“Wonder why he calls himself Sugar, if that ain’t his real name?” Cob asked. “That seems kind of dumb to me. How’s anybody supposed to know who he really is?”
“Well, maybe he don’t like…” Cane started to say, but then he stopped. He looked over at Cob, at his cowboy hat and the red bandanna tied around his fat, sweaty neck and the pistol hanging at his side. He was the spitting image of the drawing on the last wanted poster they had seen, the one the store clerk had carried. Jesus Christ, why hadn’t he thought of that before? By the time Chimney found the bowler and made it back up to the road, Cane was in the process of changing their names and working on a line they could use. From here on out, he announced, at least until they crossed the border, he and Cob were Tom and Junior Bradford from Milledgeville, Georgia, and Chimney was their cousin, Hollis Stubbs. They were on their way to Canada to find an uncle.
“That’s it?” Chimney said. “Seems a little thin to me.” He set the bowler between his horse’s ears.
“We need to keep it as simple as possible. That way there’s less chance of screwing up.”
“What brought this on?”
“Something Cob said about the colored boy. I should have thought of it before.”
“You must be startin’ to slip if you got Cob giving you advice,” Chimney said.
“We got to change our looks, too,” Cane said, ignoring him. “Get rid of those cowboy hats and the neckerchiefs. And stick your pistols in your saddlebags.”
“You mean all of them?”
Cane stopped and considered for a few seconds. “No, you’re right. Maybe we better each keep one handy just in case.”
As they got ready to leave a few minutes later, Chimney said, “I still don’t feel right about you takin’ that shot away from me. I need to keep in practice.”
Without a word, Cane grabbed the bowler off the horse’s head and tossed it to the ground a few feet in front of them. “Go ahead then, have at it.” Chimney smirked a little and pulled out his Smith & Wesson. Every time he fired, the hat skidded and tumbled a little farther down the road. He didn’t stop until the gun was empty. “There, ye satisfied?” Cane asked.
“I don’t know,” Chimney said, as he dug some bullets out of his pocket to reload. “But I reckon it’ll do till something better comes along.”
38
CRAWLING ON HIS belly until he reached the woods, Sugar then ran for another quarter of a mile or so before collapsing behind a fallen tree. He stayed there barely moving a muscle for over an hour. At one point he counted six shots being fired, and he hoped that maybe the motherfuckers had killed one another before one of them picked up his bowler. Finally, he got up the courage to sneak back to the field to look for it, but it was nowhere to be found. He kicked at the weeds and cursed his bad luck. The finest hat he had ever owned and now some sonofabitch dressed like Billy the Kid was going to take a dump in it.