The Heavenly Table

23

AFTER SHOOTING DOWN Reese Montgomery’s airplane, the Jewett brothers started traveling mostly at night. Since they had to stay off the roads most of the time, it was slow going in the dark. During the day they camped along brushy creeks and snaky swamps, hid in hollowed-out caves and deserted homesteads, with one always standing guard while the other two slept. They lived mostly on hardtack and candy and tins of stew and evaporated milk, but it was still the best fare they had eaten since before their mother died. Continuing their way northward, they robbed several general stores, collecting up various firearms and boxes of ammunition — along with a Webster’s International dictionary and a teakwood box of silver flatware — to the point where they finally had to steal an extra horse just to haul their arsenal. Inspired, at least in part, by The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, Chimney and Cob started dressing in cowboy garb, ten-gallon hats and dungarees and hand-tooled pointy-toed boots, while Cane, with the black frock coat and new white shirt, his hair greased back with pomade, took on the same look of shady refinement favored by riverboat gamblers and dissipated men of the cloth. Crossing into Tennessee, they held up three more banks, finally hitting the jackpot in a little town called Wayward. That night, after Cane finished counting the $29,000 in hundred-dollar bills the trembling bank clerk had pulled out of the vault and tossed onto the coat Chimney had spread on the floor, he looked at his brothers and said, “That’s it, we’re done.”

“What do ye mean?” Chimney said.

“No more robbing. There’s enough cash here we don’t need to take any more chances.”

“You swear?” Cob said. By this point he was sick to death of running all night and hurting people and stealing their property. Sometimes the only thing that kept him from slipping off and giving himself up at the nearest post office or calaboose was Cane’s promise that they would buy a farm, a home, a place to call their own, as soon as they made it across the border into Canada.

Cane nodded. “All we got to do now is disappear.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded. The big haul in Wayward had come with a heavy price. While Cane was sitting on his horse acting as lookout during the holdup, a deputy in a motorcar had spun around the corner, ramming the steel bumper into the animal’s front legs and snapping them like twigs. Tumbling backward out of his saddle, Cane hit the ground hard, but managed to hold on to his Smith & Wesson. Just as the deputy raised his rifle, Cane fired two shots at him, the first one ripping his chin off and the second puncturing his right lung. Townspeople ran to their windows and watched as the tall man in the black coat put the screaming horse out of its misery before emptying another pistol into the still-sputtering engine of the automobile.

Though they managed to escape and steal another horse that night, the very next day they encountered still more trouble. While looking for a place to relieve himself, Bill Wilson, the leader of a posse from Wayward, accidentally wandered upon them hiding in a thick, tangled stand of pine trees. He was unbuttoning his trousers when he looked up and saw Cane pointing a gun at him. To the outlaw’s surprise, Wilson smiled with an air of complete confidence. He was the constable in Henderson County, and had been, over the course of a twenty-year career, in a number of fixes just as bad as this one. Most criminals, he had often told people, were essentially gutless cowards, and if you didn’t show any fear, they’d usually lose their nerve and slither away like snakes. He’d shot a number of them hightailing it for some hidey hole after he’d stared them down. But even men as dedicated and tough as Bill needed a break now and then, and he had been fishing the riffles on the Beech River when all hell broke loose in Wayward, or he would have probably already had these bastards either locked up or in their graves. “You better think twice about that, buster,” Wilson said coolly. “I got a whole pack of men right over the hill waitin’ on me.” From the witnesses he’d talked to, he was fairly certain this dirty thug was the one who had blasted half of Deputy Lamar’s face off.

“Keep quiet,” Cane said.

“And what if I don’t?” asked Wilson loudly, shifting his eyes over to the fat one someone had described as a half-wit, sitting on a log in the gloomy shade in a cowboy outfit with what appeared to be a paper bag of Circus Peanuts in his lap. He wondered where the third one might be. Probably passed out in his bedroll, he figured. That was another thing about such scum; within a few hours of committing a crime, they usually got liquored up, either to celebrate their haul or to keep from dwelling on the fate that awaited them once they were apprehended. He was about to say as much when he heard a footstep behind him and the swish of something cutting through the air. There was no chance to call out to his comrades over the hill or draw his weapon or even utter a final prayer. As he landed with a soft thump on the pine needle floor, the last thing he saw was a skinny boy bend down in front of him and wipe blood off a machete; and the last thought that went through his partially detached head was that today was a Thursday, and tomorrow would be a Friday.

Just a few hours after the posse brought Bill Wilson’s body back to Wayward, the attorney general of Tennessee, Ezra Powys, consulted with his most trusted political advisers and upped the reward for the brothers dead or alive from $750 to $5,000 American dollars. It was an outrageous amount to offer, even for cop killers, but he had run on a platform pledging to clean up corruption, and recent allegations that he was in the pocket of a consortium of Memphis moonshiners were steadily gaining traction throughout the state. But, as his consultants told him, if he played this right, and showed the people that he was willing to do whatever it took to bring the criminals to justice, the murder of Bill Wilson might just save his career. Within hours of making the announcement, he realized he had made a mistake ever listening to the dumb bastards. According to several editorials that ran in that evening’s papers, the majority of taxpayers of Tennessee didn’t think there were more than three or four people walking the globe worth five thousand dollars, and certainly not a self-deluded, two-bit constable from Henderson County who had a reputation for shooting misdemeanors and old drunks in the back. Too, many of these same taxpayers lived on collard greens and corn pone six or seven days a week; and a great percentage of them were beginning to view the robbing of a bank as a just blow against the system that helped keep them in poverty. One of the writers even speculated that the reason the attorney general was so eager to offer such an outlandish reward was because the money the Jewett boys had stolen in Wayward belonged to one of his Memphis cronies! Even worse than that, Powys found out that the funeral for Bill Wilson was to be held on Sunday at noon, and he had a tee time scheduled for one o’clock at the newly opened Happy Valley Golf Course. Though he had only recently taken up the game, it was already becoming an obsession. One of his underlings discreetly tried to get the service changed to an earlier time, or perhaps even moved to Monday, but Mrs. Wilson insisted that her husband be buried on the Sabbath at the same time of day that he had entered this world forty-two years ago. “Sorry, Chief, she won’t budge.”

“Well, shit” was all Powys said. He glanced regretfully over at his clubs sitting by the door of his office. All week, the only thing he’d had to look forward to was spending some time practicing his swing. By the time he was photographed kneeling in prayer beside the coffin, and sat through three hours of pompous preaching and teary accolades, and walked the widow through the cemetery, he almost hated Bill more for getting killed than he did the outlaws for killing him.

Even so, he woke up Monday morning looking forward to seeing the hard-earned publicity that his advisers had guaranteed him on the front pages of the papers, only to discover that John Herbert Montgomery had stolen his thunder. Yesterday evening, the tycoon had suddenly broken his silence about his son’s killers, informing a group of newsmen gathered outside his Long Island estate that he was willing to pay three times what Tennessee was offering to whoever brought him their heads. Except for brief notices in a couple of the local rags, Bill’s funeral wasn’t even mentioned. Photographs showed Montgomery barely able to control his grief, and the attorney general vaguely wondered whether he could ever summon such emotion — if, for example, his old mother passed away, or his wife ran off with a better man. He doubted it. As blind as he was to most of his defects, even Powys knew that the first thing a man lost when he entered politics was his humanity.

Of course, the story Montgomery fed the journalists was not the real story at all, which was something the attorney general, as many times as he had manipulated the press himself, should have realized. As for the tears in the photographs, all the eighty-year-old tycoon had to do was recall the afternoon long, long ago when he’d told a young, impoverished Tom Edison to go fly a kite, and they fell like rain. And as far as Reese went, the outlaws had actually done him a favor by blowing his spoiled, rotten son out of the air — by his accountant’s calculations, the lazy little whoremonger had cost him close to a million dollars in the past year alone — but still, as several of his cronies had reminded him repeatedly in the days since the boy’s death, you couldn’t let the hoi polloi think they could murder the privileged class without repercussions, or you’d end up with another Russia on your hands. The sooner this Jewett trash was tracked down and dealt with, the sooner he could forget about the entire mess and get back to the business of the day, which was making as much money as possible off the cluster-fuck in Europe before somebody threw in the towel.

On the heels of Montgomery’s pronouncement, reporters from all the big news organizations on the East Coast were quickly dispatched south to get in on the story before it was too late. Every newspaper in America featured tales written about the outlaws and their crimes. From time to time, the brothers managed to get hold of one lying around somewhere, and the black-and-white drawings of their faces nearly drove Chimney crazy the first few times he saw them, since he was made to look like a sneaky, bucktoothed rodent, and Cob a fat, goofy baby, while Cane was always portrayed as some sort of devilish ladies’ man. Disregarding the facts, several of the more liberal publications began to twist the crime spree into a romantic saga, due in part to a hysterical widow’s claim that the oldest had handed her a bouquet of sweet williams and a fifty-dollar gold piece after they watered their horses at her well in Chapel Hill. More conservative journalists, however, chose to ignore the heartthrobs and moonbeams, and put a different spin on the tale. Thus, on the same day that a Socialist weekly in Boston ran an editorial stating that the brothers were just humble, illiterate sharecroppers who had killed their tyrannical overseer after he refused to allow them time off to bury their dead father, a staunchly right-wing daily out of New York City compared the outlaws to a band of ungodly savages who were possibly even worse than the Huns, going so far as to claim that they had robbed and left for dead a half-dozen good Christians along a highway in Arkansas who were on their way to a revival. And things were just getting warmed up. Crimes as far away as Idaho and Arizona were soon attributed to the trio. A fruit farmer in Vermont, sensing that his nosy wife was beginning to suspect his own sick behavior, and viewing the brothers as the perfect fall guys, walked into the Montpelier police station and swore that he had come upon them burying a woman’s nude body in his orchard. Fortunately, the detective on duty, a man by the name of Abe Abramson, was blessed with an uncanny ability to detect when someone was lying, mostly by observing the manner in which they held the cup of coffee or tea he thrust upon them while they were being interrogated; and within hours the farmer was arrested for the slayings of nine females who had disappeared from the Green Mountains over the past decade. Still, even though that grisly incident received much attention nationwide and should have served as a wake-up call that perhaps the outlaws were being blamed for crimes they hadn’t committed, the reporting became more and more tawdry and unbalanced, and the telegraph and phone wires fairly sang with contradicting lies and outlandish bullshit. But there was one thing that everyone seemed to be in agreement on, and it was this: with deputized posses in six states now searching for them, along with a great number of independent bounty hunters, it was only a matter of days or even hours before the brothers now known as the Jewett Gang would be no more.