the Hot Kid (2005) (26 page)

"Wait a minute--"

"I mean the next time we have to be apart. I got the same situation coming up. Guy wants to shoot me."

"I know--Jack."

"But this time I'm gonna be at the nut farm."

"So . . . ?"

"I don't want you to be with me."

She stayed calm.

"Why not?"

"I don't want you maybe getting shot on my account."

"Why? 'Cause we're pards? Who're you, Tom Mix?"

Louly turned her voice up and was herself saying, "You jerk, we're the same as married. When we're apart I miss you 'cause I love you so much. Honey, I love even to look at you when you don't know it. If we're gonna be apart all the time I may as well become a nun. I'll even turn Catholic and my stepfather Mr. Hagenlocker will see if he can get me burned at the stake. Carl, I have to be with you. That's all there is to it."

He had said he didn't want her to get shot. What was a better reason to leave her home? Now he said, "I love you with my whole heart.

That's why I don't want any chance of him shooting you." Carl added
,
"The way he shot Nancy Polis."

Louly said, "So that's it. Well, I'm going with you."

He had said it twice now and it hadn't changed her mind any. He was thinking it was something guys in movies always said to the babes, and that's why he said it. Except this girl had shot Joe Young in a moment when she had to. She was no shrinking violet, she stepped up. He said, "All right, if you want."

"You knew I was going," Louly said. "I want to make a bet. If you get Jack at the nut farm we get married there, this year."

"That's what you win?"

"What we win. You want to get married, don't you?"

"Yeah . . . ?"

"But you have this fear that if we're married you couldn't put yourself all the way into your job and take chances. You'd hold back being a marshal. You get Jack, it would show you can do your job and not worry about me."

He wasn't sure if that made sense, but said, "What if he gets me?"

She hesitated. "You've never thought that before, have you?"

"Or he gets away. He's always getting away."

She said, "Or what if you give me a gun and I get Jack? I wouldn't mind, since the man's a poisonous snake."

"Or Virgil shoots him," Carl said, "with his new Krag?"

They were having fun kidding around. Still, neither one offered Narcissa as a shooter.

Chapter
22

Carl and Louly arrived at sundown in the '33 Chevy they gave him to replace the shot-up Pontiac. Carl didn't even get inside the house before he and his dad were sitting on the porch talking about the weather: over a hundred degrees for the past twenty-five days, Virgil said, from July into August.

"A hunnert eight to a hunnert eleven in Okmulgee. It got so bad shade trees were dying in town. I haven't counted what we lost, must be a couple dozen. No discovery wells are going in anywhere less they're near water. The crew working the Deep Fork section were sucking water out of the creek and the graze was starting to look burnt, so I had 'em shut down the wells."

"You can't live on oil," Carl said.

"That's the truth."

"You told me that a long time ago. The night Dillinger went to the movies it was a hundred and two in Chicago."

"With those two women," Virgil said.

"The Lady in Red, a whorehouse madam named Anna Sage, and Polly Hamilton, his girlfriend while Billie Frechette's doing two years. They say Dillinger wouldn't let her drink 'cause she's Indian."

"I never heard that, she's Indian. So it was these two other women."

"Everybody was going to the movies during the heat wave. Get some of that 'Modern Refrigerated Washed Air' blowing on them."

"Here you see in the movie ads 'Air-Cooled for Your Comfort' with a polar bear sitting on a block of ice."

Narcissa appeared saying, "For you two polar bears," and set a tray holding a bowl of ice, a bottle of whiskey and two glasses on the table between them--once Virgil moved his newspapers. Carl said, "You know what that last movie was Dillinger saw?"

"If it was Dillinger," Virgil said.

"You want to get into that?" Carl sounding tired. "There's some question it wasn't Dillinger. But he did have plastic surgery and that's all I know. Right now it's still John Dillinger they got."

"I won't argue with you," Virgil said, pouring their sundown drinks.

"It opened Friday at the Orpheum. I've been hoping you get here before it leaves."

"I sat home all last week," Carl said, "waiting for Belmont to call and complain about the surveillance around my apartment. He has my number, but must've lost it. I doubt he takes care of his things. This afternoon he called the marshals asking for me and was told I was on my way here. They gave him your number. They don't do it as a rule, but want to get this business done."

"There gonna be marshals around here?"

"I told Bob McMahon, you want to get this over with, stay away. He said, once he knows Jack is on the property--I call and let him know-GCo
h
e'll set up roadblocks so he can't get out."

"So you expect Belmont to show."

"He seems stuck on living up to his word--at least with me. He says he's gonna shoot me, he has to try. Tony, the True Detective writer, phoned to tell me Jack's killing Nancy Polis got him on the wire servic
e
as a possible number one public enemy. Now he has to live up to it, even though he's still only a flash in the pan. Tony wants to be here if Jack shows up. Says he'll write the story and use 'Jack Belmont's Last Ride' as the headline. But Tony doesn't think he'll show, not with every law officer in Oklahoma looking for him." Virgil said, "I don't think he will either. I was him, I'd think about lying low till I was an old man."

"He was going to Mexico in a La Salle from Kansas City, but then I brought him home and he changed his plan."

"If you think he's coming," Virgil said, "what're you doing sitting out in the open?"

"He has to get here first, then work out how he'll do it before he can shoot me."

"All by himself?"

"I don't know," Carl said. "But who'd want to help him?"

The first ones Jack thought of were his roadhouse bouncers, Boo and Walter. He didn't think he could get used to being in the same car with Boo, but Walter would make a good partner, for a while anyway, and Walter had come from Seminole, same as Heidi and the roadhouse whores. To get there Jack needed a different car, one that wasn't hot for a change.

What he did, he left Nancy's Chevy on the street in downtown Tulsa and walked all the way home, to the Belmont mansion in Maple Ridge. It took him nearly two hours. He sneaked around back to the maid's room, the one who'd taken in his overalls, and got her to the window in her nightgown buttoned to the neck. He said to her, "Margaret, mama said I could use her car, but I need the key. It's in the cupboard in the butler's pantry on the second hook. It says Cadillac V-twelve on it."

Margaret, thirty-six, never married, had turned to stone looking at him. Jack said, "But don't wake her up to tell her. Wait till she needs the car. Tell her don't worry, I'll bring it back." She got him the keys and still didn't say one word.

That same night he drove to Seminole and parked his mom's Cadillac in front of the whorehouse where Heidi and the girls used to work. Not one of them was back. Jack got to drinking with a whiskey runner he knew, a young guy from the Cookson Hills who'd made a few deliveries to the roadhouse. Jack asked did he know what'd happened to his bouncers. The whiskey runner said yeah, Boo was living up at Bunch with some woman keeping a vegetable garden these days. "Walter, hell, Walter's back in Seminole keeping the peace in a roadhouse, the one out this way across from the Philips station."

Jack said, "He worked for me and I never knew his last name. You know it?"

"Walter's a heinie," the whiskey runner said. "He doesn't have a sense of humor and doesn't like people making fun of him. I saw it written down one time, on some papers he had. It's Schitterer."

"How do you spell it?"

"S-c-h-i-double-t-e-r-e-r. But you smile saying his name, like some drunks have done? He'll break your jaw. He won't tell his full name as a rule and stays out of trouble."

Jack said, "Schitterer," and couldn't help but smile. He recognized Walter from behind by that tree trunk of a neck growing out of his shoulders, part of his Charles Atlas build. Walter recognized Jack from the picture of him in banks and his name on the list of the 10 most wanted. He brought Jack outside to ask him, "Are you crazy, showing yourself?"

It meant this fistfighter was sympathetic to Jack's plight. Or hadn't yet heard about the thousand-dollar dead-or-alive reward. "Walter," Jack said, tempted to call him Mr. Schitterer, but not sure he could keep from grinning, "see that Cadillac V-twelve parked over there? It's mine. What I'm driving to the home of a wealthy oilman who doesn't trust banks. He keeps enough money in his house to last him all his life. I estimate a hundred thousand or more. You want some?"

"How much?"

"Forty percent."

"How you come to that?"

"We each take half, but I get ten percent more for knowing about it."

"How do we work it?"

"Watch the house. Wait for them to drive into town for some reason, for supper, and we go in."

"You say, 'Wait for them.' Who's them?"

"In case he has company, or takes his housekeeper."

"What if we can't find where it's hid?"

"Ten bucks it's in his bedroom. How about we leave tomorrow?"

Jack said. "You want to, you can drive the car, that brand-new Cadillac V-twelve."

Sunday afternoon the four of them got in Virgil's car to go to the show in Okmulgee. Virgil had said he'd bought the '31 Nash because he liked the upholstery's floral design, shades of rose and green on the beige fabric; it was like driving around in your home. The reason they took Virgil's car--Narcissa in front with a big paper sack of popcorn on her lap, Carl and Louly in back--was in case Belmont kne
w
Carl was driving a Chevy now and was out on the road waiting for it to come along.

Going east toward Okmulgee Virgil's gaze went to the rearview mirror and fixed on it. He said, "Oh, my God, look behind us." And got the others to look around at the solid mass of dust moving across the sky from the south, a heavy yellow-brown curtain closing off the horizon. Carl said it was getting worse; he'd only seen dust storms like this out in the panhandle. Louly took his arm and Carl told her it was way over in Oklahoma City; it wasn't going to catch them. Virgil said farmers kept plowing through droughts; nothing grew, and with the ground cover plowed over there was nothing to hold the topsoil. Winds would come up off the plains and blow away farmland. He said, "Around Guthrie they're shooting cattle that're starving, dying of thirst." They didn't talk much with the dust behind them, miles and miles off but they could feel it, living on the edge of the Dust Bowl. Carl said, going in the Orpheum, "I hope this is a funny movie."

Manhattan Melodrama.

Clark Gable is Blackie. William Powell is Jim. Myrna Loy is Eleanor. They said Myrna Loy was one of Dillinger's favorites. Muriel Evans is Tootsie, the platinum blonde, and she ain't bad. Blackie loses Eleanor to Jim, because Jim's such a swell guy. But it's okay with Blackie because he and Jim were boyhood pals and are still close friends, even though they're on opposite sides of the law, Blackie a gangster and Jim a prosecuting attorney and finally the governor. Blackie bumps off Jim's assistant, a snake who has evidence that would keep Jim from winning the governor's seat. Blackie is tried and convicted, sentenced to die in the electric chair. Jim, now the governor, could commute hi
s
sentence to life, but won't because he lives by the letter of the law. Evelyn tells Jim if Blackie hadn't plugged his assistant in the men's room at Madison Square Garden, witnessed by a blind beggar, he wouldn't of been elected governor. Jim still won't budge. Evelyn can't believe he won't help his friend. She leaves Jim, unable to continue being his wife. At the last moment Jim gives in, commutes Blackie's sentence to life. But Blackie won't accept it. If he doesn't go to the chair, Jim will have to resign his office. Blackie goes to the chair, Carl thinking during the scene, They're going to muss his slick hair with the metal skullcap, that part that looks like it was cut into his scalp. Carl only used a little water. He'd lost interest knowing what was going to happen. There was a good scene of Jim and Evelyn getting back together, out in the hall. Carl felt his eyes dew-up just a little. That Myrna Loy was all right. On the trip home Virgil said, "You believe a guy sentenced to die would turn down getting off?" "Uh-unh," Carl said. "Except Blackie said he'd rather fry than spend the rest of his life inside. That could be."

Virgil said, "I wanted to see more of Tootsie. I saw her in some westerns, Muriel . . . Something."

"Evans," Carl said.

They all thought the plot was okay, even if it wasn't believable, since it was a movie.

"You notice," Carl said, "how Blackie jabbed the gun as he fired it? That jabbing doesn't help any."

"I'll tell you something," Narcissa said. "That boat, the big excursion boat catching fire, the two boys become orphans and live together a while? It was Irish families on the boat in the movie. It was in 1906 an
d
it's true, it happened in the East River of New York. But it was Germans it happened to, not Irish people. I read about it."

It wasn't six o'clock yet, the sun still beating down when they got home. Narcissa went in the house to cut up chickens. Sunday dinner was always fried chicken. Louly went in to use the bathroom. Carl stood on the porch with his dad while Virgil explained Roosevelt's Farm Mortgage Act, how it helped farmers stay out of the hands of the banks. Virgil kept up with what the New Deal was doing for farmers and Carl felt obliged to be patient and listen. Virgil was getting into the Farm Bankruptcy Act and Narcissa stepped out on the porch. She said, "Virgil?" and waited while he finished what he was saying to Carl.

"What is it?"

"Somebody broke in the house."

Carl first thought, A hundred thousand stolen while we're at the show. He expected his dad to have a fit.

Virgil said, "They take anything?"

"They pulled stuff out of drawers. Tore pictures from the wall."

"Looking for a safe," Virgil said. "Why would they think a pe-can farmer would have a safe?"

"Outside of you being a millionaire pe-can farmer."

Louly came banging through the screen.

"Somebody wrecked the bedrooms looking for something."

Virgil said, "You know this is the first time I've been broken into since we built the house?" He turned to Carl. "How old were you?"

"Four," Carl said.

"That's twenty-four years ago, give or take. I use to tell these pe-ca
n
crew guys I'd pick up every year? You bust in my house, I won't hesitate to shoot you. The newspaper guys would ask what I do with my money and I'd notice my tree shakers listening in." "Aren't you gonna look," Carl said, "see what was taken?"

"Right now," Virgil said.

"What about that money you kept in the house? You told me one time a hundred thousand dollars."

"This past winter I put it in the Okmulgee bank. Oris Belmont, one of the owners, asked if I'd be on the board. I ever tell you that?"

"Oris did," Carl said.

"He seemed like a guy knew what he was doing," Virgil said. "I thought hell, let him hold it. The bank's close enough I ever need it in a hurry."