The Heavenly Table (13 page)

“A boy!” Bovard yelled, frustrated beyond measure with his cock’s lack of response. “You dirty whore! What do you think I am?”

“I got no idy,” she said, rolling off the bed, “but a regular man you’re not. And who do you think you are anyway, callin’ me a whore? I got half a mind to send me old man up to kick the shit out of ye.”

“Oh, so your husband is hanging around here somewhere, is he? What, lurking in a closet? Hiding under some bed? What is he, your pimp?”

“No, he works the desk downstairs,” she said matter-of-factly.

Bovard stared at her for a second, a puzzled look on his face. “Him? The old fellow who brought up the cart?” Oh, God, he thought, could this frightful mess get any worse? What a mistake he’d made.

“Ol’ Taylor might not look like much,” she said, “but at least he knows what to do when the hinges is greased and the door’s ready for entry. Why, he’s like a young bull when it comes to—”

“Out!” Bovard screamed. “Get out!”

“Would ye like your sheets changed before I leave?”

“No, damn it to hell.”

“There’s a lad I know who—”

Bovard lurched from the bed with a look of insane fury on his face, and the maid grabbed her uniform off the floor and the money from the dresser and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her. He stopped and stared into the mirror hanging over the mahogany dresser. There he stood, twenty-two years old and naked except for a crusty nightshirt, the sour taste of some scullery maid’s unwashed vagina in his mouth, his tongue blistered and quite possibly bleeding, his manhood shriveled with shame and defeat, his brain soaked with alcohol, at the end of his tether in a hotel room in the middle of Ohio, when he realized with a jolt the awful truth about himself. And the truth was that he, Vincent Claremont Bovard, had never had any more interest in the female body than a woodchuck has in learning the particulars of Latin verb conjugation. Feeling himself getting sick, he stumbled into the bathroom and retched up the sliver of chicken the maid had pushed down his gullet in a playful mood. Then he went back into the room and flopped down on the bed. How could he have been so blind? So ignorant and full of self-denial? After all, his revered Greeks and Romans had written so much about it. Buggery. Pederasty. Homosexuality. Tears began to run down his face. Thank God Elizabeth had called off their engagement. Cold chills ran over his body as he thought about the embarrassing fiasco the wedding night might have been. Then he leaned over and vomited again, this time on the braided rug, before falling into a fitful, nightmarish sleep.

The next afternoon, after deciding that leaving this world unsullied by lust was the more honorable thing to do after all, he looked by chance out the window and saw, down below on High Street, a military parade made up of Spanish American veterans showing their support for the war and carrying a banner advertising Liberty Bonds. He reached for a bottle and sat down to watch. Citizens of all ages were lined up on the sidewalk waving paper flags, tossing flowers and confetti. Though his head was fairly pounding, it was the most soul-stirring scene he had witnessed in ages, brimming over as it was with patriotism and excitement and the feeling that something world-changing was about to take place. Something much bigger and important than he, anyway.

It was that moment that he was thinking of now, as he sat on the porch smoking and looking out over the camp. To die on the Western Front, he had realized that day as he watched the old soldiers marching by, would be a far better way to leave this world than slitting his wrists in a tub of hot water. Once the procession passed and the crowd began to drift away, he had dozed off again and awakened the next morning filled with energy and purpose. After a bath and a shave, he packed his trunk and took a cab to the nearest armory. Though the draft hadn’t officially started yet, he was quickly sent, for no other reason than he had a college degree, to the Plattsburgh Barracks in New York for officer training. And now here he was, back in Ohio and on the verge of realizing his true destiny. War-ravaged Europe, with its inbred rulers and long-standing prejudices, was going to provide him, Lieutenant Vincent Bovard, with a death worth fighting for.

17

T
HANKS TO A
beaten-down bank manager named Leonard Spindler who had actually been praying for the past several weeks that such an event might happen, Cane and his brothers took the Farleigh Savings & Trust without firing a single shot. For the past nine years, Leonard had been ensnared in an increasingly unhappy marriage to the daughter of Francis Gilbert, a moneyed and maniacal bully who also happened to own the bank, along with most everything else in the town and the surrounding area. Ironically, he even had a hold on the property of Thaddeus Tardweller, a despised second cousin from his mother’s side of the family. For Leonard, it wasn’t so much that Mirabelle was hard to get along with—from the first time he’d met her, he had found the poor girl as easy to manipulate as a cud-chewing cow—but that her father wouldn’t back off in his demand that they start turning out babies. However, no matter how many times a day they had intercourse, sometimes with Gilbert standing right outside the bedroom door urging them on with a snappy rhythm he beat on a snare drum, the results were nil. What had once looked like a golden opportunity for advancement—Leonard had grown up on a chicken farm out in the country, but had fled to Farleigh on his eighteenth birthday with aspirations of becoming a dandy—had slowly turned into an unremitting nightmare, and the bank manager’s nerves had become so overwrought that he now suffered from interminable crying jags that he had no control over. And the longer his father-in-law clamored for an offshoot, the worse the affliction became. Just that morning, standing in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea and dabbing at his eyes with a dish towel while Mirabelle frantically did her fertility exercises in the parlor, he heard the man say loudly, “Girl, I realize anybody can make a mistake, but I still can’t understand why you hang on to that no-account fool. When in the hell is he ever going to plant his seed in ye? I can’t wait around forever for a grandson, though God only knows what kind of pinheaded cretin that might turn out to be with ol’ Bucket of Tears as the father. I’m tellin’ you, Mirabelle, honey, you’d be best to go ahead and cut your losses now before he saps all your youth. I know one or two men over in Atlanta who still ask about ye.”

Leonard had endured a thousand such insults and harangues in silence over the years, but, as many tyrants realize too late, even a spineless toady sometimes has his limits. Although Francis Gilbert would have never dreamed that his son-in-law had the grit for such a scheme, Leonard had been slowly and methodically draining the bank coffers for the past eleven months, in preparation for his escape to gaudy, wide-open San Francisco. Once there, he planned, in no particular order, to become a complete fop, seek out the best ophthalmologist on the West Coast, and knock up the first woman with a good set of childbearing hips who’d spread her legs for him. Only one more thing was needed to perfect his plan, and that was a scapegoat.

And so, when the awkward and grubby trio entered the bank just a few minutes after Leonard unlocked the door, and announced their felonious intentions, it was all he could do not to welcome them with open arms. In fact, he almost felt sorry for them, as he watched the short fat one trip on the doorjamb, and the youngest accidently spill over a spittoon on his way to guard the front window with a shotgun. It was obvious to the bank manager that the oldest, tall and serious in a black frock coat a bit too big for him, was the brains behind the operation, but even he, after pulling a pistol from the waist of his ragged overalls, seemed at a loss over what to do next. Afraid that some customer might walk in and spoil everything, Leonard took it upon himself to hurry the heist along, first showing them the empty vault, and then dumping the money from the two cash drawers into a bag and setting it on the counter. After that, to give them time to make their getaway and also to cover his own ass, he pretended to faint.

The Jewetts were already two miles out of town by the time Leonard moseyed up the street to the sheriff’s office. On the way there, he went over the story he planned to tell one more time in his head, and then squeezed his eyes shut in front of Ollie’s Livery until the tears were practically cascading down his pale cheeks. Everyone in Farleigh knew that he bawled like a baby over the slightest upset, and he figured that anything less than full-scale blubbering might arouse suspicion. And what did it matter? After nine years of ridicule, what were one or two more embarrassments? He had thirty thousand dollars hidden under the floorboards on the back porch at home, and only he and the robbers knew how little cash had actually been in the bank that morning. Within a few days, he would be on a train bound for the West Coast with a suitcase of money and the last laugh.

The sheriff, Earl Cotter, a potbellied man with greasy gray hair and a vein-streaked nose shaped like a cork, was sitting at his desk leafing through a seed catalog when Leonard walked in wiping at his eyes. He shook his head at the powder-blue parasol the bank manager carried and the white carnation stuck in his buttonhole. Cotter was just about to ask Leonard why he was carrying a goddamn umbrella when there hadn’t been a drop of rain in three weeks, when it suddenly occurred to him that the man never left his post before lunchtime. Never. “What are you doin’ over here?” he said, furrowing his brow.

Leonard took several deep breaths as he wiped at his face with a handkerchief, then let out a sigh and whimpered, “It was awful. I thought for sure I was a dead man.”

Before the bank manager could finish his report, Cotter leaped up from his desk and grabbed a shotgun from the rack behind him. Hurrying to the door, he stepped out warily and pointed the gun up and down the street. But there wasn’t a sign of anything out there except for the Phillips boy bouncing on his damn pogo stick on the wooden walkway in front of Cinderella Vanbibber’s house. After the way she had harassed him since spring about birds landing on her fence posts, he was a little surprised the old bitch hadn’t already sent her maid over with a complaint about it. “How long since this happened?” he shouted at Leonard through the open doorway.

“Oh, fifteen, twenty minutes ago. No more than thirty.”

The sheriff walked back into the office, a dumbfounded look on his face. “And you just now tellin’ me!”

“Well, Earl, it takes a while to count to a thousand, even for a banker.”

“Count to a thousand? What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“That’s what I was told to do and I did it,” Leonard said. “You weren’t there, Sheriff. They were killers if I ever saw one.”

Cotter rolled his eyes. “I doubt very much if you’ve seen many killers in your lifetime, Leonard.”

“Well, I seen three this morning, I can tell you that.”

“So they was packin’ guns, was they?”

“Had ’em pointed right at me,” Leonard said, as he watched the sheriff pull open a desk drawer and rummage around for his pistol and holster.

“Anybody else see them?”

“No, I’d just unlocked the door when they barged in threatening to murder me.”

“How much they get?”

“All of it.”

“Jesus Christ, boy, how much was that?”

“Thirty thousand,” Leonard replied without batting an eye. “Thirty thousand, three hundred, and fifty-four, to be exact.”

“Lord, have mercy!” Cotter shrieked. “Ol’ Gib will probably cry his own self when he hears about this.” He hurried to load the gun. His fingers started to tremble just thinking about how Francis Gilbert would react if the thieves got away; he’d once seen him, over the course of several weeks, drive a clerk named Henry Loomis to suicide over an accounting mistake that amounted to sixteen cents. Outside, the sound of the pogo stick got a little closer. He dropped a bullet and dug in the drawer for another one.

“Yeah, Earl,” Leonard said, fighting to suppress a smile, “I reckon he might.”

“We’ll be damn lucky if he don’t fire the both of us,” the sheriff said. By this time, sweat was running down his face, dripping onto the desk. In his seventeen years of being Gilbert’s lawman, he’d never had to deal with anything this bad before, and he was already thinking the worst. If it ended up that he had to kill himself, he swore to God he’d take Leonard with him. And that goddamn pogo stick, too, while he was at it. He holstered the pistol and thrust the shotgun into the banker’s hands, then grabbed a rifle from the rack and turned toward the door. “Well, come on, boy, let’s go. Thanks to your sorry ass, they done got a good start on us.”

“You go on ahead,” Leonard said.

“What?”

“I need to go home and change first. Do you realize how much this suit cost?”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Cotter said, shaking his head. “We got us some robbers to catch.”

—

S
TAYING OFF THE
main road, the Jewetts rode north for several hours before finally stopping in a thicket to give the horses a rest. Cane opened the green cloth bag the bank manager had provided them with and counted the money while they finished eating the rest of Tardweller’s ham. “Three hundred and fifty-four dollars,” he finally said.

Though Cob had never been able to comprehend exactly how numbers worked—three hundred and fifty-four didn’t mean any more to him than a million—he detected disappointment in his brother’s voice. But if the old boy at the bank wasn’t upset, then why should they be? Heck, he had been one of the nicest fellers they had ever met. He swallowed a piece of meat and said, “Well, heck, that ain’t bad.”

“Shit, that ain’t nothing but chickenfeed,” Chimney said. “Especially once you go to splittin’ it three ways. Why, a good whore probably costs two or three dollars.”

Cane began putting the money back in the bag. “I got a feeling that fancy boy pulled one over on us,” he said.

“How do ye figure?”

“Things just seemed a little too easy in there. Hell, he seemed almost glad to see us. I’m bettin’ he had the biggest part of it hid somewhere else.”