The Moth (23 page)

In the morning I found some other place, and had sliced orange, ham and three eggs, flapjacks, and coffee. They treated me O.K., but by now I was getting more and more self-conscious about my scrubbed-out jeans. I began looking for clothes. The good places I stayed out of, because I figured they’d be shy of the stuff I wanted. But on a side street, back of one of the hotels, I spotted a place that said “summer clearance sale,” and walked over there. First I picked out a pair of heavy khaki work pants, the kind that go up under your chin in front and fasten with a pair of suspenders behind. Then I tried on shoes. I needed brogans, but got the best-looking pair I could see. Then I got two pair of woolen stockings. I think they felt best of all. On the road, if you’ve got any socks at all you’re lucky, but if they’re not all full of holes that cut your toes and blister your heels, then you’re asleep, dreaming. To wobble my foot and feel clean wool all over it was wonderful. Then I picked out drawers, undershirt, and shirt. I wanted a check, like the girls had had, but I happened to think it might be the one thing somebody would remember me by, if they were pinned down in court. I said make it khaki, to go with the pants. Then I picked out flannel pants, to wear under the khaki, a dark coat, and a brown hat, one of the two-and-a-half-gallon jobs that practically everybody wears in that neck of the woods. I dressed in the backroom, and told them to throw my old stuff away. Was I glad to kick it all in a corner, and step out of there clean, whole, and with a decent smell!

Outside, on a bench, at a bus stop, I counted up again, and had nearly sixty dollars. I sat there, trying to think what I was going to do. Across from me girls kept going up and down, and I wondered if my sixty dollars, provided I ate three times a day, would get me in shape so they looked like girls, instead of just things in skirts. But I had to cut Buck and Hosey in, I knew that, and if I felt it had to be my own way, to be safe, I still had to do it. I walked on down to the store again, and bought them the same outfits. There was no trouble over sizes. I’d heard them call theirs, so many times, in the missions, I’d have known them in my sleep. I took the stuff up over to the hotel, taking care to keep all sales slips in my hip pocket, in case. I still had a little money left, so I went out and bought beans, bacon, eggs, and stuff. I still had my gunny sack, that I had washed out with the other things in the Salt River, so I opened all packages, dumped them in, and threw away the wrappings. I shook it up, like it had been filled in a hurry. I took it over to the S.P. tracks. From there, following Hosey’s directions, I hit the jungle, and there, believe it or not, feeding a fire he’d made between two piles of bricks, was Buck. “Well, for God’s sake look at Adolph Menjou!”

“Buck, how are you?”

“Sir, I’m fine.”

“Hosey here?”

“Out mooching grub. He’ll be along.”

“I brought some grub.”

“Well, will you
talk?”

“Slight case of theft, that’s all.”

“You mean—?”

“Well, what do you do in a case like that? I was walking along, going about my business, when up the street a piece of fire apparatus went by. Well, I stopped and looked like everybody else. Then, in front of a store, a party came out, and went running up there, to see better. Or maybe it was his house that was burning down, I don’t know. Well, could I help it if that was the place I’d decided to price a few small articles I needed? I went inside, stomped on the floor, hollered, and whistled three times, and nobody came. So I filled my sack. Every pile I saw, I took three of a kind, and then slid out the back way. But going past the kitchen I noticed some things to eat. Anyway, I dropped them in the sack on the principle we needed them most. Then I beat it.”

The way he grabbed those socks, and smelled them, and hugged the shoes to him, made you want to turn your eyes away. Hosey came, with a sackful of the rotten potatoes and bread heels and the crab bait that we always had whenever he went out to mooch. He acted the same as Buck, only worse. When we finally got the grub cooked and they were outside some of it and all dressed up in their clothes, I could hear little giggles coming out of them and they’d keep passing their hands over their mouths, to hide their grins, or maybe rub them off. I kept thinking how funny it was, that I had to cook up this yarn, because I couldn’t trust them with the truth. But then, sure enough, Hosey had the wind-up on it: “Boys, we got to move.”

“Why?”

Buck wasn’t any too agreeable about it, full of food and all dressed up like he was. “Can’t we just set, for once in our life?”

“They’ll be looking for us. The cops.”

“And how would they know who did it?”

“Ain’t we wearing the evidence?”

I wanted to tell him for God’s sake be his age, but I’d told them this dilly, and if I went back on it I’d have to tell them the truth, and that didn’t suit me. So there was nothing to do but listen to him line it out, how we’d pulled two jobs here in Arizona, and had to get out of the state, quick. So that’s how we came to hit for the bridge and cross into California.

W
E PULLED JOBS IN
Indio, Banning, Redlands, and San Bernardino, then doubled over and pulled one in Mojave. That was a little grocery on one of the streets off the highway, railroad track, and rabbit run in the middle of town. But when I had the stuff sacked, and was tiptoeing out, Buck called. There were shots, and bullets went past my head. I ran so hard that when the three of us met, in a jungle by the water tank, I couldn’t talk for an hour. We cooked our grub and ate it, but figured the time had come for another change of states and hopped the U.P. for Las Vegas. There, after making two dollars parking cars in a lot on Fifth Street, I took a fifty-cent room in a motel near by, washed, shaved, and looked myself over. In the face, I looked what I was, a hard, sun-baked bum. On clothes, I looked good enough, though not quite good enough to sign in under my own name. Ever since Atlanta, in all missions, flophouses, and joints, I had used some phony monicker, like Dikes or Davis, and that’s what I did now.

I went out and tried my luck on the wheels. I bought a dollar’s worth of ten-cent chips at a cut-rate place, and tried a few passes, red against the black. I won. Then I moved over to the numbers, and bet the first twelve against the second and third. I won some more. I raised the ante, and began making support bets, little gambles that didn’t add up to much if I lost, but meant a whole lot if I won. I mean, on the first twelve I’d put fifty cents. Then on the first four I’d put twenty-five cents. Then on number one I’d put ten cents. Then if the ball fell in any number higher than twelve I was out eighty-five cents clean on the whole spin. But if it fell in any number below twelve I cashed a dollar for my fifty-cent bet, and made fifteen cents. If it fell in the first four I made $2.25 more. If it fell on number one I made $3.50 more. Since then I’ve seen plenty of gambling, and done a little, and have nothing to say against the system I figured out that night. Any betting’s a gamble, but I’ll say this for support betting: It’s offensive, and if you win you take home something. Hedge betting’s defensive, just a way of stringing it out longer. I didn’t have too much luck for a while, just a dribble now and then, but then I landed with number one, and felt the tide come in. I quit after three straight losses, and left with thirty dollars or so.

It felt good to be able to look up Buck and Hosey, where they were laying kindling, and tell them the truth, and invite them to a room in the motel. Hosey, he hated to cough up, but so long as it was my money he had to. We slept, and then in the morning Buck and I hopped a bus to Boulder Dam, or Hoover Dam they call it now, that was building then, to get a job. They weren’t hiring, but said come back next week.

So we went back to our motel and cinched our belts, and tried to make our money last by laying on the bed, so as not to get hungry. Then Hosey wanted to move, on account of the guy in the next room to him, who he said had a gun, and kept shifting it around, from the bureau drawer to his trunk to his suitcase, so it got on his nerves. Buck and I didn’t quite attach the importance to it that Hosey did, and fact of the matter we wouldn’t have paid any attention to it at all, if I hadn’t picked up another day on the parking lot, and when things were slack, slipped across to the filling station next door to use the toilet. The manager was fixing a flat, and part of the time he was outside the toilet window with it, beating on the tire with a hammer. Following him around was a kid that seemed to work there, who as well as I could figure out had been transferred to another station of the chain, and wanted tips on how to act. The place he was going seemed to be the “flagship” as the manager called it, the main station, and the kid was a little nervous about what to do. The manager told him how to get there, by following Highway 91 and watching for the sign, and some more stuff that I remembered later. Then I heard the kid say: “When do they open?”

“Seven a.m., same as here.”

“And close nine?”

“No, ten.”

“Gee, that’s bad.”

“No, you’ll like it. They split it up so the week you’re on early, you’re off before dinner, and when you’re on late, you don’t come in till after lunch.”

“Funny, though. There’s no business after nine.”

“The chief, he don’t bank in Nevada. So every night, after they close, the station managers turn our cash in there, at the flagship. It’s put away, and then in the morning it’s sent over to Barstow, California. Which is why the place closes one hour later. All guys expecting their wife to bring suit for divorce have a strange enthusiasm for keeping their funds in some other state.”

At the motel, I lay there in the dark and listened to people snore, and kept telling myself to forget what I’d heard. I kept telling myself to put it out of my mind I might ever try anything real with Buck, or Hosey, or anybody. I kept telling myself to get rid of any idea I could do it alone. And all the time I kept thinking of those station managers, driving in late with their little canvas sacks. I kept thinking about Mojave and the bullets, and wondering why, if I had to play shooting gallery, I didn’t do it for dough. I guess that was what got me, more than anything else. I began going over it, Hosey’s idea that stealing grub was O.K., something the judge would go easy on if we ever got caught. Who said he would? Who said he wouldn’t send us up for ten years, to show the law was meant to be obeyed? It came to me, we weren’t talking about any judge. We were talking about ourselves. What we really meant was: Everybody’s entitled to eat, and if they have to steal to do it, then O.K., so long as there’s no other way. But anything more than that, regular stealing, that we weren’t equal to, to figure the right and the wrong of it. But the way my head kept pounding, I knew I didn’t care.

In Buck’s room, next to mine, the door opened and footsteps went down the hall. Then the screen door squeaked. Pretty soon I caught the smell of a cigarette. I got up, put on some clothes, and went outside. Buck was squatting on the ground, in pants, coat, undershirt, and shoes, smoking, and staring at the lights of the town. I sat down too. “Kind of restless, boy?”

“Jack, what do we do it for? Tramp. Steal. Rat.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why, stead of catching the goddam freight, don’t we let the freight catch us? You know any good reason we should roll away from those wheels?”

“Tell me something, Buck. This guy with the gun—?”

“... Hosey’s friend?”

“Where does he keep it? If you know?”

“In his room. Different places. Mostly places he lets Hosey see, so Hosey don’t get any idea he might go in and begin feeling around. Anyhow, that’s how I dope it.”

“Could you find it?”

“Couldn’t you? What locks are there in this dump?”

“You sure he doesn’t
carry
the gun, Buck?”

“I
think
not. Why?”

I told him what I’d heard in the filling station. “I figured, for a while at least, we could take care of things by getting ourselves a little dough.”

“I’d call that a little risky.”

“O.K., but I’ve noticed something.”

“Which is?”

“It’s a wide-open town, same like Kansas City, only more so. On account of Boulder Dam the girls have flocked here.”

“Listen, Jack, I’m listening, but—”

“Yeah, but how long?”

“Then O.K.”

He stretched out and began to talk the gloomiest kind of way about women and how he’s no good any more and never will be, and I calmed him down a little by owning up I was in exactly the same shape. But, I said, what we needed was rest and grub and water on our skins once a day and maybe now and then a couple of jokes. He said to hell with this idea we were just going to steal a little bit, and I said: “Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.” That was it, Buck said. After a while we heard something, and when we looked there was Hosey. “Couldn’t seem to sleep.”

“... Oh. Neither could we.”

“Hot.”

“Yeah, Hosey, sure is.”

“I heard what you guys was saying. I couldn’t help hearing. All I got to say is: You got the right idea.”

“You mean—?”

“Count me in.”

Next morning Buck slipped in, while I was shaving. “Well? Jack, what do we say on letting Hosey in?”

“I guess it’s off.”

“... I’m not so sure.”

“Him? I wouldn’t trust him— Listen, Buck, it’s not that I don’t think he likes us, or that he wouldn’t give all the right answers if we asked him how he felt about us, or whatever. It’s just that I don’t think he’s got anything left any more. Hell, I think they could break him with the smell of coffee. You don’t go to war with a bunch of goddam cripples.”

“And we, we have got something left, hey?”

“More than he’s got.”

“Jack, we can use him.”

“For what?”

“Watching, for one thing. He can smell a cop further than—”

“All right.”

“If either one of us had anything left, we wouldn’t be pulling something like this. We’re trying to get it back. Maybe he is, too. Maybe—”

What he really meant was that Hosey had it on us whether we liked it or not, and if we were going to pull this job instead of waiting to pull some other job we had to take him. He was more use than we expected. He went over there to this flagship later that morning, dropped dead in front of the door, and when they brought him to with ice water he came up with stuff about not having eaten for three days, and they let him make a buck cleaning the place off with a squeegee. He came away with a pretty good idea of where everything was, and said as far as he could see there wasn’t any safe, that the money was kept in a cash drawer out by the pumps, that they opened every time a customer paid. He drew up a plan of the station, with all streets marked, and distances in yards. He had the names of the station manager and the boss of the chain.