A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  Nobody was happier about this geographical marvel than Charlie. “I hadn’t wanted to say anything and be a spoilsport,” she said, “but the farther we’ve come into this damn desert the more I’ve been wondering how I can live in such a godforsaken place. This little patch of trees and water is exactly what I need to keep from losing my mind.”

  It was a roasting afternoon and the swimming hole too tempting to resist. Buck and Russell and I stripped down to our trousers and dove in. That was all the encouragement the girls needed to kick off their shoes and take the plunge in their dresses. The water was chilly and dark green and smelled wonderfully fresh. We splashed and dunked each other and took turns on the rope somebody had tied to a high tree branch overhanging the pool. You’d swing way out over the deep part and let go of the rope and stay suspended in the air for one marvelous instant before dropping into the water.

  An old couple sat at a table and seemed to enjoy our frolic. Every time Charlie or Belle swung out on the rope and dropped off, their skirts flapped up around their hips, affording us a good look at their legs all the way up to their underwear—and every time, the old man would yell “Ya-hooo!” along with me and Buck and Russell. When the girls came out of the water to take another swing, we’d grin and grin at the way their thin sopping dresses clung to them.

  “You bunch of oversexed galoots,” Charlie said.

  “And they always will be, honey,” the old woman said, giving the old guy a reproving look. He shrugged with his palms turned up in the universal gesture of “Who, me?”

  Russell dunked Charlie every chance he got, heedless of her repeated cries of “Quit it, Russell!” Then she got even. He was standing in belly-deep water and admiring Belle’s legs as she swung out on the rope when he suddenly went under like the pool bottom had given way. Charlie burst up from the water, laughing and crowing that she’d pulled his feet from under him. He came up thrashing and coughing and she grabbed him from behind by the head and pulled him under again and scooted out of his reach. He flailed wildly at the surface as he struggled to get his footing but kept slipping and couldn’t get up for a breath. I was about to jump over there and haul him up when his head broke water and he finally managed to stand, choking and wild-eyed. Charlie shook a finger at him from the other side of the pool and said, “When I say no more I mean no more, dammit!”

  The old woman at the table applauded and called out, “That’s telling him, girl!”

  “You crazy cooze,” Russell managed to say through a coughing fit. “You about drowned me.”

  “Take it for a warning, Buster,” she said. But she was careful to keep her distance from him until he cooled off.

  “Rough as they play, it’s a wonder they ain’t all got black eyes,” the old man said to nobody in particular, but staring at Belle’s bruises.

  After a while we climbed up on the bank and stretched out in the grass and let the sun beat down on us. The old couple called goodbye and we waved so long. When we were about half dry we put our shoes on and went back to the house.

  We ate supper at the long table on the sideporch—fried beefsteaks and baked potatoes and buttered rolls, big glasses of iced tea with lemon so tart you could taste it in your nose and sugar so coarse you felt the grains against your teeth. Then Buck and I opened a couple of the quarts of beer and poured a glass for everybody and the cigarettes got passed around and we all sat there sipping and smoking and watching the sun set in a welter of reds and golds and purples.

  Belle took a sip of her beer and made a face, then went to the Frigidaire and came back with a bottle of Coke. She was sitting beside me, and as the darkness began to rise around us I felt her leg press against mine. I put my hand on her thigh and looked at her but couldn’t make out her expression in the closing gloom. “Go for a walk?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. I took one of the packs of smokes and said we’d be back in a while.

  The moon was risen low, hugely full and saffron yellow, and a cool breeze had kicked up. She took my hand and we strolled up the road to the park. The trees rustled in the easy wind and cast long undulant shadows.

  The pool held the moon’s glimmering image. We sat on a shadowed bench and smoked without talking. After a while I put my arm around her and she put her head on my shoulder, and a while after that she turned her face up to me and I kissed her. She moved up and sat on my lap and I stroked her flank and bottom while we kissed some more. I slipped my hands inside her shirt and felt her breast and fingered its tightened nipple. She put her hand over mine and pressed it harder to her. We were using our tongues now and breathing heavily.

  “Let’s go to the room,” she said.

  On the way back we stopped every few yards and kissed and ran our hands over each other and then started walking again, moving a little faster against the encroaching chill and in our eagerness to get to our bed, laughing and groping at each other as we went. When we came in view of the house we saw the parlor and kitchen windows brightly yellow.

  “Looks nice, doesn’t it?” she said. “Like some safe little place way out here in a big nowhere.”

  We went in by the front door and headed for our room at the end of the lighted hallway. As we passed the kitchen door, Buck looked at us from the table, where he was cleaning his pistols. Belle waved at him but he only stared blankly and then gave his attention back to the guns. The porch door was open behind him and we heard Russell and Charlie laughing out there.

  “What’s with him?” she whispered. I shrugged, not really paying much mind to anything at the moment except her. I steered her into the room with a hand on her ass and she laughed and was already unbuttoning her shirt as I closed the door behind us.

  For somebody who claimed to have no experience at it except with a thieving boyfriend in Corsicana and with the sonofabitch who did her when she was drugged, she was pretty adept—and as avid as any woman I’d been with, including Brenda Marie. I’d pulled the bed away from the wall to avoid thumping, but I guess we were pretty loud anyway with our gasping and moaning and rocking so hard the bed’s feet scraped the floor.

  When we paused to catch our breath she whispered, “You think they can hear us in the next room?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Don’t care.”

  “Me neither,” she said, and pulled me to her.

  No telling how long we were at it before finally going to sleep with me spooned against her from behind, but it didn’t seem very long before I woke to a window full of sunlight and the smells of coffee and bacon seeping into the room. The faint strains of a string band came from the radio Charlie had bought for the kitchen.

  “Hungry?” Belle murmured, nuzzling my neck. Her hand moved up my thigh and found me rigid. “Merciful heavens, boy, don’t you ever get enough?”

  “As if you do,” I said, caressing the smooth swells of her buttocks.

  She giggled and kissed my ear and slid a leg over me and mounted up.

  After a time we got out of bed and put on our clothes and went into the kitchen. Russell and Charlie were sharing the newspaper. Buck had a road map spread in front of him. Charlie looked up and smiled brightly.

  “Well now,” Russell said, “here the slugabeds are—and walking a little bowlegged it appears to me.” He smiled lewdly and tapped his open palm several times with the top of his fist. I gave him the finger.

  Belle was blushing. “Morning, you all,” she said and got a pair of mugs from the cabinet and filled them from the coffeepot on the stove. She added cream and sugar to one and handed it to me. Charlie got up and gave her a brief hug around the shoulders and told us to sit down, she’d fix us some bacon and eggs.

  Buck’s expression was of put-upon patience. He lit a cigarette and sighed a long stream of smoke. “Like I already told these two,” he said to me, “it’s enough of fun and games. We’re set up now and it’s time to get to work.”

  We spent the next two days getting ready, checking maps, tending to the car. We changed the oil, lubricated t
he joints, replaced the radiator rather than taking a chance on the soldered spot coming open again. On the day we were leaving, Buck said to come in his room for a minute, he had something for me. He dug in his travel bag and took out a Smith & Wesson .38 with a six-inch barrel.

  “I got another of these plus the .45,” he said, releasing the cylinder to check the loads, then snapping it back in place. “You can have this one. Bulldog’s okay for indoors, but if we get into an outside scrap you’ll need something more accurate.”

  He said it as casually as a fisherman might explain the advantage of one type of reel over another, but the remark reminded me of the mean possibilities in this business and I felt my skin tighten. He handed me the piece and smiled. “Still feel like last summer?”

  “Better,” I said. “Probably because I spent nine months thinking I might not ever get to feel it again.”

  “Sure you wouldn’t rather get your ass in college and learn how to steal all nice and legal? Lot more profitable.”

  “Could be it is,” I said, “but I’ll bet anything it ain’t near as much fun.”

  “That’s my guess too,” he said, grinning back at me.

  We packed a change of clothes and put our small bags in the car, then sat down with the girls to a lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and iced tea. Charlie and Belle put on a show of good spirits, joking about what a relief it would be to have the house to themselves for a while, to be free of our rude male smells and loudness. We didn’t know how long we’d be gone, a few days, maybe longer, depending on what Bubber Vicente might have for us. Now and then—for an instant before she’d snatch up the smile again—I’d catch Belle looking at me the way my mother used to look at my father on the nights before he’d ship out. Like she was trying to memorize his face.

  Out at the car the girls gave us each a hug and kiss and we smacked them on the bottom for luck and told them to hold the fort.

  The road to Odessa cut through the heart of West Texas oil country—the landscape mostly flat and wholly bleak, the sky hazy with dust and oil fumes, the air acrid with the smells of gas. We drove through more and more oil fields, great black forests of derricks and bobbing pumpjacks. Sometimes we had to shout to hear each other above the pounding drills. The road thickened with the traffic in and out of the fields and from neighboring towns, most of it moving in a big dusty hurry. And then we’d be out in the open country again and the traffic would thin out once more and the main sounds were of the motor’s puttering and the wind flapping through the windows.

  We passed through Grandfalls, loud and overcrowded and the dirtiest town any of us had ever seen—until we got to Crane, about thirty miles from Odessa. The streets of Crane were so clogged with cars and transport trucks and mule-drawn wagons we could have crossed the town faster on foot. The clamor made you wince—klaxons blatting, motors racing, transport trucks unloading pipe and heavy equipment with great iron crashings, men communicating in shouts and hollers, music blaring from radios at full volume. Swarms of dreamers chasing after their share of oil money in another town too small to shelter them all. We’d seen a few tent camps on the outskirts of Grandfalls—ragtowns, the boomers called them—but Crane looked like a vast republic of ragtowns and shantyvilles raised from every kind of scrap. Men with pockets crammed with money were living in their trucks, their cars, whole families were residing in packing crates, men bedding in sections of pipe. Privies everywhere, their effluvia thickening the general stench.

  “I don’t know what’s worse,” I yelled, “the noise or the stink!”

  “I know it!” Buck hollered. Then took a deep breath and added, “But you catch that one sweet smell mixed in there with all them stinks?”

  “What sweet smell?” I said, making a show of fanning my nose with my hand.

  “You don’t detect that aroma?” Russell said. He inhaled more deeply of the foul air. “Money, son. Money.”

  The main street was chockablock with stores selling everything from tools to tents to workclothes, with groceries and drugstores and cafés, hotels and boardinghouses and fleabag flops, moviehouses, barbershops, bathhouses, pool halls and dime-a-dance joints. Every place had a sign proclaiming it was open twenty-four hours a day. A line of people stood at a truck that was selling water at a dollar a gallon.

  “Whoo!” Buck said. “Ain’t this something? I bet you there’s a dozen high-stakes games going on this minute all over this town.”

  “They say this Crane is nice as a church compared to some of the other boomtowns out here,” Russell said. “But godawmighty, looks like mostly clip joints to me.”

  “Remember that dime-a-dance place we went to in East Texas a coupla months back?” Buck said. “Talk about clip joints.”

  “Was it ever,” Russell said. “Some dances didn’t last even a minute before the band switched to a different number and you had to give the girl another ticket or get off the floor. You could go through a dollar’s worth of dance tickets in less than ten minutes.”

  “Bunch of damn thieves,” Buck said.

  “They had a preacher on about every corner,” Russell said, “hustling for handouts and threatening you with hellfire if you didn’t pony up—like that one there!”

  He pointed to a man in black standing on a wooden crate and shaking a Bible above his head as he harangued passersby, few of whom even glanced at him. There was a large bucket at his feet, and painted on it was “$ for Jesus.”

  “Dollars for himself, more like it,” Buck said. “I wouldn’t reckon Jesus needs anybody to hustle money for him.”

  Cars were parked two deep along the street. We saw an unattended car being pushed out of the way so the car it was blocking against the curb could get out—and then the pushed car was abandoned in the street, one more obstacle for the tangle of traffic to negotiate.

  Crane was only a few blocks long but it took us almost an hour to get through it. Finally we were clear of the town and out past the traffic of its northern oil fields and breezing through the open country toward Odessa.

  “Well, like the monkey said when he got his tail caught in the lawn mower,” Buck said, “it won’t be long now.”

  Bubber had left word with the desk man of the Bigsby that he’d be at Earl’s Café on 1st Street if anybody came looking for him, so that’s where we went. The café was large and jammed with oil workers, every booth and table full, every counter stool occupied. Raucous with loud conversation and laughter, the clash of dishware, music from a radio turned up high. Bubber wasn’t in sight, so Buck asked one of the harried waitresses if she knew him and where he might be. The waitress narrowed her eyes and wanted to know who was asking. Buck told her and she said to hold on a minute, then disappeared through a hallway door flanking the entrance to the kitchen. She came back shortly and said to go all the way down the hall and tell the fella sitting by a door there who we were.

  We did—and the man let us into a speakeasy with tables and chairs, a bar running the length of the back wall. Even at this early-afternoon hour the place was loud and nearly packed. The dance floor full of couples swaying to “The Birth of the Blues” coming out of a radio behind the bar.

  “Well, godawmighty damn, lookee who’s here!” A dark-bearded man heaved his large bulk off a bar stool and came toward us with a wide smile and arms outstretched. He gave Buck and Russell in turn a big hug and they all cursed each other amiably and smacked each other’s backs.

  Buck introduced me and Bubber Vicente said, “Your nephew? Be goddam! What say, young fella?” He nearly crushed my hand as he shook it in his big paw. His right cheek bore an old oval scar that had pretty obviously been made by somebody’s teeth.

  The man he’d been sitting with was his partner, Earl Cue, a good name for him, so skinny he looked like a pool stick with a pompadour. He had the most badly pitted face I’d ever seen. “It’s like his face caught fire and somebody put it out with an ice pick” is how Russell later described it. But he was friendly enough and set us up with drinks at a cor
ner table against the back wall.

  They caught each other up a little on their doings since they’d last been together in New Orleans. We were eager to hear about the jobs Bubber had for us, but he’d got onto the subject of Mona Holiday, whom he’d met a few weeks ago and who at first sight had become the love of his life. She was beautiful, she was smart, she had a great sense of humor, she had tits round and sweet as cantaloupes. Plus, she had a sharp head for business and ran one of the most profitable whorehouses in West Texas.

  “Trouble is,” Bubber said, “her cathouse is in Blackpatch, about sixty-five miles southways. If it wasn’t for going to see her once or twice a week, I wouldn’t be caught dead in that place. Wait’ll you get a load of it—one of the jobs I got you boys is in Blackpatch. It’s way the hell in nowhere. But that’s why Mona’s house does so good, see? Them boys in Blackpatch don’t have much choice about where to get laid.”

  But she also did so well, he said, because the Wildcat Dance Club—a tidy two-story smack in the center of town—was one of the cleanest houses in Texas. She had her girls examined once a week by a doctor who kept an office in an upstairs room of the place. If a girl didn’t pass muster, out she went. “Not a dirtyleg in the house,” Bubber said, his voice proud. “Man who gets laid at Mona’s can rest assured he won’t pick up a nail.”

  Despite Mona’s prosperity in Blackpatch, he had been trying to talk her into moving her business to Odessa. It wasn’t only that he wanted her living closer to him, but that he believed Blackpatch was just too damn dangerous a place to live. It had been called Copper Hill way back when there was a mine there, though the hill it was named for wasn’t but forty feet high. The mine had pretty soon played out, however, and it wasn’t till about five years ago that a wildcatter tried his luck there and struck it rich. Then three years ago—before Mona got there and when the place still had fewer than a dozen buildings and but a single street—one of the gas wells blew up and the whole town caught on fire. When it was all over, fifty-one of the 135 souls who’d lived there were dead and dozens of the survivors had been badly burned. There hadn’t been anything left of the town of Copper Hill but a bare black patch of sand. But there was still a hell of a lot of oil under that hill, and not a month after the fire they struck a new gusher. A new town sprang up on the sludgy ashes of the old one and they called it Blackpatch.