Feast for Thieves (20 page)

That’s what he proposed we take for ourselves after we both got out of the joint. He’d been in longer than me and was released two months before I was. On the day I got out, I was given a change of clothes and a twenty dollar bill, was driven to the bus station by a guard and told to get lost. Crazy Ake was already waiting for me in the shadows. He told me to forget the bus ticket; he had an old truck he was driving. Then he took me to lunch and picked up the check and afterward when we were lumbering down the highway he said he had a plan for getting rich, although he couldn’t pull it off alone.

Debt or no debt, I said no to his proposition at first. I wasn’t a criminal, not really. Much to my relief, he simply gave me his address at a boardinghouse in Memphis and told me to think about it. But as soon as he let me off at the next town I threw the address away. I didn’t want nothing to do with the man.

That’s when I started drifting. I hitchhiked from one town to the next, always looking for work, always mindful of my responsibility to my daughter. But one month turned into another and my belly got emptier and emptier. By the time I finally reached my home state of Texas, dropped in on the Chicorys, and discovered the full extent of danger I’d placed Sunny in, then I knew I had a real crisis on my hands. In my desperation I bet the high card to Rance Chicory, lost, and knew I was sunk.

That’s when Crazy Ake caught up with me again—when I was at my lowest. I reckon that’s the way evil often works. The morning after losing to Rance Chicory, I was eating from a garbage can at the back of the Cool Hand Tavern in Rancho Springs. Crazy Ake rumbled up in his truck, opened the door with a smile on his face, and said, “Get in, Rowdy. Your luck is about to change.”

I couldn’t tell you how he tracked me down. Maybe he followed me around the whole time. Sure, his was a foolish plan, even though it sounded rational to a man as deep in his misery as I. Crazy Ake never outright said it, but he hinted around at my being honor-bound to him for saving my life, particularly when I started to waver.

“Old Rowdy boy, well, if it wasn’t for me, then that knife of Big Red’s sure had your name on it—didn’t it?” he said, just before we reached the bank in Cut Eye.

“Yeah,” was all I’d said.

Crazy Ake handed me a rifle. It wasn’t even loaded. We set the old truck’s hand brake and jigged out the side while the motor was still running, shrugged off the rain while throwing sacks over our heads, and bustled straight up the middle with our rifles aimed forward.

Shoot, I never would have hurt nobody innocent. Never in a million years. I just needed money real bad.

Real, real bad.

Like every man does if he’s spent time in the clink and nobody will give him a job once he gets out.

Like every man does if his four-year-old daughter boards with a devil who’s only biding time before he makes her start working in the worst way for him.

“So where’s my cash?” Crazy Ake’s rifle was still aimed at my head.

“Nearby,” I said.

“Get it then.”

“Well, it ain’t in the parsonage, if that’s what you mean.” I tried to laugh but my words came out choppy and nervous. All I could think to do was keep him talking. “If you put down that M1, we’ll catch up. I’ll get the cash for you soon.”

“Get it for me now.” His trigger finger twitched.

“That’ll take some doing. Law was hot on me after we jumped off that bridge. It’s stashed a bit aways from here.”

Crazy Ake grinned. He set his rifle on his lap and ran one hand up and around his sideburns, scratching. “Rowdy, I tell ya, a man of your devilment is an object of wonder. What a team we make! What a team! The idea of posing as a preacher.” He cackled heartily. “That’s something only a man of great cunning could pull off, I tell you what.”

I took a step closer toward him. He set his other hand back on the rifle and shot me a cold stare.

“Relax,” I said. “I’m only going to make some coffee. Thought you might want some.”

“Coffee? Since when you drink coffee?”

“No whiskey in a parsonage.” I raised an eyebrow.

He laughed again. I glanced at the rifle. It was still solid in his hands.

“Rowdy, here’s what I propose.” Crazy Ake slid his boots off my table and let the front legs of the chair clump to the floor. “It doesn’t surprise me that our cash is well hid. That was a smart thing for a fella to do, and I would’ve done the same myself. So let’s do this. Now that you know I’m back in town, I’ll leave for a day or so. When I’m gone, you dig up the money. I’ll come back and we’ll square up. How’s that sound?”

I stared him in the eyes. He was being smart, not kind, and I knew it, but what could I do—tell him I’d decided to follow Jesus then taken the money back to the sheriff’s office? There’d be a bullet between my eyes faster than I could say skedaddle. I took another step toward the kitchen and asked, “Out of curiosity, how’d you track me down?”

He shrugged. “Wasn’t hard. Came back into Cut Eye last week, stopped by the Sugar House, shut my mouth, and listened.” Crazy Ake shifted in the chair. “The place was real quiet. Hardly
no men around, but some yahoo was talking about sawing timber with a reverend every Saturday. ‘Mighty big fella, too,’ the yahoo said. ‘He could saw timber all day.’ So that got me to thinking. I hung around town awhile more, then saw you driving up the highway one afternoon in that DUKW.” He laughed loud. “You own that outright, or did you steal that too?” The rifle was ever near both of his hands. He was telling stories now, but he wasn’t off guard. Not in the least.

“It came with the job,” I said.

“Well, I see that’s not all the job came with.” Crazy Ake’s eyebrows flew up to his forehead. “Who’s that pretty young gal I saw you jogging with earlier today down Lost Truck Road? I bet she came hard to bargain for.” He cackled a full thirty seconds.

“That’s the sheriff’s daughter.” I wanted to include some truth in what I was telling him, lest he’d done more homework, so I eyed him closely then added, “She worked as the minister before me. She’s been showing me the ropes.”

“I bet she has.”

“Nah, it’s not like that. I’m not with her.”

“That’s not how I saw it.” He wiped froth from his mouth with the back of one hand. “But what does it matter. Look—here’s how this is going to go down. I’ll give you a full forty-eight hours to get the money. Tuesday night we’ll meet again and get squared. Seventy-thirty split, like we agreed. And don’t think you’re gonna run anywhere in the meantime. I know you wouldn’t do that to a friend anyway, but if I can track you here, then there ain’t no place safe for you to hide.”

Crazy Ake stood to leave, still loosely aiming the rifle toward me. He circled around me and walked backward toward the door, ever keeping me in his line of sight.

“Time’s ticking, Rowdy.” He winked. “And I want mine in small bills.”

EIGHTEEN

I
was in a jam. A real hamstrung jam.

I contemplated sleeping in the DUKW that night, but it was all open air, so that would never do. Instead, I stayed inside and locked the front door of the parsonage, and I never locked my doors. Not sure why that would do me any good even. A bullet could come straight through those walls if Crazy Ake wanted it to. I contemplated digging a foxhole and sleeping out in that, but without a weapon, even a foxhole wouldn’t do me much good. There was nowhere safe from that man.

All night long I paced and figured, paced and figured. Sleep fled from my eyes. There was nothing I could do to get out of this mess, no matter how I saw it. I sure couldn’t come up with the cash, that was for certain. Crazy Ake didn’t know the exact amount of what we’d snagged, but by the size of the sack I carried out the door, he knew his take was going to be in the thousands. Where would I ever borrow that kind of cash?

I couldn’t go to the sheriff and tell him the story to get justice on my side. If I did, then that was the same as admitting my guilt to robbing the bank. Halligan would be obliged to throw me in jail for a long time to come. Sunny would never get free from the Chicorys. The state would pounce on the sheriff for costing the taxpayers money. He’d lose votes come next election, and Oris Floyd would run the town. Lots of folks would be in a mess then.

I couldn’t run nor hide, not that I even wanted to. Just like
Crazy Ake said, he’d find me no matter wherever I went.

It was a heap of trouble even to buy a rifle and defend myself. All my money went to pay off Rance Chicory. Maybe I could get a cash advance from Emma at the mercantile, but even then, what was I supposed to say when I bought the rifle? That I was taking up hunting? With me eating at the café, there was no need for extra food. That I’d been a sharpshooter during the war and wanted to practice my skills lest they wither? Nobody wanted to hear about war exploits these days. Maybe I could buy a gun in the next town, but even if I could pull that off, I wasn’t sure how much good it would do anyway with the cards stacked in Crazy Ake’s favor, especially the element of surprise. If I came out on the good side of a shootout with Crazy Ake, it’d likely land me back in the slammer, or worse—the law would see it as murder unless I could explain the fuller story behind why I was shooting at him. I was sunk. A man without a plan.

On Monday morning I got up, tossed on some clothes, and headed into the pine slash with my axe. Didn’t even get breakfast. I just chopped and chopped, trying to get my head around my predicament. I kept chopping all through lunch and on past dinner until it was dark. About 9 p.m. I headed back to the parsonage, still without a plan.

A note was tacked to my front door. It had come out of the blue while I was away, and the note flapped in the evening breeze.

When it came to leaving a name, the note was unsigned. The coward. It struck me so strange, such a contrast—here I was with my mind so full of life-and-death matters, some spiritual, some physical, and then one of my congregants jabs at me over something as petty as a skipped verse of a hymn.

I didn’t rightly know how to respond to this criticism. Or even if I should. I felt like shouting at this person to stop being so easily irritated, but a shout didn’t seem reflective of my ministerial office. Without me knowing who signed the note, I couldn’t speak to the note writer in person to address the matter head-on. Maybe when it came to music, I could make a mental note of different folks’ individual preferences within the congregation. Maybe that was the solution. But music being what it is, and folks being folks, there were bound to be plenty of conflicting preferences—so I had no idea what to do. Maybe there was a different solution, one I didn’t savvy yet. I was still getting used to this strange life as a reverend. I hoped I’d have a good number of years left to do so.

The note, I crumpled, and used it to light a fire in the stove to take the chill out of the air. I hadn’t eaten all day, not since lunchtime the day before, but I wasn’t feeling the pain in my stomach. I was feeling it deep in my bones. I went back outside and did overhand pull-ups on the awning until I thought I’d about pass out. Then I came back inside and paced around the parsonage some more.

Long after midnight, I fell into a shallow and restless sleep.