Infamous (37 page)

“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.