The Yolanda Hotel, 1933

It rained steadily the night they crossed the border. Bill drove, easing the car over the patchwork dirt road, with Jack at his side. A thin film of red dust lifted into the air behind them and concealed the endless line of telephone poles strung along the horizon like thin black crosses. With the rain came mud, and in the mud their pace slowed.

It was in a cheap, rusted, haphazardly held together heap that the two men drove. One of them had a scarred face - Jack. The other was Bill: a lean, lank man with a nose like a razor and eyes that sat on his face like two raisins in milk.

They switched driving an hour later. As Jack drove he took his hands off the wheel and steered with his elbows. Then he unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out a small cylinder with silver caps on both ends. Gold letters printed along the center of the tube read BENZEDRINE INHALER. With his elbows still on the wheel Jack cracked the tube in half and extracted several sheets of rolled white paper. A heavy menthol smell filled the car.

“Gonna need me somethin’ to wash these suckers down with,” he said. “Hey, gimme that bottle underneath you there, yeah, right, right.”

Bill reached under his seat and produced a fifth of whiskey. It was almost empty. Jack rolled the strips into small pill-like shapes and swallowed them with the whiskey. Then he rolled two more and held his outstretched palm toward Bill. Bill turned to the window. Jack shrugged and swallowed the paper

They passed a town called Wichita Falls but didn’t stop. They didn’t even look. Their vision was ahead, somewhere beyond the telephone poles that were becoming more and more frail as they went.

“Is that the place?” Jack asked, nodding his head in the direction of a pale pink building rising in the distance. He lifted the crumpled sheet of paper and strained to read the words printed in Bill’s illegible scrawl:

Hotel Yolanda

Paseo Colón 3333

Tamps., Mexico

Jack slowed the car as they approached the outskirts of town. Bill remained silent and glanced out the window: the hotel sat above a yellow river and its faded paint gave him the impression that it might get swept away with the passing of one more day.

An underfed white dog stared at them as they passed, shaking and still soaked from the rain. Two men worked bundling stalks of wheat.

“Dogs…” Bill muttered.

Jack pulled the car around the back of the hotel making sure to to park out of view of the entrance. The pair climbed out of the car, bodies aching, cracking after the long drive, and looked at their surroundings. The town was quiet.

“Rest tonight,” Bill said. This was the most he’d spoken all day. “Tomorrow we get to work.”

That night, the first night, Jack couldn’t sit still. He went down to the lobby and drank cheap Mexican coffee, three or four cups, cracked again into the Benzedrine for another hit of speed, paced the front of the building. Then he went back up to the room and sat down on one of the beds. Bill was on the other lying flat on his back, clothes on, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling.

Jack tried to sleep. Tomorrow, tomorrow, he thought. But as the speed combined with the coffee and his tired mind, lying there on a musty bed in that rathole hotel, Jack soon came to a realization: I have lived my life as a spectator. As someone who has bought a ticket to watch the show. Believed that it was others who are meant for the leading roles, that the world belongs to them.

One emotion took hold of him and overtook all of others, rising above the tightness, the pain, the angst: he felt that by living without intent, by being swept along with the events of his day, he had inflicted a horrible blow to the gift of life. He began to cry in the darkness, stifling the tears, desperately hoping that Bill wouldn’t wake and hear him.

But Bill was awake. He had not fallen asleep. So Jack has cracked, he thought. He has gone dumb, he’s liable to blow the whole thing tomorrow.

While Jack thought, A chance to act. Tomorrow. I will take that chance and then I can be whole again.

⚫

On their second day the pair bought lobby coffee and walked to the end of town. It wasn’t far, but it soon became apparent that the hotel was the best kept building in town. A feeble main street running through the middle was little more than a mud pathway cleared out by repeated travel and the buildings that stretched alongside it looked as if they might collapse at any moment.

Further on they came across a building that had fallen apart. A section of the outer wall was missing and one could see an uninhabited apartment, a bathtub against the far wall, a rug in tatters fraying in the wind. Stray dogs hid within the compound avoiding the men, the mud, the rain.

Just past this ruin they came upon a bank. Small, one floor only. A parking lot had been cleared into the dirt out front and a single guard leaned sleepily against the front entrance. The bank sat nestled up against nearby railroad tracks and was only a few hundred feet from the crossing.

Bill stalked back and forth sketching the scene in a small black notebook. He walked up to the train tracks, scribbled a drawing, made a rough estimate of the distance to the bank, glanced at the horizon, took note, back to drawing. Jack, meanwhile, wandered around with a boredom that was impressive. He lit a cigarette, took more Benzedrine, kicked at dust, tried to pet a dog but couldn’t get near enough. He put a nickel on the train tracks and when he stood he eyed the point where they vanished into the distance thinking: Tomorrow, whole again.

Then it was night, the second night, and there was no going back. Bill knew it. Jack knew it, and by morning the knowledge had begun to kill him in inches.

⚫

It was still dark when they stepped into the street the following morning, but dawn was near. On the roof of a building across the street birds chirped sleepily. The sky hung heavily over the cream colored homes and the pale pink hotel, all soft and quiet in the sparse yellow streetlights.

Jack and Bill were dressed in their best imitation of police uniforms and now, sitting in the car, the pair had an air of authority about them. Jack drove toward the bank and stopped a few yards away, parking the car across the road in front of the railroad crossing. Bill pulled something large and heavy out of the trunk. He placed the two objects on the ground and, with the trunk left open, climbed back in the car.

At 8:15 a.m., just as they had planned, the armored truck pulled around the bank. It slowed as it came upon the two men who now stood outside of the car. Jack waved and called for the drivers to get out. Believing him to be police, they obeyed. Two men lumbered out of the compartment and then Bill hit them with the strobe lights. Jack slipped a hood over his head, a potato sack he had pulled from the back of a cargo truck in Brownsville. His face was covered by thick burlap with three openings: two tiny slits for the eyes and one for the mouth.

The hooded Jack descended in the lead, gun in hand, and Bill followed. They took the drivers one by one and then Jack ran to the back of the truck and banged on the door. It swung open to reveal a man with a gun holstered to his waist. Jack pulled him out. The man tried to fight back but Jack was prepared and punched him to the ground.

He turned to Bill who stood lookout. The two other men were face down in the dirt.

“Let the one with the gun have it,” Bill said. Jack turned his gun on the man in front of him and fired several shots. The man fell back and sent a cloud of dust into the air. Then Jack hoisted himself up into the back of the truck and began to rifle through everything he saw, tossing it all until he came upon a large leather briefcase. Jack busted the flimsy lock and threw the case open: $27,000 in cash and a large amount in bonds.

Outside, the dead man was still in the dirt. Bill lifted the body, dragged it to the car, and shoved it in the trunk. Suddenly loud bells began to ring. Jack was on his way out of the truck by that time, briefcase in hand, and ran toward Bill. By the time he’d hit the ground a train had come crashing through. Jack sprinted past the car toward Bill who was already up ahead alongside the train.

“We got it, we really got it,” Jack shouted up to Bill. Bill’s pace brought him beside an open boxcar and Jack watched as he grabbed the railing and hoisted himself up. Shouts rose behind the pair. Once Bill was up and in Jack threw the briefcase which landed with a thump at Bill’s side. Bill didn’t move. Jack strained, pushing as hard as he could, and shouted Bill’s name.

Bill remained stiff in the doorway with his back an easy target. He watched as a face slowly emerged from the darkness of the boxcar. He saw a short, thick beard, wrinkled eyes, clothes sewn together in patches. A bindle with various cans spread over it. Bill hadn’t expected to see anyone and stood there in shock.

Then there was a bang and he fell to his knees.

“Bill!” Jack shouted.

A second later Bill slipped from the boxcar and hit the dirt. Jack wavered for a moment before continuing past Bill’s body, his eyes fixed on the suitcase on the boxcar floor. He was running as fast as he could, but the train gained distance and the men were closer than he thought. He could hear their voices clamoring after him. A second shot followed and then a third. Pain ripped through Jack’s shoulder and he began to lose speed. He pushed once more but was immediately tackled and fell to the ground.

“We got him, we got him,” someone shouted. Jack was ready to burst into tears as he watched the train roll away. He caught one last glimpse of the boxcar and saw a hand materialize out of the darkness and pull the briefcase back into the shadows. With that the train was gone and, hands behind his back, someone pushed Jack’s face into the dirt.

Limber Leg had been from Peoria to Coatsville and a hundred towns in between. In the thousands of miles and many hours of travel he had come to understand the few essentials of life. One of them was the benefit of a good night's sleep. He’d gone the last few months without a pillow and endured the struggle uncomplainingly. But now, much to his surprise, something had come flying into his boxcar like a gift from above.

He crept out of the darkness and pulled the briefcase closer to him, not bothering to open it. Nothing inside could compare to the joy he was about to receive. Limber Leg paced the briefcase firmly in a corner where two walls met and, beneath the various monikers and images scratched onto the wall (a stetson hat, a palm tree, the name bozo), laid his head down, closed his eyes, and let the loud chunk of the rails rock him gently to sleep.