The Hot Kid

  Carl stood by the door on the side of the courtroom away from the jury. It led to where they kept the defendant and either took the cuffs off or left them on before bringing him in. There were more bank robbers this year than before, most of them tough young guys, but even some family men out of work, respectable-looking men. Trials that should take ten minutes and went on all day, the defense lawyers not having any idea where they were going.

  During these first months no one he had arrested appeared before the court. Most of them, though, were familiar from their case files or Carl had seen them on wanted sheets.

  The one he saw in the audience that surprised him was Venicia Munson, Peyton Bragg’s girlfriend from Bunch. That scene at her house, the night they waited for Peyton to make his move, had been more than a year ago.

  Carl’s reasoning had her here on behalf of a bootlegger pal who’d been arrested, caught in what was still a dry state even though Prohibition had been repealed. Here you could buy 3.2 beer and that was it.

  He saw her looking at him standing by his door. He looked back at her and smiled, but she didn’t. They met in the hall at the end of the session. Carl reached to touch the hat he wasn’t wearing.

  “Miss Munson, it’s nice to see you again.”

  He thought she looked pretty good, like some girl with style had shown her how to put on makeup and cock that little pillbox down on one eye. Carl would say she looked almost saucy in her hat and coat.

  He said, “You have business with the court?” Making it sound like a pleasant experience.

  “I have business with you,” Venicia said. “I’ve come for my rifle, a Winchester with a scope sight you took from my house.”

  He remembered aiming at that Essex in the dark, the taillights…“I never returned it, did I?”

  She said, “Would I be here?” Her mouth a slit of red saying it, the memory of his shooting her boyfriend, Peyton, still in her eyes.

  “You understand,” Carl said, “the rifle had to be described in the coroner’s report and a Bertillon exam made, showing I had fired the rifle. I got it back and was gonna bring it to you the next time I was out around Bunch…Or give it someone going that way—”

  “You still have it?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s at my apartment, on South Cheyenne.”

  “Why don’t I pick it up?” Venicia said. “It’s only been fourteen months since you took it.”

  Carl said, “Listen, I’m really sorry. I forgot all about it.”

  She said, “If you’re going home now I’ll follow you and be out of your hair.”

  They walked out of the courthouse together, Carl making conversation.

  Louly would say to him, “Do you love me, Carl? Do you really love me?”

  He’d say, “I’m nuts about you, baby.”

  She’d say, “Can’t you ever be serious.”

  He’d say, “Tell my dad I’m nuts about you, a man whose heart is in his nuts, and see what he says.”

  She’d punch him on the arm and give him a push. Louly was nuts about Carl, too.

  She’d say, “Aren’t we gonna get married?”

  “I don’t know if I could put myself all the way into my job if I was married and had kids.”

  She knew he was serious, not making up an excuse, and would say, “Don’t put yourself all the way into your job but almost.” He’d grin and take her by the arms and kiss her.

  This evening she waited looking out the front window, thinking she was still awfully young.

  He’d come home and have a beer while he changed from his suit to a wool shirt and cowboy coat and they’d drive down to Okmulgee and spend the weekend with Virgil and Narcissa, their third visit since Kansas City. This one special, Virgil was turning sixty tomorrow. Louly told Carl he looked it, too. Carl said his dad knew how to live; he watched the world go by but only paid attention to certain parts.

  The birthday present was a Krag-Jorgensen five-shot magazine rifle Carl had bought off a gun collector in Bixby, the same model Virgil had carried around Cuba, nine pounds of .30-caliber army rifle.

  Louly was anxious to get going after sitting around the apartment all day. It was about time she got a job—not like the one in Kansas City—maybe as a saleslady at Vandever’s. Wait on rich Tulsa women and get to talk like them. A few times a week she went to the picture show.

  She liked that slow way Virgil had of talking to Carl about criminal offenders, the oil business, movie stars, Will Rogers—whatever subject they got on they could wring it dry.

  She liked Narcissa, too. While she fixed supper Louly would listen to her talk about the human body and how you had to respect it. “You can’t believe,” Narcissa said, “how that old man don’t take care of himself but is so full of vigor in bed.”

  Like his boy. At this moment arriving home. From the window Louly watched Carl getting out of the Pontiac.

  But now he was waiting on the sidewalk, facing the way he had come. Checking his hat. Lighting a cigaret.

  Now a green car pulled in behind the Pontiac. Louly watched a woman who looked at least forty get out of the car. She wore a pillbox trying to look saucy, her mouth bright with Tangee. Now the two were coming up the front steps, Carl getting his key out. Louly left the window and went to the kitchen.

  The front door opened and Louly came out of the kitchen raising her eyebrows to show surprise and then smiling while she dried her hands on a dish towel. Carl said, “Louly, this is Miss Munson from Bunch. She’s come to pick up a rifle I have belongs to her.” Carl went out to the closet in the spare bedroom, leaving Louly with this woman from Bunch. Louly remembered a road sign one time that said bunch, but couldn’t recall where she was going.

  She smiled at Miss Munson and said, “Are you and Carl old friends?”

  “No,” Venicia said. “Carl Webster shot my boyfriend one time with my Winchester and kept it fourteen months.”

  Louly took that into her head and said, “Oh…” and, “Is that right?” Because it didn’t seem to matter what she said. Now she remembered where she saw the road sign, bunch, one end of it pointed, on the way to Stilwell to pick up seeds or something, for Mr. Hagenlocker.

  It was later on it occurred to Louly for the first time she could run into friends and relatives of people Carl had shot or sent to prison. The way he was adding to his score it seemed likely. She believed they’d look at her a certain way…

  What Venicia did when she left the apartment with her Winchester, she got in her car, her green Essex, drove to the next cross street, turned left and went all the way around the block, returning to South Cheyenne and pulled in to the curb at the corner. Venicia parked close enough to Carl’s street that she could see the apartment building and remembered the name of it cut into the concrete block above the entrance, the cynthia court.

  Now she waited, checking her watch.

  She waited forty minutes for them to come out with one suitcase and get in the Pontiac, Carl Webster and cute little Louly, his little homemaker who wasn’t his wife.

  Walking out of the courthouse Carl sounded embarrassed about holding on to the Winchester so long and started talking to be talking, telling her he and Louly were driving down to Okmulgee for the weekend, tomorrow his dad’s birthday, turning sixty, and they were stopping in Bixby to pick up a present he’d bought from an ad in the paper. He didn’t say what it was and Venicia didn’t ask, not wanting to seem interested in his life. She learned his dad had a thousand acres of pecan trees in the Deep Fork bottom west of town, but didn’t ask anything about the property. She barely spoke coming out of the courthouse and going to their cars. She’d follow them without getting too close and ask directions to the nut farm once she got to Okmulgee. Forty miles, figure on three hours round-trip. Hurry back to Tulsa to tell Billy.

  She never thought of him as Boo.

  Louly said to Virgil, all of them sitting around the table in his kitchen, “Your boy says he’s nuts about me.”

  Virgil was putting chili sauce
on his meat loaf, popping the bottom of the bottle with the palm of his hand. He paused to look at Louly.

  “I don’t blame him. I’d be after you, too, if Narcissa didn’t look like Dolores Del Rio. And I’ll bet you Dolores Del don’t even know how to cook. But if he’s nuts about you and doesn’t marry you, it’ll be the biggest mistake of his life. But the way he’ll tell it, after it’s too late, it was the only mistake of his life. Once you hear him say that, you begin to realize what his problem is.”

  Louly held her fork raised with grits on it and a touch of meat loaf gravy. She said, “Well, I do have something to say about it. I’m years younger’n he is, I don’t have to rush into anything. Carl could be fifty years old before he gets around to asking me.”

  “By then,” Virgil said, “you’ll have been married to oil men a couple of times and you’re doing okay. You don’t need to get married to anybody.”

  Carl was paying attention. He said to Louly, “You want to get married?”

  “You mean to you, or do I want to be married?”

  “Be married.”

  “Not especially.”

  “Then why do you keep bringing it up?”

  “I want to hear you ask me. Not set a date, but I want to know we will sometime.”

  “Are you thinking like in a year?”

  “Make it two years.”

  “Yeah…?”

  “Make it whatever you want.”

  “You keep living at my place?”

  “Carl, it’s called living together. Does your dad approve of that?”

  “He’s been doing it for twenty-five years. Says it’s okay in his case.”

  “’Cause I’m Creek,” Narcissa said.

  “We’re common-law by now,” Virgil said. “I die, she’ll be the richest Indian woman in the county.”

  Carl said, “Aren’t you leaving me anything?”

  “We’ll see how long you survive,” his dad said, “before I put you on the list. But if what this girl says is true, you’re nuts about her, I think you ought to get married. See, then if you don’t make it—”

  “Somebody shoots me in the back?”

  “See, I know when you’re kidding, ’cause you never boast on yourself. That might be the only way, shot from behind, and it could happen. I was gonna say, if you don’t make it, I’ll scratch your name off and leave it to your heir, or heirs, you have these little redheaded nippers running around.”

  Louly said, “I hadn’t thought about becoming a widow.”

  Narcissa said, “No, you think he’s wonderful. If he’s like his daddy then he’s also lucky and that can carry him.”

  Louly said, “Yeah, but Mr. Webster doesn’t do the same thing as Carl. He doesn’t have people shooting at him.”

  Carl said, “When did anybody take a shot at me?”

  Louly said, “You know what I mean.”

  “You know Virgil’s lucky,” Narcissa said. “He let people discover oil on his property, didn’t he?”

  They followed the county road that lay west out of Okmulgee, Venicia wanting to show Billy Bragg the private road that turned into the nut farm. An old single-story house with broken windows and missing shingles stood there empty. Billy looked at it through his dark glasses and didn’t say anything. Venicia told him she left her car out here last night across the road, and ruined her high heels walking through the pecan orchard. Finally she came to where his dad was living now, in a huge house with a porch clear across the front. A garage stood to one side and Carl Webster’s car was parked in front of it, his Pontiac.

  Venicia said they could take a place over in the cover of trees, not more than fifty, sixty yards from the car, and when Carl came out to go someplace, he’d be almost life-size through the scope sight.

  “How long,” Billy said, “we have to stand out there in the pe-can trees freezing our asses off? How do we know he’ll come out?”

  “I’m saying this is one place you could do it. I’ll show you another one, you won’t have to wait long.”

  In the car, following the next dirt road left, coming to oil derricks that Carl hadn’t mentioned, only the pecans, and finally coming to a road that crossed the bottom of the property, she turned in and came to a stop. Venicia pointed across a winter pasture starting to sprout, up a low grade to a light showing through pecan trees.

  “That’s the house.”

  She couldn’t look at Billy when she spoke to him. All the way coming here from Tulsa the burnt side of his face and little nub of an ear were toward her in the car. They got in an argument when he said this was a lot of trouble for a hundred bucks. She said to him, looking straight ahead at the road, “You’re avenging the murder of your brother. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” He said at the time it happened, yeah, he went looking for Carl, set on shooting him for nothing. But it wasn’t till about a year later he ran into him. “At the roadhouse I told you about? But there was always a crowd of people around and they all thought he was a swell fella. Then we had that gunfight with the Klan.” She offered him the C-note knowing she’d also have to let him screw her. Last night at the dingy hotel in Tulsa they had a bottle and she saw it was going to happen, so okay. What she did, she kept her eyes shut tight so she wouldn’t have to look at him and twisted her head around, stretching her neck as far as she could, like Billy’s loving was making her go crazy.

  Looking toward the house now, she said, “Last night I crept up the side of the pasture toward that same light you see now, with my high heels off and cut my feet up. I got close enough to see the table through the kitchen window? Set for supper.”

  Billy said, “They were right there?”

  “His girlfriend and some Indian woman.”

  “But you knew they’d be in to have supper?”

  “When it was ready.”

  “And you had your rifle?”

  “In the car, but I didn’t have bullets till this morning.”

  “Jesus Christ, you could’ve done it right then.”

  “What I need,” Venicia said, “is somebody knows how to shoot. Somebody that can hit him with the same gun he killed Peyton with. Don’t you understand that? I’d give you anything you want if you could hit him in the back of the head at four hundred yards.”

  “And if you were good-looking,” Billy said, “we could set up housekeeping.”

  “Damn,” Venicia said, “I’m missing out again. But we don’t always get what we want, do we? You rather walk up to the window and shoot him eating his eggs, go ahead and do it. I’ll settle for that.”

  Louly drove to Deering’s drugstore in town for cigarets and today’s paper. She got back to see Carl and his dad standing on the porch in their wool shirts, hands in their pockets. “We waited breakfast,” Carl said. “I hope you’re hungry.”

  She was, but it wasn’t on her mind. Louly said, “The woman who came yesterday for her rifle, Miss Munson? I saw her car in town.”

  Carl paused to glance at his dad. “Remember Venicia Munson?” and said to Louly, “You sure it was hers?”

  “How many times,” Louly said, “you see a green Essex coupé two days in a row, red spoke wheels, and it isn’t the same one?”

  “Hudson makes it,” Virgil said. “You don’t see too many of them, either.”

  Carl said, “But you didn’t see Venicia?”

  Louly said no. “I was in that creeping Saturday morning crowd on Main, families in horse and wagons in town to buy stuff. I saw the car parked on my left, facing me, by the hardware store. A guy was sitting in the passenger seat but no Venicia. I went on to Deering’s and introduced myself, talked to Mr. Deering for a while. I came back by way of Main and the car was gone.”

  “The guy in the car,” Carl said, “what’d he look like?”

  “I couldn’t tell. He was wearing dark glasses.”

  Carl looked out at the pecan trees and said, “Let’s go in the house.”

  They went inside and Carl kept going, up the stairs.

  L
ouly called to him, “What’re you getting?”

  He said, “My gun,” without stopping.

  “He’ll take a look out the upstairs windows,” Virgil said.

  Louly was starting to catch on.

  “Miss Munson told me yesterday, when she came to get her Winchester? Carl had shot her boyfriend with it. Who was that?”

  “Peyton Bragg,” Virgil said, opening his gun cabinet. “Peyton robbed the bank in Sallisaw—you remember that?”

  “I wasn’t there at the time.”

  “He planned to hide out at Venicia’s, near Bunch. Only Carl got in the way. Peyton’s the only man Carl shot with a rifle,” Virgil said—bringing a Remington twelve-gauge out of the cabinet—“since he was fifteen and shot a cow thief in that back pasture. Took a long shot and hit him square. Carl said after he should’ve stepped down from his horse, he didn’t mean to kill him.”

  “Carl was fifteen?”

  She tried to picture him but couldn’t.

  “The man was stealing his cows.”

  She felt in the middle of something she didn’t know anything about. “Who’s the one with the dark glasses?”

  “Boo Bragg, Peyton’s kid brother. Boo was in an oil tank fire that burnt half his face off. You don’t want to look at it.”

  “He’s out for revenge,” Louly said.

  “Or Venicia has him along.” Virgil brought a Winchester out of the cabinet. “This is the one Carl used to put the cow thief out of business. Fella name of Tarwater. I saw him lying dead waiting for the undertaker. Nice-looking young fella. I have both shootings in a scrapbook, his and Peyton’s, you want to see ’em. News accounts describe Carl as must be one of the world’s deadliest shots. He knows he was lucky to hit Peyton.”

  He was coming down the stairs now with his revolver.

  “I’ve told him,” Virgil said, “that kind of publicity can get some rascal sneaking up on him.”

  Louly watched him shove the revolver into his waist and take the Winchester from his dad. He seemed different now, concentrating on loading the rifle while his dad slipped shotgun shells into the Remington.