Up in Honey's Room

Eight

Honey could not believe the way the two of them kept talking, paying no attention to her: Kevin Dean the FBI agent and Carl Webster the U.S. deputy marshal, older but not that old, facing each other across the table and talking about an island in the South Pacific, Los Negros, where it turned out they’d both served but not at the same time: Kevin with the First Cavalry, ashore only two days when he was severely wounded by a Japanese grenade; Carl in the navy with a Seabee outfit, Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit 585, when he was shot, twice, and blamed Kevin for leaving two Nips hiding in the bush.

Honey sat facing the entrance to Hudson’s Pine Room, full of shoppers having lunch. For a while she turned her head from one to the other as they talked back and forth. Now she found herself looking more at Carl, an old pro with a gaunt face who wasn’t even forty.

Kevin said, “I don’t see how you got shot, the island was secured.”

Carl said, “You know what a Duck is? Not the one you eat, the kind you drive. She goes on land or water, looks like a thirtyfoot landing craft with tires. We’re coming back from the supply depot on Manus, the main island, with stores and a hundred and fifty cases of beer. We take the Duck into the water for forty yards and we’re back on Los Negros. A minute later there’s rifle fire, four shots coming out of the bush and I’m hit. Right here in the side, the fleshy part, the first time in my life I was ever shot. The two guys with me hit the deck. One of ’em, George Klein, had fallen in love with Lauren Bacall the night before watching To Have and Have Not on a sixteen-millimeter projector. It’s the picture Lauren says to Humphrey Bogart, ‘You know how to whistle, Steve?’ If he wants her for anything. ‘You put your lips together and blow.’ The other one aboard the Duck, a fella named Elmer Whaley from someplace in Arkansas, me and Elmer were sucking on Beech-Nut scrap during the trip. I got hit and like to swallow the wad of tobacco. I remember I said, ‘Boys, it’s dense growth out there. We have to wait for the Nip to come to us.’”

Kevin said, “You were armed?”

“We had carbines with us.”

“In case you saw Japs?”

“Your people told us the island was secured and we believed it. No, we brought the carbines along for fun, fire off a few rounds. The only trouble, our weapons were up in the bow. We couldn’t get to ’em without showing ourselves. But for this trip I also had my .38, the one I’d been using in the line of duty for the past seventeen years.”

“The .38 on a .45 frame,” Kevin said, “the front sight filed off.”

“Filed down so she’d pull like she was greased.”

“That was in the book. The same gun,” Kevin said, “your wife used to shoot Jack Belmont that time he was stalking you.” He said to Honey, “Remember I told you about it?”

She said, “I think so,” not sounding too sure.

“I looked him up,” Kevin said. “Jack Belmont was on the FBI’s most wanted list in 1934.” He said to Carl, “He’s the one his daddy was a millionaire?”

“Oris Belmont,” Carl said, “sunk wells in the Glenn Pool south of Tulsa and came up a multi-multimillionaire. Jack Belmont was harum-scarum from birth. He tried to blackmail Oris for having a girlfriend. That didn’t get him anything, so he set one of his dad’s storage tanks afire and Oris had him sent to prison. Jack came out of McAlester and started robbing banks, show his dad he could make it on his own. Why Jack had it in for me I’ll never know, but he came to my dad’s place near Okmulgee stalking me. Jack got to where he was aiming a .45 at me, I’m not even looking, and Louly, bless her heart, shot him three times.”

Honey remembered Kevin telling her about it, but without the details, like why she had Carl’s revolver. And something about Louly being Pretty Boy Floyd’s girlfriend? Honey was thinking maybe she should read the book about Carl.

Kevin was saying, “There was another guy Louly shot, wasn’t there? Another bank robber?”

“That was Joe Young they called Booger,” Carl said, “suppose to’ve been in Pretty Boy Floyd’s gang, what he told Louly, but never was. Louly happened to be with Joe Young at a tourist court the time we showed up to arrest him.”

Honey thinking, Wait. She happens to be there with Booger?

Carl was saying, “He opened up on us, Joe not wanting to go back to prison. We answered and there was an exchange of gunfire. Louly’s in there with him, an innocent party to what was going on. She saw she was liable to get shot, bullets ripping through the door and windows. While I’m trying to get the cops, local police, to stop firing, Louly pulled a revolver from her crocheted bag and shot Joe Young, put him out of his misery.”

Kevin said, “She packed a gun?”

“It was one Joe gave her. He’d told Louly he was gonna show her how to rob a bank.”

Honey thinking, Do you believe this?

“I told her, after, the Oklahoma Bankers Association was prepared to give her a five-hundred-dollar reward for putting her friend out of business. She said Joe wasn’t ever her friend, but did admit she had a crush on Pretty Boy Floyd. Louly met him, she was still a kid, the day he married her cousin Ruby. Then wrote letters to him while he was at Jeff City doing time. She made up a story, that Joe Young stole her stepdad’s Model A and abducted her, took her to the tourist cabin. I told her, stay with that and you won’t go to jail. But then the newspapers got hold of it, ‘Sallisaw Girl Shoots Abductor.’ Reporters started talking to Louly, wanting to hear her story, and before you know it the headline was ‘Girlfriend of Pretty Boy Guns Down Mad-Dog Felon.’ After a while she got over it, tired of people thinking she was Floyd’s sweetie, bothering her all the time.”

Kevin said, “And you married her.”

“Not till she grew up. Now she’s a U.S. Marine teaching jar-heads how to shoot a Browning machine gun.”

“You left off, you’re still on the Duck,” Kevin said.

“I hear the Nip coming through the growth,” Carl said. “I see an Asiatic face in a dirty cap appear above the gunnel. I shot him as he’s bringing up his rifle. We thought he was by himself, but now there’s another one aiming a rifle at me, his face pressed against the stock. I shot him about a second before he fired and it threw him off. I got hit in the leg ’stead of between the eyes.”

“That got you home?”

“By then I’d served my country and had a tattoo and a Purple Heart.” He said to Kevin, “They must’ve given you one of those.”

“Yes sir, I got a Heart. After that I was invited to attend FBI training.”

“That’s all, they didn’t give you a medal?”

“Not for ending up in a VA hospital.”

“They gave me a Navy Cross,” Carl said, “for doing the two Nips. I think because nothing was going on at the time, the island, you keep telling me, being secured.”

Carl missed Kevin’s helpless look. He’d turned to Honey Deal.

“I can’t wait to hear you tell me about Walter.”

She liked his eyes and the way he was looking at her that had nothing to do with Walter. She said, “If you all are through telling war stories, why don’t we order? I have to get back to being a salesgirl, put on my smile.”

Carl said, “I was hoping we’d have time to talk.”

She said, “I could meet you after work for a drink,” and saw a gleam come into his soft brown eyes.

Carl said, “Tell me when the last time was you saw Walter.”

“The day I walked out, November ninth, 1939.”

“You think about him?”

“Hardly ever.”

“You want to go with me when I see him?” It stopped her. She saw Walter staring, he opens the door and she’s in his life again. He looks stunned. Well, confused.

“Really?” Honey said, wanting to smile but held off. “What would I do, introduce you?”

“I think you’ll make him nervous,” Carl said. “I’ll get him talking, ask him questions. You watch, jump in when you think he’s lying.”

Kevin said, “I’m there too, aren’t I?”

“The only trouble,” Carl said, “if you’re with us-Walter’s already told you he’s never laid eyes on Jurgen and Otto, and he’ll stick to it, realizing it’s why I’m talking to him. I want to edge around the two Krauts and take him by surprise, get him admitting things before he knows it, while Honey stares and has him fidgeting. But what you can do for me,” Carl said, “find out if Walter’s at the butcher shop or the farm.”

Honey watched Kevin, the poor guy not knowing whether to cry or act like a cool federal agent. What he did, he stuck to the job saying to Carl, “You don’t know where anything is around here.”

Honey said, “I know where the butcher shop is. Give me the address of the farm and I’ll see Carl gets there.”

“All right, fine,” Kevin said, looking at Carl, “if that’s how you want to do it.”

Taking it like a man, Honey thought and looked at Carl, wanting to say, We work pretty well together, don’t we? What she said was, “Are we having lunch or not?”

Carl ordered the chicken potpie.

Kevin asked the waitress if he could have the Canadian cheese soup and, let’s see, a club sandwich, toasted, no mayonnaise?

Honey was hungry but chose the Maurice salad for now. She saw herself with Carl until he went back to Oklahoma.