Infamous (28 page)

Harvey tossed him a pack of cigarettes and then his lighter.

“Go make some chicken.”

“Is that the sheriff?” Boss Shannon asked.

“No,” Harvey said. “That’s ‘Mad Dog’ Underhill and Jim Clark. And those two crazy bastards are gonna watch you, just like you and Potatoes watched Mr. Urschel. Now, let’s talk about George and Kathryn again.”

“She left her furs,” Boss said.

“Boss!” the old woman said.

“And her jewelry,” Boss said.

“Boss!”

“Well, it’s true. I know she’s your kinfolk, but I ain’t dangling out my bits and pieces for the likes of them.”

The car, a big green Lincoln, rolled to a stop, and Wilbur Underhill stepped from the driver’s seat and onto the running board. The white suit and straw boater looked cartoonish on the skeletal man with the big eyes and farmer’s features.

“What’d they say?” Underhill asked. Jim Clark pulled himself from the passenger door and didn’t take two paces before he whipped it on out and started to relieve himself on some skittering chickens.

“Miss Ora is gonna make us a big fried-chicken dinner and then—” Harvey said.

“And then what?” Underhill said, squinting into the sun.

“Then we gonna have a little come-to-Jesus meeting.”

“Did he just come out the shitter?” Underhill asked.

“That he did,” Harvey Bailey said.

“Well, hell. Open the door and let it air out. I needed a commode since the state line.”

THE THREE-CAR CARAVAN MADE ITS WAY NORTH WITH DETECTIVES from Dallas and Fort Worth, three government agents besides Doc White, Joe Lackey, Colvin, and Jones. One of the boys—a kid named Bryce—was promised to be a real Oklahoma sharpshooter, and, when Jones had doubted him, he’d tossed a poker chip into the air and blasted the center from it. Jones had nodded, said he’ll do just fine, and they’d loaded up a little later—three hours later than Jones would’ve liked—and now, with the sun falling across the hills, he thought about the layout of the Shannon place and having to make their way through the gate and around the house without causing some newspapermen sympathy.

“You know they have dogs,” Jones said.

He and Doc White sat in the rear of the sedan. Detective Ed Weatherford drove.

“You told me.”

“Bulldogs,” Jones said.

“I never in my life saw a trick like that kid pulled today.”

“He shouldn’t shoot so near the hotel.”

“You called ’im out, Buster.”

“Yeah. I guess I did. You see the way he pulled out the poker chip? He’d been saving it, just for this type of occasion.”

“They all aren’t college boys with neatly parted hair,” White said.

“You’re one to talk about hair.”

“Hell with you.”

Jones watched the hills smooth down to nubs and the miles pass by so low and flat you could spot a grasshopper at a hundred feet. And he didn’t like it a bit. He checked his watch, knowing the sun would be down long before they made Paradise. The sun looked like the end of a fire poker, melting across the plains. The scrub brush and mesquite flew past the window.

“Colvin tell you Urschel was flying down?” White asked.

“No.”

“He wants to go with us.”

“Hell.”

“He said he’d furnish his own weapon. A 16-gauge he uses to hunt ducks.”

“Why’d Colvin tell him?”

“He thought he’d put his mind at some ease,” Doc White said, rolling a cigarette on his trouser leg and sealing it with his mouth. “Said he’d been a mite nervous since he come back.”

“He can’t go.”

“That’s what I told him you’d say.”

“Last time I checked, Mr. Urschel didn’t sign my checks.”

“You don’t like the timing.”

“I don’t think we’ll fire a shot.”

“But if we do?”

Jones didn’t answer, just checked his timepiece and reached for the machine gun at his feet. “Let’s hope they throw poker chips at us.”

“You know how to shoot that thing?”

“I do.”

“Just seems you were against using such a device.”

“I was thinking on that. Thinking about the Indians who didn’t pick up an iron and tried to fight with the bow and arrow.”

“A .45 ain’t a bow and arrow.”

“Might as well be.”

Jones pulled the gold watch from his vest again and wound the stem.

“Would you quit checking that thing?” White said.

“Stop the machine,” Jones said.

Weatherford slowed the lead automobile, and Jones crawled out, stretching his legs and putting on his hat. He waited for the other men to join him on the long ribbon of highway. He took his time as they gathered, filling his pipe bowl with cherry tobacco and finding a stick along a gully. The sun was half down on the long plain and cast a long, hot wave of shimmering light on the hard-packed earth and through the dead tree branches.

Jones got down on one knee in front of the men and drew a box for the Shannon place, their barn, a pigpen, and a handful of outbuildings. He noted the direction of Armon Shannon’s place and where the trouble would come from if there was trouble.

“And they have dogs,” he said. “I don’t know how many. But if you got to shoot ’em, shoot ’em. But I’d prefer we keep quiet and not tip our hand.”

“How far?” Agent Colvin asked.

Jones looked up at the young man and then at the setting sun. He could feel the heat on his face as he smoked and studied their situation a bit, coming back to that long canyon so many years ago. The dead horses, and Rangers exposed, with only a few boulders for cover.

“Boys, we’ve got about twenty-six miles to go over slow roads,” Jones said. “We might reach the place before dark, but even if we did I doubt we’d be able to finish the job before it got black. There’s only one road into it, and that’s as plain as the devil. We can’t creep up on the place because it’s so flat you can see an ant a mile off. The only way to get in there is just head straight in, and for that we need daylight. I’ve done enough shooting in my time not to want to go barging into a strange place where the odds are all on the other side. My judgment is to back off, go down to Fort Worth, and get a little sleep, then hit this place at sunrise.”

21

Saturday, August 12, 1933

T
hey waited the next morning nearly ninety minutes for Sheriff Faith and the deputies he’d promised to show. Jones walked from car to car, idling on the lone highway, clicking the timepiece open and closed in a nervous fashion, while the hands crept up to six, the sun well on its way. He didn’t hesitate when he said to hell with ’em, and the caravan moved on northwest from Rhome on Texas Highway 114, passing over the railroad tracks at Boyd and motoring on through the pasture and worthless farmland till they neared the county road turnoff to the Shannon place. The morning sun shone sharp and bright into the vehicle’s windshield while Jones unhitched the circular clip of the Thompson, checking the rounds of ammunition, as Doc White loaded the two thumb busters he wore from a belt rig, smoking down the last of a hand-rolled cigarette and spying the farmhouse growing in the distance.

Agent Colvin drove the automobile this morning, some kind of Ford, or perhaps a Chevrolet, and beside him in the passenger seat—much to Gus T. Jones’s disliking—was Mr. Charles Urschel, holding a handsome duck-hunting shotgun with a French walnut stock, his pockets loaded down with more buckshot. The man had just had a fresh haircut, the back hairline shaved up high and tight above his earlobes, and you could see the white, untanned skin for a good inch on his thick neck, talcum powder on the collar. Jones shook his head.
Hell, what was a man to do?

He’d been cabled at the Blackstone Hotel, where they domiciled the night before, direct from Hoover himself, that Urschel was to accompany the raiding party. Hoover said to keep him back from the action, if there were action, as a spectator, requested special by the governor of Oklahoma.

“This is gonna be like kicking over a hornet’s nest, Mr. Urschel,” Jones said. “And there’s no telling what kind of desperadoes will be shooting their way out. So I’d ask that you stay back near the vehicles. Behind them, to be more exact.”

Urschel said nothing, just watched the windshield like it was a moving picture, while the automobile wheeled past a crooked mailbox tacked to a cedar post, an open cattle gate, and zipped down a potholed road, kicking up big, thick balloons of dust and grit. The back window dulled with a brown haze so thick that Jones couldn’t see the men following.

“Get within a quarter mile of that front porch, Mr. Colvin,” Jones said. “Don’t even draw your weapon unless you hear a shot.”

The eastern skyline lit up hard and clear blue, and soft, rounded shadows fell from the columned, one-story house and lay down long across the rows of dead corn and live beans, trailing and crooking up strings tied to a dozen or so poles. Jones felt he’d stepped back a bit, with a cluttered heap of old wagons, a rusted mule plow, scythes and gears, and the spinning windmill, creaking and turning as slow as the second hand of a watch.

Colvin stopped, and killed the engine. Men piled out of cars, careful to close the doors with a light touch. With shotguns, pistols, and three machine guns, the detectives and federal agents started down Boss Shannon’s gully-washed drive, shadows retreating at their feet.

That’s when they heard the dog’s breath and feet, and saw the little brown shape bound—almost in midair—for the men.

HARVEY BAILEY COULDN’T FALL ASLEEP EARLIER THAT NIGHT. Ma Shannon had cooked up four whole chickens, along with some mashed potatoes and slices of tomato. She’d even made a lemon icebox pie—although they’d been so famished the pie was still warm to the touch, but nice with a side of coffee and poor cigars on the front porch. Underhill and Clark had decided to sleep at Armon’s shack, where he kept a stack of French naturalist magazines, and Miller slept on the Shannons’ couch, smoking and listening to an orchestra from a top hotel in Dallas. Harvey found himself on the porch, lying on a cot and staring across the pasture, sweating like a son of a bitch and wishing they’d go ahead and a get some kind of word on George so he could take a decent shower and kick the dust off his shoes and this godforsaken shithole.

But the stars were electric. Being in the city, he’d forgotten just how many there were, and on a hot summer night, not a cloud in the sky, it was just the kind of blackness up there that led a man to contemplate things, where he was headed, with a few rough directions and some half-formed ideas.

And so he took the cot off the porch and made his way behind the Shannon home, far from the artificial light that spilled from a kitchen window, everyone alone and asleep, the din of the radio-signal static—already signed off for the night—sounding like an ocean’s surf.

He found a spot of even ground and used both hands to hoist his bad leg up onto the cot. He lay there, staring skyward, in nothing but a pair of BVDs and black socks, and he lifted a cigarette from his pack of Chesterfields, thinking to himself that he’d once believed in the order of man and church and family and now the only order making any sense was chaos. He wondered if he could go back to the farm with his wife and boy and get back behind a mule, hang up the keys to the big cars and put the fancy suits back on the hangers, to collect dust on the shoulders. You just stand there before those teller’s cages and feel your heart up in your throat, hand on the pistol, and, by damn, you feel like God.