“Not much,” Luther said, rubbing his unshaven jaw. He had the nose of a drinker, bulbous and veined. “Wouldn’t let me in his office, though. Told me to go ’round to this alley like I’s some kind of beggar, where he didn’t come back for a half hour.”

“You know any good lawyers?” Kathryn asked. “In Oklahoma? Sam Sayres wouldn’t know how to shit outside Texas.”

“I know’d a real good counselor over in Enid. You want me to call him up?”

Kathryn reached into her cosmetic kit for a jar of cold cream and began to rub down her face. Luther sat the opposite way, shaking his head and grunting with her complaints. “I don’t know where that SOB is, but when I find him he’s gonna surrender to the G and get my momma sprung.”

“Mighty white.”

“So you trust this fella?” she asked, slathering the cream up on her cheeks. “Really trust him?”

“Who?”

“The lawyer in Enid.”

“With my own life,” Luther said. “He’s gotten me out of a scrape or two. Misunderstandings with the law. You understand.”

“But of course.”

“Mrs. Machine Gun?”

“Call me Kit.”

“Kit, you want me to call ’im? I’d appreciate a ride back to town to use the telephone. The weather’s mighty nasty to walk the road again. I kept slipping outta my brogans.”

Kathryn shook her head and reached for a rag to wipe the cream from her face, staring into her own eyes, thinking about her next move to get out of this goddamn mess. The rain kicked up a little outside, pinging the windows, and Luther turned from the commode and said, “Whoo-whee.”

“Scoot over,” Kathryn said.

“Ma’am?”

“I need to do some thinking.”

He exchanged places with her on the commode and stood, looking awkward and loose, arms folded across his chest and trying to look smart, as she talked out a plan, more to herself than to Luther.

“I want you to take the bus back to Fort Worth tomorrow,” she said, holding up a hand, the silk material on her robe draping down her forearm like a butterfly wing. “Hold on… Hold on… I’ll pay. But I want you to go back and see that sorry fat bastard Sam Sayres and tell him that he no longer works for the Shannon family. Tell him we’re trading up, and that Kit Kelly wants her Chevrolet back.”

“He has your machine?”

“Used it as collateral, for him sitting on his ass while my dear ole momma is sent to the gallows.”

“You want me to drive the car back here?”

“I want you to go to Enid and hire that lawyer you told me about. I’ll take Gerry and Flossie Mae with me.”

“Where to?”

“San Antonio,” Kathryn said. “You can contact me there care of General Delivery. I’ll make sure they’re clothed and fed till you get back. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Luther nodded.

“He better be good,” she said.

“He’s the cheese on apple pie.”

Kathryn nodded, long legs spread in a solid stance on the commode, listening to herself and making the plan definite in her mind. “Tomorrow morning I’ll give you five hundred dollars to advance him.”

“Five hunnard,” Luther Arnold said, Kathryn noticing the shriveled flesh on his toes and long, curled nails turned yellow. “That’ll keep him busy for a while.”

“And tell him I want him to put the deal for George on the table,” she said. “If the G wants George R. Kelly, they can have ’im. All I want is my momma.”

Someone knocked on the door. “Daddy?”

“Yes, muffin.”

“I got to pee-pee. What’re y’all doin’ in there?”

“What if you can’t find Mr. Kelly?” Luther asked in a whisper.

“That rotten son of a bitch disappears when you need him most, but he’ll show up like a bad penny. I know my George.”

31

When Kathryn heard the story, she couldn’t tell which parts were true, which parts George invented, and how much of the small stuff he just threw in there to keep it sounding gospel, the details of it coming out of George’s mouth like a sinner come to witness about his road of trials. George started with when he’d jumped into a jalopy Chevrolet and headed off Ma Coleman’s land, heading right for Biloxi, knowing that Kathryn would understand his note and follow him to his favorite hotel, where they could lay low a bit, put their feet in the sand and drink some cold beer, out of the forsaken state of Texas, down to the Gulf, to vacation from being outlaws for a while. He’d made it as far as New Orleans, George knowing some people in that part of the country from when he’d run booze up to Memphis, and he’d taken a room in the Lafayette Hotel and only left once to get a pint of gin and an Italian sandwich. He said he sat in the room all night, not being able to sleep, reading five different newspapers, all of ’em carrying the same story about her momma’s family being taken by airplane to await a fair and speedy trial. And he said it made him so damn sad that he didn’t want more company than a bottle of gin, remembering that he’d left the hotel one more time, walking down Canal Street to find a liquor store and a Catholic church, where he wandered in and lit a candle for the Shannon family. That part of the story diverging a bit from the truth of that piney gin, but Kathryn took the lie as a solid gesture, and let him continue on about driving out of the city the next morning, figuring the one-eyed bellhop sure noticed he could be none other than “Machine Gun” Kelly, and him driving along Highway 90 into Mississippi, following that road through Waveland and into Bay Saint Louis, where he went to the Star movie house and watched a Barbara Stanwyck picture in the colored balcony. Again getting sad, because Barbara sure had a lot of Kit Kelly in her, wandering out of the black night like a crazy dream and staring out at the Bay under oaks older than time, moss in the cool breeze, getting good and buzzed till his heart stopped hurting. He drove on through Gulfport to Biloxi, a town that he knew just as well as he knew Memphis. He headed to the first pharmacy he saw to buy a bottle of peroxide and a shower cap, a toothbrush and some talcum powder, and five True Detective magazines, before checking into the Avon, that fine old hotel right off the Gulf.

For three days, he rubbed his body with baby oil and poured the peroxide into his hair, wearing purple-tinted sunglasses and drinking gin mixed with pitchers of lemonade that the negros sold to the tourists. No one talked to him, and everything seemed fine as moonshine, as he’d sit in a deck chair, dozing to the sound of the surf, letting his cramped car legs unknot, and waking only as the shadows ran long across the combed beach and the sun got ready to disappear to wherever it went at night. In the evenings, he’d order up steaks and hamburgers to his room, some more gin, and would drink all his sorrows away while reading “How the Sensational Boettcher Kidnapping Was Solved, the Baffling Mystery of the Dead Dancer, the Minister-the Love Lyrics-and the Murdered Woman,” and then coming across an advertisement in the back pages that promised to help you “Read Law at Home and Earn up to $15,000 Annually,” and George said that sure let the snakes loose in his head, thinking, hell, he was earning fifty thousand a year just for knocking over a few banks, and they had to get good and greedy and start in the kidnapping racket, letting the hounds loose on their trail. (This was usually when George would go into that long speech about how he had a different path in Memphis with his first wife-sweet Geneva-and what a good man his father-in-law had been, much better than his own father, that worthless, mean son of a bitch, and that if Mr. Ramsey hadn’t been snuffed out like that, a high beam falling from his own construction site and splitting open his head like a watermelon, old George Barnes-that being George’s real name-would be an upstanding member of Memphis society to this day.)