Ace Atkins - Infamous

“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.”

They 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.

Could you get that from planting a turnip? Were you any less a man on the other side of a banker’s pen?

Harvey smoked two cigarettes. He wished for a drink, but he drifted off for a few hours without it. At first he thought it was the morning light that had woken him, but, as he turned on one elbow, he heard the automobiles from way off, knowing this was a one-way road to the Shannon place. He reached for the.38 under his pillow, hoping to see a sixteen-cylinder midnight blue Cadillac, as he stood and almost sleepwalked in the early sunlight across stones and pebbles, watching three long black cars appear and, far off, men crawling from vehicles, men in cowboy hats with guns. And the sight of them startled him, sent him scrambling back and jumping onto the porch, pain shooting from his heel up through his calf, as he woke Verne Miller, who clutched his Thompson on the old couch like a spent lover, and told him to get his crazy ass up because the G had arrived and was about to come a-calling.

Miller calmly got up and tucked his pant legs into his boots. He sat on the couch, checking the weapon’s load, and placed a fresh cigarette in the corner of his mouth. With those cool blue eyes trained on Harvey Bailey, he said: “Wake the old man and woman. Go fetch Wilbur and Jim and Potatoes. And let the dogs out. Give those G-men a nice welcome.”

THEY WEREN’T LIKE ANY BULLDOGS JONES HAD EVER SEEN, brown mongrels with jaw muscles as tight as walnuts, bounding-almost flying-in solid muscular leaps across the dusty ground and launching themselves at Bruce Colvin. He turned his back, careful not to fire and wake the house, but the dog caught a solid bit of his arm and chewed and tore, not letting go. Colvin spun wild and tried to knock the hound away.