Feast for Thieves (2 page)

Dang that rain. Our old truck’s motor coughed its last revolution just as Crazy Ake slid behind the wheel and I slid in the other side. He stomped on the starter but the wetness must have already slunk into the wiring because the motor sputtered and growled, but no life came. It never rains in West Texas, least never when I was growing up near here, and I don’t know why we picked this day of all days to commit a crime. Sure enough, the rooftop gutters on the adobe bank were full and overflowing, and muddy rivers were flashing up and rolling down the streets already. Crazy Ake slugged me hard in the shoulder as if the truck’s dead motor was my fault. I moved to paste him back when I thought smarter and hollered instead, “Run!”

The bank sits square on Main Street, right across the way from the sheriff’s office and jail. We sprinted east a block, hooked south onto Highway 2, and kept running. Far in the distance we could see our goal. There ain’t but one stretch of two-lane in and out of the town of Cut Eye, Texas, and if we’d had more time we would have done smart to hide somewhere. But since we could already hear a siren starting up from back of the sheriff’s house, we kept running, hoping to get lost in the wide section of bunch grass and mesquite trees out of town.

We passed by the café and mercantile, the tavern and pool hall with its shady rooms on top, and pushed ourselves hard past the Cut Eye grade school, a red-and-white brick building that squats direct across the street from the tavern. I reckoned city planners wanted their children to grow up seeing the evils of
strong drink up close, which made me laugh, though by the time we reached the far edge of the school’s baseball field the thought of the school’s ill location flitted out of my head. Except for a few scattered houses, the town of Cut Eye was finished. Crazy Ake and I were running free.

That’s when a bullet zinged behind my ear. I jagged to the right and Crazy Ake jagged to the left. Another bullet rang out and thudded into the mud on the highway’s gravel shoulder five yards in front of us. That sheriff behind us was never a military man, I reckoned, to shoot so far away from his target such as he was doing. Or maybe he was simply a man of mercy and wanted to catch his criminals before frying them in the chair.

I glanced back and saw the long snout of the car’s hood gaining on us. No way we could outrun it no how, and I could already see the narrowed eyes of the two men inside. By the cut of the man’s uniform in the driver’s seat, I knew it wasn’t the sheriff but only a deputy. He shot out of the window of the squad car with one hand on the wheel and another on his gun. That meant he was shooting left-handed and squirrely, though a bullet is a bullet any way you look at it. Another man in regular clothes sat beside him, just some hayseed in overalls who probably had money in the bank, so I knew he weren’t the sheriff neither, which further relieved me a mite.

Even so, I sprinted harder and jagged off-kilter again so the next bullet would be just as hard-pressed to find the back of my head. Sure enough two more shots thudded into the blacktop near my feet, and then a fifth and a sixth. I noticed the deputy shot with a Smith & Wesson square-butt military and police revolver, a real gem of a weapon that’s warmed the hearts of thousands of men in authority across the country. So with six shots fired, that meant he needed to pause and reload. That gave me a moment to hatch a plan.

A hundred yards ahead lay the bridge across the river. Crazy Ake and I jagged closer together and kept sprinting forward. The squad car pulled in close and breathed on our heels; it’s a wonder the deputy didn’t accelerate and run us over. Wasn’t much of a plan, I knew even in the moment, but I dropped my rifle to the pavement, lashed my gunnysack to my belt while still on the run, and hollered, “Jump in the river! Swim with the current!”

Our boots clattered on the edge of the bridge’s grating just as two more bullets whizzed over our heads. Crazy Ake didn’t answer at first. Then he yelled, “That’s my money! You remember that, Rowdy Slater!” And he leaped over the guardrail and dived into the water faster than you could yell jackrabbit.

I jumped after him and counted on the long way down.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four
—and sucked in a quick lungful of air right before I hit. The shock of cold water smacking my body flattened me out. It was all mountain runoff, and I burbled underneath the black river that raced along now in flood proportions from today’s heavy rainstorm. Immediately something hard struck me from behind and scraped its way along the top of my head. I fought against the current and scrambled to reach the surface, but no surface could be found. I pushed and shoved with my hands and arms, kicking with my legs so as not to go deeper under. Whatever was blocking me rolled and turned this way and that. I was stuck.

From its feel, the blockage seemed to be the stump of a tree trunk caught over my head. The deadwood washed its way down river same speed as me, except now I was tangled in the bare branches on the stump’s other end. I kept counting, all the while struggling to break free.
Thirty Mississippi. Thirty-one Mississippi. Thirty-two
—I clawed and pushed against the branches. Nothing would budge. I couldn’t bounce upright and I couldn’t clear myself away.
Hundred-and-one Mississippi. Hundred-and-two Mississippi
—my lungs pounded in my chest. The tree became my lawman,
judge, and jury, and was trying me for my crimes, finding me guilty, holding me under.
Two-hundred-and-fifty Mississippi
.
Two-hundred-and-fifty-one Mississippi—
my hands flailed against the branches above. Air trickled out of my nose. My lungs emptied and I fought a strong urge to gasp.

Strange how a man is racing along under the surface of a rain-swollen river, he’s but a moment away from death, and he takes a split second to take stock of his life. Maybe the thought rushes at him because he can’t help himself. I knew I was about to die and I wasn’t afraid. No, it honestly wasn’t fear. Last December 1944 I’d survived the artillery blasts of the Battle of the Bulge. For two months I’d slept in a foxhole during Belgium’s coldest winter in thirty years. We were outgunned and outmanned with no proper winter clothing or supplies. We ate thin brown bean soup with maggots in it and peed on our hands to warm them before pulling the trigger against our enemies. No, it wasn’t fear.

’Twas regret. That was the thought that rushed at me.
All that scrapping around I done. All that getting loaded. All that visiting the shady rooms above taverns
. My C.O. once called me “the most incorrigible man in Dog Company,” and considering we were a combat-hardened group of paratroopers who brawled, drank, and visited brothels every chance we got, that was paying me no compliment indeed. Shoot—I was the worst of the lot. From a hundred yards away I could fire my M1 and hit the wings off a fly, and that’s the only thing that saved me. My skill as a sharpshooter won their respect. My ability saved their lives. My knack with a rifle saved me from going to the clink before I did, even though I undoubtedly deserved it way ahead of time.

The thought raced away from me as quick as it came, and I continued to fight. Raging water surrounded me. I began to black out. Still I fought, but still the branches wouldn’t come loose. My chest sunk flat and a pressure caved the insides of me. I inhaled a lungful of muddy water, and then another. The river swirled into
me like a bullet from a Nazi’s rifle, choking my insides, filling tight my lungs.

That’s when I heard him. I swear I did. The man spoke loud, although I couldn’t tell from what direction his voice came. Some man I didn’t recognize, maybe a lawman who sprinted alongside the riverbank. He shouted at me the same clear way I’d shouted at Crazy Ake exactly eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds earlier by my count of Mississippis.

“Hey fella!” came the voice. “You want to live?”

How that man’s voice was reaching me so far under the water, I couldn’t rightly fathom, but there under the river, caught as I was and speeding along in the current of destruction, I nodded my head and hoped a saving rope would soon follow.

“Then find the good meal and eat your fill,” it said. “Swear you’ll do that?”

I nodded again.
What a crazy thing for the man to say
, I thought. Maybe I was going unconscious, but just then the tree broke loose like a strong hand moved it, the tangle of branches passed over my head, and I shot to the surface. A moment later my knees scraped gravel on a shallow section of riverbed. I stumbled forward out of the river, walked three steps onto dry ground, and vomited a bellyful of muddy water.

No one was around. I flopped down on my side and stayed flat against the cold river stones for some time, panting. I could see the river bent right where I washed up. The river’s force must have propelled me to safe ground, and the lawman, whoever had yelled at me, was lost in the dusk. Maybe passed by on the bank.

Little by little, the rain let up. Somewhere a coyote howled. Crazy Ake was nowhere to be seen, same as the deputy and the fella in the overalls chasing me in their car. The sack of money was still tied to my belt. After a time, I stood and walked to the river’s edge. I washed away the vomit’s slime from my mouth,
then scrambled a mile or two more downstream on my feet, all the while taking stock of what to do next. I found a thicket to hide myself and waded into the midst of the trees. Again I listened carefully. No sirens. No dogs in the distance. If the shouting lawman had been near he would have caught me by now. I didn’t know exactly how far I’d traveled, but I might be ten miles away from Cut Eye now at the rate that river raced.

A piece of flint lay in my jacket pocket, same as I always carried it, so I gathered some brushwood, lit a tiny flame so as not to be seen, and set about drying the chill out of my wet clothes. The thicket covered me well enough, so in stealth I counted out the cash, ventilating stacks of bills in the heat of the flame so they wouldn’t stay wet and grow moldy, and saw we’d bounced out of the bank with exactly $18,549. That amount of money would solve any man’s aggravations, I knew, including mine. But when I stared at the loot it looked oddly tarnished, as decaying as an enemy corpse found in the woods. As impossible as it seemed for someone like me, I actually whispered out loud, “I don’t want it.”

’Course, I didn’t know what to do with the money neither. A man can’t be roaming around the Texas countryside with fifteen years’ wages stuffed in a gunnysack. I clambered halfway up the bank, far enough so high water would never touch the mark, and eyed out a location at the base of a tree. I scraped out a hole, lined it with rocks to prevent rot, and buried the money still in the sack.

My stomach rumbled. The adrenaline buzz of nearly dying gave me the shakes, and I reckoned some food might do me good. After making it up the rest of the bank, I stopped, momentarily mesmerized by the clearing of the clouds. The wind blew stormlike, except the storm was leaving, not coming, and high in the night sky as far as I could see was a breathtaking blue and black. Below that were the ends of a sunset, the purples and reds, and low against the horizon were the last oranges and yellows, all fire and brilliant, an absolute pure light.

I didn’t want to leave this sight of wonderment but I knew a criminal needs to make haste. In front of me lay thin growths of tussock and salt grass. One lone juniper tree stood tall in the dark. I wondered what distant land I might run to now, far away from Cut Eye, Texas, and the law. There came another rumble deep in my gut, one I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried, and I recognized it as the kind of ache that brings about death if a man ignores it long enough. I wondered how I might find that good meal, the one the voice was talking about, and eat my fill.

TWO

T
hey say the town of Cut Eye sits halfway between nowhere and emptiness. It’s been around for some one hundred and thirty years, ever since the days of the Wild West. The only highway for two hundred miles in any direction is Highway 2, which passes right through Cut Eye, and I knew if I didn’t find that highway, I’d be wandering around in the sagebrush until the buzzards ate me.

So I left the riverbank, pointed myself southeast, and started walking. What I hoped to do was flag down a long-haul trucker, a man passing through who had no knowledge of the events that transpired the late afternoon before. What I didn’t want was any locals to come along and get suspicious of a man standing beside the side of the road with his thumb sticking out, someone they didn’t recognize straightaway.

It took me most of the night to find my way back to the blacktop. I hid in the ditch while a car or two passed. When a tanker truck loomed in the distance I took a risk and stepped up. Morning sun was just beginning to show, and on the truck’s side was painted “Kansas City Southern Lines:
For the Duration
,” so I knew he was hauling for the railroad, most likely out of Shreveport or Lake Charles. Sure enough, he pulled to the shoulder and I ran to the cab.

“Where headed?” He was a colored man, which didn’t bother me none, and although he was leaned over so as he could speak
to me, I could still see a shotgun resting across his legs pointing my direction.