“Not for long,” he said. And was asleep again in a minute.
He was awake again that evening when I looked in. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll lead the way out and you or Buck can bring up the rear.”
“Anyway you want it, Uncle,” I said, grinning back at him. The way he said it, you’d have thought Buck was in the next room rather than in a Midland jail cell.
Whenever I checked to see how he was coming along over the next few days, Charlie would often as not be ministering to him—feeding him, bathing him, shaving him, changing the bandage around his upper torso and shoulder or the one on his leg. He had dark circles around his eyes and was uncommonly pale, but he said he was doing fine. “Be right as the rain in no time,” he said.
“Yeah, sure,” Charlie said. “Only it hardly ever rains around here, so don’t let’s get too far ahead of ourselves.”
We’d been back twelve days when the telegram came from Bubber: GOOD LAWYER BUT HARD JUDGE STOPTWOYEARS SANTA RITA STOP LM WELL STOP TRANSFERS TOMORROW STOP BV.
Charlie didn’t want me to wake him up just to read him the telegram but I did anyway. He listened to it and rubbed his face and scowled. “Two years. Bastards.”
“That’s not so bad, is it?” Charlie said. “He can get parole in, what, seven or eight months, right?”
Russell looked at her like she was trying to sell him something—then turned to me and said, “If only I was in better shape we could’ve sprung him when they were transferring him to the farm. That would’ve been the ticket.”
“What are you talking about?” Charlie said.
He ignored the question. “Send a telegram,” he said to me. “Tell Bubber we need everything he can give us on this Santa Rita joint. Once we have that we can figure how to—”
He had a sudden coughing fit. There’d been a hard wind for the past two days and the air was full of dust. He said it didn’t hurt his back wounds when he coughed but it looked to me like he was flinching despite his best effort not to. He tried to resume what he’d been saying but got caught up in coughing once again, this time the pain of it starkly evident on his face. He slumped back on the pillows, gasping.
“All right, that’s enough visiting now,” Charlie said sharply. “Come on, Sonny, let the man get his rest.” I let her steer me to the door.
“Send it now, Sonny,” Russell said in a tight rasp, then fell to coughing again. I said I was on my way. Then Charlie closed the door on me.
She’d been testy ever since our return, and I was pretty sure it had to do with our business. She’d never much cared for Russell’s being in the robbery trade, and now she seemed to get upset by any talk of it at all. I had the feeling they’d been arguing about it, but if that was the case, they were keeping it between themselves. We’d always shared confidences, Charlie and I, but just the day before, when I asked her what was wrong, she’d said, “Nothing” in a way that made clear she wasn’t going to bring me into it.
Belle didn’t know what was troubling Charlie, either. She’d gotten to know her at least as well as I did, maybe better, and she’d tried to feel her out a couple of times, but Charlie wasn’t confiding in anybody.
“I think she’s real scared he might get hurt worse,” Belle said. “But she’s just as scared to say anything to him about it. You know how he is when she complains about you all’s work.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “She’s always known what he does. She’s always known it’s a risky business.”
“Yeah, well. Being told something’s risky is a lot different from seeing what can happen.”
I figured she was probably right—Charlie was just scared. Russell’s blood was her first look at what can happen when the job goes bad. And I realized how different Belle was in that respect. She’d seen plenty of cases of risk gone bad. She’d seen what men looked like after falling off derricks, after getting their heads smashed by falling drill pipe. She’d seen men who’d been burned up so bad in field fires they looked, as she put it, like big charred dolls and gave off a smell you’d never forget. In the case of her own daddy, she’d seen what they looked like after being gassed to death. I doubted that Charlie had ever seen any such things or their like.
By the time we got the word about Buck, we had another problem—we were nearly broke. After the latest visit to the grocer’s and then to the Callaghan Street house to get some beer and hooch, I had less than ten dollars. I searched Buck’s room in case he might’ve stashed some money in there but all I found was sixty-three cents in a dresser drawer. Belle had about two dollars left of the grocery money I’d given her before I went to Odessa. Maybe Russell had enough money to cover our rent and groceries and booze and so forth until he was ready to work again, but I had a feeling he didn’t. He’d always let Buck take care of the money and only carried enough himself to pay for incidentals or to take Charlie out for a night on the town. Forget borrowing money from Bubber. I’d heard Buck say that Bubber never lent money to his holdup men—not because he didn’t trust them, but because the risk was too great that something would happen to them before they could repay him. Nobody faulted him for his caution.
That night in bed I explained our financial problem to Belle and told her if Russell was as flat as I was I’d have to go out on a job pretty soon.
At first she didn’t say anything, but although it was too dark to see her face, I could feel her eyes on me. Finally she said, “Who’d do it with you?”
“Nobody,” I said. “It won’t be that big a one.”
“It’s always better if somebody stays with the car and has it ready for the getaway.”
“Do tell,” I said. “What do you know about it?”
“I’ve heard you all talk, you know.”
I’d had no idea she’d listened so closely to any of our shop talk.
“Let me go with you, Sonny. I can drive for you, you know I can.”
Until a little over a week ago I hadn’t known she could drive a car at all, never mind drive as well as she did. For lack of anything else to do one afternoon, we’d gone for a long drive way out into the desert. We put the top up on the roadster to keep the dust off us and I sped us over an old truck trail that went winding every which way around outcrops and arroyos and came to an end at an abandoned oil camp. She loved it, yahooing along with me as the roadster went leaning through the turns, raising high rooster tails of dust behind us. I told her about the rough trails we’d had to drive on in doing the Blackpatch hijack, and she said she’d learned to drive on some pretty rough roads around Corsicana.
“I was fourteen when Daddy started teaching me in his Dodge,” she said. “He loved to speed around like you, and he’d always let me drive fast too. I don’t mean to brag on myself, but he said I was a regular Barney Oldfield. He taught me lots of stuff—how to fish, how to use tools. I was an only child, so he didn’t have anybody else to teach.”
“Want to show me what a hotshot driver you are?” I said.
“Think I’m lying, don’t you?”
We traded seats and she got us going, smoothly working the gearshift and clutch. At first she took it easy, rolling along at moderate speed, taking the turns slowly. But I could tell she was only getting the feel of the car. Then she began to accelerate. As we headed for the next curve she gave me a sidelong glance and said, “Hold on to your hat.”
She smoothly shifted down into second gear and gunned the motor and I fell against my door as she wheeled through a tight left turn. She took the next two curves just as nicely, and I whooped along with her.
But she got a little too cocky and took the next one too fast. We skidded off the trial and onto the softer sand and the car slogged to a stop and stalled before she could shove in the clutch. She started it up again and put it in low but the back wheels spun in the sand.