Макс Коллинз - Road to Perdition

Rather crude suspect sketches of my father and me hit the papers, though until subsequent events put Michael O’Sullivan, John Looney, Connor Looney, and Harlen Maguire back in the papers (and on the radio and in the newsreels), neither Papa’s name nor mine was associated with the story headlined “ARMED ROBBERS SOUGHT — Getaway Driver a Young Boy.”

At the time, of course, my father and I had other, more pressing concerns — chiefly, survival. Fortunately for us, other families — perhaps most families — in those hard times were scratching out a modest living and knew what it was to struggle just to exist. None of what has been written about my father and me has covered — no amount of diligent research has uncovered — the identity of the people who helped us, in the aftermath of the Grand Hotel shoot-out .

They are gone now, and their deeds — whether interpreted negatively or positively — cannot harm these good Samaritans. I would ask that you think of them as representative of a breed of American who lives no longer — hearty pioneers who managed to wrest a livelihood of sorts out of hardscrabble land .

Farming in the Great Plains never really made a recovery after the collapse of farm prices in 1920 and ’21. Though even worse adversity lay ahead — droughts and dust storms would soon place Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma in the middle of the so-called Dust Bowl — farmer families were already barely scratching out a living, after the Depression drove prices into the cellar .

Thus the landscape into which I drove my wounded father was topsoil rich and money poor, a desolate paradise that promised us, if not salvation, respite from the road .

Frightened though he was, Michael could handle the situation as long as his father was conscious, giving him directions — turn here, stay at the speed limit, take a left . Papa had managed to get the bleeding stopped with a piece of cloth torn from his own shirt, wouldn’t even let the boy stop to help wrap the makeshift bandage around himself.

That may have been what finally taxed his father’s considerable stamina and willpower, sending this strong weakened man into unconsciousness.

And then panic rose in the boy like water overtaking a sinking ship. Instinctively, he pulled off the main road, knowing he had to find a residence, a farm maybe, to seek help for his father. The Ford did well on the rutted dirt road, but Michael had to slow, not wanting the jolts to cause his father pain, even in his unconscious state.

Up ahead were some rickety buildings — a farmhouse, a barn, shack-like structures constructed of paint-peeling planks — that might normally have put the boy off. Right now, he was happy to see any sign of civilization, even if this spread was more like the hillbilly houses he’d seen in moving pictures and funny papers than the nice farms around Rock Island.

A pair of old people — in their fifties, maybe — were working in a field that looked pretty rough; warmer here, spring easing out winter, already. The couple was moving along slowly, kneeling at tilled soil, the man digging, the woman planting; their clothes were old and worn-out looking, the man in overalls and a ragged shirt and raggedy hat, the woman in a calico dress — both she and the dress had probably been pretty once, before the boy was born.

Michael pulled up at the edge of the field, where the couple worked, the boy thrilled to see any human being, particularly any that weren’t shooting at him and his father. He ran between tilled rows, desperately waving his arms, and the couple glanced at each other, knowing help was needed, ready to give it.

What followed was a frenzied blur to the boy — a heated knife digging at his delirious father’s shoulder, a bloody bullet dropping into a tin cup like a coin in the offering plate at church, his father shivering with fever on a makeshift cot in the front room of the shack-like house.

“Night sweats,” the farmer said. His name was Bill; he had kind blue eyes, a grooved face, and mostly white hair. “It’s good he sweats out the poison in him... but tend him, son. Stay with your father.”

Michael didn’t have to be told that. His father had tended to him, over these long weeks, and now he removed his father’s shirt, buttoning cuffs that were frayed and stained from their travels. He folded his father’s tie, placing it over the end of the cot, ritualistically, in the way he’d seen his father do, so many times.

The farmer and his wife — her name was Virginia, and she had blue eyes, too, in a face as pleasant as it was weathered, and dark-blonde graying hair — stayed in the room, but out of the way, mostly over by the kitchen part. They wore concern in their features that seemed unusual to Michael, considering he and his father were strangers. They didn’t have Catholic icons in their house, so they weren’t of the faith of his family; but Michael knew these were Christians, because they did Christian things... unlike some people who said they believed in Jesus.

Their name was Baum, but he thought at first they said “Bomb,” which struck him as a funny kind of name. Later his father corrected him, saying their name was like Balm in the Bible — “The Balm of Gilead,” Papa said.

By the next night, his father was awake, but groggy, still not really communicating very well. Michael sat beside him and fed him soup with a spoon that was a little too small for the job; he would have to wipe Papa’s mouth with a frayed napkin Mrs. Bomb had provided. It was as if Papa were the child, and Michael the father, and the change felt good, made the boy feel older, that he was somehow paying his Papa back for all the wonderful things his father had done for him.

When the Bombs had gone off to their own bedroom, Michael settled on the threadbare sofa opposite his father’s cot — Papa was still feverish, but not as bad, not near as bad — and the boy was settling his head on a pillow Mrs. Bomb had given him, when he noticed the gun in the holster under his father’s jacket, on a chair where Mr. Bomb had draped it.

Papa was asleep, and so was the farm couple. The boy crept off the sofa, carefully removed the gun from the holster, and he stood and looked down at the weapon, huge in his small hand — rough and cold, not smooth and warm, like you’d imagine, from Tom Mix and the Lone Ranger.

But the longer he held it, the more natural it felt — he stood at the cracked mirror of a dresser off to one side of the room and pretended to be Tom Mix, drawing his gun at himself — looking fierce, a bad, bad man...

Then he pretended he was the Lone Ranger, and at some point, in his imaginings, he was his father...

O’Sullivan was not exactly sure how many days had passed. Three at least; probably no more than five. Unshaven, topcoat over his tieless white shirt, he sat in an old wicker chair on the porch of the timeworn farmhouse, feeling not bad, a tin cup of coffee steaming, cradled nicely in his hands. In the world around him, green was overtaking brown, and snow was nowhere. When had spring crept up on them? It had been winter, an eye blink ago.

Yet somehow it was not a surprise. They had been on the road together, he and Michael, forever — and yet there was no way to put enough time and space between them and the taking of Annie and Peter to give any solace, to make it seem anything but terrible and fresh in his memory. Out in the field — what a hard life these people had, but it was a life, wasn’t it, better than their own — Bill was allowing Michael to help in the planting, the boy doing the digging with energy and enthusiasm, while the warmly amused farmer followed along, dropping seeds.

Mrs. Baum, a grizzled goddess in a frayed checkered dress, peeling potatoes, was watching the boy, too. Then she glanced toward the ramshackle barn, where the maroon Ford could be glimpsed, since the door was half off its hinges.