cotton field, such a precious thing? Before long Jesse had begun to save up his money.

  His earnings at picking went to the support of the family, but what he picked up playing Saturday-night dances was his. After being jilted he had recklessly gone back to smoking; now he quit again and once more began putting his tobacco money in a jar. It was no mule this time that he was saving for. He had to have a pistol; and before she would be reliable as a getaway car the old buggy needed a set of rings and at least one new tire to replace the one on the right rear with the boot and the slow leak around the valve.

  Which bank Mr. O. B. Childress kept his money in Jesse did not know, but he wanted to be sure not to rob that one. Not that Jesse had any love for Bull. But Bull’s money was, or would be, Naomi’s; and if it should come to pass that having robbed just one bank and gotten away with it he decided not to make a career of it but came back home rich and they got married after all, he would not want it on his conscience that some part of his money was his wife’s. The surest way to avoid it was to go outside the state.

  Across the river over in Texas, in the county-seat town of Clarksville some forty miles away, was a bank which had been the object not long since of a spectacularly unsuccessful robbery attempt. The three robbers had been shot down like fish in a barrel as they emerged from the bank by lawmen posted on the adjacent rooftops. That gang had failed because they were too many—including a fourth who had informed the law of their plans. No one would be able to tip them off on him; and according to Jesse’s calculations, swollen with self-conceit, the Clarksville sheriffs would be incapable of imagining that their bank might be struck again. And when things had blown over and he returned home in the chips, he would explain how he came into it by saying he had gone wildcatting in Texas and struck oil. And if he got caught? He was not aiming to get caught. And if he got killed? Who was there to care if he did?

  The old buggy turned out to need more than a new tire or two, as Jesse found when, cotton picking over, he went to work on her. He gave her a valve job, up to his elbows in grinding compound, cleaned the plugs, put in points, regulated the timer. Then came the crowning touch, installation of a second carburetor, taken from the companion car, the adapter engineered by himself. The result: pickup that left new cars sitting, as he proved on the road to Tishomingo, where he went one day in October in quest of that pistol.

  And on a subsequent trip shortly thereafter, thanks to those two carburetors, she hit seventy, shaking like a shimmy dancer, but she did it. That was a practice run down to Clarksville, where under an assumed name he opened a savings account at the bank with that fruit jar full of pennies and nickels and dimes, which took the teller a long time to sort out and count, giving Jesse a chance to study the layout.

  He chose Halloween. You could wear a mask then and be just one among many, and the noise of firing, should it come to that, would be lost among the firecrackers and torpedoes. The night before Jesse wrote a letter to his folks, to be mailed from somewhere when the job was finished (it was found on him afterwards), explaining that he had left home to seek his fortune and would come back when he had made good, that he had left without saying good-by so as to avoid tears, and not to worry about him.

  He left the car in a side street in back of the bank, as planned, engine running, a thing that attracted no notice in those days when old cars were often left running at the curb for fear of their not starting again. In an alleyway he slipped on his witch’s mask. The square was filled with masked revelers and there was noise of fireworks. At the door of the bank Jesse faltered for just a moment, then boldly stepped in.

  It was all over in seconds. Jesse went to one of the cages, pulled his pistol, and said, “This is a stickup.” The teller ducked, bells clanged, Jesse panicked and ran, straight into the arms of a bank guard, who held him in a bear hug while a second guard slugged him senseless with a blackjack.

 
A young man who identified himself as his attorney, appointed by the court, came round a few days later to visit Jesse in his cell. He was still new to his trade and nervous as a young intern with his first cancer patient. In exasperation he said at last, “Fool! If you just had to rob a bank, why didn’t you pick one near home? Or don’t you even know that here in Texas armed bank robbery is a capital offense?”

  No, Jesse said, he never knew that.

  At the trial the lawyer pled his client’s youth and previous good character and lack of criminal record. But there had been a rash of bank robberies of late, and it was felt that an example must be made. Being from out of state went against the defendant also. The jury was out one hour and returned a verdict of guilty, and the judge sentenced Jesse Neighbours to die in the electric chair.

  Appeal was denied, and in answer to their letter to the Governor of Texas, Jesse’s father and mother received a form reply regretting that nothing could be done, the law must take its course.

  Execution was fixed for a day in February. Will and Vera went down to Huntsville the day before to bid the boy good-by. They were given an hour together, but three quarters of it passed in silence. They spoke of things going on around home, as they had agreed beforehand they would. Once or twice they laughed over something, and once started all three laughed loudly. All through the interview his mother kept glancing nervously at her boy’s hair despite herself, thinking of it being shaved off, as she had heard was done. Nothing was said about Naomi Childress. When the time was about up Jesse said he was sorry for the troubles he had brought on them, and they said not to think about that. He said tell his little brothers, and especially Doak, not to be proud of their outlaw brother and want to follow in his footsteps, but to be sensible boys and stick to farming, as crime did not pay. His mother would have liked to ask if he had made his peace with the Lord but was afraid of embarrassing him. When it came time to say good-by they kissed and she managed to stay dry-eyed, as Will had admonished her that she must. It was he whose eyes filled with tears as he and Jesse shook hands.