I’d guessed that.
“The folks around here call me Old Creepy,” he said. “I don’t know why.” And he smiled. It was a ghostly, ghastly smile. It was a smile a mean kid wore when pulling the wings off a bug. He was pulling part of the wing of a chicken off, at the moment.
“Or O.C.,” Nelson corrected.
“Or O.C.,” Karpis allowed. “I’ll answer to that.”
I nodded to him. “Glad to meet you, Karpis.”
He held up a greasy hand. “We can shake hands later. I understand your name is Lawrence.”
“That’s right.”
“From Chicago.”
“As of now.”
“And connected.”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’ve had dealings with the Chicago Boys before.”
“Really.”
“I’m not crazy about Chicago. A plain Kansas boy like me, I prefer the wide-open spaces. I like to be able to make a getaway through a field or a farmyard, down a dirt road, across a dry creek bed. In Chicago, the city—it’s all asphalt and traffic and big buildings. Who needs it.”
I swallowed a bite of mashed potatoes and gravy. “It’s nice out here. I could be a convert to this country life.”
Karpis nodded; the glasses and slicked-back hair made him look like a math teacher. But that smile would give Lon Chaney the willies.
He said, “You’ll find the company better, too, I think. We work for a living, unlike your hoodlum pals.”
He returned to eating his chicken. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I didn’t feel like following up on it.
Ma said, “Somebody ought to go up and drag that girl down here. She needs to eat.”
She meant Louise.
Dolores, sitting next to her man Karpis, said, “I don’t think so, Ma. She’s had quite a shock. She’s crying her fool head off. I don’t think she could keep anything down.”
Ma shook her head, looking at the remaining food on the table. “It’d be criminal to waste this good food,” she said. “The poor little thing ought to come down and eat.”
Paula smiled as some whiskey went smoothly down, then said, “Maybe I could take a plate up to her.”
Ma was adamant. “She should get right back in the swing of things. Best thing in the world for her.”
I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Ma, don’t you think it’s asking a little much of her to sit down and eat at the table she just saw her boyfriend stretched out dead on?”
That should have killed a few appetites, but everybody’s appetite was alive and well at this table—except for Moran, who was looking at Paula’s glass with glum envy.
Ma didn’t get my point. She said, “It’s just a table.”
Doc Barker, who’d been silently (and dedicatedly) eating, lowered his ear of corn and smiled messily and said, “Ma, sometimes you’re a riot.”
“Don’t sass!”
Across the table from his brother, Fred grinned his mostly gold grin, and said, “You’re a cold-blooded old Ozark gal, Ma, no gettin’ around it!”
“Well,” Ma said, her feelings a little hurt, “there’s apple pie for them that wants it.”
Everybody wanted it except Moran, who sat at the table, slumped. Paula finally took pity on him and went out in the other room to get her pint; she filled a water glass half full for Moran, and freshened her own glass, too.
But he drank it quickly down, and most of us were hardly started on our pie when he stood and announced, “And so to bed.”
Ma said, “So early, Doctor?”
He touched a hand to his chest with mock-drama. “I’ve had a long, tiring and quite difficult day, madam. I lost a patient, in this very room, mere hours ago. There are times when I seek refuge in a bottle; but there are times when sleep can serve that function just as well.”
The two farm boys nudged each other with elbows and laughed. The old doc talked funny.
“Sit down, Doc,” Nelson said, quietly, cutting a small bite of pie with his fork.
“Are you addressing me…Baby Face?”
A pall fell over the room.
Nelson smiled as he forked the bite of pie; lifted fork to lips, ate. “Yes. Sit down.”
“I’m tired. And I will take no orders from—”
