Two days in that nasty town jail had been hell. During that time, me and Yvonne had got roughed up something terrible by them punk deputies. Two of them nasty buzzards had even made a sport of Yvonne, raping her right before my eyes.

If it hadn’t been for Willie Frank, a righteous white dude I’d met in prison, there was no telling what else might have happened to us. He was our best friend and business associate. To make a long story short, since we bought all the liquor we sold our guests from Willie Frank, he got his uncle Lamar to pull some strings to help us get out of jail. That old man owned a lot of land and his wife’s sister’s daughter was married to the district attorney, so he had a lot of pull in Branson, Alabama.

Lamar Perdue and Sheriff Orval Potts was close buddies and because of “lack of evidence” it had been easy for Lamar to get the charge against us dropped. It hadn’t been cheap, though. Lamar had paid Sheriff Potts two hundred dollars, but he wanted us to pay him three hundred back. Me and Yvonne was already struggling just to get from one day to the next. We knew it was going to be hard for us to come up with that kind of money—and Lamar wanted it by the end of this month. That meant we had only about three weeks to get it. Even if I busted into a dozen houses and stole everything I could carry, there was no way I could come up with three hundred dollars in three weeks. Besides, I had stopped breaking into houses a long time ago. I had quit while I was ahead because I did not want to get arrested again. If I went back to prison, I could handle it, but Yvonne was too dainty to do another stint. I knew I’d have to do something real drastic to get the money we owed Willie Frank’s uncle, and I didn’t care what it was.

A few colored folks had issues with me and Yvonne being so close to Willie Frank because he was the lowest kind of white: a tobacco-chewing, snaggletooth, uneducated hillbilly that made his living running a still. We didn’t care. He was still good people as far as we was concerned. Not only was he a lot of fun; he sold his liquor real cheap to us. But he made the other bootleggers he supplied pay full price. Even with his raggedy teeth, he was still a good-looking guy. He loved the ladies, and they loved him because of his fun-loving attitude, thick blond hair, and blue eyes. And he was a generous soul. He spent a lot of the money he made on colored women. Next to me, he was the second most popular trick that went to Aunt Mattie’s whorehouse.

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