Full Dark, No Stars(40)
Their life as fugitives had begun.
Arlette whispered more about that life than I wished to know, and I don’t have the heart to put more than the bare details down here. If you want to know more, write to the Omaha Public Library. For a fee, they will send you hectograph copies of stories having to do with the Sweetheart Bandits, as they became known (and as they called themselves). You may even be able to find stories from your own paper, if you do not live in Omaha; the conclusion of the tale was deemed heartrending enough to warrant national coverage.
Handsome Hank and Sweet Shannon, the World-Herald called them. In the photographs, they looked impossibly young. (And of course they were.) I didn’t want to look at those photographs, but I did. There’s more than one way to be bitten by rats, isn’t there?
The stolen car blew a tire in Nebraska’s sandhill country. Two men came walking up just as Henry was mounting the spare. One drew a shotgun from a sling setup he had under his coat—what was called a bandit hammerclaw back in the Wild West days—and pointed it at the runaway lovers. Henry had no chance at all to get his own gun; it was in his coat pocket, and if he’d tried for it, he almost certainly would have been killed. So the robber was robbed. Henry and Shannon walked hand-in-hand to a nearby farmer’s house under a cold autumn sky, and when the farmer came to the door to ask how he could help, Henry pointed his gun at the man’s chest and said he wanted his car and all his cash.
The girl with him, the farmer told a reporter, stood on the porch looking away. The farmer said he thought she was crying. He said he felt sorry for her, because she was no bigger than a minute, just as pregnant as the old woman who lived in a shoe, and traveling with a young desperado bound for a bad end.
Did she try to stop him? the reporter asked. Try to talk him out of it?
No, the farmer said. Just stood with her back turned, like she thought that if she didn’t see it, it wasn’t happening. The farmer’s old rattletrap Reo was found abandoned near the McCook train depot, with a note on the seat: Here is your car back, we will send the money we stole when we can. We only took from you because we were in a scrape. Very truly yours, “The Sweetheart Bandits.” Whose idea was that name? Shannon’s, probably; the note was in her handwriting. They only used it because they didn’t want to give their names, but of such things legends are made.
A day or two later, there was a hold-up in the tiny Frontier Bank of Arapahoe, Colorado. The thief—wearing a flat cap yanked low and a bandanna yanked high—was alone. He got less than $100 and drove off in a Hupmobile that had been reported stolen in McCook. The next day, in The First Bank of Cheyenne Wells (which was the only bank of Cheyenne Wells), the young man was joined by a young woman. She disguised her face with a bandanna of her own, but it was impossible to disguise her pregnant state. They made off with $400 and drove out of town at high speed, headed west. A roadblock was set up on the road to Denver, but Henry played it smart and stayed lucky. They turned south not long after leaving Cheyenne Wells, picking their way along dirt roads and cattle tracks.
A week later, a young couple calling themselves Harry and Susan Freeman boarded the train for San Francisco in Colorado Springs. Why they suddenly got off in Grand Junction I don’t know and Arlette didn’t say—saw something that put their wind up, I suppose. All I know is that they robbed a bank there, and another in Ogden, Utah. Their version of saving up money for their new life, maybe. And in Ogden, when a man tried to stop Henry outside the bank, Henry shot him in the chest. The man grappled with Henry anyway, and Shannon pushed him down the granite steps. They got away. The man Henry shot died in the hospital two days later. The Sweetheart Bandits had become murderers. In Utah, convicted murderers got the rope.
By then it was near Thanksgiving, although which side of it I don’t know. The police west of the Rockies had their descriptions and were on the lookout. I had been bitten by the rat hiding in the closet—I think—or was about to be. Arlette told me they were dead, but they weren’t; not when she and her royal court came to visit me, that was. She either lied or prophesied. To me they are both the same.
Their next-to-last stop was Deeth, Nevada. It was a bitterly cold day in late November or early December, the sky white and beginning to spit snow. They only wanted eggs and coffee at the town’s only diner, but their luck was almost all gone. The counterman was from Elkhorn, Nebraska, and although he hadn’t been home in years, his mother still faithfully sent him issues of the World-Herald in large bundles. He had received just such a bundle a few days before, and he recognized the Omaha Sweetheart Bandits sitting in one of the booths.
Instead of ringing the police (or pit security at the nearby copper mine, which would have been quicker and more efficient), he decided to make a citizen’s arrest. He took a rusty old cowboy pistol from under the counter, pointed it at them, and told them—in the finest Western tradition—to throw up their hands. Henry did no such thing. He slid out of the booth and walked toward the fellow, saying: “Don’t do that, my friend, we mean you no harm, we’ll just pay up and go.”
The counterman pulled the trigger and the old pistol misfired. Henry took it out of his hand, broke it, looked at the cylinder, and laughed. “Good news!” he told Shannon. “These bullets have been in there so long they’re green.”
He put 2 dollars on the counter—for their food—and then made a terrible mistake. To this day I believe things would have ended badly for them no matter what, yet still I wish I could call to him across the years: Don’t put that gun down still loaded. Don’t do that, son! Green or not, put those bullets in your pocket! But only the dead can call across time; I know that now, and from personal experience.