“You ain’t told me your name.”
“That’s none of your concern,” I said. “My business is with Miller.”
The man sighed and removed his spectacles and massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingers. I told myself to keep cool, there was nothing to be gained by getting blackassed. “All right,” I said. “The name’s Bill Loomis. Satisfied?”
He seemed to give the name some thought for a moment, then spat away the toothpick. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t help you.” He put his glasses back on and picked up the magazine.
“Hey man, you wanted my name, you got it.”
His expression was utterly blank. I cursed under my breath and started for the door, figuring to ask the mechanic about Miller, ask the grocer across the street. Then I thought, What the hell—you never know. I stopped and turned and said, “LaSalle, goddammit. I’m Sonny LaSalle.”
He put the magazine down again and looked like he might be thinking of smiling. “That so?” he said. He glanced out the window again. “Well now tell me, Mr. LaSalle: You ever hear of a fella named Ansel Mitchum?”
I felt like my horse had come in at thirty to one. “I guess I have.”
“Didn’t old Ansel have him a nickname? I disremember what it was.”
“I believe it might be Buck.”
He grinned back at me and put out his hand. “Miller Faulk,” he said as we shook. “Lived in Narlens most my life and known your uncles since way back when. Sorry for all the caution, Sonny, but it’s lots of fellas always looking for lots of other fellas, and a man can’t be too careful about who he helps find who, if you know what I mean.”
It was an hour’s ride to Galveston on an electric railcar over a causeway flanked by gleaming baywater as flat as a tabletop. A humid but pretty afternoon smelling heavily of the sea.
I got my bearings according to the rough pencil map Faulk had drawn for me and made my way along the island’s shady residential sidewalks until I came to Avenue H. On a corner two blocks over I found the house number I was looking for. A picket fence ran around the small yard and thick white oleander shrubs lined the porch. The whole place well shaded by a magnolia tree full of jabbering mockingbirds. A bright yellow Pierce-Arrow was parked in the driveway leading to the garage in back.
I stood at the gate, peering past the oleanders and into the dark shadows of the porch. Someone was sitting there, a woman, busy with something in her lap.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” I called out. “I’m looking for some kin of mine and I wonder if you can—”
The woman gave a small shriek and a pan clanked on the floor and a scattering of snap beans spilled off the porch. She came scooting down the steps and I saw it was Charlie.
I dropped the Gladstone as she yanked open the gate and flung herself on me. I spun her around and couldn’t help laughing as she cried and kissed me all over my face and said, “Sonny, Sonny, Sonny.”
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s hairy uncle. Hey brother, come see what the tide’s washed up.”
Russell stood grinning at the top of the porch steps in his undershirt and galluses, hands in his pockets.
Now Buck came out in turned-up shirtsleeves, a newspaper in his hand. “Jesus Christ on a drunken plowhorse. That young scoundrel with his hands on your woman—is that who I think it is?”
“Looks like he’s been sunbathing down in Miami, don’t it?” Russell said. Beaming would not be too strong a word for the way they were looking at me. I could feel myself beaming right back.
“Can you all believe it?” Charlie said. She laughed and clutched me tighter.
“I always hoped you’d find a way out, kid,” Buck said, “but I never really…” He made a vague gesture.
“I figured if I wanted to see you no-counts again I’d best take measures,” I said.
“Listen to him,” Buck said. “Take measures. Smartypants is full of himself, ain’t he? Same like always.”
“Probably wants us to call him Houdini or some such,” Russell said. “Escape artist like him.”
“You all quit picking on him,” Charlie said. She grabbed up the Gladstone and tugged me by the arm, pulling me through the gate and saying to come on, we had a lot of celebrating to do.
And Buck and Russell charged down the porch to hug me hard.
I’d been pleasantly surprised to find Charlie with them but I wasn’t sure how freely we could talk in her presence. They must’ve read the uncertainty on my face. “Everything’s jake, kid,” Russell said. “She’s in.”
She was sitting next to him on the sofa and patted his knee. “He gave me ten seconds to decide if I wanted to come along,” she said. “I took about seven to make up my mind.”
“Had to play hard to get,” Russell said.
“Now here I am, a moll,” she said, affecting to talk tough out of the side of her mouth. Then smiled wryly and said, “My poor momma must be going round and round in her grave.”
The bulldog was digging into my hip, so I took it out and set it on the small table beside my chair. Buck and Russell smiled at the sight of it. Charlie didn’t.
I was as eager to hear what they’d been up to as they were to ask me questions, and we went through several quarts of homebrew as we caught each other up on things. Sharp Eddie had given them the details about the trouble that put me in Angola. They called me twenty kinds of fool for getting in a tank fight in the first place—especially in defense of some faggot—and in the second for hitting a jailhouse cop, no matter the cop hit me on the head. You couldn’t win a fight against a jailhouse cop; you only ended up with more time behind bars. And if you killed him, well, kiss your ass goodbye.
“The only thing surprises me,” Russell said, “is they didn’t hang you. I mean, John Bones’ kid. Even if it was an accident, the only worse trouble you could’ve made for yourself was if you strangled Huey Long’s momma.”
“That old sumbitch’ll turn Loosiana inside out looking for you,” Buck said.
I said I’d heard so much about what a hardcase John Bonham was that finally I didn’t believe it. “Maybe he was a rough cob in his younger days, but anymore he’s nothing but a gray old man with only one hand, for Christ’s sake.”
“Old and gray as he is,” Buck said, “I wouldn’t take him too light, me.”
“You ever have dealings with him?”
“No, but we know some who have, and we could tell you stories,” Russell said.
“I’ve heard plenty of stories,” I said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if he put out most of them himself.”
“Can we quit talking about that man?” Charlie said. “You already said he couldn’t do a thing to Sonny in Texas even if he knew he was here, so why go on about him?”
“Girl’s right,” Buck said. “To hell with that coonass.”
They wanted to hear all about Angola so I told them. Buck said it had always been one of the roughest prisons in the country and it couldn’t have gotten any softer since Long became governor. “I like the Kingfish,” he said, “but I wouldn’t pick his prison to do my time in.”
Charlie said a place like that was proof enough what beasts men really were. Russell affected to growl and gently bite her arm. She playslapped at him and said, “Quit that, or I’ll put you back in your cage.”
They loved hearing about the escape. When I told about turning the dog-bait trick around on Garrison, Buck laughed and said, “See? Told you it’d work!”
They couldn’t stop marveling that I’d run the levee. Through the rest of the evening one or the other would every now and again say “How do you like this kid?” and punch me in the arm and laugh the way they’d laughed on the night Russell brought Buck home from Texas. And I’d laugh along with them, the way I’d always wanted to.