“Yeah, Terri,” the man said. “Quiet.
“Well, we robbed them, made a run for it in Smat’s car, and then we hid out. Smat, after a few days, he begins to think he’s done shit in the frying pan. Starts saying we got to give it back, like they were gonna forgive and forget, like we brung a lost cat home. We hid the money near Geronimo’s grave one night, took some shovels up there in the dark and buried it by an oak tree. There ain’t nobody guards that place. There ain’t even a gate. It was a lot of money and in a big tin canister—and I mean big. A million dollars in bills is heavier than you’d think. We took about ten thousand and split that for living money, but the rest we left there so if we got caught by cops for other things we’d done, we wouldn’t have all that big loot on us. If we went to jail, when we got out, there’d be a lot of money waiting. Right then, though, we didn’t plan on being caught. That was just a backup idea. We were going to wait until the heat died down, go back and get it. But Smat, he got to thinking that, considering who we robbed, the heat wasn’t going to die down. He reckoned they’d start coming after us and keep coming, and that worried him sick. It didn’t do me no good to think about it either, but I didn’t like what he wanted to do. He was planning on making a map and mailing it to them so they could come get the money. He showed me the map. We had driven to Nebraska, where we was hiding out. He was gonna send them the map with an apology, just keep moving, hoping they’d say, ‘Well, we got our money, so let’s forget it.’ He thought he could go on then and live his life, go back to small stickups or some such, and steal from people who would forget it. But them boys at that dice game, I tell you, they aren’t forgetters. With a million dollars, I tell him, we can go off to Mexico and live clear and good the rest of our lives. You can buy a se?orita down there cheaper than a chicken. Or so I’m told. Shit, them boys were gonna forget it like they would forget their mamas. Wasn’t going to happen.”
“Yeah,” Terri said. “I’d be mad, I was them. I can hold a grudge.”
“Damn right,” the man said. “What I told Smat. Mama Johnson didn’t raise no idiots.”
“I guess that’s a matter of opinion, Mr. Johnson,” Terri said.
“I swear, girl, I’m gonna cut you from gut to gill if you don’t hush up.”
Terri went silent. I glanced at her in the mirror. She was smiling. Sometimes Terri worried me.
“Thing was, I couldn’t let him mail that map, now, could I? So we had this little scuffle and he got the better of me by means of some underhanded tricks and took off with the car, left me stranded but not outsmarted. You see, I knew he had a gal he had been seeing up near Lawton, and the money was around there, so I figured he’d go back. He might mail that map, and he might not. Finding the map in your car when I come up on missy here, that was real sweet. I knew then you knew Smat, and that he was the uncle you were going to see.”
“Did Uncle Smat ever mention us?” I said.
“No,” Johnson said. “I hitched my way back to Oklahoma, went up to where we buried the money one night, had me a shovel and all, but I didn’t use it. Wasn’t nothing but a big hole under that tree. Smat had the money. I thought, Damn him. He pulled it out of that hole on account of me. I didn’t know if he reckoned to give the bad boys a new map with the new location of the money or if he took it with him, deciding he wasn’t going to give it back at all. Now he could keep it and not have to split it, which might have been his plan all along. I was down in the dumps, I tell you.”
Terri was leaning over the seat now, having forgotten all about Johnson’s harsh warning and the knife.
“Sure you were,” she said. “That’s a bitter pill to swallow.”
“Ain’t it?” Johnson said.
“I’d have been really put out,” Terri said.
“I was put out, all right. I was thinking, I caught up with him, I’d yank all his teeth out with pliers. One by one, and slow.”
“He wouldn’t have liked that,” she said.
“No, he wouldn’t. But like I said, I knew he liked a gal in Oklahoma, and I’d met her, and he was as moony over her as a calf is over its mother, though it wasn’t motherly designs he had.”
“It wouldn’t be that, no, not that,” Terri said.