Buck grabbed me by the throat and affected to choke me, and Russell hissed, “Snuff that smartass.”
“Yes sir,” I said in a mock-strangled voice, “eloquent’s the word for these little family chats.”
Then we were all laughing and trading punches on the arm and drawing stares from all over the dining room. The manager came over to ask frostily if everything was all right.
“Couldn’t be better,” I told him. “Thank you for asking.”
One chill February afternoon in my junior year I came home from school to find my mother on the kitchen floor. A few hours after going into the hospital she had a second stroke and it finished her. My wire got to Daddy while his tanker was loading oil in Texas City. He wired back he’d catch the next train. When I got home the apartment felt way too large. My throat tightened when I leafed through a few of her favorite books, and when I read her margin notes in her copy of Yeats—“So true!’’ “Yes, exactly!’’ “I love this!”—the tears came. Then I went through her closet and caught the smell on her clothes and wept even harder.
I met Daddy at the station the next day and his eyes too were redly glazed. For more than a week after the funeral he sat around and didn’t say much. His aspect was of someone sitting in an empty room. Then suddenly he was all in a rush to be back on a ship, as if the only solace possible to him was out on the open sea. On a cold morning of heavy yellow fog I went with him to the docks and he got a pierhead jump on a rustbucket called the Yorrike. It was bound for ports of call all over the Orient and not due to return for nine months. I was old enough to take care of myself and there was enough money in the family account to cover my expenses for several months. He would send more each time he got paid. He’d already asked Buck and Russell to watch out for me. He shook my hand at the foot of the gangplank and told me to study hard. Then went aboard and stood at the rail as the tugs nudged the ship out to the channel and it faded in the downriver mist.
He sent money about every six weeks, each time with a short letter mostly taken up with thumbnail descriptions of the places he’d most recently been—Colombo, Rangoon, Singapore, Manila. He tried hard to sound in good spirits but I could sense his persisting grief. He always closed with an admonishment to keep up my grades and a reminder that my mother would’ve been disappointed if I didn’t.
I shared his letters with Buck and Russell, who read them with glum faces. They never said anything about them except one time when Russell said, “I guess it’s rough when you really love them,” and Buck nodded and looked out the window.
They kept an eye on me as they’d promised Daddy they would. Except when they were out of town on business, as they always called it, I’d drop in on them about twice a week and we’d usually take supper together. They came to visit me just as often. Sometimes I’d have a girl with me when they stopped by and they’d apologize for the intrusion and take a hasty leave. The next time they’d see me they’d say I’d better not be spending so much time chasing after nooky that I was ignoring my schoolwork. I’d assure them I wasn’t and proved it with my monthly grade reports, which they had to sign with Daddy’s name for return to the headmaster. I was also on the boxing team again and they never missed a match, not even when it was held at some school in another parish. At the end of my junior year I won the state middleweight title, and afterward they took me out to celebrate.
By that time they’d quit the burglary business for good. They’d never much cared for jobs that required a lot of tools or for sharing the take with fences. They still pulled gambling tricks, but their main livelihood was now armed robbery. Their longtime middleman, Bubber Vicente, was steering them to most of their jobs. They had hit their first bank only a few months before—a small one, way up in Monroe—and I’d never seen them so pleased with themselves as when they told me about it. They said two men were enough for a holdup team but a three-man team was best, so they’d taken on Jimmyboy Dolan to do the driving.
I liked hearing about the holdups they pulled. About the way they’d prepare for them and how the people’s mouths came open when they saw the guns and heard them announce the stickup. Their faces got so alive when they talked about it. Their eyes looked electric. No question about it, they were naturalborn bandits.
Me too—I just knew it. I’d felt that way since I was a kid, and I’d known it for sure the night they came back from Texas. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did, and I would be damned if I’d deny it just because I couldn’t explain it. They anyway explained it well enough one night when they were in their cups and talking about the criminal life.
“Everybody knows won money’s sweeter than earned money,” Buck said, “but stole money—especially robbed money—is the sweetest there is. All you need to win money is luck. Skill helps but ain’t necessary. But to pull a righteous stickup you need luck and skill both—and you need balls.”
It’s why cheating at a table was more exciting than playing it straight. Cheating wasn’t gambling, it was robbing, and it raised the stakes as high as they can go.
“Get caught cheating the wrong guys,” Buck said, “and it’s like to mean blood on the floor.”
Russell agreed. “Every time you do a holdup you’re risking your ass,” he said. “You never know when a guy will resist, when he’ll be somebody with a gun of his own and the sand to use it. You never know when you’ll have to get down to it with the cops.”
That’s why more people didn’t rob and steal, Buck said. “It ain’t because they’re so moral like they say. Morality’s just a excuse to hide behind. World’s full of thieves at heart who don’t steal nothing because they’re too scared to. They’re scared of the law. Scared of being punished.”
“They’re chickenshits and they know it,” Russell said. “Thump on their Bibles to try and cover it up.”
No ethics lecture I’d ever heard in school was as plain on the matter as that.
My mother had often remarked that it would be a waste of my intelligence if I didn’t go to college, and Daddy agreed, and I had allowed them to think I would. I didn’t see the need to disappoint them any sooner than necessary. I figured I’d break the news to them when the time came. But before the time came my mother died, and then ten months later—midway through my senior year, a week before Christmas and two weeks prior to my eighteenth birthday—there came a telegram to inform me that on its way back to New Orleans the Yorrike had been caught in a bad storm and foundered somewhere north of the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks in the South Atlantic. A rescue ship picked up a lifeboat with the only four survivors and none of them was my father.
The first whiskey drunk of my life lasted for all of a cold and sunless week. I sat in the apartment with a bottle at hand and Christmas carols intoning on the streets. Sometimes, asleep in the chair, I dreamt of my father on the shadowy ocean floor amid his cadavered shipmates, his skin gray as moss, his hair swaying in the current, small fish feeding in his eyeholes and passing between the bared teeth of his gaping jaws. I’d waken as wet and cold with sweat as if I’d been hauled up from those very depths.
Buck or Russell came by every day to ensure my store of whiskey. They didn’t want me out drunk on the streets, looking for more. They didn’t say much or stay long, grieving for their brother in their own way.
Some French writer once said that when a man’s father dies his only true judge is gone. Maybe so. After a week of blurred days and bad nights I cleaned myself up one morning and packed my two bags and by noon I had moved into a much smaller and cheaper apartment on Esplanade. Then I went downstairs and telephoned my uncles and arranged to meet them for an early supper at Lafitte’s.