Russell made a dismissive gesture, but he lowered his voice. “Look, a whore’ll do anybody and say anything, no questions asked except where’s my money. But a free woman saying she prefers a stump to a whole one? She’s either bullshitting or mighty damn drunk. No offense.”
None taken, Buck said. But we’d be surprised at the way a lot of women reacted to his mutilation—which he’d mention to them before they even got anywhere near a bed. He’d tell them he got it in the war.
“It’s like it’s some kind of challenge or something,” he said. “They have to see it. And once they do, they have to see what it feels like.”
“Challenge, my ass,” Russell said. “Pity freaks, more like it.”
“Could be,” Buck said. “All I know is I’m getting it more and getting it a lot easier than I used to with a whole one.”
Maybe so, Russell said, but if the devil himself came along and promised him all the poontang in the world in exchange for most of his dick, he’d keep what he had, thank you.
“I don’t blame you a bit,” Buck said. “Those three inches mean a lot to you, I know.”
“You dickless shitbird,” Russell said.
“You brainless asshole,” Buck said.
“I surely do enjoy being privy to these eloquent fraternal conversations,” I said.
They turned on me. “You smartmouth jackleg,” Russell said.
“You egghead pogue,” Buck said.
“Gentlemen,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper and leaning over the table, “have you never before heard that profanity is the linguistic crutch of inarticulate fuckheads?”
Buck grabbed me by the throat and affected to choke me, and Russell hissed, “Snuff that smartass.”
“Yes sir,” I said in a mock-strangled voice, “eloquent’s the word for these little family chats.”
Then we were all laughing and trading punches on the arm and drawing stares from all over the dining room. The manager came over to ask frostily if everything was all right.
“Couldn’t be better,” I told him. “Thank you for asking.”
One chill February afternoon in my junior year I came home from school to find my mother on the kitchen floor. A few hours after going into the hospital she had a second stroke and it finished her. My wire got to Daddy while his tanker was loading oil in Texas City. He wired back he’d catch the next train. When I got home the apartment felt way too large. My throat tightened when I leafed through a few of her favorite books, and when I read her margin notes in her copy of Yeats—“So true!’’ “Yes, exactly!’’ “I love this!”—the tears came. Then I went through her closet and caught the smell on her clothes and wept even harder.
I met Daddy at the station the next day and his eyes too were redly glazed. For more than a week after the funeral he sat around and didn’t say much. His aspect was of someone sitting in an empty room. Then suddenly he was all in a rush to be back on a ship, as if the only solace possible to him was out on the open sea. On a cold morning of heavy yellow fog I went with him to the docks and he got a pierhead jump on a rustbucket called the Yorrike. It was bound for ports of call all over the Orient and not due to return for nine months. I was old enough to take care of myself and there was enough money in the family account to cover my expenses for several months. He would send more each time he got paid. He’d already asked Buck and Russell to watch out for me. He shook my hand at the foot of the gangplank and told me to study hard. Then went aboard and stood at the rail as the tugs nudged the ship out to the channel and it faded in the downriver mist.
He sent money about every six weeks, each time with a short letter mostly taken up with thumbnail descriptions of the places he’d most recently been—Colombo, Rangoon, Singapore, Manila. He tried hard to sound in good spirits but I could sense his persisting grief. He always closed with an admonishment to keep up my grades and a reminder that my mother would’ve been disappointed if I didn’t.
I shared his letters with Buck and Russell, who read them with glum faces. They never said anything about them except one time when Russell said, “I guess it’s rough when you really love them,” and Buck nodded and looked out the window.
They kept an eye on me as they’d promised Daddy they would. Except when they were out of town on business, as they always called it, I’d drop in on them about twice a week and we’d usually take supper together. They came to visit me just as often. Sometimes I’d have a girl with me when they stopped by and they’d apologize for the intrusion and take a hasty leave. The next time they’d see me they’d say I’d better not be spending so much time chasing after nooky that I was ignoring my schoolwork. I’d assure them I wasn’t and proved it with my monthly grade reports, which they had to sign with Daddy’s name for return to the headmaster. I was also on the boxing team again and they never missed a match, not even when it was held at some school in another parish. At the end of my junior year I won the state middleweight title, and afterward they took me out to celebrate.
By that time they’d quit the burglary business for good. They’d never much cared for jobs that required a lot of tools or for sharing the take with fences. They still pulled gambling tricks, but their main livelihood was now armed robbery. Their longtime middleman, Bubber Vicente, was steering them to most of their jobs. They had hit their first bank only a few months before—a small one, way up in Monroe—and I’d never seen them so pleased with themselves as when they told me about it. They said two men were enough for a holdup team but a three-man team was best, so they’d taken on Jimmyboy Dolan to do the driving.
I liked hearing about the holdups they pulled. About the way they’d prepare for them and how the people’s mouths came open when they saw the guns and heard them announce the stickup. Their faces got so alive when they talked about it. Their eyes looked electric. No question about it, they were naturalborn bandits.
Me too—I just knew it. I’d felt that way since I was a kid, and I’d known it for sure the night they came back from Texas. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did, and I would be damned if I’d deny it just because I couldn’t explain it. They anyway explained it well enough one night when they were in their cups and talking about the criminal life.
“Everybody knows won money’s sweeter than earned money,” Buck said, “but stole money—especially robbed money—is the sweetest there is. All you need to win money is luck. Skill helps but ain’t necessary. But to pull a righteous stickup you need luck and skill both—and you need balls.”
It’s why cheating at a table was more exciting than playing it straight. Cheating wasn’t gambling, it was robbing, and it raised the stakes as high as they can go.
“Get caught cheating the wrong guys,” Buck said, “and it’s like to mean blood on the floor.”
Russell agreed. “Every time you do a holdup you’re risking your ass,” he said. “You never know when a guy will resist, when he’ll be somebody with a gun of his own and the sand to use it. You never know when you’ll have to get down to it with the cops.”
That’s why more people didn’t rob and steal, Buck said. “It ain’t because they’re so moral like they say. Morality’s just a excuse to hide behind. World’s full of thieves at heart who don’t steal nothing because they’re too scared to. They’re scared of the law. Scared of being punished.”
“They’re chickenshits and they know it,” Russell said. “Thump on their Bibles to try and cover it up.”
No ethics lecture I’d ever heard in school was as plain on the matter as that.
My mother had often remarked that it would be a waste of my intelligence if I didn’t go to college, and Daddy agreed, and I had allowed them to think I would. I didn’t see the need to disappoint them any sooner than necessary. I figured I’d break the news to them when the time came. But before the time came my mother died, and then ten months later—midway through my senior year, a week before Christmas and two weeks prior to my eighteenth birthday—there came a telegram to inform me that on its way ba
ck to New Orleans the Yorrike had been caught in a bad storm and foundered somewhere north of the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks in the South Atlantic. A rescue ship picked up a lifeboat with the only four survivors and none of them was my father.
The first whiskey drunk of my life lasted for all of a cold and sunless week. I sat in the apartment with a bottle at hand and Christmas carols intoning on the streets. Sometimes, asleep in the chair, I dreamt of my father on the shadowy ocean floor amid his cadavered shipmates, his skin gray as moss, his hair swaying in the current, small fish feeding in his eyeholes and passing between the bared teeth of his gaping jaws. I’d waken as wet and cold with sweat as if I’d been hauled up from those very depths.
Buck or Russell came by every day to ensure my store of whiskey. They didn’t want me out drunk on the streets, looking for more. They didn’t say much or stay long, grieving for their brother in their own way.
Some French writer once said that when a man’s father dies his only true judge is gone. Maybe so. After a week of blurred days and bad nights I cleaned myself up one morning and packed my two bags and by noon I had moved into a much smaller and cheaper apartment on Esplanade. Then I went downstairs and telephoned my uncles and arranged to meet them for an early supper at Lafitte’s.
The place was nearly empty at that hour and we sat at an isolated table way in the back. I made my pitch over mugs of beer and platters of oysters on the half shell. I gave them the whole speech without slowing down long enough to let them say no before I was finished. I could drive, I told them—I could shoot, I could fight, I wasn’t scared, I knew how they operated, and I knew the rules. I knew that if a thing went bad it was every man for himself but you never crossed a partner and if you went down you kept your mouth shut and took the fall and stayed ready for a chance to break. I had paid attention and I had learned all that.
I’d half expected them to laugh, to ask what in hell made me think a pair of pros would take on an eighteen-year-old who’d never done a crime in his life.
They didn’t even smile. “Well hell, I figured this was coming,” Buck said. “I had you pegged for a crook since you were knee high. I always known it’s in your blood, me.”
“Me too,” Russell said. “It’s a way about them, a look some kids got, and you always had it. Your momma wasn’t the sort to see it, but your daddy was. If he didn’t, it was only because he didn’t want to.”
“The thing is, Sonny,” Buck said, “we figured you for going to college, smart cookie like you. It’s anyway what your momma wanted.”
“That’s right,” Russell said. “We figured you’d end up doing your thieving with law books or account ledgers. Like that.”
I wasn’t sure if they were joking. They looked serious as preachers.
“World’s full of thieves,” Buck said, “but the ones to make the most money is the legal kind.”
“And the least likely to get shot or go to jail,” Russell said.
“Here you got all this good schooling and you want to be a stickup man,” Buck said. He turned to Russell and shrugged. “Could be he ain’t as bright as we thought.”
Russell turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head.
I kept looking from one of them to the other. “Law books?” I said. “Ledgers?”
“Hell, Sonny,” Russell said, “why go the riskier way and for less payoff? What’s the sense in that?”
“The sense?” I said. “You tell me, goddammit! Why aren’t you dealing in booze or running a gambling joint? You could be pulling in plenty of dough with a lot less risk than stickups. Why do you do it?”
Now they smiled. Buck turned to Russell and said, “See what I mean about he ought be a lawyer?”
Russell nodded. “Still, I guess the man’s got a right to make up his own mind. And we have been in need of a driver since Jimmyboy’s foot.”
I didn’t know anything about Jimmyboy’s foot, but right then I knew they were going to say yes—and my blood sped up.
Buck gave a long sigh. Then smiled. “Oh, what the hell. Who are we to say you can’t do like us?”
“May your momma’s soul rest in peace, and Lonnie’s too,” Russell said, “but since there’s neither of them here to object…”
“And bloodkin’s always better for a partner than just some pal,” Buck said.
I was grinning with them now.
But there was a catch: I’d have to finish school first. “It’s the one thing your daddy trusted us to see to,” Buck said. “We mean to keep our word to him.”
“Besides,” Russell said, “we don’t accept no uneducated dumb-shits for partners no more.”
They wouldn’t listen to a word of argument about it. “You want to leave school and get in the crook life,” Buck said, “you go ahead and do it, but it won’t be with us.”
“But if I finish at Gulliver you’ll take me on?”
“If you finish with the same good grades as always,” Russell said. “No bumming through the little bit you got left.”
“And if you still want to,” Buck said. “Hell kid, you never know. You might decide you’d rather run for Congress and be the biggest kind of thief there is.”
W e labored through the winter in blue clouds of our own breath, in daylong clatters of axes and growlings of saws. The calendar finally showed spring but the nights remained chilly into late April. Then a hard rain started coming down—and kept on coming. The river rose and ran fast under daily skies as dark and dirtylooking as old lead. There were reports of overruns along the bottoms, nothing nearly so bad as the monster flood of two years earlier, but portions of the upriver banks had given way and driftwood of all size and sorts was carrying downstream and jamming up in the meanders. Camp M got orders to clear out the prison’s northern levee before the accumulating debris extended into the navigation channel.
Every morning before sunrise we hiked out to the levee in the chill morning drizzle, one long heavy flatwagon rumbling ahead of us, the other one trailing behind, each drawn by a brace of mules and jarring over the corduroy road that led through this corner of the misty swamp and out to the river. The guards rode the wagons and watched us front and back. The first time we crested the levee at dawn and looked across the rivermist to the faraway opposite bank with its dark growth of reeds and brush and trees, somebody said, “There it is yonder, boys—the free world.” I couldn’t get enough of looking at it as we followed the levee road another mile or so to the bend where the biggest clusters of driftwood had built up.
The rain finally ceased but the clouds didn’t break and the days continued without color, but at least the mosquitoes were still scant. We pulled flotsam from the river the day long—fence posts and portions of sheds, logs and saplings and entire trees uprooted from upstream. We trimmed the trees on the bank before lugging them up the levee. Every day we’d load the best cuts on the wagons to take back to camp for next winter’s firewood. The rest we flung in piles on the other side of the road.
The smaller trees were easy enough to trim and drag up the levee, but we had to section the bigger ones with axes before we could get them up the slope, and even then it sometimes took several of us muscling together to haul up some of the biggest sections. Some portions were still so heavy we had to use the mules to pull them up. To make things even tougher, the slope was slick from all the recent rain, and sometimes a man slipped and went sliding back down to the bank, his load of wood tumbling with him. In the first week two men broke an arm and another an ankle. One guy went all the way off the bank and into the river and got his shirt snagged on a submerged root. We could see his terrified face a half-foot below the surface as we struggled to free him but he drowned before we got him loose.
We’d been at it a week when the rain started falling again. It didn’t come down hard enough to raise the river any higher but it fell steadily and cold for most of every day. Debris kept coming downstream and the footing on the slope got even trickier. We ate our noon meals in the rain, lining up a
t the mess truck for tin plates of beans and rice and then crowding under the big oaks on a stretch of high ground where it wasn’t so muddy. But the rain ran through the trees and down into our plates and made cold weak soup of our meal.
One late afternoon a pair of gun bosses named Harlins and Ogg pointed out six of us and said to come with them. We climbed aboard a flatwagon and the teamster trusty hupped the mules into motion. Red Garrison was in our party and asked where we were going but the guards ignored him. Garrison made a mocking face they couldn’t see, and a pair of his hardcase buddies named Yates and Witliff grinned at it. The other two cons—old Dupree and a young guy named Chano, a Mexican mute who understood English—paid him no more mind than I did.
We’d gone about half a mile when we began to hear a terrible shrieking up ahead. There was no pause to it, and as we drew closer, Witliff said, “Them’s mules.” I’d been told Witliff was at Angola for burning down his ex-wife’s house while she and her new husband were in it. They’d both survived but the story was they would’ve been better off if they hadn’t.
The teamster, Wakefield, said mules was what it was. He said he and Musial, the other driver, were on their way back from delivering a load of wood to camp and were turning onto the levee road when Musial took his wagon a little too wide and the shoulder gave way. The wagon went over on its side and slid down the levee, dragging the mules with it, then slammed into the muddy bottom of the slope and overturned completely. The mules were tangled up in the harness and screaming with the pain of God knew how many broken legs. Wakefield had gone down and found that Musial was still breathing, but he was unconscious and his legs were pinned under the wagon. There’d been nothing he could do but come get help.
“I don’t know if six’ll be enough to shove that heavy sonofabitch thing off him,” Wakefield said.
When we got to where the wagon had gone off the road, the screaming of the mules was the worst sound I’d ever heard. They were trying to get up, but even if they hadn’t been twisted up in the traces, they never could’ve stood on those legs that were showing broken bone through bloody hide. Musial was on his back with his eyes closed, his legs under the capsized wagon.
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