Infamous

27

Well, if the devil don’t walk among us,” Grandma Coleman said, spitting some snuff juice into an empty coffee can. Her hair was dyed the color of copper wire, framing a wrinkled complexion that resembled the skin on boiled milk. Sometimes Kathryn saw a bit of Ora in her grandmother, and sometimes, when the old woman grew cross, she saw a bit of herself. Mainly it was the way her cataracted eyes would gain some clarity-if only for a moment-and fix on something in her mind. Kathryn knew that look, had seen it in the mirror too many times when George would wander into the bathroom and ask her if she’d like to pull his finger or lift his leg to play a flat tuba note.

“Mornin’, Ma,” George said, leaning down and kissing the woman’s old sagging cheek. He’d showered and shaved, put on a fresh pair of gray pants and a short-sleeved white shirt without a tie. Grandma reached up and wiped away the filth of George Kelly, sticking out her old tongue like she had a bad taste, while Kathryn read the Dallas Morning News: SHANNON FAMILY FACES FEDERAL JUDGE.

“How ’bout some ham and eggs?” George asked as he poured a cup of coffee.

“Scat,” Ma Coleman said.

“Biscuits and gravy?” George asked, taking a sip, winking at Kathryn.

“I said shoo,” the old woman said. “I could smell your brand of evil soon as you crossed the threshold. You smell of sulfur.”

“Just some bay rum, Ma.”

“Git your own breakfast,” she said. “Shoo.”

George reached on the table for Kit’s silver cigarette case and fetched a Lucky, although he was a Camel man, and took a seat at the beaten table. “Can I have the funnies?”

Kathryn kept reading the front page, all about Ora, Boss, and Potatoes being in court later today and how the federal types had made a motion to extradite all three of them back to Oklahoma City, saying the outlaws had too many friends in Texas. “Son of a bitch.”

“I’ll give ’em back.”

“What?” Kathryn said.

“The funnies. Little Orphan Annie just got caught in a scrap with these pirates yesterday, and I wanted to see how the whole mess turned out.”

“George?” Kathryn said, snatching away the funnies.

“Come on, now, Kit.”

“Satan!” Ma Coleman said.

“Listen, we got to bust them out.”

“Annie and Sandy?”

“Quit trying to be funny,” she said. “They want to take my mother back to Oklahoma. They’ll hang her, George. I read they’re going to make us an example for what happened to Lindbergh’s baby.”

“Charlie Urschel ain’t no baby a’ mine.”

“I rebuke you,” Ma Coleman said, her glazed blue, sightless eyes shut. “Protect her, Lord. Seek the Lord’s forgiveness and repent.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” George said. “Would you shut her up?”

“I rebuke you, Satan,” the woman said, slapping the rough-hewn boards of the tabletop. “Bless this sister in Jesus’ name.”

“Ma?” George asked. “You still got those chickens? I’d like some eggs.”

“For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

“Sure thing, Ma,” George said, slurping the hot coffee. “But can I get some eggs first? Bacon, if you got it.”

“We got to get to Dallas,” Kathryn said, finishing the story, reading over the last line about the kidnappers and their accomplices facing the chair. “If they take Ora out of Texas, they’ll kill her.”

“You want me to march into the county jail with my pistol and rescue my mother-in-law?”

“George, bring the machine gun.”

“I’d be dead long before I make it inside the joint.”

“Call some friends.”

“Albert won’t be much help.”

“Call Verne Miller.”

“Have you gone loony tunes? His best friend is in the slammer for something we did. Not to mention, we stole their loot. He’s got cause to be upset.”

“Then give it back.”

“Doesn’t work that way, Kit,” he said. “Hell, I didn’t mean to take it. How was I supposed to know Kid Cann packed all the cash together?”

“They’re going to kill my mother.”

“You want them to kill your husband, too? We set our path a long ways back.”

Kathryn didn’t speak, flipping her cigarette case from side to side.

“We got to get out of Texas,” George said. “Today.”

“Satan,” Ma said. “The beast roams the earth as a lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

“Shut up, old woman,” George said. “I gotta think.”

Kathryn lay back and slapped George across the mug. “You’ve got to do something.”

“I’ve got to fetch up some eggs,” George said, rubbing the red mark across his unshaven jaw and standing from the table. “I’m going to take a bath, eat breakfast, and then for the rest of the day I’m going to get good and stinking drunk. You can do all the thinking today.”

“That’s your answer?”

“I’m not going to Dallas.”

“I’m going to Dallas,” she said. “They need a lawyer.”

“Go,” George said.

“Satan,” Ma Coleman said.

Kathryn tramped out of the room, the screen door swatting behind her. George wasn’t but two seconds behind, Kathryn wishing he’d waited a beat so she could muster up some good sniveling tears, but to hell with it.

“We need a new machine,” George said, jabbing his finger into her chest. “I’ll give you a few hundred, and you go to town and buy something, anything. Nothing flashy, but reliable. We’ll leave the Chevrolet here. Going to Dallas is outright lamebrained.”

She nodded, pulling long on a Lucky, burning the cigarette down to nothing but ash and flicking it from her fingers.

“And we need to bury the loot.”

“Here?”

“Right here,” George said. “When it’s safe, we can come back for it. If we get caught, it’ll always be here. We take only what we’ll need for a couple months.”

“Ah, jeez, George,” Kathryn said. “This is crummy as hell.”

“You want to lose it all?”

George was gone for a few minutes and came back from Ma’s old barn carrying a shovel under his arm and a fat leather grip in each meaty fist. “Kit? Go get us those thermos jugs we bought. Some big pickle jars, too, if they got the tops.”

So this is how it goes, Kathryn thought, life goes back to canning your goddamn crummy crops and waiting for a rainy day. She watched George walk far into a weedy pasture, where a muddy creek was crossed by a lone willow, limbs hanging loose and breezy over the stagnant water. When she turned, Grandma Coleman had felt her way to the screen door and was staring in the direction of that lone tree, her milky blue eyes seeing nothing as she coldly spit into her coffee can.

Kathryn touched her face without thinking, wondering what it must feel like to have a face like a road map.

“WHAT ABOUT COLEMAN?” DOC WHITE ASKED.

“I sent a couple agents,” Jones said. “They turn up somethin’, and we’ll fly back in the evening. Right now, just keep the motor running.”

Jones mounted the steps of the courthouse in downtown Dallas. He removed his Stetson at the door and politely asked a bailiff where to find the Shannon hearing, the man pointing down the hall, and Jones finding the courtroom packed with newspapermen. He brushed past all the men standing in the back row and wandered down to the front, where he spotted a clerk he’d known for some time, tapping the fella on the shoulder.

“Mornin’, John.”

“Buster.”

“Full house today.”

“Don’t you know it.”

“What you got ahead of the Shannons?”

“Two more on the docket,” the clerk said. “Shouldn’t take long.”

“They got counsel?”

“Fella named Sayres,” he said. “Came over from Fort Worth half hour ago.”

“I know him.”

Jones spotted the fat-bellied attorney with the bald head huddled up with Ora and Boss, Potatoes sitting off to the side, flipping and twirling the tie on his neck like a dog with a new collar.

“He’s gonna fight it, y’all movin’ ’em.”

“So I heard.”

“What’s it matter where they’s tried?”

“Let’s say I got reasons to distrust who’s minding the jail.”

The clerk nodded.

Jones leaned into the desk over the man’s shoulder and whispered, “Don’t burn your britches with the paperwork.”

The clerk heard him but didn’t say a word, and Jones walked away, back along the wooden walls, finely oiled and polished, and stood among the gaggle of newspapermen that nervously checked their watches and glanced down at the empty pages of their notebooks. He saw one of the men wore a watch with that cartoon mouse on it, and he thought these people sure were of a different ilk.

Didn’t take but five minutes before the Shannons were called, and the three of them stood with roly-poly Mr. Sam Sayres of Fort Worth. The judge heard the request from the federal prosecutor to have the family extradited from the Dallas district to that of Oklahoma City, where the crime occurred, and the judge looked over his glasses at Sam Sayres, and Sam Sayres argued that the Shannons were charged with crimes that happened in Texas and would be treated fairly only by Texans. He said it was widely known in the press that the Oklahoma authorities were looking for warm bodies to convict, and this decent Texas family needed a fair shake.

The reporter with the Mickey Mouse watch snorted.

The judge looked down at the Shannons, the ragtag lot of them dressed in clothes that looked to be borrowed from an undertaker. Armon and Shannon both wore black suits from another time, with out-of-date ties, and pants that hung down, loosely pinned and sloppy at the boots. Ma Shannon wore an old gingham farm dress and a small hat with feathers and a dead canary in the crown. They all looked as solemn and sorry as sinners at a tent revival.

“Motion granted,” the judge said.

Jones parted the newspapermen, walked down the center aisle, and grabbed a bailiff by the elbow, showing him his piece of tin and telling him he’d be taking custody. Another bailiff joined them, and Ma, Boss, and Armon were marched out of the courtroom through a side door and down a long hallway.

Their attorney shouted for an appeal.

The judge told him to take it up with the clerk.

“Your Honor, those agents are rushing my clients out of the courtroom.”

“They’re within their rights,” the judge said. “I just ordered their removal. If I were you, I’d hurry up and file that appeal-I can’t make an order without it.”

Sayres’s fat ass ran to the clerk. Jones passed him before the bench.

“Hurry up, goddamnit.”

“Can’t do nothin’ till I read ’em to make sure all’s in proper form, Counselor,” the clerk said.

Jones slipped on his hat, tipping the brim at the red-faced attorney shouting at the clerk.

Jones followed the armed men pushing the Shannons down courthouse hallways and through concrete bowels till the Shannons were out a side door and marching toward Doc White and the idling government sedan. He held the back door to the sedan open, an armed agent sitting with the family in the back. Jones found a spot up front.

“Go,” Jones said.

“You rotten son of a bitch,” Boss Shannon said.

“Good to see you again, Boss,” Doc White said. “Sit back and get comfortable.”

“I got to pee-pee,” Ora Shannon said. “I can’t hold it till Oklahoma.”

“Don’t worry, darlin’,” Jones said. “It’s a short flight.”

“Good Lord in heaven,” Ora said. “I’m not getting on no flying machine.”

“Flying machine? Darlin’, this here is 1933. We call ’em ‘airplanes.’ ”

“You’ll have to shoot me dead first,” Ora Shannon said. “It ain’t natural.”

“Natural as a crow’s wings.”

“Oh, pshaw.”

“What you did was illegal,” Boss Shannon said. “Don’t think I don’t understand my rights.”

“Was keeping Mr. Urschel tied up like a goat legal?”

“Don’t confuse a matter of the court,” Boss Shannon said, crimson-faced, from the backseat.

“Don’t confuse legal with what’s right.”

Doc White wheeled them past the front gate and onto the tarmac to the waiting airplane, a twin-engine DC-2 the director had chartered that morning. Four agents met the car and opened the doors, Jones noting two of the men carried Thompsons and the other two held shotguns.

The men pulled out Potatoes first, and he didn’t give them a bit of trouble as he mounted the aircraft steps, his father in tow behind. But old Ora Shannon was the wildcat she promised, shaking her head and saying, “I’ve never been in one of those things in my life and I’m not goin’ now.”

“Suit yourself,” Jones said.

He motioned for the agents, and they pulled the fighting old woman from the car, her back arching as she tried to claw at the men with manacled wrists, until she was held under her arms and by her feet, lifted high off the ground, and taken up the ramp. She launched a final fight at the top, right at the airplane’s door, thrashing and hollering, her screams drowned out by the approaching siren.

A sheriff ’s car had followed them from the courthouse. From the top of the stairs, Jones could see Sam Sayres in the front seat.

“Start her up,” Jones said, hollering.

An agent told the pilot. Men spun the props.

Sam Sayres waddled from the official car, hollering and cussing, holding a piece of paper aloft. Jones pointed to his ear and shook his head. White walked past him and into the DC-2. Jones smiled down on the tarmac and waved good-bye just as the wind from the props knocked the papers loose from the lawyer’s hands and sent them, scattering and tumbling, toward the tower.

Two minutes later they were in the air, headed back to Oklahoma City.

“GIVE ME A SIP,” KATHRYN SAID.

George passed the pint of Old Schenley, straight rye whiskey.

“Bottled in bond under U.S. government supervision,” Kathryn said, reading the label before uncorking the bottle.

“Makes me sad to see that.”

“I know, George,” Kathryn said, sliding up next to him on the edge of Ma Coleman’s front porch, the old woman finally in bed, door double-locked in case George decided to get frisky. “You were a hell of a bootlegger.”

“You mean it, Kit?”

“Sure.”

“Better than Little Steve Anderson?”

“George?” Kathryn asked.

He snatched back the bottle of rye and took a healthy swallow.

“Don’t fuck up the moment,” she said.

“So that’s our new chariot?”

“Best I could do.”

“I said cheap,” George said. “Not broke.”

“The man promised she ran good.”

“I haven’t seen an old truck like that since I was running liquor.”

“Man said those Model A’s will run forever if you change the oil.”

“All she has to do is get us outta Texas, and then we can ditch her.” Kathryn looked up to the beaten porch, flooded with light from a kerosene lamp, bugs swarming at its brightness, at the spades and picks, a folded-up tent, coffeepot, metal cups, and an iron skillet.

“George, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t go to Mexico. They got my mother.”

“If we stay,” George said, knocking back more rye, “they’ll hang us. That doesn’t do anyone any good.”

“I ’spec not.”

“You can bring Chingy,” he said. His eyes had grown bloodshot and his face flushed.

“Sam Sayres wants a thousand dollars.”

“Don’t you dare wire that money,” George said. “You think the G isn’t watching his office now?”

“We got to get it to him personal,” she said. “I called him today from in town. He walked around the corner and caught the telephone at some café. He says he’ll meet me if I bring the cash. Said they got Boss and Ora real good, and that they have nothing short of a lynch mob waiting for them in O.K. City.”

“Anyone you trust to deliver the dough?”

“Louise.”

“You call her?”

“Couldn’t find her.”

“Go figure.” George nodded, and passed back the rye. “Say, why does your grandma hate me so much?”

“She thinks you’re leading me down the primrose path to hell.”

“Ain’t it fun?”

“It was.” Kathryn took a swallow and made a sour face. “That’s some tough stuff, George.”

“Fresh out of champagne,” he said. “Say, how ’bout you and me and the pooch head back to Chicago? We’ll be protected. Safe. I know some joints where no white man will set foot. Only go out at night, lay low, till somethin’ knocks us off the front page and we go back to being Joes.”

“You don’t get it? Our pictures are in every paper in the country.”

“Oh, hell. Haven’t you ever been to a party and thought you’d seen some bastard who’s famous, but then you start thinking that you’re a little loony ’cause the fella is shorter or has different-colored hair or something. That’s all we need-a little change in style.”

“What can you do to your hair?”

“Go blond.”

“That mug doesn’t go blond.”

“Come on,” George said. “You want to go to the Fair. We’ll take enough of the loot to have some good times and lay low. Get drunk, lie around in our underwear, and read the funnies for a few months. I know this ole bootlegger up there who’s on the square. He owes me from Memphis. They call him ‘Silk Hat’ Harry.”

“Only if we get the dough to Sayres,” she said. “He’ll drop their case if he doesn’t get paid.”

“Shit, just give him that new Chevrolet,” he said. “That’ll keep ’im happy for a while.”

George finished off the rye and tossed the bottle far out in the weeds, before leaning back on the porch planks and staring up at the bugs gathering around the lantern. He reached out, pawing at them, trying to touch the light that was too far away. “You’re gonna get us killed with that ole hard head.”

She didn’t speak. She could think of nothing to say.

“Did I ever tell you what Jarrett wanted for fingering Urschel?” he asked.

“Figured the couple grand you took off the top from Albert.”

“That was for two cars we ditched,” George said. “And gas and the Coca-Cola we bought Urschel.”

“So what’d you pay ’im?”

“Not a cent.”

“You’re off your nut.”

“You don’t unnerstand, Kit. He said the pleasure was all his, to finger a rotten bastard like Mr. Charles F. Urschel.”

“How come?”

“I didn’t ask and I don’t want to know.”

CHARLIE HADN’T SLEPT MUCH IN THE THREE WEEKS SINCE he’d been turned loose. Each night he found himself returning to his sunporch, taking in a cold drink or a hot cup of coffee, always a cigar, and replaying every hand of that bridge game. He’d study on it until the sun would come up, and then he’d return to the kitchen, where he’d greet the federal agents, who sat in cars and walked the perimeter to babysit the Urschel house. But Charlie didn’t think much about those sonsabitches coming back. They got what they needed and were long gone by now. They were just a set of rusted parts: knobs and pins, gears and springs. He only wanted to know who wound them.

Agent Colvin walked into the dark porch. No moon tonight. You could hear the crickets and mosquitoes hitting the screens.

Charlie sat alone in a far chair, far enough that even if there had been moonlight he couldn’t be seen. He drew on the cigar and didn’t say anything, dressed in a bathrobe he’d worn all day, refusing to eat or bathe for the last week.

“We got the Shannons locked up tight.”

Colvin stood a fair distance away from Charlie’s dark corner, as if he’d catch some dread flu.

Charlie smoked and nodded. The boy wore a nice double-breasted blue suit, hat in hand, and, strangely enough, looked to be carrying a gun. Charlie’d never noticed a gun.

“Agent Jones figured they’d be safer in the city. There was some concern of an escape in Dallas.”

“Did I show you the latch?” Charlie asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you thought no more of it?”

“We’ve made inquiries into Mr. Jarrett’s business dealings.”

“Any horse’s ass can get the key to the city.”

“We’re still checking, sir.”

“I want him arrested,” Charlie said, the idea sounding ridiculous and hollow coming from his own mouth. “Or questioned, or whatever the federal police do.”

“We don’t have anything.”

“How did those men know to find me on the back porch?”

“Perhaps the light was on.”

“They had no hesitation,” he said. “Jarrett unlocked the screen during our game. They had arrived from the front. I never leave the back door unlatched.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You think I’ve gone off my rocker?”

“No, sir.”

“Timing.”

The men didn’t speak for a while. Colvin found a chair close to Charlie and asked if it was all right to take a seat.

“Sir, I’d like to take Miss Betty for a soda tomorrow evening after supper,” he said, face half shadowed, swatting away a bug that had flown through a crack. “But only if you and Miss Berenice approve.”

“Of course,” Charlie said, smashing his cigar in an empty coffee cup.

“Agent Jones is very good,” Colvin said. “He thinks the Kellys may have returned to Texas.”

“That would be foolish.”

“Kelly’s wife has people there.”

“I bet they’re halfway to South America, laughing at us all.”

“I don’t think they’re laughing.”

“You play cards, Agent Colvin?”

“I do.”

“Bridge?”

“No, sir.”

“Jarrett cheats.”

Colvin nodded.

“He hesitates before pulling a card.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Let’s say the player on your right leads with a queen of hearts. And then when it comes to your turn, you have a king, and you’re pretty damn sure your partner has the ace. You might hesitate, and toss out a three instead of a king. That way, your partner knows he can take the trick with the ace and lead a low heart back to your king. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Jarrett hesitates like a son of a bitch,” he said. “He knew I’d spotted him, yet he continued.”

“He didn’t change his game?”

“No.”

“So what do you do?”

“Confront him.”

“So he won’t cheat again?”

“Exactly,” Charlie said. “A liar must be confronted or he’ll continue to rub your nose in his stink.”

“Sir?”

“I’ve invited the Jarretts over Saturday night to play a few rubbers,” Charlie said. “I’d like you to be my partner.”