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.”
We 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 at 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.