She shrilled happily as I swept her up in my arms and said, “Prepare to be ravished, woman!” and slung her onto the bed and leaped in after her. She hurriedly guided me into her, already panting the way she did when she was close, and before we’d been at it a half-minute she was digging her fingers into my back and tightening her legs around me and letting out her long low cry of climax. I’d never known her to get there so fast.
After a while we sat up and lit cigarettes. I took off the mustache and she said, “Well hey there, Sonny LaSalle! Where you been? I just now had the best time with Douglas Fairbanks, you wouldn’t believe!”
I got out the pint of mash I’d brought along and took a long pull and then offered her the bottle. She took a small sip off it and arched her brows and smiled and took another.
Once she got started talking about the heist, she couldn’t stop. “In one way it was like you were taking so long in there I couldn’t stand it. But at the same time it was like I didn’t want it to be over with. Does that make any sense?”
I smiled at her.
She said she could hardly imagine how it must feel to rob a bank. The way she was carrying on made me laugh and remember my own happy babblings to Buck and Russell the first few times I went on jobs with them.
“I was scared,” she said, “but I felt so…I don’t know…so real. Does it ever make you feel like that too?”
“Only every time,” I said.
“Wow,” she said.
And then we were at it again.
We didn’t check out of the cabin until midmorning and we stopped at the first café we came to. We sat in a booth in back and ate like we hadn’t seen food in days, each of us putting away a platter of fried eggs, pork chops, and potatoes, with a side of open-face biscuits covered with sausage gravy. We lingered awhile over coffee and cigarettes and then hit the road again.
As we passed through various oil patches and the towns around them, she said it all reminded her of Corsicana. The landscape out here was different, but the derricks and pumps and storage tanks and trucks, the mule wagons and the crowded stores and cafés, the dirty streets teeming with oil workers, the constant racket and hazy air and awful stinks were the same as they’d been back home.
“It’s the same in every oil town I’ve seen,” I said, “and I’ve seen a few lately.”
We were in no rush, taking it slow and easy, stopping alongside the road once so I could help an old man change a flat tire on his truck, pulling up another time to watch a herd of pronghorns bounding over the grassy flats in the distance.
The sun was almost down when we arrived in Crane. As rough as Corsicana was she didn’t think it was as rough as this little town, or as loud. Pulling a job in such a place was unthinkable—you’d never get away through all the traffic. We finally emerged at the east end of town into the gathering twilight and the traffic began to thin. A mile farther on we passed an isolated grocery store where several men were loading large cardboard boxes onto the beds of a couple of red pickup trucks parked in front. A supply run for an oil camp kitchen, probably.
Neither of us spoke for the next minute or so as the road rolled under us. Then she looked at me and said, “That was a big bunch of groceries them boys bought.”
“Yes it was,” I said.
“They must’ve run up some bill,” she said. “I wonder has business been that good all day?”
“Turn it around,” I said.
As we drove back to the store I steered the car with my left hand for a moment while she put her hair up in her hat and zipped up the baggy windbreaker. The red pickups went past us in the other direction. We pulled into the lot and parked near the front door. It wasn’t a particularly large place, but through the front windows it looked jammed with goods. I figured it for a main supplier to a lot of the camps around there, and it must’ve recently received deliveries of new stock. There were a couple of other trucks in the lot, and one car, so there were at least three customers in there and who knew how many employees. Too many for one man to watch. It was a two-man job, but I didn’t want Belle out of the car. I was about to say forget it and tell her to get going again, but then a couple of guys came out, each with a boxful of groceries. As they were putting their goods in one of the trucks, another man came out with two big sacks and got in the car. A minute later both car and truck were gone.
I decided to wait a little longer. I took the paste-on mustache from my pocket and put it on, turned to Belle and said, “Okay?” She smiled and winked. She had a big wad of gum going in her mouth. I checked the .380 and put it back into my waistband against my side.
Five minutes later two more guys came out with groceries and got into the other truck and left. Ours was the only vehicle in the lot. I had her pull the car up directly in front of the entrance with the passenger side toward the door. Then I got out and went in, the screen door jingling a little bell hung atop the frame.
There were several aisles of shelves and a pair of men were replenishing them with canned goods from various open cartons. The younger guy was big, beefy, with a red face and curly hair, the other was grayhaired, shorter and leaner, but I could see a family resemblance. The younger one looked at me and I nodded a greeting. The elder said, “Help you, sir?”
“Need some cigarettes,” I said.
The elder motioned to the younger and went back to his shelving. The younger left off what he was doing and went around behind the front counter where the register was. “What kind you want?” he said.
“Old Golds,” I said. “Two packs.” I stood sideways so I could watch his father too.
He set the smokes on the counter and I brought out the automatic. “Don’t even think about going for a gun,” I said.
For a second he looked at me like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right—and then like I was some longtime enemy he recognized.
The old man stood up and said, “We ain’t got a gun here, mister. A shotgun in the house out back is all, I swear.”
“Give me every greenback in the till,” I said to the younger.
“Hell I will,” he said.
In all the jobs I’d done with Buck and Russell, in all the jobs they’d done without me, nobody, so far as I knew, had ever said no when they were under the gun.
“Want to get shot, asshole?”
“I ain’t scared of you.”
Well goddam, I thought.
“Justin,” the elder said. He had his hands half raised. “Take it easy, mister. The boy don’t mean it. You can have what we got.”
“Do so mean it,” the Justin one said.
The roadster’s klaxon sounded. Somebody was pulling in.
I kept the gun on the younger but spoke to the elder. “Listen, mister, somebody better open that register right goddam now and put all the bills in a sack. I don’t mean maybe.”
“Yessir,” the grayhead said. He hustled around the counter and pushed Justin aside and chinged open the drawer and started grabbing up handfuls of bills and sticking them in a paper bag. He shoved the bag across the counter at me and I snatched it up.
As I started backing toward the door the little bell tinkled and I lowered the gun to my waist to hide it. I turned to see a burly guy in oil-stained workclothes come walking in. The guy smiled and nodded at me and then looked past me and his eyes widened and his mouth fell open and I was already dropping to my haunches as I spun around to see the old man raising a shotgun.
The blast was loud as a cannon in those close quarters. My hat shifted on my head and I heard a crashing behind me and the oil guy started screaming.
It was a single-barrel breechloader so that was his only shot. I stood up slowly, my heart ramming against my ribs and my ears ringing. The old man was holding the smoking weapon like it was something he’d been caught stealing. The Justin one stood there with his mouth open.