“I know where I’m going.”
“You don’t even know what state you’re in.”
“I’d tell you but then he’d hear me say.”
“Goddamn.”
“Just lean back and enjoy the ride.”
“That’s what they tell the bastards in the electric chair.”
AGENT COLVIN DROVE JONES AND DOC WHITE OUT TO THE CROSSROADS made famous in the afternoon papers, Jarrett riding with them and pointing them to the exact spot where the gunmen had stopped and the two villains pulled out his wallet and took his cash. Jarrett seemed a little theatrical about the whole ordeal, walking off the paces and acting out the parts as if Jones were interested in some kind of Passion play.
“If only I had a gun,” said the rich man.
“And then what?” Doc White asked.
Jarrett started to say something but thought better of it.
He was a well-dressed man with the beaten face and accent of a rough-neck. Jones figured he’d spent many a day in the heat with oil deep under his fingernails and sun burning his neck before people started calling him sir.
A full silver moon hung overhead. Big and fat, the way a moon can only look in the country, and Jones didn’t even need a flashlight as he found the tire tracks with ease and squatted down, studying the pattern. He found matches in his shirt pocket, filled his bowl with tobacco, and lit it.
He looked up at the long endless road when he got the pipe going, Doc studying the tracks over Jones’s shoulder.
“Firestone,” Doc said.
“New?”
“Last year’s make.”
“You boys can tell that just from the tracks?” Jarrett asked.
Jones stood and walked along the tracks, taking the exact direction the farmer had noted. He pulled a small leather notebook from his coat pocket and inked in a few passages.
“He’s headed south,” Jones said, pipe set hard in his teeth.
“But the tracks go to Tulsa,” Jarrett said.
“Yes, sir, they do,” Jones said.
“Dirty kidnappers,” White said. “Remember when we’d catch fellas like this and chain ’em to a mesquite tree like Christmas ornaments?”
“No, I don’t, Doc. You must’ve confused me with someone else.”
“Horseshit,” White said. “Those Mexes jumped us outside Harlington? Remember? They’d been running whores and cheating cards out of the Domingo Roach, and we got some of ’em and tracked the rest down a trail where’d they’d laid a fire. Those bastards ambushed us right there, and we shot three of ’em dead? That wasn’t that long ago.”
“Nineteen hundred and thirteen.”
“You said you don’t recall.”
“I just wanted to see if you remembered who shot who.”
“You boys were Rangers?” Jarrett asked.
“Did you know Jim Dunaway?”
“Sure,” White said. “He lasted two weeks before being mustered out for drunkenness and insubordination.”
The silence was broken by the grumble of a low-flying airplane, and the men craned their heads to watch it pass in the night.
They continued on, following the tracks, Colvin driving slow behind them, the engine ticking and their feet crunching on gravel, moonlight leading the way.
About a half mile down from the crossroads, Jarrett about jumped out of his britches at the sight of a coiled rattlesnake raising its head, ready to strike.
“Holy shit!”
Jones shined his light, and the snake slithered off into the ditch.
“Shoot it,” Jarrett yelled. “Shoot it!”
“I’m not gonna shoot it,” Jones said. “Has the same right bein’ out here as us.”
“You ever been bit?” Jarrett asked. “Nearly killed me one time.”
“They just actin’ according to their nature,” Jones said. “Can’t fault ’em for it.”
“Shoot it.”
“No, sir.”
Jarrett walked off in the moonlight and returned with a fat river stone he had to hold in both hands. He got within six feet of that old rattler, shaking its tail for all it’s worth, and launched the stone at the snake, sending it writhing and turning with a broken back. He retrieved the rock and slammed it back down a half dozen times before the snake, bloody and broken, tried to coil and strike a final time, but only twitched on account of the nerves.
In the moonlight they watched Jarrett spit and try to catch his breath.
“Man can’t show anger toward nature,” Jones said in a whisper to White. “Any fool knows that. That’s what separates us.”
5
Monday, July 24, 1933
Okay, so the song went like this: Harvey Bailey and Verne Miller had robbed three banks since Kansas City, none of them worth squat, but the little stash growing into something neat and tidy, a figure to work with, something respectable, and a number that would be well worth telling the dealer, “I’m okay with this. I’m out.” They slept in cars and ate by cook fires. They turned their heads from friendly folks in restaurants who wanted to chat about the weather; they wore common clothes and drove common cars. Their lives, their futures, were road maps purchased for pennies at Texaco, Sinclair Oil, and Standard Red Crown service stations. They pissed in drainage ditches and fell asleep with whiskey bottles in their hands, often reaching for guns when a deer would scamper across places where they laid their heads. All in all, Harvey had been having a hell of a time since breaking out of jail. Everything was just that much sweeter.
“So if it’s good, why do we bring in Underhill and Clark?”
“Because we need more men,” Harvey said.
“Those hicks are the types that find a sexual interest in the barnyard.”
“Didn’t say I wanted to take them to dinner with us.”
“If they fuck up, we leave ’em or kill ’em.”
“You run a hard code, Verne.”
“You got more patience?”
Harvey shrugged. They stood over the hood of his Buick, parked at the edge of a rolling hill at the foot of the Cooksons, and studied the git out from Muskogee, the People’s National Bank. “Big beautiful cage on the left wall,” Harvey said. “Safe will be open for business behind them.”
