Wonderful Room by Woolley Bryan

Author:Woolley, Bryan [Woolley, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60940-000-2
Publisher: Wings Press
Published: 2010-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

SECTION E

THE BURGLAR

Whenever I substituted for Monty Montgomery on the police beat, I hung out late at night in the office of the captain of detectives. Unlike many cops, the night captain liked reporters, at least Monty and me. I could monitor the police radio there, and the captain would let me use the phone. On slow nights, he would sit at his desk and drink coffee with me and tell jokes.

Round midnight, a jail trusty would come in to empty the wastebasket and mop the floor. It was usually a different trusty every night. But then the same trusty showed up several nights in a row. He was a skinny middle-aged white man with graying hair who walked with a limp. One night when the captain was out, this man and I fell into conversation while he was mopping.

He told me his name. I don‧t remember it. I‧ll call him Bob. I don‧t remember why he was in the El Paso County Jail, either, but he said his profession was burglary. He had first gone behind bars when he was 14, he said, and had spent more than half his life in the state prisons of Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. One time when he was trying to swing aboard a freight train, he missed his grab and fell. The train ran over his foot and severed his toes. He hated the limp because it made it easy for cops to spot him, and he could no longer run from them.

“When I get out of here, I‧m going straight,” he would say. “I‧m going to make something of myself.” He said that every night, deeply sincere. He talked about hoboes, crooks and convicts he had known, as someone might remember cousins or schoolmates.

Next time I went home to Fort Davis, I looked up my grandmother‧s newspaper clippings about the 1932 murder of my grandfather, Audie Gibson, a Hamilton County deputy sheriff. Two robbers attacked him on a snowy night and shot him with his own gun. They were sentenced to life in the Texas pen. I wrote down their names, and next time I saw Bob I asked if he knew them.

“Yeah,” Bob said. “They‧re down in Huntsville. Killed a deputy in Hamilton County.”

“Tat deputy was my grandfather,” I said.

“Oh. Sorry to hear that.” He sounded sincere, not even awkward about it. Like a preacher or undertaker.

“So they‧re still alive.”

“Yeah. They‧re good baseball players.”

When Monty got back from vacation and returned to the police beat, I told him about Bob. He was even more fascinated by the burglar than I was, and believed Bob really did want to go straight and make something of himself.

Monty had a talk with Gill, who owned the Stag Bar, where the newspapermen hung out after work. Gill, a huge, redheaded Viking of a man, was tough, generous and funny, the perfect host for a joint inhabited nearly entirely by reporters, cops and GIs. Monty told Gill about Bob‧s criminal life and his prison record.

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