“We can’t just sit here,” said Helen. “Let’s take a drive or something.”
So off they went, a half hour back into Arkansas, then the same half hour back to Mavis. There was the sheriff, still sitting.
“Maybe he’s counting crows,” said J.P.
“Well, then, how about some ice cream?”
“Sounds good to me.”
So they walked back along Main Street and found the drugstore, and it turned out that Helen didn’t feel like ice cream, so she got a Green River at the soda counter and J.P. got a chocolate phosphate. They sat next to the big Coca-Cola dispenser, all red, with the white script of trademark big across it.
“I feel like a traitor to Coca-Cola,” Helen said.
“I do too, but I’ve had so many in my time, I don’t think the Coca-Cola people will hold it against me.”
“They may be keeping track,” Helen said. “They’re everywhere.”
At that point, the sheriff’s car, visible through the window, pulled out of town.
“Well,” said J.P., “looks like we’re up to bat.”
“Let’s go, Mr. Barrow.”
They ambled across Main Street, waiting to let a farmer, with two colored men riding in the back of his truck, pass by. He waved at them, as did the two colored men, showing off fine American hospitality, and J.P. touched his hat brim in response.
The two entered the bank, and Helen pulled her Bonnie-like bucket hat low across her forehead, then inserted a cheroot between her pretty lips. She sure wasn’t going to smoke the awful thing, just as she knew Bonnie hadn’t in the famous picture, but it made her feel all the more Bonnie-like. With the black stockings added to the hat and the cheroot, she thought she looked the role. Looking up, now fully Bonnie Parker, she saw that one of the tellers’ cages was closed and that three people waited in line for the other.
“Okay,” said J.P., slipping his hand inside his suit coat to remove his .45, “let me do the talking. You just—”
“HANDS UP!” screamed Helen, pulling a large .45 Colt revolver from her purse. “This here is a robbery!”
It was amazing! Helen, so quiet and cute her whole life, was suddenly transformed into a demon of energy and command by the liberating surge she felt in stepping beyond the wall.
“Ladies, hands up, dump those purses. Teller, you reach for the sky or I’ll shoot you between the lenses of your glasses. Everybody else, freeze, reach, and pray I don’t lose my temper.”
J.P. did a double take, even as, for emphasis, Helen used her left thumb to ease back the hammer on the big revolver in her right hand, the ominous click of its new position filling the stunned, silent air.
“Clyde, get the cash, and fast!”
“Yes, Miss Bonnie,” said J.P., remembering the Bonnie and Clyde gag, and he dipped beyond the counter, went to the teller’s cage as he unfurled a flour bag from his pocket. He quickly dumped the bills in the bag, then turned to a fellow in a three-piece suit sitting deskbound, hands up.
“You, sir, you lead me into the vault and point out the cash drawers. No need to be a hero. Come on, now, git!” He gestured with his handgun. But he was good at this, and had not forgotten the president’s office, so instead of following the clerk into the vault, he stationed himself just beside the door to the office, figuring it would have required just this much time for the president to win the debate with himself over the requirements of Duty, and just as he emerged with a double-barreled gun, J.P. clunked him hard on the head, but at nowhere near killing power, and the gentleman went down, dropped the gun, and curled up in a fetal position, his hands flying to the gash in his head.
“Bet many’s the time you’ve wanted to do that,” J.P. said to the clerk, who’d obligingly pulled open a drawer with tens and twenties stacked within. “Now, fill it up!”
The clerk filled the bag.
“That too,” said J.P., pointing to an unsealed stack of clearly fresh-from-the-mint bills.
“Won’t do you no good,” said the clerk. “Them numbers is recorded. Use ’em and you get arrested.”
“Granddad, ’preciate the help, but you let me worry about the technical questions.”
“Hurry up there, Clyde,” yelled Bonnie. “These ladies can’t stand around much longer, they’ve got a tea to attend.”
She smiled, but the flinty Arkansas gals had no smiles for robbers and instead sniffed their noses imperiously. Snobs everywhere, even in Mavis!
Then Helen noticed through the window: that damned sheriff was back, right across the street.
—
LES STUDIED ON IT. If the State boys were laying a trap for Helen and J.P., it occurred to him he had to act now. He saw it in a second: he could ease across the bridge, nice and smiley, waving, get up close, ask them something about the road to Dallas or somewhere, and then go to his gun fast. Close in, hardball, that should do it. Two pops a man, so close it would all be head shooting. Then he’d . . .
Then he’d what?
Wait for J.P. and Helen to show? Yeah, sit there waiting, lounging on the fender of a car, with two dead cops. Good idea. Meanwhile, what if Helen and J.P. didn’t show? What if, just as he fired, six more cop cars came around the bend? What if . . . A trickle of sweat jiggled down his forehead from under his hatband.
He did not like this at all. With action, it was all about now. This second, this instant. You were lucky or you weren’t. The bullet whacked you or it missed and hit the mom pushing the buggy. Too bad for her, but that’s the way it went.
This sitting, waiting stuff was for the birds. He found himself doing unmanly things, like a dame or a nancy, sitting there with a boob’s look on his mug, trying to guess how cops would act, trying to figure where he could run to, hoping he was lucky instead of making his own luck. But . . . he was no good at that stuff, never had been. He was the guy you want with the Thompson in hand, not bluffing and charming his way through touchy situations on savvy and intuition.
He found himself breathing hard, his focus scattered, the gases in his stomach really scorching and wasting his pipes, the sick, weak need to take a crap. It was as if his whole personality was falling apart—him, the famous, the legendary, the frightening BABY FACE NELSON, in whose presence all men trembled and all women got, even if they never admitted it, the tingle. Because everybody admired the fellow who took things and didn’t just sit there hoping someone would hand him something gratis.
He thought it through again. This time, the best way would be to avoid the bridge, wade across the river—but it looked pretty damned deep—and lay up just under the lip of the incline where the riverbank rose to meet the flats. That way, if the State cops netted Helen and J.P., he could move on them if he had to, as they’d be occupied, and it could still work out. And maybe he wouldn’t even have to pop the cops, could just disarm them, toss their pistolas in the Red, shoot out their tires, and go on. See, people got all agitated if you killed a cop, to say nothing about how angry the cops themselves got.
But even as he was sorting this out, he wasn’t moving. And doubts soon arrived that suggested the plan was a mess waiting to happen next. Maybe he couldn’t wade the river, got swept away, drowned. What a way to go! What if he’s down there and Helen and J.P. come by, don’t see him, figure he caught a ride into the next town, and rented a tourist camp cabin and—
No matter which way he figured it, it came to catastrophe. So he just sat there, torn between doom and desolation, grief and anguish, thinking this whole thing was a goddamned stupid idea and he was screwed for certain.
—
“NOW, YOU PEOPLE,” said J.P., “you had it easy, except for that clunk on the head of the president there. Don’t make us mad. No screaming, no yelling, no alarms, no nothing, you just hang cool as lemonade for three minutes till we clear town. You’ll have stories to tell your children for years. You’ll never pay for a drink in thi
s town again!”
Nobody seemed inclined to disagree with him, though the three elderly women kept that prim, holier-than-thou look on their pinched and dried-out faces.
“Sister,” said Helen, “don’t see why you’re looking so put-out, nobody took a thing from you.”
“Well, Miss Parker, ’tain’t that. It’s that I have mah-jongg at four and this’ll make me so late.”
“Well, you apologize to the girls for me. Now, hold steady, everybody.”
She and J.P. backed out together, one looking forward, the other back. At the doorway, she pulled him close.
“That damned sheriff is sitting over there, big as life.”
“DAMN!” cursed J.P. “I’ll mosey over and try and get a shot into him through the windshield. You start the car and—”
“No, and the whole county’ll be out here with shotguns and rope in two seconds. YOU start the car, Mr. Barrow.”
Since she had conviction, and J.P. only experience, he yielded to her, put his head down, the gun low in one hand, the bag of swag pressed into his thigh, and beelined for the car. Meanwhile, Helen tucked her big .45 behind her purse and smilingly approached the man with the badge lounging sleepily behind the wheel of his big car.
He looked up.
“Oh, Sheriff,” she said, “sorry, but I’ve got to do some, you know, business, is there a public facility in this town?”
The sheriff blushed as if he’d just been shown a French postcard displaying unlikely anatomical positions, then got his wits about him and started to offer the use of the restroom in the jail to her, but by that time she’d laid the barrel of the big Colt revolver on the sill of the window, pointed straight into his vitals.
“Your gun, sir. Left hand, upside down, nothing fancy, as I would have no pause in doing what I must do. Be a dear, won’t you please?”
To emphasize her argument, she thumbed back the hammer of the revolver until it clicked locked. The sheriff, in his sixties, with many a mile on him, blinked, and his outsize Adam’s apple became spastically active as he swallowed hard and got nothing down but a gallon of dry air.
The firearm, an actual cowboy gun in silver with engraving, came over to her backwards.
“What a nice revolver,” she said. “I won’t even take it. I know you treasure it.”
She stepped back from the car, still smiling, turned and lobbed the gun up onto the porch roof of the ice-cream shop. Then she walked smartly around the car, stopped at first the left, then the right, front tire and fired a bullet square into each, the sound raising dust, chicken squawks, feathers, startlement, and confusion all along Main Street. She stepped across the street and climbed into the backseat of the Hudson, which J.P. had obligingly backed out of its space.
“Helen, I believe you have a gift for this kind of work,” said J.P. as they sped away.
—
LES WAS RAISED CATHOLIC, and still considered himself a believer, but he didn’t like to waste the man upstairs’s time on minor matters. But he broke his own rule this time.
Dear Lord, he prayed, please, please, please let Helen be all right. Sir, I couldn’t get along without her, and she’s the best mom any kids ever had, plus my own mother loves her to death, and she only stepped off the path this one time to help us out of a jam, so please, sir, this is Lester from the West Side, please, sir, let her be all right.
It didn’t seem to have much effect on reality, as nothing happened or changed. Before prayer, after prayer, he was the same, just a fellow in too fancy a suit sitting on a picnic table in a glade of trees right across the Red River Bridge into Texas from Arkansas. Maybe a cloud shielded the sun, maybe the breeze kicked up, but neither of these could be taken as a message from God, so he decided that God must be busy elsewhere, with much to do that day, and just didn’t have room for Lester from the West Side. He didn’t take it personally. Though his temper had gotten him in trouble his whole life—had invented his whole life, as a matter of fact—he knew it was absurd to be angry with the same God who had guided so many bullets fired his way to miss, and so he didn’t feel at all ill-used by God.
He felt ill-used, he decided, by John Paul Chase. That was how his brain worked: he always had to have a target, a grudge, something to fuel the processing of his mind and thereby provide him with energy, passion, and courage. He had wanted to kill Homer, and if a chance had come, he would have. But now that seemed laughable, since Homer had gotten clipped in the head by a bullet and wasn’t himself—all this after saving everybody’s bacon in South Bend. He was the sort of man who said “I’d like to kill you” about people all the time and it didn’t mean anything—that is, unless he actually killed you.
So he focused on John Paul. Like many men with close friends, he didn’t really trust his close friends. He was too complicated for that. They got along so well, Les the boss, J.P. the servant, and as helpful as that was, it sort of sickened Les that J.P. took so much abuse, was so obedient. What was the problem with him? Les thought maybe he wasn’t too bright.
And he could see J.P. making a stupid decision, just like that idiot farm boy Charlie Floyd had at South Bend, because he didn’t really trust J.P. to do the right thing. So he could see J.P. panicking and plugging a cop, and he and Helen getting pinched when J.P. turned the wrong way down a dead-end street, and Helen goes up for accessory to murder one and is given fifteen-to-thirty, and he never, ever sees her again. That was a possibility, and it was so immense and destructive, it made him shaky.
Pretty soon he’d convinced himself not only that it could happen but that it did happen, and he decided, if so, he’d get himself arrested in Arkansas, he’d go to the same prison just so that he could kill J.P. to pay him back for what he’d done to Helen, then somehow he’d bust out. He felt righteous rage steaming through his insides, building up a pressure so intense, he thought he’d burst, and the more he thought about it, not only the madder he got but the more tragic it seemed, until he couldn’t tell whether he was in a killing rage or a sobbing tantrum. He knew one thing and one thing alone: he felt miserable.
“Honey?”
He looked up. Helen had a big smile on her face, and J.P. was smoking a cigar. Les hadn’t even seen them cross the bridge, he’d been so wrought up.
He raced to them.
“This gal of yours,” said J.P., “she’s the best!”
29
MACHINEGUN.COM
McLEAN, VIRGINIA
The present
ONE THING THE WORLD had no shortage of was machine guns.
A wonder of the late nineteenth century, the serial-firing, belt- or magazine-fed, recoil-operated weapon had been produced in bewildering variety since at least 1883 with the advent of the original, the Maxim gun. Every industrial culture tried its hand and the results were an infinity of ventilating holes, barrel jackets, cooling tanks, belt-linking designs, magazine curvatures, bolt protrusions, mounting iterations, stock or grip configurations, sight apparatuses, muzzle brakes or flash hiders (or both!), tri- or bipod support structures, carrying grips, to say nothing of the endless array of maintenance devices, ammo boxes, shipping crates, the detritus of the machine-made world, all in the service of chopping down men with industrial efficiency in battle. And of course each gun itself had then gone through model issues, dedication applications, prototypes, and experimental advancements, thus multiplying the base number by a staggering amount. There were thousands of the goddamned things, and the guns of ’14 through ’18 were particularly ornate, where the pressure of war had upped the pace of research and design and manufacture. The Great War guns lacked mobility—that would arrive in War 2—but were superb at their task, which is why the best of them, the Maxim, was often called the Devil’s Paintbrush. It left landscapes of ruined flesh, which it had stroked on the world’s scabrous battlefields, but there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of imitations—Vickers, Browning, and so on—that
attempted to duplicate the Paintbrush’s effect on the world.
At a variety of websites, Bob wandered among these details at a computer station in the business center of his McLean motel. Next to the screen on the table, slightly illuminated in its moonlight glow, lay the mystery cylinder, that little bit of machined perfection that looked so similar to machine-gun muzzles from the world over, and generations of machine guns past, but never quite exactly.
Maxim?
No.
Browning?
Uh-uh.
MG-42?
Nein.
Degaratov?
Nyet.
Thompson?
Almost, goddammit. But not quite.
Type 92?
Bren?
Breda?
Chauchat?
Nix to all.
He knew the damned things. He’d carried, fired, maintained, deployed, taken down, improvised with them his whole life in the military. It was a key part of the infantry trade. It was warcraft at its most demanding, and whoever kept his own guns running hot, well-fed, and positioned creatively usually won the fight to fight again.
But even with all that time behind the hammering, and all the surgery on the gun’s guts under fire or sweltering in tropic heat, struggling to keep track of pins and springs or any of the thousand tiny parts that made the thing go bangbangbang instead of click, all the miles draped in M60 belts slogging uphill or over dikes, the creature itself banging hard against his back on an improvised strap, all of that machine-gun time, machine-gun culture, machine-gun savvy, did not aid him in placing the cylinder in the machine-gun world.
He almost got a hit on a strange French heavy beast called the Hotchkiss Model 1922. This one looked as if it had been designed in a bar in Montmartre after a long day of whores and absinthe shots, being a crazy jigsaw of angles and latches and bolts. The version of it he found even had a thumbhole stock, which otherwise was shaped like a violin trying to act tough. But the Frenchies had happily affixed a big chunk of metal to its muzzle to keep the strings of 7.9s it fired from rambling all over the landscape. It looked to Bob as if he’d struck, if not pay dirt, at least dirt, though no Net picture got close enough to tell if it had twelve slots or not. If he couldn’t get a close-up, he could at least get his eyes up close.