A World of Thieves

A steeple bell rang the noon hour as Buck and Russell tugged their hatbrims low over their sunglasses and went into the bank. I watched from the car, the engine throbbing into the steering wheel under my hands. We’d nabbed the Packard in Baton Rouge and would abandon it down in Plaquemine, where we’d left Buck’s Model A parked beside the police station. Buck said it was the safest place for it. “World’s full of damned thieves,” he’d said, grinning big. “A man can’t be too careful.” I said I’d always wondered if that meant a man could never be careful enough or that he couldn’t be excessively careful. Buck looked at me like I was speaking Chinese. Russell said he only hoped the car didn’t have a red light on the roof and “Police Department” painted on the sides by the time we came back for it.

Verte Rivage, Louisiana. A hot July day. The sky pale blue and streaked with thin clouds. Mockingbirds squalling in the oaks. Spanish moss tilting in a weak breeze carrying the smell of the bayou from the edge of town, the tang of fresh-cut grass. Cajun music fiddling faintly from a radio in a screen-door barbershop. The headline in the newspaper rack heralding William Varney’s nomination for president by the Prohibition Party. More people on the sidewalks than you’d expect at dinnertime, but hardly any street traffic. According to Buck’s informant the town had a sheriff and two deputies, one man for each shift, but we’d seen no sign of the day cop. The informant also said the bank was holding five thousand dollars in farmer’s market receipts. We figured it for an easy score.

But as Buck and Russell never got tired of telling me, you never know. They hadn’t been in the bank two minutes when the sudden howl of a siren made my heart jump and my gut clench like a fist. In the backview mirror I saw a sedan with a flashing red light come around the corner two blocks away. Behind it came another one with its light and siren going—and then another. I had the top-break .44 in my hand before I was aware I’d picked it up from the seat. I knew Buck and Russell could hear the sirens—the whole parish must’ve heard them. Cars kept turning onto the street and joining the row of red lights and adding to the caterwaul. I couldn’t believe all the cops. I thought we were had. I put the Packard in gear, everything in me saying Go!

The rule was, if a job went to hell it was every man for himself. That’s what they’d told me. But the way I saw it, as long as they hadn’t gone down, the job hadn’t gone to hell. Besides, I knew damn well they’d never in the world run out on each other or on me. So I stayed put—clutch to the floor, .44 in hand, eyes on the mirror—and watched the line of cars coming down the street.

That’s when it struck me something wasn’t right. They were coming too slowly, hardly faster than a jog. For all the flashing and wailing, they were in no hurry to get anywhere. And nobody looked alarmed. More people were out on the sidewalks now, most of them smiling and waving at the cops. The barber stepped out of his shop, spat a brown streak, grimaced at all the hoorah and went back inside.

Now the lead car came abreast of me and I saw four men inside, none in uniform except for the sameness of their white skimmers, all waving back at the folk. The side of the car said “Ascension Parish Sheriff”—though we were in the parish of West Baton Rouge. The next car was from St. John the Baptist. Whatever was going on had nothing to do with us, but still, it was unreal. Of all the possibilities you plan for in a heist, a slow parade of friendly smiling cops driving by with their lights going and sirens howling isn’t one of them.

Buck and Russell didn’t come out of the bank until the lead car went past it, which must’ve been when they realized the police weren’t there for us. Then they were both at the door, still wearing the dark glasses. Buck had one hand in his coat pocket and the other holding his valise. His face fixed on me for a moment, then he walked off down the street as casually as a businessman going back to the office. Russell put his little fingers in his ears and screwed up his mouth to get a laugh from a couple of kids who had their ears covered against the screeching sirens. He smiled at them and tipped his hat to their mother and strolled off after Buck.

I watched as they went down the street and around the corner, then tucked the .44 in my waistband.

But I couldn’t pull away from the curb while the parade was still passing. I cursed its slowness under my breath and kept an eye on the bank. There were only a few cars left to go. That’s when a bald guy wearing a teller’s visor peeked out the door and in the direction Buck and Russell had gone—then ran out into the street, flapping his arms and shouting something nobody could make out for the sirens. A car braked sharply to keep from hitting him, and the one behind it banged into its rear and shattered a taillight, and the two last cars behind them stopped short too. Now I was really blocked in.

The halted cars cut their sirens and their doors slung open and the cops came out, some looking pissed and some of them laughing. One grabbed the teller by the shirtfront, but the baldy was talking fast and pointing down the street. Then the cops were pulling pistols and running for the corner where Buck and Russell had vanished, yelling at the onlookers to get out of the way. Now the cars up ahead had stopped too, and more sirens were shutting down and more cops getting out and asking what was going on. Bystanders were hollering and gesturing at the bank.

Any second now somebody was going to take notice of the stranger in the Packard. I had to quit the car fast. The barbershop was twenty feet away—I’d go in for a haircut, a guy passing through, all big-eyed and curious about the to-do in the street….

“Say, young fella, you happen to see—”

He’d come up on my blind side. Coatless and burly, brown vest with a badge, big cowboy hat over quick black eyes that spotted the .44 against my belly. He stepped back and yanked up a revolver. “Freeze!”

With that Colt muzzle not two feet from my face, I didn’t even think to do anything else.

“What’re you, boy, seventeen?”

“Eighteen, sir.”

That was about all the truth I gave them. They’d sent my prints to Baton Rouge and New Orleans but they wouldn’t get anything.

I said I was Lionel Buckman from St. Louis, where I’d been a bookkeeper for a shoe company till the place burned down. I’d come to Louisiana looking for work but hadn’t had much luck finding a position that paid enough to hold me. Yes sir, I did have papers to prove who I was, but wouldn’t you know some sorry pickpocket stole my wallet down in the French Quarter? The .44? Strictly for protection, should the need arise, knock wood. I was headed for Opelousas on a tip about a good job and stopped to get a bite. When I heard all those sirens I figured something awful serious was going on, so I grabbed the gun from under the seat in case I could help the police in some way. The car?—stolen? Sweet Baby Jesus, don’t tell me. No wonder that fella gave me such a fine deal on it. Just yesterday in Baton Rouge. My rattletrap Model T and forty dollars. Said he was in bad need of the cash. It about broke me but was too good a bargain to pass up. Wrote me a bill of sale on a café napkin and promised to mail me the proper papers care of general delivery in Baton Rouge. Seemed a right enough fella so I trusted him. Lord only knows what I did with that napkin. Damn me for a careless fool.

Damn me for a lowdown liar, the cops said. Then tried smacking my partners’ names out of me. But I kept my mouth shut and didn’t cave.

The Southeast Louisiana Sheriffs’ Convention is what it was. There were more than sixty lawmen in Verte Rivage that day, and we hit the bank just as they’d set out to the fairgrounds for a barbecue and decided to make a loud parade of it. Ten minutes later there wouldn’t have been a cop in town. You’d think Buck’s informant would’ve known about it and passed the word. It might’ve been of some benefit to our planning.

I was three days in the Verte Rivage jail while they searched for Buck and Russell. They’d stolen a truck outside of town but abandoned it with a ruined wheel ten miles away, near the edge of the swamp. The cops sent in trackers and dogs, but finally gave up the hunt.

“Most like your buddies drowned or the gators got them,” a cop told me.

Maybe, I thought, and maybe not. Buck and Russell had grown up prowling the swamps and they weren’t about to be killed by one. But the talk in the jailhouse was that they’d made off with ten thousand dollars, and everybody knew how some cops would shoot robbers they caught with holdup money and out of sight of witnesses. They’d dump the body in the swamp and report that the man got away. Easy loot and hardly any paperwork.

The embarrassment of having the town’s only bank robbed right under their noses had put a lot of the conventioning cops in a vile temper. Lucky for me some of the older sheriffs thought the whole business was fairly amusing and they restrained the hotter ones from busting me up too bad. All the same I took a drubbing. But I used every trick I knew to protect my teeth and I didn’t lose any. No bones broken. It could’ve been worse.

They booked me into the Baton Rouge jail a little before dark. While I was waiting for permission to telephone my lawyer, he showed up. He asked to see Lionel Buckman, and so I knew Buck and Russell were all right, since the only way he could’ve known the alias I’d be using was if they’d been in touch with him.

I was taken to the visiting room and got my first look at Edward Longstreet Charponne. Sharp Eddie. Buck and Russell had told me all about this criminal attorney they kept on retainer. He came from old Louisiana money but had always been a black sheep. After graduating from Tulane he set up offices in New Orleans and Baton Rouge and became immensely and notoriously successful at defending criminals of every stripe. His embarrassed family disowned him. The newspapers regularly reproached him for his choice of clientele and had called him as much a menace to decent society as the rogues he represented. Eddie in turn routinely accused the papers of an un-American disdain for every man’s constitutional right to a fair day in court.

The simple truth of the matter, Buck told me, was that Sharp Eddie got a kick out of dealing with crooks.

“It’s true,” Russell said. “He’s another one of them educated types who like to rub elbows with what is commonly called the underworld.” They’d both given me a look and I couldn’t help but grin back at them.

We sat on opposite sides of a long table partitioned lengthwise by a heavy wire screen. A guard stood over by the wall on my side of the partition. Sharp Eddie was short and heavyset but impeccably groomed and expensively tailored, his blond hair combed straight back and his goatee closely trimmed. A white Panama lay beside some papers laid neatly before him.

“I was alerted to your situation via long-distance telephone,” he said in a low soft lilt I suspected was his normal tone rather than a deference to the guard’s presence. He was of a class of men rarely obliged to raise their voice.

I asked in a whisper where they were. He said he hadn’t asked and they hadn’t volunteered the information. “Better for everyone that way,” he said.

He glanced down at the papers. “The Verte Rivage report states that you had multiple facial lacerations and various other bruises at the time of your arrest. It speculates that perhaps you’d been in a motorcar accident immediately prior to the holdup.”

His eyes roamed my battered and discolored face, my bloated ears, my dirty rumpled suit. I smiled and shrugged and both actions hurt.

“Yes, well,” he said. “Hazards of the profession.” This from a man I would’ve bet had never felt a punch.

He said I’d be arraigned in the morning and a trial date set, and five minutes after that he’d have me out on bond. The robbery charge was nothing but air, entirely and flimsily circumstantial. If the state didn’t drop it before trial, he’d move to dismiss and ten-to-one the judge would grant.

“If not,” he said, “I’ll dismantle it in court in a minute.”

The Packard might be more of a problem. I could have come by the car exactly as I’d said. Who could prove that I hadn’t? My stupid story might strain the court’s belief, yes, but most judges had heard stupidity in such quantity and size that few examples of it surprised them anymore. It could be argued—and he would so argue, he assured me—that however foolish I’d been, I was as much a victim of fraud as the Packard’s owner was of theft.

“The court might go for it,” Sharp Eddie said. “Even if it doesn’t, you have no record of previous arrest, so there’s a good chance of immediate probation. Worst possibility? Six months in the parish lockup and you’ll be out in two.”

He consulted a large gold wristwatch and stood up, gathering the papers and slipping them into a tooled leather briefcase.

“All things considered,” he said, setting the Panama at an angle over one eye, “things could be exceedingly worse, as so many residents of this institution could tell you. See you in the morning, lad.”

The tank was lit by a low-watt yellow bulb with a wire cover in the middle of the ceiling. The turnkey locked me in and went back down the hall to join the other cops in an adjacent room whose door stayed open and bright with light. There were eight bunks all in a row with stained smelly mattresses and I stretched out on the one against the rear wall.

Only two other guys were in there at first. The well-dressed drunk who’d smashed up his car got bailed out pretty soon after I arrived. The other one was a little fellow who didn’t look to be more than a kid, although he was probably about my age. You could see he was a nancy—he might as well’ve worn a sign. One of his eyes was swollen purple. Most likely he’d come on to the wrong guy. My own face should’ve made him feel better about his. He hadn’t said a word, but he kept staring at me like he wanted to talk, so I gave him a hard look and he quit the eyeballing and curled up on his bunk.

I’d been dozing when they brought in a pair of loud ones. They wore T-shirts that showed off their tattooed arms and I thought they might be merchant seamen. One of them was insisting they had only been playing a joke and hadn’t been serious about strong-arming anybody.

“Yeah, sure, Horton,” a cop said, “you’re always innocent.”

The jailer clanked the door shut and turned the lock. The Horton one stood at the bars and yelled down the hall after them about a man’s right to make a phone call.

“We want a lawyer!” the other one said. He looked like an Indian. They finally quieted down to muttering between themselves.

I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep when something woke me and I rolled over and saw the kid kneeling on the floor, the Indian behind him and twisting his arm up high on his back. The other guy had the kid by the hair and was trying to make him suck his dick.

The kid was whimpering like a dog and jerking his head away. The guy yanked harder on his hair and smacked him in the face and told him to shut up and do it.

The Indian looked out to the hallway, then said through his teeth, “Holler again I’ll break your arm.”

I told myself the fairy had it coming. Likely said something to them. Maybe they wanted some of his action and he suddenly got particular. Whatever it was, it wasn’t my concern.

And then the Indian saw me watching and said, “Mind your fucken business.”

That’s what I should’ve done. Never stick your neck out for anybody but yourself and kin—even Daddy had always said that. But the beating I’d taken in Verte Rivage had put me in a mood. I was aching to punch somebody, I was right at the edge. The glare the Indian gave me, like he thought he was spooking me, pushed me over.

I stood up and the Horton one got that look they get when the thing doesn’t go how they expect. He hustled his dick back in his pants and said, “Hey boy,” and raised a finger at me in warning. I feinted left and clipped him with the right. It wasn’t flush but it sent him sprawling.

The Indian tried to get me in a headlock but I wrenched free and hooked him hard in the kidney and he hollered and dropped to his knees. I gave him one in the neck and he fell on his side, gagging loud, and then puked on the concrete floor.

“What the hell’s going on?” A cop was at the hallway door but couldn’t see into the tank from there.

The kid was over by the wall, gawking at me. I felt like smacking him too, for being such a rabbit. I should’ve been watching the Horton guy—he came up from behind and locked a forearm around my throat. I heard the cops clamoring at the cell door as I got the footing I needed and lunged back hard and banged Horton against the bars, knocking him breathless and breaking his hold on me.

I held him against the bars with one hand and hammered him with the other, feeling his front teeth go, his nose. Somebody clubbed me from behind and I spun around and drilled him with a straight right and saw it was a cop as he went backpedaling into the wall and down on his ass.

Now the other cops were all over me and I knew better than try to make a fight of it. I hunkered down and covered up with my arms the best I could but still took a lot of thumps before the one in charge yelled, “All right, enough!”

I felt like I was wearing a ten-pound headache hat. The Indian was up on hands and knees now, dry heaving, his face gray. Horton was curled up on the floor with his hands over his broken mouth and nose. The sergeant gave him a kick in the ribs and said, “You never been nothing but trouble in this jailhouse, you shitbird.”

“Shooo,” a cop said, “lookit old C.J. That boy is out!”

He nodded at the cop I’d hit. He was sitting against the wall with his chin on his chest. One of them went over and shook his shoulder and said, “Come on, old son, get up and piss—the world’s on fire!”

The C.J. guy slumped over, eyes half open. The other cop’s mouth fell open and he knelt and put an ear to the C.J. guy’s chest.

Then looked up and said, “Lordy, this boy’s dead.”

Dead and the sole son of John Isley Bonham, a longtime deputy sheriff down in Terrebonne Parish and something of a legend all over the delta. I didn’t know who he was until one of the cops referred to him as John Bones and I remembered having heard Buck and Russell mention the name one time in discussing the roughest cops they knew of. I heard plenty more about him, from jailers and jailbirds both, while I was waiting to go to trial.

They said he’d killed more men than any other cop in Louisiana. He’d claimed self-defense in every case but rumors persisted that some of the shootings had been point-blank executions. He’d been investigated a dozen times and suspended from duty a time or two but never found guilty of malfeasance or anything else. The local newspapers had long celebrated him as a lone wolf of justice whose fearsome reputation kept bootleggers and other criminals out of Terrebonne Parish. One robber he shot lived long enough to pull the trigger on a shotgun and remove most of Bonham’s left hand, a maiming in the line of duty that made him even more of a public hero. For ten years now he’d worn a set of chrome pincers in place of the hand and they said just the sight of that thing put suspects in a sweat when he entered an interrogation room.

He had outlasted a string of high sheriffs and for a long time now he could’ve had the job for the asking but didn’t want it. He wasn’t one for politics or smiling for the cameras. It was common knowledge he wasn’t well liked by his fellow cops—he was too stand-offish, too given to working without a partner. But they all said he was the most respected man among them, which I took to mean he was the most feared.

“He is that,” Sharp Eddie said. “And he’s got a lot of admirers that don’t know the first thing about him except that he scares the merde out of crooks and that he’s had some sad luck in his life. Lost his first wife nearly forty years ago when she drowned off Grand Isle on their honeymoon. Their honeymoon, son. That’s the kind of thing that gets a man a lifetime of sympathy. He married again sixteen years later and they had a baby boy, but then twelve years ago wife number two hanged herself. Didn’t leave a note, but everybody knew she had a nervous condition and it most likely got the best of her. The man did not marry again. And now, with that sixty-year-old stalwart of the law so near the end of a long and illustrious service to the state, his only begotten son is killed in a fight with a jailbird.”

He paused to give me a cigarette, then lit it and one for himself. “It’s hardly surprising,” he said, “what with John Isley Bonham being such a tragic hero and all, that the state is charging his son’s killer with murder in the first degree and the newspapers are cheering that decision.”

Given the circumstances, I didn’t see how in purple hell they thought they could nail me on murder in any degree. But Eddie said he knew of weaker cases that had sent men to the gallows.

“In most courtrooms across our grand republic, the facts of this case wouldn’t support even second-degree charges,” Eddie said. “But we’re in Loosiana, my boy, and if the jury wants your ass it’ll have it. I got my work cut out, son, believe me.”

I said if he was trying to boost my spirits he was falling a little shy. He said he just didn’t want me looking cocky in front of the jurymen.

The only word from Buck and Russell came with a packet of cash which arrived at Eddie’s office. The envelope was postmarked Houma, and a note attached to the money said, “Buy it.”

They were obviously keeping up with the news.

But Eddie said they ought to know there’d be no buying me out of it, not with the victim being son to a policeman—especially this policeman. He did buy me a nice suit to wear in the courtroom.

The state presented Charlton John Bonham—“C.J.” to all who knew him—as a large-hearted young man cut down in the bloom of his life, as a prime candidate for such law enforcement greatness as his father had achieved. Witness after witness told of C.J.’s genial nature, of his deep devotion to a mother whose tragic loss came when he was but ten years old, of his avid desire since boyhood to be a policeman like his daddy, of his dedication to duty.

At our table Sharp Eddie gave me a look. More than one person in a position to know had admitted to him in private that C. J. Bonham was one of the worst bullies in the Baton Rouge Police Department. He’d been assigned to jail duty while the department investigated him for beating to death a fifteen-year-old boy he’d caught breaking into a warehouse. Even so, the only reason the killing was being investigated was that the boy was white and his father had died heroically in the war—and because his grieving mother had raised a stink in public. Some of the jail cops had told Sharp Eddie in detail how C.J. loved to use his club on prisoners, but of course none of them would testify to it. They said if he tried to make them repeat their stories on the stand they’d deny every word to John Bones personally and call Eddie a liar in court.

John Bones—the daddy wolf himself, the two-time widower and famous crook killer—sat in the front row of spectators. Tall and lean in a black suit and black string tie, his gray hair close-cropped, his gray mustache thick and drooping, his face stone-stiff and void of all expression. He held his planter’s hat on his lap and covering the contraption on the end of his arm. I didn’t catch him looking at me until midway through the first day’s proceedings. His eyes were brightly black and fixed on me like a hawk’s.

I gave him a look right back: Up yours, mister.

On the night it had happened, after they took the body away and charged me with the killing and transferred me to a regular cell, I’d lain in my bunk and waited to feel whatever I was going to feel about it. My pulse was still jumping and I was still trembling a little, but that wasn’t unusual after a fight, in or out of the ring. I was sorry I’d killed him, which of course wasn’t the same thing as being sorry he was dead, but how could I be sorry about that when I didn’t know a thing about him except he was a jailhouse cop? Later on, when I found out the kind of cop he’d been, the fact that he was dead didn’t bother me at all. On that night, however, all I had in mind was that I’d killed him, and I waited for guilt or regret or fear or whatever mix of feelings might descend on me. Over the next few hours I felt a twist of them all, but they passed fairly quickly. Except for anger. That’s the one that stuck.

The look John Bones gave me in court brought that anger back in a rush. What did he expect—I’d take a knock on the head and not do anything about it because his son was a cop? Buck once said the main reason he hated cops was they were naturalborn bullies. They loved the action when the odds were all on their side, but let them get the worst of it and then listen to them cry.

The old man and I held stares for a long moment—and then he showed a trace of a smile and brought that chrome thing up from under the hat and gently stroked his mustache with it, letting me see it in all its wicked gleam like some kind of surgeon’s tool. Then he slipped it back under the hat and turned away and didn’t look at me again.

To hell with you too, I thought.

The prosecutor reminded the jurymen that C.J.’s life had been taken by a man already in jail on charges of bank robbery and car theft. And now that man had committed murder, the most horrid sort of theft there was—the theft of a human life. And, the prosecutor added, this awful theft didn’t stop with C.J. The murder of that fine boy also robbed the father, John Isley Bonham—robbed him of his only son, robbed him of his lineage.

“And there he sits, gentlemen,” the prosecutor said, pointing at me. “The man who committed all of this unspeakable thievery.”

And so forth.

Sharp Eddie had wanted the fairy I’d defended to testify, and the kid agreed to it, but as soon as he’d served his ten days for solicitation of an unnatural sex act and was turned loose, he took off. Horton and the Indian disappeared too. So Eddie went to work without witnesses.

He looked the jurymen in the eye as he explained the woefully mistaken arrest in Verte Rivage that placed me, an innocent man, in the Baton Rouge jail on that fateful night. He described the frail and helpless boy who’d been there too and would have fallen victim to the sexual depravities of a pair of brutal inmates but for my intervention—an act of selfless bravery that almost cost me my own life. The blow young Bonham took was inadvertent, a random, instinctive punch in the midst of a melee. And while the mortal skull fracture he received on striking the wall was certainly tragic, it was no act of murder, but an act of God, a death by misadventure.

And so on.

A few of the jurors seemed receptive to Eddie’s argument but most of them looked unmoved. They talked it over behind closed doors for about three hours before settling on one of the alternatives the judge gave them and convicting me of manslaughter.

Better than murder in any degree, yeah…but still. When I heard the verdict I felt like the world abruptly tilted way the hell over.

And when the judge sentenced me to thirty years at Angola, I felt like I was falling off.

The newspapers thought both jury and judge had gone too easy on me. John Bonham refused to comment on the verdict or any other aspect of the trial. Sharp Eddie said he’d appeal, of course—first the conviction, and if that went nowhere, the sentence. But I’d learned to read him fairly well by then, and I had a feeling he knew the thing was settled and done. Which meant the most I could hope for was parole in ten years.

Ten.

Lionel Loomis LaSalle—that’s my name on the dotted line. I was still a child when Daddy apologized for it. Lionel Loomis was my mother’s father, and Daddy’d had to agree to both names for their firstborn son before she would marry him. But he never did use it. He called me Sonny and that’s what I went by. My mother called me Lionel until I refused to answer to it and she finally gave in and called me Sonny too. Except when she was vexed with me—then it was always Lionel.

I wouldn’t have been too happy with Daddy’s name, either—Marlon—though the name didn’t seem to bother him any, maybe because he went by Lonnie. He was Buck’s and Russell’s elder brother by ten years. He’d grown up the same sort of wildhair kid they would become—always in trouble at school and getting in fights and doing petty thieving and such. At sixteen he was caught breaking into a warehouse by a night watchman who whaled on him with a club until Daddy took it away from him and whipped him bloody before the cops showed up. The judge gave him the choice of a year in jail or lying about his age and enlisting in the military. Three days later he was on his way to a naval training camp. He learned to box in the navy and made it to the semifinals of the fleet championships. He liked the sailor’s life but not the navy with all its saluting and regulations and petty punishments. At the end of his hitch he returned to New Orleans and signed on as a merchant seaman.

He met my mother one chilly autumn morning in a French Market café. She was a librarian, a pretty but shy girl who’d grown up with stern warnings about sailors. But she was a romantic at heart and couldn’t help being amused by this handsome mariner just returned from distant ports and so happily drunk at such a saintly hour. She gave him the chance he needed to impress her and four months later they got married and moved into an apartment on St. Philip. I was born on the next New Year’s night.

Although Daddy was often gone to sea I never heard my mother complain of it. She’d known the life she was making when she married a sailorman. They were always happy when they were together. Some nights I’d lie awake listening to their husky whispers and low laughter from the bedroom down the hall. But she was a solitary woman of few friends, and when Daddy was away what she mostly did was read. She read to me too, every night from the time I was a baby until I was almost five and was reading for myself. All through my grammar school years she made sure I did my homework and would test me on it every night. She was forever correcting my grammar and pronunciations, and she’d despair to hear me lapse into the regional drawl and locutions. It was something I did now and then to fit in with the people I found myself among—though sometimes I did it for no reason except I liked how the accent felt in my mouth. When I pointed out that Daddy and Buck and Russell all spoke that way, she said that was all right because they couldn’t help it, but I could.

“Whether we like it or not, people judge us by the way we speak,” she said. “Why give the impression of being uneducated if you don’t have to?”

“I ain’t got no good answer to that, I don’t reckon,” I said.

“Lionel…”

When I finished the sixth grade, she persuaded Daddy that it was worth the cost to enroll me in a private school where I could get an education befitting my intelligence. He always deferred to her in matters of my education, and so the following year I found myself attending Gulliver Academy, overlooking Lake Ponchartrain.

Daddy had been teaching me to fight since I was old enough to make a fist, and I’d applied his lessons to the jerks in grammar school who’d made fun of my name before the teachers took to calling me Sonny. But it was at Gulliver that his tutoring served me best. The school’s motto was Mens sana in corpore sano and varsity athletes were much admired, especially the boxers. My mother had been opposed to my joining the team but I told her I wasn’t really boxing, I was engaged in the pugilistic arts—which got the smile from her I’d hoped it would. We made a bargain that I’d quit the squad if my grades slipped. They never did. The only promise she ever asked of me was to do well in my studies, a simple pledge to keep because schoolwork came so easily to me.

When I won the interscholastic welterweight championship at the end of my sophomore year, I was the youngest champ in the history of the school. Daddy’s ship had come into port two days earlier, and Buck and Russell were with him in the arena that night.

My uncles were fraternal twins, only twelve years older than I. It was never any secret to me that they’d been breaking the law since boyhood. I’d heard all about the card and dice games they’d operated behind the school gym, knew all about the burglaries they’d been doing since the age of thirteen.

I was ten when they came back from the war. Buck brought me a bayonet he took off a Hun he’d killed. “Fourteen of the bastards for sure,” he said. “No telling how many I potted in the dark.”

He pulled up his shirt to show me the pinkly puckered scars where the bullet passed through that cost him a kidney. Russell was still using a cane then. He’d been an ace sniper until a machine gun knocked him out of a tree with one leg so shot up he almost hadn’t been able to talk the surgeon out of amputation.

After hearing the first few of their war stories my mother excused herself from the room. They later begged her pardon and promised not to talk of such things in her company again, and they didn’t. They usually kept to their best behavior around her, rarely using profanity in her presence and quickly apologizing when they slipped up. But I’d heard her talking to Daddy and knew she was as much bothered by their cavalier attitude toward the violence they’d seen as by the horror of their stories. She’d known them since they were wild boys in constant trouble with the law, and she was afraid they would revert to their old ways. Daddy didn’t think so. He believed the war had changed them for the better, had made them realize it was time they became responsible men.

“They’ll find themselves a right trade, you’ll see,” he said.

They’d come out of the army with enough money to see them through for a while and they told Daddy they wanted to take their time deciding what to do for a living. When they still didn’t have jobs after two months and he offered to help them get seaman’s papers or at least some kind of job on the docks, they said they didn’t want to lie to him anymore and confessed that they were back at their old trades. Daddy couldn’t understand why, after nearly being killed in France, they’d want to risk jail or even worse by going back to thieving and the gambling dens.

“Hell, Lonnie,” Buck said, lowering his voice and glancing toward the bedroom to make sure my mother wasn’t in earshot, “it’s because we didn’t get killed in France, man. I promised myself if I ever made it back to the world I’d never take another order or live another minute by somebody else’s rules.”

Russell nodded and said, “Amen, brother.”

They made a joke of his concern over their gambling, saying it wasn’t really gambling, not the way they did it. That made me laugh out loud, and Buck and Russell grinned at me. Daddy gave me a look like I’d said something he never heard before, then told them that the way they did it was even riskier than real gambling. Buck smiled wide and said, “You reckon?”

In truth Daddy knew how good they were at what they did. I’d heard him tell my mother he’d never seen a better cardsharp than Buck or anybody who could palm dice as slickly as Russell.

“How wonderful,” she’d said. “With skills such as those, can notable achievement be far behind?” She had a sardonic side that rarely showed except when something scared her that she couldn’t do anything about, like the felonious ventures of her brothers-in-law.

Over the next few years they gambled and grifted and now and then did a burglary. Daddy was afraid they might step up to armed robbery or already had but every time he asked them about it they assured him they hadn’t. They said pulling holdups was risky enough even if you knew what you were doing—and if you didn’t, it was sheer recklessness.

“There’s an old saying,” Buck said. “A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty you’re a damn genius. Pretty lousy odds, man.”

Daddy was glad to know that’s how they saw it. Armed robbery was the fastest way he knew of to get put in prison or an early grave. “At least they’re not doing holdups,” he told my mother.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s something to boast about, to be sure.”

As it was, they had their share of scrapes and sometimes carried the evidence of them—Buck with a black eye more than once, a few times with an ear puffed like a portion of cauliflower, once with his arm in a sling; Russell with a deep cut across his cheek, another time with his ribs too sore to permit him to cough, and then with his left hand swathed in a bandage until the day he and Buck came over while my mother was at the library and we saw that the gauze was off and he was missing two fingers.

“Jesus Christ, Russell,” Daddy said. “What the hell happened?”

A dice game in Chalmette had turned unsociable when somebody accused him of cheating.

“That dickhead couldn’t have spotted me palming if I’d been wearing fireman’s gloves,” Russell said. “His problem was he lacked the proper sporting spirit—sometimes you win, sometimes not.”

What the fellow didn’t lack was a razor, nor the inclination to use it. Russell fended with his left hand and zup, his little finger vanished. Then zup, the next finger at the second knuckle. At which point he yanked out his bulldog and shot the guy one time in the heart.

It was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard—but Daddy’s face dropped. “Holy shit, man, you killed him?”

“What was I supposed to do, Lonnie?” Russell said. “Let him carve me up to the elbow?”

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.

We started before sunrise and went at it till dusk. I’d arrived in the hottest part of the summer, and we’d be dripping sweat before the sun even cleared the trees. By the end of my first few days I was as eaten up with sweat rash as every man in camp. Dinner came out to us in a truck—beans and rice and cornbread, now and then some greens, once in a while some pork. Supper back in camp was the noon leftovers.

During my first few weeks in Camp M, I would come in from the fields so tired I’d sometimes lie down to rest for a minute before stripping off my filthy skunk suit and going to the showers—and next thing I knew I’d wake up mudcaked and stinking, feeling like I couldn’t breathe, my heart thrashing, the morning bell clanging in the dark.

Angola was set on an oldtime plantation of that name. It was a most serious prison with no need of stone walls. Some sixty miles north of Baton Rouge, it was bordered on three sides by a long meander of the Mighty Mississippi and on the fourth by the Tunica Hills—a lay of land naturally isolated and perfect for its purpose. It covered nearly twenty thousand acres of forest and swamp and marshland and fields of sugarcane.

We were housed in various and scattered camps, and as bad as it was in the white ones, everybody knew it was worse for the coloreds. I was put in Camp M, one of the smallest, with only about eighty men, and the most remote. It stood between a cypress swamp and a cane field. A narrow corduroy road ran through the swamp and out to the levee more than a mile away.

There were only three freemen on the place—the captain, his foreman and his clerk. The guards were convicts, most of them doing long stretches for some crime of hard violence. They wore khakis instead of stripes and carried .30-caliber carbines or twelve-gauge double-barrels with buckshot loads. Out in the field, they’d keep an eye on us from the shade of the trees and left it to the pushers to keep us working. Pushers wore khaki too, but they were unarmed. They moved along the line and made sure we never slacked off—“flogged the dog,’’ as they called it. If a con gave a pusher any backsass, the pusher called for a gun boss to come deal with him. They were the most hated men in camp, the pushers, and they lived in the guard barrack for their own safety.

Besides the guard barrack, which had its own mess, there were three convict barracks, each one run by a floorwalker, a trusty who bunked in the barracks storeroom behind wire walls that let him keep watch on things. The captain lived in a big clapboard house with a screened front porch and a backyard vegetable garden and henhouse, and the foreman and clerk shared quarters in a sidehouse. There was a mess shack, a stable for the mules and where the camp’s two trucks and two long flatwagons were kept, a tin-roofed laundry without walls, a toolshed, and a pen of large tracking hounds that went half crazy with snarling at anybody in stripes that came near them. There were three sweatboxes and a whipping log.

Camp M covered about ten acres. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence twelve feet high with rolls of barbed wire along the top. A guard tower stood at each corner, and the tower bulls had high-powered rifles.

I never got a letter from Buck or Russell and I never wrote to them. They had told me the hacks opened every bit of convict mail, going out and coming in, no matter how much they might deny doing it. So never write to anybody you did business with on the outside, and never expect to hear from any of them. That was one of the rules they taught me in case I ever took a fall.

They’d also told me that if I ever found myself in the joint some hardcase was sure to try me soon and in front of everybody so they could see what I was made of. When the guy braces you, they said, get right to it without any talk. I hadn’t been there two weeks when it happened. The lights had just come on one morning and I was sitting on my bunk when one of the camps’ daddy hardcocks, a big redhead named Garrison, snatched up my shoes and dropped a raggedy pair in their place, saying he was making a trade and I could swap with the next newcock to come in.

He was ready for me and clubbed me on the face with a shoe as I came up off the bunk at him. I hooked him in the belly and over the eye and he went on his ass. He scrabbled up quick and swung wild and I hit him twice on the ear and he went down again. He was back up on one knee when I gave him one to the jaw with all my shoulder behind it and he hit the floor on his face, out cold.

I threw his shoes down the aisle and retrieved mine and put them on. I figured I was headed for the sweatbox for sure, but the floorwalker, a trusty named Gaylord, walked on by like he hadn’t seen a thing and said for us to get outside and form up. I found out later that he had it in for Garrison and was glad to see him get cooled.

A couple of Garrison’s pals brought him around and helped him up and out to formation. His ear looked like a bunch of red grapes. His jaw wasn’t broken but over the next few days he’d have a devil of a time eating. I’d jammed a couple of knuckles on my hand but at least it wasn’t broken. Most people have no idea how easily you can break your hand on somebody’s head. It’s why they invented boxing gloves.

As we went out to formation some of the cons were grinning at me. “Ain’t this boy something,” one said. “A regular Dempsey.”

“Dempsey, hell,” said another. “Tunney’s more like it.”

And from then on, Tunney’s what they called me. None of the cons would try me again, not even Garrison, who would tell me I had a hell of punch and then let me be, like all the rest of them.

The pushers were a different story. They rode me hard from the very first day, cursing me, ordering me to work faster. I’d set my jaws tight and keep hacking at the cane and if I ever said anything it was only “Yeah boss, working faster.” But as the days became weeks they pushed me harder still. Sometimes they’d hit me across the back and legs with a stripped cane stalk and it was all I could do to keep from going at them with my cane knife. I’d have to remind myself over and over of everything Buck and Russell taught me.

Still, word had it that the captain wanted the cop killer to earn a whipping and a day in a sweatbox, to get an early taste of what was in store for him if he tried getting tough in Camp M. Some of the cons told me he wouldn’t let the pushers ease up on me till I was punished. It was no secret why I was there—every con’s crime was common knowledge in the camp. They said I was lucky the gun bulls were convicts too, because they didn’t have it in for cop killers like freeman guards did. A cop killer in a prison with freeman guards was real likely to get shot dead “while trying to escape.”

I figured the sooner it happened the sooner the pushers would quit riding me, so the next time a pusher hit me with a stalk I snatched it out of his hand and cut it in two with a swipe of my cane knife and flung the stub in his face.

The cons around us laughed and one said, “Do that to his fucken neck, Tunney.”

The pusher hollered, “Trouble here!” but the gun bosses had been watching the whole thing and were already on their way.

I spent the rest of the day in leg shackles, trying to dig a six-foot hole in the soft muck beside the bayou, a swarm of mosquitoes feeding on my face and neck. The hole naturally filled up with muddy water as fast as I shoveled it out, but that was the idea—it was a job that couldn’t be done, no matter how long and hard you went at it. After a couple of hours, I hadn’t managed to do much except dig a small pool of muck up to my shins.

One of the gun bulls came over and said, “How you like your new job, hardcase?”

“It’s a Sisyphean ordeal,” I said.

That took the smirk off his face. “You watch your fucken mouth, boy,” he said.

When we got back to camp at dusk, the field boss made his report and the captain sentenced me to thirty lashes and a day in the box.

I had already witnessed a couple of whippings by then, so I knew what I was in for. If you were going in the sweatbox after the lashing, you stripped naked, but if you were getting nothing more than the whipping, you only dropped your pants. Either way, you knelt in front of the whipping log—a portion of oak trunk about three feet thick—and hugged yourself to it with one arm and held up your balls with your other hand in case the whip tip snapped up between your legs. The whipping guard would lay into you with a leather strap some three inches wide and four feet long and attached to a long wooden handle. With the proper wrist action, he could tear up your ass pretty well in twenty strokes, the usual number the captain called for.

The first guy I saw whipped got twenty, and he couldn’t sit for a week after. The second guy I saw get it had it worse. Fifty strokes for punching a pusher. He passed out at forty and his legs slacked apart and he revived with a scream when the next stroke popped him in the nuts. Then he fainted again till it was over. He had to be carried to the sweatbox, his ripped ass dripping blood and his testicles looking like purple baseballs.

I’d learn later that only one guy was willing to bet I wouldn’t squawk for the whole thirty lashes. He lost on number twenty-three. Once you cry out it’s hard to keep from doing it the rest of the way, and I yelled again on the next stroke. But I managed to hold it to a grunt on the last six. I could feel my legs quivering with the effort of staying clamped together—and felt the piss run hot over the hand I held my balls with. I didn’t know how hard I was biting my tongue until it was over and I tasted the blood.

Then it was into the box. Four feet square and solid oak. At the bottom of one wall was a small opening about a foot long and three fingers high. That was where they slid in your bread and water twice a day. The floor was dirt and packed with the waste of the countless men who’d been in there before me. The smell was something to choke on, and at first I thought I might suffocate, but after a while I wasn’t even aware of it—there’s probably nothing you can’t get used to when you don’t have any choice. I couldn’t sit up because of my wounded ass, only lie curled up on my side. By law, a man could be boxed for up to three days at a time, and I’d heard of guys who went crazy, guys who died of the heat.

Buck said the way to beat the box was to form a red dot in your mind and concentrate on nothing but that. You’d go into a kind of trance and the time would be up before you knew it. He said it helped with pain too—you could put it all in the dot and contain it better. I tried it, and it took a while to get right, but I finally did. Sometimes I’d doze off, then snap awake and the pain would be there again, like a rat that snuck in while the room was dark, and I’d have to chase it back into the dot.

I heard things through the night—stirrings and splashings from the swamp, the rough coughs of gators in the bayou, the cries of weak things getting killed by stronger ones. I heard the camp rouse in the early morning. Heard footfalls and then the rasp of a tin plate pushed in through the slot. The shallow plate was filled with water and two slices of bread were soaking in it and I slurped down the whole soggy mess. The slot was showing gray dawnlight when I heard the cons go off to work. And I went back to the red dot.

The slot light was almost entirely faded when the cons returned to camp. I couldn’t see the slot at all by the time the bolt shot back and the door swung open and a boss said to get out of there.

The rush of fresh air made my eyes water and burned my nose and throat, and I felt the barely scabbed wounds on my ass come open as I crawled out. The boss dropped my clothes in front of me and walked off through the shadows to the guard barrack. The other cons were already at supper in the mess shack.

My cramped muscles ached to the bone as I stood up, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected, and I slowly got dressed. The worst part was pulling my pants up over my raw ass. But an amber half-moon was well up in the east and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken such pleasure in looking at the sky, in simply breathing the night air. On some French Quarter evening, probably. A memory of Brenda Marie lying naked in moonlight of exactly this color caught me so completely off guard I felt like I’d been seized by the throat.

I chased the image out of my head and cursed myself for a careless fool who deserved another ass-whipping. Then limped off to the mess shack.

Never think about what your woman might be doing on the outside—that was another Buck-and-Russell rule. Pretty soon you’d start imagining her with another guy and make yourself crazy. The guy who didn’t have a woman when he took a fall was the lucky one. If you did have one, forget her, forget her completely. If you had to think of her, think of her as married to somebody you never met, as a mother of six kids and fifty pounds fatter than you last saw her. Think of her as dead if you had to. If she knew where you were and wrote you a letter, don’t even open it before putting a match to it.

Brenda Marie didn’t know where I was, so there was no chance I’d be tempted to read a letter from her, and when I saw how miserable so many of the cons would be for days after receiving a letter from a woman, I was glad none came for me. She wasn’t the only girl I’d been spending time with in New Orleans but she was the smartest and best-looking, a rare combination for damn sure. I’d had a lot of swell nights in her Vieux Carré apartment. But I wasn’t in love with her. The hardest thing about imagining her with another guy was in wanting to be the guy, and that was hard enough.

You never know—that was the chief rule and the one I held to the tightest. You never know what’ll happen. I reminded myself of it every damn day. That one and the one about never believing the only way out was by the state’s permission. Buck said anybody who passed up a chance to escape didn’t deserve to be a free man. Russell only partly agreed. He thought a guy ought to escape whenever he could unless he had less than six months left to do. It wasn’t worth the risk if he was so close to getting let out anyway.

Buck said he’d take any chance that came along, even if he only had a month left to do, a week, a goddam hour. He could get pretty extreme in his arguments in order to drive home a point.

But it wasn’t just talk with them. When they were hardly more than kids they pulled down a one-year sentence in the St. Tammany Parish jail for burglarizing some rich guy’s house in Covington. They weren’t there three months before they cut a hole in the roof and escaped with two other guys. And there was the time Buck took a fall in Texas and got sent to a prison farm—and a few weeks later Russell and a partner delivered him out of there in broad daylight.

They had stories to tell, Buck and Russell.

The way the cons explained it, there was good news and bad news about escaping from Angola. The good news was that if you escaped and could make it out of Louisiana, the law wouldn’t bother to go hunting after you—you’d be free as a damn bird as long as you stayed out of the Bayou State. The bad news was that you probably had a better chance of being elected governor than you did of busting out.

For one thing, it wasn’t simply a matter of escaping from Camp M, which would be easy enough. You didn’t even have to try to go over the camp fence—you only had to sneak off past the gun bulls when we were working out in the fields or in the woods. But then what? You’d still be on the prison ground, a mighty big and truly rough piece of property. The river flanked the prison on three sides and was way too wide to swim across and get to Mississippi. Even if you had a boat or some kind of raft, you couldn’t make it halfway over without somebody spotting you and picking you off easy with a rifle. There was a ferry, yeah—and a squad of armed guards posted at the landing. You could try going out by the front fence, of course—which had guard towers and dogs and no cover to hide in. It was a pipe dream to think you could escape that way.

The one other thing you could try was running the levee.

It wasn’t impossible to get around the guards at the south end of the prison by circling through the woods, and then all you had to do was make your way back to the levee and follow it for sixty miles or so down to Baton Rouge. You had other choices, of course. If you thought you were up to it, you could cut away from the levee and try crossing the swamps to the west. Chances were you’d drown in the quicksand or get bit by a viper or eaten up by the alligators or go crazy from the mosquitoes or poison yourself with bad water or break a leg or starve to death after getting so lost the Devil himself couldn’t find you. Or you could run into some swamp rat who’d shoot you on sight so he could claim the state reward for fugitive convicts, dead or alive. They said not one convict who ever took off into the swamp was ever heard of again. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t try to be the first.

All things considered, you’d probably do better to stay on the levee, although they’d be coming right behind you with dogs and high-powered rifles. Plenty of cons had tried running the levee over the years and some were shot down from as far off as a half mile away, but most were caught by the dogs, and more than a few were killed by them. There was no outrunning the dogs. Only two men were known to have made the run all the way to freedom, both of them coloreds, and both had done it a long time ago.

Well, if it was so goddam hard to get out of Angola, I said, why did they even bother having tower guards at every camp like they did? Why did they even bother having fences around the camps?

“Why hell, boy,” old Dupree said, “they don’t want to encourage nobody.”

One afternoon a convict slipped out of the cypress stand where we were axing timber and was gone a good ten minutes before a pusher noticed and harked the news to the gun bulls. The runner was a big old boy named Watkins, from Slidell. He’d been married less than a month when he and his wife were at a carnival one night and some galoot gave her a passing pat on the ass. Watkins didn’t see it—he’d been trying to win her a prize by ringing the bell on one of those “Test Your Manly Strength” machines you hit with a mallet. If she’d kept her mouth shut nothing would’ve happened. But she had to pitch a fit, so naturally Watkins had to do something, and since he already had the mallet in his hands what he did was hit the guy with it. Broke his head open like a watermelon. Drew fifteen years. He’d been at Camp M only a few weeks when his pining for his wife got the better of him.

The bosses rounded us up in a hurry and took us back to camp and put us in the barracks so they could all go join the hunt. Out by the pen the dogs were yelping as they were put on a truck to be taken out to the fugitive’s trail. By the captain’s standing order, the floorwalkers couldn’t hand out the musical instruments before sundown except on Sundays, but Gaylord didn’t care what else we did while we were in lockdown, and so we played nickel-ante poker and read and napped and sat around bullshitting. Everybody wished guys would try to escape more often.

We knew when the dogs got turned loose by their sudden higher howling. For the next half hour the baying grew fainter as they chased after Watkins—and then it abruptly intensified.

“Sons of bitches run him to ground,” Red Garrison said.

There was the flat crack of a distant rifle shot, and a moment later another, and then the dogs began to quiet down and then we didn’t hear them anymore.

They brought him back draped over the hood of a truck. We stood at the windows and watched the captain come out of his house and pull Watkins’ head up by the hair to have a look at his face. He said something to his foreman and went back into the house. The dogboy got the dogs back in their pen and a couple of the bosses untied the corpse and lugged it around to the back of the truck and laid it out on the bed and then drove him away. We heard they took him to the main hospital and from there notified his wife to come claim his body.

I saw what the dogs did to another con who tried to run. He wasn’t even a half mile away when they caught up to him. The hunting party brought him back and dumped him in the middle of the camp yard so we could all have a good look. He was barely recognizable, a heap of bloody rags and flesh, his throat torn and parts of his face and hands ripped open to the bone. He didn’t have any kin listed in the records, so the captain had him buried in the small cemetery on a rise by the back fence. None of the graves had markers except one with a small flat headstone that said “Rollie,” who had been the captain’s favorite dog.

I saw guys deliberately break their arm to go to the hospital and get off the work parties for a time. They’d position their forearm between two logs and let another guy bust it with the flathead of an ax. Some guys knew just how to hit the arm to fracture the top bone, but some did the job with a little too much enthusiasm and the poor bastard’s arm looked like a battlefield wound. After the guy regained consciousness he’d go staggering off to show the misshapen arm to the bosses and tell them he’d broken it in a fall. They knew it was bullshit but what could they do? Some guys preferred to have a leg busted because it kept them off work longer. But as soon as a broken arm or a leg was sufficiently healed, sometimes even if it was still in a cast, the man was put back to work.

Some cons went for more lasting damage by cutting their heelstring, the Achilles tendon. They figured it was worth a permanent hobble to get out of hard work for good. It didn’t always turn out that way. Sometimes they got sent back to the fields anyway, back to labor made all the harder for being crippled. That’s the way it was for the weaklings of the world, in prison or out of it—when nobody else was making it hard for them, they were making it hard for themselves.

I saw a crazy guy named Verhoven brandish a cane knife in the face of a hardcock named Burnett and threaten to cut his head off for being an agent of Satan. Burnett knew Verhoven was a lunatic, we all did, but he stood there with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops and a cigarette in one hand and said, “You couldn’t kill me if you tried all day.”

The last word was hardly out of his mouth when the blade swiped through his neck. Burnett’s head rolled off his shoulders as blood sprang up in a pair of bright red twirls and fell in a spray. The body stayed upright for a moment like it wasn’t sure yet what happened, the shoulders blooming deep red, then toppled backwards, the thumbs still in the belt loops, the cigarette still smoking between two fingers. Burnett’s head on the ground stared up at nothing and had lost most of its sneer.

They said when Verhoven went to the gallows six weeks later he was chatting happily with God right up to the minute the trap opened under him.

I saw a con get down on his belly to rinse out his bandanna in a bayou and a cottonmouth struck him over the eye. The man jumped up shrieking and started running, the snake snagged to his face by one fang and whipping every which way. A couple of cons wrestled him down and one severed the snake just under the head and flung the writhing body into the water, then pried the fangs out of the man’s brow and pitched the head away too. By the time a truck carried him off, the convict’s darkly swollen face looked like a spoiled melon. They said he was dead when they got to the hospital, that the doctor listed the cause of death as “excess of venom in the brain.”

I saw these things and more through the summer and the fall and into the first cold days of a new year.

And every morning when I woke to the clanging bell in the dark, I’d remind myself once more: You never know.

Buck and Jena didn’t quite make it to their first anniversary before she ran off. She left a note saying she’d had enough of being bored and for Buck not to hold his breath till she came back. He was half drunk and close to tears the night he came over and told us about it. It was storming hard and a gusting wind flung the rain against the shutters like handfuls of gravel. He said he knew she hadn’t been happy staying at home all the time while he took care of business. He knew she thought he was having a high old time playing cards and dealing hooch while she was home with nothing but the radio for company. But he hadn’t known things were so bad she’d leave.

My mother went over to sit beside him and put an arm around him. “It’s for the best, Buckman,” she said softly. “You’ll see.”

Later on I’d realize she knew better than the rest of us how much he loved that woman and what terrible things it could mean.

But because he was in love he could not let it lay. He had to try to find her. He made inquiries around the neighborhood, thinking that maybe she’d told somebody where she was meaning to go. What he learned from several of the nosier folk on the street was that she’d frequently had a visitor these past weeks. A man, yes, they told him—sorry to say, but yes. An insurance salesman named Wilkes who one day had called on several houses along the block until he got to the LaSalle place and then called on no others. He came back almost every evening. Drove a green Lincoln. Always parked it at the end of the street and then walked up to the house and knocked on the door and was let inside.

Buck went to some people who knew how to find out things and in about two weeks he had it all. Roman Wilkes worked for a life insurance company that had branches in Texas and Mississippi in addition to Louisiana. He had recently requested and been given a transfer to the Beaumont, Texas, office. Buck even had the man’s home address.

We learned all this from him one evening when he and Russell had supper with me and my mother. Daddy was out to sea. Buck told it in a voice I hadn’t heard from him before—sort of flat, like he was talking about somebody else’s troubles, somebody he wasn’t all that much concerned with. My mother said for him to please not do anything foolish, and he looked at her like the request was too strange to comprehend.

They disappeared for a while after that, both of them, without having told us where they were going. When Daddy next came home we hadn’t seen them in over six weeks. I checked at their place a few times but the landlady didn’t know anything except they were paid up through the next two months.

Then one breezy Saturday morning when Daddy had been back about two weeks and the Spanish moss was fluttering in the oaks and the banana leaves swaying in the courtyard, right after my mother left for the library, Russell showed up.

My mother had said all along that they’d probably gone to Beaumont to look for Jena and maybe do something to the Wilkes fellow. She hoped they wouldn’t find either one—which they probably hadn’t, she said, and that’s why they were taking so long. Daddy’d said maybe they were just off larking somewhere. But my mother was right—Beaumont’s where they’d been.

It was the second thing Russell told us after the hugging and backslapping. The first was in answer to Daddy’s questions of where the hell was Buck and was he all right.

“He’s okay,” Russell said, “sorta.”

But that was as good as the news got. It’s why he’d waited for my mother to leave for the library before he came to the door. He told us the whole thing over a couple of pots of coffee.

They’d arrived in Beaumont late at night and checked into a hotel, but the next morning Buck insisted on going to Wilkes’ house alone. He wouldn’t even tell Russell the address. He left his car at the hotel and drove off in a Dodge they’d stolen the day before. Russell waited all day, and when Buck still hadn’t come back by sundown he had a bad feeling. Then he went down to the dining room for supper and there it all was in the evening edition.

Russell had torn the report out of the newspaper so Daddy and I could read it for ourselves. A local businessman named Roman Wilkes had been assaulted in his home by a suspect who identified himself to police as Ansel Mitchum. The victim was reported to be in a coma and suffering from “severe facial disfigurement.” Police had been alerted to the fracas by neighbors who reported screams from the Wilkes residence. On arriving at the scene, police found Wilkes unconscious on the living-room floor. They followed “a trail of blood” out the back door and found the “severely injured” Mitchum crawling across the yard toward a car parked in the alley. Mitchum had been taken to the hospital but refused to give any information other than his name. Police were “not specific about the nature of his injuries.” The car, they said, had been reported stolen in Orange the day before.

Neighbors told investigators they’d seen the suspect peeking into Wilkes’ windows just prior to entering the house and that “a godawful screaming” ensued shortly after he went inside. According to neighbors, a woman—“a real looker”—had been living with Wilkes for the past several weeks, and police speculated that the assault may have been provoked by a “love triangle.” A search was underway for the woman, last seen by neighbors when she ran from the house with a suitcase in hand and drove away in Wilkes’ car.

Mitchum had been arraigned in the hospital and stood charged with attempted murder. If Wilkes should die of his injuries, police said, they would amend the charge to murder or manslaughter, depending on the facts brought out in their investigation. Mitchum would remain in the hospital under guard until he was well enough to be transferred to the city jail and there held for trial.

Ansel Mitchum was an alias I hadn’t known Buck to use before. Ansel was his middle name and Mitchum was Russell’s. Russell’s favorite phony name was Caesar Smith—God knows why. Both of them had a slew of names they went by. The idea was never to give the cops a name you already had on a jail record somewhere, even in another state. Most cops couldn’t find their ass with both hands, Buck always said, but sometimes they got lucky and came up with a previous-arrest record. You wanted always to be a first-time offender.

The next day Russell had put on a coat and tie and gone to the hospital. He told the uniformed cop guarding Buck’s door that he was Luther Sammons of Houston, Texas, a cousin of Ansel Mitchum and his only living relative. They’d lost touch with each other over the past years but had been very close when they were younger. He was in Beaumont on business and had read in the paper about his cousin’s awful trouble and that he was badly hurt. He’d brought a basket of fruit and wondered if it would be all right to visit with him for a few minutes. The guard examined every piece of fruit in the basket and then gave Russell a good frisk and said all right, ten minutes.

Russell said Buck’s face was orange with iodine and all scabbed up with deep scratches over his eyes and on his cheeks. One hand was manacled to the bed by a yard of narrow chain. A catheter hung down from under the sheet and drained red piss into a plastic bag.

“He got a kick out of me just waltzing in there,” Russell said. “I asked him could he go along with me taking down the guard and busting him out, but he said hell no, he was too stove up to even stand.”

Buck told him in a whisper how he’d snuck up to Wilkes’ house and looked in the windows and saw them together on the sofa. They were in their underwear and laughing at some damn thing on the radio like they didn’t have a care in the world. He’d been ready to kick down the door but tried the knob first and found it unlocked. He was practically on top of them before they realized he was there. He got Wilkes on the floor and hit him over and over in the face with a big marble ashtray. Jena was hollering and clawing at his eyes and he snatched her by the hair and slung her across the room. Then he started stomping on Wilkes’ head and meant to keep at it for a while except Jena came up from behind and stuck him in the short ribs with a steak knife. He grabbed her by the throat but she swung the knife underhand and stabbed him in the thigh and then swung it up again and got him between the legs.

“He said the pain of it beat all he’d ever known about pain,” Russell said. “Said he couldn’t holler for the want of breath.”

He yanked out the knife but must’ve fainted because next thing he knew he was on the floor in a mess of his own blood and Jena was gone. Wilkes looked dead. The pain was something to reckon with but he managed to get on his feet and make it out the back door before he fell again and couldn’t get up. Then the cops were there. He could remember telling them he was Ansel Mitchum but had no memory of anything else until he woke up in the hospital and got the bad news.

Russell broke off from the story to light a cigarette. He took a deep drag and sighed a long stream of smoke. Then he told us Buck had lost his dick—most of it, anyway.

“He’s got about yay much left,” he said, holding two fingers an inch apart.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Daddy said.

I’d read that some Indian tribes used to cut the dicks off enemies they captured. And heard tales about blackhanders who’d castrated guys in revenge for getting the horns put on them. Such a thing had always seemed so terrible it was almost unreal, like something out of a campfire scare story.

Buck hadn’t minded talking about it, Russell said, and even joked about it, although he couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice when he wisecracked about the greater likelihood of pissing on his shoes from now on. The doctor told him he was lucky they’d been able to save both balls, and lucky he didn’t get stabbed in his only kidney. Buck said yeah, he couldn’t hardly believe his luck. He agreed with the doctor that it could’ve been worse—hell, the bitch might’ve used a spade and took his whole crotch out at the roots.

The doctor insisted he didn’t have call to be so pessimistic. The surgery had gone well and would be swift to heal. Buck still had the nerves and blood vessels in place to feel pleasure down there and would still be able to shoot off.

“Buck said that was good news, all right,” Russell told us. “Said it’d be easier on his hand too, since now he’d be able to jack off with just his thumb and forefinger.”

“Oh man,” Daddy said, and sighed and rubbed his face.

After three weeks in the hospital Buck was transferred to the city jail. Despite the efforts of a local attorney Russell had retained for him, he’d been denied bond—he didn’t own property and was unemployed and Wilkes was still in a coma, a condition the doctors said would likely be permanent. Without the testimony of either the victim or the woman who’d fled the scene, however, the state would’ve been hard put to prove attempted murder, so it went with a charge of mayhem. The trial was two weeks later and Russell was right there for it.

Buck’s lawyer began by reminding the jury that Texas law so deeply frowned on cuckoldry that it sanctioned a husband’s killing of any man he found in flagrante delicto with his wife. His client, however, had gone to Wilkes’ home unarmed and without malice, solely to try to retrieve the beloved wife stolen from him by that homewrecker of a traveling salesman. Wilkes had met Mitchum at the door and invited him in and then attacked him with a knife, mutilating him in an unspeakable manner and forcing him to defend himself. If anyone was guilty of mayhem, Buck’s lawyer told the jurymen, it was Wilkes. He described the wound in detail and offered to have his client lower his trousers so they could see the horror for themselves, but the judge said nothing doing, counselor’s description would suffice.

“The jury kinda wormed around in their chairs when he told about Buck’s wound,” Russell said. “But they did plenty of squirming too when they saw the pictures of Wilkes all laid out like a dead man in a Halloween mask.”

The state made hash of the self-defense claim by pointing out that Mitchum couldn’t have done the awful damage he did to Wilkes after receiving his own incapacitating wound. Furthermore, since Wilkes would’ve been incapable of inflicting the wound after being beaten so badly, Mitchum must have been wounded by the woman, the only other person on the scene. She’d fled from him to be with Wilkes and then stabbed him in defense of the man she really loved. As for Mitchum’s claim that she was his wife and he had a legal right to protect his marriage, where was the proof of their union?—he’d also claimed to have lost his marriage paper in a house fire.

Russell said the jury didn’t look all that pleased with themselves for finding him guilty. The judge wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to Buck, either. He made a little speech about the difficulty of passing sentence on someone who’d already suffered in a manner to make any man quail just to hear of it. Then again, the defendant did put a man in a coma, and there was some question as to whether the woman was his legal wife. So the judge gave him three years.

Buck was taken to the state pen in Huntsville for processing, and a few days after that he was transferred to a road prison near Sugarland.

“I just came back to let you all know what happened and how things stand,” Russell said. “And to take care of some things—rent and stuff. Visit with Charlie a little. Then I’ll be heading back to Texas for a bit.”

Why go back there, Daddy wanted to know. What more could he do in Texas? The only thing to do now was hope Buck kept his nose clean and got an early parole.

“Well,” Russell said, “I figure to set Buck free of that road camp or know the reason why.”

He said it the way somebody might tell you he’d made up his mind to buy a car. I’d been sitting there feeling glum about Buck being in prison and it took a second for Russell’s words to sink in—and then my heart jumped up and danced.

Daddy called him a damn fool. He said Russell could end up in prison too. He said they might both get killed. He said it wasn’t worth it, not with Buck so likely to get paroled in just a year.

Russell said Buck wasn’t likely to think of it as just a year. Daddy talked himself blue in the face but couldn’t dissuade him. They argued about it until I warned them from the front window that my mother was home for lunch.

She was happy as a pup to see him. Then she noticed Buck’s absence and asked where he was. Still at the oil rig in Lake Charles, Russell told her, where they’d been working these past weeks and carrying home their pay in a wheelbarrow. He apologized for not having sent word but they’d been working double shifts and hadn’t had time to do anything else. He was heading back to the rig himself in a few days.

My mother’s smile was as phony as a paper cutout. She said she was glad they were doing so well and asked him to stay to supper, but he said he had a date with Charlie. Daddy suggested a short one at the corner speak but Russell said he was already late and had to hurry off. He didn’t want to hear any more of Daddy’s arguments is what it was.

We didn’t see him again before Daddy shipped out a week later on a freighter taking oil-rig parts to Tampico and Veracruz. I don’t know what went through Daddy’s mind in the three weeks he was gone, but not a day passed by that I didn’t wonder if I’d ever see my uncles again.

And then a few days after Daddy’s return from Mexico, just as we were finishing supper one night, there came a jaunty little knock at the door and I answered it and there stood Russell—with Buck smiling over his shoulder.

They hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. We were all laughing and Daddy and Buck wrestled each other around the room as my mother hugged and hugged Russell and then they traded off and kept at it. For my mother’s sake, they told a bullshit story about the Lake Charles field going dry and them deciding to come home and see about maybe opening a business of some kind. She said that was wonderful. I think she knew they were lying but didn’t care, she was so glad to see they were all right. She made no mention of Jena that night or anytime after, and as far as I would ever know, she never did find out about Buck’s maiming or his time in a Texas prison.

To celebrate their homecoming we went out into the summer night and down to the corner café and its crowded backroom speakeasy. Russell telephoned Charlie to come join us. She and my mother and a pretty waitress named Jill took turns dancing with us. The beer kept coming to the table in large foaming pitchers and we cut a rug and laughed it up till almost midnight. Every now and then Buck or Russell would let me take a pull off their beer while my mother wasn’t looking. The laughter between them was different from the way they laughed with the rest of us. It was the laughter of men who’d faced danger together. Who would risk their ass for each other.

After my mother left for the library the next morning—the only time she’d ever been late and with the only complaint of hangover I’d ever hear from her—Buck and Russell came by and told us about the break.

Russell had recruited an old pal of theirs to help out, a car mechanic and smalltime thief named Jimmyboy Dolan. They’d driven to Texas and checked into a motor court on the main highway about two miles from the Sugarland prison camp. On Sunday, the visiting day, Russell went to the camp in his guise of cousin Luther Sammons. They sat at an outdoor table and Buck told him all about the guards and the work routine and how to get to the stretch of road where his gang would be clearing ditches the next day. It was a perfect spot, isolated and lightly traveled.

The following morning Russell and Jimmyboy smeared mud on the car’s license plates and drove out to the work site. Russell stopped the car next to the transport truck where two of the gun bulls stood in the shade and Jimmyboy asked them for directions to Rosenburg. Next thing the guards knew they had pistols in their faces. The boss bull hollered at the third guard, down near the end of the work line, to throw down his gun too, but the guy just stood there. “Like he was maybe thinking of trying to save the day,” Russell said.

Buck came up out of the ditch behind him and knocked the notion out of his head with a shovel.

“Should’ve seen it,” Buck said. “Old boy wobbled around in little circles with his eyes rolled up in his head like he was having a religious experience before he finally thought to fall down.”

Some of the cons went hightailing into the woods and some stood there like they wouldn’t know what to do until somebody told them. “Sorry bastards,” Buck said. “They’re exactly where they belong.”

While Jimmyboy held a pistol on the guards, Buck collected their guns and tossed them into the car. Russell opened a hood panel on the prison truck and yanked out the coil wire and put it in his pocket. They got back in the car and Russell wheeled it around and Buck said all he saw out the back window as they made their getaway was a yellow cloud of road dust.

He looked over at me and smiled—and I felt my grin get bigger.

The first time I did it was with Solise DuBois, in her family’s boathouse, only a few weeks before Buck’s escape from the Texas road gang. Over the following months I had the pleasure of lots of other schoolgirls as well and made my first visits to some of the Quarter’s best cathouses. With such experience under my belt, so to speak, I naturally thought I knew everything there was to know about sex. But it came as a revelation to me that Buck could still sport with the ladies despite lacking most of his pecker.

I received this enlightenment one evening when I was taking supper with him and Russell in a restaurant. They’d spent most of the afternoon in a speakeasy and were feeling pretty loose. As we watched the waitress sashay off to the kitchen with our order, Buck said he sure wouldn’t kick her out of bed. Then he caught my look and laughed.

“I can read your mind, kid,” he said. He aped a look of awe and tried to mimic my voice as he said, “Can he still cut the mustard, him?”

Some patrons at a neighboring table turned our way. Buck smiled and winked at them and they gave their attention back to their plates.

He leaned forward and in a lower voice informed me that there were all kinds of pleasures he could still take with women who didn’t scare easy at the sight of his stub. He still enjoyed what they could do for him with their mouth and hands, and he could still get off by just rubbing himself on a cooter. If he fit himself just right against it, he could get the woman off too. Between that and the things he could do for them with his own hands and mouth, there was plenty of fun to go around. He said he’d proved it with nearly a dozen women already, and only the first two of them whores.

“Hell, some of them’s told me the thing feels better than a whole one,” he said. “Say it gets them in the button better.”

Russell had known about the whores—the first time Buck tested himself after getting back from Texas was at Miss Quentin’s over on St. Ann’s, and Russell had gone with him—but the others were news to him and he asked how come Buck hadn’t said anything about them before.

“What?” Buck said. “I got to report to you every time I hump a broad? I got to keep a list for you? You practicing to be parole officer?”

“Hey man, I don’t give a damn who you hump or how you do it,” Russell said. “Just don’t tell me they like that stump better than they do a whole one.”

“I’m telling you what they tell me,” Buck said. “Not all of them, but some.”

We got more looks from the surrounding tables and I cleared my throat and cut my eyes sideways to let Buck and Russell know it.

Russell made a dismissive gesture, but he lowered his voice. “Look, a whore’ll do anybody and say anything, no questions asked except where’s my money. But a free woman saying she prefers a stump to a whole one? She’s either bullshitting or mighty damn drunk. No offense.”

None taken, Buck said. But we’d be surprised at the way a lot of women reacted to his mutilation—which he’d mention to them before they even got anywhere near a bed. He’d tell them he got it in the war.

“It’s like it’s some kind of challenge or something,” he said. “They have to see it. And once they do, they have to see what it feels like.”

“Challenge, my ass,” Russell said. “Pity freaks, more like it.”

“Could be,” Buck said. “All I know is I’m getting it more and getting it a lot easier than I used to with a whole one.”

Maybe so, Russell said, but if the devil himself came along and promised him all the poontang in the world in exchange for most of his dick, he’d keep what he had, thank you.

“I don’t blame you a bit,” Buck said. “Those three inches mean a lot to you, I know.”

“You dickless shitbird,” Russell said.

“You brainless asshole,” Buck said.

“I surely do enjoy being privy to these eloquent fraternal conversations,” I said.

They turned on me. “You smartmouth jackleg,” Russell said.

“You egghead pogue,” Buck said.

“Gentlemen,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper and leaning over the table, “have you never before heard that profanity is the linguistic crutch of inarticulate fuckheads?”

Buck grabbed me by the throat and affected to choke me, and Russell hissed, “Snuff that smartass.”

“Yes sir,” I said in a mock-strangled voice, “eloquent’s the word for these little family chats.”

Then we were all laughing and trading punches on the arm and drawing stares from all over the dining room. The manager came over to ask frostily if everything was all right.

“Couldn’t be better,” I told him. “Thank you for asking.”

One chill February afternoon in my junior year I came home from school to find my mother on the kitchen floor. A few hours after going into the hospital she had a second stroke and it finished her. My wire got to Daddy while his tanker was loading oil in Texas City. He wired back he’d catch the next train. When I got home the apartment felt way too large. My throat tightened when I leafed through a few of her favorite books, and when I read her margin notes in her copy of Yeats—“So true!’’ “Yes, exactly!’’ “I love this!”—the tears came. Then I went through her closet and caught the smell on her clothes and wept even harder.

I met Daddy at the station the next day and his eyes too were redly glazed. For more than a week after the funeral he sat around and didn’t say much. His aspect was of someone sitting in an empty room. Then suddenly he was all in a rush to be back on a ship, as if the only solace possible to him was out on the open sea. On a cold morning of heavy yellow fog I went with him to the docks and he got a pierhead jump on a rustbucket called the Yorrike. It was bound for ports of call all over the Orient and not due to return for nine months. I was old enough to take care of myself and there was enough money in the family account to cover my expenses for several months. He would send more each time he got paid. He’d already asked Buck and Russell to watch out for me. He shook my hand at the foot of the gangplank and told me to study hard. Then went aboard and stood at the rail as the tugs nudged the ship out to the channel and it faded in the downriver mist.

He sent money about every six weeks, each time with a short letter mostly taken up with thumbnail descriptions of the places he’d most recently been—Colombo, Rangoon, Singapore, Manila. He tried hard to sound in good spirits but I could sense his persisting grief. He always closed with an admonishment to keep up my grades and a reminder that my mother would’ve been disappointed if I didn’t.

I shared his letters with Buck and Russell, who read them with glum faces. They never said anything about them except one time when Russell said, “I guess it’s rough when you really love them,” and Buck nodded and looked out the window.

They kept an eye on me as they’d promised Daddy they would. Except when they were out of town on business, as they always called it, I’d drop in on them about twice a week and we’d usually take supper together. They came to visit me just as often. Sometimes I’d have a girl with me when they stopped by and they’d apologize for the intrusion and take a hasty leave. The next time they’d see me they’d say I’d better not be spending so much time chasing after nooky that I was ignoring my schoolwork. I’d assure them I wasn’t and proved it with my monthly grade reports, which they had to sign with Daddy’s name for return to the headmaster. I was also on the boxing team again and they never missed a match, not even when it was held at some school in another parish. At the end of my junior year I won the state middleweight title, and afterward they took me out to celebrate.

By that time they’d quit the burglary business for good. They’d never much cared for jobs that required a lot of tools or for sharing the take with fences. They still pulled gambling tricks, but their main livelihood was now armed robbery. Their longtime middleman, Bubber Vicente, was steering them to most of their jobs. They had hit their first bank only a few months before—a small one, way up in Monroe—and I’d never seen them so pleased with themselves as when they told me about it. They said two men were enough for a holdup team but a three-man team was best, so they’d taken on Jimmyboy Dolan to do the driving.

I liked hearing about the holdups they pulled. About the way they’d prepare for them and how the people’s mouths came open when they saw the guns and heard them announce the stickup. Their faces got so alive when they talked about it. Their eyes looked electric. No question about it, they were naturalborn bandits.

Me too—I just knew it. I’d felt that way since I was a kid, and I’d known it for sure the night they came back from Texas. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did, and I would be damned if I’d deny it just because I couldn’t explain it. They anyway explained it well enough one night when they were in their cups and talking about the criminal life.

“Everybody knows won money’s sweeter than earned money,” Buck said, “but stole money—especially robbed money—is the sweetest there is. All you need to win money is luck. Skill helps but ain’t necessary. But to pull a righteous stickup you need luck and skill both—and you need balls.”

It’s why cheating at a table was more exciting than playing it straight. Cheating wasn’t gambling, it was robbing, and it raised the stakes as high as they can go.

“Get caught cheating the wrong guys,” Buck said, “and it’s like to mean blood on the floor.”

Russell agreed. “Every time you do a holdup you’re risking your ass,” he said. “You never know when a guy will resist, when he’ll be somebody with a gun of his own and the sand to use it. You never know when you’ll have to get down to it with the cops.”

That’s why more people didn’t rob and steal, Buck said. “It ain’t because they’re so moral like they say. Morality’s just a excuse to hide behind. World’s full of thieves at heart who don’t steal nothing because they’re too scared to. They’re scared of the law. Scared of being punished.”

“They’re chickenshits and they know it,” Russell said. “Thump on their Bibles to try and cover it up.”

No ethics lecture I’d ever heard in school was as plain on the matter as that.

My mother had often remarked that it would be a waste of my intelligence if I didn’t go to college, and Daddy agreed, and I had allowed them to think I would. I didn’t see the need to disappoint them any sooner than necessary. I figured I’d break the news to them when the time came. But before the time came my mother died, and then ten months later—midway through my senior year, a week before Christmas and two weeks prior to my eighteenth birthday—there came a telegram to inform me that on its way back to New Orleans the Yorrike had been caught in a bad storm and foundered somewhere north of the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks in the South Atlantic. A rescue ship picked up a lifeboat with the only four survivors and none of them was my father.

The first whiskey drunk of my life lasted for all of a cold and sunless week. I sat in the apartment with a bottle at hand and Christmas carols intoning on the streets. Sometimes, asleep in the chair, I dreamt of my father on the shadowy ocean floor amid his cadavered shipmates, his skin gray as moss, his hair swaying in the current, small fish feeding in his eyeholes and passing between the bared teeth of his gaping jaws. I’d waken as wet and cold with sweat as if I’d been hauled up from those very depths.

Buck or Russell came by every day to ensure my store of whiskey. They didn’t want me out drunk on the streets, looking for more. They didn’t say much or stay long, grieving for their brother in their own way.

Some French writer once said that when a man’s father dies his only true judge is gone. Maybe so. After a week of blurred days and bad nights I cleaned myself up one morning and packed my two bags and by noon I had moved into a much smaller and cheaper apartment on Esplanade. Then I went downstairs and telephoned my uncles and arranged to meet them for an early supper at Lafitte’s.

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.

We’d gone about half a mile when we began to hear a terrible shrieking up ahead. There was no pause to it, and as we drew closer, Witliff said, “Them’s mules.” I’d been told Witliff was at Angola for burning down his ex-wife’s house while she and her new husband were in it. They’d both survived but the story was they would’ve been better off if they hadn’t.

The teamster, Wakefield, said mules was what it was. He said he and Musial, the other driver, were on their way back from delivering a load of wood to camp and were turning onto the levee road when Musial took his wagon a little too wide and the shoulder gave way. The wagon went over on its side and slid down the levee, dragging the mules with it, then slammed into the muddy bottom of the slope and overturned completely. The mules were tangled up in the harness and screaming with the pain of God knew how many broken legs. Wakefield had gone down and found that Musial was still breathing, but he was unconscious and his legs were pinned under the wagon. There’d been nothing he could do but come get help.

“I don’t know if six’ll be enough to shove that heavy sonofabitch thing off him,” Wakefield said.

When we got to where the wagon had gone off the road, the screaming of the mules was the worst sound I’d ever heard. They were trying to get up, but even if they hadn’t been twisted up in the traces, they never could’ve stood on those legs that were showing broken bone through bloody hide. Musial was on his back with his eyes closed, his legs under the capsized wagon.

“Christ’s sake, man,” Garrison said. “Put them jugheads out of their misery.”

“Shut up, Red,” the Harlins guard said. He was already cocking his carbine and taking aim. He shot one of the mules in the head and the animal went into a greater frenzy of lunging and shrieking.

“Shit,” Harlins said.

If the guards back at the riverbend heard the gunfire they wouldn’t have thought anything of it—the gun bosses were always shooting snakes or crows or at turtles in the river or hawks flying overhead.

Harlins levered another round and shot the mule again and it jerked and bellowed and both of the animals were even more panicked now and thrashing with their broken legs like they were insane.

“Christ’s sake,” Garrison muttered with heavy disgust.

Then Ogg shot the mule and it fell still.

“About time,” Garrison said.

“I told you shut your damn mouth,” Harlins said. He shot the other mule and didn’t kill it either. The veins stood out on his forehead. Then he and Ogg fired at the same time and the mule slumped dead and the following silence was a relief.

“I guess we know whose bullet did the job,” Garrison said.

Harlins jabbed him in the face with the carbine butt and Garrison went backpedaling off the end of the wagon.

“Hey, man!” Yates said, and took a step toward Harlins.

Harlins chambered a round and leveled the carbine at him from the hip. Yates half-raised his hands and the rest of us hustled to the other side of the wagon.

“All right, Connie—all right now,” Ogg said to Harlins the way you’d talk to a growling dog. “You shut up that redhead good. Let’s see to the teamster now, all right?”

Harlins eased down the hammer of the carbine and said, “Asses off,” and we all got down from the wagon. Garrison was back on his feet and trying to stem the blood running from his broken nose. He glared at Harlins, who didn’t even look at him.

We scrabbled down the levee and checked Musial. He was still alive and still unconscious. But the wagon was lying at an angle that wouldn’t allow for using the mules and ropes to drag it off him from up on the road without crushing him under it. And even if we could get the mules down to the bank without either one breaking a leg, we weren’t sure they could make it back up the muddy slope again. There was nothing to do but unhitch the dead animals and try heaving together. But the wagon was so heavy and so fast in the mud that we could barely budge it, never mind lift it enough for Wakefield to pull Musial out from under.

“We could use you up here,” Garrison said to Wakefield. His voice had gone deeply nasal and his eyes were bloodshot and already showing dark rings. He licked at the blood still oozing from his swollen nose.

“Do it,” Ogg told Wakefield. “I’ll grab onto Musial.”

Wakefield set himself with the rest of us along the wagonside and Ogg handed his carbine to Harlins and squatted down and took hold of Musial under the arms.

“All right,” Garrison said. “Heave!”

This time we raised the thing a little but still not enough for Ogg to pull him out. Musial groaned without opening his eyes.

“One more man here and we might can do it,” Dupree said, giving Harlins a look.

“Come on, Connie,” Ogg said. “Lend a hand.”

“This is bullshit,” Harlins said. “We need more guys, what we need.” But he propped the two carbines against a large piece of driftwood a few yards away and joined us at the wagon.

He was setting himself and trying to find a proper handhold when Garrison bolted for the weapons.

Harlins started after him but Witliff tripped him down on all fours. Ogg jumped up and Yates tried to grab him but he jerked away and backstepped into me and I punched him hard in the kidney and he grunted and went to his knees.

There was a gunshot and a yowl and I spun around and saw Harlins curled on his side, crying and gripping his thigh with both hands, blood running between his fingers.

Garrison chambered another bullet and stepped over to him. Holding the carbine like a pistol, he put the muzzle up close to Harlins’ temple and said, “Shut me up now, cocksucker.” And shot him. A bright thin cord of blood arced from his head and fell away and that was that.

“Oh Jesus,” Ogg said. He was sitting back on his heels and holding his side, starting horrified at Harlins.

Garrison racked the lever and an empty shell flipped out. He smiled at Ogg and said, “You wanna see Jesus, convict? Off you go.”

The carbine cracked and Ogg flopped over backward with his legs in an awkward twist.

“Whooo!” Witliff said. He’d grabbed up the other carbine and was grinning like he’d hit a jackpot. Yates was all teeth too. But Wakefield looked scared and Dupree looked angry. Chano the Mex was off to the side, cutting his eyes from Garrison to Witliff. It was almost dark now and the rest of the camp would be coming back this way very soon.

“Well boys,” Garrison said, “it’s nothing but the noose for me now. But if a nigger could run this levee I can too. You all do what you want but I’m gone.”

He turned and started off at a trot and Witliff and Yates hastened after him.

Dupree looked from Wakefield to Chano to me. “No sir,” he said. “I seen many a one try it, me, and seen they all look like after. No, thank you.” He sat down crosslegged and stared off at the river.

I hustled past him, hearing Wakefield and Chano right behind me.

We got a great turn of luck before we’d been on the run an hour—a storm swept in, the kind you don’t usually see till later in the year, full of blasting thunder and snake-tongue lightning and a cold wind that shook the trees and slung the rain sideways to sting our faces and chill us to the balls, and it was in no rush to be done with. Not man nor dog could track us in that weather. We figured they wouldn’t even start the dogs till the rain quit coming down so hard, and we picked up our pace, trying for the biggest lead we could get before they set out after us.

We bore due south, away from the levee, skirting ponds and leaping ditches and vaulting over cattle fences, tearing through cane fields, slogging through swamp muck and splashing through water to our thighs, going by dead reckoning toward a point where the river curved back around to form the prison’s lower border. We ran in single file, Garrison in the lead, Witliff and Yates behind him, then me and Chano, with Wakefield bringing up the rear. Nobody spoke as we went—we couldn’t spare the breath. The only sounds were our ragged panting and our feet sucking through the mud. Every once in a while I’d look back and see Wakefield’s shadowy form falling farther behind.

Then it got so dark we couldn’t see each other anymore except in the intermittent flashes of lightning. When the lightning finally played out and the thunder faded, the only way I could follow Yates was by the sound of him. Wakefield had fallen so far back I couldn’t hear him.

Now and then Garrison brought us to a halt to listen for the dogs and check our bearings by feeling the bark of the trees for the moss on the north side. Each time we stoppd, Wakefield would almost catch up to us, but then we’d be off and running again, and again he’d drop behind.

Sometimes Garrison or Whitliff would slip in the mud or trip on a root, and those of us coming behind would run up on him, everybody stumbling and cursing and pushing off each other and then running again, straining through the blackness like blind men, trying to sense the hole underfoot before we stepped into it, the tree branch hanging low before we hit it with our head. Yates was wheezing hard now and had slowed down so much I kept running into him, so I finally just went around him. Chano stayed right behind me.

The rain kept falling and the wind stayed in our favor, strong and at our backs. I ran in a kind of trance, unaware of anything much beyond the feel of the ground under me and a steady burning in my throat. We came onto the levee so unexpectedly I couldn’t believe we were there. We sprawled on the slope on our backs and let the rain run down our faces into our mouths. Garrison reckoned we’d been on the run at least eight hours. Witliff said it felt like all his life.

Wakefield was no longer with us. When we’d stopped to check our heading a couple of hours earlier, he hadn’t caught up, but we’d heard him splashing in the muck way behind us. Then the last time we’d stopped we hadn’t heard him at all.

The rain had slackened to hardly more than a drizzle and the clouds had thinned out and showed the vague gray hue of the coming dawn. The air was thick and smelled of mud. Judging by the lay of the levee, we reckoned we’d come a lot more to southwestward than due south. It was a wonder we hadn’t missed the levee altogether and ended up in the heart of the swamp. On the other hand, we figured we were already a good four or five miles below Angola’s southern perimeter.

“I tell you, fellers,” Garrison said, “I never did believe God loved me, but I guess that blessed storm was His way of letting me know I was wrong. By sunup tomorrow we’ll be in Red Stick City and trying to make up our minds which whorehouse to visit first.”

I couldn’t help chuckling with the others. Then Chano touched my sleeve and I looked at him and he put a finger to his ear.

For a moment I didn’t know what he meant. And then I heard it. We all did.

Dogs.

Baying in the distance and heading our way.

We ran and ran along the snaking levee, dark river on our left and black swamp to our right. The dogs were louder but still a good ways behind. You could hear that it was more than one pack. Other camps had likely joined in the hunt. About an hour after we first heard the dogs, there were three or four quick gunshots, and after a moment, a last one. I figured that was it for Wakefield.

The eastern sky was looking like smeared copper when Chano made a high sound to get my attention and I looked back and saw that Yates was down. The way he was spread-eagled facedown in the mud it was obvious he was finished. We ran on. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the hounds’ cries went higher and I knew they had him.

We ran and we ran. The sun was above the treetops now and the river was shining the color of rum. We’d gained some distance on the pack when it stopped to deal with Yates, but then the dogs had started coming again and now they sounded no more than a mile behind us.

We went around a long bend in the levee and then Garrison stopped running and leaned over with his carbine across his thighs, huffing like a bellows. Witliff squatted beside him and braced himself on his carbine like he’d run out of sap too.

“Can’t keep up,” Garrison gasped, and motioned for me and Chano to go on. So we did. A minute later Chano looked back and his face went tight and I turned and saw Garrison and Witliff running off the levee and into the swamp.

I snapped to the trick right off—they meant to use us for dog bait. I’d heard about it from Buck. If a man running from the dogs suddenly cut in a different direction, the pack would usually run past the spot where he turned—sometimes fifty yards or more—before they realized they’d lost the trail and turned back around to find it again. The trick was to start running with some other guys and then cut away from them, let them be the bait to keep leading the dogs on. But there were counters to every trick, Buck said, and he’d taught me one in case anybody ever tried to make me the dog bait.

The pack was louder now but still hadn’t come in view around the bend. I beckoned Chano and we ran down the slope and into the trees. It was no trouble to follow their trail over that soft ground, our feet growing large and heavy with mud as we wove through the shadowy pines and cypress, cutting our hands and face on scrub brush and branches, ripping our skunk suits. We hadn’t gone fifty yards when we stumbled onto a blackwater creek, and we dropped on our bellies and lapped at it like dogs. There were no footprints on the other bank, which meant that Garrison and Witliff were running in the creek.

We hustled after them, keeping to the bank to leave an easy trail. But my trick wouldn’t be worth a damn if they didn’t get out of the water pretty soon and start laying down a track of their own. Twenty yards farther on, they did. Where the creek turned off into the deeper swamp, their new tracks angled out and held on a bearing parallel to the levee. We kept after them, right on top of those footprints.

The pack was now so loud I expected to feel teeth in my ass any second. Then I realized the yelping was coming from my left—they had already overshot the spot where we came down the levee. And then the dogs realized it too and their timbre changed and fell away as they started backtracking. Their cries rose again when they recovered the scent, and they came yowling down the slope.

By then we’d caught sight of Garrison and Witliff. They were thirty yards ahead, slapping aside the brush with the barrels of their carbines as they went. They hadn’t seen us, and we slowed down and moved deeper into the shadows in case they looked back. Garrison kept glancing in the direction of the levee. He must’ve been puzzled by the changing direction of the yapping of the dogs. He had expected to hear them catch us on the levee. That would’ve been the end of any scent for the hounds to follow up there. The hunting party might’ve searched around a little more after that, but they likely would’ve reckoned that the two cons still on the loose had headed into the swamp and would die there and good riddance. Once the party turned back, Garrison and Witliff could’ve cut back up to the levee and pushed on for Baton Rouge.

A neat plan, but I had a neater one—if it worked. The dogs sounded like they were no more than fifty yards behind us. I pointed to a spot up ahead where the ground to our left gave way into the shallow water of a cypress stand. Chano nodded, his eyes enormous. We jumped off the trail and into the shallows and went highstepping and scrabbling into the thick tangles of roots and then hunkered down in the water to our chins. My heart was lunging up into my throat.

They went by not fifteen yards from us—a dark crazed pack of howling beasts. A minute later their cries went even higher and there was a carbine report and then another and a dog was shrieking in pain and then the men’s agonized screams were mingling with the dogs’ wild snarlings. Then the hunting party went hustling by, a dozen men or more with longarms, huffing and cursing and laughing, saying they had the sumbitches, by God.

As soon as they were past us we were up and splashing through the trees and stumbling over roots and the only screaming we heard now was of the wounded dog. There came several gunshots and then only the high baying of the pack and the whooping of the hunters.

When we reached the edge of the swamp and caught sight of the levee we got down on our bellies in the shadowy muckwater to rest and wait for darkness. We stank so high it was a wonder the dogs didn’t smell us from wherever they were—a wonder the men couldn’t smell us. It was the first clear day in nearly two weeks and a pretty one, sunlight showing gently through the dense branches overhead, the sky beyond the trees cloudless and pale blue. I told myself to stay alert, be sharp, it wasn’t over yet, and then fell asleep, though I didn’t know it until I woke to the faint barking of dogs.

Less than a hundred yards north of us the hunting party was back on the levee. The sun was past its meridian. Chano was sleeping on his folded arms, his chin in the water, and I shook him awake and pointed. The dogs were on leashes now, milling and yapping, and the dogboys were loading them onto the wagons. The manhunters carried their rifles slung on their shoulders and were passing bottles around and smoking and their distant laughter rose and fell and then rose again. A pair of convicts in stripes emerged from the trees and started up the slope, carrying a body between them, and then two more cons came behind them with the other one. The bodies looked like they might be naked but I couldn’t be sure from that distance, and I couldn’t tell which was Garrison and which Witliff. I likely would’ve had a hard time telling them apart up close.

Even after they all left we stayed put. We took turns sleeping and keeping watch, listening hard for any searchers that might still be prowling the area. We drank from the water we lay in, waiting for dusk. And when at last the sun was down we got moving.

We kept a fast pace, sometimes jogging, mostly fast-walking. The weather helped to keep us stepping lively—the night was cold enough to show our breath, and our ragged skunk suits weren’t much help against the chill. But at least there wasn’t any wind. Now and then we went down the levee to drink from the river. I’d heard it said that drinking from the Mississippi was like drinking a mix of piss and mud but I didn’t see how the river could be any worse than the swampwater we’d been drinking. I was anyway too tired to care. Every time I lay down to drink, it took a greater effort to get back on my feet. Every muscle ached and my joints felt like they’d rusted. The last couple of times we drank, Chano had to help me back up the levee. I had height and weight on the little bastard but not toughness.

The sky was crammed with stars. The moon rose late and cast the landscape in an eerie sepia glow and deep black shadows. Shortly before dawn the swamp began to give way to pastureland and rail fences and we spied a light about a quarter-mile off the levee and decided to see if we could find something to eat there. We went down the slope and into the pines and soon came to a clearing marked by a narrow road that passed through a scattering of ramshackle houses, some of them no more than tarpaper shacks. Several of them were now showing lamplight at their windows and it wouldn’t be long before the whole hamlet was awake.

A dog started barking somewhere down the road, and then two others, a little closer by. We stood fast in the darkness under a tree, waiting to see if they’d come for us or if somebody would step outside to see what was nettling them. I wondered if Chano was thinking what I was—if he was remembering the talk at Camp M about how people who lived near the levee prayed every day for the chance to shoot a runaway convict and collect the state reward. But the dogs must’ve been penned or not very brave and we didn’t see anybody come out for a look.

The nearest house looked to be one of the better ones, with a front porch and a tin roof, its side window dimly glowing in the shadow of a live oak, its chimney churning bright white smoke in the moonlight. We caught the aroma of something cooking and I went light in the head. Chano nudged me and I nodded and we snuck up to the window in a crouch and stood to one side of it with our backs to the wall. The windowsill was shoulder-high, the sash raised a few inches and letting out that wonderful smell. I sidled over and looked inside.

The kitchen. An oil lamp stood on a table set with three tin plates and forks and cups. The warmth of the black-iron stove carried to the window—and the aroma of ham frying in a skillet next to a steaming pot of coffee. An uncut loaf of bread was warming beside the stove. Chano peeked around me and turned up his palm in question. I was wondering the same thing: where in hell were they? We looked all around but there was still no sign of anybody out and about. The dogs had quit barking, which meant somebody had shut them up, which meant somebody was awake—but I didn’t care, not with the smells of that ham and coffee calling to me. I pushed up gently on the sash and it rose with a tiny creak. I gestured for Chano to give me a boost. He formed a stirrup with his hands and I put my foot in it and he hoisted me. I stepped in through the window and for a long moment stood absolutely still, listening hard but hearing nothing other than the sizzling of the ham.

As I started to tiptoe toward the stove a man stepped into the room with an old single-barrel ten-gauge leveled squarely at my face. An old darkie with thick shoulders and white hair and bloodshot yellow eyes—and no expression on his face except a readiness to kill me if it came to that.

“Move even a little bit I blow off your dumbshit head,” he said. The muzzle looked big as a porthole.

I thought, Ah hell, and put my hands up.

He gave a sidelong look to the window and I glanced over and saw Chano with his hands up, facing somebody I couldn’t see.

“Any more you?” the old man said.

I shook my head. “No sir.”

He ran his eyes over my ragged skunk suit and made a face of disgust. “Don’t like convicts come in my house, stink it all up.”

“Don’t blame you,” I said. I wasn’t close enough to even try snatching for the gun.

“You run that old levee?” he said.

“Tried to.”

“Try to? You all don’t even know where you at, do you? It’s not eight miles to Baton Rouge.”

Jesus, I thought, so damn close.

A small boy leaned around the door and said, “You gone shoot em, Granddaddy?”

“Hush up, John Adams,” the old man said. “Go get two pair my pants, two my shirts. And a pillowcase.” The boy scooted away.

“There’s tote sacks in that cabinet back you,” the old man said to me. “Get you one.”

I turned and opened the cabinet door and saw a stack of neatly folded sugar sacks, five-pound size. I took one.

“Put you some ham in it,” the old man said. “Don’t take it all, we ain’t ate breakfast yet.”

I stood there, not believing I’d heard him right.

“Go ahead on,” he said.

Well hell. I plucked a slice of ham out of the hot pan with two fingers and dropped it in the sack, then snatched out another.

“Cut you some bread there.”

I couldn’t keep from drooling at the smell of the ham and had to wipe the slobber off my chin. I thought I must look like one of those halfwit bums you see on the streets of New Orleans.

The boy came back with the clothes and pillowcase and the old man said for me to hold out the pillowcase and for the boy to put the clothes in it and we both did as he said.

“Now you get,” the old man said. “Don’t let me see either you round here no more.” He had a wide pale scar around the forward wrist and then I saw he had one on the other wrist too. Manacle scars.

“Listen, Uncle,” I said, “I’m grateful to you for—”

“I ain’t you uncle and don’t be talking stuff. Just get.”

He pointed me out the door. Chano was already in front. A large colored boy of maybe sixteen was holding a double-barrel on him.

“See them to the river,” the old man said.

The darkness had given way to a gray dawnlight and the sun would soon be in the trees. The boy stayed well behind us as we made our way back through the woods.

When we saw the levee up ahead, we stopped to change clothes. The old man’s khaki pants were stained with blue paint and fit me fairly well around the waist although the leg bottoms didn’t cover my ankles, and the shirt, a faded green thing covered with big yellow parrots, was only a little snug through the shoulders. There were two quarters in my skunk pants and I put them in my new pocket. Chano had to roll the bottoms of his black pants and the sleeves of his purple shirt. He looked like a walking bruise.

We put what was left of our prison stripes in the clothes sack and I handed it to the boy. “I know your granddaddy was up the river too,” I said. “I seen his chain scars. What’d he do?”

He stared at me hard for a moment. “His family hungry so he stole a chicken. They give him thirty damn years. Take thirty years of a man’s life for stealing a chicken. They bigger thieves than anybody.”

“He ran this levee, didn’t he?” I said. “Long time ago.”

He shifted his eyes from one to the other of us. “You all go on and get.”

“He’s one of them who did it,” I said.

You could see he wanted to keep his mouth shut but wanted to brag on it too. There was no hiding the pride in his face. He settled for saying, “You never know.”

I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “You damn sure don’t!”

“Go on now,” he said. He backed up into the bushes and then vanished as neatly as a stage trick.

We gobbled down the ham and bread in huge ravenous bites we almost choked on, then scaled back up to the levee crest and got on the move again.

I felt grand to be shed of those convict stripes—like I was somebody real again. I waved at a passing barge and the pilot waved back. I exchanged nods with a colored family fishing for bream from the bank with canepoles. I sang for a while as we went along—“Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Breezin’Along with the Breeze”—mixing in a few oldies for the hell of it: “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” and “The Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” and “Hello Ma Baby.” Chano smiled and bobbed his head in time to the tunes.

The sun was above the trees when we heard the ringings and whistlings and clankings of trains and caught the smells of cinders and lubricating oil. A minute later we came in view of the Baton Rouge railyard. We figured to get some sleep in the nearby woods before jumping a freight for New Orleans, but almost as soon as I closed my eyes I was taken with a sharp pain in my gut, and I barely managed to keep from shitting my pants before getting them down and squatting behind a bush.

I had to drop my pants several times over the next two hours. I didn’t know what to blame, the water or the food, but Chano didn’t have any problem. I’d heard that a Mexican stomach could stand anything and now I believed it. Naturally I didn’t get much rest between attacks, and when they finally eased off I was too wrung out to do anything but sleep.

At some point I dreamt I was back in Camp M and hearing the morning bell, and I started awake to the clanging of a train and remembered where I was. I laughed out loud and Chano rolled over and grinned at me. He was probably feeling as goofy as I was to be free. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what he had in mind to do.

“Know somebody in New Orleans?” I said.

He shook his head, then jutted his chin at me in question.

“Yeah. It’s where I’m headed. Where you going?”

He jutted his chin to westward.

“Texas?”

He shrugged.

“Mexico?”

He shrugged again. I didn’t blame him. Never tell anybody anything you didn’t have to. In his case it was easy to keep from talking too much.

“Good plan,” I said, and he smiled.

Right after sundown we cut through the woods and came out by the tracks just past the railyard. I was still feeling a little peaked but at least my gut had settled. We didn’t have long to wait before the next southbound started chugging out, slowly gaining speed, and we ran to it and swung up into an empty slat-sided cattle car. I hugged myself against the chill wind as we sat with our legs dangling out and watched the darkening countryside go rolling by.

Not an hour later we saw the lights of New Orleans up ahead and the train began to slow down. About fifty yards before it entered the railyard we jumped off and tumbled down the rocky bed grade and I generally banged up whatever part of me hadn’t been sore already.

We brushed ourselves off as the rest of the cars went clacking by. If there was something to be said I was the one who’d have to say it, but I couldn’t come up with anything. He flapped a hand at the west side of the railyard and I nodded and hooked my thumb toward town. He looked at the ground around him like somebody checking to see if he’d dropped something.

“Hey,” I said. I dug in my pocket and took out the two quarters and held one out to him. “In case you feel like buying yourself a car.”

He looked at the two-bit piece a moment, then smiled and took it and put it in his pocket. Then raised a hand in farewell and turned and quickly crossed over the tracks and into the deeper shadows and was gone.

The French Quarter was as loud as usual this Saturday night. Klaxons blatting on the streets, boat horns blaring on the river. People laughing, shouting their conversations. Jazz pulsing from the clubs and all along the streets in a jangling tangle of melodies. I stood on a corner and took it all in, this swell free world I’d been away from for more than nine months.

The sidewalks were packed with carousers, with couples and sailors and here and there some college kids, with tourists and conventioneers. Everybody happy and most of them drunk and trying hard to stay that way, passing their flasks around, Prohibition be damned. Hustlers of every stripe working the streets. Short-conners and whores, monte players, hot-stuff sellers. The rubes getting skinned by pickpockets even as they swayed to the curbside fiddlers and accordionists and popped their fingers along with the tapdancing colored boys.

Women everywhere—sweet Christ, the women. Laughing and teasing with their beaus. Doing little dance moves as they went down the street, flashing their legs under short flouncy skirts and flapper dresses. Showing off all that skin in numbers with no back to them and necklines down to there. I was already light in the head from the aromas wafting out of the restaurants, and the nearness of so much finelooking stuff after I’d been so long without it made me even dizzier. It didn’t help that I was feeling wrung out and a fever was creeping up on me. The evening was pleasantly cool but I was soaked with sweat.

Down the street I spotted some guys I recognized—a pair of second-story men and a fence named Pogo George, who had a store on Canal. They were arguing on the sidewalk in front of the Paris Theatre. I kept my face averted as I went by.

We’d never pulled a job in any part of New Orleans—“You don’t shit where you eat” was Buck’s eloquent way of explaining it—and naturally we hadn’t talked about our business to anybody except those we had to deal with. But the Quarter was a compact world and word got around about everybody in it. The big guys—the Black Hands—left you alone as long as you didn’t try cutting in on any of their trade, but the place was full of smalltimers who’d rat you out in a minute if they thought they could gain by it. No telling who might catch sight of me and somehow or other know I was supposed to be in Angola and dash off to make a deal with the cops.

As I passed the Bon Temps restaurant I caught a glimpse of a wild-haired creature in ill-fitting pants and zany shirt and took a few steps more before turning back to have a better look at my reflection in the mirrored doors. The only image I’d seen of myself since Verte Rivage was in shaving mirrors the size of my hand. I regarded a rawboned frame and a dark whiskered face of sharp angles and hot-looking eyes. It was unlikely that anyone would know me without a real careful look. A pair of young girls brushed past in the heavy sidewalk traffic and I saw the pinch of their faces, their swap of horrified looks, their gawping stares back at me, the source of such foul odor.

As much as I wanted to avoid being spotted, what I wanted even more was a cold beer. The nearest speakeasy was in the backroom of the Anchor Café down the street and I made straight for it. I paused inside the door and peered about for familiar faces. When I didn’t spot any I went up to the bar and slapped down my quarter. I drank two beers in a row without taking the mug from my mouth each time till I’d drained it. Then let out a sequence of burps that burned my nose and made me wipe my eyes.

“Sometimes it’s like a fire we got to put out, ain’t it?” the barkeep said. It was hard to tell if he was joking. I got my nickel in change and bummed a cigarette from the guy beside me and went out again.

I headed for the south end of Toulouse, where Buck and Russell shared a two-bedroom apartment in a building called La Maison Dumas. A nice place but not showy. They could easily have afforded something more elegant but they didn’t want to live in any way that might raise too many questions about how they made their living.

“On the other hand,” Russell had said to me, “there’s no need to live in a dump like yours, neither.” Actually, I liked my little place on Esplanade precisely because it was a dump. I could abandon it in a heartbeat if I had to and I’d never miss it for a minute. I only hoped Buck or Russell had gone over there and picked up my clothes before the landlord confiscated my stuff and rented the place to somebody else.

I’d been thinking about what I’d say when they answered my knock and saw me standing there. “Got tired of waiting on you boys to bust me out so I took care of the matter myself.” Something like that.

But the guy who came to the door was a stranger in undershirt and suspenders. He said he and his wife had been living there for more than two months. I checked with the landlady, who kept the chain on her door as she peeked out and at first didn’t recognize me. I smelled gumbo simmering in her kitchen. My uncles had moved away in a hurry, she said. She had no idea where they might have gone. And then I was staring at a shut door.

So. Up Decatur and past the clamor of Jackson Square and the French Market and onto Ursuline. Halfway up the block was an ornate two-story apartment building with a lawn and a spiked wrought-iron fence and a locked front gate that only the residents had a key to. Some of the taller palms in the courtyard showed above the roof, their fronds lit up from below. I scaled the fence in the shadow of an oak and dropped onto the grass on the other side. The simple exertion made everything whirl for a moment and had me sucking for air and pouring sweat.

The courtyard was illuminated by high black-iron lamps and contained a lush garden still several weeks from full flower. A redbrick walkway took me past a large goldfish fountain shadowed by palms and schefflera. I went up the stairs to the second floor. Most of the window shutters were open and as I went along the gallery I caught sight of people at their supper, conversing, listening to radios, reading, staring at nothing. In one place all the mirrors were covered with bed-sheets, a common practice in homes where someone had recently died. I stopped at the corner apartment and stared in the window at a dimly lighted, nicely appointed living room with tall shelves of books and framed art works on every wall. A radio on a side table was softly playing. “East of the Moon, West of the Stars.”

I was about to rap on the sill when she came out of the bedroom with an empty wineglass in each hand. Barefoot, white terry robe loosely belted. She slung her black hair over her shoulder with a toss of her head and went into the kitchen and a minute later came out again with both glasses showing red wine. She set one glass down on the side table and turned up the volume on the radio. Then closed her eyes and swayed to the music. And then suddenly went still—and quickly turned and saw me. And dropped the other glass to bounce on the carpet and splash wine at her feet.

“Brenda, sugar?” A man’s voice from the bedroom. She stared at me, a hand at the open neck of her robe.

I felt the last of my strength draining away and I slumped against the window jamb. I tried to smile at her but couldn’t tell if I pulled it off.

“Sonny,” she said. And came for me as I went down.

We’d met a year earlier, at an art exhibition sponsored by the mother of one of my schoolmates. I was just a few days graduated from Gulliver Academy and I’d had my fill of everything that smacked of academics, but my buddy said there’d be free champagne and some finelooking women, so I went. I hadn’t been there twenty minutes when we were introduced. An hour after that we were in bed at my place on Esplanade.

Brenda Marie Matson. A year older than I, she had been managing the Fontaine Gallery on Dauphine Street since graduating from the Institute of the Magdalene, a ritzy Catholic girls’ school over near Loyola. She was smart as a whip and could’ve breezed through college, but like me she’d had enough of studies. The gallery belonged to a family friend who lived in Paris and let her run it as she saw fit. She certainly didn’t need the job—her father was founder of Matson Petroleum. He’d been a wildcatter who brought in one of the biggest gushers in Louisiana. Her mother was a woman of French Creole pedigree whose family never forgave her for marrying the son of ragamuffin Irish, his oil money be damned. Both her parents were four years dead, lost at sea when their chartered yacht sank off the Spanish coast.

She’d won various ballet competitions and could have danced professionally if she’d wanted to. Her toes were gnarled and callused and she didn’t like for me to look at them. She told me this one night when we were naked on her bed and I was massaging her feet. I said her toes were the hard proof of her talent and something to be proud of, like a soldier’s wounds or a fencing master’s scars.

“Oh God,” she said, “a romantic.”

I lightly bit her big toe and said gruffly, “You better believe it, tootsie”—and she laughed and snared me with her legs and pulled me to her.

She loved books and art and music, but her greatest pleasure was in sex. I knew plenty of girls who enjoyed it but not like Brenda Marie. She had no inhibitions at all in bed, was ready to try anything. I’d never had two girls at the same time until the night she introduced a blonde friend named Candace to our sporting. She called it a special treat for me—and it damn sure was—but they had as much fun as I did, and I suspected it wasn’t the first time they’d done such things with each other. I didn’t ask her about it, though. And I never asked if she spent time with other men.

That was what she liked best about me, she said—that I wasn’t jealous or possessive. “It’s because you’re not in love with me,” she said. “Oh, you love being with me, and I love being with you, and that’s just perfect. Only don’t fall in love with me. Men become bores when they fall in love.”

She was preaching to the converted. Most of the love poems and stories I’d read in school, most romantic plays I’d seen and damn near every movie, presented love as either life’s greatest happiness or as some kind of thrilling adventure that was worth every minute of it even if it ended in heartache, as it so often did in novels and plays. Both notions had always struck me as a crock. From what I’d seen and heard of love in real life, whatever thrill it provided didn’t last all that long, and the aftereffects could be a whole lot worse than just a heartache. Buck was a perfect example. He’d paid a godawful price for falling in love. Brenda Marie didn’t have to fret. I wasn’t about to fall in love with her or anybody else.

If she had other lovers, they couldn’t have been very important. Whenever I telephoned to ask if she wanted to see me, she always said yes, anytime—as long as it was at her place. The one time she’d been to my apartment had been enough for her. As for me, I’d sometimes fool around with some other girl, mainly to remind myself I was free to do it, but most evenings I was with Brenda Marie.

I had told her I was working with my uncles, that they were breaking me in—which was true, only not as a sales representative for a tool company, which was what I told her. I might’ve picked a better bullshit occupation. She’d looked at me like she was waiting for the punchline of a joke.

I’d known her for two weeks when they took me on my first job, a small bank in Lafayette. The thing went smooth as glass and we pulled down nearly two grand. As I drove us back to Baton Rouge to drop off the stolen Olds and retrieve Buck’s Ford, I couldn’t stop babbling about how my heart had been in my throat while I waited for them to come out of the bank, how nothing I’d ever done before—not boxing or the midnight car races on the lake shore with my school buddies or shagging girls at high noon under the boardwalk at the lake while people were strolling directly above us, nothing—had the kick of what we’d just done. Buck said if I didn’t shut up he’d give me a kick—he’d kick my ass out of the car. I sang all the way to New Orleans. I was into “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” when Russell put his hands over his ears and said, “Oh Jesus, I surrender. Take me in. Jail’s better than having to listen to this!” I just laughed and kept on singing.

That evening Brenda Marie said she’d never seen me so “animated,” as she put it. I told her it had been a very good day on the job. She said she never would’ve guessed saleswork could be so stimulating. She was nobody’s fool, and I figured she was curious about what I was really doing with Buck and Russell, but she was too cool to press me about it. She smiled at the gusto I took in the dirty rice and étouffée we had for supper, in the high humor I found in everything even mildly funny either of us said. The sex that night was out of this world. She said if she’d known that salesmen were such Valentinos she would’ve taken up with one long before now.

Three weeks later we hit a loan company all the way over in Mobile. Buck and Russell didn’t like to pull more than one heist every six weeks or so—they loved the action, but they also loved to take it easy and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Lately, however, they’d been getting some tips too good to pass up. Mobile was another piece of cake and good for more than a thousand.

I’d asked if this time I could go in on the stickup and one of them do the driving, and they said hell no. “You got lots to learn yet, Sonny,” Buck said. “And until you do, you’re the driver.”

“Of course now, if you don’t want to do the driving anymore…” Russell said with a big smile.

“Hell yeah, I want to,” I said. “It’s just I’d like to do the stickup sometime, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, all in due time,” Russell said.

I did like doing the driving—hell, I loved it. The Mobile job left me as exhilarated as the one before, as sharply alive to the taste and feel and smell of things, especially of Brenda. She still didn’t question me, but it was obvious she was getting pretty damn curious about what I’d been up to.

She met Buck and Russell only once, when we all took supper together one night at an Italian place on Burgundy. They were at their charming best and she was delighted to discover they were fraternal twins. She said they were so young-looking to be my uncles and she laughed at Buck’s obvious pride in being the elder by four minutes. Russell had brought Charlie along and the girls seemed to like each other, though they didn’t really have much chance to get well acquainted.

They told her stories about me when I was a boy, including the one about when I was eleven years old and the neighbor woman caught me playing with her daughter’s bare behind in the garage.

“The woman brought him home by the ear,” Buck said, “and this rascal tells his mother they weren’t doing nothing but playing doctor. You be careful, pretty girl, he don’t talk you into letting him practice on you for his M.D.”

Brenda Marie laughed and said it was too late, I’d already gotten away with that one.

The next day, Charlie told me she thought Brenda was the perfect girl for me. “Not only pretty but so smart.”

Russell hugged her from behind and said, “You’re a smart cookie yourself, girl,” and she just beamed. But he agreed that Brenda Marie was a real honey, and Buck did too. Then after Charlie left, Buck went into one of his lectures about how I best be careful not to fall in love if I knew what was good for me. As if I needed to hear it from anybody.

The day before Memorial Day we crossed into Mississippi and hit a bank in Hattiesburg. They were in and out in seven minutes and I casually drove us away with $2, 500. It couldn’t have been easier if we’d owned the bank.

Buck couldn’t believe how simple the last three jobs had gone. Russell said it was having me along that did it. “This Sonny’s some kind of charm,” he said.

“Kid probably thinks they’re always this easy,” Buck said. He gave me a tap on the back of the head as I drove us along. “Listen boy, we been real lucky so far, but you never know. You have to be ready for anything, and I mean every time.”

“I’m always ready,” I said.

“Get a load of this guy,” Buck said. “Jesse goddam James.”

We got back to the Quarter at sundown and I went to Brenda’s without even stopping at my place first. I tossed my Gladstone on her sofa and whirled her around the room like a ballroom dancer, then picked her up and took her to the bedroom.

Afterward I went in the shower. When I came out she was sitting crosslegged on the bed and holding my .44 in her lap like a serious letter she’d just finished reading. The Gladstone was open at the foot of the bed.

“I guess you need this to persuade any customer who won’t fall for the standard sales pitch, huh?”

“It’s loaded,” I said.

“I know it,” she said. She raised the revolver in a two-hand shooter’s grip and sighted on a ceramic ballet figurine on the dresser. “Daddy taught me to shoot. I’m pretty good. Want to see me murder that toe dancer?” She cocked the piece.

“It’ll likely go through that wall and the next one too,” I said. “It’ll be fun explaining to the cops how you shot the neighbor lady.”

She eased down the hammer and rested the piece on her thigh. I’d been about to lay a line of patter on her about needing the gun as protection against hijackers as we drove from town to town on our sales routes, but the way she was looking at me made me forget what I was going to say. The way she was smiling.

“You’re no salesman or ever will be,” she said. It wasn’t an accusation. Her eyes were all over me, like she’d never really seen me before. Her nipples were drawn tight. “You’re some kind of goddam bandit is what you are.”

I smiled back at her.

“Aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.’’

“Hell, that’s probably a lie right there.” But she was still looking at me in that glint-eyed way she did when she was all heated up.

She put the gun aside and lay back and beckoned me with all her fingers.

I dropped my towel and went.

Three weeks later she knew enough not to ask where I was going when I kissed her so long and said I’d be back in a few days.

And I set out with Buck and Russell to take down the bank at Verte Rivage.

The Mexican’s file says he is Sebastian Tomas Carrera. Claimed birthplace Brownsville, Texas. Prior convictions—petty theft, Houston; assault and battery, Lafayette. Stabbed a white man dead in a New Iberia poolroom and drew fifty years. Had served nearly four years of his sentence at the time he escaped. Certified mute. Remnant of tongue bears evidence of nonmedical excision, years prior. Eagle tattoo covering large portion of back. Last known address in Houston. No known next of kin.

The record on Lionel Buckman tells of no previous arrests, no official documents on file. The man figures everything in the jacket is bullshit except the photograph and physical details. He’s always believed the name was phony but it didn’t matter so long as the kid took the fall. Now the bastard is absconded and it matters plenty. He detaches the picture and puts it in his coat pocket. Then tosses both files back on the warden’s desk. The warden gawks from the files to the pocket where the man has put the photo. He looks like he’s received incorrect change for a twenty. The man’s eyes hold on his. The warden clears his throat, then smiles crookedly and resumes his discourse.

A fact’s a fact, he says, and for a fact the trail gave out on the levee. The dogs had to turn back around to find it and then chased it into the swamp and brung down two of the sumbitches and we carried out what was left of them. As for the other two, what they obviously did was try to run the swamp, that’s what kinda fools they were. No tracking them in that water but so what? Onliest place to track them to woulda been a quicksand pit or a gator hole. Their bones are this minute buried in the muck or been made into gator shit on a bayou bottom. Now sir, everbody understands your interest in the matter even though you done retired, but you can rest easy that the sumbitch who murdered your boy has been made to pay for it, by Jesus….

But the man is already halfway to the door and the warden finally thinks to shut up.