They hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. We were all laughing and Daddy and Buck wrestled each other around the room as my mother hugged and hugged Russell and then they traded off and kept at it. For my mother’s sake, they told a bullshit story about the Lake Charles field going dry and them deciding to come home and see about maybe opening a business of some kind. She said that was wonderful. I think she knew they were lying but didn’t care, she was so glad to see they were all right. She made no mention of Jena that night or anytime after, and as far as I would ever know, she never did find out about Buck’s maiming or his time in a Texas prison.
To celebrate their homecoming we went out into the summer night and down to the corner café and its crowded backroom speakeasy. Russell telephoned Charlie to come join us. She and my mother and a pretty waitress named Jill took turns dancing with us. The beer kept coming to the table in large foaming pitchers and we cut a rug and laughed it up till almost midnight. Every now and then Buck or Russell would let me take a pull off their beer while my mother wasn’t looking. The laughter between them was different from the way they laughed with the rest of us. It was the laughter of men who’d faced danger together. Who would risk their ass for each other.
After my mother left for the library the next morning—the only time she’d ever been late and with the only complaint of hangover I’d ever hear from her—Buck and Russell came by and told us about the break.
Russell had recruited an old pal of theirs to help out, a car mechanic and smalltime thief named Jimmyboy Dolan. They’d driven to Texas and checked into a motor court on the main highway about two miles from the Sugarland prison camp. On Sunday, the visiting day, Russell went to the camp in his guise of cousin Luther Sammons. They sat at an outdoor table and Buck told him all about the guards and the work routine and how to get to the stretch of road where his gang would be clearing ditches the next day. It was a perfect spot, isolated and lightly traveled.
The following morning Russell and Jimmyboy smeared mud on the car’s license plates and drove out to the work site. Russell stopped the car next to the transport truck where two of the gun bulls stood in the shade and Jimmyboy asked them for directions to Rosenburg. Next thing the guards knew they had pistols in their faces. The boss bull hollered at the third guard, down near the end of the work line, to throw down his gun too, but the guy just stood there. “Like he was maybe thinking of trying to save the day,” Russell said.
Buck came up out of the ditch behind him and knocked the notion out of his head with a shovel.
“Should’ve seen it,” Buck said. “Old boy wobbled around in little circles with his eyes rolled up in his head like he was having a religious experience before he finally thought to fall down.”
Some of the cons went hightailing into the woods and some stood there like they wouldn’t know what to do until somebody told them. “Sorry bastards,” Buck said. “They’re exactly where they belong.”
While Jimmyboy held a pistol on the guards, Buck collected their guns and tossed them into the car. Russell opened a hood panel on the prison truck and yanked out the coil wire and put it in his pocket. They got back in the car and Russell wheeled it around and Buck said all he saw out the back window as they made their getaway was a yellow cloud of road dust.
He looked over at me and smiled—and I felt my grin get bigger.
The first time I did it was with Solise DuBois, in her family’s boathouse, only a few weeks before Buck’s escape from the Texas road gang. Over the following months I had the pleasure of lots of other schoolgirls as well and made my first visits to some of the Quarter’s best cathouses. With such experience under my belt, so to speak, I naturally thought I knew everything there was to know about sex. But it came as a revelation to me that Buck could still sport with the ladies despite lacking most of his pecker.
I received this enlightenment one evening when I was taking supper with him and Russell in a restaurant. They’d spent most of the afternoon in a speakeasy and were feeling pretty loose. As we watched the waitress sashay off to the kitchen with our order, Buck said he sure wouldn’t kick her out of bed. Then he caught my look and laughed.
“I can read your mind, kid,” he said. He aped a look of awe and tried to mimic my voice as he said, “Can he still cut the mustard, him?”
Some patrons at a neighboring table turned our way. Buck smiled and winked at them and they gave their attention back to their plates.
He leaned forward and in a lower voice informed me that there were all kinds of pleasures he could still take with women who didn’t scare easy at the sight of his stub. He still enjoyed what they could do for him with their mouth and hands, and he could still get off by just rubbing himself on a cooter. If he fit himself just right against it, he could get the woman off too. Between that and the things he could do for them with his own hands and mouth, there was plenty of fun to go around. He said he’d proved it with nearly a dozen women already, and only the first two of them whores.
“Hell, some of them’s told me the thing feels better than a whole one,” he said. “Say it gets them in the button better.”
Russell had known about the whores—the first time Buck tested himself after getting back from Texas was at Miss Quentin’s over on St. Ann’s, and Russell had gone with him—but the others were news to him and he asked how come Buck hadn’t said anything about them before.
“What?” Buck said. “I got to report to you every time I hump a broad? I got to keep a list for you? You practicing to be parole officer?”
“Hey man, I don’t give a damn who you hump or how you do it,” Russell said. “Just don’t tell me they like that stump better than they do a whole one.”
“I’m telling you what they tell me,” Buck said. “Not all of them, but some.”
We got more looks from the surrounding tables and I cleared my throat and cut my eyes sideways to let Buck and Russell know it.
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?”