San Francisco—April 18, 1906
Jesse and Billy had rented a row house on Steiner Street in the marina district of San Francisco. It was early in the morning and Jesse was still asleep, when suddenly his bed tilted, dumping him onto the floor. At first he thought Billy had done it, coming into the room to play some joke on him. But as he lay on the floor, still in a stupor, he realized that the entire house was shaking. From outside, he heard a loud roar.
The closest he had ever come to experiencing anything like this was being caught in an artillery barrage during the war, and for one irrational moment, he thought perhaps that was exactly what was happening. But no, that couldn’t be. The shaking continued and seemed to get worse with each second. Suddenly one entire wall came crashing down, exposing the outside.
He was unable to get to his feet because of the violent tossing of the floor, then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.
“Pa! Pa, are you all right?” Billy called from his room.
“Yes, I think so. Are you hurt?”
“No,” Billy said. “But I can’t get the door open. I’m trapped in my room.”
“Let me see what I can do,” Jesse said.
Jesse didn’t have the problem with his door that Billy did, because Jesse’s door was off the hinges. When he stepped out into the hallway, he saw why Billy couldn’t get his door open. A pile of bricks and board, shaken loose from the house, was stacked up in front of the door. Jesse worked on it for nearly half an hour, until he got enough of it moved aside to allow Billy to come through.
“Get dressed, gather up the money, and let’s get out of here,” Jesse said.
Fifteen minutes later, they were dressed and outside, where they saw that the streets had cracked and opened, with chasms extending in all directions. Entire buildings had collapsed, and they saw dead people and animals, crushed under the debris. And though the sun had come up, the sky was black with smoke roiling up from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fires.
“Pa, you think we can get back in the house?”
“Why would you want to go back in?”
“We left all our clothes in there.”
“We’ll buy new clothes,” Jesse said. “We aren’t like the others; they live here, they have to stay here. We don’t. We’re leaving.”9
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Long Beach, California—November 1908
Jesse and Billy had bought a house on the beach. Both of them got jobs, as much to have something to do as to demonstrate to neighbors that they had a sustainable source of income. Billy got a job as a trolley motorman, and Jesse took a job in a store called Walkers Spirits and Fine Wines.
The liquor store stayed open till nine o’clock, and one night, at about a quarter until nine, Jesse was waiting on Mrs. Prescott, a middle-aged widow who was a regular customer.
“Mr. Alexander, I do declare that wine you recommended the last time I was in here was such a success. I served it to the ladies at our book club.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it, Mrs. Prescott. I have to confess that I don’t really know that much about wine, but Mr. Walker does, and he suggested it. He goes up to where they grow the grapes and make wine.”
“Well, I’ll just have another bottle if you don’t—”
“Put your hands up!”
The shout came from the front door as two masked men came bursting into the store. Both were brandishing pistols.
“You, old man!” one of them said, pointing his pistol toward Jesse. “Empty the cash box. You, bitch, hand over your purse.”
“Now, is that any way for you to talk to a lady?” Jesse asked calmly as he put the cash box on the counter.
“I’ll talk to her anyway I want. And if I hear another word from you, I’ll shoot you and her both.”
“Leave now, or die,” Jesse said.
“You don’t listen good, do you?” The robber turned his pistol back toward Jesse, but before he could pull the trigger, Jesse took his pistol from inside of the cash box and fired twice, in less than a second. Both men went down.
Mrs. Prescott screamed, and Jesse, with the smoking gun still in his hand, stepped around the corner and put one arm around her shoulders.
“I’m sorry you had to be here for this,” he said.
“Are they . . . are they dead?” Mrs. Prescott asked in a tight, frightened voice.
“I expect they are,” Jesse said. Walking over to the wall-mounted telephone, he lifted the receiver, then moved the hook up and down a few times.
“Operator, get me the police department,” he said. Then a moment later he spoke again. “Police, my name is J. Frank Alexander, and I just shot two men who tried to rob me at Walker’s Spirits and Wine. Yes, I’ll be here when you arrive. What? Oh, yes, they’ll be here, too. They’re both dead.”
Because both men were still masked, both were holding pistols, and Mrs. Prescott substantiated Jesse’s account, there were no charges filed against him. And, Mr. Walker, who had been summoned by the police as soon as they received the call, rewarded Jesse with a ten-dollar bonus.
The cabin on the Brazos—March 18, 1942
“Jesse, did you feel a little strange about shooting those two men? I mean, put yourself in their shoes. What they were doing was no different from what you, by your own admission, had done many times before,” Faust asked.
“I suppose looking at it from your viewpoint I can see where you might think that,” Jesse said. “But I didn’t put myself in their shoes then, and I don’t now. At the time, I believe those two men fully intended to kill me, and probably Mrs. Prescott as well. I had no choice but to shoot them before they did that. And if they didn’t intend to shoot me, they made me think they were. That’s one of the risks you take when you go down that trail. I’ve taken many of those risks myself.
“Did I feel strange? No, and I didn’t even feel bad about it. I have been in those kill-or-be-killed positions many times in my life. They are never pleasant while you are in the middle of the situation.” Jesse smiled. “But I’ll tell you this. Life is never sweeter than it is when you have almost lost it. There aren’t any of us going to get out of this world alive, Fred. You are a lot younger than I am, but who knows, I might well outlive you.”10
“I suppose that’s true. Tell me, how long did you stay in California?”
“Almost three years. We were in San Francisco for half a year, until the earthquake drove us out. And we left Los Angeles a few months after the incident I just told you about.”
“Where did you go from there?”
We went to Phoenix. Well, not exactly Phoenix. We wound up in Maricopa County, Arizona.”
“Did you go into ranching in Arizona?”
Jesse laughed. “Sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“You remember when I told you we spent money on ostriches?”
Long Beach—February 10, 1909
“Ostriches?” Jesse questioned, not sure he had heard Billy correctly.
“Yes, we’ll start an ostrich ranch, and we’ll make a ton of money,” Billy said.
“Ostriches are those great big birds, right?”
“They’re big all right. From the ground to the top of their head is over six feet tall for the female birds, and the male birds could be as tall as eight feet.”
“And would you tell me just what in the world did you plan for us to do with them? Do people eat ostriches?”
“I don’t know if you can eat them or not. But we won’t be raisin’ them to eat. We’re raisin’ them for feathers.”
“Feathers?”
“Yeah, Pa. I’ve been readin’ all about ’em. Why, did you know there are rich society ladies that will give forty dollars for one feather?”
“If one feather cost that much, it isn’t going to be cheap for us to buy ostriches, is it?”
“Four thousand dollars for a pair,” Billy said.
“Four thousand dollars?” Jesse shouted. “Are you kidding? A prize bull do
esn’t cost that much.”
“Pa, when you pull out a feather, it grows back. Why, these things are regular money trees!”
Maricopa County, Arizona—June 9, 1916
The ostrich ranch didn’t work out the way Billy thought it would. Ostriches proved to be very difficult to raise. It took three years for the birds to mature to the point where the feathers could be plucked, but they lost more than half their birds in the interim. The birds would step into a hole and break a leg, in which case they had to be put down, or they would get hung up in a barbed wire fence, cut their throats, and bleed to death. They were also very aggressive birds, and during mating season, sometimes the male birds would kill each other.
Then, the first year that they had enough birds, and enough feathers to go to market, the fashion changed.
“What do you mean, the fashion changed?” an exasperated Jesse asked the broker in Phoenix.
“The fashion moguls in New York say that feathers are too ostentatious for the new style.” He pointed to the sacks of feathers Jesse and Billy had brought in. “You may as well make a feather mattress out of these feathers. Right now, that’s all they’re good for.”
One month later they sold their remaining birds to a zoo for display. The creatures, which once cost four thousand dollars for a pair, sold for twenty-five dollars apiece. They had ten of them. The land sold only for enough to pay off the note the bank held.
They bought a Ford Model T and left Arizona with one hundred dollars cash between them.
“What are we going to do now?” Billy asked.
“We’re going to do what I do best,” Jesse said. “We’re going to rob a bank.”
“Pa, it’s been a long time since we’ve done anything like that. Do you think you still have what it takes?”
Jesse’s only answer to Billy’s question was to glare at him.
Ft. Worth, Texas—July 3, 1916
“Pa, I know you are used to going into banks with guns drawn, ready to blaze away if you need to,” Billy said. “But I’ve come up with another idea. That is, if you’re willing to listen to it.”
“I’m always willing to listen,” Jesse replied.
“Tomorrow is the Fourth of July. There’s going to be all kinds of noise, fireworks, probably a few people shootin’ off their guns. Especially tomorrow night.”
“There probably will be.”
Billy smiled. “I’ve got some nitroglycerin. We’ll be makin’ our own noise tomorrow night.”
“You’re planning on blowing a bank vault, are you?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
Jesse shook his head. “These new vaults can’t be blown open. Not unless you use enough explosive to take down the whole building.
“The Cattlemen and Merchant’s bank vault is the old-fashioned kind, with a square door,” Billy said. “It can be blown.”
“You know this for a fact, do you?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve already checked it out.”
“All right, Billy, I’ll go along with it. What’s your plan?”
“Most of the fireworks will be goin’ off between ten o’clock and eleven tomorrow night. That’s when we’ll break into the bank.”
Just as Billy had predicted, the town was alive with fireworks the following night. Rockets burst high in the air, sending out showers of brilliantly colored sparks, firecrackers popped on the ground, and repeating bombs boomed loudly overhead.
Jesse and Billy parked the car on the street about a block away from the bank, and because there were dozens of other cars already there, one more car didn’t arouse any curiosity. Leaving the car, they walked, unobserved, into the alley until they came up behind the bank.
“Wait,” Billy said, and, climbing up the telephone pole, he cut enough wires to render every telephone within a three-block area mute.
“Now,” he said, after he climbed back down.
It wasn’t hard to get through the back door; Billy was able to slip the lock with his knife. The security that the bank counted on was the vault itself. Once inside, Billy used the flashlight beam to locate the safe. “See, I told you. It’s the old kind.”
From very close by some aerial bombs burst, the noise so loud as to cause the two men to jump. Billy laughed.
“I told you this would be a noisy night.”
Billy forced nitroglycerin into the cracks in the square door. Then taping on a dynamite cap, he ran the detonating wire back from the safe to the marble base of the teller’s cage.
“We should be all right behind here,” Billy said as he and Jesse squatted down behind the base. He touched the two wires together. The explosion was so loud that it made their ears ring, and pieces of the safe door were scattered around the room, joined by pieces of plaster from the nearby walls.
“There it is!” Billy said as his flashlight beam caught beams fluttering down through the cloud of smoke that had been generated by the explosion. The explosion was messy and loud, but it had done the job. The money was now there to pick up.
Jesse and Billy had decided that they would pick up as much money as they could in thirty seconds. Thirty seconds, they believed, would leave them enough time to escape from the bank before anyone came to investigate the explosion.
Their plan worked. They were out of the bank and in the car, driving away, before they saw the flashing red lights of an approaching police car.
Once they were safely out of Ft. Worth, they counted their take. As it turned out, several of the bound stacks were of one-dollar bills. They wound up with only four thousand seven hundred dollars.
“Damn, where were the stacks of twenties, fifties, and one hundreds?” Billy complained. “You know the bank had to have that kind of money.”
“We were grabbing stacks in the dark, and we limited ourselves to thirty seconds,” Jesse said. “If you ask me, we had a pretty good haul, considering. Besides, how much money did we have left when we went into that bank?”
“Forty-two dollars and seventeen cents,” Billy said.
“Four thousand seven hundred is better,” Jesse said.
Billy laughed. “Yeah, it is.”
The car began wheezing and coughing.
“Oh, now, this is just what we need,” Billy said. “The car is about to go out on us.”
“Maybe it’s time we got a new car,” Jesse suggested.
“Yeah,” Billy said, smiling broadly. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. And I know we have enough money for it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
They stayed in the finest hotel in Denton for the next two days, not leaving the hotel room except to come downstairs for their meals. On the evening of the second day, Jesse saw the article in the paper he had been looking for.
“Listen to this,” Jesse said, reading from the paper. “‘The Cattlemen and Merchants’ Bank of Fort Worth was robbed of nearly five thousand dollars on the night of July Fourth. The bank robber, or robbers, took advantage of the exploding fireworks to blast open the safe. The identity of the perpetrators is unknown, but according to Mr. Travelstead, the bank president, the effect could have been much worse, as more than fifty thousand dollars were left behind.’”
“Damn!” Billy said. “I knew there had to be more money than what we got.”
Jesse chuckled. “You’re only looking at the negative,” he said. “The good thing is that they have no idea who did it. Or even if it was more than one person.”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “Yeah, you’re right. There is that.”
Jesse divided the paper into two sections, keeping one section for himself and giving the other to Billy. The room had twin beds, and the two lay on the beds, reading the paper, occasionally pointing out an article of interest to the other.
“Pa,” Billy said. “Were you serious about getting a new car?”
“I think we need a new one, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do think. And this is the one we need.” With a broad smile, Billy passed the newspaper back over to Jesse, pointing out a half-p
age advertisement.
The ad was for a Packard Twin Six, and it had a line drawing of the car, driving along a high coast road.
In plain speech, that car is best which
will start quickest, control easiest, rides
smoothest, and run longest. To obtain this
result, the Packard Motor Car Company
created the 12 cylinder engine, and provided
in the Packard twin six greater safety,
smoother action, and longer wear—with
the elegance of a really fine carriage. By
its performance, Packard has made the 12
cylinder car the world’s standard of value.
$2750.00
Ask The Man Who Owns One
“Are you serious, Billy? Do you see how much that car costs? It costs more than half of all the money we have.”
“We can get more the same way we got this money,” Billy replied.
Jesse chuckled. “I guess you’re right at that,” he agreed. He looked at the ad again. “And what else are we going to spend it on?” he asked. “We can only eat and drink so much.”
There was, sitting on the floor in the show room of the Denton Packard Car dealer, a Twin Six, exactly like the one they had seen in the newspaper ad. The car was a deep green, and it glistened in the overhead electric lights. Billy opened the door on the driver’s side, then closed it, rewarded with a solid sounding thud.
“Please, be careful,” a man said, approaching them. He was wearing a brown-tweed three-piece suit and glasses. His hair was combed over to cover the bald spot on his head. “That is a most expensive piece of machinery. Should you do something to diminish its value, I’m sure Mr. Proxmire would hold you liable.”
“We’re in the market for a new car,” Billy said. “I’m afraid that one has just about given up the ghost.” He pointed to the Ford Model T that was parked just in front of the display window.
Shot in the Back Page 21