“Whether we like it or not, people judge us by the way we speak,” she said. “Why give the impression of being uneducated if you don’t have to?”
“I ain’t got no good answer to that, I don’t reckon,” I said.
“Lionel…”
When I finished the sixth grade, she persuaded Daddy that it was worth the cost to enroll me in a private school where I could get an education befitting my intelligence. He always deferred to her in matters of my education, and so the following year I found myself attending Gulliver Academy, overlooking Lake Ponchartrain.
Daddy had been teaching me to fight since I was old enough to make a fist, and I’d applied his lessons to the jerks in grammar school who’d made fun of my name before the teachers took to calling me Sonny. But it was at Gulliver that his tutoring served me best. The school’s motto was Mens sana in corpore sano and varsity athletes were much admired, especially the boxers. My mother had been opposed to my joining the team but I told her I wasn’t really boxing, I was engaged in the pugilistic arts—which got the smile from her I’d hoped it would. We made a bargain that I’d quit the squad if my grades slipped. They never did. The only promise she ever asked of me was to do well in my studies, a simple pledge to keep because schoolwork came so easily to me.
When I won the interscholastic welterweight championship at the end of my sophomore year, I was the youngest champ in the history of the school. Daddy’s ship had come into port two days earlier, and Buck and Russell were with him in the arena that night.
My uncles were fraternal twins, only twelve years older than I. It was never any secret to me that they’d been breaking the law since boyhood. I’d heard all about the card and dice games they’d operated behind the school gym, knew all about the burglaries they’d been doing since the age of thirteen.
I was ten when they came back from the war. Buck brought me a bayonet he took off a Hun he’d killed. “Fourteen of the bastards for sure,” he said. “No telling how many I potted in the dark.”
He pulled up his shirt to show me the pinkly puckered scars where the bullet passed through that cost him a kidney. Russell was still using a cane then. He’d been an ace sniper until a machine gun knocked him out of a tree with one leg so shot up he almost hadn’t been able to talk the surgeon out of amputation.
After hearing the first few of their war stories my mother excused herself from the room. They later begged her pardon and promised not to talk of such things in her company again, and they didn’t. They usually kept to their best behavior around her, rarely using profanity in her presence and quickly apologizing when they slipped up. But I’d heard her talking to Daddy and knew she was as much bothered by their cavalier attitude toward the violence they’d seen as by the horror of their stories. She’d known them since they were wild boys in constant trouble with the law, and she was afraid they would revert to their old ways. Daddy didn’t think so. He believed the war had changed them for the better, had made them realize it was time they became responsible men.
“They’ll find themselves a right trade, you’ll see,” he said.
They’d come out of the army with enough money to see them through for a while and they told Daddy they wanted to take their time deciding what to do for a living. When they still didn’t have jobs after two months and he offered to help them get seaman’s papers or at least some kind of job on the docks, they said they didn’t want to lie to him anymore and confessed that they were back at their old trades. Daddy couldn’t understand why, after nearly being killed in France, they’d want to risk jail or even worse by going back to thieving and the gambling dens.
“Hell, Lonnie,” Buck said, lowering his voice and glancing toward the bedroom to make sure my mother wasn’t in earshot, “it’s because we didn’t get killed in France, man. I promised myself if I ever made it back to the world I’d never take another order or live another minute by somebody else’s rules.”
Russell nodded and said, “Amen, brother.”
They made a joke of his concern over their gambling, saying it wasn’t really gambling, not the way they did it. That made me laugh out loud, and Buck and Russell grinned at me. Daddy gave me a look like I’d said something he never heard before, then told them that the way they did it was even riskier than real gambling. Buck smiled wide and said, “You reckon?”
In truth Daddy knew how good they were at what they did. I’d heard him tell my mother he’d never seen a better cardsharp than Buck or anybody who could palm dice as slickly as Russell.
“How wonderful,” she’d said. “With skills such as those, can notable achievement be far behind?” She had a sardonic side that rarely showed except when something scared her that she couldn’t do anything about, like the felonious ventures of her brothers-in-law.
Over the next few years they gambled and grifted and now and then did a burglary. Daddy was afraid they might step up to armed robbery or already had but every time he asked them about it they assured him they hadn’t. They said pulling holdups was risky enough even if you knew what you were doing—and if you didn’t, it was sheer recklessness.
“There’s an old saying,” Buck said. “A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty you’re a damn genius. Pretty lousy odds, man.”
Daddy was glad to know that’s how they saw it. Armed robbery was the fastest way he knew of to get put in prison or an early grave. “At least they’re not doing holdups,” he told my mother.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s something to boast about, to be sure.”
As it was, they had their share of scrapes and sometimes carried the evidence of them—Buck with a black eye more than once, a few times with an ear puffed like a portion of cauliflower, once with his arm in a sling; Russell with a deep cut across his cheek, another time with his ribs too sore to permit him to cough, and then with his left hand swathed in a bandage until the day he and Buck came over while my mother was at the library and we saw that the gauze was off and he was missing two fingers.
“Jesus Christ, Russell,” Daddy said. “What the hell happened?”
A dice game in Chalmette had turned unsociable when somebody accused him of cheating.
“That dickhead couldn’t have spotted me palming if I’d been wearing fireman’s gloves,” Russell said. “His problem was he lacked the proper sporting spirit—sometimes you win, sometimes not.”
What the fellow didn’t lack was a razor, nor the inclination to use it. Russell fended with his left hand and zup, his little finger vanished. Then zup, the next finger at the second knuckle. At which point he yanked out his bulldog and shot the guy one time in the heart.
It was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard—but Daddy’s face dropped. “Holy shit, man, you killed him?”
“What was I supposed to do, Lonnie?” Russell said. “Let him carve me up to the elbow?”