Prologue

Nobody had taken Old Tom seriously for decades, least of all the family. He had, in fact, been considered the Town Character for as long as most folks around there could remember.

    Twice a day, for example, he'd shuffle down the steep hill to Saucer's Texaco Station for a cold bottle of Royal Crown Cola. Old Tom was completely blind in his left eye and about eighty-percent blind in his right, so the only way he could find his way to Saucer's and back was to follow the stripe down the center of the highway. Cars and trucks would top the hill, and suddenly see this old man with a cane hobbling along, and they'd honk their horns, and slam on their brakes, and swerve to avoid hitting him, and he'd cuss a blue streak, lashing out at the offenders with his cane, and, often, connecting with a fender or even a windshield.

    In his younger days, Old Tom had been known to take a drink, but, as far as anyone knew, he hadn't had a drink since the day in 1928 when he fell off of a scaffold and lay passed out in the rain until well after dark. He hadn't done a day's work since then either, of course, but that's another story entirely.

    He did like to fish, though, and, back before his eyesight got so bad that Saucer's was the only place he could get to, he walked to the mill pond and back every day, carrying a minnow bucket and three cane poles, and usually managed to make it home with a fair catch. Of course, it was left to Flossie to do the fish cleaning and the cooking. But Tom hadn't been fishing since sometime during the fifties, and so had spent most of the sixties sitting in his chair, dipping Garrett snuff, spitting in a coffee can, and waiting for Douglas Edwards to come on with the evening news so that he could cuss Lyndon Johnson for all he was worth. He couldn't see the television, of course, but he could hear what a mess that big-eared son-of-a-bitch was making of the country, and he was only too happy to tell anyone who'd listen.

    The truth is that everybody just made fun of Old Tom, so, when he called Jimbo and Spud in that day to let them in on the secret he'd been harboring for nearly sixty years, they listened attentively, and were polite enough about it, but both of them merely wrote it off as the ramblings of an old man's mind.

    "C'mon in boys, and close the door," Tom had said, "Don't nobody else need to hear this." He leaned over the side of his chair and spit, then wiped the dribble from the white stubble on his chin with the cuff of his long johns.

    "I'm a gonna tell you boys this 'cause I figure I ain't gonna be around too much longer," he began.

    "You'll outlive us both, you tough old coot," Spud said.

    Tom ignored the remark, and continued. "I ain't made much of my life, and don't have nothin' to leave to you boys."

    "We don't need anything, Papaw," Jimbo said, giving Spud a wink.

    "I'm gonna give you boys the directions to where there's a strongbox full of gold buried," the old man said, pausing to spit and wipe again.

    Now Spud returned Jimbo's wink.

    As he leaned back in his chair, Tom began his story, "Things was hard back during that time, and I fell in with bad companions for a spell. Mama warned me about fellers like that, but I was young and full of piss and vinegar, and figured I was old enough to pick my own friends. But Mama was right. They was a bad bunch, sure enough."

    Spud, figuring this was going to take a while, dragged a chair over to Old Tom's corner by the fire, and sat down to listen. Jimbo did the same.

    "I'd found work at a sawmill up close to Horatio, and was doing okay for a while, but the work played out after six months or so, and I was about broke and a long way from home." He paused, momentarily, to spit in the can. "And I was having a drink one day when the boys found me, and told me they wanted me to throw in with them to rob this bank up at De Queen."

    Jimbo and Spud exchanged incredulous looks; they couldn't imagine Old Tom as a bank robber.

    "There was four of us,” he recalled, "Me, and . . . . . . . . "

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