Buck said he’d been playing stud in the next room when the gunshot sounded—and the men at the table grabbed up their money and scattered like spooked birds. He pulled his piece and ran in the dice room and there was Russell wrapping his hand in a bandanna and nobody else in the room except the dead guy on the floor. They casually walked out and on down the street back to their car, and if anybody in the neighborhood heard the shot they must not’ve paid it much mind.
“Tough place, Chalmette,” Buck said. “Anyway, this doc we know in Metairie did the stitch job. Does good work.”
They told Daddy not to worry so much about it, they figured they were clear. Nobody knew their real names or where they were from or even that they knew each other. The police weren’t likely to give much of a damn anyhow about some razor-toting grifter laid out in a gambling scrape.
“Goddam razor,” Buck said. “That’s no weapon for a white man.”
“I wish I’d thought to scoop up my fingers,” Russell said. “I’d’ve buried them decent. Some broompusher probably swept them out with the trash.”
It’s why the three of them were always so cautious in their conversation when my mother was around—they didn’t want her getting an earful of any such story.
When she came home and saw Russell’s hand she nearly wept. He told her he’d been working at a packinghouse and got careless with the saw, but I could tell she didn’t believe that for a second.
All the same, they could usually make my mother smile with stories about their girlfriends or with some of their cleaner jokes or with their imitation of a robber being chased around the apartment by a Keystone Cop. The biggest grin they ever got out of her was when Buck said he was getting married.
It was all fairly sudden, he’d only known the woman a few weeks—Jena Ragnatela her name was—but he was as in love as a man could be. We didn’t even meet her till the day they got hitched in the city hall and we had a small reception for them at our place.
Jena wasn’t one to talk much, and when she did say something you had the feeling it wasn’t what she was really thinking. She rarely smiled, and if she ever laughed I never heard it. My mother had wanted Buck to get married but I could see by her face that Jena wasn’t what she’d had in mind. Still, it was easy to see why he’d gone for her—she was a knockout. Black-haired and green-eyed, lean-hipped, high-breasted, as easy in her moves as a cat. She always drew every eye in the room and you could tell she always knew it.
It was at Buck’s wedding that we also met Charlie Hayes, Russell’s latest girlfriend. Her real name was Charlotte but she didn’t care for it. She was nineteen, only five years older than me, a copper redhead, slim and pretty. She liked to joke and cut up and she taught me to do the Charleston. Sometimes when we were slow-dancing I’d get such a stiffie I knew she could feel it. The first time it happened I tried to back away a little but she only smiled and pulled me tighter against her and whispered, “Don’t fret about it, honey, it’s perfectly natural.” That’s how she was. Every time it happened, she’d give me that same smile and hold me close, and I couldn’t help smiling back at her, even though my ears were on fire and I felt like everybody in the room knew what was going on.
Russell himself had been shy about dancing ever since the limp he got from the war but Charlie got him over that and he pretty soon enjoyed dancing as much as anybody. He’d had a lot of girlfriends but she was the best of them and he knew it. She would still be his girl four years later when I started partnering with him and Buck. I asked him once if he planned on marrying her and he laughed and said hell no. Well, did he love her, I asked. He said he didn’t know but didn’t lose any sleep over it.
“Lots of people say they love each other and don’t do nothing but cause each other heartache,” he said. “Love’s harder to figure than long division. All I know is we like being together without a lot of talk about love. That’s fine with me.”
Despite my mother’s reservations about Jena it looked for a while like Buck’s marriage had done as she’d hoped and turned him and Russell away from the criminal life. They bought a filling station across the river in Algiers and seemed to be doing all right at it. Daddy was as glad as my mother was, but I had my doubts about the new leaf they’d supposedly turned. Even back then I didn’t believe that falling in love would change a man’s nature.
And sure enough, it wasn’t long before they admitted to Daddy that they were running a nightly poker game in the back room of the station and selling hooch for a local bootlegger.
“It ain’t like we’re really in the life anymore,” Buck said. “I mean it’s not but cards and a little moonshine, for Christ’s sake.”
Daddy smiled sadly and shook his head like it was no surprise to him. And like he didn’t really believe that was all they were up to.
It wasn’t. In addition to the gambling and the booze sales, they were doing burglaries again and had already pulled their first holdups—only small jobs so far, groceries and filling stations, a couple of cafés. They were learning the trade slowly and carefully, but they had ambitions. A fellow in Algiers named Bubber Vicente—who had a hand in everything from bootlegging to burglary to armed robbery—was setting up jobs for them and giving them pointers.
I knew all this because Buck and Russell told me. They were secretly giving me shooting lessons, and when it was only the three of us they talked pretty freely. They’d asked me at the start if I could keep my mouth shut and took me at my word when I swore I always would. When I’d asked them to teach me to shoot they said sure—as long as we kept it between the three of us, so as not to upset my mother or get an argument from Daddy.
That was fine by me. And so once or twice a week they took me out to the boonies and taught me all they knew about handling and shooting their pistols and shotguns.
The day I busted twelve bottles in a row at forty paces with the .44 top-break, Buck gave it to me for a present.
Every day began with a big bell clanging in the dark. I’d wake to the darkness and remember where I was and for a moment I’d feel like I was suffocating and my heart would bang against my ribs like some trapped thing. I’d have to fast remind myself that you never know—you never know—before I could breathe a little easier. It was like that for the first few seconds of every morning.
Then the ceiling lights would come on and the floorwalker did a headcount and told us to unass the bunks. The barrack windows were screenless and my ears were always swollen with mosquito bites. We jostled each other going in and out of the latrine, getting to the piss troughs, the shitters, the water faucets. The usual bunch playing grab-ass and cracking wise, the usual ones cussing at nothing in particular or muttering to themselves, the same ones of us rarely saying a word.
We’d form up in the darkness like rows of broken ghosts in our black-and-white stripes and trudge off to the mess shack for a breakfast that rarely changed—sweet potatoes and blackstrap, grits and coffee. Then out in formation again and off to the toolshed. The eastern sky only now turning gray and the trees still black against it, the roosters crowing at the chicken house behind the captain’s quarters, the air still wet and heavy with the smells of muck and overripe vegetation. The toolshed trusty gave us whatever tools we needed for the day—cane knives, shovels, axes, hoes. Then the bosses took us away to trim or cut cane or hoe the fields or lay down shell on the camp roads or fell trees or clean out shit ditches, something.