“Why would you want to?” Virgil said.
“Show I didn’t miss anything.”
“You know how many times the other night,” Virgil said, “you told me about the ice cream on his mustache? I’m thinking three or four times.”
“You had to see it,” Carlos said. “Here’s this bank robber everybody’s scared of, doesn’t know enough to wipe his mouth.”
“I’d forget that part,” Virgil said. “He shot a lawman in cold blood. That’s all you need to remember about him.”
A month passed and then another, Carlos becoming fidgety. Virgil found out why it was taking so long, came home to Narcissa putting supper on the table, Carlos sitting there, and told them the delay was caused by other counties wanting to get their hands on Emmett Long. So the matter was given to the Eastern District Court judge to rule on, each county laying out its case, sounding like they’d make a show out of trying him. “His Honor got our prosecutor to offer Emmett Long a deal. Plead guilty to murder in the second degree, the motive self-defense as the victim was armed, and give him ten to fifty years. That would be the end of it, no trial needed. In other words,” Virgil said, “your Emmett Long will get sent to McAlester and be out in six years or so.”
“There was nothing self-defense about it,” Carlos said. “Junior wasn’t even looking at him when he got shot.” Carlos sounding like he was in pain.
“You don’t know the system,” Virgil said. “The deal worked ’cause Junior’s Creek. He was a white man Emmett Long’d get life or a seat in the electric chair.”
Another event of note took place when Carlos was fifteen, toward the end of October and late in the afternoon, dusk settling in the orchards. He shot and killed a cattle thief by the name of Wally Tarwater.
Virgil’s first thought: it was on account of Emmett Long. The boy was ready this time and from now on would always be ready.
He phoned the undertaker, who came with sheriff’s people and pretty soon two deputy U.S. marshals arrived, Virgil knowing them as serious lawmen in their dark suits and the way they wore their felt hats down on their eyes. The marshals took over, the one who turned out to be the talker saying this Wally Tarwater—now lying in the hearse—was wanted on federal warrants for running off livestock and crossing state lines to sell to meat packers. He said to Carlos to go on and tell in his own words what happened.
Virgil saw Carlos start to grin just a little, about to make some remark like “You want it in my own words?” and cut him off quick with “Don’t tell no more’n you have to. These people want to get home to their families.”
Well, it began with Narcissa saying she felt like a rabbit stew, or squirrel if that’s all was out there. “I thought it was too late in the day,” Carlos said, “but took a twenty-gauge and went out in the orchard. The pecans had been harvested, most of ’em, so you could see through the trees good.”
“Get to it,” Virgil said. “You see this fella out in the pasture driving off your cows.”
“On a cutting horse,” Carlos said. “You could tell this cowboy knew how to work beef. I got closer and watched him, admiring the way he bunched the animals without wearing himself out. I went back to the house and exchanged the twenty-gauge for a Winchester, then went to the barn and saddled up. She’s right over there, the claybank. The sorrel’s the one he was riding.”
The marshal, the one who talked, said, “You went back to get a rifle without knowing who he was?”
“I knew it wasn’t a friend stealing my cows. He’s driving them down toward the Deep Fork bottom where a road comes in there. I nudge Suzie out among the cows still grazing, got close enough to call to him, ‘Can I help you?’” Carlos started to smile. “He says, ‘Thanks for offering but I’m done here.’ I told him he sure was and to get down from his horse. He started to ride away and I fired one past his head to bring him around. I moved closer but kept my distance not knowing what he had under his slicker. By now he sees I’m young, he says, ‘I’m picking up cows I bought off your daddy.’ I tell him I’m the cow outfit here, my dad grows pecans. All he says is, ‘Jesus, quit chasing me, boy, and go on home.’ Now he opens his slicker to let me see the six-shooter on his leg. And now way off past him a good two hundred yards, I notice the stock trailer, a man standing there by the load ramp.”
“You can make him out,” the marshal who did the talking said, “from that distance?”
“If he says it,” Virgil told the marshal, “then he did.”
Carlos waited for the marshals to look at him before saying, “The cowboy starts to ride off and I call to him to wait a second. He reins and looks at me. I told him I’d quit chasing him if he brought my cows back. I said, ‘But you try to ride off with my stock I’ll shoot you.’”
“You spoke to him like that?” the talker said. “How old are you?”
“Going on sixteen. The same age as my dad when he joined the U.S. Marines.”
The quiet marshal spoke for the first time. He said, “So this Wally Tarwater rode off on you.”
“Yes sir. Once I see he isn’t gonna turn my cows, and he’s approaching the stock trailer by now, I shot him.” Carlos dropped his tone saying, “I meant to wing him, put one in the edge of that yellow slicker…I should’ve stepped down ’stead of firing from the saddle. I sure didn’t mean to hit him square. I see the other fella jump in the truck, doesn’t care his partner’s on the ground. He goes to drive off and tears the ramp from the trailer. It was empty, no cows aboard. What I did was fire at the hood of the truck to stop it and the fella jumped out and ran for the trees.”
The talkative marshal spoke up. “You’re doing all this shooting from what, two hundred yards?” He glanced toward the Winchester leaning against a pecan tree. “No scope on your rifle?”
“You seem to have trouble with the range,” Virgil said to him. “Step out there a good piece and hold up a snake by its tail, a live one. My boy’ll shoot its head off for you.”
“I believe it,” the quiet marshal said.
He brought a card from his vest pocket and handed it between the tips of his fingers to Virgil. He said, “Mr. Webster, I’d be interested to know what your boy sees himself doing in five or six years.”
Virgil looked at the card and then handed it to Carlos, meeting his eyes for a second. “You want you can ask him,” Virgil said, watching Carlos reading the card that bore the deputy’s name, R. A. “Bob” McMahon, and a marshal’s star in gold you could feel. “I tell him join the marines and see foreign lands, or get to love pe-cans if you want to stay home.” He could see Carlos moving his thumb over the embossed star on the card. “The only thing he’s mentioned is maybe getting a job in the oil fields once he finishes high school,” Virgil said, looking at his boy.
“Isn’t that right?”
Virgil and the marshals waited the few moments before Carlos raised his head to look at his dad.
“I’m sorry—were you speaking to me?”
Later on Virgil was in the living room reading the paper. He heard Carlos come down from upstairs and said, “Will Rogers is appearing at the Hippodrome next week. He talks about current events while he’s showing off with his rope. You care to see him? He’s funny.”
“I guess,” Carlos said, then told his dad he didn’t feel so good.
Virgil lowered the newspaper to look at his boy. He said, “You took a man’s life today.” And thought of a time in Cuba behind an overturned oxcart looking down the barrel of a Krag rifle pressed to his cheek, wanting the first one coming toward him riding hard—his friend being chased by the three behind him—to get out of the way, get the hell out of his line of fire, and he did, swerved his mount, and Virgil put his sights on the first one coming behind him and fired, felt the Krag kick against his shoulder and saw the horse tumble headfirst on top of the rider, threw the bolt and put his sights on the second one, bam, took the rider out of his saddle, threw the bolt and aimed at the third one coming like a racehorse, the rider firing a revolver as fast as he co
uld thumb the hammer, a brave man set on riding him down, twenty yards between them when Virgil blew him out of his saddle and the horse ran past the overturned oxcart. He’d killed three men in less than ten seconds.
He said to Carlos, “You didn’t tell me, did you look at him lying there?”
“I got down to close his eyes.”
Virgil had taken the boots off the third one he killed, exchanged them for the sandals he’d worn in the Spanish prison, the Morro.
He said, “Looking at him made you think, huh?”
“It did. I wondered why he didn’t believe I’d shoot.”
“He saw you as a kid on a horse.”
“He knew stealing cows could get him shot or sent to prison, but it’s what he chose to do.”
“You didn’t feel any sympathy for the man?”
“Yeah, I felt if he’d listened he wouldn’t be lying there dead.”
The room was silent. Now Virgil asked, “How come you didn’t shoot the other one?”
“There weren’t any cows on the trailer,” Carlos said, “else I might’ve.”
It was his son’s quiet tone that made Virgil realize, My Lord, but this boy’s got a hard bark on him.
2
Jack Belmont was eighteen years old in 1925, the time he got the idea of blackmailing his dad.
This was the year the Mayo Hotel opened in Tulsa, six hundred rooms with bath, circulating ice water that came out of the faucet. They knew Jack at the Mayo and never said anything about his stopping by to get a bottle of booze off the bellboy. It cost him more this way, but was easier than dealing with bootleggers. Drive up in his Ford Coupé and honk the horn, tell the doorman to go get Cyrus. That was the old colored bellboy’s name. Sometimes Jack went inside to hang around the lobby or the Terrace Room, see what was going on. It was how he found out this was where his dad, Oris Belmont, kept his girlfriend when she came to visit, at the Mayo. The girlfriend being what the blackmail was about.
Her name was Nancy Polis from Sapulpa, a boomtown in the Glenn Pool grid, barely ten miles from Tulsa.
Jack believed his dad must visit her when he went out to the oil field and stayed the night. He figured his dad was worth ten million or so by now, except it wasn’t all sitting in the bank; it was invested in different things like a refinery, a car lot, a tank farm, and a trucking line. It was boom or bust in the oil business, the reason Oris Belmont spread his money around, and why Jack wasn’t sure how much to ask for blackmailing him.
He chose a number that sounded good and entered the dad’s private study at home, fixed the way Oris wanted it: steer horns over the fireplace, photos of men posing by oil derricks, also miniature rigs, little metal derricks on the mantel, on bookshelves, one used as a doorstop. Jack walked up to the big teakwood desk and sat down in soft leather across from Oris, the dad.
“I don’t want to take up your time,” Jack said. “What I’d like you to do is put me on your payroll. I’m thinking ten thousand a month and I won’t bother you no more.”
Eighteen years old and talking like that.
Oris set his desk pen in its holder and gave this good-looking, useless boy who favored his mother his full attention.
“You aren’t saying you’re going to work, are you?”
“I’ll come by once a month,” Jack said, “on payday.”
Oris said, “Oh, I see,” easing back in his chair, “this is a shakedown. All right, I pay you more’n the president of the Exchange National Bank makes…or what?”
“I know about your girlfriend,” Jack said.
The dad said, “Is that right?”
“Nancy Polis. I know all about your putting her up at the Mayo when she comes to visit. I know you always come in through that outside entrance to the barbershop in the basement and have a drink before you go up to her room, always the same one. I know you and your oil friends have blocks of ice in the urinals, and you bet on who can make the deepest hole pissing on ’em, and you never win.”
“Who told you all this?”
“One of the bellboys.”
“The one gets whiskey for you?”
Jack hesitated. “A different one. I told him to keep an eye out and call me when she comes in the hotel. I’ve seen her in the lobby and recognized her right away.”
“What’s all this information cost you?”
“Couple of bucks. Dollar for her name and address, how she registers. A girl in the office told the bellboy you pay the bill whenever she stays, usually every other Friday through the weekend. I know you met her when you were living in Sapulpa those years we never saw you.”
The dad said, “You’re sure of that, huh?”
“I know you bought her a house, set her up.”
The dad’s droopy mustache gave him a tired look staring across the desk, the way Jack saw the dad whenever he thought of him. The big mustache, the suit and tie, and that tired look, rich as he was.
“Let’s see,” the dad said, “you were five when I came out here to work.”
“You left us I was four years old.”
“Well, I know you were ten when I bought this house. Fifteen in 1921, the time you took my pistol and shot that colored boy.”
Jack looked at him surprised. “Everybody was shooting niggers, the race riot was going on. I didn’t kill him, did I?”
“That whole neighborhood of Greenwood burned down—”
“Niggerville,” Jack said. “Was the Knights of Liberty started the fires. I know I told you back then I never struck a match.”
“What I’m trying to recall,” the dad said, “the first time you were arrested.”
“For shooting out streetlights.”
“And assault. You got picked up for getting that little girl drunk and raping her. Carmel Rossi?”
Jack started shaking his head saying she wasn’t any little girl. “You’d seen the titties on her you’d of known she was grown up. She dropped the charge, didn’t she?”
“I paid her daddy what he makes in a month.”
“She had her panties hanging over a bush before I ever touched her. Was my word against hers.”
“Her daddy still works for me,” Oris said. “Builds storage tanks, the big ones, hold fifty-five and eighty thousand barrels of crude. How’d you like to work for him, clean out tanks? Get in there in the fumes and shovel out that bottom sludge. Start there and we work you up to your ten thousand a month.”
“Everything I got into,” Jack said, sitting low in the leather chair, comfortable, “either I didn’t start it or it was a misunderstanding.”
“How about getting caught with the Mexican reefer? What didn’t the police understand about it?”
Jack grinned at the dad.
“You ever try it?”
See what the dad had to say to that.
Nothing. He said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You’re a nice-looking boy, wear a clean shirt every day, keep your hair combed…Where’d you get your ugly disposition? Your mama blames me for not being around, so then I feel guilty and give you things, a car, whatever you want. You get in trouble, I get you out. Well, now you’ve moved on to extortion in your life of crime. What’re we talking about here? I pay what you want or you’re telling everybody I have a girlfriend? Jesus Christ, you know how many girlfriends there are in Tulsa? Set up with their own place? Hell, I keep mine in Sapulpa. Is that the deal, you’re threatening to tell on me?”
“I tell Mama,” Jack said, “see how you like her knowing.”
Now he was getting the cold stare again, Jack ready to pick up the metal derrick from the corner of the desk if Oris came at him. Be self-defense.
But the dad didn’t move. He said, “You think your mama doesn’t know about her?”
Shit. Jack hadn’t thought of that.
Still, Oris could be bluffing.
“All right,” Jack said, “I’ll tell her I know about it, too. And I’ll see if I can get Emma to understand you’re screwing this oil camp whore.”
He thought it would set Oris off, get him yelling—the idea of his little Emma hearing such a thing, even though she had no sense of things. The dad stayed calm across the desk and it surprised Jack, the bugger staring, but holding on like that.
When Oris did speak the dad’s voice seemed different, delivering a judgment now with no more to say about it.
“You tell your mother she’ll hate you for knowing it and never be able to look at your face again. She’ll tell me you have to leave and I won’t hesitate. I’ll throw you out of the house.” He didn’t refer to Emma. But then gave him a choice, still his dad saying, “Is that what you want?”
Oris Belmont was another wildcatter story.
Glenn Pool had twelve hundred wells piped and flowing to refineries by the time Oris came to Oklahoma to join his wife’s Uncle Alex in Sapulpa. Alex Roney, known in the field as Stub, held mineral leases on Creek Indian land, a scattering of half-sections he’d bought for three dollars an acre before the area came into its boom. By the time it did, Stub was broke, had no means of drilling a discovery well. He was drunk the day he highjacked a tank truck of crude, was caught stuck hub-deep in mud and spent the next four years doing his time at McAlester. Stub got his release and called Oris Belmont. Oris arrived from Indiana with a load of salvaged drilling tools, pipe, casing, a pair of steam boilers, sixteen hundred dollars he’d scraped together and twenty years of oil stain under his fingernails.
They drilled two dry holes, Stub No. 1 and No. 2, and the old uncle’s luck ran out on him. They were looking to take the No. 2 derrick apart, Stub up on the runaround, the catwalk that circled the derrick sixty or so feet up. He hadn’t yet hooked his safety belt to the structure, and when he lost his hold he fell sixty feet to the drilling floor, his final breath smelling of corn whiskey. Oris had been afraid the old uncle might fall or have something fall on his head.